The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  Elizabeta and Luisa sat on the wooden steps, pressed together against the cold. The sun was hidden now behind huge grey clouds that had blown in from the south, and a cold wind blew off the mountains.

  ‘I’m cold. I want to go inside. Why can’t we go inside?’

  Elizabeta slipped an arm around her sister’s shoulders and pulled her in close. ‘In a minute.’

  The voices inside were loud and angry and the fighting was in Hungarian again, so fast that Elizabeta couldn’t make out any of the few words she still remembered, but she knew in her heart it was about getting out of Bonegilla, leaving this place as soon as they could. Would it make a difference if she could understand her parents’ weapons of argument?

  There were many things she wished she didn’t know. But some memories you could never leave behind.

  The next morning the family walked together to the mess. Her parents had been curt with each other since they’d got up from their thin mattresses and squeaking beds. Elizabeta had barely slept, on edge about another fight; kept awake by the ache in her cheek where her mother had slapped her. It still hurt to touch and the cool of the sheets in the frigid night air hadn’t been much relief. No one had spoken a word as they’d rugged up in their squeaky beds the night before, shivering in the cold. The row had exhausted her parents. After dinner, there had been no energy to sing a nursery rhyme to Luisa, who had sobbed under the blankets until she exhausted herself into sleep. And today, as they trudged across the camp, her father’s mouth was pulled tight and the dark shadows under her mother’s eyes were like storm clouds about to burst. Words had been exchanged between her parents that she didn’t understand and emotions were on show that she couldn’t name.

  Luisa was irritable and refused to hold Elizabeta’s hand as they walked to breakfast, but Elizabeta insisted. Her sister had a habit of running off, hiding between the rows of huts, finding other children to play with and not coming back for hours. Elizabeta had found her up a gum tree once, wedged between the trunk and a spindly bough, half hidden by thin silvery grey leaves.

  ‘Come down,’ Elizabeta had called. ‘It’s not safe up there.’

  ‘I’m climbing the tree,’ Luisa had called back. ‘I want to get to the top.’

  ‘You’re a monkey,’ Elizabeta had said, shielding her eyes from the sun, smiling at her sister’s exuberant delight.

  ‘I’m not a monkey. I’m a koala.’

  Elizabeta didn’t want any such fuss this morning. She wasn’t in the mood to chase her little sister or rescue her from tall trees. When they reached the queue at the door to the mess, the smell of coffee in the air, Berta’s eyes darted around the grounds, scanning the crowd, searching every face. Elizabeta knew with a sinking heart who she was fearful of seeing.

  Her father slipped an arm around her mother’s shoulders and drew her in close. ‘We won’t be here much longer,’ he reassured her for the hundredth time. ‘I will get work soon. I’ll go and see the employment agents again after breakfast.’

  Berta’s face didn’t register that she’d heard a word. She had stopped walking. Her eyes were fixed on a spot in the distance, and Elizabeta knew. Had her mother’s fear summoned him somehow? The man from the dance was walking towards them, his food tray in his hands.

  And her blood turned to ice.

  The man stopped and looked too, taking in each member of the family, then he jerked around and walked off in the direction from which he’d come.

  Berta shot a searching glance at her oldest daughter. A flash of understanding was there in her bleak eyes and Elizabeta knew. The secret they had kept for almost ten years was in the air between them, crackling like a lightning strike. All these years later, thousands of miles away, they were both back in that cottage in Hungary.

  The queue moved and without another word they went inside for breakfast but her mother didn’t touch a bite. Her plate sat in front of her, filled with porridge she didn’t eat as Luisa chatted away with their father. He offered her spoonfuls of corn flakes from his bowl and she opened her mouth wide to him like a baby bird.

  Two days later, on Friday afternoon, Jozef came back to the hut from a meeting with the employment agent with a beaming smile on his face. There was sheen of sweat on his forehead and he was puffing. Elizabeta was sure he’d sprinted the whole way back.

  ‘Berta,’ he called from the doorway. ‘I have work. It’s over,’ he’d announced with a slap on his thigh as he bounded up into the hut.

