by Ian Wedde
Although it shamed him to admit it to himself, he’d expected that Catha would admire the good wooden body he’d built for the Model-T chassis and motor and the fold-down seats on the truck’s tray, but she climbed up without saying anything, and she and Greta sat there in the chilly autumn breeze with their arms around each other as if the truck was just an everyday thing, and perhaps it was, back in the town. But then she leaned around the cab as he was cranking at the front of the truck and shouted Giddy up! with just a little taunt in her voice, and so they still knew each other just the same.
Then there was work to be done preparing the hives for winter. In a week or two there could be snow on the hilltops, the year before there were heavy spring falls in the valley just before the war ended, earlier in September someone had thrown a lit can of kerosene into ‘the Turk’ Badem’s woodpile – what had they wanted to accomplish by that, freezing the little almonds? So he’d driven over with Adam and a truckload of dry wood – no one had had the guts to say a single word to him about that either then or later. But even so, they were not as far from that kind of thing as Catha might imagine where she was now sitting in the warm parlour drinking tea with Ma and nibbling on a piece of Ettie’s honey cake while feeding little bits to Grace on her lap – it was a scene he had often pictured and held in his thoughts and now there it was – and then Adam came in out of the chilly evening, and when his Aunt Catharina stood up to kiss him with Grace squashed between them he was head and shoulders above her!
But what news of the Professor?
Ettie gave him a look from behind Catha, but his sister just said ‘Gone,’ with no particular expression, adding ‘South America’ after a pause that indicated she was unwilling to add even that much.
It was Smithy who’d galloped over from his place at first light – they’d better watch out because some bad buggers had set fire to the Badems’ woodpile shed and Smithy reckoned Wolf’s lot might be next in line. The Badem woodpile was still smouldering under its collapsed roof when he and Adam arrived with the truckload of firewood. Denis said he and Omer had doused the fire with water from their tank and then with buckets passed up from the river by the two older kids and Omer’s wife Nehir. Did he know her name meant river, asked Omer through teeth whitened by the sooty darkness of his face – and just as fucking well they had a river on their side, but she was pregnant again and if anything had happened to her while she was being a pregnant fucking river in the freezing cold he’d have got along to the settlement with his gun for the bastards that did this, he could guess who the fucking bastards were, the same ones who’d knocked over half a dozen hives the week before.
Shush Omer, said Denis, what good would that do? And thank God the woodpile wasn’t the house-ah one in the lean-to because then the house-ah would be gone. He and Omer were raking out the logs that could still be used from under the remains of the shed roof and dousing the smoulder. Thank you Wolf, thank you Adam, he said. That is what matters now, to say thank you for the good, not to run offah with your gun like a angry boy.
His voice was so hoarse it could hardly make words at all. Omer said something angry in Turk and bashed sparks out of one of the unsplit rounds with the back of his rake. Adam took the rake from Denis and began to drag the big rounds out. You go and get a cup of tea with Dad, Mister Badem, he said. I can do this. Omer and me can do this, can’t we Omer.
He saw Adam’s quick look and the jerk of his head that meant bugger off, Dad. The lad was already as tall as Omer who was small and quick like a bird, and when he put his arm around the angry little man’s shoulders and turned him towards the work and away from his father, his brawny boy outline obscured Omer’s for a while as they began to reach with their rakes into the woodpile.
He stood and watched the smoke that still rose in breezy wisps from the pile as Adam and Omer carefully raked, because it was the three littlies Ettie had lost that were rising and blowing like wispy smoke, the two that were never formed properly and the one that died, the one before Henry that might have been called Henry that Ettie bled out as just a mess that hard first year after she was sick back at the camp, and the one before Josephina that might have been called Josephina that also bled out but you could see the little curled bean-sprout beginning shape of her, and the one that died before Peter that they called Grace who only lived for two weeks because she could never breathe properly and was the sweet colour of a plum, but then there was the last one after Peter that was born strong and noisy that they also called Grace so they could always have the little plum with them.
