The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  She roused herself to look towards the dairy from the back verandah. The lights were on. Tom would be nearing the end of the milking. She shuffled back to the bedroom and slipped under the blankets. It wasn’t long before the screen door slammed. She heard Tom undress. How he knew what she wanted she couldn’t say, but he did. He held her from behind, embracing her shape, kissed her on the neck and trickled endearments into her ear.

  Chapter 11

  THE DATE of the wedding was agreed, September 20th or thereabouts, six weeks away after the ewes had lambed, a civil ceremony at the old red-brick mechanics’ institute. Tom said that Horry Green the bookie, also a justice of the peace, would officiate if asked. For the time being, they told no one. Oh, and before the wedding, the Grand Opening of the bookshop. The name: ‘Madame Babel’s Bookshop’. But really?

  ‘The thing is, Han, nobody in Australia is called Madam. People will think you’ve got tickets on yourself. Too posh.’

  As soon as he’d uttered the word, Tom wanted to take it back.

  They were in the shop, shelves of books competing in allure, arranged by title rather than writer—Hannah’s democratic bias. She didn’t want sections of shelves turned into colonies of titles by the same author. Writers had to muck in together. At the same time, she would ride roughshod over any rule in order to save a book from the jeopardy of an unsympathetic shelf companion. The Making of the English Working Class was not expected to sit beside The Making of Americans, a book Hannah disliked. As a buffer between the two, she had placed a skinny soft-cover booklet, Making Your Own Jam.

  ‘Posh? People will think I am giving myself airs? Posh is saying that, isn’t it? “Giving yourself airs?”’

  ‘Some people.’

  ‘Oh, just “some people”. “Madame Babel gives herself airs,” some people will say. Madame Babel who ate the corpses of rats in Poland. Madame Babel who begged at the feet of the kapos. This Madame Babel is the one who gives herself airs. I see.’

  Tom hadn’t been told of the rats, of the kapos, whoever they were. He exchanged a glance with David the canary, who had taken to Tom as a favoured habitat, sitting on his shoulder and nibbling at his earlobe.

  ‘So I can tell the signwriter when he comes, “The bookshop of the Hungarian woman who gives herself airs”? Or you have something better?’

  Tom extended a finger, took David on board and transferred him to the top of the cash register.

  ‘Hannah’s Bookshop. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Hannah’s Bookshop,’ said Hannah. ‘Nice and plain. Nothing fancy, God forbid.’ And then, without evident motive: ‘Tom, I had a son once. His name was Michael.’

  She went to the door of the shop and quietly pressed it shut.

  Tom said, ‘I’m listening, Han.’

  Hannah shrugged, looking away. ‘I wanted to tell you. When you came back to bed after milking the other day. That’s when I wanted to tell you.’

  Something was working in her. Her glance moved back to Tom, then towards the shelves, back again. The gaze of her green eyes, the light, was something she could intensify or subdue in the space of seconds. Tom waited. He knew he had to be still. Hannah was a woman whose moods required very careful judgment. If he put his arms around her now she would push him away.

  ‘But you didn’t,’ he said, since it seemed that he was being asked to fill the pause. ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘But now?’

  Hannah lifted her shoulders and let them fall. She said, ‘Now, yes.’

  Was that all she had to say? She picked up a book from the counter: a red cover with a yellow band. She studied it.

  ‘Maybe a new book, Tom? This is excellent for you. Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky. Do you think?’

  ‘You don’t want to tell me more about your boy? About Michael?’

  An expression of exasperation passed over Hannah’s face, as if Tom were trying her patience.

  ‘Tell you more what? He is dead.’

  It was risky, but now might be the right time. Tom stepped forward and put his arms around Hannah. Even if she wriggled and pushed, he intended to hold her. But she didn’t. Instead she circled him with her own arms and held him close, the book still gripped in one hand. She lifted her face so that she could see him. ‘I am too difficult, Tom. I know it. You can leave me, I promise you. No—no what-do-you-call-it? No hysterics. I promise you.’

  Then she rested her chin on his shoulder.

  ‘But Tom, please don’t. Please don’t.’

