The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  After the funeral, I had to clear out Dad’s study for the farm manager who was coming in. I’d seldom been in that room, it was Dad’s retreat and woe betide Mum or me if we disturbed him. It had some books and a radio, a desk with the farming accounts and bugger all else. Everything stunk of stale cigarette smoke, until I opened an old wardrobe and found these bits and pieces of uniforms hanging there. One was German, I could see that, then there was another grey tunic and a brown battle-dress, and a red and white checked scarf that looked like an old tablecloth and what looked like a steel bracelet or necklace linked to a flat metal crescent with the word Feldgendarmerie above an eagle or hawk in mid-flight, with a swastika on its tail. On the shelf above were three hats, one an ordinary looking old fashioned black baseball hat, one with a red star and what looked like an SS officer’s hat, jet black with a silver skull and the German eagle. I’d seen the Gestapo hat in war comics. I wish I’d had Arch there to tell me what the others were. They were freaky just hanging there in the gloom, and they stank of something, much stronger than mothballs or cigarette smoke. Cordite or something, like someone had been celebrating Guy Fawkes in the wardrobe and letting off skyrockets. The stink of war. Acrid. Foul. I was about to close the door and leave it all for another day, when I saw a shoe-box on the shelf underneath, pushed to the back. There were half a dozen envelopes, addressed to Henry Spence, but when I opened them, they all began Caro Rico. I couldn’t understand a word of them, but they were signed Donatella. I must have had the thought even then that I’d go to Italy, because they’re in the side pocket of my pack here beside the dunny.

  They plqnted oaks for some of the men from the district killed in the two great wars. There’s one on the road from Ngapara into Tokarahi to Private J Dasler, Gallipoli 1915 and two for the Lamont brothers along the Devil’s Bridge roqd. They should have planted one for Henry Willia? Spence. Lost in action. But maybe I can find him.

  Someone’s hammering on the door, so I better get my qrse out of here.

  32

  It was weird having her father’s words so alive in the room and written when he was younger than she had ever known him, younger than she was now, while he was lying there, close to death. He’d once been someone else before he’d become her father. The details about her grandfather Harry’s brutality had shocked her. He’d never talked about it.

  She remembered driving her father down the Waiareka Valley early in spring almost exactly a year ago. He’d finished his last bout of chemo and, even then, must have known the cancer still had some purchase in his blood and that his end was near: he’d wanted her to take him back to the farm.

  She’d thought he was asleep, head lolling, but he was taking it all in. He told her there’d been a lot of change to the valley, that much of the land’s mixed cropping charm was gone. He remembered patchwork rectangles of wheat and oats and linseed and sheep-grazed pasture, all delineated by hawthorn and gorse hedges, which had been ripped out so that massive irrigation centipedes could crawl unimpeded across the huge bare paddocks, pugged and polluted by cows.

  ‘But it’s wonderful!’ she’d said, and to her urban eyes it was: the valley undulated gently in front of them and rose eventually to the purple Kakanuis, snow still on the tops.

  They’d driven to the end of the valley and stopped beside the old Oamaru stone flour mill at Ngapara, shuttered and quiet, then walked about fifty metres up the hill behind to a hurricane gate that used to lead to the coal mine. The gorse and broom had covered the track into the side of the hill. They could see the top beam of what must have been the entrance to the main shaft, battened off with corrugated iron and four-by-two.

  ‘The town died with the mill and the mine,’ he’d said, as they walked back down to the car. The village looked so cute, the old pub and the rows of workers’ cottages behind the trees on the opposite side of the main road.

  Beyond Ngapara the road began climbing up and around huge limestone bluffs. ‘The hill country hasn’t changed,’ said her father. ‘It’s too tough for cows.’ Too tough for her, too. Above them the stone ramparts soared, the striations pockmarked with caves like footholds to the sky.

  Her father directed her further into those hills, then asked Clare to stop the car beside a huge oak with a small white cross at its base, with a name and a date: 1915.

  ‘Dad should have had one of those,’ he said. ‘Missing in action, even though he came back.’

