The Refuge (9 page)

‘Yes, frightened,’ she said; and having begun, she continued rapidly. ‘All the time I am frightened, ever since we are leaving London. Like you, they all tell me Australia is safe, there is plenty money, friendly people, all that. But where is safety for a woman, tell me? Me—I am just another bloody refugee, isn’t it? Go to Australia, they say. There you will be orright. Now I am here. What happens next? What do I do, in Australia? What do I
do
?’

I learned, long afterwards, that she had been private secretary to the secretary of a local branch of the Dutch Communist Party in one of the smaller industrial centres in Holland. This followed a fantastic escape from Berlin, where she had lived mostly in hiding, though very active in Party interests, since nineteen thirty-three when, like many older and wiser people—in that year she was a precocious thirteen—she had offered her services to the Communists after the election of Adolf Hitler to the Chancellorship of the Reich. During the vigorous training that had followed her acceptance by the Party, when she had been investigated by agents from Berlin to Kovno, her forgotten birthplace, her name with thousands of others became ‘known’ to the Nazi police. Just in time, she disappeared from the day-light scene and from all her former haunts. It is likely that her political colleagues would have abandoned her in those days of stealthy terror but for two things: she was already a consummate linguist after a childhood spent wandering about Europe with her father, a musician of sorts; and her integrity, youthfully impassioned though it was, was nevertheless absolute and unwavering. She was thought of favourably as being of great future usefulness, and during her year in hiding she became a sort of pet or mascot—for at that time, I suspect, she was something of a
gamin—
among the fearful and fanatically determined members of the Party in Germany, and had proved her luck moreover by successfully carrying out, before her fifteenth birthday, several missions of some slight importance within and outside the Reich. She usually dressed as a boy, she told me until the attentions of various official and private members of the Nazi party became dangerously personal. I believe her love of wearing pyjamas began during that period of her life.

‘Well,’ I said, and I was again quite in control of mind and body, ‘what can you do? Have you a profession? What did you do in Holland?’

She said, tilting her chin with a sort of haughtiness I afterwards learned to mean she was not telling all, ‘I was secretary—to a gentleman.’

It seems she was at last allowed to reappear in Berlin, after some months spent in Switzerland letting her hair grow long again. She was manoeuvred into a job in one of the best fashion-houses, where wives of higher Government officials, with much more money to spend than most of them had ever dreamed of gathered to look at and buy the new gowns and furs from France and Britain and America. For security reasons, and others which they did not mention, her directors thought it best for her to join the Nazi Party with a show of enthusiasm, and with the false papers provided by the experts in her own Party she had been able to do this easily—as easily, in fact, as many Nazis had joined the Communists in the same way and for the same purposes.

Meanwhile, she began to enjoy her work in the dress salon when it was discovered that she had a fresh gift for design as well as a natural ability as a model—an ability sprung, I think, from her intense and perfectly controlled femininity. Though she did not much care for the mere wearing and display of clothes, she somehow transformed them; and by this time, Nazi-trained, Communist-schooled, and mercilessly drilled by the mistress of the salon, her control of face and body was perfect and instinctive, without thought, a part of the sum of her conscious being. She began to feel that there was nothing she could not do, no part she could not play.

Today, in the artificial light from the cabin ceiling, she looked forlorn, but not helpless. I never did see her look to be unable to help herself, except once. Now the expression of defensive hauteur faded, and again her face relaxed; again I saw that faint smile move the corners of her mouth, though it did not warm her eyes or soften the cool severity of her brow.

‘I am also,’ she said, ‘
couturière.
You have those in Australia, no?’