  Elizabeta was on the steps watching Luisa playing with her marbles in the grass below. Berta had been sweeping the hut and at the news she dropped the broom and it thudded on the floor. ‘We’re leaving Bonegilla?’

  ‘There’s a job in a factory. In Adelaide. They showed me on the map. Adelaide!’ He swept Berta up into his arms and she wrapped her arms around her husband. They laughed together and then Berta’s laughter became sobbing and Jozef made soothing sounds as he tried to calm her.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she cried. ‘When do we go? Tomorrow?’

  ‘I leave on Monday,’ Jozef said.

  Berta pushed herself out of his arms. ‘You leave on Monday?’

  ‘I am going ahead. You and the girls will have to wait here.’

  Elizabeta spun around to watch her parents. They couldn’t go, too? Her heart sank. They were going to be one of those families, like Vasiliki’s and hundreds of others. Their fathers were gone and they were stuck here at Bonegilla. They were going to be the half a family left here at the camp.

  ‘Wait here without you?’ Berta slammed a palm against her chest and stumbled, and Jozef led her backwards to sit on the bed.

  ‘There is only single men’s housing near the factory. I don’t like it either but this is our chance, Berta. I know how much you want to leave, to start our new life with the girls. If this is what we must do, then it’s what we must do.’

  Berta was so pale Elizabeta thought she might faint.

  ‘You would take this job and leave your family here?’

  ‘It won’t be long. We knew this when we signed the papers to come to Australia. I have to work for two years and then we are free to go wherever we please.’

  Elizabeta felt like a witness to something profound and important between her parents. When her mother began gnawing on a torn fingernail, Elizabeta felt fresh anxiety knot in her stomach. How would she look after her mother? Her father knew how to soothe her. She couldn’t do it. What would she do when her mother was upset? How would she make things better for her? And how would she protect her from the German?

  ‘Where is this Adelaide?’ Berta demanded. ‘I’ve never heard of the place.’

  ‘It’s not far, I promise. As soon as I can find a house to rent, you and the girls can come. All will be good from now on, Berta.’

  Elizabeta turned away and buried her head in her hands. She couldn’t watch. There was the squeaking of the metal-framed bed, then soft sobbing and her father’s voice, quiet and soothing.

  ‘The children,’ Berta said in between tears. ‘You can’t leave us here. We must go, too.’

  ‘A house, keep thinking about that. Three bedrooms. One each for Elizabeta and Luisa. And no more food from the mess hall. A kitchen of your own. You’ll be able to cook sauerkraut and spätzle and you can make your own sausages again. No more mutton, yes? Won’t that be a good thing for us?’

  Berta’s sobbing continued unabated.

  Elizabeta dropped her head to her knees. After a little while, there were footsteps behind her and then her father was crouching in the doorway.

  ‘Luisa,’ he said. ‘Come over here to me.’

  Luisa picked her marbles from the grass and ran to her father’s side. He slipped an arm around her and gave Elizabeta a knowing look.

  ‘I have news, Luisa. The government has found me a job and I’m going to go and work and find a new place for us to live.’

  ‘Will there be school where we are going?’ Luisa asked.

  ‘Of course. A very
big school with lots of other children for you to play with. We can get a dog for you, if you promise to look after it.’

  ‘A dog, Vati? I promise I’ll look after it.’

  ‘And there is a beach. You can swim every day!’

  Luisa’s chin dropped. ‘But I don’t know how to swim.’

  ‘I can teach you. I can swim. I used to swim in the lakes back in Germany. It’s easy.’ He ruffled her hair lovingly.

  Elizabeta reached for her father’s hand. ‘Will we be able to come to Adelaide very soon?’

  A flash of seriousness darkened her father’s expression but he blinked it away. ‘As soon as I find a home for us to live in, you will come on the train, ja? But until then, you will look after your mother.’

  ‘I will,’ Elizabeta promised, and she meant it, but a fear settled in her stomach. She wanted to cry but couldn’t let her father see her tears.

