The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  She turned to him, reached for the lapels of his suit jacket and pulled him closer. This was to be the last time she would ever see Tom Burley and she needed every detail. The night, the quiet, the warm vinyl of the car seats, the smell of Brylcreem in his hair, the coarse weave of his suit. The feel of his lips on hers and the strength in the arms that were now crushing her, pulling her in so tight she felt his heart pounding in time with hers.

  And then kissing wasn’t enough. Vasiliki pulled back from him. Their hot breath had fogged the car windows, as if they were together in a cloud. There was one more thing she wanted from Tom before they said goodbye. There was one thing she wanted to share with someone she loved. She knew the words in English but was too shy to say them, so she reached for the hem of her skirt, gathered the fabric of her petticoat and pulled both of them up. She slipped her hands underneath and lifted her bottom, tugging off her rayon panties. She dropped them by her shoes and searched his face.

  Tom was speechless. His fingers swept up her bare thigh and then inched higher, and she threw her head back, pressing it on the back of the bench seat while his fingers explored her.

  ‘Please, Tom,’ she said. ‘One time.’ She clambered over the front seat into the back and Tom followed, whispering in her ear how much he loved her while they made love for the first and last time.

  On 16 June, 1956, Vasiliki married Stelios Papadopoulos at the Greek Orthodox church in East Melbourne. As was the tradition, the only one to speak during the entire ceremony was the priest. The lace on Vasiliki’s beautiful A-line wedding gown that her parents had bought from Myer in Bourke Street scratched at her the whole day. Her family and all their friends, old ones from the village and new ones from Australia, came. Vasiliki was allowed to invite one friend, and it was Shirley from the Majestic. She didn’t want the Bonegilla girls there. She didn’t want them to see the wedding for the lie it was, and the idea of sharing the day with Frances—Tom’s sister—would have been too much to bear. She distracted herself with thoughts of the wedding gifts: dinnerware and silverware and linen tablecloths and sheets for the bed. Dishes and crystal glasses and an elaborate punch bowl decorated with large purple flowers. Wedding gifts for a wedding she hadn’t wanted.

  Weeks later, she finally summoned the courage to write to Frances and Iliana and Elizabeta, sharing the news that she was Vicki Papadopoulos now. She had slipped in each envelope a photo of her in her scratchy wedding dress with her arm slipped in Stelios’s elbow. It was easier than having them there in person to see her marry a man she didn’t love.

  She and Steve—for Stelios had decided to simplify his name too—moved into a house next door to her parents in Oakleigh. That had been the biggest surprise of all. She hadn’t known until the day of the wedding that they had bought it for her, but by then she was immune to being shocked about the decisions they made for their daughter’s life. This was her future. Her parents had chosen her friends, her husband, her house and even her wedding dress. She was a piece they moved around from place to place on a chess board. They had created a new life for her in Australia but it was a closed circle: her husband, her home, her parents, the milk bar.

  But there was one thing Vasiliki had created for herself.

  When she walked down the aisle, she was already pregnant.

  She would never have the life she wanted for herself, but she would forever have a part of Tom with her.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Elizabeta sat on the edge of her bed, rubbing her aching feet, from ball to heel and back.

  The ten-minute walk home from the train station always irritated her already sore feet and the second she arrived home she would slip off her shoes. She would never complain to her parents about her sore feet when her father worked so hard, so this ten minutes in her room after work, alone, was the time in which she rested, cleared her head of the demands of her boss and her customers and thought about dinner. She knew her mother would be waiting for her in the kitchen, for that little extra help, so she slid her feet into a pair of soft slippers and went out to say hello.

  ‘What can I do, Mutti?’ Elizabeta kissed her mother’s cheek and then reached for the apron hanging on a hook on the door leading to the laundry.

  ‘Salad,’ her mother said. Elizabeta slipped the apron over her neck and then took the lettuce from the fridge, and the salt and pepper and vinegar from the cupboard. They finished preparing the meal together. Peeling potatoes. Making salad. Chopping cabbage. Elizabeta and her father worked and Elizabeta and her mother kept their home. That was the routine they had settled into in their new house in Clark Street in Woodville, a dozen stops on the train from the city where Elizabeta worked.