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised; and I had to laugh, for the remark was characteristic of the ignorance of this country which nine out of ten of those foreigners brought with them: an ignorance amounting almost to an unwillingness to know, which largely explained the mixed suspicion and contempt which coloured their whole attitude towards the land and the people who gave them refuge. Today the Government-sponsored immigrants, who—though they are infelicitously styled New Australians—are still refugees from conditions, if not from groups of individuals, over which they have no control, at least learn something of the social and political and economic character and the material resources of the world’s only island continent, the huge leonine mass of barrenness and fertility pitched between the tropic and polar oceans, before they arrive; at least they are aware, however vaguely, that much of human history and forced nationalistic development was crowded into the century and a half of measured time that had passed before they came; at least they have known they were leaving an old and in some sort moribund civilization for no new barbarity of existence. But the earlier ones, the frightened and arrogant refugees from the terror of Europe, exhibiting that remorseless egomania which is the result of intolerable dread seemingly suffered indefinitely, yet suddenly left behind—those came convinced that a land in which black-skinned tribesmen still roamed at large in the west and the north must be a waste-land of beachcombers and bushrangers and futile remittance-men and ignorant fossickers. Like Irma at first, they supposed the social and cultural arts were their own prerogative to reveal as they saw fit and to dispense as they pleased; and this had always made me laugh a little, because so many of them seemed to us to have, not quite concealed beneath the gesture of habit and the glance of scorn, the half-developed minds of badly spoiled children. Even their suffering could seem, at times, like something they had indulged in and whose memory they vainly cherished.

‘You are laughing at me,’ she said in a soft voice, with her strange blue gaze now focused and intent upon my face.

‘Indeed no,’ I said. ‘I was laughing at Europe.’

The casual remark, scarcely a hint of what I had been thinking, effected a startling change in her face, which seemed to darken as though under the shadow of a hand. With a sort of animated impatience she shook her head several times emphatically. Looking back, I realize that by now both of us had to some degree forgotten where we were, and the hour, and the future unrevealed beyond the hour; I because without knowing it I was already fallen under the spell of her young enchantment, secret and ineffable, of absolute womanhood, and could not see the violence it concealed; she because with speech her troubled fear was abating steadily, and also because she was at last confronted with a native of the unknown, whom she must certainly have found to be much like other men on the opposite curve of the world.

‘At Europe?’ she said. ‘Then do not. You are not police. Would you laugh at Jesus while the men hit the nails through his wrists? Before the cross is lifted up? No. That is Europe.’

If there is one human manifestation for which I have neither sympathy nor compassion, it is this sort of melodramatic speech which seeks to impress both by emphasis and by far-fetched metaphor. I was not impressed as she had meant by what she had just said; any hack writer could have thought that up, and even got it into print, in those days of mounting sentimental hysteria, when none of us knew where we were heading. What I did feel was a sense of shock and disappointment, that so much youth and vitality and feminine beauty should have been so well-schooled in the mouthing of spiritless clichés; for I could not then and cannot now believe that the passion for their maggot-eaten homelands which these people so readily put into words is a real passion of body and mind and spirit, and not largely a guileful parade of perfected artifice. What I did believe is that they were profoundly glad Australia did exist and was there unguarded for their exploitation.

Furthermore, I have no patience with the easy use of the image of Jesus which is become in these times of loose and vitiated language a commonplace and a habit. I am a Christian and a Catholic, as the men of my family have been since the sixteenth century; I am not actively devout now, but it is there in my consciousness, never to be spoiled, and I can no more listen to the name of my own inspired prophet lightly spoken for the sake of a phrase than I can myself speak it, or for that matter the names of the other prophets before and since Jesus, lightly for the same purpose.

It brought me at once to my senses: I remembered the work I must do before the ship berthed, and realized that the young woman looking at me so intently and even angrily now could very well take care of herself—this
couturière
who had been ‘secretary to a gentleman’. An unaccountable disappointment came upon me; I felt that these few minutes in the company of that young stranger, whose mood could change with such apparent sincerity so bewilderingly, were so many minutes apart in my life, to be lived only once but remembered always, with that catch at the throat for something exquisite for ever gone which in the end becomes a conviction that an obscure and priceless opportunity within one’s grasp was in that instant irretrievably lost.

