Where We Begin

by Christie Nieman

  ‘Anna, would you believe I used to have a motorcycle?’ Hessel began almost as soon as he had entered the room and sat down on the couch opposite. Bette bustled back and forth from the kitchen, setting the large dripper coffee pot out on the low table between us. ‘I will tell you some things from Europe. You will like this. Although, you should know, my memory is not as sharp as it used to be. And also,’ he said, with hammy theatricality, ‘my memory is not as sharp as it used to be. Huh? You like that?’

  ‘Very good, Grand– Hessel.’

  ‘So,’ he said, leaning back in his chair. ‘My motorcycle. It was a wonderful motorcycle – it was a very deep blue, which was just so unusual at the time. And do you want to know where I rode it?’ he asked. ‘I rode it all around the Netherlands. Oh we had such freedom back then.’

  Bette arrived with a plate of pie-shaped cookies and poured steaming coffee into a delicate blue-ware coffee cup. She handed this to Hessel along with a small plate with a single, still-warm cookie on it.

  The smell coming off the coffee was doing strange things to my gag reflex, but it seemed tea would not be an option at this event.

  ‘And I rode it into Amsterdam in the early morning, to this wonderful little cafe there, and they knew me and would be waiting, and they had the most glorious little gevulde koeken – like this,’ he said, waving his cookie, ‘but not like this, better than this. Elizabeth does her best, but an Amsterdam cafe . . . well. So they would wait for me to get there and to have the first one before they would give it to any other customers. They wanted my seal of approval, you see?’ His eyes twinkled at the memory.

  Bette slipped another gevulde koek onto my plate as soon as I finished the first one, barely hearing what Hessel was saying, transported as I was by the glorious almond paste inside the crumbly shell. Nassim has to try this, I caught myself thinking, and then suffered a little wave of pain at the thought of him.

  ‘. . . and all the artists and thinkers would come to the cafe,’ Hessel was saying. ‘European thinkers, with such things to say, nothing like you find here. And the art there . . . and then the art here . . . Ah well. Here we have the open space all around, I suppose. Room to breathe, huh? Something to compensate.’

  Bette took off her apron and sat down in a third chair, brought in from the kitchen. She took a small, careful bite of cookie and she and I shared a look of cookie-bliss. ‘These are amazing, Grandma. Truly beautiful,’ I said.

  Bette smiled and a piece of koek dropped from her mouth and tumbled down her dress onto the floor. Hessel scoffed while I giggled and picked it up for her, putting it on the table in front of us.

  ‘Yes, this is quite a good batch,’ said Hessel, leaning forward and holding out his cup for Bette to refill. ‘Still. My old Amsterdam cafe cannot be beaten. The taste of them is something I will never forget. So I would taste their koeken for them, and then I would climb back on my bike and just take off, just ride all around.’

  ‘You’re not drinking, Anna,’ said Bette. While I hastily picked up my cup and tried not to inhale while I sipped, Hessel leaned in towards me, mock-conspiratorially, and whispered loud enough for Bette to hear. ‘I had girlfriends all around, you see. A girl in every town.’

  Bette rolled her eyes and smirked, but a bit of cookie caught in my throat and I coughed.

  ‘I brought them all they knew, the latest thinking, the best music papers, and all the delicious specialties from Amsterdam. It was so exciting for them when I rode in on my motorcycle –’

  ‘I’m sure they were very grateful,’ I said, clearing my throat and hiding my twitching mouth behind my coffee cup. Did they do this every week?

  Hessel pressed his fingers together while he spoke. He sat upright in his dark leather chair, and the whole time Bette smiled and nodded and made assenting noises and caught my eye every now and then, moving only to refill coffee cups and plates, using the silver serving tongs to dole out cookies.

