THE MADNESS LOCKER

by EDDIE RUSSELL

  “How was she to do that, Helga? She was in the attic all those years.” Anna spoke up for her friend.

  “But she isn’t there now, is she? The war has been over for some time. Yet she never came forward, never came to look for me. I was her scapegoat, wasn’t I?”

  “To a point. But we felt unsafe with our decision anyway, and Martin, my brother, escorted her to Switzerland a year ago. I know that it’s no consolation to you—” Magda offered.

  “Wait!” Helga interrupted. “You mean to tell me that she has been gone for nearly two years?”

  No one dared answer that question.

  Helga grew visibly agitated and stood up. “I will spend the night here because I have no other choice. In the morning, please accompany me to the bank to retrieve my money. I presume that that is where you put it?” She directed her question to Helmut. He nodded quietly. With that, she turned to leave.

  “Helga, your grandmother meant for this to be your home. So far as I am concerned, I am happy to respect that wish.” Magda attempted to offer some consolation in retrospect.

  Helga turned back, softening some in her stance. “Aunt Magda, this is not my home. It never really was. I wouldn’t feel safe here. The last time you sacrificed me to save your grocer’s daughter. This time around you might sell me into prostitution to obtain groceries. Ten years from now, you will say that it was an unavoidable necessity. The truth is that I don’t want what is left of my life to be a litany of euphemisms.”

  “But what are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

  “Wherever it will be, it will be as far from here as possible, and to forget that I was ever here.”

  They could hear her steps as she ascended the staircase and walked across the landing to the very room from which she had been abducted all those years ago. The three of them sat in their pain and humiliation. Helmut sipped his cold tea and then stood up to rinse his cup.

  “Helmut, why don’t you sleep down here, at least until I can work all this out in my head?” Magda turned to her husband.

  He turned back swiftly. “What? You are blaming me for all this? It is very well for her to come back here all high and mighty and blame us. She put herself in this mess when she threatened to betray us to the Gestapo.”

  “A mess that you put us in in the first place.”

  “Maybe so. But Heinrich was a dear friend, I wasn’t about to turn him away.”

  “I agree with Papa. I am sorry about what happened to Helga, but I never liked her from the start. She was mean. Ruth was my best friend.” Anna reiterated her father’s sentiment.

  Helmut waited for Magda to recant her request, supported by his daughter’s backing. But it didn’t come. Shortly after, Anna and Magda went upstairs to bed while Helmut stayed downstairs.

  In the morning he accompanied Helga to the bank, gave her the money in full, and parted company from her at the same train station where she had disembarked a day ago. No more was said of the discussion of the night before.

  He bade her goodbye and good luck. And that was the last they saw or heard of Helga Dreschler.

  BELLEVUE HILL,

  EASTERN SUBURBS, SYDNEY

  WINTER 1986

  They had progressed to dating: going out to the movies, restaurants, a few plays; and trips on the ferry to Manly for lunch, the Blue Mountains for the day, Bondi Junction for an afternoon of shopping. Activities that Ruth, in the final months of Ernie’s life, had deferred from engaging in. Her life had been restricted to visiting him first in the nursing home, then at War Memorial Hospital while he was recuperating, and then back at the hospital as his condition inexplicably deteriorated, where he finally died.

  If she had to admit it to herself, the restrictions on her life, in those long months before Ernie died, had caused her depression which, in the aftermath, had brought her to contemplate suicide, rather than, as she initially thought, his death itself. It was a selfish thought, to be sure. But realistically we all are, with some heroic exceptions, selfish when it comes to our needs. And though she was deeply saddened to lose her partner of many decades, it could have just as easily been her that passed on first, in which case she wouldn’t have wanted him to mourn her unnecessarily. Life, after all, is lived once, and there is little point in spending your remaining years grieving over someone whose fate you couldn’t alter.