  It was only half an hour before Elizabeta set a bowl of steaming spätzle on the small dining table that sat in the middle of the kitchen.

  ‘How was your work at the cafe today?’ Jozef asked. He was wearing a clean shirt and trousers, and his hair was wet and slicked back as if he’d smoothed Brylcreem through it. He smelled of Old Spice and soap; of a familiar evening routine that Elizabeta cherished. He always showered when he got home from the factory to wash away the grease and the dirt from his hands.

  ‘It was very busy,’ Elizabeta replied. She sat down opposite her father, her mother in between them at the end of the table, and passed her father the serving spoon.

  Under the table, Elizabeta kicked off a slipper and rubbed her stockinged feet, the arch of her left on the sole of her right, and then reversed. ‘One man came in today and ate four pieces of Pflaumenstreusel.’

  ‘What did he want with four pieces?’ Jozef asked, his eyebrows jumping up into the creases in his tanned forehead.

  ‘It’s very delicious,’ Elizabeta replied. ‘He ordered one piece, sat down at the counter and ate it in four bites. And then he said it was better than his own mother in Dusseldorf used to make. So he had three more!’

  Elizabeta looked to her mother at the head of the table. Berta looked up with a forced smile, as if she knew what was expected of her and she was doing her best to oblige. Had she seen her mother happy since Bonegilla? Elizabeta’s heart shrank at the realisation that she hadn’t. Places you can leave, but memories come too, no matter where you go.

  ‘Four pieces.’ Jozef howled with laughter as he loaded his plate. He picked up a spoon—he always ate with a dessert spoon and a fork—and scooped up the slippery noodles. His spoon was US military issue, souvenired from the postwar years in Germany when he’d worked on a base. The handle was oval shaped at the end with an oval cut out of it. Just below the cut-out was stamped U.S. When soldiers went home to the States after their tours of duty, they dumped everything. Elizabeta’s father had been too used to having nothing to let such useful things go to waste. It had no value to anyone but it was so special to him that he’d insisted it come to Australia in the wooden chest with their rest of their most valued possessions. A Bible. A set of almost brand-new saucepans. Some photos from their time in Germany. Their best clothes.

  They sat in silence for the rest of their meal, Elizabeta slowly chewing on her chop bone. Perhaps it was because Berta never seemed to have much to say and Elizabeta talked all day to her work colleagues or her customers, because Jozef was after relief from the grinding noise of the factory, that this silence was a reprieve for all of them. Elizabeta always thought of Luisa during those quiet meal times, wondering what she might look like now, two years older, if she had lived. Would she would have enjoyed going to the local school, just a short walking distance away? Would she have liked having her own bedroom with a view over the back yard? Would her parents have bought her the dog she had so desperately wanted?

  Elizabeta missed brushing Luisa’s hair and forming it into long, perfect plaits, so thin at the end there was not more than a few thin strands, and then looping them up and fastening them. ‘Circles,’ Luisa had called it. She’d always wanted her plaits in circles. Elizabeta missed her funny laugh and the way she tried to skip along, getting it wrong, lo
sing her rhythm, stopping and starting again with great concentration. Luisa would always be happy and young in Elizabeta’s memory. Always perfect. She chose not to remember her sister as sick, moaning, incoherent, pale. Elizabeta had developed a strength for blocking out those memories, the kind that tore at her, and those of her sister were among the most haunting.

  It was a huge house for three people. Elizabeta still couldn’t fathom how much bigger it was than their Bonegilla hut, or the second one at the Woodside holding camp in the Adelaide Hills. They’d lived there a month before they’d found a suitable rental home. The sandstone bungalow had three bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom with a bath, and a kitchen with enough room for the table in the middle. The toilet was outside by the side fence and Elizabeta was still scared of the spiders with the long fine legs that inhabited it. There was a twin cement laundry tub in an asbestos room set off the back veranda. They had a wringer washing machine with rollers and it squeezed and creased their clothes into thick pancakes. The large backyard was a square of lawn and a Hills Hoist and vegetables: capsicums, chillies and potatoes. An old lemon tree gave them abundant fruit and a peach tree by the back fence yielded the sweetest peaches. Her father had built a chicken coop with scrap wood he’d got from the factory and second-hand sheets of galvanised iron. The chickens scratched around the backyard, eating the kitchen scraps, and laying more eggs than Berta would ever need for the cakes and noodles she made.

