Orphaned Leaves

by Christopher Holt

  She touches his arm. “Oh, Otto, I’m so sorry for you. You, of all people, need to find a trusting ear and you let Magdalena get away. But can’t you still get her back – even at this late stage? We have a saying in England ‘Faint heart never won fair lady.’ You must find someone close. Otto, if only to unburden the silence – remember the orphaned leaves? You need to find a home for them.”

  “You’ve given me much to think about, Peggy,” he says, but he is anxious not to let the conversation go on any further, and if he is strictly honest with himself, he dreads the day when a letter may arrive to tell him she has met someone else. “I should be going. Do you mind if I just look in on Alan?”

  “Of course; he’s revising for a history exam tomorrow, though he probably doesn’t need to.”

  Alan puts down his book and stands up as Brandt enters his bedroom. “Hello, Otto. How did it go?” Brandt can hear a trace of anxiety in the boy’s voice, the fear from St Edmund’s still lingers. Alan must wonder what the teachers have been saying about him behind his back.

  Brandt shakes his hand. “Congratulations, Alan, Miss Bartlett tells me you’re doing very well indeed.”

  Alan’s countenance brightens and his voice loses its strain. “Do you know any Australian history, Otto?”

  “Not much.”

  “The Sydney Museum helped – and Vaucluse House. I feel good about the history exam tomorrow.”

  “That’s good, but it’s late, Alan, and I’ve got to go – I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  “Drive back carefully, Otto.” They come with Brandt to the front door.

  “I’ll see you both at the weekend,” says Brandt.

  Peggy kisses him on the cheek and they both wave him off from the veranda.

  *

  Brandt hasn’t seen another vehicle since leaving Tumut half an hour ago. The night road is ice-hard and slippery, and the open bush has a wintry look. On the verges, the frost glistens like powdered glass from Brandt’s headlights. He gropes for a lower gear to climb the rise into the alpine zone, but as he rounds a bend he gasps in shock.

  The woman is standing in the middle of the road.

  22

  Brandt brakes in terror as the spectre, still bloodied and torn, slouches towards him. Crashing gears back and forth again and again, he manages a five-point turn and, thank God, he does it without stalling. With adrenaline surging through his body, he speeds back in the opposite direction.

  Twenty minutes later, he finds the other route that Milo had told him about, through Diss. He has heard that Diss is what the Australians call a ghost town, not the best choice of words, but he has no option but to go through it. He is feeling light-headed, and, despite the icy draught and the invisible fingers of the night, he winds down the window.

  There are no street lights in Diss. Only through his headlights can Brandt make out the layout of the town. The houses, if you can still call them houses, are shanties of corrugated iron. The larger buildings – the hotel, garage, church and school – are choked in blackberry and lantana. The buildings are like monstrous skulls: their unglazed windows are eye sockets and their open doorways are gaping mouths. Blocking half the road is an old, wrecked bus.

  His arms are rigid and his hands grasp the steering wheel with bone white knuckles. Brandt is driving like an automaton; that is, until a random thought prompts him to glance at his fuel gauge only to finds the tank is three-quarters empty. To save petrol, he eases his foot off the accelerator – just as the road gives out.

  Now he’s in a cul de sac, but he won’t stop even for a second. Wildly he swings the wheel to the right and then to the left, riding the clutch and swearing, until, with one more swing of the wheel, he’s on the road back. But then he notices something chillingly odd. The houses have their doors shut, but Brandt distinctly remembers that they were open before. The thought makes him want to speed up, but, as desperate as he is to conserve fuel, his foot barely teases the accelerator. Once again, he passes the ruined hotel, and just behind the derelict bus he finds the proper road out of the town.

  Thank God, Diss is mercifully behind him, but to get home he’ll now have to backtrack on the Adaminaby Road. Hardly taking his eyes off the petrol gauge, he nurses the Land Rover up every hill, then freewheels down the other side – hoping he won’t burn out the brakes – but his greatest terror is that the spectre will make its next appearance over the lip of a hill crest or greet him on a hairpin bend.

