“The credit is entirely due to you, Otto. They’ll be thanking you when they’re on Bondi Beach. You’ve heard of it? That place in Sydney.”
“So, they will be living there?”
“No, not exactly. They won’t actually be staying in Sydney, but we’ll see they get to the beach from time to time.”
Brandt has caught the hesitancy in the priest’s voice. “So, if not in Sydney, where will these boys be living?”
“They’ll be split up and sent to country missions, all over New South Wales and Queensland.”
“Ah, boarding schools.”
“Yes, proper farm schools for orphaned boys. I’ve never been to any of them myself, though. My work ends when the boys are passed over to the mission staff at Sydney Central Station. That’s the last I shall see of them. The brothers and I will be staying with our order in Sydney for two weeks, then we’ll be returning to Liverpool to fetch the next lot.”
But Brandt remembers quite distinctly that when he was teaching the boys to swim they were forever talking about Sydney, especially the big surf beaches. He had imagined they were to be adopted by Sydney families. From what they had told him, they were in no doubt of it.
“So, they all go to orphanages, Father?”
“Special orphanages, as I said; they are farm schools. Of course, the boys could still be adopted, but that’s unlikely. Couples prefer to adopt babies.”
“So, please explain to me, Father, are all the parents of these boys dead?”
“No, Otto, it’s only that they have no fathers.”
“So, the fathers are dead, yet their mothers are still alive; surely, they cannot then be orphans? I do not understand.”
“Are you familiar with the English word ‘waif’? It is old-fashioned and rarely used, but it has no modern synonym.”
“No, Father, I don’t know this word.”
“These boys are mostly what I would call waifs. They’re like flotsam washing up on the beach. They have no family, no roots and their mothers are unsuitable; some are whores. Quite rightly, their sons are taken away from them. Believe me, they’ll be much better off in Australia. Take Alan Gilbert, for instance. His mother scarpered off to Chicago with her American GI and left Gilbert with us in Liverpool. That was in 1946. We had to tell the boy she was dead.”
Brandt doesn’t reply and goes off to change out of his swimming trunks.
*
Leaving dinner early, he goes back up on deck and leans over the rail to gaze out on an ocean that, apart from the single furrow ploughed by the Syrenia, is as smooth as dark satin. He turns his head as he senses the rich aroma of cigar smoke, and finds Tregowan off duty and staring at the lights of a distant ship passing in the opposite direction. “She’s the Fairchild,” he says, “She’s going home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Blighty.”
They are interrupted by a deafening blast on the Syrenia’s foghorn and, minutes later, an answering reverberation comes from the Fairchild; it is a low sound, and Brandt imagines the bellow of a drowning buffalo. He watches the Fairchild, already hull down and poised to dip below the horizon. In just seconds she’s gone and he feels a new isolation; that of the exile.
“Not even a breeze; dead calm,” says Tregowan, “and bloody humid. The old seamen would say it was the night of the wraith.”
“What is a wraith?” Brandt asks.
“A ghost; not a happy one either. Often a woman.”
Brandt feels the sweat running down his face and neck – the air is steamier than a laundry. “Today I learnt another English word that sounds like wraith,” he says, “but it means something very different; that word is ‘waif’.”
“They may not be as different as you think.”
Brandt accepts a cigar from Tregowan, and both men look seaward where crepuscular rays stream through a brazen firmament darkening by the minute.
“A storm,” says Tregowan, “you can feel it coming and,” he points, “look, sheet lightning over the Australian shoreline, and the sea’s gone morbid.”
The calm ocean has metamorphosed into a riot of angry little swells spoiling for a fight. A few give the hull of the Syrenia an imperious slap, but most surge on towards a line of white breakers. The sun is gone and the visible world has an unhealthy look, a deathly mustard pallor, as dense banks of cloud are building up in the south.