  Elizabeta had a comfortable bed, with bedsprings that didn’t squeak, and a dark-stained wooden wardrobe with a hat drawer and more than enough space to hang her clothes. There was a dresser with two small drawers and two big ones underneath with a large framed mirror attached to it, on which she’d set out her special things. The wooden box from Germany with Luisa’s peg doll inside it. A matching hairbrush and comb she had bought with her first pay. A two-inch square photo of Luisa’s grave in Albury in a small silver frame, a bouquet of flowers on it, which Frances had sent to Elizabeta. Her mother hadn’t wanted it on the mantelpiece in the living room.

  Her father pushed his plate into the centre of the table. ‘Schmeckt gut, Berta.’ He rubbed his stomach and pushed back his chair. He didn’t have to tell his wife and his daughter that he was going into the garden. They knew his routine by now. While they washed the dishes and cleaned up, he watered the vegetable garden, tugged at some weeds, smoked a cigarette or two and then came back inside to listen to the radio for a little while before going to bed.

  It was a small, quiet life they lived. They had no other family in Australia. There were no aunts or uncles for Elizabeta, or cousins. They hadn’t made friends with any neighbours. The family on one side had made an art form of dashing away when Elizabeta or her mother and father were in the front yard. She was sure the young man who lived in the house across the road caught the same train as she did into the city every day, but he’d not once said hello or even smiled.

  ‘Some people just don’t like new Australians,’ her father had told her. Elizabeta knew that to be true. She saw it in the suspicious looks of strangers when she spoke German to her parents when they were out. It seemed to her that Bonegilla had given her the wrong idea about Australia. People from all those different countries had come here for a new life. They’d all come in their different boats but were all in the same boat at the camp. They’d seen up close what could divide people and turn them against each other and they didn’t want that here. They had travelled halfway across the world to get away from that. But Australians were suspicious. How lucky they’d been to be so far from the war. How could Elizabeta make them understand that all her family wanted, all the other people from Bonegilla wanted, was the chance to work and live and be free.

  Elizabeta cleared the table, gathered the plates and cutlery and stacked them on the side of the kitchen sink.

  ‘Go and listen to the radio, Mutti,’ she said and Berta obeyed. A moment later, the sound of strings and a crooner filled the living room. Elizabeta lost herself in the suds as the sink filled. Her neighbours might be unfriendly, but there was one place she felt a part of the country in which they had chosen to live. And it was at work.

  It was what Australians called a continental cafe, the kind that served real coffee from ground beans and always had an array of European cakes on display. The Kirschners had been in Australia for twenty years, refugees from another time, and liked employing staff who could speak German. Elizabeta worked Mondays to Saturdays, and on Sundays there was church with her parents. They dressed up for church, more for an outing and a routine than out of belief, her father in the one charcoal grey suit he had brought with him in the trunk from Germany, her mother in a lovely floral dress she’d had for years, with white gloves on her small hands and a hat on her dark brown curls. It was Berta’s only excursion during the week. Now that they were settled, she didn’t much like to leave the house. Elizabeta wondered if she was scared of seeing the German man again. Elizabeta tried not to think about him, about where he had gone for work and where he was living now. She hoped he was far away. Perhaps in Queensland or Perth.

  After dinner, when the dishes were put away and the table wiped clean, Elizabeta found the present she had brought home for her mother and went into the living room to give it to her. Berta was listening to Blue Hills but Elizabeta knew she wouldn’t understand much of it. Her English was still sparse and what little Elizabeta had tried to teach her was only enough to say hello. It was the sound of the voices she must have found comforting.

