Empire Day

by Diane Armstrong

  Late one night, two Gestapo in belted trenchcoats and grey fedoras pulled low over their foreheads banged on his door and, ignoring his protestations and explanations, pushed him, together with Gisela, five-year-old Heinz and seven-year-old Renate, into their black Opel.

  It took Emil a long time to comprehend that although he didn’t go to synagogue or observe the dietary laws, to Hitler he was as Jewish as the rabbi, and his fame wouldn’t help him. In those first disorienting days in the camp, his protestations that he was a famous magician met with derision. ‘If you’re a magician, why don’t you disappear?’ the SS guards mocked him. While flogging him, they laughed and goaded him to turn their whip into a rabbit. Gisela and the children had been taken to the women’s part of the camp. Desperate to help them, he often saved half his piece of clay-like bread and slipped it across the fence to them.

  He’d been in the camp for six months when one of the SS guards recognised him and the word soon spread that he really was the Great Novello. Now the Nazi devils came to his wooden bunk every night, shook him awake and dragged him to their quarters, ordering him to entertain them while they drank. Without even the basic magic apparatus, he’d put together a show using coins, cigarettes, a grimy pack of playing cards and a piece of string. Like children, they were fascinated by his tricks and demanded to see them again and again. He despised these sadists and murderers, and wished he had the moral strength to refuse to perform for them, but his new status as the camp magician meant special privileges, which included a little more food and a little less brutality. Best of all, it meant he was protecting Gisela and the children, because the commandant assured him that as long as he continued to entertain them, his family would be safe.

  Deception is a magician’s stock-in-trade, but as Emil was to discover, his masters surpassed him at this art. He believed them when they told him that Gisela and the children had been moved to a camp where they would have more food and better conditions. But they’d double-crossed him. By the sleight of hand that the Nazis had perfected, the bodies of Gisela, Heinz and Renate had been transformed into the sweetish black smoke that poured from the chimneys looming over the camp.

  Emil was one of the walking skeletons the liberators found among the stinking pile of cadavers in the camp, staring into space, almost too weak to blink or to swallow his own saliva. He no longer cared whether he lived or died. He hated the Nazis but he hated himself even more. One thought burned in his brain. Never again. As long as he lived, he would never perform magic again.

  As he watched the ambulance officers carrying the sick boy into the house, he stroked the satin lining of the coffins his children had never had. He’d kept his vow. But he had performed one final trick: he’d made himself virtually invisible. Magic had now become irrelevant. His whole life had been a sickening illusion, and Australia had become his own substitution trunk.

  Chapter 32

  School had broken up for the Christmas holidays, and from his chair by the window Meggsie could hear the girls giggling as their skipping ropes thudded on the footpath. Jimmy Noble’s dad had made him a wooden billycart, and Meggsie could hear it rattling as the wheels scraped along the ground. Jimmy was giving some of his mates a turn, pushing them down the street, while the kids waiting impatiently on the pavement urged them to hurry up. Every now and again he heard a girl whining, ‘Stop pushing! I’m telling on you!’ or ‘That’s not fair, it’s my turn!’

  Meggsie couldn’t see much through the window but he listened out for Hanny’s voice and hoped that she’d come over. Although her mother had forbidden her to visit him for fear of catching polio, Hanny would sneak across the road, stand on tiptoe on a couple of bricks and talk to him through the window. Sometimes when her mother was at work, Hanny came inside and talked to him from the doorway of his bedroom. Unlike almost everyone else who came to see him, she talked to him just as she always had, and for those brief moments he felt normal again. In between her visits she sent him little notes and sketched funny little cartoon faces at the bottom which made him laugh.

