But he hadn’t studied hard. In fact he hadn’t studied at all and, as his father had predicted, he hadn’t amounted to anything. At least, not anything his father valued. He remembered the day his life changed. He was ten at the time, and when he closed his eyes even now he was back in that darkened theatre in Berlin, holding his breath as the magician in a satin suit swirled his cape and pulled a rabbit from his top hat. With the help of his pretty assistant in a short satin skirt that barely covered her bottom, he sawed a woman in half and later made a man levitate above the table.
It was Emil’s first glimpse of another kind of existence, one which lay outside the realm of diligence and discipline. This was a world where normal rules didn’t apply and anything was possible. He knew then that this, and not his father’s tightly circumscribed existence, was what he wanted for himself. The world of illusion, magic and transformation. He hadn’t known then that this world also relied on appearances, and required just as much discipline and deception, and that, in the end, whichever world you chose, you could never escape your destiny.
The illusion that had made his heart pound, the one few magicians could perform, was the one in which the magician cut off a man’s limbs as well as his head, tossed the parts in the air, and then restored the body to its normal shape. Much later, when he got his first job with an illusionist, he discovered how this trick worked. He was one of the assistants dressed in black who moved silently and stealthily against a backdrop of black cloth, while the stage was brightly lit to distract the audience from what was going on. Unnoticed, they slipped the man’s arms behind the cloth and hooked on dummy limbs. At a crucial moment they unhooked them and flung them in the air. The supposedly severed head was also a dummy, stuffed with rags. Emil had been thrilled by the power of creating such a deception and making the open-mouthed audience believe the unbelievable.
The knocking grew louder and more peremptory, and he hurried towards the door. Surely the boy hadn’t seen anything. Even if he’d stood on the bucket, he couldn’t have seen through the blind. Just the same, he was worried by the boy’s insistence that he hadn’t seen anything. He opened the door and saw two uniformed policemen standing there, and the blood drained from his face. They didn’t have to wear black uniforms or jackboots to make his heart race.
‘I’m Sergeant Frank O’Connor from Waverley Police Station, and this is Constable Tom Adams,’ the older one said, indicating his colleague. Frank O’Connor had sandy hair and a mottled complexion that reminded Emil of minced veal.
‘It’s come to our attention that there’s been a lot of hammering coming from your place at night,’ the sergeant explained. ‘Could you tell us what you’re doing there, sir?’
‘I fix things, that is all. Sorry for disturbing the neighbours,’ Emil said. He spoke quickly to sound confident.
‘Can you show us where you do all this fixing?’
Waving his arm in the direction of the back of the house, Emil said, ‘Just an ordinary room.’
‘We’d like to see it, if you don’t mind.’
Emil’s eyes darted around for an escape route as he tried to quell the panic. There was no way out.
He led the way. Their expressions didn’t change and he realised that this was what they had expected to see.
‘The boy told you, yes?’
‘We’re not at liberty to say who it was,’ O’Connor said
Emil supposed it was the boy’s mother. She smiled to his face and helped him mend his shoe, yet she’d gone behind his back and reported him. He wondered why she hadn’t talked to him instead of going straight to the police. Perhaps that’s what people did in this country.
The two policemen were walking around the coffins, looking at them gingerly from various angles as though expecting someone to jump out.
Finally the sergeant spoke in an affable tone. ‘Is this what you’ve been hammering here at night?’
Emil nodded.
‘And what’s inside them?’
His mouth was so dry that his tongue was stuck to his palate and he had to clear this throat before he could answer. ‘Nothing.’
‘Do you mean to tell us they’re empty?’
He nodded again.
The policeman seemed to be considering how to phrase his next question. ‘Can you tell us who they’re for?’
Emil shook his head. ‘Not any person.’
The younger officer was pacing out the length of the coffin on the workbench and writing down the measurement in a notebook. He said something to his associate, who nodded and turned back to Emil.
‘Do you expect us to believe that you spend night after night making coffins for nobody? They’re not very big, are they? I reckon they’d be the right size for kids, don’t you?’
He thrust his face closer to Emil’s, and placed his big hands on his hips.
‘Can you tell us where you were on the afternoon of 22 May?’ he said in a threatening tone.
Emil froze. ‘Please, I do not understand. Why you ask me this?’
‘We’ll do the asking, if you don’t mind. If you don’t want to answer here, you can come with us down to the station.’
Emil tried to calculate what day of the week the twenty-second had been, but his mind was paralysed and there was a dull humming in his head.
‘Let’s jog your memory,’ the police officer said. ‘Were you in Waverley Park by any chance?’
Again Emil tried to think but anxiety increased his confusion, and he couldn’t remember where that park was. He had the urge to bolt past them and escape, but managed to calm himself. This was Australia in 1948, not Berlin in 1938. He tried to focus on their question. He often walked for hours without seeing where he was going. Perhaps he did walk across the park that day, but he couldn’t be sure. If only he knew why were asking these questions.
‘So you refuse to tell us where you were that day, or who these coffins are for?’
‘I do not refuse, I said you already. The coffins are for no one. And I do not remember where I was that day. Maybe I walked, maybe not.’