  The road forks, and Brandt sees a light on a small Snowy Scheme encampment and to his relief, there are still men about, swigging beer from bottles, so he pulls over.

  “Good day,” he calls out. “Where is this place?”

  “Lob’s Hill, mate. What are youse doing driving around at this time of night?” The voice is slurred.

  “Trying to find some petrol to get home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Near Tumbledown.”

  “Crikey mate, you’re out of your way a bit,” says another voice this time a sober one. Got a quid, sport?”

  “Here.” Brandt hands over two ten-shilling notes, and the man lumbers off and returns with half a jerry can of petrol, which Brandt pours into his tank. “Thanks,” he says. “Which is the best way for me?”

  The man points back to the fork. “Keep on the Adaminaby track. You’ll have to go down one hell of a steep hill by the quarry, but if you keep her in low gear, you’ll be right. See yah.”

  “Thanks, mate.”

  “Just hold on there,” roars an inebriated voice. “You’re that German bastard from that night in Cooma, aren’t you?” The big Scandinavian comes out of the darkness between the tents. “I remember your accent – ah, and there’s the Land Rover. You Nazi mongrel; you’re dead, mate. Dag. Kom hit.” he bellows.

  The second Scandinavian staggers into the light, wielding a crow bar.

  Brandt leaps into his ute and, thank God, it starts first time. One of the men races over to intercept him, but lurches away as Brandt drives straight for him. Back on the road, he breathes more easily, but he has to squint as a blinding spotlight glares from his mirror and he hears the battered Studebaker roaring up behind him.

  At a bend, Brandt cuts straight through the bush, but minutes later he bounces back onto the Adaminaby track and starts the steep downhill run he was warned about. Immediately, the merciless spotlight catches his mirror, which he yanks aside as the Studebaker revs hard to overtake him, but Brandt hogs the centre of the track, wildly accelerating. Like a pursuing fiend, the monster car tails him as the speedometer leaps to sixty miles an hour. The boxy Land Rover will never take a sharp bend at this speed. Even a pothole would be enough to flip him into a chasm of the night.

  Brandt takes his foot off the accelerator and touches the brake deliberately risking a rear collision. The sudden shriek of brakes behind him is alarming, and Brandt clenches his teeth. The Scandinavian has braked, but too soon and far too hard. In his mirror, Brandt sees the Studebaker roll twice on the track, plunge through a bank of saplings and lunge over the edge of the quarry.

  There is a side of Brandt’s nature that says he should go back and render help, but, remembering what these men did to Magdalena’s face, he speeds on. At the bottom of the hill, he parks in a clearing and reaches for his torch. Despite his terror of encountering the spectre, he climbs out of the ute to check the wheel bolts and to examine the underside of the vehicle.

  He has driven nearly sixty miles out of his way, but all is well and an hour later he is home.

  At Garigo, he slumps down on a sofa, and tries to calm himself over a double whisky and ice. The maniacal escapade on the Adaminaby track was horrific, but it was not a horror. The apparition near Diss is another matter.

  When he left Tumut earlier, he had planned to spend time that night on his front veranda staring up at the constellations, and listening to the koo
-roo of the mopoke in the sycamore and the slurping of the big carp in the billabong. Instead, he is skulking inside, afraid of the dark and convinced that he is going mad.

  *

  “You’re looking bushwacked, Otto. What’s happened to you?” Brandt hadn’t heard Milo arrive; he must have ridden up from the alpine gate. His horse is hitched up by the water tanks, chomping the last of the summer grass around the taps.

  “Had a bad night, Otto. I’ll tell you about it later. Tea? Toast?”

  “Both. Thanks.”

  They sit down at the big kitchen table. Milo must have something on his mind to turn up at Garigo at eight o’clock in the morning. He unfolds a heavily creased map and spreads it out. The map covers most of Tumbledown and the alpine region of Garigo Homestead.

  “What’s this, Milo? Building your own airstrip?”

  Milo shakes his head takes a sip of tea and stares at him. “My word, you look crook, Otto. Peggy phoned me up and said you seemed a bit crook – ‘poorly’ is the word she used. She told me to keep an eye on you. I gather the school thing went all right though. They seem pretty happy about Alan; it’s you we’re concerned about. How are you bearing up?”

