The Painting

by Alison Booth

  Darling Anika,

  Spring has officially started; the newspaper has announced it. And I can see with my own eyes that the daffodils are emerging, I even have one in a pot on my kitchen windowsill, the bloom is the palest yellow with a deeper yellow trumpet, and it brings me such pleasure. The birds are building nests and the days are getting longer and even I am feeling that my joints are easing, and perhaps all the scrubbing is good for me. The flat will soon be sparkling and maybe I’ll even wash the net curtains once the days get warmer, though I fear they will disintegrate, so perhaps I should begin with just one, from a window that doesn’t matter.

  Nyenye wrote that Anika must find her letters boring but she never did. The day-to-day domestic details bound them together in a way that other topics wouldn’t. Politics, world events, these could be found in other sources. But Anika could see that single daffodil on her windowsill and know how important that was after a long winter. Nyenye had an eye for beauty. And from no one else could Anika get the minutiae of Nyenye’s life, the little details that connected them.

  When Anika was young, Nyenye would laugh at things Anika’s parents would disapprove of. ‘We are complicit, little Anika. Speaking across a generation gives us such licence,’ she told her once. It took her years to understand what her grandmother meant, that they were an alliance against the limits set by Anika’s parents, that Nyenye would always provide a sympathetic ear when Anika needed one. And that, although she never undermined Anika’s parents, she could interpret how and why they behaved as they did, so Anika could better understand them.

  By the time Anika had read the letter twice, Tabilla had finished with her client and joined her on the terrace. A cooling breeze had arisen and the fading sky was streaked with a few lavender clouds, brushstrokes dashed across a pale blue canvas. It was nice having Tabilla sit beside her, Anika thought; she felt like proper family, as if she’d known her all her life rather than the few years since she’d reached Sydney.

  ‘Do you think Mrs Thornton has ever heard of the lady of Lesbos?’ Anika said.

  ‘Probably not, but why do you ask?’

  ‘Just now she said that Penny and Jane hang about together too much, and the other day she told me it’s strange for two young women like them to be doing up a house together.’

  ‘She might have meant that it’s unusual for women to do building work. She would have seen the Gay Mardi Gras on television so she must know about lesbians.’

  ‘But there’s a leap from seeing lesbians in fancy dress on TV and making the connection to Penny and Jane.’

  ‘That’s true. And she’s lived in this street all her life so she’s probably had quite a sheltered life.’

  ‘What did Mr Thornton do?’

  ‘He was a wharfie. Died on the job. They had two children, both grown up now and living in Queensland, so she hardly ever sees them. She’s very lonely, I think, and that’s why she likes to make the street her family. She’s a great asset except when you’re in a hurry.’

  At once Anika started to feel sorry for Mrs Thornton, a solitary old woman forever looking out of her house for someone who would never come home to her. This was followed by regret: too often she let impatience get the better of her and surely she could sometimes let Mrs Thornton ramble on. All that was needed to make her feel connected was the occasional nod and smile while she talked. It was not as if that time was wasted. Anika could always think of something else to dam that river of fatigue that threatened to overwhelm her once Mrs Thornton opened her mouth.

  ‘I’ve been living in this house for exactly fifteen years,’ Tabilla said pensively. ‘I would never have been able to afford it if it hadn’t been for Mrs Barraclough.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘My very first customer after I started dressmaking.’

  ‘Did she drop the price?’

  ‘No, this house wasn’t hers. She left me some money in her will. She had terrible arthritis and couldn’t get about easily, so every time she needed something made I went to her little flat just off Darling Street with my pins and fabric swatches and a tape measure. After she died I was amazed to discover that she was actually quite comfortably off and she’d left me some money so I used it to buy this place. It was cheap and needed a lot of work, and when that was done I began to consolidate my business.’

  ‘And you haven’t looked back.’