‘Well that’s not very satisfactory,’ the police officer said. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to accompany us to the station.’
As Emil pulled on his coat and the hunting hat with the green feather, he understood something for the first time. It was so clear that it made his head swim. Starting a new life in another country wasn’t as simple as crossing a border. It meant entering a new world of deception and illusion. Like a magician, a migrant had to reinvent himself or be destroyed.
When Verna Browning looked out of her window that afternoon and saw two uniformed policemen escorting the foreign gentleman across the road and pushing him into the back of the black Holden, she caught sight of his pale, frightened face and felt sorry for him. The man was strange, there was no doubt about that, but she didn’t think he was a criminal, and as the car sped from Wattle Street she wondered why they’d taken him away.
She looked around to see if any of the neighbours had witnessed the arrest, and noticed Maude McNulty standing on her verandah. She held shears in her hands, seemingly focused on trimming her hedge, but Verna knew this was merely an excuse to watch what was going on. Perhaps the old gossip knew something.
Leaning over the low brick wall that separated their verandahs, she said, ‘I wonder what he’s supposed to have done. He seems so inoffensive.’
Miss McNulty gave a thin, knowing smile. ‘Still waters run deep,’ she said. ‘I always knew there was something fishy about him.’
When Ted came home that evening, his mother told him the news. ‘I think Miss McNulty knows more than she’s letting on,’ she added.
‘That wouldn’t surprise me,’ he commented.
‘Seriously, though, you should look into it. I can’t imagine why they took him away. He looked so frightened. It could be an interesting story.’
Ted shrugged, and from his dismissive manner she realised that he wasn’t interested in Wattle Street gossip. Turn
ing the chops under the grill, she asked instead, ‘How’s the romance going?’
‘Pretty rotten,’ he said moodily. ‘Her father’s a real tyrant. Doesn’t like her going on dates or having boyfriends.’
She nodded sympathetically. ‘Some of these New Australians have funny ideas. But if she really likes you, she’ll find a way of talking him round. Maybe if he met you he’d change his mind.’
‘I doubt it,’ he muttered. He was about to tell her what he thought of Lilija’s father but she’d already switched on the wireless and settled down to listen to one of her favourite serials. The ghostly creaking of the asylum door indicated that Inner Sanctum was about to begin.
Chapter 18
When Pop Wilson came over to fix the leaky tap in their bathroom a few days later, Ted found the solution to a problem that had been on his mind ever since his meeting with George Addison.
When they had met at Cahill’s restaurant, the former teacher from the Bonegilla migrant camp had turned out to be as pedantic as his letter had indicated. It wasn’t until he’d finished his steak-and-kidney pie and folded the edges of his napkin until they were perfectly aligned that he’d been ready to reveal what he’d witnessed.
Ted was shocked to hear that the Jewish migrants at the camp, who were vastly outnumbered, were often victimised by other migrants who threatened, ambushed and beat them up. Their complaints, however, were ignored by the manager of the camp, whom Mr Addison suspected of a shady wartime past.
‘He said he’d been a farmer in Lithuania,’ he told Ted, ‘but when I looked at his hands I knew he’d never done any farm work. The thing that bothered me was that he was responsible for issuing identity cards to other migrants who arrived here without any documents. Who knows what some of these people got up to during the war? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them had been in the SS.’
‘But how did they get into Australia in the first place?’ Ted asked. ‘Surely the screening officers would have looked for the blood group tattooed under their left armpit?’
George Addison gave a thin smile. ‘Yes, but most of them had the tattoo surgically removed in the DP camps. And if a medical officer happened to notice the scar, they said they’d had a boil lanced, been stabbed or hit by a bullet.’
While the waitress served their blackberry flummery dessert, George Addison opened his briefcase and handed Ted a letter one of the inmates had written.
Honoured Sir
I am Jewish man from camps in Europe for six years and now again I am in camp with Nazis. One Jew in barrack with nineteen fascists. The Baltics and Ukrainians mens tell about Jews they killed. They show nife across throat and say look how we kill Jews. They sorry not kill more. They laugh and say you next. Did I survive war to live with Nazis in Australia?
Help please.
With respect,
Itzak Klein
George Addison had shown the letter to the Australian major in charge of the camp, but when he had confronted the attackers, they had denied everything.
‘The major thought he was Eisenhower,’ George Addison said. ‘He ran the camp like a military establishment, and barked at the migrants like a sergeant major addressing soldiers on the parade ground. He didn’t want anyone criticising the way he ran the place, and he dismissed the whole affair as nonsense. And that’s probably why I lost my job,’ he added. ‘I was poking my nose into matters they wanted to keep quiet.’
He sat forward and lowered his voice. ‘I’ve heard something interesting recently, but it has to be off the record. I don’t want my informant to lose his job.’
He waited until Ted put down his pen before continuing in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘A friend of mine who works for the Commonwealth Investigation Service told me that the Yugoslav government has applied for the extradition of two war criminals who are staying at Bonegilla, but our government has been ignoring their request.’