  Beverley sometimes dropped in with a book. Last week she’d lent him Treasure Island, but he couldn’t concentrate on it. He’d been home for two weeks now, but he couldn’t get interested in anything. In the hospital all the other children were sick too, but here he was the odd one out. His arms and hands were still weak, and all he could do was lie in bed or sit in his chair, listening to the other kids running around and having fun, and he felt more like a prisoner than ever. Whenever he heard them talking about going to the beach, he realised with a shock that he might never paddle in the waves again, or feel the warm sand between his toes. At their mothers’ prompting, some of his mates dropped in now and again with a dog-eared comic book, or his brothers would come in and sit on the edge of his bed and give him a game of checkers or fiddlesticks, but they didn’t know what to say to him now that he couldn’t play footie or cricket. Outside, the sun was shining, and after a few minutes they’d start fidgeting and find an excuse to run off again.

  Uncle Bill, who was always collecting old tools, discarded appliances and bits of scrap metal, loved tinkering and fixing things, and soon after Meggsie had come home he had presented him with a contraption he’d made. It was something between a pushchair, a wheelbarrow and a pram, with a flat base and small wheels, so that Meggsie could get out into the street if someone pushed him. He hadn’t been able to wait to go outside with the others, but as soon as his mother had wheeled him out, the other kids had rushed up to ask if they could push him, and he’d felt like a sideshow freak at the Easter Show. When he’d seen some boys pointing at him, whispering and giggling that Meggsie was a cripple, he had asked to be wheeled back inside. After that, he had refused to go outside again.

  He looked around when his mum came in to make the bed. As she helped him into his armchair, she said, ‘Come on, love, go outside for a bit. You’re looking that peaky, you need some sun on you.’

  But Meggsie shrugged and shook his head. ‘I’m not going out there for them to make fun of me,’ he muttered, and his mum reluctantly gave in.

  Back in the kitchen, Kath opened the Daily Standard. Reading about the terrible things that befell others sometimes helped to take her mind off her own problems. There were the usual sensational stories about murders, bashings, thefts and tragedies, but today they only added to her despair. She was about to put the paper down when a small article caught her eye. It was headed KENNY POLIO CLINICS A SUCCESS IN THE UK.

  The article was about a bush nurse from Queensland called Sister Kenny who had apparently found a way of helping kids with polio, using methods that differed from those used by the doctors. Kath sat forward and read on. Although Sister Kenny had encountered considerable opposition in Australia, from the medical profession as well as from the massage association, her unorthodox treatment had been accepted in America and in the United Kingdom, where clinics using her methods had been established.

  Kath reread the article carefully to make sure she had understood it. Why had no one ever told her there was another way of treating polio? No matter how strange it was, it might be worth trying. According to the article there was a clinic at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney that used the Kenny method. Kath underlined the name and cut out the article. For the first time since bringing Meggsie home, she felt a little hope.

  Chapter 33

  On the evening of the school dance, Hania put on her pink organdie dress, did up her new black ankle-strap shoes, let her thick dark hair out, parted it in the middle and slipped blue clips on either side. Her mother hadn’t made any comment about the dress Aunty Muriel had made. When Hania had carried it home, she’d looked expectantly at her mother, who had given it a brief, critical glance and turned away without a word. But now, when she saw Hania wearing it, she caught her breath. ‘You look beautiful,’ she said as she tied the sash around Hania’s waist. She blew her nose several times even though Hania knew she didn’t have a cold. But her mother’s reactions we
re always strange and inexplicable so she didn’t give it another thought. Impatient to go to the dance, she gave her mother a perfunctory peck on the cheek and ran across the road to Beverley’s place.

  The two girls were chattering excitedly and walking so quickly that Beverley’s mother could hardly keep up with them. The hall, which was usually bare except for the photograph of King George VI on the wall, had been decorated with balloons and streamers, and when Hania went inside she glowed with pleasure at the envious glances of the other girls. She felt like Cinderella at the ball.

