She stopped walking, looked down and didn’t say anything for what felt like a very long time. When she looked up, she looked troubled.
‘My father don’t — doesn’t like for me to go out,’ she stammered.
‘It’s only to the movies,’ he cut in. ‘It won’t be a late night. We could meet in town, see the film and come straight home. Would you like me to ask him?’
She shook her head.
‘But you’re not a child, he can’t keep you locked away.’ Ted was surprised at his own persistence.
‘Maybe for you I am adult, but for Father I am still child. No boyfriends,’ she said.
‘What about your mother? What does she say?’
Lilija shrugged. ‘She say what he say. Always.’
They were already in Wattle Street, and with an anxious look in the direction of her house, she hurried away.
That evening, after Ted had finished the grilled lamb chops, peas and mashed potatoes his mother placed in front of him, he thought about his conversation with Lilija with a growing sense of frustration. There had to be some way of making a date with her.
The Andrews Sisters had just finished belting out ‘Rum and Coca-Cola’ on 2GB, and Al Jolson was singing his mother’s favourite song, a sentimental ditty called ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’. Verna was singing along with him in her clear soprano voice.
‘Mum, is Nola Wilson still nursing?’
Verna Browning wiped her soapy hands on her apron. ‘I have no idea. I remember her poor mother telling me that Nola had started nursing at Sydney Hospital, but I don’t know what she did after that.’
‘I could ask Pop Wilson,’ he said.
His mother shot him a sharp look. ‘What’s all this about, love? Is it to do with your work?’
He smiled, amused at the way his mother always assumed he was working on a story.
She was still looking at him, waiting for an explanation.
‘I was talking to … you know, that girl up the street,’ he said, trying to sound casual. ‘She wants to do nursing, so I thought Nola might be able to give her a few tips.’
‘And give you a good excuse to see her again. What’s her name?’
‘Lilija,’ he murmured, revelling in the pleasure of rolling her name on his tongue. He turned away so she wouldn’t see him blushing. He couldn’t hide anything from his mother.
‘I don’t know that I’d mention it to Pop,’ Verna said slowly.
It was a fair while since Nola had started nursing. At least eight years, Verna calculated. Maybe more. A lively girl, she was; good-looking too, with that glossy chestnut hair and nice figure. She hadn’t seen Nola for years. When the war had started, Violet Wilson had said Nola had become a WAAC and had sailed to the Old Country on a troopship, but she had never mentioned her again after that. Maybe the girl had stayed in England.
Verna sighed, thinking of poor Violet who had dropped dead from a heart attack five years before. Now that Ted had brought it up, she realised that she hadn’t heard Pop mention Nola for years. She wondered if they’d lost touch, but if they had, and that caused him heartache, he never said, and she never asked, even though they’d had been neighbours for over twenty years. People were entitled to keep their lives private, although she did notice that the number of wine bottles Pop lined up on his front porch for the bottle-o seemed to be growing.
‘I wouldn’t mention Nola,’ Verna said again.
She scanned her son’s face and read his thoughts. ‘Don’t worry, love, I’m sure the New Australian lass will get all the information she needs from the hospital when she applies for the job.’
She smiled at him. ‘And I’m sure you’ll come up with some other way of getting to know her.’
That was the end of the conversation because it was time for her favourite serial. Pulling her winged armchair closer to the Kosy heater, she turned the dial on the large walnut console to tune in to When a Girl Marries, and picked up her knitting bag.
She was knitting Ted a striped sleeveless vest but every few minutes she put down her knitting and thought about the private lives and hidden heartaches behind closed doors.
Chapter 10
As soon as Szymon came in and hung up his hat and coat, Sala placed a loaf of rye bread and a plate of cottage cheese in front of him and made a helpless gesture in the direction of the food.
‘I couldn’t get near the stove today with all the other women fighting over it,’ she said. ‘The kitchen here is awful. It smells of rancid grease. It’s probably never been cleaned. It makes me feel sick.’
