The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  ‘Hello,’ she called and Vasiliki and Iliana waved back.

  Elizabeta sat down next to her friends. She looked up at the sound of squawking. A flock of white birds with yellow heads flew over. She made a mental note to ask Frances what they were called.

  ‘A sunny day,’ Vasiliki said.

  ‘Yes,’ Elizabeta replied.

  ‘Your father is gone?’ Vasiliki asked. Her English had improved so much since Frances had begun lessons with them that she was now translating at the camp’s post office and at the shop for her parents.

  ‘Yes. He goes to Adelaide.’

  Iliana and Vasiliki exchanged glances. ‘Where is Adelaide?’

  Elizabeta shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My father says we go to a house soon in Melbourne.’

  ‘We will go soon, also,’ Elizabeta told them. ‘When my father, he finds a house. It can take a long time.’

  Vasiliki looked down at the grass, pressing her fingers to blade after blade and plucking them from the ground.

  Iliana wiped her eyes. ‘Papà. Work in New South Wales. One week.’ She held an index finger in the air. ‘One week. We go on train.’

  They sat in silence for a long time.

  When the bell rang out across the camp to signal lunch, they went wearily back to their family’s huts to get their plates and knives and forks and spoons and cups, promising to tell Frances their news when she got home from school.

  When Elizabeta returned from lunch, after a melancholy half hour with her friends, her mother was out of bed, but Luisa was in it in her place.

  ‘What is wrong?’ she asked, crossing the hut and kneeling down at her sister’s side. Luisa was stripped down to a singlet and her underpants, and was tugging at her blankets, kicking them off with her bare feet, exposing her skinny, pale body. Her head tossed and damp little ringlets had formed in her hair from the sweat on her face. Her pillow was damp.

  Berta stood in the corner of the hut, her arms wrapped around her thin frame. ‘A teacher brought her home from school.’ Her mother may have been out of bed, but she was still speaking and moving in slow motion. ‘She is so hot.’

  Elizabeta pressed her palm to her sister’s forehead.

  ‘Luisa,’ Elizabeta asked her sister. ‘What did the teacher say when she brought you to the hut?’

  ‘Where’s Vati?’ Luisa moaned and then she coughed weakly. She began to whimper and rub her eyes.

  Elizabeta looked to her mother for some guidance, for some hint that she was going to take charge, to be strong. But there was nothing.

  They sat with Luisa for a long while, willing her to sleep, but she was too restless, too unsettled, her coughs hacking and rasping. Elizabeta got to her feet. ‘I will get some water.’ She took two cups from one of the silver trays sitting on the small table and quickly walked to the ablutions block. She was almost running. When she twisted the tap on, she filled the cups, quickly drained one herself, and then filled it again. She took a moment to take a breath, to find her strength, to think about the English words for what Luisa was suffering: hot, sick. To pray to God that her mother might find the strength to help.

  Each step back to the hut jolted the bones in her body. Her head was throbbing, her heart racing, as she walked back down the alley, trying not to spill the water. When she reached the hut, Vasiliki, Iliana and Frances were waiting for her.

  Frances stepped forwards. ‘Hello, Elizabeta. Vasiliki and Iliana have told me about your father.’ She looked as if she might burst into tears but Elizabeta didn’t have time for anyone else’s fears.

  ‘Yes. He is gone …’ Elizabeta stumbled for the words but didn’t stop walking. ‘My sister.’ Her friends turned their heads to the red door at the sound of coughing and then wailing.

  ‘She’s sick? What’s the matter with her?’ Frances went to Elizabeta, touched her arm in a gesture of comfort.

  ‘She is very hot. She cries.’

  Frances tightened her grip on her friend’s arm. ‘I will get someone to come and see her. You wait here. Iliana and Vasiliki,’ she said, pointing to the hut and shaking her head. ‘Do not go in.’

  Then she turned and ran, her thick woollen skirt flapping around her knees like a tangled kite as she disappeared around a corner.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It all happened so fast.

