The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

by Robert Hillman

  Trudy’s four letters were the one letter written four times. The first sentence of each letter read: ‘You will only see this letter if Pastor says it’s okay.’ Tom had postponed telling his wife of the letters (what they revealed wouldn’t be welcome news to her) but now, sitting at the kitchen table at ten in the evening, he handed each of the five letters to Hannah, beginning with Eyre Heath Moore’s communication, and proceeding to the earliest of Trudy’s four.

  Dear Tom,

  You will only get this letter if Pastor says it’s okay. Dear Tom what a bad wife I was for you! You loved me deeply and I didn’t care! But now there is something so important to tell you. It is this. I want Peter to live with you. It is not a good atmosphere for him at Jesus Camp. He wants you. He has tried two times to get back to you and now Pastor has locked him up first at night but now in the day too. Peter is so brave. I am proud of him. But Dear Tom, I am a bad mother and I don’t take proper care of him but I love him only I am not such a good mother and things get all mixed in my brain because of the bad mistake I made you remember, when I left you not one time but two times and there was that horrible time with Barrett who I’m glad to say is now dead in Brisbane. Peter loves you and I know that you truly love Peter, that’s the only thing I properly truly understand, Dear Tom. He must be with you. I know that you are married again and I hope this is a happy, happy marriage for you this time. I hope that your new wife will love Peter, that is my true hope and that Peter can live a happy happy life on the farm.

  Your wife in the past times, Trudy, dear love.

  Hannah sat hunched in her chair. All that was vivid in her had drained from her face. Knowing what she would say, Tom readied himself.

  ‘Of course, the boy must come to you,’ said Hannah.

  Tom said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I must go.’

  ‘No, Hannah. No.’

  ‘Yes, Tom. I will not live with a child. Not again.’

  Tom had hoped he could talk her round. He still hoped he could. She was too certain in things she said. Too dramatic. He would talk her round. He had talked her round a couple of times in the past. She would let him. She wouldn’t carry this thing as far as leaving him. Pray God.

  ‘Put it aside for now, darling. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

  Hannah didn’t reply. But had he ever seen her so grey, so haggard? He picked up her hand from the table and kissed it. Her fingers clenched.

  ‘Pour me a drink, Tom.’

  ‘Scotch?’

  ‘Brandy.’

  Tom poured the brandy, in pain. They had never discussed this, husband and wife: what would happen if Peter came back. Because they knew it would be the end of everything, that Hannah would retreat into a cave of wraiths.

  She drank her cognac slowly, shuffled to the bathroom, cleaned her teeth. In bed, Tom held her close. He said, ‘Darling, my beloved, blessed Hannah. Never leave me.’

  When he woke with the alarm at five—later, because Hector and Sharon handled the milking now—she was gone.

  Chapter 28

  SHE SAILED from Bremerhaven for Melbourne in a Danish liner full of optimistic Dutch families. Nine weeks after embarkation, she was teaching the children of a town in the Mallee the songs of Schubert and Cole Porter. It was April of 1966. The children were sick of Schubert as soon as they heard him but quickly became enthusiastic about ‘You’re the Top’.

  The Education Department provided a house for her on a dirt road that went out to the orchards. She was required to share the house with a highly strung redhead named Rhodie who cried in the morning before school and in the afternoon when she came home. She said that the boys in her classes were rude to her. Hannah said, ‘Slap them.’ Rhodie tried slapping, but wasn’t good at it. After a fortnight of sobbing, Hannah marched into the poor young woman’s most troublesome class with a Beretta pistol that had once belonged to her second husband. She placed it on Rhodie’s desk and said, ‘Use it if you have to.’

  =

  The house was a little starved of furniture and ornaments. Most of Hannah’s belongings were yet to arrive in Melbourne, including her piano. She tacked up three of her lovely Coptic appliqués of boys and girls with curly black locks carrying water jugs from a stone well. Thus encouraged, Rhodie drew from a huge wooden trunk a number of strange sketches of a man in a black helmet. Hannah was amazed by their originality, having expected in her snobbish way (as she conceded) sentimental renderings of young women reading love letters.