  Miss Charlton, Hania’s teacher, went over to the gramophone, placed a record on the turntable, cranked the handle, and the music started. Standing around the edge of the hall, the girls looked eagerly at the boys, trying to catch the eye of the good-looking ones. With their hair slicked down and parted on one side, and their white short-sleeved shirts neatly tucked into their long trousers, the boys didn’t resemble the untidy tearaways who chased each other around the playground on school days. But now, subdued by the formality of the occasion and the expectation of having to ask girls to dance, they hung back, fidgeting and looking at the floor, until one of the male teachers pushed them forward. When they’d chosen their partners, they stumbled around, often treading on the girls’ toes as they lolloped in the wrong direction in the progressive barn dance or forgot the Canadian two-step, which their PE teacher had been drumming into them over the past few weeks.

  Shortly after the record started playing ‘Come Back to Erin’, Barry Skelton planted himself in front of Hania and mumbled something that she took to be an invitation to dance. Barry was the most popular boy in sixth class. The girls swooned over him because he was tall, had a lock of fair hair that almost covered his left eye, and a devil-may-care smile. What made him even more attractive was the fact that he never took any notice of them. As Hania walked onto the dance floor with his arm clamped around her waist, she saw her schoolfriends watching enviously.

  But they’d hardly done two turns of the Pride of Erin when her neck began to itch. Within a few minutes her eyes were red and streaming, her nose was running, and there were big red welts on her neck which she couldn’t stop scratching. To make things worse, everyone was staring at her, pointing and whispering. She tried to keep dancing, but the itching was so bad that she had to stop, and she stood there, not knowing what to do until Aunty Muriel rushed forward and said she was taking her home.

  Midnight had struck for Cinderella, and as Hania walked from the hall, feeling as though everyone was staring at her, she wished the ground would swallow her up.

  As soon as her mother saw her, she ran to the telephone box to call a Polish doctor she’d met on the ship to Australia. He arrived within an hour, and after examining Hania he said that it was an allergic reaction, but whether it was to a plant, an insect bite or something she’d eaten, he couldn’t tell. Her mother, however, had no doubts. ‘It’s that dress,’ she said, barely able to suppress a note of triumph. ‘You’re allergic to that material.’

  By the following morning the swelling had gone down, the welts had disappeared and there was no sign of the allergy that had ruined her night. And to add her to misery, Christmas was only a few days away.

  After giving Meggsie a bed bath and massaging his back and legs, Kath went into the kitchen to make the Christmas pudding. Whenever she thought about Christmas, she let out a long sigh. She’d managed to scrape together a few shillings to buy the boys some comic books, socks and a cricket ball, but she’d only be able to put rabbit on the table this year — a turkey was out of the question. Lost in her thoughts, she was stirring her worries into the dough along with the sultanas, and throwing in a few silver threepences, when the doorbell rang.

  She wiped her floury hands on her apron and hurried to the door, but before she got there she could hear hoarse voices singing ‘Jingle Bells’. Collecting money for some charity, she supposed. She opened the door and was about to say she was sorry she couldn’t spare anything, when she stepped back in surprise. On her doorstep stood Mick Kelly and Bob Longley from the pub, and they were struggling with a large cardboard box.

  ‘This fell off a truck the other day and we thought maybe you could use it,’ Mick said. Thrusting the box into her hands, he mumbled, ‘Merry Christmas, love,’ and before she could thank them, they’d gone.

  Inside the box was the biggest turkey she’d ever seen, a leg of ham, a bag of potatoes and a box of biscuits.

  Kath rushed to Meggsie’s room. ‘It’s a miracle, that’s what it is,’ she kept saying as she sat down on the edge of his bed. ‘We’ll have a proper Christmas now. All we need is another miracle to make you well.’

  Chapter 34

  For weeks Hania had heard the other children talking about Christmas. Beverley and her family were going to Thirroul to visit her Aunty Tessie, but when Aunty Muriel invited Hania to go with them, her mother tried to talk her out of it.

  ‘Christmas is a family day for Christians,’ she said. ‘You’ll be out of place.’

