He spent the rest of his journey in the trousers of a man with legs a couple of inches shorter and the shirt of a man with broad shoulders, a thick neck and long arms, hoping particularly not to meet the owner of this shirt, giant that he must be. Only a very few razors were distributed, and no shaving cream or mirrors, and so hardly any men attempted to shave. Emil wore his ill-fitting clothes and itchy, lice-ridden beard through another five weeks of dry biscuits, thin soup and no fresh fruit or vegetables, three rounds of dysentery and the loss of a stone in weight. He had just enough energy to feel sorry for the kosher Jews who appeared to live on little more than the occasional dash of lime juice in their black tea. His hair, still for the most part black when his journey began, was almost entirely grey by the time they reached Fremantle. He knew this because Solomon commented on it one morning when the angle of the ship allowed a sliver of morning light to fall upon his head in the hammock. His teeth ached with the intensity of a nail lodged in his brain that someone occasionally moved around a little for good measure.
To pass the time he listened to Solomon’s talks on literature and helped whittle the bottom of table legs into tiny, match-like sticks for one of the boys who was building a steamer with real matches and scraps of wood gathered from the men and one or two of the kinder guards. He ran a book on how many days Solomon could go without being sick. His record was three. The internees owed him fifty-seven pounds, fifteen shillings and fourpence, which he promised to split with Solomon, if he ever received it.
After they rounded the southern tip of Western Australia, glimpsing from the gangways the grey-green scrub and red dirt, they sailed off into nothing again, until they reached Adelaide, its dry hills in the distance beyond the flat dusty suburbs. These places, these far-flung outposts of Englishness with corrugated tin roofs. It was bewildering to see such domesticity perched on the edge of the desert with dust skimming along the streets in the warm, dry wind.
Of Melbourne they saw nothing. Most of the men were not allowed to disembark, or to move about, though some were taken off, including a group of Nazis, offloaded for God knew where. The others cheered as the Nazis were ordered on deck. ‘May that be the last we see of your kind!’ the man in the hammock next to Emil shouted, a usually quiet chemist who had given his own daily lectures from his table for the past two months. But you always saw Nazis again, Emil thought. More rose up to replace them. Here they were, on the other side of the world, and still there were Nazis.
For the last few days at sea, as they steamed north along the coast of New South Wales, the air on the ship was thick with rumour and anxiety. Even the men who had slipped into lethargy and sickness for most of the passage, who had ignored the maths and physics and literature lectures and avoided the chess games played with sets made of matchsticks on squares etched into a table top, even these seemed to wake up, talk late into the night like the rest, ask their neighbour what they knew of Australia, of Aborigines, of kangaroos, of the food.
Early on a September morning, no one quite knew which anymore, the ship’s engines ground as it slowed to a halt. Emil lay awake in his hammock, listening for the approach of the tug. There it was, distant at first, then unmistakable, and then they were moving again. He climbed down from the hammock and gestured to Solomon, who was lying with his arms behind his head, listening as well to the growl of the tug coming alongside.
Solomon, on the table for this last night at sea, watched Emil slip down from his hammock and land softly on the floor beside him before climbing onto a table where another man lay sleeping under a porthole. Balanced astride the sleeping man’s legs, he leaned against the porthole, one of the few that had been uncovered during the journey. The man woke. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’ he said, but in the light from the porthole it was clear that all around the hold men were jumping on their neighbours’ tables to do the same. The man beneath Emil was quickly up beside him. Men crowded around the circles of light. They came into Sydney Harbour jostling around the portholes, ten to a window, absorbing unstable flashes of pink sky and sandstone and eucalyptus trunks, blue harbour, dark forests, fields. Emil saw fishing trawlers, naval ships, ferries, lone fishermen on tiny dinghies. Wharfs, mansions, windows flashing like jewels, the curved steel bridge, of which he had seen photographs, soaring above the next hill. All in glimpses of a second or two pressed by odorous flesh, rancid breath on all sides, the others telling him to get down and give the others a go.
Soon the broad waters of the main harbour narrowed to a long inlet amid a crowding of wharfs and smokestacks and railway lines and the ship was shunted alongside a dock. They were kept below decks until evening. Through the long day the men returned at intervals to the portholes. All that changed was the position of the flotillas of working boats docking at the wharfs with their stinking fish and crates of cargo, that and the deepening of blue as the sun rose higher in the sky. The men cursed and fidgeted and prayed. There was some laughter. Today, tomorrow, they would walk on land again. They had not, astonishingly, been blown to smithereens.
Emil and Solomon sat on the table and tried to imagine the country outside. ‘Have you read Kangaroo?’ Solomon asked Emil. ‘There are wonderful descriptions of the country, and the feel of the country to a European. Fascists too, believe it or not.’
‘No,’ said Emil. ‘I have met Australians but I don’t know much about them. It seems hot already, and this is only spring.’
‘Perhaps it’s not so hot everywhere. Remember the pastor said that we’re destined for a pleasant camp, with gardens?’