  ‘They’re by a man my mum knew before she got married,’ said Rhodie, gratified by Hannah’s enthusiasm. ‘He’s famous now.’

  Rhodie always remained at the school until five, attending meetings in her conscientious way and preparing lesson plans for the next day. Hannah came back to the empty house in the afternoons baffled by this latest landfall in her ludicrous journey through life. She sat on the back step with a gin and tonic gazing out over the unfenced backyard with its giant peppercorn in one corner, its dusty patches of lawn. The weather was scorching hot every day. She enjoyed the heat, the only feature of her new home that had made her happy. The blue of the sky was many shades deeper and more insistent than anything she recalled from Europe.

  She was used to gazing at beauty with her soul streaming towards the source, empty of every fear in her being. Here, baffled, daunted. Who owned this land? It was said that the local black people kept to a camp out of the town. She thought, Let me see them. But her colleagues at the school said no. The black people would tell her nothing.

  Nevertheless, she went. Without much experience of driving, she’d purchased an old car, an Australian car, with the steering wheel on the right, quite odd. A map had been drawn for her by Byron, a friend, less conventional than others at the school. ‘Show respect, I don’t need to tell you.’

  She crossed a big, dirty river lined with slumbering gums, the foliage a mess, like a woman who has risked the disaster of cutting her own hair. On the far side of the river, rough tracks headed off into the scrub. She took what she hoped was the marked track and became lost within minutes when it came to an end. Backing, she jammed her car between two gums with pale trunks.

  It was a simple matter to follow the track back to the road on foot but Hannah lost herself again and again. She laughed, then became afraid. This was the most implacable silence she had known in her life. Except when bird calls broke it, and crashing sounds in the scrub. Then a hostile screeching like an attack of harpies, and a great number of white birds with yellow crests passed overhead.

  In the late afternoon, the sun still hard and bright, she was found by a family of the black people she’d been seeking. They stood in her path: two women, a tall grinning man in a blue work singlet, three barefoot children. She stopped in her tracks and stared in amazement.

  ‘What’s happen, missus?’ the man said. ‘You getting lost round here, eh?’

  The children and the two women laughed; true mirth.

  Hannah gestured behind her. ‘My car…’

  They led her back to her car in ten minutes. One of the children, a boy, walked beside her chatting nonstop about the town of Mildura, the ice-creams found there, the picture place, the cars. Along the way, one of the women stopped Hannah and indicated that she should remove her high heels and walk barefoot. She did as she was told. It was apparent that the black people, the Aboriginals, considered her a complete idiot, poor thing.

  The man—the father?—freed the car from the two trees with ease. Hannah had imposed enough. She didn’t ask to be guided to the camp. Should she offer money? She had carried her bag with her on her hopeless tramp along the tracks. Would it seem rude, a ten-dollar note? She held out the note. ‘For ice-creams,’ she said. The man shrugged. The talkative boy took the money with a whoop of delight.

  Hannah was urged to drive her car slowly, while the family followed. They kept just behind her until she reached the road. She stepped out of the car and shook the man’s hand—he’d given his name as Jonathan—thanke
d him effusively, thanked all the family. Then drove home.

  Rhodie was in bed with Kurt, the German maths teacher who’d come to Australia under the same arrangement as Hannah. Rhodie was mortified; Kurt, not so much.

  On the back step, in the twilight, Hannah sipped her gin and tonic. The family had spoken their own language most of the time. The sound of it in her ears pushed into some back room her Hungarian, German, Russian, English. Byron had told her that a party of Aborigines had marched to the German consulate in Melbourne after Kristallnacht to protest the Nazi treatment of Jews.