Winter ade, scheiden tut weh, Goodbye winter, departing hurts, sang the first wisp that could have been Henry as it blew away towards the river where mist was rising while the morning warmed, that was the song Mutti said she sang over and over to Adam at her little house in Bute Street when he was the baby who could never sleep and Ettie had to look after Aggie when she was sick that time with the sore swollen cheeks. Also she sometimes sang Wie traulich war das Fleckchen wo meine Wiege ging, it was a song about the cosy spot where a child’s cradle had rocked, that one he remembered in the part of his mind that was like the world just before night fell when certain sounds like the morepork’s hoot were not exactly anywhere. Across the river was the slope of cleared land that Badem leased to Smithy where the ragwort was doing well. Some of Smithy’s sheep were bleating hoarsely over there but it was the second wisp he could hear, Winter ade, scheiden tut weh, how could such a guttural sound come from such a tiny little curled thing? – and then the Grace that only lived for two weeks was singing as she blew away into the river mist.
Winter ade, scheiden tut weh.
What are you singing, Dad? Go and get your cup of tea.
Adam’s big boy hand on his shoulder steering him towards the kitchen door where Denis Badem was waiting.
Are you all right, Dad?
Smoke and mist and the hoarse cries of spirits across the river.
Then Adam was sitting him down at the Badems’ kitchen table.
Nehir who was a river, the glasses of tea, some of the honey.
Adam should drive you home, said Denis, you don’t lookah so good. Can you drive, Adam? Thank you for the firewood. We are all right now. You go home. Adam, take your father home. He don’t lookah so good.
But he was all right.
Winter ade, scheiden tut weh, under his breath.
‘Isn’t that the song you used to sing?’ said Ettie to Ma in the kitchen as he and Adam came in. ‘For the love of God, what made you think of that song, you mad bugger? Go and have a lie-down for goodness sake, Wolf, I’ll keep the littlies out of your hair for a bit.’
He lay down in his longjohns without washing off the smell of smoke and Ettie threw the covers over him. The next thing he knew sunlight was coming in the window on the west side of the room, it was already early afternoon at least.
Voices on the other side of the house, Ettie and Ma, and Peter who already had some words, one of them was ‘more’.
‘More, more!’ Banging with his spoon on the table.
He walked through the kitchen past the questions on Ma’s and Ettie’s faces and took off the longjohns and washed himself all over in freezing water at the tank with the bit of yellow soap there. No, he couldn’t tell them that he hadn’t wanted to wash off the smell of smoke at first because, because what?
No, he couldn’t tell them that.
He put on a good shirt and the fresh suit of clothes he’d taken out of the wardrobe and stood on the porch in the afternoon sunshine polishing his good boots. Bandy little Peter swaggered out so he gave him a boot and a brush to have a go with.
Ettie came out too and frowned at him but he shook his head at her – either she’d guessed what he was up to or she hadn’t, either way it made no difference. The kids were going over to Smithy’s place for a bit after school, Ettie said, so why was he getting dressed up like that? Of course she probably guessed why.
It was that nice time of day in winter when the air was fresh and cl
ear and the long late-afternoon tree shadows were making stretched-out patterns across the cleared ground down to the river, especially when the house-smoke was blowing away. It was still blowing steadily in the direction of the river and across it, as it had been earlier at Badems’, when that old song had come into his head.
Adam hadn’t gone to school after driving the truck back from the Badems’. There was little point anyway – in a year or two he’d be working. He’d been keeping an eye out for those buggers, he said, meaning the ones who’d lit the fire. He’d done a bit of clearing-out work over in the veges. Where was Dad going? Could he come?
No, he could not and he needed to saddle Blackie up and be ready to come over quick if anything happened back here at the house. And it was a bit slushy from the frost-melt around the shady back of the house, could Adam get a couple of buckets of gravel from the river?
Come over where?
He’d be at the pub.
