Kath’s mouth stretched into a thin line. ‘She doesn’t care enough to find out if we’re alive or dead, so why should I?’
They sat in silence, then Kath shot Verna a sharp look. ‘Why, do you think I should?’
‘Just wondering. He is her grandson, after all. You’re waiting for her to get in touch, and she’s probably waiting for you to make the first move. Maybe you’re both cut from the same cloth. What was it that Indian fellow used to say, you know, the one in the loincloth that got killed last year? An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind?’
Kath looked at Verna in astonishment. It wasn’t like her to interfere.
As if she’d read her mind, Verna said slowly, ‘I didn’t talk to my father for the last three years of his life and I’ve always been sorry. He went off with someone else and left Mum when I was fifteen. She was bitter and never forgave him. He tried to stay in touch with me and wrote to me, but whenever I mentioned wanting to see him, Mum hit the roof. I didn’t want to upset her so I didn’t write back. I didn’t know what to say. Anyway I thought he’d always be there, so there’d be lots of time to see him, but he died a few years later, and I never did.’
Kath studied her hands for a long time without replying. ‘I know you’re right,’ she said at last, ‘but I just can’t take that first step. And even if I did, it wouldn’t work because I’d be too resentful. Maybe one day I’ll get in touch with her, and maybe I won’t and I’ll be sorry, but I just can’t do it now.’
‘Sorry, love,’ Verna said. ‘Didn’t mean to preach. I was just thinking aloud. I hadn’t thought about my dad for a long time, that’s all.’
As Verna walked back to her place, she wondered whether she would have braved her mother’s anger and contacted her father if someone had told her that time was finite, and missed opportunities caused more heartache than misguided actions.
Chapter 42
The sultry days of February had begun, and at night the air was heavy, still and moist. Clammy after a night spent tossing from side to side on rumpled sheets, Ted sprang out of bed as soon as the first rays of the sun lit up his room. It was Sunday, the sky was a Namatjira blue, and he was going to spend this golden day at the beach with Lilija.
Too excited to wait until it was time to meet her, he sprinted to the tram stop and found, to his delight, that Lilija was already there. Her red sundress accentuated the creamy European pallor of her skin and the silvery blondeness of her hair, and he couldn’t stop looking at her.
‘You know what I wish?’ he murmured into her ear. ‘I want you to be the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night.’
She blushed and nudged him because the middle-aged couple standing nearby were watching them.
‘They’re just jealous,’ Ted whispered, squeezing her hand as they climbed onto the tram. ‘They wish they were as happy as we are.’
For the past six months, the Bondi tram had stopped running on Sundays due to power cuts, but now that the service had been resumed, thousands of sunbathers had come to Bondi Beach. Ted and Lilija stood at the top of the wide flight of stairs leading down to the sand, and looked down on the mosaic of beach towels, umbrellas and suntanned bodies sprawled on sand as pale as lightly baked shortbread. Ted breathed in the sharp and salty air, sniffed the nutty sweetness of coconut oil, and smiled as he felt the tension leave his body.
He spotted a space between the flags, took Lilija’s hand, and they ran down the steps, past the foreign teenagers sitting there. They were an animated lot, and Ted admired their exuberance and camaraderie, but he wondered how any of them ever managed to finish a sentence with everyone calling out, gesticulating and interrupting. Most of the blokes were short but well built, while the girls had hourglass figures accentuated by their tight shorts and halter tops.
‘They call this the Jerusalem Steps, because of the Jewish kids who sit here on Sundays,’ he told Lilija, who turned to have another look.
They spread out their towels, and he lay on his side watching Lilija as she stepped out of her sundress. He swallowed hard as he looked at the swell of her breasts and her small nipples pressing against her black swimsuit. She flopped onto her towel and turned her back to him, twisting her hair away from her neck as he rubbed coconut oil on the soft skin on her long, smooth back. Occasionally his hands slid to the front and brushed against her breasts and he almost stopped breathing. When he’d finished oiling her back, she lay on her stomach, but he stayed on his side with his head propped on his hand, watching the dip of her back and the curve of her buttocks, glad that she couldn’t read his mind.
