The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  Iliana covered her face with her hands. ‘I’m so sorry, Frances.’

  ‘Wait a minute. You knew about the baby?’ Vasiliki was incredulous.

  ‘Yes. Frances came to Cooma when …’ Iliana stopped to let Frances tell her own story.

  ‘When I had to hide, Iliana’s family took me in. It was different back in those days. You all remember what they said about girls like me. We had to go away, disappear. Hide our shame. The Agnolis were wonderfully kind to me. I was in Cooma for about six months and when it was almost time, I went back to my parents and told them the truth. My son was born in Albury.’

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Elizabeta said.

  ‘I have lived with that, with what I did, all this time. I need to do something for myself now. I had to give up my child. I’ve been a wife and mother for twenty years. You know, I think those feminists are right.’

  ‘My daughter Stavroula is a feminist,’ Vasiliki announced. There was a long pause. ‘And … a lesbian.’

  Frances blinked. ‘She is?’

  Vasiliki waved a hand at a passing waiter. ‘Two more bottles of wine.’ She turned back to the table. ‘I blame that university. She pushed and pushed to go and now she’s doing something called Women’s Studies. And she has a girlfriend. Who’s not even Greek.’

  ‘I think one of my aunties was a lesbian,’ Frances said. ‘My father’s oldest sister never married and lived with her best friend her whole life. We used to call them spinsters back in those days.’

  Iliana crossed herself again and said something quietly in Italian.

  ‘Stop that with all the crossing,’ Vasiliki snapped. ‘Stavroula is fine. She’s very smart and doing very well at the university. She’s still my daughter. I don’t understand this thing, and I can’t say I like thinking about it, but I still love her. Steve … well, he’s not so understanding. And her yiayia and papou? They can’t even look at her.’

  ‘They’ll understand one day,’ Elizabeta said. ‘When they think about how lucky they are to have four granddaughters.’

  ‘Do you sometimes wish we had been born when they were?’ Frances asked. ‘They have so much freedom, our daughters. They can do whatever they want.’

  ‘I compare myself to her all the time. I couldn’t even marry who I wanted to. And she gets to be a lesbian,’ Vasiliki said. ‘In 1956, we were two years out of Bonegilla and I was working at the milk bar in Bourke Street, the one my father and my uncle had back then. One Sunday, they introduced me to this man at church and that was it. We were getting married.’ Her face fell. ‘I didn’t want to marry Steve.’ She glanced at Frances and hesitated. ‘I was in love with another boy.’

  Frances remembered that day, ten years earlier, after she and Massimo had been together that first time in her sewing room. When Frances had walked back into the kitchen, she had seen the knowing look on Vasiliki’s face and had realised immediately that Vasiliki had guessed her secret. And now, ten years later, Frances understood why she had never revealed it.

  Because she’d had a secret, too.

  ‘This other boy,’ Elizabeta asked. ‘Your family didn’t approve?’

  Vasiliki lowered her eyes to the empty plate in front of her. ‘He was an Australian boy. A lovely boy. It would have broken our family apart if I told them. I couldn’t do it. Greek girls didn’t do things like that to their families back then.’

  Frances laid her hand on Vasiliki’s shoulder. They shared an understanding look.

  ‘I’m glad things are changing,’ Vasiliki said. ‘It’s about time. Can you imagine me these days telling my daughters who they should marry? We wouldn’t think of doing such a thing.’

  ‘Well,’ Elizabeta sighed. ‘It seems today is a day for sharing secrets.’

  Her words were heavy between the four women.

  She continued. ‘We have been friends for thirty years. Will you all promise me something? Sometimes I worry that we will lose our friendship, that something will come between us, make us argue and not care about each other anymore. Or that we will let what we have slip through our fingers.’

  The waiter arrived with the extra wine and clean glasses. They were silent until he left with a gracious smile.

  ‘Iliana,’ Elizabeta said. ‘You don’t agree with what Frances is doing but we must always be friends. I need to know that you will always be my friend. I need you all now more than ever.’

