“I’d like to give it a try, Milo – I’ll take it up for sure.”
“Well, it might help you balance the budget – you might do well. By the way, do you eat avocado pears? Got some down from Queensland. Being a vegetarian, I find they come in useful. Aubergine’s prepared a couple for our lunch.”
Brandt has never eaten an avocado in his life, but spooned out of its jacket, sprinkled with salt and pepper, mixed with a drop of Worcestershire sauce and accompanied with home-baked bread and farm butter, it makes a glorious change from Snowy food.
“As far as I know, you’re the first vegetarian I have met in Australia,” he says.
“That’s not surprising; meat’s cheap and good over here, so we vegetarians are a rare breed, though, to be scrupulously honest, I’ve been known to take the odd trout now and then.”
“Have you always been a vegetarian?”
“Going on for five years now. Before that, I slaughtered my own stock, shot ducks, raised turkeys and boiler chooks, and fished crayfish out of my own creeks. I had the best stocked barbeque this side of Tumbarumba.”
“So, what happened?”
“I had cancer of the stomach. They opened me up in Canberra Hospital, took one look, then stitched me up again. ‘It’s over for you, Mr Hudson-Beck,’ they said and gave me six months to live. ‘We’ve got a good hospice in Canberra,’ they added. I told them to go to hell with their hospice and opted to come back and die at home.”
“I think I can understand that.”
“Yes, well. Anyway, I thought I’d put my life in order. I said to myself, I don’t want to eat meat anymore – hypocritical, really, as I run a cattle farm – but I let the chooks and turkeys go free, though, as I said, I cast for trout now and then, and the odd crayfish. I still have to keep the rabbits down, but I use the rifle – I won’t have anything to do with ferrets or poison bait.
“I needed to keep busy, so I ploughed up all the silt land and put in deciduous orchards, grew vegetables and then went into horticulture. I’ll show you my greenhouses. I planted pine trees – fourteen thousand of them – and they’re pretty quick growing. There’s a post-war building boom going on and there’ll be a shortage of soft wood for the next twenty years at least. I want to take advantage of it and you, yourself, should do the same. You must grow with the land, not dominate it like my father and his father before him – and like the Fullers all tried to do. Anyway, get some more of those pine trees planted.”
“That’s what Tom Henty advised me too, but what happened with your cancer?”
“After the diagnosis, I made up my mind to keep to a healthy diet. I live on mushrooms, cheese, dates, dried fruit and Aubergine’s home-baked bread. Some of the fruit and vegetables I can’t grow myself, so Aubergine drives down to Cooma every Monday morning and collects my crate off the Sydney train. Oh, and as you can see, I drink beer; not much – rarely more than a schooner. I used to have a ferocious reputation for drinking, it was well deserved I can tell you, but not anymore. Anyway, only a few months into my new regime, I’d started to feel healthier – not just my body but my mind too. Something odd was happening to me.”
Brandt puts down his slice of bread. “How do you mean?”
“It’s a bugger to explain, but I was beginning to see life differently, to take what you might call a sacramental view of our time on earth. My attitude to other people was different, I looked for a spark of the divine in every person I met – and in the natural world too. Possums, rosellas, wallabies and echidnas – well, you can’t miss these, I know, but then I started to observe in detail the colours of dragonflies and those brown-and-black designs you find on the wings of moths. I began to notice the warm, sweet breath of Goldi, my Jersey milk cow as she munched the new grass around the tanks. I listened as much as I talked – which is a lot – and, because I’d been told my own life was soon to end, I became more appreciative of the lives of all other living creatures – even spiders. Do you know, Otto, I haven’t killed a spider in years. You can say I’m off my rocker if you like, but I’ve even come to love the little buggers.”
“What did they say at the hospital when you went for a check-up?”
“Well, first I told them that, as eight months had passed and I wasn’t yet dead, they’d better take a look at me again, so they did, and they were flabbergasted. I tell, you, Otto, it fair blew their socks off. I was as clean as a dewdrop at dawn.
“I can’t actually remember the drive back from the hospital, but when I got home I was so choked up with gratitude that I was alive, so alive, Otto and I wanted to carry on trying to put things right with me and the world.