He sat up and looked at the sunbathers around him. The beach was the city’s social and economic leveller. Outside their homes and offices, without their everyday clothes and trappings of power, the men smoking cigarettes and exchanging pleasantries could be postmen or politicians, doctors, company directors or dustmen. Here, under the blazing sun, in their swimsuits, they were all equal. And those New Australians on the steps, who had brought with them their strange languages and sad memories, they too were part of the fabric of the new Australia that was being woven right here in front of him. Ted thought about his own street, where the newcomers had moved in among the Aussies. Lilija and her parents, Hanny and her mother, and the mysterious Mr Emil. Life was changing and he was witnessing something important, something that might even be worth writing about.
He heard a roar and saw groups of athletic, suntanned men climbing up on each other’s shoulders, forming pyramids. Every few minutes they shouted as the pyramid collapsed and they tumbled down, laughing and spraying sand in all directions.
Two suntanned lifesavers, with caps tied under their chins, ran past him, and he recalled that seven years before, a Japanese shell had hit the clubhouse. As he watched them changing the position of the flags, he remembered Pop Wilson’s story about Black Sunday. Next weekend he’d definitely go and see him.
Too hot to sunbake any longer, he tapped Lilija’s reddening shoulder. ‘Let’s go in and cool down,’ he said and, taking her hand, pulled her towards the sea.
She ran into the water but recoiled whenever the cold waves broke and sprayed her sun-warmed body.
‘Come on, you’re in Australia now, you’ve got to learn to bodysurf,’ he said. ‘Don’t be scared, I’ll show you what to do. See that wave? Dive under it now, before it breaks. Now!’
But she hesitated too long, and a moment later a roller whacked into her back, knocked her off her feet and dragged her under, buffeting her as she tumbled in the water like a strand of seaweed. She came to the surface, coughing and gasping, grazed by the sand and spitting sea water. Glaring at Ted, who was wading towards her, she punched his chest. ‘I nearly drowned,’ she gasped. ‘I want to come out.’
But Ted held onto her hand. ‘Don’t be a quitter,’ he said. ‘You can’t give up after one go. If you fall off a horse, you get straight back on again.’
She frowned. He could see that she didn’t understand about the horse, but she stayed in the water clutching onto him. On her second attempt she got the timing right and surfaced on the other side of the wave with a triumphant smile.
They were running towards their towels when they saw the beach inspector, in his white singlet and Panama hat, bearing down on a young woman in a brief two-piece swimming costume which consisted of a tiny red-and-white polka dot brassiere and a skimpy triangle that barely covered her shapely bottom. She was surrounded by a group of young men whistling, howling and making catcalls. And small boys chanting ‘Hubba hubba, digga digga! Strike me lucky, what a figure!’
Before the girl had time to dip her scarlet-varnished toes into the water, the inspector barred her way.
‘Cover yourself up, young lady, or you’ll have to get off the beach.’
She started to protest in a foreign accent, but the inspector broke in and told her to leave the beach.
Lilija turned to Ted. ‘What does he want? Why does he tell her to go?’
�
�Inspectors have the right to order girls off the beach if they’re wearing indecent bikinis,’ he explained.
Lilija looked amazed. ‘Australians are very old-fashioned.’ While they were drying off, she poked him playfully in the ribs. ‘But you thought girl in indecent bikini looked beautiful, no?’ she said.
He flicked her bottom with his towel. ‘Not as beautiful as you. Come on, let’s have lunch.’
As they walked past Ravesi’s Tearooms, he recalled that his mother had taken him there for a treat on his tenth birthday. He had never seen such a classy place, with starched white cloths, potted palms and waitresses in white caps and aprons, and he still remembered the cupcake with the vanilla icing that dissolved in his mouth. He would take Lilija there for afternoon tea one Sunday. He squeezed her hand in anticipation of all the wonderful Sundays ahead of them.
