The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  And so it began, against all odds.

  For his part Pierre tried hard to persuade her to end it.

  ‘His father is a wabid anti-communist,’ he said reasonably. ‘He’s a sworn enemy of Tito. And his son’s no better,’ he went on, less reasonably. ‘Your own father’s their pwoberbial wed under the bed. What could possibly go wong?”

  As a rational thinker and a dialectical materialist, Pierre, Anna knew, had a tin ear for the poetry of romantic love. But he was proven right about one thing. It did all go terribly wrong.

  Anna was not much prone to superstition, but had she been so she would have marked 18 September 1970 as her own Black Friday. That was the day of the second Vietnam Moratorium march in Sydney, a far more violent event than its predecessor, and by the end of it Anna lay in a coma, wired up to a life-support system in St Vincent’s Hospital.

  On the other side of the world on that fateful day, her idol, the psychedelic rocker Jimi Hendrix, died in London of a drug overdose. And on that very same day her lover Marin Katich had vanished, without a word and without a trace, into thin air.

  It was the strangest day in her brief life. All her subsequent efforts at detective work would prove fruitless, not least because Marin’s father refused all communications—refused, even, to acknowledge her existence. All she had been able to piece together from that day was that she had been found unconscious in a lane in the city centre in the aftermath of the march. It was believed that she had been beaten over the head with a police billy club. Some tried to tell her, Pierre among them, that it was surely Marin who had attacked her and then run away in shame. Anna knew that this was not true, but Marin’s disappearance left her bewildered, confused and angry. The sense of loss and the ongoing mystery might have overwhelmed a less resilient person, but Anna forced herself to finish her thesis and won first-class honours.

  She then faced the inevitable question of what to do with the rest of her life.

  The New Year came around and Anna responded, without much optimism, to a newspaper ad for trainee radio journalists at the Australian Broadcasting Commission. She assumed that her record of political activism, not to mention the publicity around the Moratorium incident, would rule her out. However, after a series of interviews, voice testing and a general knowledge exam, she found out that she was on the shortlist of candidates. The final hurdle was a cross-examination by the notoriously conservative News chief of staff, Charlie O’Brien, known in the division simply as ‘The COS’.

  When the day of the interview arrived, Anna was shown into a conference room where two men—one of them older, O’Brien obviously, and a bearded younger man—sat behind a table cluttered with manila folders and notepads, an overflowing ashtray, some empty teacups and a jug of water.

  O’Brien drew deeply on a cigarette, a habit clearly against his better interests—his brick-red face was a topographical map of burst blood vessels and veins that writhed across his temples like swollen creeks. His pulsating head rested on dodgy foundations: a thickened neck and a bloated torso that strained at his shirt buttons. By contrast, the younger man was lean and roguish-looking, and were it not for his old Harris Tweed jacket and badly knotted woollen tie, he might have just come from pirating on the Spanish Main.

  O’Brien ground his cigarette into the ashtray and slowly raised himself to shake Anna’s hand. The younger man followed, introducing himself as David Ireland.

  From the outset O’Brien ran the interview courteously. Anna had been ready to fend off accusations of leftist affiliations and for scrutiny of her many campaigning editions of The Tribe. Instead O’Brien confined himself to straightforward questions on the technical side of her work putting a weekly paper together, about which he, as an old newspaperman, seemed genuinely interested. The bearded pirate, somewhat lasciviously, probed her on the paper’s explicit content—about how she chose it, where she had sourced it and if she thought pornography was the real secret of The Tribe’s notoriety.

  ‘You won’t have that kind of freedom if you end up working here, you know,’ Ireland remarked with a wink.

  ‘Well, I never thought …’

  ‘It’s all left to the imagination in radio,’ he said.

  ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ O’Brien interrupted. ‘We don’t rely on imagination in radio news, just facts.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Anna. ‘I just want the chance to learn how to be a proper journalist.’