“We farmers can be pretty cruel when it comes to animals. We dock the tails of cattle, we castrate rams and pigs, we make male dairy calves anaemic so we can slaughter them for white veal. We shoot brumbies on sight – you know, wild horses – and I’m told that in other parts of the state they’re killing off rabbits with some agonising disease called myxomatosis and flooding the warrens with poison gas to exterminate the young.”
Brandt closes his eyes for a second or two as the Aktion crashes through his mind like a Tiger tank.
“I’m still trying to change my outlook,” continues Milo. “It’s a slow business and I’m a bloody slow learner too – redemption in small steps, you might say – though I suppose most of us have to do it in one way or the other; otherwise, what’s a man’s life all about?”
Milo pauses, then adds as an afterthought: “It was when I finished with the hospital that I began to see more of Peggy. I’ll get you to meet her one day. As I said, she lives in Tumut. It’s not that far from here, but it’s a helluva road after a rain storm. Sometimes, I’ve got to do a detour around Diss, the old ghost town, which is a bloody nuisance that adds another hour to the journey.”
*
Later, back on Garigo, Brandt loads his case onto the Land Rover for his return to Island Bend, but, before setting off, he sits for a few minutes on the veranda and watches the solemn shadowy twilight descend over the billabong, and a solitary black swan fly down and settle somewhere among the reeds. He lights a cigarette to ward off the mosquitoes, and he reflects how Milo and his ‘sacramental’ view of life are a million years removed from the orders he had never questioned while he was serving in Himmler’s SS. And as for Aubergine, his own Einsatzgruppen Schützen would have slaughtered her without a qualm.
Just as he gets up to lock the front door, he sees an animal skulking low under the mulberry tree. There’s no mistake, it’s a red fox.
11
“Yeah, we’ve got foxes in Australia, all right,” says Gunna as he fills the tank of Brandt’s ute. “Brought over from Pommyland in the early days and let loose so that the squatter aristocracy like the Hudson-Becks could play tally-ho just like the English gentry. It didn’t work over here, don’t ask me why, but then the foxes went feral and they became a bloody nuisance. Some of the local kids hunt them for the bounty. They can get five quid for a thick winter pelt and a good brush tail. It has to be a single rifle shot, mind, and not through the head either. Those Melbourne ladies are rather partial to their stoles having pretty little foxy faces.”
“How did the fish bombs go?”
“Bloody useless. Thanks mate.” Gunna takes Brandt’s five-pound note, and returns him a handful of loose silver and copper coins. “Sorry about all this shrapnel. Be seeing yah, Otto. Don’t overdo the gelignite; don’t blow yourself up – or your mates either.”
The images of feral foxes slinking about on his land and Melbourne society women wearing furs occupy Brandt’s mind with ghastly evocations all the way back to Island Bend.
That night, he is glad of the Authority’s powerful hot shower, and the loofah he’d bought in Cooma to scrub the dust and sweat out of his pores.
Rubbing his chin, he realises he could do with a new blade, some proper shaving soap and a brush. He also wishe
s he could get hold of some Mäurer and Wirtz Number 4771. It was the best of the men’s colognes and issued to all SS officers in the war.
His hair could do with a good wash too. Why can’t a man buy proper shampoo in this country? “Shampoo, mate?” the storeman at Island Bend had said when Brandt had asked for it. “Only a queer uses a word like that. What’s wrong with soap?”
After his usual purgatorial scrubbing, he turns the shower to a cold deluge; the shock is violent but the freezing water clears his mind. At last – cleansed, shaved and dry – he turns to the mirror to comb his hair and there, as always, staring right back at him is the face of SS Brigadeführer Ernst Frick… or is it Otto Brandt? In the foggy mirror he sees one face, but two men: one the SS officer who coldly ended the lives of innocent men women and children in Eastern Europe, the other the shy engineer on the Snowy Mountain Project, who’s bought a farm – the ideal settler.
And, right now, he ought to be occupying his mind with the future of that very farm. Milo’s revelation about gold is encouraging, but he’ll only believe it when he unearths some on his own land. In the meantime, he needs to draw up a list of the essential tasks to do within the old house before he can even think of farming, let alone go prospecting for gold.