  Jozef slipped his arms around his daughters and kissed the tops of their heads. ‘You are good girls. And now I must go and sign some papers.’ He jumped to the ground, and strolled off down the alley between the two huts, turning right in the distance and out of their sight. For the first time in a long time, the girls heard their father whistle.

  So, their time at Bonegilla was soon to end. Elizabeta looked down the alley towards the laundry and the toilet block, watching the comings and goings of other residents. How would she remember this place when they were gone? Would she recall the smell of mutton wafting from the mess hall or the scent of the gum trees in the mornings? Would it be the friendships she had made or her mother’s sadness? The freedom of being a young woman here or the memories that had been packed up in her suitcase with her clothes?

  Bonegilla was filled with sparkling, pretty faces and those wearing the marks of too much suffering. What they shared was a kind of limbo, stuck between the old world and the new, between everything they had known and a wide brown land full of mystery and names they couldn’t pronounce and people who would tell them to speak bloody English. Bonegilla was temporary, not the real beginning of their lives in Australia.

  Elizabeta would have to ask Frances to look up this place called Adelaide on her book of maps. Perhaps it wasn’t that far away. She might be able to come back to Bonegilla on the weekends to see Frances and Iliana and Vasiliki.

  But they would be gone one day, too, and probably soon.

  In Elizabeta’s life, saying goodbye had been a rare thing. People had been snatched out of it without her even knowing. When they’d lived in Hungary, their neighbours the Hermanns had been escorted from their home by soldiers and sent away. No farewells. And a few days later, when her father was taken, there had been no chance to say goodbye either before he was sent to a labour camp, crushing rocks for the Russians. The Blumenthals, who were the bakers in their village, had disappeared in November 1944. They’d lost touch with so many people. Her uncles and aunts, her grandmothers. Most people Elizabeta knew were already ghosts.

  Luisa opened Elizabeta’s hand and dropped her marbles in her palm. Blue, green, red, clinking against each other like drinking glasses. Prost.

  ‘Are you happy, Elizabeta, that Vati is going to find us a house to live in?’

  ‘Yes. I am happy,’ she replied. It was important to sound happy, perhaps even more important than actually being happy. ‘I want to have a room to myself and a bed that I don’t have to share with you. I won’t have to listen to your coughing. Or the way you snore all night like a goat.’

  ‘That’s not me,’ Luisa giggled. ‘That’s Vati snoring.’

  Elizabeta found a smile for her sister, to reassure her. It was important now that she look after her mother and her sister. Until they left Bonegilla, the weight of that heavy burden fell entirely on her shoulders.

  On Monday, Berta, Elizabeta and Luisa stood by the front boom gate of Bonegilla and said goodbye to Jozef. The girls hung back while there were quiet words between husband and wife. Other people were saying goodbye, too. Some families, but mostly men on their own, were going to Cooma, Melbourne, Barmera, Sydney, Townsville. Some of them hadn’t stopped moving for years and now they were on the move again. No one looked particularly happy about leaving Bonegilla, which Elizabeta could understand. One woman, a mother with four children crowding around her, wailed as her husband stepped onto the bus.

  There were other children saying goodbye to their fathers, with loud sobs, clutching legs and arms and bodies, whatever their little arms could reach. Elizabeta couldn’t cry. She was sixteen after all. Jozef let go of his wife’s hand and held his daughters in a hug that Elizabeta hoped would never end.

  ‘You be good girls for your mother.’

  ‘Yes, Vati,’ Luisa said, a hitch in her voice.

  ‘We will,’ Elizabeta assured him.

  ‘Will you write me a letter when you get to Adelaide?’ Luisa asked. She had to raise her little voice above the chugging of the pale blue bus that was waiting to ferry people to the Bonegilla rail siding.

  ‘Of course I will. Lots of letters.’

  Luisa beamed. ‘I will read them every night.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Jozef said.

  After one last kiss for his wife, he stepped up onto the bus. The doors closed, and smoke belched as the chugging of the engine grew louder. When the driver manoeuvred through the main gate and out onto the road to Australia, Elizabeta watched her father go and didn’t say another word.