  Within half an hour, Luisa was in a bed in the isolation ward at the Bonegilla children’s hospital. The urgency of her daughter’s condition had snapped Berta out of her sadness and torpor, and she and Elizabeta had raced across the camp. They sat on a hard wooden bench in the corridor outside the ward, staring at the white walls. Berta was praying, mumbling quietly to herself. Elizabeta prayed too, crossing herself over and over. Please God let Luisa be all right.

  The ward doors opened and closed quickly behind a man in a white coat and glasses and another man wearing a grey uniform, not a white coat.

  ‘Mrs Schmidt,’ the doctor began.

  ‘Yes?’ Berta stood on shaky legs. Elizabeta jumped to her feet, trying to clear her head so she could concentrate on the English words the doctor would say.

  ‘Tell her what I’m saying, Klaus.’

  ‘Yes, doctor.’ The man stepped forwards. He was neat and slight. ‘Frau Schmidt,’ he started in German. ‘My name is Klaus Bauer. I was a doctor in Stuttgart. I will translate for you what Dr Jenkins says.’

  Berta and Elizabeta studied Dr Jenkins’s face but listened intently to Klaus.

  ‘Let me ask. Your husband is still here at Bonegilla?’

  ‘He has gone to Adelaide,’ Berta snapped. ‘My daughters and I are here alone.’

  Dr Jenkins began to talk but all Elizabeta could hear was Klaus’s cultured voice, his perfect German. ‘Your daughter is very sick.’ He paused. ‘Die Masern.’

  Measles. Elizabeta knew the word. She clutched her mother’s arm and searched her face. Berta was white now, her lips pulled thin, her hollowed cheeks shadowed. They knew all about diseases and sickness. There had not only been hunger and starvation in Europe during the war, but there had been typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, meningitis, pneumonia. And measles. Berta began peppering Klaus with questions.

  He answered them all, patiently waiting while Dr Jenkins explained the answers, and then adding his own thoughts to the translations. ‘She is in good hands. Dr Jenkins and the nurses will give her some medicine and soon she will be well again. You’ll see.’

  ‘I must see my Luisa.’ Berta reached for Klaus’s sleeve. ‘Please?’

  ‘I have her doll.’ Elizabeta pulled it from her coat pocket and showed Klaus and the doctor. It was made from a wooden peg, with a pink, orange and brown floral dress Elizabeta had sewn herself, with a snip of lace like a shawl around its neck. Elizabeta had drawn on a face: two round eyes and a crooked red smile.

  When Dr Jenkins shook his head, Elizabeta put it back in her pocket. He said some more to Klaus, but Elizabeta was too upset to concentrate on them and then she and her mother watched him walk away down the corridor, his lace-up shoes clicking on the linoleum.

  ‘The doctor says the best thing you can do is go back to your hut and get some sleep,’ Klaus said, his voice low, a polite attempt at reassurance. ‘When little Luisa is no longer infectious, you will be allowed to see her. It’s for the best, for you and for all the other children at the camp. There’s one other case so it seems like we might have put a lid on it. No one wants it spreading.’

  ‘No,’ Berta said quickly. ‘No one wants more sick children.’

  Klaus stepped forwards. He put a hand on Berta’s shoulder. ‘It’s not like back home, Frau Schmidt.’

  ‘I will come tomorrow,’ she told Klaus, nodding. ‘I will see my daughter tomorrow.’

  ‘That is a good idea. I’m very sorry your daughter is ill.’

  ‘Vielen dank,’ Berta said and reached out her hand to take his. They nodded to each other and only then did Berta step back and breathe. Elizabeta’s shoulders dropped. She w
as relieved to see some of the tension in her mother’s face was gone.

  ‘Komm, Mutti.’ Elizabeta took her mother’s hand. They walked in silence back to their hut. Elizabeta took the long way, past the post office and the canteen, past some of the other accommodation blocks, past Tudor Hall and the lawns where children were playing soccer, because after that they would go back to their hut and stay there until the morning, with the walls closing in and creaking in the night.