Brandt hears the first strains of ‘Great is Thy Faithfulness’ and he remembers that on Sundays the A Deck saloon becomes a chapel. As he listens more attentively, he catches the words:
“Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
He looks at the distant line of surf. Would he find peace in this new land he was about to call home? But he believes that only the assurance of freedom from arrest would bring peace. As for forgiveness, he had loyally served his superiors, both in the SS and the management of the chalet; he didn’t need any forgiveness.
“Maybe we should be in there singing with them,” says Tregowan as he stumbles off.
Brandt gives a contemptuous shrug– and then he remembers his nightmare.
Ten minutes later, the ship is beginning to roll and pitch deeply in the green surge. The gunwales are awash with foam, while, over Brandt’s head, the sky is a menacing indigo. Forked lightning trickles on the port side and a terrific crack of thunder smarts his ear drums.
The rain storm breaks like the Final Judgement; a wild deluge lashes his cheeks and drenches his tuxedo, lambasting the deck in a riot of heavy drops that plaster down his hair, flood his shoes and gallop like cavalry over the deck. The ship gives a sudden lurch to starboard and Brandt makes a grab for a stanchion. The lights go out and the singing stops.
Indifferent to the elements, Brandt remains on deck – a lone stoic in a torrent of blackness. It occurs to him what a vulnerable thing a ship is – even a steel liner like the Syrenia whose layers of paint perpetuate the façade of permanence. Everything about the ship is a work of faith. The passengers have faith, whether praying at the Sunday service, meeting the love of their life on the dance floor or promenading the decks of this same little vessel now pitching and lunging over a chasm four thousand fathoms deep.
An hour later, the storm abates and the sea calms, yet Brandt still doesn’t move. He has travelled half way around the globe, but the greater voyage has been across the ocean of his own subconscious, plumbing unbearable depths yet finding only deeper levels of futility and darkness.
He returns to his cabin below decks, where the air is choked with the acid stench of seasickness.
*
The Syrenia berths in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo docks while daybreak is piercing the harbour fret and dazzling Brandt’s senses. He casts his eyes down to where the ship’s propeller is churning up yellow silt, the water roiling and frothing like yeast.
Soon he is queuing with the other non-British immigrants at the lower gangway onto Woolloomolloo docks. He sees Michaela Haas squired by the Danish photographer, but, as Brandt catches her eye and nods an awkward farewell, she turns away and his spirit curls like a leaf on a pruned branch.
“Jerry!” Squirming through the melee of disembarking passengers Alan Gilbert rushes up to him, his eyes full of anxiety.
Brandt looks around him for the other orphans, but the boy is alone. “Hello, Alan. Glad you came down to say goodbye, but you’d better be getting back. They’ll be looking for you.”
“I need your address. Please print it.” The boy thrusts a piece of cardboard at him and a blunt pencil.
“I don’t know it yet, Alan, but I suppose you might reach me at.” Tucked in his passport is his letter of appointment. He glances at the details then prints in large letters: ‘Otto Brandt, c/o The Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, Cooma, NSW’. “That should find me,” he says, “Remember I’m called Otto – no more Jerry, eh? So where will you be?�
�
“I don’t know, Jerry; I mean Otto. The brothers have been telling us we’re all going to be split up. They’re sending me to a place called St Edmund’s Mission – it’s in New South Wales, but the brothers say it’s nowhere near Bondi Beach.”
Brandt shakes the boy’s hand. “Goodbye, Alan Gilbert and be strong. We’ll meet up again, you and me.”
“Promise?” The boy is blinking violently to control his tears.
“I promise.”
“You’re a good bloke, Jer-Otto,” he says and rushes off. If Brandt is to retain just one memory of his arrival in Sydney, it will be that a young English boy had told him he was a “good bloke”. He closes his eyes and they remain shut until he feels the pressure of someone’s suitcase against his leg as the queue shuffles forwards, and life is dragging him along with it.
He has heard that Sydney is an urban wildness with surf beaches and parties, where fun and risk should be mandatory, but not for him. He clenches his cabin luggage and scans the wharf for waiting police in uniform, and official-looking men in ties and jackets, but there are none. He hears the whine of trams, and catches the smells of motor engines, food frying and stinking drains, then he descends the gangway to a paved jetty, and the jarring stability of bricks and concrete.