  The interview proceeded in this manner. The flirtatious younger man and the gruff older one sparred from time to time, and Anna became cautious, wondering if this was a good cop, bad cop routine designed to get her to reveal some tragic flaw. She appeared to have reached the end of the interview unscathed and was beginning to relax when things took an unexpected turn.

  ‘Will you stand up, please?’ said O’Brien, making the request sound like an order.

  Anna sat there, puzzled. Did he want to check out her figure? She glanced over at Ireland, hoping he might reveal the intention, but the pirate seemed amused and raised an eyebrow as if to say, He’s the boss, what can I do about it? So Anna stood up.

  ‘Now,’ said O’Brien, ‘please pick up the chair you’ve been sitting on and hold it at arm’s length out in front of you.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ She stared at him, astonished.

  ‘Just do it, Miss Rosen,’ O’Brien barked.

  Ireland was smirking now and gave her a small nod. You better do as he says.

  Anna picked up the chair and held it in front of her, glaring at O’Brien. Unperturbed, he peeled back his shirtsleeve and stared at his watch, timing out a full minute before he spoke.

  ‘You can put it down now,’ he said. ‘Please sit.’

  Anna sat. But she was so humiliated and angry she couldn’t hold her tongue. ‘I’m not a performing dog, Mr O’Brien.’

  ‘Did I ask you to roll over, Miss Rosen?’ he retorted. ‘Did I ask you to jump through a hoop?’

  When Anna didn’t reply O’Brien ploughed on relentlessly: ‘I simply asked you to hold up that chair. Do you want to know why? No? Well, I’ll tell you. A Nagra 4.2 tape recorder is standard equipment for our radio reporters. With batteries and tape, it weighs fifteen pounds. When you add the microphone, spare tapes and other items, you’ll be expected to carry around more than twenty pounds of equipment for hours on end. That’s more than the weight of that chair. I need to know you’re capable of doing that. Any questions?’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Do you make the men do that?’

  Ireland guffawed. But O’Brien leaned towards her menacingly, his belly pushing at the edge of the table.

  ‘Has it occurred to you, Miss Rosen, that the very reason you’re here now is precisely because you are a woman? There’s a push on to hire more of you, and it just so happens that you’re the most qualified of the female applicants, no matter what inflammatory and pornographic trash you filled your little paper with … You’ll soon learn that leftist rhetoric won’t wash here, or you’ll get your marching orders. To be honest, I’ve got my doubts about you. But others tell me that the sins of the father should not be visited on the daughter. We’ll soon see who’s right.’

  Anna stared at O’Brien for a moment, trying to comprehend what he had just said.

  ‘Does that mean I’ve got the job?’ she asked at last.

  ‘We could say you’ll be on probation,’ said O’Brien, before showing her the door.

  Anna had gone away pondering that phrase, ‘the sins of the father’. Her upbringing had imbued in her what might best be described as a siege mentality.

  Her earliest memories were of existential threats to her father and, by extension, to her family. Frank had tutored all of them never to say anything about him or his movements, certainly not on the telephone, or to strangers, or even friends for that matter. He was ostentatiously cautious on the phone. He had the habit of putting on loud music when meeting Party officials in the house. He would p
oint out to his children the men in suits who sat for hours in their sedans just over the road from the house, and Anna became used to the ones who came knocking at the door, dressed like Mormons, to inquire after Frank during his many absences.

  All of this was a constant reminder to Anna that her family inhabited a treacherous world, a world of conflict, and that this made them fundamentally different to others. Frank’s revolutionary principles, and her mother’s unwavering support for them, bound them into a conspiracy of belief. Anna learned from childhood that the state was their enemy and that its agents regarded them, in turn, as enemies of the state.

  All this made it hard for Anna to make friends at school. She was jeered at and taunted by some children who seemed to have learned red-baiting from their parents by osmosis. From a young age she became used to being denounced in the playground as a commo, which incidentally taught her empathy for the other abused minorities—the wogs, wops, dagos, reffos and abos—who were still outnumbered in those days by the offspring of white Christians. The Christians, especially Archbishop Mannix’s lot, really had it in for them. But her father dismissed them as bigots.