He put his arm around her. ‘Bread and cheese is fine with me. But are you sure you’re not feeling sick for some other reason?’
She shrank from him and sat down at the table. ‘I feel sick because the kitchen is disgusting,’ she said pointedly. She knew what was on his mind.
‘I was hoping you were pregnant,’ he said as he sat down beside her.
She raised her voice. ‘How can you even think of having a baby in a place like this? Look at us. How could we provide for a child when we don’t have anything?’
‘Don’t worry, Salcia.’ He used the affectionate form of her name whenever he tried to talk her round. She knew that his favourite sister had been called Salcia, and he loved using the name. ‘You’ll see, in time we’ll have everything.’
She knew he got that optimism from his father, the rabbi. That was another major difference between them. She’d grown up in a secular, urban family in Łód, whereas he was one of nine children of a rabbi in a small town. Whenever food was scarce, or the children needed shoes, his mother would wring her hands in despair, but his father would say it was an insult to God to lose hope, because God would always provide.
Sala stopped spreading the cottage cheese on her bread and looked up. ‘I suppose you still think God will provide,’ she said bitterly. ‘Just like He’s provided everything else in our lives.’
Szymon shook his head. ‘You have to have faith in the future, and the future means children.’
Now that there was no hope of avoiding the subject, she ploughed on. ‘I don’t know how you can think of bringing children into a world like this.’
‘It’s the only world we have,’ he replied. ‘And isn’t that what Hitler wanted, that we should all die out? You want to help him? Can’t you see that not having children means he’s won?’
Sala turned away, shaking with anger, and stood to clear the plates. In all their arguments Szymon was like a steam train gathering speed downhill. But this was one argument he wasn’t going to win. For once, she wasn’t going to be browbeaten. No children.
She stole a glance at him. He was raking his hands through his thick dark hair as he sat hunched over his English–Polish dictionary. With his thick black eyebrows that arched above his deep-set eyes, he would have been handsome if his nose hadn’t been flattened by a German rifle butt.
Watching him she felt the confusion that was poisoning their relationship. She admired his strength and optimism, but at the same time she resisted it.
The saucepan of water came to the boil on their small primus stove, and as she sipped the black tea and sucked a cube of sugar, the steam rose from the glass and her mind wandered off into another room, another glass of black tea, and another man.
Forcing herself back to the present, she peered over Szymon’s shoulder. ‘What are you looking up?’
He pushed the wooden chair away from the table and leaned back. ‘I’m trying to find a word the foreman used. When I asked him to tell me what it meant, they all laughed. They’re always making fun of me, and I want to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’ His eyes flashed with anger. ‘You know how humiliated I was the day I went to see Max Furstenberg about the job.’
Sala nodded. She remembered his resentment when he’d told her about the disdainful way the secretary had looked him up and down, from his brown shoes with the white toecaps, to the jacket he wore draped over his shoulders, European-style.
‘You want to see the boss?’ she had asked. ‘Do you have an appointment?’
He frowned, and she rephrased the question. ‘Does Mr Furstenberg know you are coming?’
‘I try to make appointment from Poland but line is busy, so I come in person,’ he’d said, but from her blank look he’d realised that his sarcasm was lost on her.
‘This isn’t how we do things here,’ she’d said coolly.
‘I been in concentration camps six years,’ he’d exploded, ‘and they do things different there too! So now you tell how you do it here, please.’
Shocked at his outburst, she’d risen hastily from her desk and asked him to wait. A few moments later, Max Furstenberg had appeared. He’d taken one look at Szymon and slapped him on the back. ‘Szymon Wajs! Funny thing, I always knew you’d turn up!’