Brandt is not long in Sydney. After passing through Customs and Immigration without hindrance, he boards a green bus waiting to take him and the other Snowy recruits to Central Station for the train to Cooma. He had never spoken a word to any of these men on the long voyage and doesn’t know a single one of their names.
6
A watercolour world splashed with light. Each morning brings the clean brightness of the Snowy Mountains, and Brandt is still not used to it. In the Australian forests there is no Gothic darkness because the slender leaves of the gums hang vertically and let in the sun. Above the tree line the subtle tones of the plains and mountains are like illuminated pastel. In the dazzling brightness, even the lichens on the granite boulders reflect like splodges of new paint. The light brings an openness, which mocks the secrets that humans keep from each other and the falsehoods they nurture within their minds.
One blistering summer and two icy winters have hardened Brandt’s features, giving him the bronzed photogenic look so appealing to the overseas film crews making newsreels on the Snowy Scheme. He avoids them; the last thing he needs is for someone in a Munich cinema to note that the heroic engineer blasting a tunnel through a granite mountain bears a remarkable likeness to the late SS Brigadeführer Ernst Frick.
Like the other migrant workers, he is housed in tent accommodation at the Island Bend Camp. In the igloo-style mess hut his meals are free, but he had to buy his own pannikin, plates and cutlery. Every day finds him living and working with Slavs, but the frequent interactions are surprisingly good and, in fact, if he is honest with himself, he prefers to have his meals with the exuberant Poles and Yugoslavs than with the more serious Germans. Try as he might, and he tries mightily, Brandt can find no difference in courage, intelligence and fortitude between Nordic Aryans, Slavs and Italians, and, for all he knows, some might even be Jews.
But, despite the bond of unity and camaraderie among the Snowy men, he never takes the the Authority’s green bus into Cooma with its bars, prostitutes and unfettered gambling. Instead, Brandt works every overtime shift he can get, treating his work as a sacred vocation. It’s as if he is ordered by divine decree to enslave the Snowy River, forcing it through the ancient bones of Australia itself, to rotate the mighty turbines spinning electricity for Sydney and Melbourne. Only then will the river be released to flow westward to irrigate the parched lands of the interior and turn them into orange groves.
Brandt, the explosives engineer, is taking more physical risks in this peaceful country than ever he did throughout the entire Second World War. He and the team he now leads are not deterred by the heavy crates of detonators lethally stacked near the arc welders, nor are they daunted by the rock falls, cave-ins and avalanches. Without complaint, the men breathe into their lungs the acrid vapours of newly poured concrete and wet steel. Daily, their ears are numbed with the whine of diamond drills, the groaning of cranes, the rumble of heavy winches and the blunt power of new detonations resounding along the tunnels like awakened dragons.
The other engineers accuse Brandt to his face of having a death wish. Surely, no man, other than a prospective suicide, could be so careless about his life, yet they all agree that, although Brandt courts death a dozen times a week, he is scrupulous not to expose a single subordinate to the risks he takes on himself. Brandt is always the one man left behind at the rock face to spring the detonators just seconds before the blast.
He is told that the bosses call him the ‘Maverick’, but when his team earns the most bonuses in the race to excavate the tunnels these same bosses are compelled to acknowledge his leadership. When one of them announces in the mess hut that Otto Brandt has been promoted to the rank of Engineer Level 2, there is cheering at every table and the union representative, a former British infantryman no less, proposes a toast to his health.
The female employees in the site offices, canteen, and first-aid block are not the hazard for Brandt that they would be in most other work places because there are so few of them, and, in any case, Brandt works miles away from the camp. But all the women know his name and they single him out. He overhears a kitchen hand say to one of the new nurses, “Otto is a good-looker all right, just like a film star, but why does he always looks so sad and… keeps to himself all the time; none of us gets a chance to get near him. What’s he’s got against women?”