  ‘Some of them are dangerous bigots, mind you,’ he once told her. ‘It’s one thing to be a communist. To be a communist and a Jew—that’s double jeopardy.’

  Frank himself had abandoned any religious belief when he was a boy. That was only logical because, as Trotsky put it: ‘He who believes in another world is not capable of concentrating all his passion on the transformation of this one.’

  But as Anna grew older she came to understand that her father’s commitment to the revolutionary transformation of the world was not so far from the religious belief that he shunned in others. That he clung for so long to the corrupted citadels of communist power would be the cause of the deepest rift between father and daughter; but she had always, even when she doubted him most, admired his stubborn bravery.

  When Anna was a small child, a bushfire had rushed up to their back fence like a raging beast. She saw its power for herself when a stand of eucalypts exploded into fireballs ahead of its onslaught. Sinister formations of white-grey smoke glowered over the land. The sun was a red ball behind it.

  When burning ash dropped on to their roof from the swirling oven in the sky, Eva Rosen sprayed it with a garden hose while her daughter clung to her dress, two puny humans in the face of an apocalyptic force. Anna wished her brothers had been there, but they were away at a Eureka League summer camp. Frank was in the scrubland beyond the fence line with other men from the street. Among them was Laurie McManus, the father of her friend Katie, who had forbidden his daughter to set foot in the house of the ‘Godless communists’.

  Frank was stripped down to his old army boots, khaki shorts, a singlet and a broad-brimmed hat. His mouth and nose were masked like those of a bandit, with a bright red scarf soaked in water. The men fought the fire together with gunny sacks and rakes, desperate to protect their homes and families.

  Finally the wind changed direction and the fire turned its fury away from them. The exhausted, smudge-faced veterans passed around cold beers, joking together with relief after the shared danger. Then they went back to their houses and closed the doors, and resumed their ostracism of the Rosen family.

  That night Eva cooked a baked dinner. Frank chose a Mozart symphony and put the record on the radiogram before falling into a deep slumber in his armchair, a bottle of dinner ale at his feet. Anna helped her mother by peeling the potatoes.

  ‘Wash them first, darling.’

  ‘Dad’s fast asleep—will he be having dinner?’

  ‘He’ll be hungry when he wakes up.’

  Anna got on with her chore, looking out the window at the blackened skeletons of the trees that once whispered and rattled in the breeze. The birds were gone. The smoke stench was still in the air. The horizon glowed with distant fires.

  ‘Are we safe now?’ she asked.

  Her mother looked up from dressing a leg of lamb. ‘The wind turned the fire around, but it’s always there for us, Anna, smouldering away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that, for your father, the danger never goes away. It’s no wonder he’s exhausted.’

  Anna always remembered these words from her mother, who retained a faint German accent. Eva understood the encroaching danger better than any of them. She knew that great murderous firestorms could rise up out of nothing and burn civilisations to the ground. Eva had narrowly escaped being turned to ash herself.

  Every year on 22 September, the Rosen family had an anniversary dinner to celebrate the vote in 1951, which had so narrowly saved Frank from prison, or a life on the run. Prime Minister Menzies’ referendum to outlaw communism had seemed destined to pass and, on the night before the vote, a car had come to take Frank into hiding. He hugged his young sons, picked up his baby daughter and drew Eva into his arms for a farewell kiss before driving away with his comrades. Frank had been jailed as a communist once before, in 1940, during Menzies’ first prime ministership, and he was determined not to let that happen again.

  The Party’s most secret operative, Wally Clayton, had set up the networks of houses and sympathisers that would allow its continued existence and for the comrades to operate underground. But by some miracle, which Frank could never explain, the Menzies referendum was defeated. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that even their implacable enemy, Archbishop Mannix, had voted against it.