  She made tea. As they sat in the elegant upholstered chairs Hannah had bought for the shop so that customers could sit and read, she told Tom that Michael had died in Auschwitz, the same Auschwitz she had spoken of before, months back.

  ‘A concentration camp. In Poland. Near Cracow. More than one camp, three, four camps. Here they murdered us, Tom. Many, many thousands. Here they murdered Michael. Here Leon died in the gas chamber. He had typhus so they put him in the gas chamber.’

  Tom managed not to say anything trite. It was all part of knowing that the Germans, the Nazis, were pretty bloody awful. He thought he may have been told something by Uncle Frank about concentration camps. It was to do with a decision not to erect a bigger fenced-in yard for the chickens. Uncle Frank had said—did he?—that the bigger you built a yard, the more chickens you wanted, like the Germans and their camps. Maybe he was talking about POW camps.

  Hannah sat with her legs crossed, sipping her tea. Her massy hair was longer now than when Tom had first met her, with more grey. She spoke calmly but was not, as Tom could see, in the least calm. She gave him a few details of her arrival at Auschwitz. Her husband Leon had been sent in one direction, she and Michael in another. The officer in charge, the one with the white gloves, SS, had spoken to her. He had asked her—

  ‘SS?’ Tom interrupted.

  ‘An SS officer. You know the SS?’

  ‘Not much. I’m sorry, Han.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Horrible. This officer was among the worst.’

  In Auschwitz, she and Michael were set aside. She was in a daze. She lost consciousness for a minute. In that minute, Michael was gone.

  ‘To where?’ said Tom.

  ‘To where?’ Hannah bent over and put her cup and saucer on the floor beside her. ‘To be killed, Tom. To die.’

  ‘But why, in heaven’s name?’

  Hannah raised both hands and let them fall to her lap. ‘Tom, do you know nothing about the war?’

  ‘I do, Han. But up in the islands. That’s where we were, in the islands, fighting the Japs. My Uncle Les was on the Kokoda Track. Mum’s brother.’

  ‘Okay. But in Europe, Tom, the Germans put all the Jews into camps and killed us. You understand? Millions. Not only in the camps. In towns all over Europe. Millions.’

  ‘But Han, why? That’s what I don’t get.’

  Hannah nodded. She looked away. Her hand drifted up to her bare throat and softly kneaded the flesh there. When she looked back at Tom, she simply said, ‘So, he was gone.’

  She reached across and patted Tom’s knee. ‘You like the shop?’

  ‘Of course. It’s beautiful, Han.’

  ‘When I can’t be here from three to six, Maggie will look after it.’

  Tom nodded, but was aware that not enough had been said about the boy, about Michael. He said, ‘Darling, I’m sorry about your boy. I truly am.’

  ‘Yes. Well.’

  Hannah stood and let her gaze wander up and down the shelves. She thought she might say, ‘And your boy, Tom. He can’t be with you.’ But she didn’t.

  ‘Then Hannah’s Bookshop?’

  ‘That’s best,’ said Tom. ‘Hannah’s Bookshop.’

  When Teddy Croft came an hour later to pick up the signboard, that was the name Hannah provided.

  Tom gave the brass of the shelf railing a rub with a rag soaked in a light oil and showed Hannah how to slide the ladder along. Then he headed back to the farm to tend to a hundr
ed things, such as nailing down the new sheets of iron he’d left only temporarily fixed to the roof of the dairy. ‘We’re going to have some weather,’ he said. Hannah said she’d come to him after she’d seen her students.

  But she had something to tend to before she left the shop for the flute and the piano. She took an oblong of stiff paper, craft paper, the colour of parchment, sat at the counter and wrote a single line of neat Hebrew script with black ink and a steel-nibbed pen. She taped the paper to the window, close to the door and beneath the prayer she had posted months earlier.

  Horry Green didn’t speak Hebrew and couldn’t read Hebrew script. His wife was C of E and, naturally enough, didn’t speak Hebrew either. Certainly the five Green children, who were well aware of their father’s Jewish heritage but had been raised as pagans, knew not a word of Hebrew. That took care of all those in the shire who would have even recognised the language the sign was written in. And so Hannah’s first choice of a name for her business remained known only to her: Bookshop of the broken hearted.