  Frances reeled. The fragile bird who had turned up for their reunion lunch was stronger than any of them had realised. Of course she was. How on earth could she have survived everything in her life if she wasn’t strong?

  ‘I will need you to look after Nikolas and Luisa and Johnny if …’

  ‘If what, Elizabeta?’ Vasiliki demanded.

  ‘If I die. You see, I have breast cancer.’

  Chapter Forty-two

  Elizabeta blinked her eyes open against the bright ward lights after her surgery, and remembered her breast was gone.

  There was a tightness where there had once been plump softness, and bandages now constricted her chest. She still felt thick-tongued from the anaesthetic and couldn’t seem to move any of her limbs.

  But she was awake.

  And the first face she saw, leaning over her hospital bed, was her daughter’s.

  ‘You’re awake,’ Luisa said tremulously.

  Elizabeta nodded. She tried to speak but her tongue and the roof of her mouth were stuck together, as if gummed up by cement. Luisa poured a glass of water from the plastic jug on the bedside cabinet and angled the straw so her mother could sip without sitting up. When she stopped, Luisa put the glass on the cabinet. She gripped the metal rail on the side of her mother’s bed and watched her, her face half broken by the sight.

  Luisa. Her lovely daughter. Elizabeta had tried to encourage play and delight and wonder in her children as a way to ward off what she feared lurked in them. What she’d seen in her own mother and what she suspected was in her heart, too. A memory of sadness and grief so strong that it washed up from its depths at times of its own choosing. Memories of trauma so fierce and overwhelming that Elizabeta thought they must be imprinted on her own DNA now, that they had set in the calcium of her bones.

  And in her daughter’s face, at that moment, she could see what she had so long feared. The ghost was there in her eyes. Elizabeta had tried so hard to kill it, to make it invisible, to fight it, but that had been to no avail. The knowledge that she had passed on her grief to her daughter hurt more than losing a breast ever would.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Luisa asked. She quickly brushed the tears from her eyes and forced a smile.

  You’re so young to see your mother in such pain, Elizabeta thought.

  Just like I was so young.

  She wished she could excise the ghost in her daughter’s eyes as easily as the doctors had predicted they would get rid of her cancerous breast.

  ‘Not so bad,’ Elizabeta croaked.

  ‘Dad has taken Johnny to the cafeteria to get something to eat. I swear that boy has hollow legs.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Nikolas was doing something good for their son, distracting him.

  ‘And, there’s a surprise for you,’ Luisa said, and there was a cry mixed with a laugh in her voice. ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Who is here?’ Elizabeta rasped, her throat sore from the ventilator tube. She sounded as if she’d smoked for the past fifty years.

  ‘The Bonegilla girls. Auntie Vicki’s come from Melbourne and she picked up Auntie Iliana and Auntie Frances at the airport. They’re waiting outside. Shall I tell them to come in?’

  It had only been three weeks since she’d seen them in Melbourne.

  She reached for her daughter’s hand, her knuckles white on the rail, and held it. ‘Tell them to come.’

  Elizabeta felt greatly comforted by the presence of her friends. The girls she had known at Bonegilla now had girls of their own but in her eyes, at that moment, they were all sixteen again. Her eyes drifted closed a
gain, and she heard the voice of the Bonegilla girls, chatting together as they roamed the vast camp, studying Frances’s atlas at the mess, playing table tennis and watching the young men playing soccer. Her mind went back to the happy times they shared, not the grief since. She had hoped that the memory of the German would vanish; that he would become invisible, erased to history, too unimportant to ever be remembered by anyone. Remembering him only dignified his life, didn’t it? When all he deserved was to be less than the dust on someone else’s shoe? But life—and memories—didn’t work that way. He was always there because he was her sister Luisa’s father. The thought of it was still too much to contemplate.

  When she’d been diagnosed Nikolas had asked her if she was scared. She had scoffed. How could she be scared of cancer? She had lived through so much worse. As soon as it could be done, she had wanted it gone, cut out of her, so she could forget it, too.