  ‘Anika, I’ve told you that I never look back unless I have to.’ She hesitated, her face thoughtful. ‘But if I did look back,’ she continued, her voice so quiet that Anika had to lean forward to make out the words, ‘I would see a woman who was training to be an engineer when Tomas and I thought, like all the others, that we could throw the Russians out of Hungary. How naïve we were.’

  This was the first time Tabilla had mentioned that she’d been an engineering student. Anika’s family in Budapest had never referred to it either. Although her mother had never met Tabilla, her father certainly had, and he seemed fond of her. Had Nyenye not spoken of Tabilla much because she’d survived the Revolution and Tomas hadn’t? Now Anika thought about it, Nyenye’s face had taken on an odd expression whenever her name came up, and maybe she hadn’t liked her much. Yet all Anika’s life Tabilla had kept in touch with her and Miklos. She had sent them postcards throughout their childhood. Of landmarks like the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, of extraordinary marsupials and those brilliant lorikeets that Anika had never tired of looking at, with their technicolour bodies that looked like something an imaginative child had coloured in.

  ‘Anika, don’t look sad,’ Tabilla said. ‘I am not in the least bit sorry to be dressmaking instead of designing concrete beams. It is much more colourful and sometimes it is even rather satisfying.’

  Peering down the garden, Anika wondered how much you ever knew of one person. Probably not much. An orange cat appeared from the back of the outhouse, caught her eye and then withdrew quickly. Mrs Thornton in her kitchen began to sing a few bars and then lapsed into what might have been silence if you couldn’t hear the distant hum of traffic from Victoria.

  You learn a bit about someone, Anika thought, from observation and what they choose to tell you, but you could live side-by-side with them for years and never know who they really were. She herself kept so much concealed, and so too did her parents and her grandmother. Amazing that when she was living at home she hadn’t thought to ask what sort of war they’d had. Tabilla was right when she’d said earlier that young people often never thought to discover more about their families until it was too late. Too late. There were so many questions she wanted to ask her family before it was too late.

  Chapter 10

  Late on Saturday afternoon Daniel collected Anika for their date. Drinks and dinner in the beer garden of a pub overlooking Watson’s Bay, somewhere to the east of the city, somewhere she’d never been before. They chose a table close to the water, where the air smelled salty and a light breeze, twisting the leaves of a eucalyptus tree, tempered the heat and filled the sails of a dozen or so yachts that danced across the harbour. Small waves slapped against the sandstone shelf below them, the wake from a ship that was being towed towards the heads by a fussy little tug.

  Daniel asked what Anika would like to drink and returned with a bottle of dry Riesling – in an ice bucket that looked like a length of clay drainage pipe – rather than the glass she’d expected. This gesture touched her; they were to be here for the evening and were not to be caught up in that ‘your shout, my shout’ business that drinking in pubs entailed.

  Sitting opposite her, he poured the wine. He was unusually quiet this evening. After handing her the glass, he scrutinised her closely with those dark intelligent eyes. She drank too quickly: the wine loosened her tongue and she began to talk, releasing all those words that had been bottled up inside her. She told him how, as a teenager, she’d often fantasised about going to Sydney for
reasons she still didn’t understand. Maybe it was because Australia was one of the countries that had absorbed Hungarian refugees after the Second World War and the 1956 Revolution, maybe it was because she had family here, maybe it was because of the colour and sunshine of the postcards Tabilla had sent that acted like a magnet to someone who’d grown up in a cold and drab communist country.

  When Anika explained to Daniel that the migrant points system gave extra points for hairdressing, he looked surprised. ‘There was a shortage,’ she said. ‘There still is. So what with my hairdressing qualifications and my English language skills and an Australian relative, I was able to get into Australia.’

  He glanced at his watch, and Anika wondered if he was finding her conversation tedious. But when she faltered, he smiled and prompted her, so she carried on talking. He refilled her glass and still he was watching her closely. Watching her face, watching her hands as she raised them to express something she was struggling to tell him, as if the motion of her hands would reveal more than her words. When she was attracted to someone, something happened to her eyes, and she felt it now and had to use her willpower to stop her eyelids batting. How embarrassing that would be, a real giveaway. You would think that after all these years of concealing feelings it would have become easier to keep those eyelashes under control but it had not. It was a distraction too, having to concentrate on her eyelids, and it diverted her attention from what she was trying to express.