  On the step, thinking of the black man, she said, ‘Now I see.’ She thought of the white tribes of the world stepping off their ships to subdue people who were not white, and who had only a rudimentary understanding of firearms. Or none. She sighed. What could she ever know? Inside the house, Rhodie and Kurt were having a row. She heard Rhodie crying out, ‘Yes, but when, when, when?’

  Hannah’s employers sent her to Swan Hill, further down the river, after four months at the Mallee school. She was bitterly disappointed and phoned the Education Department. She ended up in the hands of a senior official who said simply, ‘You signed the contract, love.’

  She had grown fond of Rhodie, and frankly doubted that the poor foolish girl would survive without her. And fond of Byron, who had shared her bed, respite from his four demanding children and justifiably suspicious wife.

  =

  The house she was given in Swan Hill was pretty much the Mildura house all over again. Peppercorn, parched lawn, no fence to interrupt the view from the back step of paddocks taking on a green winter tinge. She shared the house with a young woman as neurotic as Rhodie, and just as pretty. This new young woman’s name was Stephanie—Steph—and she used the same phrases in her arguments with her boyfriend that Rhodie had favoured. ‘You’re the Top’ was once again popular, Schubert once again scorned.

  A feeling of arrested motion troubled Hannah, not merely in the duplication of houses and housemates but in the unawareness of the people. She liked Australians: good-natured, but not so much change from person to person. In Budapest on any day out walking, you knew you passed scoundrels, visionaries, tyrants, angels. Here, no. People always smiling, always cheerful. Too much. Often, her expressions were misjudged. She meant something wry, satirical; the Australians thought she was being nasty. And dear God, the terylene. The women wore terylene.

  From Swan Hill to Hometown, after five months. By this time Hannah’s belongings had arrived, the piano most importantly. She was given a house a bit out of town on the road to the tip. The pretty first-year teacher with whom she was meant to share the house, Valerie, had a vexed relationship with her boyfriend and harrowing difficulties with the Form 2s. Nothing new there.

  With the best will in the world, Hannah couldn’t find the optimism to negotiate the whole absurd business a third time. A month into the new year, she found the house in Harp Road and moved out. She didn’t know if she could go on teaching. Her allotment was dominated by first-formers. The boys were older than her son had been before Auschwitz, but in one child here and another there, she noticed mannerisms that brought him back with uncanny force and detail. On those days, a bleakness like the coldest day of a cold winter marched into her heart and her blood flowed like a torpid ooze.

  She advertised for students. Piano, flute. Parents at that time had been roused by an unseen force to invest hope in their children’s talents. They were avid to hear their son or daughter picking out Beethoven on a keyboard, Mozart on a flute. Hannah had more than enough students to support herself, if she should choose to give up teaching at the end of her contract. And she did so choose.

  Chapter 29

  HE WOKE in the dark muttering to himself like a crazy person. He said again and again, ‘She’ll come back.’ Anger took hold. What was she asking? That he turn away this boy who was desperate to live with him? She couldn’t ask that.

  His progress about the house always ended in the same way. He dropped down in a chair at the kitchen table and sat shaking his head, helpless. He saw shadow shapes in the kitchen, like the ghosts his wife had gone to live with. Hannah was his blood and breath. In the crowd of the world, they were both marked with the stain of meeting. He saw her among the shadow shapes and pleaded with her to return.

  He went all over the town looking for her, then all over the shire. He carried a picture of her, head and shoulders. ‘Have you seen Hannah? Have you seen this woman? It’s my wife.’ One afternoon in a place she would never have come to, a small town on the northern reach of the river, he saw her vanishing around the corner of the post office and left his car in the road to chase her. He called her name. Each time he caught a glimpse of her it was just as she was disappearing, rounding another corner, or suddenly on the other side of the road with a log truck in between. Then no more glimpses. He was losing his mind. He was seeing things.

  He asked the postmaster if there were any strangers in town, a woman in her forties, pretty, long curly hair, a red FB panel van. The postmaster in his bifocals said, ‘Nope.’

  Tom said, ‘Can you see properly through those things?’ He didn’t mean to be rude, but it was taken that way.