I made a sort of bow without saying anything more, and turned to go, and had taken one step into the dead air of the corridor when I heard her move and felt a touch on my arm. In the same soft, humble voice in which she had accused me of laughing at her she now said, ‘One moment, please. Please? Do not go for one moment.’

Her touch on my arm was like that of a dog asking for food and words; it was at once urgent and diffident, and when I remembered it later, thinking all this over, I was reminded of my golden cocker bitch, Donna, whom I kept at Hill Farm, in the mountains. She had just that trick of asking, shyly but impressively, with her paw on my hand or arm and her eyes, as brown as oiled cedarwood, fixed on my face. There was certainly nothing doglike about Irma’s eyes when I faced her. Their slate-blue gaze shone in the light with perhaps tears, but her voice was steady enough in its softness, her hand was firm and her lips calm.

‘Tell me what I shall do,’ she said. ‘Help me. You are clever, I see it. You will know what is for me to do. I have no friends.’

‘Not on this ship?’ I said. ‘Surely.’

‘Surely not.’ She removed her hand to make a gesture dismissing her fellow-passengers. ‘They are not for me. They talk. They make love. They eat. They sleep—and when they wake up they start the talking again where they stopped, and all the rest—where they stopped. Folly and waste of time.’

Her voice was severe, and its tone expressed perfectly an intellectual disgust which had nothing to do with whatever might have been her physical reactions to such behaviour. She nodded her smooth head weightily, like an old man sitting in judgment.

‘No friends. Five weeks I have of this, this chattering, this—
five weeks
! And on the ship are three men who would like to kill me. Communists, you understand. Bad men. They come to make trouble here, I tell you, and they hate me because I know them. Once I too was Communist, but not now. I left the Party. It is not permitted, but I do it. And these three men know this. They know I know them. So one of them, he tries to make love to me—it is orders, they wish to find out what I will do, they do not trust me. All three try to make love. It is like the Nazis. I tell them I am no more Communist, and they laugh, but they look—you know—dark.’

She scowled heavily to illustrate.

‘“Once a Communist, always Communist,” they say, but they are a bit afraid.’

She was speaking rapidly and without passion or gesture, her hands clasped loosely together, her opaque eyes on mine as though to compel belief. I was to learn that she had left the Party in a spirit of bitter revulsion, when she heard what went on in the higher councils and what was to be directed eventually by Moscow, and realized that their aims differed from those of the Nazis in the north and west, the Fascists in the south and east, only in name. She who had believed herself to be risking her life and giving her body and her mind for the cause of man’s freedom had finally perceived that she too was fighting, plotting and living only for a rival form of world-domination by a select group of political bigots no less fanatical and one-eyed than the very men against whom, in her small sphere of action, she had fought with all her youth and goodwill, all the zeal of her immortal soul up in arms.

Her revulsion and defection had been complete. Someone had betrayed her ‘gentleman’ and herself to Nazi agents in Holland, whither she had been hastily removed from Berlin when the fact of her Party membership had come fatefully to light. In broad daylight, wearing borrowed furs and jewellery, carrying a mass of hot-house flowers and escorted by inconspicuous fellow-Communists whose laughter hid terror and whose tears were effortlessly real, she had swept on to the main city railway station pretending to be a famous actress leaving for a season in Paris, and with so much glamour and gaiety had tricked the German railway officials into smiles and bows of delight, and their Nazi overseers into a benign tolerance; and so had made good her escape into Holland and a freedom she hoped would last until the inevitable outbreak of the war in Europe. It was the boldest acting of her brief career. She was then sixteen.

Her orders were to make herself known to the Communist secretary of a district whose solidarity was questionable, and to engage herself as his private secretary. As this man’s own adherence to the Party line had for some time been suspect, she was to do what she could to strengthen his loyalty—for he was popular with the masses of workers, and so potentially valuable to the higher organization, which had long foreseen the southward movement of Germany the moment war came. At the same time she was to forward secret reports on him to Berlin. For this purpose, it was made clear to her that as quickly as possible she must become in all ways intimate with him.