‘He also told us that God was guiding us across the sea in his gentle hands.’
‘I suppose we shall find out soon enough, when they let us off this ship. I shall not miss the sea.’
‘One swim would be nice, wouldn’t it? Before they take us away. Did you see the water of the harbour? There were little beaches all along the shores. One could swim in a different place every day.’
Solomon laughed. ‘I cannot swim, Emil. It’s a miracle I have survived the ocean all this time.’
‘Then for God’s sake, I’ll teach you! You’ll go home from Australia swimming like a fish. And then we will both learn to ride a surfboard!’
At dusk the order came to file up on deck with their belongings. What could they mean but the shirts on their backs? Instantly there was a sense of others on the ship, for whom an effort must be made, for whom it must be made to seem that there was a proper relationship between these men and their luggage.
As they emerged from the hours of slowly shuffling bodies on the stairways onto the deck above the harbour, their impatience erupting in little shoves and falls, they peered around themselves, ignoring the carping of the soldiers. The sky was the same pale grey as the water and the chimneys had ceased belching black smoke into the low cloud gathered at the end of the day. Factory and warehouse workers filed out of huge dark buildings, little black creatures swarming across the docks and into the streets above the harbour. A long train sat in sidings beneath them. The men watched it, after they had taken in all else, as though it would change, or tell them something about their fate.
A crowd had gathered below, held back by a line of Australian soldiers with their lopsided hats. In front of the soldiers was a row of police, all along the quay, staring up at the men on the ship. Emil wondered what these people had been told about them.
There was movement at the other end of the deck, and the taller men saw and called back that they were beginning to disembark, and there started up pushing and surging. Solomon kept hold of Emil’s shirt sleeve. All were pressed together and the evening was still warm though a little breeze was lifting off the harbour, bringing up to them the smell of the sea and the petrol fumes of the boats. A soldier nearby shouted some orders and the men settled. After what seemed an age of imprisonment in the crowd, men close to them began to move, and then it was them shuffling unsteadily towards the gangplank. They came across the narrow gap, dark water below, onto the ungiving land, the dea
dness of solid earth reverberating through knees and spine. As they stepped down, Solomon whispered: ‘Australia!’
The police and soldiers watched them as they moved forward, straggling towards the train. Some of the police were sweating. Workers had gathered behind the lines of uniformed men and stared frankly. Emil looked around him at his fellows. The men were starving thin with fat beards and wild hair. They looked as though they were dangerous prisoners, locked up on some notorious rock for years. A woman pushed up behind the police guard as they walked by. ‘Dirty Jews!’ she called. He looked at her face. She was the first woman he had seen for two months. Not bad beneath the scowl; well-turned-out, dark hair waved about her face, luscious red lipstick. An office worker. Respectable. If she could be made to smile . . . But he knew any woman, of any description, would be appealing. All around him the men were staring at her and the other women gathered behind the guard. No one else cared what they were saying either. Each thought of the same things. Clean hair that smelled like flowers. Long, plump limbs. Soft, giving skin. They did not seem like nice women, these Australians, but no one just now was as discerning as he might be.
When they reached the train, they were ordered to space themselves out along the carriages. There was endless counting. The men had over the weeks taken to murmuring numbers quietly to put them off. Whether or not it was their doing, the soldiers always came up with a different number. Finally Emil and Solomon, still miraculously together, boarded an old train with leather seats that smelled of the old life, of travel with family, of summers across nearby borders. Then they filled the train with their terrible stench and the soldiers came among them and opened the windows. You could jump right out of one, if you had a mind to it. The soldiers were mostly overweight and old, not the tall bronzed figures they had imagined and talked about. Perhaps these men were tall and bronzed in the last war.
Emil took a seat next to Solomon, who was looking about himself, smiling, and they faced forward as the train finally shunted out into Sydney, the men chattering too loudly, as though they were off to war and must bolster their courage by showing off. The light fell away over the roofs of the little terraced houses. They saw in the dusk warehouses, scrubby cuttings. Occasionally a child on a bike down a little side street. They were all fascinated by the children, as though they had not seen a child before. Such little hands and feet. Some tramps around a fire in the wasteland beyond a suburban train station. The soldiers brought around sandwiches, fruit and tea, passing them out with cheery voices, though it was hard to understand what they said. It was the best meal Emil had ever tasted. The orange was incredible, the apple unbelievably sweet and crisp. They laughed as the juice spurted across their shirt bibs.
After their meal, they fell asleep to the rocking motion of the train on the rails. Emil dreamed of nothing; he was simply at rest for seven hours, and then he opened his eyes to the country lit with the colours of the sunrise outside the window. The others were opening their eyes too and they watched in silence, smiling occasionally as birds—small parrots, big black and white crow-like creatures—swooped amid the glowing trunks of eucalyptus. As the morning grew full and bright Emil noticed that opposite him an old Australian soldier snored, clutching his rifle between his knees. The three Germans surrounding him looked at each other and laughed. Emil watched the country unfold outside the wide window like a cinema screen, leaning back in his seat, eyes on the horizon. He could do this for days.
