The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Kill it, Bobby,’ said Tom.

  Bobby made a motion with his hand as if to say, Not so fast.

  ‘Bobby, kill it. It’s in agony.’

  ‘Deserves to be, well,’ said Bobby. But he plunged the bayonet through the dog’s neck.

  They threw the dogs over the top fence into the scrub. Tom would dig a ditch and bury them in the daylight. He was grieved a bit, walking back to the house with Bobby, thinking how little he resembled any decent sort of farmer. Uncle Frank had never given a second thought to putting a bullet into a dog’s brain. A dog that had gone bad had to be shot. That was all there was to it. Tom drove Bobby to his home in Ben Chifley Road then parked outside Hannah’s darkened house. Should he go in and wake her? She might say, ‘So selfish when you know I’m asleep.’ No, she wouldn’t say that. She would say, ‘Tom, I’m so glad.’ He was at that stage of loving in which insight and confidence are only there for moments at a time. He knew Hannah in the whole of her being with passionate certainty; then he doubted everything. And it was in those minutes of doubt and not in the moments of belief that he left the ute and went to her back door and knocked quietly, sure she would be too deeply asleep to answer or that she would hear the knock but decline to stir herself at such an hour.

  Hannah came to the door in the satin slip she wore at night, hair disarranged, sleepy and smiling. She kissed Tom on the lips, pardoned herself for the taste of her breath, then kissed him again with the generosity of a woman who knows her heart.

  Later, hours later, she showered with him. The shower rose protruded out over the green enamel bathtub, a plastic curtain depicting tropical fish of many colours and shapes hanging down. The novelty of being in the shower with another person, a woman, Hannah, most beloved, put a smile on Tom’s face and the smile spilled into laughter. What now? She picked up from a shelf built into the bathtub surround a clear glass bottle with a cork stopper, the bottle half-filled with an amber liquid. She had Tom lather her hair, shrieking instructions in two languages above the hiss of the water.

  Tom felt—what?—foreign, from Paris or somewhere, sharing a shower. Is that what happened in Paris? Showering together? Then she dried him so slowly and carefully that he burned with embarrassment, kneeling down to get between his toes, all of this with such close attention to detail that you would have thought him a statue of amazing value being prepared for display.

  Breakfast. Something from Hungary. ‘Not kosher but who minds?’ said Hannah, and then had to explain ‘kosher’.

  ‘Some things we can eat, some things we can’t. Jews, you understand? All the good things, we can’t eat.’ Tom watched the preparation with a fixed smile. As the ingredients multiplied, many of them in packets and jars never seen before in Hometown, Tom’s unease increased. A type of pancake it was: thick, with a filling. Tom swallowed each mouthful without chewing, but some of the flavour escaped onto his palate.

  ‘Hungarian?’ he said. Hannah, at the other side of the kitchen table sipping coffee made with a clever device, watched on with an indulgent frown and also a small, satirical smile.

  ‘Hungarian. Hortobágyi. You like it?’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Tom, meaning: inedible.

  Hannah came to her feet, crossed to Tom’s side of the table, whipped the plate away, dropped it and the large remaining portion of hortobágyi into the kitchen sink. Baffled, he blinked up at her as she stood with arms crossed. She was angry? It was possible in Hungary to get angry if someone didn’t enjoy your hortobágyi?

  ‘If you don’t like something, say, “I—don’t—like—it.” Hear me, Tom? “I—don’t—like—it.”’

  ‘It was good,’ said Tom.

  Hannah took two steps to the table and seized Tom’s chin between thumb and fingers.

  ‘No! You don’t like it. You can say if you don’t like it. Don’t try to be so nice every minute, Tom.’ She softened. ‘Stay nice. It’s okay.’

  She kissed him. ‘I’ll make you fried eggs. Aussie fried eggs. Now, what’s the recipe? Oh, yes. Melt butter in pan, throw in the eggs. Serve with tomato sauce.’

  As she fried the eggs, she asked Tom if he’d been reading Great Expectations.

  ‘I’m up to page thirty.’

  ‘You like it? Don’t be nice!’

  ‘I like it. I like Pip and Joe. Pip is like Peter.’

  ‘Peter? Peter is who?’

  ‘Trudy’s boy. Trudy I was married to. I told you about her. Some of it.’