But when Mr Furstenberg had taken him into the factory to show him the knitting machines and introduced him as an expert from Poland, the foreman had scowled at the boss’s new protégé. Szymon had arrived early on his first day, eager to get started, but whenever he’d asked the foreman to explain something, he hadn’t been able to understand the answer because the man spoke with a broad accent, and his thin lips hardly moved when he talked. Finally, he had raised his voice, and that’s when the foreman had said the word Szymon couldn’t catch, even though he’d repeated it several times during the day. From his tone, and the laughter of the other men on the factory floor, Szymon had realised he was the butt of a joke, and the sooner he figured out what it meant, the sooner they’d stop making fun of him.
‘It sounded like fakov or maybe farkov but it’s not there.’ He looked up from his dictionary. ‘There was another word he used — skab — but I can’t find that either.’
‘Try s-c-a-b,’ suggested Sala. She’d spent the long weeks on board the ship studying English, while Szymon had passed the time playing poker, and she had some idea about the vagaries of the spelling.
‘I’ve got it!’ he exclaimed. ‘Dry skin that’s formed when a wound or sore heals.’
He slammed the dictionary shut and swore. ‘Cholera psia krew! This dictionary is useless.’
‘They must be Australian words, that’s why they’re not in there,’ Sala suggested.
‘What do you mean, “Australian”?’ he shouted. ‘What are they, Hottentots from Timbuktu? Don’t they speak English here, with their King, their flag, and their Empire Day?’
It was useless trying to talk to him when he was in this mood but his bad moods never lasted, so she opened her English grammar book and waited until he’d calmed down.
He slurped his tea and put down the empty glass. Taking her hand he said, ‘Salcia, now that we’re getting settled, I’d like to light candles on Shabbas.’
She set her mouth in a straight line. In her own family, being Jewish had meant little more than festive dinners at Passover and Rosh Hashana. On Yom Kippur her mother was the only one who had fasted, and she’d done it out of respect for her own parents and for tradition, not for any religious reason. They never lit candles on Friday nights.
‘Settled?’ she repeated. ‘Just look at this room.’
‘Settled enough to light candles,’ he said.
‘You know I’m not religious. I don’t believe in any of that stuff.’
He moved closer to her and looked into her face. ‘Do it for me, Salcia. It means a lot to me.’
There were tears in his eyes and she knew he was thinking of the Friday nights at home with his parents, brothers and sisters who were no longer alive. She nodded. If candles and blessings would help to fill his emptiness, she would do it. If only there was something that could fill her own void.
He put his arms around her and drew her down onto his lap. ‘I’m earning six pounds a week at the moment, but Mr Furstenberg said that in time he’ll make me foreman, and then I’ll get a raise. You’ll see, Salcia, I’ll buy you that block of flats you liked in Bondi Road. Or perhaps like the one where Fela and Lutek live.’
She couldn’t help smiling at the grandiose ambitions of this man who had only arrived a few weeks ago and was a factory worker on the basic wage, but from the expression on his face, she knew he was serious.
When they’d arrived in Sydney, his cousin Fela, who had sent them their landing permit, was waiting for them on the wharf.
As soon as she saw Szymon she threw her arms around him, and then stepped back and screamed. ‘What happened to you? You used to be so handsome!’
His hand flew to his misshapen nose. ‘There’s been a war, or haven’t you heard?’
Fela had migrated to Australia in 1938 with her husband Lutek who had foreseen the looming tragedy in Europe and had talked her into leaving. By migrating when they did, they’d escaped the fate of most of the Polish Jews and arrived in Sydney at a time when manufacturing businesses were thriving. Lutek had started up a handbag factory and by 1948 he’d made enough money to buy a spacious apartment with a balcony in Bellevue Hill.
‘The Australians call it Bellejew Hill,’ Fela said as they drove Sala and Szymon from the ship in their new Holden. Sala didn’t understand the joke, but she was too engrossed looking out of the car window at the leafy avenues and impressive homes to take any notice of what was being said.
Inside the flat, Sala stood in the hall transfixed. It was as though time had rolled backwards. She might have been standing in her parents’ home before the war, in a world of Persian rugs, walnut sideboards and porcelain figurines. She had forgotten that before the war people had taken their belongings with them, because they’d still had possessions to bring.