  He was weak, but had insisted on climbing up the hill towards two limestone crags, which she now realised must have been the ones in his diary, the soles of the Moon Man’s boots pointing skywards after his plunge to earth. Where her father had seen his father howling at the empty sky.

  She’d helped him climb the boulders on the uphill side and they’d stood on one of the Moon Man’s soles, braced against the wind coming, he said, over Danseys Pass from the Maniototo. He should have told her about his father. Instead, he’d stood there for five minutes and said nothing, then asked her if she felt any connection.

  ‘To this?’ she’d asked, looking out at the burnt grass burst through with mushrooming limestone. It might as well have been the moon. The closest she’d got to a farm was the spring lambs at Cornwall Park. That was enough. This looked alien and almost malevolent. The only sign of life was a green sheen of buds along the branches of the oak down beside the road. ‘Sort of,’ she’d lied.

  ‘It was hard to leave,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should have stayed.’

  She wondered if his mind was there now. His face seemed unchanged, but she couldn’t give up hope that he might be hearing her.

  May 7th 1976.

  So?ething terrible’s happened. I got to Treviso last night, found a flea pit near the railway station where I’m writing this. One thing about trqins and railways is you don’t get a great impression of places. There’s always a Terminus Hotel and it’s always crap and the station’s in the crap part of town. Maybe I’m s bit biased because I’ve only really seen London and here and the papers keep saying that the UK and Italy are the two sick men of Europe. I can believe that. But Italy’s just got sicker. The reason I’m still here writing this is because Gemona got hit by an earthquake yesterday. I went in this morning to buy a ticket for the last leg up to Gemona and the guy in the ticket booth, who looked a bit shaken to be honest, kept saying ‘No train, no train’, then said ‘No Gemona.’ I didn’t get what the hell he was trying to say until he grabbed a newspaper off his desk and showed me the headline — huge headline — TERREMOTO. I didn’t need to be able to translate that to see whqt had happened by the pictures underneath. There was one, must have been shot from q plane, of what remained of a huge church on top of a hill. One wall was half intact but in between there and the re?ains of the spire was just sky and rubble.

  The spire was two thin shards of stone sticking out from the pile of rubble, like q two-fingered salute to God. The guy in the ticket office was pissed off with this insensitive tourist until he caught the look on my face. I’d like to say it was sympathy for the people cqught in that earthquake, but it was also dismay. I didn’t realise until I saw those pictures of Ge?ona how much I’d been banking on finding out something good about my father.

  I’m not giving up, I’m going to stick around for a few dqys, then see if I cqn still get up to Gemona. Venice is close, but I want to save that for on the way back, I might enjoy it more. One of the stops on the failure trail the guys told me about wqs a place called Fusina, a camping ground somewhere close to Venice. Maybe I’ll try and find that, see if I know anyone there.

  May 8th, 1976.

  I found Fusina, got a bus there. It dropped me off down the road and I walked the couple of hundred yqrds to the camping ground. It’s in the middle of the industrial area of Mestre and the wharves called Marghera: surrounded by great pipes and fat petroleum tanks shimmering in the sun, soaring smoke-stacks and gas burn-off pipes on huge gantries crowned with blue flame. We
ird place for a holiday.

  There was a sign up at the gate, saying — You Are Now Leaving Dagoland and Entering the Republic of Fusina. A proper sign, looked like it had been there for years. Do they think Italians can’t speak English? Do they think Italians are as ignorant as they are? Right inside the gate are Fosters signs and a big bar, and on the other side are goalposts. It was mid-afternoon so I went into the bar and there were pissed Kiwis and Aussies and South Africans, girls and guys, in stubbies and jandals and T shirts saying ‘All Pommies Are Bastards’ and ‘What’s Fuck Off in Frog?’ and lots of silver ferns and green and gold. I didn’t know any of them but I had a beer and I qsked this girl who said she was from Wellington if she’d heard about the big earthquake. She was shocked. But as soon as she knew it was here not there, she didn’t give it another thought. I finished my beer and headed back to the bus-stop. I might be fucked in my own way but I didn’t come twelve thousand miles across the world to end up in the same plqce.

  May 9th, 1976.