  Hannah at the stove turned to look at him. She held a spatula in one hand. Her hair had dried and formed curls. She was wearing the yellow dress that Tom admired. She studied Tom warily.

  ‘A boy. Her boy? Not your boy? Are you not his father?’

  ‘Another fellow.’

  ‘Another fellow. Not you?’

  ‘Not me.’

  Tom looked away from Hannah’s gaze. He felt as if he’d blundered.

  Hannah served him his eggs. She put the Rosella sauce in front of him and the salt and pepper. The lip of the bottle wasn’t darkened with dried sauce in the normal way; Hannah always wiped it before she screwed the lid back on.

  ‘So, a boy,’ said Hannah. She’d seated herself opposite Tom. She hadn’t made any breakfast for herself, only coffee. ‘Where is he? With the woman?’

  ‘With Trudy,’ said Tom. And then, with an obscure sense that it would betray Peter not to say more, he told Hannah the story.

  She paid attention.

  ‘Now he’s with these Jesus people for good?’

  ‘Yep, with them.’

  ‘But you love him.’

  ‘Yep.’

  Tom risked a question. He’d been wondering about this but hadn’t seen an opening. And the possible answers worried him.

  ‘You’ve had children, Hannah?’

  She sipped her coffee.

  ‘You’ll go home before you come to the shop?’ she said.

  ‘Have to feed Beau. Do one or two things. The cows, I’m running late with them. I’ll be at the shop about ten.’

  Hannah took Tom’s plate away. As she passed behind him, she touched his neck for a second with her free hand.

  ‘Sleep for a few hours, Tom Hope,’ she said. ‘Okay?’

  The touch of her hand told him that something had gone out of her. He knew it. He wanted to ask her if she was upset, but he didn’t.

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS possible to think of nothing. For hours at a stretch, nothing. In a dormitory of a thousand women, she might lie on a wooden bunk with a stranger on each side, her mind a stone. The women beside her held her close for warmth. But not only for warmth. Each thought Hannah still in possession of her pride and her wits. They wanted to be as near to her as they could be, as if she might suddenly do something extraordinary, reach under her bunk and produce a saucepan of soup, maybe that. It would require only a few words to disabuse them, but Hannah kept quiet. The women clasped her in a way that cost her little. Best if they believed what comforted them.

  Her reputation was based on a lucky find in the feather factory where she worked each day, a huge wooden shed in the east of the camp. The task of the forty women who were assigned there was to empty quilts, cushions and pillows confiscated from Jews as they arrived at Auschwitz on the train. The feathers were gathered in big wooden tubs and would be used to fill quilts, cushions and pillows for sale in shops in Germany. Some would become padding for cold-weather military coats. The room was a blizzard of feathers from the timber rafters of the ceiling down to the floor. The Polish kapos, wraiths who had survived in the camp for years, Jews themselves, shuffled through the drifts of feathers murmuring in uninflected voices, ‘Miss nothing, miss not one feather…’

  She’d found a loaf of bread hidden in a pillow, someone who’d expected food but not pillows to be taken away, hard bread but not a spot of mould, and a prayer book, the siddur; nowhere else in Auschwitz would a siddur exist. She’d eaten a few mouthfuls of the bread, given away a portion and saved what was left for
Michael, if she should ever find him.

  But what she’d hidden had been discovered and devoured. It was an omen. She would never find Michael. She had been told by the kapos that he was dead; up the chimney. And Leon. Typhus. Then the gas chamber. He’d lasted ten days. What could you expect? A runny nose used to send him to bed for a week. Her grief for Leon came in one huge gulp. She was not ready to grieve for Michael.

  As a woman, she should not read aloud from the siddur, but everyone agreed: in Auschwitz, it’s okay. She read the Hebrew prayers to a gathering of fifty or more each night, for a week. The kapo who was in charge of the dormitory listened in silence. On the seventh night, the woman’s wits left her head and she ran into the gathering and snatched the siddur from Hannah. She stood railing against Jews as if she’d been raised in the bosom of the Third Reich. It was the only time she’d shown emotion of any sort. Her rage gave way to a storm of tears and she ran away with the siddur and did not return for three days.