They bought mint freezes from Bates’s milk bar, hamburgers and chips from the hole in the wall next door, and strolled towards Ben Buckler with their arms around each other.
Outside the boatsheds, an old fisherman was scaling fish and throwing them onto chipped ice in his wicker basket. As they peered at his catch, he pushed his battered hat back from his weather-beaten face and looked up. ‘Two of my mates went out in a dinghy a couple of months back and landed a fourteen-footer. Razor-tooth he was. Just over there,’ and he pointed to the spot where surfboard riders were catching waves a few yards away.
Lilija looked at Ted in alarm. ‘I will not go in the water again.’
He laughed and, taking her hand, helped her climb up the steep vine-carpeted slope above Ben Buckler. The slope flattened out at the top into a tangle of bushland and they made their way past diosma bushes covered in tiny pink flowerets, their branches twisted by wind which blew up from the sea. Lilija pointed at the erect candle-like flowers of the banksia trees and gingerly touched their straw-coloured spikes, delighted by their unexpected softness and cushiony centre.
They found a small shady space between a stand of casuarinas and sat on a soft blanket of fallen needles to eat their hamburgers.
‘I used to come here a lot when I was a kid,’ he said, his voice soft with nostalgia.
In the distance, a large tanker, like a painted ship, sat on the horizon. Closer in, two frail-looking yachts were sailing towards the Heads, and the lifesavers’ boat was speeding towards a swimmer caught in a rip some distance from the beach. Lilija shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted at the waves, trying to spot razor-tooth sharks lurking in the depths below them. Seagulls screeched overhead, swooping down with their sharp predatory beaks on the potato chips Ted threw to them, and flying away with the food before their rivals could snatch it away.
Suddenly he was telling Lilija about his childhood. With her head resting in his lap, and her fair hair fanned out on the dark green needles, he told her that he used to come here as a kid to play cops and robbers with his mates. He pointed to Nosey’s cottage and told her that sometimes they’d dared each other to go into the haunted house and stay there alone at night. Later, as a teenager, he’d come here whenever he wanted to be alone. Like the time he’d found out that his father would never come home again.
Then he told her about the war years, about Japanese submarines in the harbour shelling Sydney and hitting a street not far from where they were sitting now. He told her about the blackouts, the drills, the buckets of sand in the classrooms, and having to crawl through wire entanglements to get to the beach.
Lilija stroked his cheek while he talked, but after a while he tailed off. How trivial those experiences must seem to her, compared to what she and her family had gone through, with so many of their relatives being deported to Siberia, and then going through the war in Latvia where her father had had such terrible experiences that he still had nightmares. And after all that, they’d had to flee from the Red Army, live in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany, then start a new life in a foreign country.
As he lay beside her, he felt dizzy with romantic intoxication. It seemed as if his whole body was vibrating. He reached over and eased the straps of her swimsuit down over her shoulders and whispered, ‘Let me look at you. I just want to look at you.’
A moment later he was kissing her breasts and sliding his hand down her belly until it rested between her thighs and he could feel the thrilling heat of her body.
‘Not here,’ she whispered, and pushed his hand away.
He looked into her face and kissed her. He could wait.
Hands linked behind his neck, he lay back and gazed at the vastness of the sky. He felt a surge of power, of faith in himself, and sensed the depth and width of existence that his father had hinted at. He gazed at Lilija and felt gloriously connected with the entire universe.
The late-afternoon sun was slanting through the branches and when Ted sat up he saw that the uppermost boughs of the eucalypts and acacias were glazed with a syrupy amber light. Without speaking, they held each other and gazed at the sun falling towards the sea and disappearing behind the horizon.
When the last tinge of colour had faded from the sky, Lilija looked nervously at her wristwatch. As she turned her beachbag upside down to shake out the sand, her wallet dropped to the ground and a small photograph fell out.
‘What’s that?’ Ted asked.