  It was easier to look away, to gaze over Daniel’s shoulder at a point on the eucalyptus tree behind him, where the slanting sunlight made the smooth salmon-pink trunk glow, it was almost incandescent, as if it were about to burst into flames. But after a while she sensed that this made him uncomfortable, and he didn’t deserve this, him being so helpful to her. When their eyes met again, a blush began in her neck and moved inexorably up to her face. Cheeks hot, she turned away again from the intensity of those dark eyes. He barely touched his second glass but sat observing her as she babbled on.

  The light slowly faded and a crescent moon rose and glided across the darkening sky. They ordered and ate their fish and chips, and she drank too much and talked a lot, and it was late by the time they left. The beer garden had become raucous, words spilling out over the harbour water, and laughter too. She felt unburdened for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom. Maybe the act of telling someone about yourself was an act of trust and her subconscious had decided that Daniel was worthy of it. It had been a long time since she’d opened up to someone in this way; even Tabilla had not heard as much as she had told Daniel. She wondered if he felt the same about the evening; that receiving her history had moved them closer together.

  Daniel struggled to start the yellow Beetle and eventually the engine ticked over. He smiled and Anika knew where that smile was directed. His affection for his Beetle was palpable; strange how people could fall in love with a car. She told him how the splutter of a two-stroke engine made her homesick for Budapest and the belching blue smoke that stank up the streets with fumes. Right away he understood what she meant, without her even mentioning the word Trabant, and she liked that he was clearly not in the least bit tempted to explain the workings of the two-stroke engine.

  On the journey back to Rozelle, they drove along Old South Head Road. Past the rows of shops, a string of villages by the foreshore, and bay after bay glittering in the moonlight, and on through the city centre towards the inner west. Daniel drove slowly the better to talk; he had a lot to say after listening to her all evening. He told her about his family. He had two brothers who were older than he, both of them lawyers. His parents were immigrants who’d left Germany in the mid-1930s, lucky to get out while they could.

  When they reached Tabilla’s house he opened the car door for her from the outside, like a doorman at a posh hotel or someone in an old movie.

  ‘Thank you for everything, Daniel.’ Though the streetlight behind him lent a glow to his hair, his face was in shadow.

  ‘It’s been a wonderful evening, Anika.’ He rested his hands gently on her shoulders and leaned towards her. She raised her face and wished she could see his eyes. She felt they’d been moving towards a kiss all evening and felt unexpectedly nervous. When there was a sudden blast of gunfire she jumped away, heart fluttering like a bird in a trap.

  ‘It’s just a car backfiring from Victoria Road,’ Daniel said, his voice calm. ‘Or a truck.’

  At this moment Anika heard a squeaking from behind her. Cursing inwardly, she turned and saw that Mrs Thornton’s front door, with the hinges that needed oiling, was shifting in the breeze. Once her eyes adjusted, she spotted her neighbour standing in the shadows on her verandah. She was wearing a floral dressing gown over a pink nightdress that was too long and almost dragging on the ground. When she lifted the hem slightly you might have thought she was about to curtsy, but instead she took a couple of steps along the path to her gate to inspect Daniel more closely.

  ‘Nice evening, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘A bit of a wind sprang up just now and it’s cooling things down nicely. I didn’t mean to make you jump, Anika. It’s just that I heard a strange noise and thought I should investigate. Must have been a car backfiring. We’re normally a quiet street,’ she said to Daniel. ‘In spite of being near Victoria Road. It’s the one-way system, you see. A real blessing.’

  ‘I’m sure it is.’ Daniel was nodding and smiling at the same time. ‘I hope we didn’t disturb you.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Thornton. ‘Anyway, I won’t hold you up any longer. Goodnight.’ She hauled up her nightie again and was shutting the door behind her before they had time to reply.