  =

  If you were sick of life, sick of Auschwitz, there was an easy way out. At the selections in the mornings—a couple of thousand women in rags in groups of five, the standard cohort—you could cough, keep on coughing, and the SS soldiers would be directed by an officer to take you to the gas chamber. Thirty minutes after your coughing fit, you would be burning; an hour if there was a backlog.

  Hannah felt the urge to cough herself crazy each morning, but didn’t. It was said that Michael was dead. Well, all sorts of things were said and many of them were not true. It was said that the Americans were in Berlin, but they weren’t. That the camp commandant had ordered an end to the gassing in order to get the place in shape for liberation by the Allies. No, the gassings went on, the chimneys sent up their columns of black smoke. That Adolf Hitler had shot himself through the head. Well, so what? If every SS guard, every SS officer in the place shot himself through the head, okay. But Hitler? Fuck him.

  Do you know what would be heaven, what would be a miracle, the best thing ever in the world? A glimpse of Michael in warm clothes with rosy red cheeks and stout little shoes. Maybe in the arms of the officer who’d spoken to her that first morning, him with the white gloves. That would be okay. White Gloves takes a shine to the boy, keeps him alive as a pet. That’s fine, fine, fine. That Michael would still be alive when the Germans were defeated and that she would still be alive and that the officer would by that time have cut his own throat—fantasy. Just Michael alive. To know that, okay, gas me, go ahead.

  It was possible to think of nothing for hours at a time, but not forever. She remained furious with Leon, who was dead. She whispered to him about his foolish conviction that the Germans would never invade Hungary, never come to Budapest. ‘They’ve lost the war. They don’t care about Jews now.’

  Oh, really? He was thought to be the gentlest, the most compassionate man on earth, but he was an arrogant individual underneath. ‘Hannah, eight hundred thousand Jews in Hungary. They can’t afford to bother with the Jews now. They’ve lost the war.’

  Oh, really? All this came from his friends in Russia. But what was she talking about, his friends in Russia? All Russians were his friends. He wanted a Russia in Hungary. The workers of Russia, the workers of Hungary, their hands clasped for eternity. He who had never used a hammer in his life, who barely understood the function of a sickle. But so dear, in his way; in his stupid way.

  The Polish kapo said, ‘Up the chimney,’ and rubbed the tips of her fingers together as she raised her hand: the upward motion of smoke.

  Marta, who held Hannah so close at night, whispered to her, ‘Come and hear. Come and hear the Litho.’

  Who? A Lithuanian by the name of Elizabeth. Everybody respected the Lithuanians, who’d come to the camp in the middle of summer and now, in November, were running small classes for Hungarian women who wanted to learn Yiddish. In Auschwitz, a Yiddish school. Absurd. In the darkness, no pens or paper, to women starved and exhausted who might well be murdered in the morning. Elizabeth gave her instruction in German. Most of the women knew half the German language by now. Also classes in philosophy. The Lithuanian Jews had apparently spent their lives with their noses in books. Good for them.

  Hannah went to the corner of the dormitory where Elizabeth was talking in a strangely tranquil way about Rousseau. The Lithuanians knew nothing about their faith but everything about a thousand goyishe philosophers. Hannah was enthralled. She’d read all that Rousseau had written, and yet what Elizabeth had to say was welcome. ‘You ask me, “But what is ‘freedom’?” It is what we are born with. The baby comes, the midwife counts its toes, its fingers. She says, “All there.” She should say, “All there, everything, and a beautiful free soul.”’

  Someone called out, ‘Not here!’

  Elizabeth said, ‘Even here.’

  The SS never came to the dormitory. It stank, and God alone knew what diseases clogged the foetid air. But this morning Hannah’s dormitory was visited by an SS officer who looked a little too young for the job. A few others that you caught sight of from time to time on the way to the feather factory—too young. The war was going badly for the Germans, maybe not so many grown men left. So this boy soldier would have been thrown into the job of visiting the dormitory by his superiors. He announced shrilly that all the women in the dormitory were to ready themselves for a hike to the railhead. The officer added that ‘workers’ were permitted to take their belongings with them. A low murmur of laughter ran through the dormitory. Belongings? The officer looked about in alarm. He repeated the invitation to the workers to take their belongings. This time, no laughter; just a few snorts.