Brandt’s promotion serves him well. On top of a hefty rise in his salary, he is also given his own cabin, which is really a box made of wood and asbestos, and unintentionally so designed as to give its occupier acute claustrophobia, especially at night when he is wakened by frost, which cracks like pistols on the tin roof.
It is little wonder that Brandt chooses to spend very little time in the cabin. He lives only for his work, volunteering for every hour of overtime that comes his way; he is quite unaware of the burgeoning funds in his Commonwealth Bank account until, one day, the manager in the Cooma branch, Tom Henty, writes to him with an offer to transfer a thousand pounds to an investment portfolio. Even after agreeing to Henty’s offer, Brandt is astounded to find he still has another four thousand pounds left over.
In Cooma, the Authority is holding its first vehicle ‘changeover’, which is when the old work vehicles are being auctioned off. Brandt meanders through the rows of cars, jeeps and lorries, running his practised eye over engines, tyres, manifolds and bodywork. Eventually, he successfully bids for a short-based Land Rover, a sturdy little ute with its spare wheel bolted onto the front bonnet. The vehicle has a canvas roof and just enough room for the driver and two passengers at the front. It looks and feels stocky, indomitable and military. At the wheel, he feels less vulnerable and much more independent.
When he drives it into Island Bend, the other Snowy men give him a friendly wave of approval, and an hour later the site supervisor comes around to his cabin and orders him to take twenty-four hours compulsory leave.
“For your own good, Otto,” he says. “Now you’ve got a bonzer little ute to drive around in, there’s no excuse for you. So, bugger off, mate, and see the bush. Kosciusko State Park is worth a decko.”
*
The deserted road winds between granite boulders that rise from the plateau into a stainless breadth of azure sky. Gleams of deeper blue mark a line of narrow lakes, and Brandt remembers, with a pang of loneliness, his young swimmers on the Syrenia and wonders how they are faring. Recalling the voyage, even after more than two years, brings an inexplicable pain of loss and he increases his speed, driving with the hood down, letting the iced wind toss his hair and smart his cheeks until the glare of sunlight reflecting off the frosty rocks forces him to slow down.
Brandt p
arks the Land Rover by a sparkling runnel, with its banks overlapped with snowdrifts; a world of optical magic. From the culms of grey tussocks, whole curtains of needle-thin icicles are weeping with the spring thaw and spider webs, with their burdens of frost, billow out in the wind like the shrouds of glass galleons.
He opens a new packet of Capstan Blue. He finds Australian cigarettes superior to the European varieties and yet he doesn’t light up. There is a purity in these high places, the air is too sweet for tobacco, and the Führer, who loathed the smoking habit, would surely have approved.
After doing fifty hard press-ups, Brandt climbs back into the vehicle, starts the engine and moves off. The road leaves the mountains and their blinding flanks of snow, and descends into the montane zone with its lofty woollybutts and twisting snow gums swathed in terracotta and silver, all eventually yielding to a dappled bushland of iron barks and native pines, where the warmer air is redolent with eucalyptus oil and sticky resin.
Just beyond a bend in the road, he is waved down by a tall man wearing a bronze government badge on his slouch hat. Under his open, long Driza-Bone coat there’s a grey jacket, white shirt and brown tie. His boots have an ox-blood shine. An apprehensive Brandt brings the ute to a halt.
“G’day,” says the government man. At close quarters, despite his moustache, he looks very young, barely out of his teens. “Sorry about this, mate, but could you spare us a moment?”
“G’day,” says Brandt automatically as if chanting a religious response. He pulls the Land Rover over to the side of the road and gets out.
“You see,” says the young man awkwardly, “my fiancée, that’s Jill, well, we’ve just got the Methodist minister up from Tumut to marry us here in the state park, but now he tells us he needs an extra witness, so I wonder if you could oblige us? I’m Bob McColl, by the way, the local ranger.”
Orphaned Leaves Page 6
