The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  In the morning after the milking, a tour of the farm, and the damage was not so bad. The rain had fallen like something biblical, but with only moderate winds. The workshop, with the old ram roaring on the platform at the back, had come through well; so had the garage that housed the two tractors and the forklift. The drainage channel had done its job. The woollies needed a good breeze to dry them out, but no harm done. The horses Tom kept stabled to save their hooves from the water and muck in the highway paddock.

  They drove to Hannah’s house in Harp Road for some dry clothing and then to town. People from all over Hometown had been drawn to the shopping strip as the place where stories of the storm could be traded, complaints broadcast (the weather bureau), expressions of amazement voiced. People said: ‘What the hell?’ and ‘Never in my life’ and ‘We were due’.

  Connie Cash held forth on the savagery of nature. ‘I looked at that cloud coming down the valley and I said, “You wicked bastard.” You were standing beside me, hon. You heard me.’

  Connie’s husband, Duke, endorsed what his wife had said.

  ‘“You wicked bastard,”’ Connie repeated. And: ‘Nev and Poppy. Where’s their place? Halfway to the Murray!’

  ‘Nev and Poppy,’ said Duke. ‘Scotty Campbell. Halfway to the Murray. Nev and Poppy are with Poppy’s aunty on Hell’s Ridge, Scotty and Di are with the Pastors. They’ll be wanting that insurance to come through. Didn’t touch us, but. The water parted up the hill and went both sides. Couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘On both sides,’ said Connie. ‘Little bit got under the lino, not much. And what about your shop, Hannah? Have you had a look? All the shops, Dennison’s, Russ Burnett’s, Jenny’s, the Lawsons’—bad, bad damage. Bad. Your beautiful books!’

  Hannah said, ‘I haven’t seen.’

  She and Tom made their way to the bookshop of the broken hearted, followed by Connie and Duke, prepared to stand as witnesses to the devastation. Hannah unlocked the front door. The shelves gleamed. Hannah stepped inside. She clapped her hands.

  ‘Tom, can you see?’

  ‘Looks okay,’ said Tom.

  ‘Can you see?’

  ‘I’ll have a squizz out the back.’

  The shire land behind the dozen shops sloped down, and the flood had surged under rear doors. But Tom had erected a fence at the back of Hannah’s shop, sinking the hardwood palings a foot into the clay according to Uncle Frank’s painstaking method, and so the flow had been forced away.

  ‘Bit of good luck,’ said Tom.

  And Connie: ‘Will you look at that?’

  Duke: ‘I’ll be buggered.’

  Juicy, who’d come along to help Hannah lament, said, ‘Tommy, if you didn’t bury those planks, fuck me. Sorry, Hannah. But you see what Tommy’s done? Water couldn’t get under. That’s engineering, my friend.’

  Hannah grabbed Tom and squeezed. Embarrassing for some watching on; not for Tom.

  Others heard of Tom’s fabulous foresight and came to gaze in admiration. Tom explained that he’d put up the fence to make the back look good; he hadn’t been thinking of a flood.

  ‘But you sunk the palings,’ said Juicy. ‘How many blokes would think of that? Eh?’

  It was while these people were gathered around the engineering marvel that was Tom Hope’s fence that Hannah made her announcement.

  ‘Okay, so this man I will marry. Everyone comes to the wedding—everyone.’

  The wedding had not been made public yet. Those in the gathering held on to their good wishes until they were able to feel confident in Tom’s reaction. It was widely accepted that Hannah was at least a bit mad, and no wonder with Hitler and all that, so anything she said about marrying Tommy was maybe nuts. Best wait for verification.

  But Tom smiled and nodded. ‘Yep,’ he said.

  Slaps on the back. A hearty shaking of Tom’s hand by Juicy Collins, Duke Cash, Arnie Priest from State Rivers. Connie kissed Hannah.

  ‘When?’ asked Juicy.

  Tom was vague. Then could Hannah answer the question?

  ‘Soon,’ she said. ‘Open the shop. After that, soon. September.’