Ted had felt his adrenalin pumping. He’d known he would have to find some way of getting into Bonegilla to investigate the allegations; they’d never let him in if they thought he was a journalist stirring up trouble. Now, as he watched Pop Wilson taking screwdrivers and spanners from his old tool bag, and inserting new washers, he figured out how to do it.
The next day he rang Pop’s front-door bell. As he waited on the verandah, alcohol fumes rose from a pile of empty wine bottles. The door opened and there was Pop in a singlet and baggy shorts.
He beamed when he saw Ted. ‘Come in, son, come on in,’ he said. ‘Been breaking lots of hearts, have you?’ he asked in his jocular way.
Ted grinned. ‘Been beating them off with a stick.’ He could never figure out why people thought he was some kind of Casanova, or why all throughout his teenage years attractive girls had flirted with him even though he’d been too shy to approach them himself. When he looked in the mirror he saw an ordinary face with a square jaw and no distinguishing features.
Pop was already twisting the cork from a half-empty bottle of sherry on the sideboard. ‘Will you join me?’ he asked as Ted sat down.
Without waiting for an answer he started pouring the sherry into two tumblers with hands that shook so much he splashed some of it onto the sideboard.
While he went into the kitchen for a cloth, Ted looked around the room. The curtains, which hung unevenly, were still drawn, and the musty smell suggested that the windows hadn’t been opened in a long time. Old newspapers were scattered all over the worn settee, and the current issue of the Sportsman was spread out on the table. Pop had obviously been studying the form guide.
It was Saturday afternoon and Ted could hear Ken Howard calling the races on 2UE.
‘Wonder where he’s calling them from today,’ Pop said, wiping the sideboard with a rag which smudged the sticky liquid. ‘They barred him from calling the races from the track, so every week he has to find a different vantage point nearby. Last week at the Hill, he hid above an oil storage tank to see the races,’ Pop chuckled. ‘And the week before, at Canterbury, he climbed up a tower above a chookhouse! One of the racing blokes at Randwick threatened to turn a shotgun on him for broadcasting from the roof of a block of flats, but that never put him off. They reckon once he even used a hot-air balloon!’
Pop turned up the volume. ‘Hang on a sec,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bet on this one.’
A moment later Ken Howard’s distinctive voice filled the room. ‘They’re lunging for the wire, and it’s London to a brick that Fancy Pants will make it a hat-trick. Here they come, turning into the home stretch, they’re settling down for the run to the judges, and,’ his voice rose to a new pitch of excitement, ‘it’s Scarlet Pimpernel coming round the straight, Scarlet Pimpernel’s the one to watch, he’s gaining on Fancy Pants, it’s neck and neck, he’s edging ahead now. Boilover!’ he shouted as the outsider won.
Pop Wilson tore up his SP slips in disgust and switched off the wireless.
‘You’ll have to excuse the mess,’ he said as he handed Ted a glass printed with finger marks. ‘I don’t have many visitors these days.’
Ted took a sip of the sickly wine and glanced at the two framed photographs on the mantelpiece.
In the formal studio photograph of a bridal couple, the bride had a kiss-curl over her forehead and a lace veil that trailed over her slinky satin gown. Standing beside her, the groom, stiff in a dark suit, held her arm as he stared into the camera. There were no other family photos. Ted thought about Pop’s daughter Nola and remembered his mother’s advice, but curiosity got the better of him.
‘I was thinking about Nola the other day,’ he said. ‘What’s she doing these days?’
Pop looked out of the window for a moment, drained his glass and, without giving any indication that he’d heard the question, pointed to the other framed photograph. It showed ten lifesavers in woollen swimsuits and head-hugging caps tied under their chins.
‘You wouldn’t know it, but that’s me in the middle,’ he said, pointing to an earnest-faced young man. ‘Of course, I
was better-looking in them days.’
Ted studied the photograph. ‘When was that taken?’
‘Just after Black Sunday,’ Pop said. ‘We made lifesaving history that day.’
He didn’t need any prompting to tell the story, and as he talked Ted sensed that he was reliving the whole incident.
‘It was a stinking hot Sunday in summer, and there were so many sunbathers on the beach that you couldn’t see the sand for people. There were lots on the sandbank in the surf as well. Suddenly the water went flat and it was deathly quiet. Then these massive waves rushed in, one after the other. They crashed into the sandbank and it collapsed, and hundreds of surfers were swept out to sea.’
Pop was shaking his head. ‘I reckon God was watching over Bondi that day because we’d arranged to have a race in the surf that afternoon, so there were at least sixty of us on the beach. Otherwise, Lord only knows what would have happened.’
‘What did happen?’ Ted asked.
‘We manned all the surf-reels, grabbed all the rubber floats, surfboards, whatever we could lay our hands on, and plunged into the surf.
‘The trouble was, the surfers panicked and started pulling at the surf-lines and got in our way. They made it even harder for us to get people out, and all this time huge waves were breaking over us. By the time we managed to get everyone out of the water, there were about seventy people lying on the sand like beached whales, and some of them were unconscious. By then people were running around the beach in a panic, looking for relatives and friends, while us lifesavers, ambulancemen and doctors were going all out trying to revive the victims. It was a miracle that out of all them people only a handful died.’
Empire Day Page 12