  ‘Did it all go okay? The surgery?’ Vasiliki clutched her hand. Her glossy black hair shone in the hospital lights. Tough, no-nonsense Vasiliki looked heartbroken. Her face was pale, her cheeks drawn, her bottom lip quivering.

  ‘I spoke to the doctor just before you arrived,’ Luisa chimed in. ‘He says everything went very well. Mum will have to have some radiotherapy, just to make sure all the cancer cells are gone but, at this stage, no chemo.’

  ‘That’s a relief, isn’t it?’ It was Frances, on the other side of the bed, next to Luisa.

  ‘It is, isn’t it, Mum?’

  Elizabeta felt tired. She had surrendered her body to the nurses and surgeons and anaesthetists and didn’t want it back just yet. She needed to sleep, to find some strength, to find a future in the news that she would survive.

  Iliana came forwards, leaned down, and kissed her on the cheek. She was sobbing.

  ‘C’mon, Iliana. We’ll get you a cup of coffee. Strong and black.’ Vasiliki winked at Elizabeta.

  She closed her eyes, gave in to the thick fog rolling into her head. She didn’t want to see their pain as well as Luisa’s. She’d been stoic for them all, for Luisa, for John and for Nikolas. For the Bonegilla girls.

  Now she had to turn inwards, help herself heal.

  There was so much scar tissue now.

  Ten days later, when Elizabeta arrived home, the people who loved her most in the world were waiting.

  Nikolas had picked her up from The Queen Elizabeth Hospital just before lunch, and they walked gingerly to the car, where he’d parked illegally in a disabled parking spot.

  ‘You don’t have a permit to park here,’ she’d chastised him, refusing to get in the car. He’d put her hospital bag in the boot of the car and slammed it shut.

  ‘You must be feeling better. You’re already nagging me.’ Nikolas smiled across at her and she realised then how much her illness had hurt him, too. They’d been married for twenty-five years. For half of their marriage, she had not loved him. They had drifted from each other, let each other go. But since her mother had died, they had remembered what they had loved about each other in the first place. And now, just when it seemed they might have some time for themselves, with Luisa and Johnny now twenty-four and twenty, a teacher and a carpenter, she’d been diagnosed. The trip they’d been talking about for years, a holiday back to Germany, was postponed. They’d planned to show Luisa and Johnny where Nikolas had grown up, in a town near the Bavarian Alps, and the place near Hessental where Elizabeta and her family had lived after they’d been deported from Hungary.

  They’d saved for years for the airfares, not an easy feat on a single factory wage, but it could wait.

  Elizabeta sometimes wondered, in those lonely hours in her hospital bed, in the rowdy night-time when machines beeped and there were too many nurses’ footsteps and it was too light to sleep, if she had somehow wished her cancer on herself because she didn’t want to go back to Europe. She hadn’t wanted to leave home; for, finally, Australia was home.

  There was nothing about that part of her life that she wanted to revisit but she couldn’t say that to Nikolas. He didn’t know what had happened to her mother, what she herself had seen. There were some things best left unsaid in the hope that the memories would die out when she did.

  Nikolas manoeuvred the car into the driveway and Elizabeta looked out over her front garden. The roses along the front fence were blooming in welcome and the lawn, which was John’s weekly chore, was neat and trim. The lemon tree by the side fence looked shiny bright.

  ‘Someone’s been hard at work,’ she said.

  Nikolas turned the key in the ignition. ‘Yes,’ he smiled at her, tears welling in his eyes. ‘Just you wait and see. Come on.’

  Elizabeta took her husband’s arm as she stepped up onto the front veranda and through the open front door into the house. The hallway was quiet. There was no evidence of Johnny’s football boots outside his room, a regular sight. She glanced at Nikolas, who looked so happy she thought he might burst.

  As they approached the living room, the glass sliding doors opened as if by magic and there they all were.

  Luisa, Johnny, Nikolas’s parents. And the Bonegilla girls.

  Her family.