He fills his fountain pen, shakes the surplus ink on a blotter, wipes the nib, then settles down at the tiny cabin desk and folds open the first page of an unused writing pad. He will write his list in English, definitely in English, anything to disassociate it from the Tagesordnung that his father had handed him the day he was eight years old and every day following until he finally left home for the academy.
As a child, he had been drilled to read each chore aloud then promptly return the list to his father, who then ordered him to repeat each task from memory. On the rare occasions he dithered, got the sequence wrong or, worse, forgot one of the chores altogether, he was taken to the garden shed where his buttocks were thrashed with a riding crop. On school mornings, the pain was so intense when he sat at his desk that on one occasion he passed out.
At first, the most hated chore had been killing, and skinning or plucking the feathers from the animals they kept caged for food. He had found it impossible, despite his father’s curses, to accurately decapitate the hens and pigeons with a hatchet, and, as he was not strong enough to wring the necks of ducks, he was ordered use the same short-bladed knife employed to kill rabbits and geese. By the time Ernst Frick was nine years old, he was as hardened to butchering animals as the slaughter men at the abattoir.
But Brandt tries to put the memories of his father behind him as he writes:
‘Garigo Farm Job List One December 19th, 1952
‘1. Rubbish disposal – all curtains, broken furniture, bottles, etc. to the farm tip.’
He cannot do anything in the house until all this is cleared out. He’ll wait until winter, then he’ll burn it.
‘2. Cleaning and dusting – carpets, walls, furniture, windows, etc.’
Reading back, these items look more like a woman’s priorities to Brandt and then he realises with a shock that he is entering what he knows would be Brigitte’s prime concerns if she were with him. He finds a perverse comfort in this, and masochistically imagines her next to him as they plan the farm together.
‘3. Check all plumbing, especially the hot water system – repair as required.’
No, it’s all too much; after all, it’s not meant to be a home at all, or a proper shared family home anyway. He tears out the page and screws it up. He doesn’t need lists, as he’ll find out in his own good time what needs to be done and he’ll get on with it – practical things just to exist; there is nothing else. As for Milo’s ‘redemption in small steps’, for Brandt it is a chimera.
*
The heat is worse than summer in the Ukraine. The land is drought brown, and it’s too hot for manual work on the farm. Brandt brings his survey map out onto the veranda and spreads it on the table. One feature stands out on his alpine zone close to Milo’s border and it’s surprising he hasn’t noticed it before. A vortex of tight brown contours on the map reveal an isolated peak called the Cone, which rises eight hundred feet above the plateau.
The feature is so compelling that, despite the heat, Brandt decides to ride out and see it for himself. Milo had recently sold him a pale stock horse called Phantom. “He should be just right for your place,” he’d said. “He’s a good saddler, tough and adaptable – and he’s light on water. He’s got his own peculiarities, mind. Keep him off public roads – oh, and Phantom doesn’t like heights.”
“We live among the mountains and he doesn’t like heights?”
“That’s why you’re getting him for a song.”
The farm track is flint hard, making it an easy ride. In half an hour, Brandt is up in the alpine zone with its basalt crags, rounded boulders, silver tussocks and shimmering slopes. Despite the time of year, bright saddles of snow still flash among its clefts. In the blue sky, a dozen large birds are being tossed in the high winds.
The Cone is clearly not a part of the main range; he tries to imagine it in winter when the plateau will lie sleeping under soft drifts and for miles around the mountain will stand as a lone sentinel, a far and glittering peak.
Brandt draws the reins as he sees an eagle, its wings upswept like a monstrous butterfly, spiralling over the summit. “Eagle”, says Brandt to the horse. “If that mountain wasn’t already called the Cone, I would name it simply Eagle.”
He is about to canter on when he spots something moving at the base of the Cone and can just make out two figures dragging the carcase of a large animal. In seconds they have vanished into the shade of the rocks. Brandt rubs his eyes and wonders if it was an illusion.
He decides to take a different route back to the homestead and, as he descends to the tree line, he comes upon Fuller’s Hut, which is set on the flat rise, and that he and Henty had first noticed on the survey map. Brandt rides up to a veranda of crudely cut flag stones, then dismounts, taking time to gently scratch the withers of the sweating Phantom before hitching him to one of the horse rails.