They’d been at Fela and Lutek’s place for about a week when at dinner one evening the conversation turned to life in Sydney during the war.
‘You know, we suffered here too,’ Fela said in an aggrieved tone. ‘We had blackouts and we had to cover the windows and put covers over the car headlights, and there was barbed wire all along Bondi Beach. And there was rationing. We couldn’t get butter for love or money. Did you know that Japanese submarines came into Sydney Harbour? They even fired a few shells. It was terrifying. We were staying in a flat in Bondi at the time, and one of the shells fell just outside our place. You should have seen the hole it made in the pavement!’
Sala and Szymon exchanged glances but said nothing.
Things came to a head when Sala spilled some borsch on the tablecloth. Leaping to her feet, Fela screamed, ‘That tablecloth came from my mother’s house!’ She scurried back and forth, feverishly removing all the plates and dishes from the table, refusing to allow anyone to help as she scrubbed the cloth with soap, muttering that the beetroot stain would never come out, and her tablecloth was ruined.
Sala went into their bedroom and sat on the bed, white with anger and barely able to speak when Szymon came in to see what was wrong. ‘Your cousin’s crying about a tablecloth and she thinks that not having butter is a tragedy, while we —’ She stopped, too choked to say any more. ‘I’d rather sleep on a park bench than live here with them.’
The following day they’d rented the room in Wattle Street.
‘There’s a telephone in the hall. I should ring Fela and let her know how we’re going,’ Szymon said.
Sala bristled. ‘Tell her I’m going to commit suicide because I’ve got a ladder in my stocking.’
‘Don’t be like that, Salcia. You can’t expect them to understand what we went through. They mean well.’
‘They’re ignorant and insensitive,’ she snapped. ‘You talk to them. I’ve got to figure out what kind of job I’m going to get.’
She knew he was right about one thing: you couldn’t expect anyone to understand. And there was no way you could talk about it. If you went into details, people would stare at you with horror or pity or, worse, disbelief. But you couldn’t blame them. There were times when even she couldn’t believe what she’d gone through. But glossing over things would mean trivialising the enormity of it all. Tragedy couldn’t be explained. It had to be en
dured.
If it hadn’t been for Ernst Hauptmann, she wouldn’t have survived. At the thought of his heavy footsteps on the wooden floorboards above the musty cellar, her heart started racing. She had to think about something else.
‘I’m going to see about getting a job tomorrow.’ She spoke loudly to drown out her memories.
Szymon smiled and patted her shoulder. ‘I’m glad you’re starting to settle down.’
Chapter 11
Ted paced outside the entrance of the Prince Edward Theatre, pulling up the sleeve of his overcoat every few seconds to check the time. Every now and again he glanced across the road at the men in dinner suits and the women in floaty evening dresses as they mounted the steps of the Hotel Australia.
A small crowd had already gathered on the footpath to gawk at the Sydney celebrities arriving for the ball being held in honour of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. As the chauffeur-driven Daimler of the guests of honour pulled up noiselessly outside the hotel, Ted craned forward, but all he saw was a shimmer of a white fox-fur stole, a gleam of pearls, and the back view of a man who was shorter and stockier than he’d expected. Then the Oliviers disappeared inside and the crowd dispersed, murmuring breathlessly about the famous couple.
Ted fumbled in his coat pocket for a Capstan, lit up, took a few puffs, then threw the cigarette in the gutter and resumed his pacing. He decided to wait another five minutes, and then five more. He should have known it was too good to be true when, after two weeks of pleading, Lilija had finally agreed to meet him. Now that she’d started nursing at the hospital, they met on the Bondi tram after work whenever her shifts allowed, and he had made the most of the opportunity to persuade her to go out with him. Now he wondered whether it was the amused glances of the passengers who had heard his entreaties the previous evening that had induced her to agree to a date she had no intention of keeping. There was no point hanging around any longer because she wasn’t going to show up. What a fool he’d been, thinking she’d come.
Empire Day Page 7