  And there was also the other thing that, with the passing of the years, had diminished in prominence. She never spoke of it to anyone. Not even Ernie. In the early years she wondered why. She was, to an extent, troubled by her indifference towards the sacrifice made by someone else in her stead. But as with all things, she reasoned, it was her good fortune and she had thrived on it. Had she been apprehended with her parents then she would have calmly accepted it as her fate, suffered the horrible consequences; may or may not have survived. And in the end, if she had ended up surviving, she would have endured a life shadowed by nightmares, as did those people she knew who were euphemistically referred to as Holocaust survivors.

  Like the Miskys from Warsaw - survivors? She wondered if they really survived, or just lived through the horrors to emerge emotionally gutted. Physically scathed, gradually healed, other than the tattoos on their forearms, but emotionally destroyed. If she imagined the horrors that she had seen in the film archives as her experience, she couldn’t see a way to reconcile that with her ordinary life after the war. How do you conduct a normal life with an abnormal experience? You walk into a grocery store, do your shopping and then reflect that five, ten years ago you shovelled thousands of bodies from the showers into the crematorium to burn. Imagining it could never be the same as experiencing it in your own flesh and blood.

  As with the people who inanely blather, “I can imagine”, or “I know how you feel”, or “I know how you must feel.” No, you don’t. Because it is not an experience that you underwent with your own flesh. You are only imagining it vicariously. But your flesh and blood were not infused with the experience. It is just an ephemeral thought. Like a movie; a good movie. You sit there, savour the experience, emerge from the dark cinema, make some inane comments and then forget about it as you devour another piece of strudel and sip your cappuccino.

  Admittedly she couldn’t upbraid those she ungraciously referred to as the ministering tittle-tattles who superficially engaged in any experience as long as it made for good conversation - conveying their grief here, their compassion there - without holding herself in opprobrium for discarding her parents so swiftly and adopting the Jodls as a matter of convenience and safety. What did that meddlesome Jewish troublemaker from Nazareth say? Judge not and ye shall not be judged. Well, on this count, he was right?

  Did she dwell on her parents’ fate? Not for long and not too deeply. Did she seek out any survivors, once the camps were liberated, for any morsels of information on what might have happened to them? Had they been killed instantly? Together? Separately? Or were they systematically ground down until they died as a result of starvation, deprivation and harsh labour? She never did, not even once. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, but she reasoned, always with self-preservation in mind, that it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, or in this particular case, let sleeping dogs die. Because... well, because there might be one dog that was not quite dead. And it was this dog that she feared alerting to her whereabouts.

  Her trail from Zurich, after Martin had left her with Helmut’s acquaintance, disappeared into a maze of bureaucratic subterfuge. First she was Swiss; then she was German again. Then she was an Austrian Jewish refugee in need of assistance making her way to England, and from there to Australia. She could have easily stayed in England. There were enough sympathetic people ready to assist, particularly when they heard that she was an orphan, and about her wondrous tale of survival. (Naturally, with a few modifications and embellishments. The last thing she wanted to do was leave a very clear anecdotal trail that would bring her to the attention of the press and of that sleeping dog who might be lying in w
ait with one eye open.)

  It didn’t take long to arrange, via the Australian High Commission in London, papers to travel to Sydney. She was even able to secure free passage. Australia was eager to attract young people to its distant shores. And she was young. She was also fleeing, trying to put as much distance between herself and what she feared, through her sense of guilt, would be a very vengeful person. She may not have needed to flee, but there was no way to enquire as to that person’s fate without alerting her to her whereabouts.

  So on a blustery day in 1947 she set out from Portsmouth to Sydney on a voyage that took the better part of a month. When the ship docked she was pleased to have arrived safely, but wistful at having to reorient herself within a culture that was very foreign to her. A society preoccupied with bonhomie, excessive drinking and sport, none of which suited her temperament.