  A cheer went up and there was clapping. Elizabeta couldn’t take it all in. Everything in the room had changed. A new plush green velour corner lounge sat elbowed around a new dark wood coffee table. In the other corner, facing the windows that looked out on to the street, a dark green leather recliner chair sat with a wide-ribboned bow around it. The walls had been painted a crisp off-white and there was a new framed photo of her family on the wall, something they’d taken for Christmas two years earlier and which had laid, unframed, in a kitchen drawer with pens and rubber bands and old bills. And on the main wall, there was a long wooden cabinet with a brand-new television set on it. It was the biggest screen Elizabeta had ever seen. It looked like something from the movies.

  ‘What’s all this?’ she gasped. Luisa and Johnny were behind her, holding on tight.

  ‘We used the holiday money,’ Nikolas announced. ‘What’s the point of it sitting in the bank when you should be comfortable while you get better, huh?’

  ‘Oh, my goodness.’

  ‘And the chair in the corner there,’ Luisa said. ‘It’s a present from the aunties.’

  Open-mouthed, she turned to the Bonegilla girls. Had they performed this miracle for her?

  They came to her with open arms.

  ‘No one else sits in that chair but you,’ Vasiliki said adamantly.

  Frances whispered in her ear. ‘We’re glad to see you looking so much better.’

  Iliana pulled away from the group embrace. ‘Come and eat. I’ve made some lunch.’

  They led Elizabeta to the dining table, which was filled with enough food for three times as many people.

  This was her new start, she decided.

  Her life was to begin again today.

  Chapter Forty-three

  1985

  ‘So, my darling wife. How does it feel to be a nonna?’

  Iliana thought over Vinnie’s whispered question as she stared into the perfect face of her first grandchild. Bianca Iliana. The tiny baby was wrapped up tight in a blanket, only her face revealed. And what a beautiful face. Were there enough words in the whole world—in either Italian or English—to describe how much she already loved this little girl?

  ‘It feels …’ and before she could finish a sentence, Iliana burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, Mum, don’t cry. You’ll make me cry.’ Iliana and Vinnie’s eldest daughter Anita lay in her hospital bed, exhausted but happy. Much like her mother.

  ‘I can’t help it. She’s so … so …’ Oh, this little girl was so everything that Iliana’s heart was about to burst.

  ‘Here’s the prosecco.’ Iliana and Vinnie’s son-in-law, Michael, walked back into the maternity room clutching a bottle and four plastic glasses.

  ‘See, Mum?’ Anita said. ‘He might not be Italian but we’re brainwashing him into all our ways.’


  So Michael wasn’t Italian. He was Irish. But at least he was Catholic. And at least they were married. Iliana knew how things were for young people these days. Everyone now seemed to be living together and, much to Iliana’s shock, having babies when they weren’t even married. That was a bridge too far for her. She was happy and relieved when Anita had announced the year before that she was getting married, even if it was to an Irishman. A family was a family and Iliana could be Italian enough for them all. She was already planning in her head what she would cook for the christening party. They could have it in their backyard. It was big enough after all, and they could push back the doors of the shed, set up trestle tables and eat out there.

  Vinnie took the bottle from Michael and poured out the prosecco. It fizzed in their glasses and Iliana carefully leaned sideways so she didn’t dribble any on her beautiful granddaughter. Bianca was only half an hour old. She and Vinnie had been waiting at home; well, Vinnie had been watching the football and she had been pacing, completely unable to concentrate on anything other than the pain her daughter was going through. While Vinnie watched, Iliana had called the maternity ward every ten minutes for updates on Anita’s labour, presuming that she and Michael would be too busy to call them when, finally, she was told the baby had just been born. She’d pushed Vinnie into the car and they’d driven right to the hospital.

  She wanted to meet her grandchild as soon as she could. If she could have flown there, she would have.

  This little one nestled in her arms was reward enough for everything she had gone through to have her own children. She wished her own mother was still alive to see this. All the sacrifices her own parents had made in their lives, to see a future for their own children, had created life for their children and their children. A bedraggled, poor Italian family on a boat all those years ago had helped create this little girl. That was indeed a miracle. If they’d stayed in Italy, she would never have married Vinnie and never had Anita who would never have met Michael at the law firm and there it was, a history of a family. A story of a little girl born in Australia in 1985.