  Chapter 12

  THE RIVER ran due north from the Alps before turning west on the inland side of the ranges, then north once again until it found the Murray. The Hometown valley, formed where the river changed direction, took most of its stormy weather from the east, the moist wind hurtling down from the mountains as clean as if it were running along a fixed channel in the sky.

  Those like Tom, obliged to form an idea of what weather was on the way, took a pale blue sky in the east as the harbinger of a storm: an odd portent, but don’t ignore it. Tom was up on the roof of the dairy with an electric drill and coach screws as soon as he got back to the farm. He paused in his work and gazed east and saw the black storm with a golden haze around it powering over the hills. Small drops rattled on the iron. Before he’d fitted two more screws the rain came down in a blinding torrent.

  He worked in the downpour at some risk—electrocution—to fasten the remaining screws, then detached the drill from the extension flex and hurried down the ladder. Beau, drenched, was fretting below. He whistled the dog along as he ran to check on Jo and Stubby. Rain shouldn’t spook horses with any character at all but Tom had spoiled the creatures by stabling them in every storm. Now, they were galloping up and down their paddock in hysterics, blind Stubby with the fit upon him cannoning into Jo and squealing. Tom shrieked above the roar of the rain until Jo came at him full tilt, pulling up just short of a collision. Tom hurried both horses into the shelter of the stable, Stubby letting go with a high-pitched keening like a bird.

  ‘Shut up! You’re inside, you moron!’

  Beau, thinking it was required of him, nipped Stubby on the fetlock and had to endure the bafflement and ignominy of Tom’s boot.

  The cows: Tom herded them into the dairy. The reek of wet beast was rich. The rain on the iron roof a crescendo heralding an implacable god who was ready to announce the end of everything. The water ran across the dairy floor up to the height of Tom’s ankles. Beau barked at the flood, bit it, quickly looked to Tom in case this also was something punishable.

  A cow is a tyrant of a certain sort, and all dairy farmers entertain fantasies of murder. The sheer unendingness of the milking routine. Even Tom, who loved the beasts, sometimes imagined shooting the lot of them. Water lapping his shins, he battled to keep the stainless steel milking pails from floating away even as he worked the teats.

  He stopped to listen. The racket of the rain had increased, impossibly. As he waited with his head raised, the noise took a new leap. Tom thought, Nothing can survive this. The flow on the concrete floor had almost reached his knees. At that moment the old demented ram burst into the dairy and charged Tom. It was not malice, just panic. Tom managed to get in a punch forceful enough to subdue the ram.

  ‘Get into the workshop!’ he shouted. ‘Jesus! What’s wrong with you?’ He grabbed a handful of fleece and urged the ram to the workshop, and inside. The floor at the back of the building was raised high above the ground. Tom pushed and prodded, installed the fool of a beast out of the flow of the water, returned, exasperated, to the milking. He had to get the woollies in the slough paddock to higher ground. The slough would fill with water and become a lake up to the fences and beyond.

  He heard his name called, or probably didn’t, a trick of the drumming rain…but no, there was Hannah beside him, shouting into his ear.

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘I’m here!’

  Her lovely green dress was plastered to her body. Her hair looked like sea wrack. Her shoes of stiffened green felt were sodden and muddied.

  ‘I can milk!’ she shrieked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes! I can milk!’

  ‘Get inside!’

  ‘No! I can milk!’

  ‘You can’t! Go inside. Get dry.’

  ‘Yes! I can milk!’

  He knew enough of her obstinacy to accept that she would do exactly what she intended at any given time. Her idea that she could milk was insane. But he had to get to the drowning woollies, and gave way.

  The density of the downpour was absurd: not rain but a waterfall. Tom called Beau to him, told him in a shout that they wanted the woollies.