  At first she figured that with time she might be able to make her way back to Europe. Yet, with the passage of time she discovered enclaves in amongst the alien culture that imported and preserved a European way of life: the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. She settled there, finding work as a dressmaker, and by night taking accounting courses. And that’s how she met Ernie. A former doctor and a refugee like many others, forever scarred by the experience that had brought him to these shores by way of Africa and a desire to put up a wall between the past and the present: he gave up medicine and took up the sterile world of numbers in its stead.

  She liked him instantly. He had an easy-going manner, not the usual lugubrious demeanour that European men seemed to carry about them like a shroud. A wry sense of humour that made her laugh, and a none-too-inquisitive manner that left her to her secrets. Her parents had died in the Holocaust. She had no other relatives that she knew of. That was that. He didn’t dwell too long on her lack of interest in trying to locate any. She just told him that she preferred to sail adrift from all of that past and start a new present. He accepted that without too much curiosity; after all, he understood walls - he had erected one to protect his sanity.

  It wasn’t long before he was offering to help her with her lessons, which led to him appearing more and more often in the tiny flat that she was sharing with another lady. When things got more serious, he suggested that she move in with him rather than upset her flatmate, who appeared to frown more often now when he appeared on the doorstep.

  At first she was reluctant, thinking that her reputation, little known as it was, would be tarnished; a single woman moving in with a single man. But she trusted Ernie enough to know that, as the saying went, he would make an honest woman out of her.

  And true to his intentions, and to her relief, he proposed two months after they moved in together. From that point on she started to breathe easier. Her name was now Weissman. Not that it was Lipschutz before - she had travelled under an assumed surname from London. But taking on a married name created a colder trail for anyone that may be seeking her under her birth surname.

  Nearly four decades later, Ernie was dead. Decades that passed in silent contentment as her life progressed uneventfully from wedlock to parenting (the one child only), to receiving her accounting degree and setting up a practice with Ernie (Weissman & Associates), and to retirement. A retirement that only lasted a brief nine years before Ernie fell ill, recuperated and then relapsed and died.

  In the obituary notice Ruth announced the passing of a loving father, husband and grandfather. She also felt comfortable enough to mention that the surviving spouse, Ruth Weissman, was née Lipschutz. A casual reference, if any, to another time and another life. And nearly four decades on, it was nothing if not a small tribute to her parents’ memory that she had immortalised them somewhere in this new land where she had built her life. A trivial gesture at best, given that in all likelihood both Lipschutzes were dead, due either to old age or having perished in the Holocaust. If anything it was done more to appease her conscience in having ignored their memory hitherto.

  But a gesture that, alas, had the unfortunate ramification of awakening the sleeping dog who had been scouring the papers avidly, week in and week out. Asking about her in centres where Jewish people might congregate. Reading through obituaries. Following the personals in the papers. There were vague references; none that proved fruitful. But this was the first real clue that led her right to her quarry. And none too soon. At her age the clock was winding down on this promise of vengeance. And if revenge is a meal best served cold then this one would prove to be delectable, for if anything it was frozen.

  It didn’t take Helga long to trace the obituary notice to the cemetery, and from there to the funeral parlour. From the funeral director it was an easy leap to Ruth Weissman’s address in the Eastern Suburbs. By comparison, a walk in the park versus the search she had conducted in Zurich to unearth the whereabouts of her namesake. Locating her. Following her to London, only to lose the trail there in the boatload of émigrés that made their way to the US, Canada and Australia.

  She settled on Australia after deciding on a hunch, that in later years she came to doubt many a time, that if she were Ruth she would travel as far away from Europe as she could. And like Ruth, she decided that no place was further than Australia.

  And now she was watching and learning the movements of her quarry. From across the street she noticed her arm in arm with a tall Aryan-looking gentleman, both appearing very happy as they emerged from the building in Bellevue Hill and walked amiably to Bondi Junction, no doubt for an afternoon matinee and early dinner.