  She wouldn’t go. The prospect of even glimpsing Michael taken from her forever? At the selection she would cough. She produced a practice cough as soon as the officer departed.

  The dormitory was rowdy. Many, many rumours. The Polish kapo who had run away with the siddur was back. The women asked her, ‘Where are we going? To the gas chamber? Tell us!’

  The kapo was in an agreeable mood for some reason. She said, ‘To Stutthof, in the north. No selection. All of you go to Stutthof.’

  In the lines that formed for the exodus to the train station, to Stutthof, Hannah coughed loudly whenever an SS guard came close. She was ignored. The order was given to march. Hannah, forced along, kept her eyes on the ground. She would have wept if that were possible, but it wasn’t; nobody wept in Auschwitz after the first month. Instead she whispered to herself, ‘He is alive. No one can say that he is dead. He is alive.’

  By the time she passed out of the gates of Auschwitz, she had stopped whispering. She thought nothing. But the tears had come.

  Chapter 9

  IF NOTHING else, they had made a beautiful shop. The cedar shelves shone under three coats of varnish, and on the only vacant area of wall Hannah had hung a tapestry from her native Hungary depicting a king being entertained at court by jugglers, a magician and dancing girls. The tapestry was said to be very old. Elsewhere, Tom had left alcoves in the shelves in which Hannah displayed a series of coloured lithographs of Holy Days, Jews at table feasting and talking, Jews at prayer.

  Hannah had arranged the titles in standard categories—Fiction, Biography, Travel and so on—but she’d also included, without much prospect of reward, a hundred volumes of poetry, both anthologies and individual collections. And she’d made a feature of contemporary Australian novelists.

  The only advice she’d taken from Tom so far as the stock was concerned was to give a bit more thought to it before she went ahead and ordered various German, Russian and French classics, untranslated. He said, ‘Darling, nobody will buy them. Nobody speaks German in Hometown. Nobody speaks Russian.’

  She had a temper. ‘Why? Anyone can learn German in two weeks. Am I to run a bookshop for lazies?’ She gave an hour or more to ugly ranting, complaining that Tom himself was one of these people who would rather listen to football than study a German primer.

  Tom had indeed brought a transistor radio, a little So
ny, to the shop one Saturday afternoon to catch the footy call from the MCG, much to Hannah’s disdain. But if her sense of betrayal found irrational expression, she always recovered. She ridiculed the call of the game all through one quarter, then repented and apologised, called herself a little bourgeois snob and listened to the next quarter with Tom, holding his hand.

  ‘Which team is your special one? Blues, is it called? Blues? I want Blues to win this game, Tom. Blues will be my special ones too. Do you forgive me? Kiss me. Forgive me. Don’t be silent. I can’t bear it, Tom.’

  A few tasks remained. Tom had to put up the ladder tracks but hadn’t yet made the ladders themselves. He fetched in the timber he’d need, good aged oak from planks he’d been hoarding, cut the lengths on his bench saw at the shop and was about to head back to the farm to turn the rungs on his wood lathe when Hannah appeared. She was wearing black slacks, a big black woollen jumper with a wide neck, and what looked like the sort of boots a stylish mountaineer would choose, laced up almost to the knees.

  She said, ‘Take me with you, Tom. Show me your farm.’

  Tom had to smile. God forbid she should simply pull on a pair of jeans and a windcheater.

  He walked her down among the woollies in the big north paddock, showing her how the sheep could pick out the grasses they preferred and the way they stayed close to their leaders, lifting their heads to keep track.

  ‘In every flock,’ Tom said, ‘there’s a genius. And the sheep know who the genius is.’

  ‘Ai! Do you imagine? One is a genius!’ Hannah was thrilled. Her accent grew more pronounced when she was happy.

  She wanted to know how the sheep could tell each other apart.

  ‘They look the same to us,’ said Tom, ‘but they know who’s Sally and Sue among themselves.’

  Hannah was full of admiration for Tom’s knowledge in the same way, at the shop, she’d praised his carpentry. Tom would have been happier if Hannah’s compliments had been commensurate with achievement. It took only bare competence to fashion dovetail joints, after all. He’d come to understand, though, that it wasn’t really flattery; instead, a sort of delight that was roused in Hannah for anything she didn’t know, anything new to her. She could never come to the end of all that pleased her.