  I found out I could get a train up to San Pietro di Livenza, so I thought of doing that, taking Arch’s letter up to Aldo’s bar, then found that I could get a ticket to Trentino, north of Gemona tomorrow. So I’m doing that. Who knows, they might let me off at Gemona.

  May 10th, 1976.

  Holy hell. The train went through Gemona all right. Very slowly, they’d obviously just cleared the tracks. It looked like it used to be a beautiful old station a couple of storeys high and now the whole roof has caved in and most of the walls are gone. When you look from the station up to the hill where the old town was and where that spire is still pointing to the sky, it’s just a sea of rubble, with cranes and rescue workers and red cross still amongst it trying to find people, but how the hell do they know where to start? In some places you can’t even see where the streets used to be, the stones are just spread evenly across the landscape, like a huge river alluvial of rubble. The train didn’t stop and even if it had and they’d let me off, I had no business doing that. It would have been disrespectful to even ask. There are more important things than my questions.

  I’m in another flea-pit at Trentino writing this. Another terminus hotel. I’m trying to work out what I do next, since finding out anything about Dad seems to be a dead duck. Bugger.

  Gemona 1943

  33

  For once Charlie was full of questions to which he genuinely wanted answers. Harry, though, was played out, said little. But Joe knew. Harry was a hunter of trophies, like the ones Joe had seen on the walls of houses back home — deer antlers and boars’ ears and tusks. He’d taken the red kerchief and the hat, so One-Eyed Jack was dead. The Slovenian leader hadn’t been wearing knickerbockers, so Harry had killed at least one other, whose boots didn’t fit. Joe had thought back a hundred times to what had happened up on the ridge above Monfalcone, trying to work it out. Harry had asked the Slovenians if they had arms and ammo. He knew now that Harry had planned exactly this: to kill them for their weapons.

  Harry stacked the guns and began unfurling himself from the belts of ammo.

  Charlie didn’t get it. ‘Nice of ’em to share.’

  ‘I made my move when we were close to the border,’ said Harry, ‘and slipped them.’ He lay down on his bed and was instantly asleep.

  Charlie looked at Joe, realising he was missing something. Joe thought he could see a touch of fear. For once, Charlie said nothing.

  Joe climbed carefully back up to Reant. The village was quiet in the early afternoon, the villagers inside resting after lunch. Joe stopped by the little stone chapel with the two-bell campanile. Set into a wall nearby was a tiny shrine to the Madonna holding the baby Jesus. After checking that no one was watching, Joe plucked an onion flower and laid it at the Madonna’s feet. He thought about what he should pray for but didn’t know any more.

  * * *

  Late afternoon, Harry woke and asked about food. When Charlie told him that it was Masarolis tonight, and Harry shook his head and said he liked the look of Valle better, Joe knew he was worried about the Slovenians. Masarolis was up high, only about a mile from the Yugoslav border, while Valle was further down the road from Reant, back towards the plain.

  Harry had it all worked out. Charlie would go lead scout as usual, unarmed. Harry would follow with the Mauser semi-auto and pistol, and Joe would be the packhorse at the rear carrying two rifles and most of the ammunition. That role suited Joe: he’d have preferred not to carry a weapon again but there was no choice, so he dutifully trudged after Charlie and Harry down the pitted road towards Valle.

  Harry was full of admiration for the Slovenians. ‘Tough hooers,’ he said, ‘and practical. They all carry German weapons because that’s who they’ll be killing. Makes it easier to get ammo and parts.’

  ‘If they’re killing Germans,’ said Joe, ‘doesn’t that put them on our side?’

  ‘Whoever kills us is our enemy,’ said Harry. ‘They shot three Kiwis cold. They’ve only lost two.’

  Joe wasn’t sure if that was the way the Slovenians would see it.

  As they dropped down to Valle, the smallest of the villages, a cluster of three or four houses on a track that led up from the road, they heard raised voices. Charlie stopped and motioned them into the trees. They found one of the foresters’ trails that took them round above the village, from where they had a good view down to the small square.