  He worked until late each day to compensate for the time lost on these desperate searches. Hector pitched in. He worked on both farms. He said, ‘Mister Tom, she won’t stay with this boy, this Peter. Okay? But listen to me. My civilisation is three thousand years old. Everything has happened many, many times. So, we know. And I tell you this woman, this Hannah, she loves you. Yes, yes. I can see it. She will come back to you. Because there will be no life for her. So she will come back. The Nazis, fuck them for what they did.’

  He had to think of other things, of Peter. He drove up to Shepparton to see Dave Maine once more. Good news. Changes to the law meant Tom could legally be recognised as one of the adults in the boy’s life with a valid claim to custody.

  Dave, in the same fawn suit he’d worn two years earlier, asked Tom to confirm that he and Trudy had been married all the time the boy lived with the two of them. Yes, they’d been married. And Tom had acted in the role of father, was that right? Yes, that was right.

  ‘If the mother is judged to be mentally incompetent, strictly speaking you’re the next in line, Tom. By the new rules. You’ve acted in the role of father for five consecutive years. But your ex–old lady, Tom, it sounds as if this “mentally incompetent” thing is self-diagnosis. Is that your impression?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s been a doctor involved, no. She’s come to feel that this Pastor Bligh is a dud. She wants to get Peter out of the place.’

  Dave Maine paused to think, kneading the saggy flesh of his face with both hands. ‘You see, Tom, the law takes a dim view of self-diagnosis of this sort. Prefers a few learned letters after the name of the individual making the call. The child welfare people might attempt their own assay, or send this Gertrude, this Trudy, off to the clinic. Perhaps she’s just exhausted. Well, ninety per cent of the mothers of Australia are exhausted at any given time. Can’t have them saying, “I need a nap, take the kid.” And why doesn’t she simply walk out? She could bring this little Peter to you, hand him over, go on her way. She can’t do that if she wants the whole thing stamped and dated, of course.’

  Tom nodded. ‘Dave, I reckon she’s frightened of Bligh. But she won’t leave Peter in his care. Herself, yes. But not Peter. There’s some grit in her.’

  Dave Maine would make enquiries. And send notice to Trudy and Bligh that he had been retained by Tom Hope. But Tom, with no guarantee that any letter posted to Trudy would reach her, had Dave Maine draft the letter then and there and took a copy away with him. Three days later he left Hector and family in charge of everything and drove to Phillip Island, to Jesus Camp.

  He thought all the way not of Peter but of Hannah. ‘What if I knew I would never see her again? How could I love Peter? How would I do that?’ He had heard the story of Hannah’s boy vanishing. All around her, the hu
ts and fences of a place made for murder. That grief in her heart, she was shorn of her hair. Every glance on that day seeking the boy, and the next day, for two weeks. Until a Polish wraith, a Jew in authority, three years in Auschwitz, told Hannah Babel that the boy, this Michael, had gone up the chimney. Nothing of him remained. Not a tooth, not a toenail.

  Tom said as he drove to Jesus Camp, ‘I’m sorry for your boy. But you must come back, Hannah.’

  Jesus Camp looked deserted. Tom scanned the buildings and the grounds without seeing a soul. Then a child, a young girl in the shapeless green tunic of the place, appeared beside him from out of nowhere. She stood there, perfectly at peace, humming a tune. Tom asked her where he could find Pastor Bligh. The girl broke off her humming to say, ‘Pastor’s in church.’

  Sunday. Of course. The girl pointed towards the church building, topped by its oversized white cross.

  ‘Everyone’s not here,’ she said. ‘Everyone’s in Big Church. I don’t go.’

  ‘Don’t go to church?’ said Tom. He’d crouched down to talk to her. She would have been six? Her hair was a thriving mass of dark curls, her eyes jet black. Hannah’s hair. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘From screaming,’ said the girl.

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘Things,’ said the girl, and without warning, she let out a shriek so loud that Tom sat back on his heels in alarm.