  I didn’t know what to make of it. On the one hand I was trying not to laugh, but I was also beginning to feel paralysed. Hessel’s monologue was strangely numbing. I almost didn’t need to be here. I imagined myself in one of the pictures behind him, an oil-brushed image of myself, my face boldly lit against a shadowy background, my painted mouth thoughtful but unspeaking, a look of serious attentiveness on my face: ‘Young Woman, Listening.’ I found myself complying with this version of myself, as Bette did. Hessel’s complete lack of enquiry after my experience of the world, or Bette’s for that matter, meant that it would take a certain level of energy to project any of my own personality onto the scene. And it was more energy than I felt compelled to spend, quite frankly: let the old man have his moment, I thought, and I began to ask questions I knew he would enjoy: How fast was the motorcycle? Do you think Dutch coffee is better than Italian coffee?

  Eventually, after an age, I tried to stand up, but Hessel continued talking as if I hadn’t moved – ‘Country women in Holland are not the same as country women here’ – and I was forced to sit back down. ‘In the Netherlands country women are sophisticated. My girlfriends – oh, they were all so smart.’ I looked at Bette but her eyes stayed down as Hessel detailed his girlfriends. He went on and on, and the less Bette responded the more I began to feel annoyance on her behalf. ‘They were great company,’ Hessel was saying. ‘They knew all the great philosophers, so they recognised a good thinker in me.’

  I had to interrupt. ‘Weren’t they good thinkers themselves? If they were reading great philosophers it sounds like they were capable themselves of –’

  ‘Oh no,’ he stopped me. ‘Women’s brains are made different, they cannot think this way. Of course there are always exceptions, masculine women, but the attractive ones, they are the great appreciators – it is very important to have great appreciators.’

  I felt my jaw falling. My mouth was actually falling open. I was going to laugh at him if I wasn’t careful – I wouldn’t be able to help myself. ‘So just how many girlfriends did you have?’ I asked, worried that I was chuckling a bit underneath it. But he actually smiled and laughed too. He thought I was with him, celebrating his conquests.

  ‘How many towns are there in Holland?’ he said.

  Bette stood and began to clear the things, then took them away to the kitchen. And still Hessel continued.

  ‘Australia is not a very refined place,’ he said. ‘The culture is a poor copy. It is so thin. It is all the same. It glorifies the stupid. You might be alright though, you are Dutch. You might get a passport. Emigrate to Holland. Marry a Dutch man.’

  ‘I’m not too interested in any men at the moment, Dutch or otherwise.’

  ‘Good girl!’ said Hessel, smiling approvingly. ‘A girl shouldn’t have too many boyfriends. Australian girls have too many boyfriends.’ Hessel sat back, as if this settled it.

  ‘Oh I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve only really had the one, and he was already distracting me too much from my studies. I want a career, you see. Although as far as distracting boyfriends go, Nassim was really nothing to complain about.’

  The old man’s face was still. Nassim’s name hung oddly in the air between us. Hessel paused in his monologue long enough to regard me for a moment, to finally notice that I was sitting there, a real flesh and blood person. And at the same time I was suddenly caught up in a complicated tangle of pain and confusion at my own casual mentioning of Nassim. Perhaps Hessel could see it, the wobble it caused me. I hoped not. I didn’t want to talk about it. He blinked at me for a moment but then he went on just as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘One of my girlfriends had a career,’ he said. ‘An “artist”, she called herself, but she was a painter really. She was quite good at it – decorative watercolours, pretty things. But women aren’t really built for careers, you see. Women should only have pastimes.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Elizabeth used to play the piano,’ Hessel spoke over me. ‘That was her pastime. She used to play all the music at the dances.’

  He paused fo
r a moment to sip coffee. I sat back, debating whether to try and enlighten my hilarious old Dutch dinosaur grandfather, or to just keep humouring him. It didn’t seem to matter much what I did either way. So I said, ‘Oh poor you, Hessel, no dance partner with your wife stuck at the piano. But I guess it would have been worse if she’d made a career out of it.’ I couldn’t resist that last little poke, but it seemed to pass him by.

  ‘Oh, ho ho, don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I had partners. I had many partners. The women in this town, they are so far away from anything of European culture, they flock to me on the dance floor.’

  ‘And Grandma was happy about that?’ I asked, a laugh bubbling away in my voice.