  ‘Well, well, well, it didn’t take long for dear old Ruth to find a replacement for the recently departed Ernie; always the pragmatist. No time to waste. Except this replacement gentleman doesn’t look that Jewish. But what do I know? What does a Jewish person look like? That collection of Nazi elite - Goering, Goebbels, Himmler and even Hitler - hardly resembled anything like model Aryans: tall, blond, blue-eyed, with broad shoulders and rugged muscles. Alter egos of what they wished to be.” Helga was anxiously muttering under her breath from the coffee house across the street as she studied Sam Steimatzky and Ruth disappearing around the bend towards Bondi Junction.

  As she sat there over a cup of coffee and a muffin, running her hand through her scraggly grey hair, mumbling nervously, her eccentric behaviour perturbed the waiting staff. After one hour of watching her they decided that she was an elderly person suffering from dementia, but not necessarily dangerous.

  As soon as Ruth and Sam were out of sight, Helga wrote down the time on the pad in front of her: 3.34pm. Figuring that it would take them twenty minutes to get to the mall, and that they would then watch the four o’clock matinee, stop for a light meal and then head back, by her reckoning they ought to reappear around that corner no later than 7.15pm. She raised her hand to alert the waiter.

  A courteous, Italian-looking waiter appeared at her side instantly, hoping that she would ask for the bill, pay and leave.

  “What time do you close?”

  “We stay open till eight for takeout. We only serve coffee and pastries after 6.30pm. Will Madame be wanting the bill?” he asked, ever so solicitously, hoping that the reminder would nudge her to leave.

  Ignoring the waiter’s question, Helga went back to studying her pad, on which were listed various times of arrivals and departures, broken up by days. So far, three, starting with the early-morning constitutional for Ruth’s beau, right to the lunchtime appearance of Ruth as she emerged to catch the 326 bus to Double Bay, joining the other ladies for the afternoon coffee klatch. On other days the schedule varied for Ruth, but never for her date. He was as precise as a Swiss watch. Which confirmed Helga’s suspicion that he was either the eponymous nationality or German. Her instinct told her the latter.

  Her first objective was to compile a weekly schedule for the two and then plot how she would take her revenge. At first she thought the optimum time would be when he was out. But on reconsideration she decided that having him in the apartment at the same time would serve her purpose admirably. She would
set it up in such a way that he would be culpable if he so much as uttered her name, and would therefore be forced into eternal silence regarding her crime. In effect, he would be her silent alibi.

  Serendipitously, the plot that she devised in her cold rage played better than she had imagined once she inadvertently stumbled upon his secret. A secret that would bind them both to their graves.

  BELLEVUE HILL,

  EASTERN SUBURBS, SYDNEY

  WINTER 1986

  Outside it was drizzling, the rain beating a steady tempo as it fell on the rooftops, then cascaded down the gutters to the street below. He looked up at the sky: dark and cloudy. It didn’t really matter; he wasn’t going anywhere. He heard the lift door open below and the detective’s footsteps as he exited the car and made his way to the gate.

  Instinctively he looked at his watch: 3.45. They had been talking for almost two hours. He had told him everything he knew; as a neighbour and acquaintance and, in the short time since Ernie passed away, as a friend. That’s all he could ever say. Yes, they had developed a closer friendship once Ernie had died. But that was normal: both their partners were dead and all they had was each other. What did they do? What retired seniors usually do: movies, theatre, galleries, trips, restaurants.

  Did he hear anything unusual next door? Not that he could recall. If he had, he would have awakened and checked on Ruth - “I mean Mrs Weissman,” he hastily corrected himself. The interrogation, if that’s what it is when a detective has a conversation with you, amiable though it might have been, enquired as to whether Mrs Weissman had expressed any concern or worry to him regarding a threat to her life. No, of course not. What threat would a seventy-six-year-old woman be facing, other than the random, unpremeditated acts of violence perpetrated against older and younger citizens alike?