  Chapter 13

  IN NORTHERN Poland in the valley of the Vistula the earth begins to harden in late November. By mid-December the snow stays where it falls without melting. Within a further month, the rivers ice over up to Danzig on the Baltic Sea. Late in 1944, Hannah and the women of the slave army were sent to the eastern flood plain of the Vistula to labour with picks and shovels in the frozen earth. Their task was to excavate trenches deep enough to baulk Soviet tanks. The shoes they were given were made of coarse wood and the feet of all the women bled each day. If Hannah permitted herself to wish for anything, she thought of soft leather and woollen socks.

  One team started to the left, one to the right. The trenches were to be three metres broad, fifteen metres long, two metres deep. If one team reached halfway before the other, the four women of that team were permitted to wait. But they were not to sit. They rested on their picks and shovels, huddled close for the sake of warmth.

  The team of a Lithuanian woman by the name of Judith, built like a circus strong man, always finished first. Her face was bright red in all weathers, even brighter in this time of ice and snow. She showed off her muscles to the SS guards when they asked her, baring her arm and flexing it. Indomitable at the digging site, at night she wept bitter tears for her father and mother and little sisters. None of the other women wept. Most had lost parents, sisters, brothers, but it was only Judith who remembered as if it had happened a few hours ago. Even Hannah had ceased to shed tears.

  One day Judith failed to wake at dawn and was pronounced dead where she lay by the doctor of the slave army, a Polish medical student of limited competence. The SS officer commanding the wandering slave army of twelve hundred, Oberführer Schubert, came to the tent out of curiosity. He wanted to see Judith’s corpse stripped so that he might satisfy himself that she was female. She was.

  He allowed Hannah and two helpers to bury the body, at Hannah’s request. It was a big concession. The many women of the slave army who faltered along the way and were shot dead were carried a short distance from the roadside and left in the snow.

  Hannah had developed a skill of her own with her tools. She had studied Judith. But she knew the pick and shovel and the miserly rations would kill her soon—kill all of them.

  From the Polish doctor who was not really a doctor and from one of the kapos she learned that the Germans were close to defeat. The Russians were advancing from the east with tanks and big guns and a million soldiers in uniform.

  She was quite sure that Oberführer Schubert would shoot all of the women of the slave army when the Russians drew closer. Maybe he would shoot himself, too. Every so often he would stand at the lip of the trenches watching the women while a junior officer held a huge black umbrella over his head. He never said a word.

  But what would he say? ‘What’s the point?’ Or ‘Go home, for God’s sake, it’s all over.’ Or ‘Today I’m having you shot, don’t ask why.’ His face was gaunt and grey. It was too much to believe that he was wrestling with his conscience. He had served at Auschwitz. What would be left of his conscience?

  Hannah sometimes looked up at his face. He allowed her to meet his gaze. If he’d asked her to speak, she would have said: ‘You killed my son. I hope there’s a hell and you go there.’

  The worst days were the days of blizzard. The wind and snow came down on the slave army from the Arctic. The canvas of the tents was stiff with ice. The horses were draped in blankets, but not the women. They died each day by the score. Some froze upright, still holding their tools. Those living wrapped themselves in the rags of the dead. They bound their clogs, bound their hands. Looking up from the bottom of the trench pit, the world was white. Digging was impossible. Hannah and the three women of her team hugged each other and turned in a circle, stamping their feet.

  Then, one morning, the women of the slave army decided to die. Two days
had passed without any food from the kitchen wagon. All over the camp, without any previous discussion, the women stayed in their tents wrapped in their bedding. A collective decision in the corporate mind of the oppressed: time to die. The soldiers would come and fling them all from their tents into the snow. Then they would be compelled to shoot each woman, because not one would find her feet and pick up a shovel.

  Waiting for the end, Hannah imagined heaven for the first time since childhood. Bright stars in a blue sky and her celestial body free of pain. The air of eternity had a vanilla taste.

  It was not the soldiers who came, but Marika from the kitchen wagon, a fair-haired girl of eighteen from Budapest who had been sleeping with the cook. She stood in the midst of the women and told them that the Germans had gone. They had taken the three wagons and the six horses and gone. The soldiers had assumed that they would shoot the women before departure, but Oberführer Schubert said no. They were gone, all of them. Marika added: ‘There is no food.’