Late in the afternoon they came to a standstill. He pulled up the window next to him. The air outside was warm and still. A cluster of dry-looking eucalypts swept the dirt road, which was somewhere between orange and red. ‘Sheep on the track!’ they heard someone call from the end of the carriage, and the men laughed again. The train started up soon afterwards.
Too quickly, after a day of cards with the soldiers and the green of the land growing sparser and sparser, little towns appearing out of nothing and then a few moments later gone, they were pulling into a town. Then there was the endless process of the engine coupling and uncoupling rows of carriages to pull them into parallel lines along the station. ‘Get your bags!’ came an order from the ground. ‘They like to joke, these Australians,’ someone said. They stood, stretched legs, jumped down off the carriage onto the ground below, hardly anyone carrying more than a coat or hat.
Then they were back in the awful endless drudgery of two thousand men being shifted from one place to another as they were corralled into rows. Emil looked around him at the flat, rusty plains and low, tin-roofed houses, wondering where it was they planned to put them. When they were finally gathered at one end of the station, the first of the men already having moved off, they saw it, the high barbed wire of the camp beyond the town, the long, low huts, the guard towers, the barren spaces between. Behind the guards, townspeople had gathered on the platform to look at them. Emil caught the eye of a boy no more than five, hiding behind his father, a serious-faced farmer. Beside the station house, a mounted gun was pointed at the men. The platform was lined with soldiers with rifles. Some pointed them at the men, some didn’t seem to have their heart in it, and their rifles hung from their shoulder straps somewhere between the ground and the soldiers’ knees as their owners watched the internees shuffle by in their hundreds.
The earth all around them was flat—there was a parade ground across the tracks—the sky grey. Ahead of them the long thin straggle of emaciated men, ragged clothes hanging off their bones, marched from the station towards the camp. Emil and Solomon carried nothing. Their riches were in their pockets. Emil had a cigarette from a soldier on the train. Solomon had a toilet roll, on which he had written his shipboard diary, rolled and tucked into his loose waistband. It helped keep his trousers up.
‘Cheer up,’ said the soldier behind them. ‘Tea’s on. Mutton tonight.’
They walked silently along the dirt road, the houses and the station behind them, scratching at lice and peering into the afternoon haze at the flat red pasture all around them. There were cows—chewing on what, one could scarcely imagine. Thin sheep. You could see their ribs. Lone trees, white branches reaching out into the blue. Emil, trudging forward amid the stinking bodies, stared at the blurred line where the reddish brown scrub met the sky.
‘Whatever next?’ said Solomon.
Finally, they approached the high gates in the barbed wire, guarded on each side by a soldier with a fixed bayonet, hundreds of men before them filling the space between the half-built huts, hundreds still to come behind. Emil moved on without time to hesitate, pushed inside, beyond the wire.
Hannah
LIVERPOOL, 1940
Mother and I spent many nights in the cellar that September as the German bombers droned over London. In bed in the dark, when the floor trembled, I thought I was at sea. She called at my bedroom door before the air-raid siren had finished, flask of tea in one hand, torch in the other. I reached for my dressing gown on the door, and down we went, away from the house with its lamps and smells of living, and into the coal-dusty cellar stairwell. The walls were damp at the bottom, so close to the pond, and I peered at the gaps in the mortar in the light of the single hanging bulb, returned to childhood fears of drowning underground. Mother must have taken clean enamel mugs down there in the day, because they were always there on a little table ready, with magazines and a tin of fresh biscuits. There were two wicker chairs on a round rag rug, each with a blanket folded over the arm. Mother sang quietly in Welsh when the ground shook while I chewed my nails and sent up messages to the bomber pilots: Do not drop your bombs on me. I love your country, and your language, your music and your books. Some of us shall be friends again one day. Keep going, over the fields, and the sea.
Now I stood at the rail of the Largs Bay at Liverpool, the crowd of tiny people on the dock beneath dreary in their winter coats. The north was not the England I knew, but I took it into my body: the grey sky, the seagulls wheeling above the shipping containers, the smell of sand and salt. There was a sudden be
auty in the squat red buildings and the wide port of Liverpool—it came with the nightly bombings, the threat of imminent destruction. When I left London the day before, the train running through the backs of the flats, gashes had been taken out of the streets and fires still smouldered. Until then, the rubble of the East End on the front of the Evening Standard was almost too much to believe.
My nail-bitten fingers gripped the cold, rough rail. My travelling companions were beside me: Jill Baum, wife of another refugee at the Hay camp, and her two children, Polly and Henry. We had only just met, peering at one another with frank unease in an awful café behind the dock, exchanging little snippets—of trepidation about the ship’s food, of our mutual shock upon learning Australia was the men’s destination.
We were silent at the rail, all of us, she towering at my side. As the ship let out its horn and pulled away from the dock my heart longed for land while his body drew mine across the wet rim of the world.
Hannah & Emil Page 28