  But Hania was adamant. It was bad enough missing out on the Christmas tree, the presents and the festivities she loved; she wasn’t going to miss out on the outing as well. Away from her mother, with Beverley and her family, she’d be able to forget she was an outsider, and feel she was part of something for once.

  On the train she sat next to Beverley, her nose pressed against the grimy window as she stared out at the backs of red-tiled cottages with their outdoor wooden dunnies and the skinny dogs running around and barking in backyards. Every few minutes the train ground to a halt at another station, until finally they reached Thirroul.

  Aunty Tessie, Uncle Dick and their three children lived in a fibro cottage facing the beach. They kept chooks out the back, and as soon as they arrived, all the children rushed out to see if there were any eggs. Inside, the men were arguing about football, and Uncle Bill told Hania that his brother used to play for the Butchers, the local rugby league team. There was a strong piney smell in the lounge room where the Christmas tree stood, hung with brightly coloured paper chains, tinsel, shiny baubles, and an angel with a silver star on top. As they stood admiring the tree, Uncle Dick said that now the cedar forests around Thirroul had been logged, real Christmas trees were hard to come by, but he’d managed to get one for the kids.

  Exciting boxes and parcels wrapped in bright Christmas paper were piled up under the tree. Except for the fact the tree stood in a bucket and was propped up with bricks, it reminded Hania of Christmas at her foster parents’ home in Poland. Despite her mother’s warning that she’d be intruding, they all made her feel as if she were part of the family, and Beverley’s aunty told her to call her Aunty Tessie like the other kids did.

  After the roast turkey, ham and baked potatoes, Aunty Tessie brought out a steaming Christmas pudding and warned them to eat slowly to make sure they didn’t swallow the threepences she’d put inside. Beverley’s little sister Daisy was the first to squeal that she’d bitten into one. Aunty Tessie had been very generous with the coins, because by the time the pudding was finished, all the children had found at least one.

  When they’d finished lunch, Hania hung back while Beverley and her little sister and cousins were given their presents but, to her surprise, she hadn’t been forgotten. Aunty Tessie handed her a small parcel wrapped in Christmas paper, and said, ‘Merry Christmas, love.’ It was a book called Seven Little Australians. Hania was thrilled to be given the book, but the best thing was being included.

  As they travelled home on the train, Hania found it difficult to join in Beverley’s light-hearted chatter. The elation she’d felt at Thirroul was replaced by a feeling of sadness. Being included in the Nobles’ Christmas celebration didn’t mean she belonged. As the train rattled towards Sydney in the soft darkness of the summer night, it struck her that being included had accentuated the fact that she was different.

  There was only one way to stop being different, and for the rest of the journey she thought about the i
dea that had been germinating in her mind for some time.

  Hania had often passed St Xavier’s church while walking home from Bondi Junction, and she had sometimes paused, wondering whether she dared go inside and carry out her plan, but a few days after Christmas she summoned up the courage to enter. Tentatively she swung open the heavy wooden door of the old parish church and looked inside, surprised at the austere interior. It didn’t have the rich ornamentation, vivid paintings and dramatic atmosphere of the churches in Poland, but as soon as she came to the stone baptismal font and the half-burnt votive candles, a feeling of peace descended on her. It was like being held by strong, loving arms.

  In front of the altar the priest was talking to the old sacristan, and she crept in and sat down on a wooden pew. She breathed in the smell of incense and candle wax and gazed at the white lace-edged cloth over the altar, with the bowl of roses on top and the crucifix above it.

  Their conversation over, the sacristan hobbled across the transept and his limping footsteps resounded in the empty church. He disappeared through a side door, and the priest, a tall figure in a black cassock, entered the confessional. Wondering what to do, Hania crept towards it and stood outside, peering through the latticed screen.

  ‘Have you come to confess, my child?’ the priest asked.

  Taken aback, she didn’t know what to say or how to address him in English. ‘No,’ she stammered.

  ‘I haven’t seen you in here before,’ he said. ‘Are you from this parish?’