  The Lithuanians had been the most competent women of the slave army, and all were dead. Leadership fell to Hannah. She said that they should walk east and hope to meet the Russians. The objection was raised that the Russians would rape them. The Germans were monsters, sure, but the Russians had uncontrollable appetites; not quite monsters but bad enough.

  Hannah dismissed the complaint. ‘They’ll rape the German Poles.’ She was talking about the ethnic Germans of Northern Poland. ‘Plenty of them to go around.’

  With the complicity of the heaven Hannah had pictured, the blizzard abated, then ceased. She doubted there were any Germans left on this side of the Vistula and felt safe enough shuffling east on the open road with the eighty remaining women of the slave army. It was her hope that they could raid the farmhouses abandoned by those fleeing the Russians. She’d seen plenty of these deserted farms as they marched westward.

  They met ethnic Germans and Poles heading the other way in horse-drawn carriages. No fuel for motor vehicles. The Poles and Germans passed silently, but with faces in which disdain could not be completely concealed. A few of the smaller children held their noses and made waving gestures as if to fan away the stink. Abandoned cars and trucks littered the road. The women searched each vehicle for food. A bag of ten hard sweets was divided up, two minutes per sweet by strict count in the mouth of each woman.

  They found the first farmhouse at the limit of Hannah’s strength. Hewn timber, two storeys, a steeply pitched shingle roof. It seemed to be empty, but wasn’t: a bedridden old man inside began screaming abuse. Hannah ignored him to concentrate on the larder. And dear God—a full ham, potatoes, carrots, green apples, salted beef, hazelnuts. It was agreed that dietary rules applied at other times in other places and the entire ham was carved, the potatoes and carrots eaten raw, the beef shared out, the hazelnuts demolished, the apples—eight of them—divided up among eighty. They fed the old man, even as he hissed at them. The rest of the family had apparently abandoned him. It was suggested by some that the old man might be better off dead, but Hannah said no.

  And in the farmhouse they remained.

  There was wood for the stove and three fireplaces and materials for makeshift bedding—curtains, tarpaulins from the farm’s workshop, horse rugs. As if overwhelmed by this sudden comfort and warmth, five of the women died within two days. Hannah found herself digging once more.

  Two cows were tethered in the milking shed, Holsteins, lowing with hunger and the discomfort of full udders. They were milked by Frieda, the oldest of the surviving women, who’d grown up on a farm in Hungary. She showed Hannah how to go about it, but her instruction was curtailed by her death after a brief coughing fit. Hannah did her best with the beasts, but struggled.

  The food quickly dwindled. In one of the fields a solitary goat was left running about, a big billy. A team of women chased him with carving knives and an axe. It took, finally, ten would-be butchers to corral the beast. He was held down while a woman with a carving knife straddled him and stabbed him wherever she could, again and again. The billy struggled free and for days evaded capture, watching the women in his dire exhaustion through his slots of eyes. When he collapsed, he was beheaded with multiple blows of the axe, inexpertly chopped up and served stewed for days on end.

  After the debacle of the goat, any further killing of animals—the cows—was never a realistic solution. It was suggested that half of the women should take to the road again to search out other deserted farms. By the middle of January, after three weeks on the farm, Hannah and twelve of the original eighty were all that remained. They lived on milk and turnips, a small mountain of them in the cellar.

  The snow had stopped falling but the fields were white, other than the vivid patch at the site of the billy goat massacre and the red dotted lines that mapped the progress of the unfortunate beast after his initial stabbing. Hannah, bundled up against the cold, developed a habit of sitting in the seat of the tractor in one of the sheds for an hour each day. It was a period she employed for thinking of nothing: for blankness. If she were to live and if the war truly came to an end, this is what she would do. Sit and think of nothing. She would read no more books. She would avoid art of any sort. She would not cultivate her mind. Nothing in books was true. Art was not true. The truth was Michael burned up at Auschwitz. There would be no more children.

  On the first day of February, the Russians came.

  Chapter 14

  TOM’S VERDICT on Crime and Punishment was that nothing could redeem a man who’d murdered two women with a hatchet. ‘It’s a good story,’ he said to Hannah, ‘but if you knew this Raskolnikov, there’s no hope for him. There’s no use Sonya coming to see him in jail. He’s a basket case.’