  That night, Berta sobbed herself to sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Berta stayed in bed for two days after Jozef left for Adelaide.

  She had refused to eat, so Elizabeta had taken Luisa to the mess and walked her to school in the mornings during that next week. It was a Bonegilla rule that no one was allowed to take food from the mess back to their huts, but Elizabeta had slipped an orange into her coat pocket and left it on the table. She kept everything clean, sweeping out the grit of dirt they all carried in on their shoes, and wiped the window in fierce circles until it sparkled. She made the beds every day and tidied, but it was such a small hut that those chores took less than ten minutes.

  Elizabeta needed an excuse to get away, to make sure she didn’t get sucked into her mother’s grief. She collected up clothes that needed washing and walked past building after building towards the laundry at the end of their alley. She passed a group of Italian men playing a bowling game and four women sitting around a small table playing cards. Two olive-skinned women walked by carrying brown paper parcels tied with string saying the words ‘post office’ in English, and laughing at the sound of it. Ahead, a brown-haired man sat in a chair, and a darker-haired man with very hairy arms stood behind him, wielding a comb and scissors. He combed and snipped, combed and snipped, and as he worked, little pieces of hair caught in the breeze and fell to the grass. The man in the chair held a mirror in his hand and watched and there was a queue of men waiting their turn.

  A shriek up ahead had everyone turning. Then another, then another. At the women’s ablutions block, people fled like bees from a newly opened hive. A panic of people rushed through the doorway, little girls and women and mothers with toddlers hoisted off the ground in shaky arms and they spread in all directions.

  ‘Snake!’ someone yelled.

  Everyone knew ‘snake’.

  Elizabeta reached the laundry block and went in. She shivered. It was colder inside than it was outdoors. Two long metal sinks were positioned on either side of an exposed pipe with taps every few feet. Two Dutch women were talking animatedly and jostling with a Pole for space in front of a tap, none of them willing to make way for each other. Elizabeta was in no great rush to go back to the hut, so she waited, watching the women working at the flat troughs, their sleeves pushed up to their elbows, pressing their palms into their sudsy clothes, rubbing and twisting and rinsing under the frigid drizzling water. A space became free and Elizabeta took out each item, singlets, socks, underwear, and turned on the tap. Her fingers stiffened in the cold water. As she scrubbed, the s
uds making her fingers slippery, she wondered if her father’s job at the factory in Adelaide would pay enough money so they could buy the thing called a washing machine. She’d heard some German women in the mess the day before talking about them. It was a metal machine that did all the hard work. Perhaps when they settled in Adelaide her father would buy her mother a washing machine. And a new radio too, and beds that didn’t squeak and a fireplace to keep them warm and windows that didn’t let the draught in. And another pair of shoes. And a new dress. And a string of pearls. Perhaps those things would make her mother happy again.

  Elizabeta scrubbed and squeezed and thought of Frances and Vasiliki and Iliana. She had been so busy with her mother and looking after Luisa that she hadn’t seen them for most of the week. She missed them. Their laughter, the new English words she might learn from Frances, the funny way Vasiliki joked and Iliana’s shy smile. But she had other responsibilities now. She had her mother and her sister to look after. She had promised her father that she would. Her distance from her friends made it easier not to think about her father leaving, her mother’s sickness, the dancing German, and leaving Bonegilla.

  Elizabeta hauled the wet clothes to the washing line and fastened them with wooden pegs. She wasn’t sure how long it would all take for them to dry in this weather, but at the moment, she had all the time in the world to wait.

  The next day, once breakfast was finished and Luisa was in school, Elizabeta walked the camp until she found Vasiliki and Iliana.

  The early-morning clouds had cleared and the sun was out, weak but warm, and the girls were sitting near a gum tree by the oval where the young men played soccer, but there was no game that day. In the distance, the big sky was a pale autumn blue and the mountains were dark purple and gun-metal grey. The magpies trilled in the straggly trees and a couple landed on the grass. As Elizabeta approached, they stared back at her. She was fascinated by the black-and-white birds, their long beaks and their calls.