There is no doubt that the building needs renovating. Rusted hinges support a sagging wooden door, which Brandt has to lift to open. When he goes inside he finds that, although it’s called a ‘hut’ and has only one room, it is as capacious as a village church. However, its split-log walls are pocked with either woodworm or termites, and the joints are rotten. Brandt takes shallow breaths through his nose. The air is slightly sweetened with the scent of old wood smoke, but it doesn’t overcome the acid stink of bats.
Half the floor space is occupied by what looks like a theatre stage, roughly four feet high. Brandt supposes that this is meant as a sleeping area for sheltering cattlemen, but the screws securing the slats have long since rusted themselves free. Facing the sleeping area is a yule-sized hearth, deep in white ashes, which unsettles Brandt, who lifts his eyes to follow the brickwork of the chimney up to the sooty rafters. From a hole in the roof, a shard of bright sun captures a universe of dust motes in a single beam and he coughs instinctively.
Above his head is a rack of wooden skis, some are about fourteen feet long and probably a century old. Suspended from iron hooks on knotted beams are buckets, billy cans, cast-iron cooking pots and three pairs of dried out leather boots. He dreads to think what might be lurking within these boots.
Despite its granite foundations, Fuller’s Hut is beset with fragility – the rotting wood, the missing screws and the collapsing door – and emptiness. Every orifice, every utensil and even the hearth itself proclaim emptiness, including the pots, kettles and old bottles, and the boots and skis that have long been empty of feet. Every item is a single void; it can only listen, it conveys nothing. The disturbed dust sets Brandt coughing again, and he is glad to go back outside in the sunshine.
Orienting his map from the veranda, he sees that not far from the hut th
e contours merge at a single point to the south called Fuller’s Leap. That’s all he needs to know for the present. He folds away the map, and unhitches and mounts Phantom. He guides the horse at walking pace along an overgrown path through the bracken fern towards a vertiginous cliff. Below him is the gleam of a running creek, which the map had shown to be a source tributary of the Snowy River. Beyond it, the land rises steeply to the alpine zone and the Cone.
Phantom is skittish near the cliff edge, so Brandt takes a track along the ridge where he has another view of Fuller’s Hut. He notices that behind the outhouses the land slopes to the north. Quickly, he checks the map, but there is no mistake – Fuller’s Hut has been built on a natural watershed. Minutes later, his observations are confirmed when he has to cross a second creek flowing the other way, towards the Murrumbidgee River. Along its course are deep, clear waterholes, and he is tempted to take off his boots and socks to cool his feet in one of them, but the wind changes and brings the stench of a rotting carcase, so redolent of the death pits that Brandt instinctively covers his lower face. Phantom’s ears fold back. Brandt knows that any stench is many times worse for a horse, so he turns him about and Phantom needs only a loose rein to head back to the homestead at a gallop.
*
By Christmas Eve Brandt has stacked enough wood to last him until the autumn of the following year. The old rotten log piles are gone, along with four copperhead snakes and any number of bush rats. The walls of the barn are now barricaded by row upon row of clean, perfectly split logs, each sawn two-and-a-half feet long to fit his three open fires. The ramparts of his log piles are fifteen feet high. An equivalent amount of wood is also stacked at Tumbledown, but Milo’s logs are a foot longer.
Brandt decides to spend Christmas at Island Bend. Like most human motives, his are mixed, but they include a strong conviction that he should be with the other migrant workers at this time of the year. A Sydney newspaper reporter describes the Snowy Scheme as ‘the land of lonely he-men’ and Brandt has to agree. This will be his second Christmas at Island Bend camp and he’ll have to pretend, like the rest of them, to be jolly in the summer heat. Some of the Germans are getting maudlin over ‘Stille Nacht’. They are supposed to be singing it in English so as not to offend the Poles, but the edict is ignored. Some Wehrmacht veterans start on ‘Lille Marlene’ and the Americans drown it with ‘Jingle Bells’, and every man puts on a John Wayne kind of expression to hide the truth that he would rather be with someone else, somewhere else.
Orphaned Leaves Page 11