  ‘It’s been a lovely evening, Anika.’ That moment when they might have kissed had gone and Daniel’s tone had become formal. He shifted and the shadows cast by the street lighting now defined his face. His head might almost have been one of those Greek busts you see in museums, so sculpted did it appear.

  ‘Thanks for taking me out, Daniel.’ Anika’s words, heartfelt when she first spoke them, sounded stilted on repetition.

  ‘Let’s do it again soon.’

  ‘I’d love to.’ She opened the front gate, put her key in the front door lock and heard it click open before turning her head. Daniel was still watching her but his face was again in shadow and his expression unreadable. She wondered if she had imagined that almost-kiss. When she stepped inside, the door slammed shut behind her.

  A moment later she heard Daniel’s car engine revving up – that characteristic putter-putter noise – and then he was gone.

  Chapter 11

  Only at this moment did Anika become aware that there was a gale blowing down the hall. The television was turned up so loudly that Tabilla didn’t notice Anika entering the lounge room. With her back to the door, Tabilla was leaning forward in her chair the better to peer at the images on the television screen. When she saw Anika, she waved her over to the sofa. Immediately Anika recognised the streets all those people were marching along, she recognised those buildings. The camera shifted to Kossuth Square, a place very familiar to her, no more than a kilometre or two from the apartment block where her parents lived. A vast crowd filled the square, thousands upon thousands of people gathered in front of the Parliament Building.

  Eyes brilliant, Tabilla turned to her. ‘They reckon there’s over a hundred thousand people there. And look, not a policeman or uniform in sight!’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Can you credit it, Anika, they’ve just announced that free elections are to be held within a year! Gorbachev doesn’t care what the Eastern European satellites get up to now. The Soviet Union is fed up with subsidising them.’

  Anika wondered if her parents were among the crowd in Kossuth Square, and Miklos and his friends too. ‘So Prime Minister Németh’s trip to Moscow’s paid off.’

  The pictures of Kossuth Square were replaced by an ABC commentator talking abo
ut momentous changes in Central and Eastern Europe. When the piece finished, Tabilla said, her face luminous with excitement, ‘This morning I didn’t have time to tell you what I heard on the BBC World Service. Németh wants that fence dismantled.’

  ‘Which fence?’

  ‘That electrified one along the border with Austria. The one with the flares that Hungary can’t afford to maintain. Németh spoke to Gorbachev about that too.’

  This was the border over which Tabilla had escaped over three decades before; no wonder her face was glowing. Anika felt as if a burden was shifting from her shoulders and in its place that lightest of feelings, hope, fluttered by. Brushing her with its wings, it left behind the thought that before too long – perhaps next year or the year after – she might be able to visit her family in Budapest.

  When the news from Hungary was replaced by the smiling image of Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, she skipped down the hall to shut the back door. In the kitchen she slid on fragments of something hard that were scattered across the floor.

  Grabbing hold of the bench, she turned on the light and her delight dissipated. Shards of glass littered the vinyl-covered floor. The back door was wide open and all that remained of its once-glazed top panel were jagged edges. Edges as sharp as sharks’ teeth.

  My painting, she thought, and the breeze through the doorway suddenly felt icy. She dashed back to the lounge room, where her aunt was smiling to herself as she absently watched the cricketing highlights. ‘Tabilla, come into the kitchen, quickly!’ Anika had to shout to make herself heard. ‘Careful, there’s glass all over the place.’

  ‘It’s odd that I didn’t hear anything.’ Hands on hips, Tabilla contemplated the mess. ‘When I got home from the concert everything was fine.’ She turned on the outside light that illuminated the herbs and the roses.

  ‘The garden’s deserted.’ Anika’s voice cracked as she spoke. ‘You can see that from here. Unless there’s someone really thin hiding in the old dunny with the gardening stuff.’