  ‘Get ’em up, Beau!’ Overjoyed at the opportunity to exercise competence, Beau ran and baulked and turned and leapt and drove the woollies to one gate and through it and to another and through it until four hundred sheep had been forced onto the higher ground of the hill paddock with the other two-thirds of the flock. They formed a thick collar around the base of the bushy gums, except for the ning-nongs, the dumbest of the flock, left out in the flood from the sky.

  The water flowed unimpeded through the grass. The entire farm was a river. The house was raised two feet above the ground but Tom worried that two feet might not be enough. And God, the chooks. They’d have enough sense to roost high, wouldn’t they? Tom hurried with Beau to the hen shed, where the chooks, under the generalship of the roosters, had found the topmost shelves of the coop. They would be saved from drenching by the projecting roof Tom had built a month earlier. They looked tranquil.

  The orchard would be okay. The trees were past blossom and wouldn’t suffer any harm once the water ran off.

  In the dairy, Hannah on the milking stool battled to hold a ten-pint pail steady with her feet while she worked unavailingly on the teats. She had filled half of one pail in thirty minutes. The cows looked at her askance. At the first sight of Tom, they raised their wet noses to the scent of the trusted and familiar.

  Hannah made some sort of complaint.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Cooperate! They won’t cooperate.’

  Tom took her place on the stool and demonstrated, Hannah’s face beside his so that she could hear. ‘A tiny bit too firm, they don’t like it. Don’t twist your hands at all. You get the feel after a while. Just for the moment, they don’t care for you. But they know when you’re trying your best. They do.’

  Hannah eventually finished her pail while Tom filled the remaining eight. Wrecked and sodden though she was, Hannah’s eyes still glittered with the joy of instruction. She kept calling comments back to Tom as she went about her botched milking. Nothing carried; the crash of the rain was deafening. But he smiled. He couldn’t think of a time when he’d loved her more.

  Tom stored the pails in the refrigerated chest. Indoors again, they showered and dressed, Hannah in Tom’s trousers and jumper with a raincoat and sou’wester and rubber boots a few sizes too big for her. Tom would have preferred her to stay indoors, but she imagined herself a big help and must be allowed to go with him when he dug a channel at the back of the house for the water to drain away. And as a matter of fact, she was a help. She took the spade and cleared the channel of soil as Tom swung the mattock. Using a spade with a steady swinging action, taking a full load of soil with each motion—that took practice. So where, when? In what-do-you-call-it? Auschwitz?

  The rain had abated, but not much. Looking up to the hill paddocks, he could see the f
low running through the barley grass and phalaris with a freight of twigs and leaves, small branches, also a sheet of corrugated iron from the old derelict bird blind Uncle Frank had built up above the hill paddock fence. Frank had given birdwatching a shot for a year or two when Tom was a kid.

  When Tom had dug the channel to the side of the house and was ready to turn the corner, he glanced down towards the flood plain and saw the astonishing sight of two complete houses bobbing distantly in the river. He called Hannah.

  ‘Look at that!’

  ‘Aiee! Tom!’

  ‘They must’ve come loose at Sawyer’s Flats. That’ll be Nev and Poppy’s place, and Scotty Campbell’s. God almighty!’

  ‘Aiee! My house, Tom. Will it go into the river?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing from Harp Road. You’re a mile from the river.’

  ‘The shop, Tom. The water will go into the shop!’

  ‘Maybe. Yeah. Can’t do anything just now.’

  =

  The rain stopped at dusk. Hannah and Tom fed themselves on leftovers and went to bed at eight. The storm had drawn all the strength from Tom’s body and he was desperate for sleep, but Hannah chattered without pause. The experience of the storm had left her as high as a kite. She lifted Tom’s eyelids with her fingers whenever he gave way to the longing for unconsciousness, squeezed his cheeks, slapped him lightly. She wanted to talk about Dostoyevsky, about Crime and Punishment; also Turgenev, the favourite of Russian readers among all the towering geniuses of the nineteenth century, more than even Tolstoy, Tom, more than even Chekhov.

  He was aware that Hannah was making free with him as she babbled. Fine by him, but it had to unfold while he slipped into a potent sleep of rising water and flotsam, and of his wife-to-be swimming, swimming with an elegant overarm stroke.