  The Slovenians were there. They had the villagers, men, women and children, lined up, except one. Mario, a strong charcoal burner in his forties, father of two small boys being held back by his wife, had his hands pinned behind his back and his head pressed against the stone trough by the barrel of a Mauser.

  Joe didn’t know him but Harry and Charlie recognised the man who had hosted them many times, feeding them whatever the family had while Charlie did his tricks for the boys in front of the fire. The Slovenian with his rifle at Mario’s temple was shouting. They couldn’t hear his words but they didn’t need to. The villagers were stoic people, they weren’t crying or pleading, not even the children. They stood awaiting the imminent execution of one of their few able-bodied men and stayed silent: this is what happened when the outside world came into their world. It had always been thus. They would suffer and endure.

  While Joe was grimacing, waiting for the shot, Harry handed him the semi-auto and took one of the rifles. When Charlie realised what Harry was planning, he whispered, ‘No! You’ll bring them down on us!’

  ‘They’re here already,’ said Harry. ‘What’s to lose?’

  As he sighted the rifle, Joe’s gaze went back to the tableau in the village square: the women trying to hide their children’s eyes, the men flinching in anticipation of the bullet fragmenting Mario’s head, the Slovenian executioner shouting louder, enraged at the villagers’ intransigence . . .

  Then one side of his forehead blew away and he fell backwards into the trough. Joe hadn’t even heard the bullet.

  ‘Three all,’ said Harry.

  34

  What followed was the march from hell. Though it wasn’t so much a march as a desperate scuttle-run across angry country. Joe thought more than once of Arch and his Hare Battalion. They were hares being hunted along a maze of foresters’ trails. The Slovenians had started below them in Valle so they had to climb higher before coming west. There was no going back to the buca, they’d just bring the Slovenians down on Reant. Perhaps they’d already visited Masarolis and extracted information that had led them to Valle. Joe tried not to think of the warm cave as darkness fell and he strained to see the trail ahead under a half-moon that was often obscured by clouds and trees.

  It had been Harry’s idea that Joe would lead under his direction with Charlie, now armed with one of the rifles, in the middle and Harry bringing up the rear, the first point of contact if the Slovenians caught up with them. For the first hour, while the light held, they were close to running and Charlie had
no breath to talk. But as dusk closed in Charlie began a breathless patter, thinking out loud, trying to justify an attempt to find a village or even a house, get some chow and a good night’s sleep. They could slurp water from the streams they clambered through, but Charlie and Joe hadn’t eaten for the best part of eight hours. God knows when Harry last ate.

  Charlie’s visions must have got to Harry. ‘Shut up,’ he told him, ‘or I’ll shut you up.’

  Every so often Harry would stop and listen, sniff the air like a pig dog and say, with what seemed like a kind of satisfaction, ‘They’re still coming.’

  At times Joe thought that Harry might be disappointed if they outran the Slovenians. Giving Joe directions according to the grid in his head, he seemed to be enjoying the chase and didn’t really see himself as the quarry. A couple of hours into darkness he told Joe they were far enough ahead and could start working their way down. They didn’t want to be caught up near the border in daylight.

  By the early morning hours, even Harry was done in. They stumbled across a charcoal burner’s hut in a clearing and he said they could rest a while. Charlie and Joe huddled inside the hut while Harry took the first shift, sitting propped against the outside wall, the semi-auto between his knees, looking back the way they’d come.

  When Joe woke it was just light. He was stiff and sore from the wooden shelf he’d slept on and went outside to stretch. But Harry was nowhere to be seen. Joe went inside to wake Charlie. Harry was suddenly there, fingers to his lips: ‘Let’s go! Scappato!’

  Joe and Charlie grabbed their rifles and stumbled after Harry. He was leading them back up the hill, on a right angle to the track they’d come in on. Joe wanted to ask why, if the Slovenians had caught up with them, they weren’t fleeing further west, but the answer soon presented itself. A platoon of Republicans appeared and started sniffing around the hut. Joe tried to reassure himself that they hadn’t lit a fire or eaten anything, so there’d be no trace of their occupation: all they had to do was stay quiet in their well-camouflaged vantage point and the danger would pass.