Then he cranked the truck and drove slowly up the hill through the rows of poplars he’d planted for their good straight grain. He could start felling some in another four or five years. He could measure how long he and Ettie had already been there by the length of the poplar shadows.
*
They were eating Ma’s rabbit stew with the last of the winter carrots. Oh, they had no idea how delicious it was after the food back in town, said Catha with her head thrown back. There they all were around the table, except for Peter who was asleep. Adam had already pushed his empty plate to one side but was waiting for his second helping. Henry had his head down and was shovelling up the stew. Josie was picking at hers. Greta had made an organisation of the carrot pieces and the pieces of rabbit and was rearranging them each time she got one of them on her spoon. Aggie had ridden over from Smithy’s and was sneaking looks at her Auntie Cath. Grace was on her auntie’s lap, and that Catha sister of his was interrogating him with those sharp blue eyes of hers over the child’s head.
Really? Nothing had happened after the woodpile? No one ever bothered the noble house of Wenczel? What was her brother hiding under those wolf eyebrows?
‘Das ist aber Wolfscheisse,’ she said so the children wouldn’t hear the bad word.
He wasn’t going to talk about it.
Yes, they were lucky, he said, putting some rabbit in his mouth. Adam was a good shot.
What? He had Adam keeping guard like a trooper?
Of course she was teasing him.
‘Rabbits,’ he said.
‘What, the ones that burned the woodpile?’
He took a swallow of tea and looked No at his sister across the table. No he did not wish to talk about it. She had that smile.
‘He went up to the pub,’ said Ma. ‘It’s a story they tell around here now. But what do we know, we weren’t there.’
‘Ma,’ he said.
‘He ordered drinks for everybody, so the story goes,’ said Ettie. ‘There were either a dozen of them, or fifty, depending on who’s telling the story. And he was about nine foot tall at the time.’
He pushed his chair back and went out through the kitchen door into the cold night. It was clear and windless and the stars were very bright in the sky. There was one of those owls they called morepork on the other side of the river. It was nearly always there.
More pork, More pork.
My shout, he’d said. Line them up. He’d already spotted the pair he guessed had lit Badems’ woodpile. I want to thank you all for your kindness, so come on boys, drink up. Three of my children have died in this valley, this is where we belong. Thank you for your brotherhood.
Then he’d drunk his glass and left. He hadn’t waited to see whether the two who’d lit the woodpile drank theirs. It didn’t matter. They’d be known, anyway. When he got home Adam was sitting on the porch next to his 303 and who could blame him, still just a boy despite his size, and scared as well, and scared of showing he was scared. He’d thanked Adam and then picked up the gun and ejected the five rounds from its chamber. That was five lives, he told Adam, without anger but holding the boy’s still smooth face close to his own with a hand under his chin – five lives that times five is twenty-five and that is already a war, did Adam understand? Now could he go and unsaddle poor old Blackie and give him a good feed, because he wouldn’t be needed until school time in the morning, and after he’d done that he could come in and have a cup of tea and some of his ma’s honey cake, he was a good boy, his mother and father were proud of him, as well as a bit scared, because he was big as well as brave and might be too brave for his own good sometimes.
A couple of days later Denis Badem rode over with a parcel. This is for you and for your family, for thanksah. Some others had come down to the Badem place with more wood, and with some provisions. Perhaps Missis Josephina would like to open it because she interesting such thingsah?
The thank-you gift was rolled up in sacking like a big sausage and tied with baling twine. Ma frugally undid the knot in the twine, twisted it into a bunch around her hand and tied it off, and then, as if she had been delaying the moment, unrolled the thing on the veranda in the chilly late-afternoon light and then sat back in her chair and looked at it. She and Denis Badem had quite often sat out on the veranda with cups of tea and talked – Ettie had teased her about it at first but had stopped doing that for quite a while now. The gift was a small carpet about six foot long and four-and-a-bit wide. Its colours were old ghosts of red, blue and green. There was a faded blue chain pattern around the border, within that a narrow green border of entwined vines, and within that rows of rectangular frames filled with different kinds of flowers and leaves.