Gently she brushed off the specks of soil and handed it to him. It was an old, sepia-hued photograph of a wintry scene in Europe with snow on the ground. A pretty girl of about twelve, muffled in a woollen scarf and heavy hooded coat, was standing beside a uniformed man, her mittened hands clasping his as she smiled into his face.
‘When was this taken?’ he asked.
‘In Riga in 1942, I think so,’ she said. ‘My father was on leave from army.’
‘Which army was that?’
‘Latvian army of course!’
Ted studied the peaked cap, khaki uniform and wide leather belt. There was an armband on the sleeve and as he looked at the emblem he felt as though he’d just been dropped from a great height.
‘Something is wrong?’ Lilija asked.
He shook his head. Despising himself for the deception, he said in a tight, thin voice, ‘We’ve got a photographic section at work. If you like, I can get your photo enlarged for you.’
Then he pulled her to her feet. ‘Come on, it’s getting late. We’d better go.’
Suddenly it was evening, and as they walked back along Campbell Parade Ted saw that the beach had emptied. Its colours had faded like Lilija’s old photograph, and its sounds had become dull and muted. Ted was aware that she was saying something but he found it hard to concentrate on the words.
Four years before, while he was still a cadet, he’d accompanied a reporter to an area of the Blue Mountains where bushfires had been raging. Ted had never forgotten the haunted expression on one man’s face as he stared at the devastation that had once been his home. ‘It’s all gone,’ he’d kept whispering over and over. ‘It was there this morning and now there’s nothing left.’
He’d felt sorry for the man in his numb, confused state, but now he understood. That was how you felt when everything you cared about suddenly disintegrated before your eyes and was reduced to a pile of ashes.
Chapter 43
Bent over the rolltop desk in the front room, with his Latvian–English dictionary open in front of him, Paulis Olmanis was composing his report. He usually gave it verbally to the Commonwealth Investigation Service agent whenever they met on Campbell Parade, but this time he felt a written report would better serve his interests.
The agent had intimated that the Commonwealth Investigation Service was about to be replaced by a new body, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation. Paulis knew from bitter experience that once these security departments changed names, they usually made drastic staff changes to justify their existence. Whether his contact was moved upwards, downwards or sideways, Paulis suspected that he himself would fall into the crack created by the shift, unless he moved fast to prove his impo
rtance to Australia’s new security organisation.
Closing the door so that Marija wouldn’t interrupt him with her tiresome questions and offers of coffee, he picked up his fountain pen and began to write.
Frequently consulting his well-thumbed dictionary, he worded his report with great care to indicate his respect for the current organisation and to compliment it on its vigilance in safeguarding the country from the evils of Communism, while at the same time expressing the conviction that the work of making the country safe from Communism would now proceed even faster and more efficiently.
He took the opportunity to remind them that he’d already justified their faith in him by reporting on the pro-Communist attitude of several Sydney residents, including a young reporter he’d been watching, and he hoped that he’d be permitted to continue assisting them in their important work. In fact, he now had firm evidence that this particular individual had made contact with a Communist action group calling itself the Anti-Fascist Society, and he was ready to provide them with more details. Wishing the new department every success, he signed his name with a flourish and blotted the report.
Paulis leaned back in his chair, reread what he’d written and smiled at his own subtlety. They’d soon see they weren’t dealing with an amateur, and they were sure to take the bait he’d so skilfully dangled in front of them by hinting that he had more information.
On his way to the Bondi Junction post office to buy a postage stamp, he raised his hat to the white-haired woman whose son had written those malicious lies about Baltic migrants. Giving her a stiff bow, he said, ‘How do you do,’ as they did in the English films, and quickly crossed the road.
Paulis had spent the past two weeks observing the comings and goings of the Anti-Fascist Society, most of whom he suspected of being Communists and Jews, and he hadn’t been able to believe his luck when this reporter had turned up. Naturally he’d wasted no time in telling his daughter that it was a good thing he’d stopped her from seeing this fellow who was obviously a Communist. She’d just stared at him and walked out of the room without saying a word, but he knew that in time she’d realise he was right.
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