  Hannah gave him Down and Out in Paris and London and 1984 and he finished both books in ten days. The pace of his reading had picked up. He thought Down and Out was terrific, but 1984 far-fetched.

  Hannah enjoyed watching as he read; she barely cared what it was she’d given him. Or maybe that wasn’t true. She did care. But the way he held a book in his hands, and the frown of concentration on his brow kindled love in her heart like that of a mother for a son. She wanted to stroke him as he read. The altering expressions on his face were like cloud shadows passing over a landscape.

  How careful she was, though, to avoid saying, ‘Good boy!’ when he finished a book. Her maternal feelings for Tom didn’t embarrass her in the least. But she would keep them to herself.

  The bookshop opened without any great fanfare, just a full page advertisement in the River Tribune.

  Hannah Babel and Tom Hope announce the opening of

  HANNAH’S BOOKSHOP

  Ben Chifley Square, Hometown.

  Our Shire’s only bookshop.

  Open 9 – 5 weekdays. 9 – 12 Saturday.

  Fully stocked with Classics and the

  Best New Books of every variety.

  7500 Titles!

  Come and browse, enjoy a cup of tea or coffee—free!

  Opening day coincided with the annual Hometown Hospital Stall, sixty card tables and trestles piled with articles that the people of the shire had been prepared to donate over the year. The hospital stall attracted a big crowd to the King George VI Lawn and the Coronation Memorial Rose Garden opposite Ben Chifley Square. Never any concern about weather; it had not rained on Hospital Stall Day in the thirty-two years of the event.

  Also celebrated on this day: the Shire Ferret Show, important in this ferret-loving region where the quicksilver blonde was first bred. The results of the rabbit hunt were announced at the ferret show, a year-long contest between Queenie, the blonde ferret, and Bobby Hearst with his Mauser. This year’s tally: Queenie, 211, not counting kittens; Bobby, 247, only counting confirmeds. Bobby was every year’s winner. The River Times regularly sent a photographer: Bobby and Queenie cheek to cheek, Bobby looking smug, Queenie bitter.

  The Hospital Stall gave Eber Stanley, the local federal member, a big opportunity to put himself about dressed in a
way that promoted him as the best friend the farmers of this partly rural shire had ever known: fawn slacks, Blundstones, checked shirt, Akubra hat. Another year, Eber might have ducked away to float a fly in the pools below the granite bridges. This year he sensed he’d have to fight to hold his seat.

  After Harold Holt’s disappearance in the roiling surf of Cheviot Beach, the problematical John Gorton had become PM. Gough Whitlam was opposition leader, a fair bit more electable than old Artie Calwell. Eber, with a wetted finger held aloft, detected the winds of change blowing over the shire. The number of women wearing blue jeans—a worry. Eber thought a frock did more for the female figure. He saw a link between women wearing jeans and women acting bolshie. But it wouldn’t hurt to loosen up, hence the button offered by Moira the pothead displayed on his shirt pocket, A Woman’s Place is Everywhere! Also, in Juicy Collins’ butcher shop, kebabs on wooden skewers flavoured with a preparation of spices barely contemplated in the Australia Eber knew and loved. What the hell?

  Still, change—what could you say? Eber boldly parted with a dollar and ten cents at the grill Juicy had set up on a corner of Commonwealth of Australia Street opposite the Rose Garden. He forced down a skewer of the dire product, with an extravagant smile for the River Times photographer.

  Fair-goers wandered across to Hannah’s Bookshop in a mood to spend something on literature, perhaps. And a few of the ferret people from Fisher Reserve, when they could tear themselves away. Books were sold: Enid Blyton more than most; a number of Noddys, Famous Fives, Secret Sevens.

  Most of the customers were women. Some would take a book from the shelves and turn it about with a savouring expression. Others held the books a little anxiously, as if picking up a volume might count as a commitment to purchase.

  Bunty George who, like Tom, managed her farm single-handedly on what the early settlers from Yorkshire called ‘the big moors’ west of the town, had no such scruples; she went through the Agatha Christie titles like a chaff-cutter and brought a bale of books to the counter.