  The next morning, Berta and Elizabeta ate a quick breakfast in the mess before returning to the hospital. They’d had a fitful night. Elizabeta had listened to the possums on the roof for what seemed like hours and when her mother wasn’t mumbling prayers under her breath she was outside in the cold, smoking a cigarette. When the sun came up, Elizabeta had worked hard to convince her mother to eat something and had finally won the battle. Her mother had been slim for as long as Elizabeta could remember, but she seemed not to have gained back any of the weight she’d lost after her long bout of seasickness on the voyage over. She’d become even thinner at Bonegilla; her skin sallow, her collar bones as sharp as knives under the collar of her dresses.

  ‘I’m sure Luisa will be better today.’

  They were walking purposefully, Elizabeta’s quick steps barely enough to keep pace with her mother. They walked up the alley nearest their hut, past the women’s ablutions block, heading towards the mess and then north to the hospital, when her mother stopped suddenly.

  Elizabeta almost tumbled into the back of her. ‘Mutti?’

  Berta didn’t answer. She was still as a post.

  ‘Mutti? What is wrong?’ Up ahead, there was a queue leading into the mess.

  He was standing alone at the back of the line, the German, his tray in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He drew in and then exhaled, the red tip of his cigarette lifting and lowering.

  Berta spat something under her breath.

  The man dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with the sole of his shoe.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Berta warned her daughter in a tight hiss. ‘Sagt nichts.’

  They had to pass the mess to get to the hospital and as they neared, the man looked up.

  ‘Guten morgen, Frau Schmidt.’ The German smiled. In the light of day, Elizabeta thought how ordinary he seemed. Medium height, slim, his hair short at the sides and the front slicked back. He was slight, inconsequential, ordinary. His cheeks pulled in, making hollows, and his scar was jagged, as if it had healed badly. He wore tweed trousers and a brown jumper. As brown as dirt.

  Elizabeta was so close to her mother she could feel her chest rising and falling with words unsaid.

  ‘Who would have thought. To come all this way from Europe and see someone from home. How are you finding Bonegilla? Is the accommodation to your liking?’

  Elizabeta was frightened. She knew her mother’s strength, knew that once she’d been a fighter, but she hadn’t seen that spark since they’d come to Bonegilla. It was as if her courage had fallen overboard into the ocean somewhere on the way to Australia.

  ‘And Fräulein Elizabeta. It’s nice to see you again.’ He came closer, an arm’s length away. ‘She’s quite the dancer, your daughter. She moves quickly. Very light on her feet.’

  Elizabeta’s heart thumped and a chill shook her from the inside. The morning sun was on their backs but it was as if they were standing in the snow-filled streets of Hungary with the wet seeping into the newspaper-lined soles of their worn-out shoes.

  Berta raised her chin, took in a deep breath. She reached her arm out to the side to shepherd her daughter behind her. ‘Get out of my way.’ Her voice was broken glass.

  The man leaned in close. ‘The war was a long time ago, yes? We are not the same people we were. Are we?’

  Her mother leaned in to the man’s face. So close, their noses almost touched.

  ‘Sie sind der Teufel.’ You are the devil.

  ‘Not a devil. Just a soldier. Like millions of others, who were doing their sacred duty for the Fatherland.’

  Berta spat at his feet. ‘I will tell the police you are here.’

  The man laughed at her.

  ‘And why would anyone believe your stories, old woman? There were lots of soldiers in Hungary. Germans. Hungarians. Russians. It could have been anyone.’

  ‘You forget something. I know who gave you that scar on your face.’

  The man narrowed his eyes. ‘Look here, Frau Schmidt. I’m here for a new life, too. This is my chance to start again. To forget. My homeland has gone, too.’ Then he shot a quick hand out and wrapped his fingers around Berta’s wrist, jerking her forwards. ‘If you tell anyone, I will come after her. Do you understand?’

  He quickly looked from side to side, as if he was checking for spying eyes. Satisfied there were none, he felt free to sneer at Berta and stalk away. Elizabeta watched him go. She had been right. It had been him. They’d come all this way to the other side of the world but the ghosts from the past were walking alongside them at Bonegilla, eating alongside them in the mess, breathing the same clean Australian air. Where was her father? What should she do now? She was too scared to move, too frightened to comfort her mother. She slipped her hand inside her coat pocket and clutched Luisa’s wooden peg doll.