  Frank returned home the next day and resumed his life. From her earliest days Anna had absorbed the family lore that, were it not for a handful of voters in three states, she may never have known her father. She certainly would not have grown up with him.

  For Anna this past was much more than a foreign country; it was the smithy in which she and her beliefs had been forged. Her political activism at university had been the logical extension of this, but university life had also tempered her by focusing her on opposition to the Vietnam War. That, in turn, had deepened her alienation from the state. It was only when she won a student election to become editor of The Tribe and began obsessively working at it that she discovered journalism was her calling.

  For her first year at the ABC, working under Charlie O’Brien’s supervision, Anna applied herself to the technical skills of voice work, sound recording and editing. She found O’Brien’s authoritarianism and his perverse chauvinism a constant trial, but she learned to live with it just as army recruits do with their drill sergeants.

  No doubt O’Brien considered himself an equal opportunity bastard. He referred to all the trainees, male and female, as ‘pixies’, and they were all used to hearing his shouted commands, ‘Send me a pixie! I’ve got an edit that needs doing!’, and his complaints, ‘These pixies are as useless as tits on a bull!’ It was all done with ironic humour, but the idea was clear enough. They were lower-order creatures until they graduated into the reporters’ ranks, which comprised a kind of ‘officer class’ inhabited mostly by men.

  Within the O’Brien hierarchy women were never destined for the top ranks. Any thought that the ritual humiliation would magically end for Anna with her elevation from pixie status was put to rest one morning when she saw ‘The COS’ turn on his one female senior reporter after she made a factual error on air.

  ‘Rita!’ he yelled across the newsroom, heedless of who was listening. ‘My office, now! And you better put an exercise book down your panties because I’m going to spank you with a ruler.’

  As the only female trainee in her group Anna was outraged, and her anger was not diminished when O’Brien pretended it was all an ironic joke. She resisted any thought of quitting because that would notch up another win to the bully. Instead she resolved to get out from under his thumb.

  The following year, having graduated from pixie to reporter, Anna found herself chafing under O’Brien’s conservative news agenda and his mantra: ‘If it’s not in the papers, it’s not a story.’ She began chasing leads that came to her from conta
cts she’d nurtured as editor of The Tribe and covering stories that O’Brien’s newsroom had long ignored: police actions against Aboriginal activists; random violence against gay men; sexual abuse of women in their workplaces; police corruption and connections to organised crime.

  Where she could, Anna skirted O’Brien’s authority by taking her ideas to other editors, but he soon got wind of what she was doing and demanded she clear every idea directly with him. So she began working on stories in her spare time.

  In July she was tipped off by a contact in the Yugoslavian Embassy, an old friend of her father’s, that a group of Croatian extremists with links to Australia had been killed or captured in Yugoslavia attempting to raise a rebellion against Tito’s government. Her contact, whose diplomatic post she assumed was cover for something far more interesting, told her that the story of the incursion had deeper implications for the government and for the security service.

  When she took this information to Charlie O’Brien and asked his permission to pursue the lead, she didn’t mention her own Croatian connection, nor her immediate suspicion that Marin’s father, Ivo Katich, might be somehow involved.

  O’Brien scoffed at the idea, rejecting her request out of hand. ‘Sorry, Rosen, I’m not going to send you gallivanting around after a bunch of Yugoslavs.’

  ‘Croats.’

  ‘Whoever they are, we don’t have the resources,’ he said, digging his heels in. ‘You’re a news reporter. Stick to the news.’

  O’Brien’s implacable refusal to even listen to her arguments was the final straw. In her frustration Anna went outside proper channels and set up a meeting with Peter McHugh, who as head of Radio Talks had a reputation for backing fearless journalism. She pulled the one string she had and McHugh agreed to a meeting.

  Entering his office, she was confronted by a fierce-looking man with a hawkish face sitting behind a large, untidy desk. McHugh stared at her over the top of half-rim glasses before speaking.