‘Is from Iskenderun, old one, silk and a little bit wool.’
Ma was leaning down from her chair and moving her hand across the weave. He couldn’t see the expression on her face but could tell what it was like from the way she was moving her hand. Then she sat back and took her handkerchief from the sleeve of her coat and wiped the tears from her cheeks.
‘So schön wie ein Traum,’ she said.
And yes Denis Badem’s carpet was as beautiful as a dream in which things entwined of their own accord – it was surely because the weavers of Iskenderun knew how to show the order that was already in the world, the order they dreamed perhaps even when they were awake and working at their looms. Perhaps they had songs they sang while weaving, songs that had the rhythms of the entwining. He could imagine them sitting and singing at their looms in the patterns of light and shade cast by leaves and branches on the swept tiles of a courtyard, or in the flickers of light that came in to a cool room with old carpets already on the floor, like the ones at the Badem house.
Sometimes Ma sang to herself when she sat sewing on the veranda with the view across the trembling river to the trees on the far side that went on shaking the light from their leaves. Wie traulich war das Fleckchen. And now a year later there the carpet was rolled out on the floor away from the table where they had just eaten their tea, where Catha could see it because this was a special occasion with all the family joined up in their own pattern, and she was looking at it and then at him with a question in her brow.
It was a gift of thanks from Denis Badem and his family after the woodpile burning, he told her. He would not take no for an answer, that Denis, such a firm man. And so now a year later it was a reminder that the Badem family and the Wenczel family were connected.
Catha’s eyebrow went up.
‘And those Hansens, of course,’ he added, because now there was Catha in the pattern, and Greta who had always believed the carpet was a magic one from the moment she had watched her grandmother unwrap it under Denis Badem’s smiling inspection, and was now looking at the magic carpet as if she expected it to fly off into the night sky at last.
Though it was certainly not the best time to do so and Ettie’s expression said as much, it was then that he asked his thoughtfully gazing sister about Professor Hugo von Welden – perhaps it was because the professor’s thread was not included in the
pattern of the little carpet spread out for all of them to look at on the kitchen floor of the house he and Ettie had built, starting with slab timber and canvas and ending with verandas on two sides, a honey house just a bit further up the river, good sheds and gardens and hives and some pasture and all the rest of it! And the children who were well fed and schooled and cared for – he didn’t say, What kind of man would just bugger off and leave his wife and child and the family that had minded his child for him? – he didn’t say it but he guessed from Catha’s expression that she had read his thoughts. She tapped with one fingertip on the table and shook her head.
But then she beckoned to Greta who came around the table and stood with her arm around her mother’s shoulders. Catha had that look as though she was going to say something – she closed her eyes and made the grimace face he knew happened whenever she was trying to do something she didn’t want to – but then it was Greta who piped up clearly and her mother’s head turned towards her as if astonished that her quiet daughter would do this.
It was all very well for them all to be all friendly and sympathetic towards the Badems, who were nice enough people, but her father had been a nice kind man as well and had loved her, except the difference was that he had been put in prison and that was different. So who was going to be kind to him when he came out? Probably no one. So now he was in Buenos Aires in Argentina which was in South America next to Chile and Uruguay, and she hoped he would be happy there and that one day she would go and visit him.
Greta stood up straight there next to her mother and blinked, but no tears came; it was as though she wouldn’t let them.
‘Oh God, I’m sure you will, my darling girl, if anyone can it will be you,’ Catha said and then pressed her face into her daughter’s narrow chest, certainly that was to hug her but also perhaps to conceal her own tears that she couldn’t stop.
Ettie got up with a loud grind of her chair legs against the floor and fetched the bottle of brandy from the cupboard. The last time they’d had a nip in company was when Denis Badem came round with the carpet.