  ‘Mutti?’

  Berta looked up and put her knitting in her lap. ‘Ja?’

  ‘Here. I found this today for you.’ Elizabeta handed her mother a slim brown paper bag. Berta pulled a magazine from inside it and smiled. It was quick, but it was a smile, and Elizabeta hung on to it.

  ‘Heimat Romans,’ Elizabeta said, encouraging her mother to open the cover. ‘I know how you like them.’ They looked at the cover, with its distinctive red border and a handsome couple kissing within its frame. Elizabeta had discovered the magazine while browsing in a newsagent in Regent Arcade one lunchtime. The magazines were filled with love stories, all in German. Her mother had read every copy Elizabeta had brought home and there was now a pile stacked in the corner of the living room by the radio, so high it toppled over one day when Elizabeta was sweeping around the edges of the rug.

  Berta reached for her daughter’s hand and kissed the back of it. ‘I’ll read it tomorrow. Thank you, Elizabeta.’

  If her mother didn’t want to engage in the world, Elizabeta had taken it upon herself to bring the world to her mother. One romance at a time.

  Berta was anxious about it but Elizabeta was excited.

  After more than two years in Australia, Elizabeta’s parents had finally made some new friends and now they were coming for lunch—the Mullers would be the first guests they’d ever had at their home in Woodville. Jozef had swept the path in the backyard and weeded his vegetable garden. Berta and Elizabeta had spent all of Saturday morning mopping and polishing the floors, shining every surface and picking flowers from the garden to set in little green vases on the mantelpiece in the living room and on the telephone desk in the hallway.

  They prepared sauerbraten, stuffed capsicums filled with minced beef and rice, and potato salad. Because the winter sun was shining, they had set up a picnic table in the backyard.

  The Mullers had recently arrived in Adelaide. They were German and had also spent time at Bonegilla after they’d arrived in Australia on the boat a couple of months earlier. After meeting at church, Elizabeta’s father and Herr Muller had become fast friends. Suddenly, there were plans for lunch the next Sunday after church.

  ‘His wife is Carolina and they have two children. Nikolas is twenty-two and there is a little girl, Angelika.’

  And when Elizabeta opened the front door to them, the scent of sausage took her back to their house in Germany. Herr Muller was a butcher and he had brought along a gift basket of smallgoods—bratwurst and wei
sswurst and mettwurst he’d smoked himself in his new Australian backyard.

  Berta gasped when she’d spotted the succulent sausages. ‘Herr Muller. This is too kind.’

  He smiled and nodded proudly. His cheeks were puffed and red, his smile friendly. ‘Just like home, hey?’

  ‘There is nothing like this in Adelaide,’ Berta said. And she smiled and Elizabeta held on to that small moment of her mother’s happiness before welcoming the Mullers into their home.

  After lunch, Elizabeta’s father gave Herr Muller a walking tour of his vegetable garden, and even dug up some potatoes for the Mullers to take home. Her mother and Frau Muller sat at the picnic table, chatting quietly, watching. Elizabeta didn’t want to put a name to what she was feeling, seeing her mother look so at peace. Perhaps that was all she needed, to find a friend. Someone who reminded her of home, someone with whom she could speak in a language that was easy, that didn’t require effort and confusion and a gnawing feeling of incompetence. Someone who spoke the language of her dreams.

  Elizabeta watched as the two women spoke. She had stretched out a blanket on the square of green lawn, neatly trimmed by her father that morning. Nikolas was at her side. Through lunch, she had noticed him looking at her, and she’d looked away, feeling the heat in her cheeks. She had been looked at before by men. At the cafe, on the train, on the street. He seemed different to those men.

  ‘Your sister is …’ Elizabeta searched for the word. ‘Ein Affe. What is that in English?’

  ‘A monkey.’ Nikolas sipped from his glass of beer, laughing into the foam. He had short brown hair and a barrel chest. His English was as good as hers and she had started their conversation in English to impress him.

  ‘A monkey,’ Elizabeta repeated. ‘Yes. She is a monkey.’