  “Not all that good – war memories.” Brandt is surprised how easy it is for him to say this aloud. He watches Milo take another sip and suspects that he is only drinking it through politeness. Brandt can never manage to make tea like the Australians. “The memories, they unnerve me,” he continues. “Peggy says that my ‘tension’, as she calls it, is even affecting Alan. That’s the last thing I want to hear. Thank God the boy’s got you two in his life. I tell you this, Milo. I’m no bloody good for him.”

  “That’s bunkum, mate. After all, it was you who saved the little coot, no one else. He sees you as his only parent. More so, than I’m afraid he may think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you were up in Sydney, I did what I said I would do when he first came here. I sent for more details about Alan’s time in England. Yesterday, in the post, I received some answers. The Catholics were right about one thing. His mother didn’t want the boy; apparently her new GI boyfriend didn’t want him either, so she just ditched him with the Brothers in Liverpool and signed him away.”

  “How could a mother do that?”

  “Human beings can do a lot of cruel things to each other.”

  Brandt’s mouth feels dry, “Yes,” he mumbles.

  He knows damned well they can. He sees the face of a small Jewish boy in Lublin who had broken away from a queue boarding one of the death trains. The child had rushed over to him, probably believing that the tall officer in the fine uniform would protect him, and had barely reached out to grab his arm when an SS Schütze shot him in the head. Brandt remembers how his driver hurried over to him to wipe the brain particles from his black leather coat.

  “Which means, Otto, young Alan needs you more than ever before, and if may I say it, so do Peggy and I. And do you know what? We need him too. Neither of us have children of our own left alive. We all need each other and that’s the truth.”

  “So… if anything happened to me, you and Peggy would definitely…”

  “For Christ’s sake, Otto. As I keep telling you, you’re still a young man. You’ll outlive both of us, but of course we’d look after Alan. I told you once and once should be enough.” He pauses for a moment. “You are OK aren’t you, Otto, physically, I mean?”

  “I’m fine. Now what are you going to show me on the map?” Brandt collects up the tea stuff and the plates, and stacks them by the sink, while Milo flattens out the map and takes a flat carpenter’s pencil from his shirt pocket. “With your background, you would know something about cross country skiing,” he says.

  “Langlaufen? Yes, I am familiar with it. It’s the best way of getting around in the snow.”

  “Remember that most Australians have never even seen real snow, let alone skied on it. It’s an exotic novelty for them. You and I can change all that. I found out when I was a kid that cross-country skiing is much easier to learn than downhill. Imagine it, Otto.” He taps the map, “So here’s an idea, why not turn your Fuller’s Hut into an alpine chalet? Run a cross-country course through Tumbledown’s High Country and back to Garigo all the way around the Cone.”

  Brandt feels a rare surge of enthusiasm as the idea takes hold. “And not just for the winter, Milo. I suppose we could still let out the chalet for trout anglers in the summer.”

  “Now you’re talking.” Milo folds up the map. “So, saddle up Phantom and we’ll take a look-see. Come on.”

  Milo obviously knows Garigo better than Brandt himself. He doesn’t take the road track to Fuller’s Hut but instead leads them straight through dense bushland to a finger of higher ground overlooking a small valley.

  “We’re on Fuller’s Ridge,” says Milo. A sort of observation post.”

  Brandt recognises it immediately for across this valley is Fuller’s Hut and the start of the alpine zone. Below it are the store cattle yards, and further down in the valley are the stone flats by the dry creek and Aubergine’s school. Brandt imagines how the creek will look after he releases all that pent-up water of his retainer dam.

  “Concentrate on the location, Otto. Can you see how the chalet will blend into our rugged landscape? I’m so keen on this project that, with your approval, I want to invest in it. I’ll get some of my construction blokes to work on it. I reckon we could get the job done before Christmas.”

  “And I’ve got a four-day week engineering contract for the next three months,” says Brandt. “I should be better off. When do we start?”