  Hessel suddenly stood up and pointed a shaking finger at me. I pulled back quickly, surprised by his action. He looked me in the eye as he spoke. ‘You keep asking the wrong questions,’ he said.

  As I leaned back away from his finger Bette re-entered the room, but stopped abruptly when she saw Hessel standing over me.

  Hessel still had his arm up, his shaking finger pointed squarely at my nose. He looked from me to Bette and back to me again, and after a moment he dropped his arm. Standing, he seemed somehow less upright than when he was sitting – his back seemed to reach up as if it meant to be strong and straight, but failed at the last moment, curving forward at his shoulder blades, pushing his head forward and his chin out.

  I felt sorry for him, this old man, so proud of his youth and his exploits. For all his jokes he seemed somehow unaware that his body was catching him up, that one day, not too far away, it would bring him down.

  He turned to seat himself again, but halfway through the motion he seemed to change his mind. Still standing, he turned back to me.

  ‘Forgive me my brutishness, Anna. I am cultured, yes, but I am still a man, you see? I am a man, and I have worries on my mind.’

  ‘Um, okay. That’s okay.’

  ‘I am just so worried about my Polly, you see. So we will have to cut this short – I apologise.’

  Short?! How long had he been planning on going on for?

  ‘Oh! Of course. Yes. That’s fine, Hessel. Perfectly understandable.’

  Hessel waited, and Bette gestured to me, ushering me out of the room first. Hessel followed us and closed the doors behind us. They came together with a solid ‘click’, then he turned and reached for his coat and his hat in a single movement and seconds later was out the door.

  ‘Right,’ said Bette, suddenly bright and industrious. ‘Best get all this packed away then.’

  18

  Despite coffee and Hessel’s extended monologue, I managed to be standing at the bus shelter when the coach arrived. The door hissed open and the same bus driver as the other night gave me an enormous smile. ‘Well, I’m glad to see you!’ he said.

  And I gave a little curtsy. ‘Here I am, alive and well, and in the flesh.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ he said. ‘A promise is a promise. Hop in.’

  I climbed the steps and the driver gave me a high-five as I passed him and sat in the same seat I had occupied on the trip down. The bus was crowded, the more civilised hour and the few services a day funnelling people together. Paddocks passed by, green and brown; cairns loomed and receded one by one; unattractive dams, scraped unceremoniously from the flat earth, held shallow pans of water around which sheep crowded and drank. It was odd to be back on the same bus that had brought me all the way from Melbourne, to go just fifteen minutes down the road. As the bus drew me along through the landscape it was as though I had rejoined my original journey again after a strange pause, an interlude in another world.

  And then the bus began to climb and the road became curvy as it traversed hills rather than the flat plain.

  And then forest. I hadn’t expected that.

  Open, sun-dappled forest. Black-trunked trees with deep fissures running all the way up: the roughest, most textured ebony bark I’d ever seen. Leaves, long and thin and shimmering silver-blue, stood out brilliantly against the shadowy trunks. I thought of Hessel’s Dutch pictures – the beauty of something bright contrasted against shadow. The air grew sweet and I saw that each and every tree was in flower: a cluster of creamy white flowers at the end of every branch, an overall winter spectacle as delicate and as breathtaking as any snowfall on German forest. And the fragrance – the winter sun on the flowers filled the air with honey, an aroma that broke through all the stale smells of the bus and filled my heart with a reasonless joy. I stood up, opened the small sliding window above the larger window, ignoring the looks from my co-passengers as cold air poured into the bus, put my nose to the outside and breathed and breathed and breathed. The bus driver smiled in the mirror.

  And then, sooner than I would have liked, the forest thinned and old brick houses and fenced-off depots full of earthmoving equipment and farm machinery appeared among the trees. And in a matter of minutes there was no forest at all as the bus reached the top of the hill that overlooked the busy town and began its descent into it.

  I shut the window and sat back down. My phone had bars. Instantly it pinged. A message from Nassim. Just saying goodnight, no need to call me back. Unless you want to. Goodnight sweets.