  ‘That man … that piece of shit.’ Berta’s breath exploded from her mouth and she wrapped her arms around her daughter, holding her while she shook and cried.

  ‘Mutti,’ Elizabeta sobbed into the lapels of her mother’s scratchy woollen coat. ‘I remember everything.’

  ‘I’m sorry you remember. I’m so sorry you remember. We came here to forget. We came here to forget everything.’

  Elizabeta pushed out of her mother’s embrace and searched her expression. She hadn’t always been scared and anxious. Once she’d been strong. Once she’d been a fighter.

  ‘You cut his face with the kitchen knife,’ Elizabeta whispered.

  Her mother took a shuddering breath. Her voice was nothing more than a whisper. ‘Yes, I did.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  That night, as Elizabeta lay in her squeaky bed in their hut at Bonegilla, the scratchy grey blankets pulled up to her chin, she tried not to remember.

  But some memories you can never leave behind.

  That day, almost ten years ago, there had only been the two of them, Elizabeta and her mother. There had been no Luisa back then; she was yet to be born. And tonight, in their small hut, so cold their toes turned blue despite the layers, there was once again only the two of them. As Elizabeta squeezed her eyes shut to keep the memories away, she could hear Berta praying quietly in her bed, fighting sleep. They had gone to the hospital that morning, after they’d seen the German by the mess, but they were turned away by nurses in white caps and crisp dresses who tuttutted and shooed them out of the ward. They hadn’t seen Klaus, so there was no one to explain to them in words they could understand how Luisa was faring. Elizabeta knew her sister would be so scared to be there by herself, with only a few words of English, perhaps even those forgotten in her delirium. She held Luisa’s little doll, clutched tight in her hand as she shivered under the blankets and remembered.

  She remembered there was snow.

  It had been winter in their small village in Hungary, two miles from the nearest town where there had been a grocer and a butcher and a baker and her school. It was not much more than a collection of small cottages on a strip of fertile farming land set at the intersection of two dirt roads. It must have been sometime between November and February, when the ground was white and the trees were bare. Had they had Christmas yet? Elizabeta couldn’t place whether it had been before or after. Her memories were photographs, not moving pictures; so much of it lost, or so she’d thought, so much of it pushed back into the place in her mind where she had hoped it would remain trapped forever.

  She had been almost seven years old; old enough to remember but still too young to understand. By then, her father was in a forced labour camp, hav
ing been arrested by the Hungarian Nazis. There was just Elizabeta and her mother. That day, she had been next door at the Hermann’s. Her mother and her best friend Greta’s mother worked in a weaving factory making woollen and linen cloth, the machines loud and repetitive and grinding in their heads all day, and Greta’s grandmother was tasked with their care. Schools were closed because of the war, and with snow three feet deep it was too cold to play outside for long. Elizabeta had loved her days with Greta. Every night she went to bed wishing that Greta was her sister. Her friend was pretty and kind and wore her fine brown hair in two plaits that hung almost to her waist. They found lots of things to occupy them during the dim days of that winter. They sewed little dolls out of bits of string and fabric. Greta’s grandmother had taught them how to crochet by pulling apart worn jumpers and re-using the wool. They read books and played marbles and kugels by the fire. They’d talked often about what they would do when the winter was over, when the snow turned to sludge and became puddles and streams and the blossoms budded and bloomed. Despite what she’d seen, Elizabeta longed to go back into the forest, to roam among the towering fir trees, to inhale the scent of them and the fresh air and the smell of wild flowers, to search for wild mushrooms. Her father had shown her exactly where to look: under the tallest trees pines, nestled in the damp undergrowth of the fern fronds. The previous spring, Elizabeta and Greta had picked dozens and dozens and her basket had been so full that her mother had made mushroom soup and even though they hadn’t had sour cream, they had sprinkled wild dill on it and it had been delicious.

  On that day, the day it happened, she and Greta had been sitting together on the rug on the floor, reading the school books they’d managed to keep, practising their words and eating stale rye bread with a smear of lard and paprika that Greta’s Oma had made for them. The paprika on top of the white lard looked like orange snow.