  For the moment, Brandt shelves the horror of the previous night. This new project is going to be a real job of work. He stares across the little valley to Fuller’s Hut. The building won’t be easy. He will have to build a second storey and a mezzanine loft, modernise the plumbing and heating, and provide something resembling the comfortable, yet rustic furniture he saw in the Tyrol. He’ll use the old stone foundations, of course, and he’ll vastly enlarge the open fireplace. Using his own timber will bring the costs down.

  Ideas are coming to him thick and fast. The chalet will have a steep roof. It will be a shame if he has to use corrugated iron. He’d prefer shingles, but he understands there are problems with shingles in Australia. Plumbing will be a challenge, but…

  “Hey, come over here, Otto. Take a decko at this.” Milo has found something in a clearing further along the ridge. He is trying to prise open the door of an abandoned Chevrolet sedan. “I remember old man Fuller driving this old Chevvy around before the war. It had white-wall tyres and a full leather trim. And now look at the poor old girl. A real beaut like this, just left to rust away.”

  Brandt has not been to this corner of the ridge before, and is surprised and impressed by Milo’s discovery. “I won’t let her rust away,” he says. “I’ll restore her, Milo – in time to give to Alan when he starts university – in how many years? Five? Six?”

  “It’ll come around sooner than you think,” says Milo. “Mark my words. While we’re here, let’s see how Aubergine’s doing at the school; she tells me she’s never been happier. I know we said we’d leave her in peace for her first week, but she’s been there nearly a fortnight now. She could do with a friendly visit.”

  “I suppose she’ll only have those fair-skinned children,” says Brandt.

  “She’s not supposed to take the full-bloods – that’s the law anyway.”

  They canter down to the single classroom sheltered near the dry creek bed, both men quite unprepared for the scene of efficient organisation that awaits them. All the children of the Cone, including the full-bloods, are there standing in line in front of a white pole. A tall boy is raising the blue Australian flag. Brandt and Milo dismount and hitch the horses, unobtrusively remove their hats, and stand behind the pupils. At the front, Aubergine, in a sm
art purple dress and white hat, nods quietly to the visitors.

  Aubergine begins the oath.

  “I honour my God.”

  “I honour my God,” repeat the pupils, joined by Milo and Brandt.

  “I serve my queen.”

  “I serve my queen.”

  “I salute my flag.”

  “I salute my flag.”

  Looking quite unperturbed by their visit, Aubergine welcomes Milo and Brandt on behalf of the school, and takes them into the classroom. The walls are hung with reading charts, letters of the alphabet printed out in her meticulous script, numbers in columns, and geometric shapes cut from blue cardboard. The most striking item in the room is a mural drawn by all the pupils. Using charcoal, mulberry juice, white clay, and yellow, brown and red ochres, they have emblazoned the back wall of the room with native animals, birds, fish, flowers and trees. Brandt recognises the Cone with snow on its slopes and a rufous eagle overhead. Dominating the bottom half of the mural is the farm itself, with its high eucalypts, and outsized wombats, echidnas and wallabies. In the bottom corner is the familiar green billabong and his homestead.

  Brandt focuses on each object in turn with almost a scientific interest, but if one of the children, a girl of about thirteen, hadn’t directed him to the spaces between the trees, he would have completely missed the eyes, peering out of the shadows; so many eyes.

  There is a gentle tug at his sleeve and he looks down to see a child, no older than five, pointing out to him a tiny spidery figure by the billabong. “You?” asks Brandt.

  The child doesn’t reply. She points to the figure once more and then to Brandt.

  “Oh, I see; that’s me?”

  “She won’t answer you,” says Aubergine. “Call it shyness if you will, but none of these children have had any close contact with Europeans. I’m sure that will change if you and Mr Hudson-Beck make more visits.”

  “They, the children, they’re so… beautiful,” says Brandt. “This, this… is so… beautiful. Congratulations, Aubergine. I only wish… Never mind.” His old school in Weimar comes into his mind, and how, long after he left, he heard how all the older teachers had been dismissed and replaced by half-educated acolytes of Adolf Hitler.