  Quickly, pushing all thought and guilt aside, I closed the message and opened my emails instead. There was nothing from my mum, but my email was full of messages from my dad. The first was Dad entreating me to reach out and talk to my mother. You don’t understand where she’s coming from, honey, he wrote. But I’d heard it all before. He was like a broken record. I was sick of having to understand where she was coming from. It was time for me to look out for me.

  In the next few emails Dad had attached shots of his head in front of various scenes, smiling against the main street of the town, the little German church with its plain and beautiful lines, a summer scene of lazy cyclists along a canal. There was one of my father with Opa, Dad holding his hand while Opa’s rheumy eyes tried to find the camera to smile for me.

  My eyes filled with tears. I’d been stupid, so stupid not to go there. But then, what would have happened if I’d gone? I would have been over there, having to sort out my situation in a foreign country under my dad’s watchful eye. Impossible. Tears made the words swim as I responded with Looks like fun and Hug and kiss Opa for me, let him know I love love love him, and then hit send.

  The bus slowed along the main street of the town: gold rush era buildings crowded close to each other, as though proximity might protect them from the great wide expanse of landscape all around them. It was pretty, but after the street I’d just seen in the pictures of Germany I felt reluctantly inclined to agree with Hessel: that it was a poor copy of all things European.

  I stepped down onto the street with the others, and the driver gave me a cheery wave as he drove the empty bus away, leaving a view of the stately post office across the road.

  There it was. And this was it.

  Inside the building there was no queue and I walked straight up to the counter.

  ‘Yes, love,’ said a man appearing at the desk through the doorway behind.

  ‘I’m picking up a package for Anna Krause,’ I said.

  ‘Have you got your mailbox slip there?’

  ‘My slip? No, it’s a direct to post office delivery.’

  ‘Your code then – you would have been messaged a receipt code when it came in. On your phone there?’

  I frowned, and looked at the face of my phone. ‘Um, no,’ I said, as I uselessly scrolled through my emails and messages for something I knew wasn’t there. ‘But it should have been here today.’

  ‘No “shoulda” when it comes to packages, love. But I’ll have a look. Krause was it?’

  I nodded and the man disappeared back through the door. More people queued behind me. Eventually he reappeared, empty-handed.

  ‘Sorry love. Not today. You gotta wait for the notification.’

  ‘But –’

  The man looked past me and addressed the next person in line.
‘What can we do y’ for?’ he said. Dismissed, I turned and walked out onto the street again.

  Cars went up and down the road, everyone on their way to somewhere else. I had hours until the next bus back. No studying here. Such a waste of precious time. I suddenly felt like an alien – what was I doing here? And I felt like crying, too: crying for my sick Opa, crying for not being there with him, crying for Nassim, crying for being pregnant and for my wasted day.

  No. A minor setback, that’s all this was. A minor setback.

  A sandwich board was propped on the pavement ahead. A two-dollar shop. I would use some time getting supplies. Inside, I immediately found a power board and an extension lead, a packet of six mouse traps, and also an electric kettle and a little aluminium teapot. And then I picked up a cool-bag and freezer block so I could keep milk over at Bromley. I shouldn’t have been spending my money like that, but the thought that I could study with beverages actually cheered me a little. From the next aisle I could hear a woman’s voice in discussion with a young man.

  ‘Well, is there even any point getting these now?’

  ‘Yeah. Totally. I so reckon he’ll just turn up, Ma.’

  ‘If there’s something you’re not telling me, if you know anything, anything at all . . .’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t. He must have really wanted to though, hey.’

  ‘It’s not that simple, Basil. For him as much as anybody.’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe it’s better – you don’t know.’

  ‘Basil . . .’

  Leonie and Basil were standing in front of a quite decent art-supplies section.

  ‘Anna!’ said Leonie. And Basil turned around and beamed at me.

  ‘Just the person,’ he said. ‘Just in the nick of time.’

  Basil seemed happy to see me and I was surprised at how happy I was to see the both of them. People I knew. Family friends. ‘For what?’ I asked.

  ‘To save me from my mother’s fifth degree.’

  ‘Third degree, you little twerp,’ said Leonie. ‘Hey honey, you alright? You look sad, or sick, or sad and sick.’