Grigor had slipped into her life as though falling from the stars that danced above. He would tell her tales just like Kooradgie had. His stories of life in Germany seemed like the other worlds she and Euroke had imagined would greet them at the end of a train journey, each a circus tent containing a different spectacle.
Other times he tried to teach her things about the world, knowing that she had not had much schooling. “On the one hand, the government reforms law at a snail’s pace in the interest of the bourgeoisie — that’s the middle class — and removes obstacles to industry. It allows workers to be exploited by the rich. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie — that’s the middle class remember — leaves all the actual power in the hands of the government. The bourgeoisie buys gradual social emancipation through the immediate renunciation of political power. They find this acceptable because they fear the proletariat — that’s the working class, like you and me — more than the government.”
When Elizabeth seemed bewildered, Grigor smiled affectionately. He told her that Germans knew more about such things because they had the advantage of being the most theoretical people in Europe. “But I have come to spread the message here. We need to safeguard the true international spirit which allows no nationalism to arise and we need to capture that spirit which welcomes the proletariat movement no matter which nation it comes from.” He looked at her earnestly, as though he would consume her. She solemnly nodded without really understanding what he was saying.
“We are outsiders, you and I,” Grigor would say, his mind far away, as hers was, but in a different realm, a different geography. Both longing for somewhere else. And lying in the grass, looking up at the Mea-Mei, Elizabeth could almost imagine she was twelve again, Euroke by her side, the smell of the campfire, of roasting bundar. It was the closest she had felt to being home again.
11
1922
SHE WOULD HAVE MARRIED Grigor Brecht to avoid living in the house with Mr Howard who had ignored her since his unwanted violations ended, to avoid the sharp tongue of Mrs Howard, the accusing looks of Miss Grainger, and the ever-present figure of Mrs Carlyle, the angel of dark things. She said “yes” because, along with all these things to flee, all those longed-for escapes, she felt that Grigor really did love her, that when he looked into her face, into her eyes, he saw her; and she felt that he loved what he saw. When he held her hand in his, she felt safe.
Miss Grainger only hardened towards her more. If it wasn’t the seduction of Mr Howard and the stealing of her dreams, she could not believe that the little darkie was going to marry a Kraut. That Elizabeth would cohabitate, fornicate and spawn with one who smelt of immorality—the result would be a bastard breed of black Huns. The thought would make her shake with revulsion as she would angrily set the table or count out the silverware. As soon as Elizabeth would enter the room, Miss Grainger would loudly slam down a knife or a spoon, give Elizabeth an accusing stare, and leave the room.
It was Miss Grainger’s undisguised loathing that made Elizabeth happiest to get away, more than Mrs Howard’s tangible resentment and petty meanness, as much as the constant fear that Mr Howard would resume his night-time visits. Only Xiao-ying, who understood her need to escape, offered a sincere blessing that she find happiness.
“I wish I could come to the ceremony. Why are you not having it here?”
“Grigor says it will be better to do it in our new home, far from here. And except for you, I can’t think of anyone here that I would invite. But,” she added, touching Xiao-ying’s hand, “I will wear the brooch you gave me, so it will be almost like having you there.”
Xiao-ying smiled back comfortingly. “Almost. I wonder what your parents would say if they knew. Weren’t they looking for someone for you to marry?”
“I guess I found someone on my own,” Elizabeth replied softly. “Grigor says that when we are married, he will come with me to find them.”
She parted from Xiao-ying with a promise to write, “I’m not very good at it but our letters will help me get better.”
Xiao-ying gave her a hug and whispered, “You are my best friend.”
“And you’re mine,” she replied.
As Elizabeth walked slowly back to the Howards’, she did wonder what her parents would think if they knew of her plans. While she would never have wanted to disappoint her mother and father, knowing that Grigor had come to save her and was offering to give her a home washed away any fear of their disapproval. And she remembered what Miss Grainger had said so spitefully to her: if they had wanted to get her back, they would have come for her by now. They may not have come for her yet; but Grigor had. With this resolve, she left for a ceremony in a Registry far away from Parkes and for nights she could sleep through without waking once in fear.
I dream that I am home again.
Euroke is near. I can hear him.
I can smell the cooking bundar wafting in the air.
I am home.
I run towards home.
Faster and faster. So fast I fly.
I do not stop until I awake.
Grigor had taken Elizabeth to a thriving town, behind the Blue Mountains, at the end of 1922. There he worked as a photographer on the local newspaper and spent his spare time organising unions and his local branch of the Communist Party. He fulfilled many of the promises that he had made to Elizabeth. He gave her a home where she could run things as she liked and did not have to take orders from anyone else. He did take her to the moving pictures and he continued to tell her stories about his life in Germany and to teach her about the oppression of the working class. But he never took her home to Dungalear.
Grigor Brecht’s arrival in Australia had been less romantic and less noble than the way he had described. It was not a principled political exile and it wasn’t based on a desire to ensure that the workers of the world unite, as he claimed. Nor was it modelled on Marx’s exile from his same country, his same city, as he so often described it.
What Grigor had not told Elizabeth when he lectured her about the exploitation of workers was that he had been born in Cologne to a wealthy family. His family home had a coziness, created by rugs and wallpaper of different colours and patterns, knick-knacks, soft armchairs and overcrowded rustic furniture. This affluent life of privilege was one that did not teach him that there were things he couldn’t have and that might be denied to him. He was blessed with opportunity and with strong, clean, clear looks. In his youth, his face and physique opened many doors for him, and he never questioned the opportunities that were given to him, taking it as given: tailored clothes, an excellent education, nannies, hunting in the country, automobiles.
His first interests were not philosophical but aesthetic. Even as a young child he would fix his eye on objects, colours and compositions. He liked drawing and painting and was fascinated by light, texture and form.
From an early age, he felt an affinity with his city, felt connected to the moods of the streets and the feel of the history that hung in the air like a fine mist and coated his body like a second layer of skin. As a young boy he would wander the university and the concert halls. He would sit in the pews of the Cathedral of St Peter and St Mary that had taken over six centuries to finish. He could marvel at what man could achieve with his hands, whether the gothic splendor of a place of worship or the fine ornaments within the church itself: the exquisitely crafted high altar and the Gero cross and its dark Jesus with a pot-belly and man-breasts, the oldest western sculpture. In the grandeur of the cathedral, he could feel not a spiritual awe but a wonder at the capacity of man to create and defy the centuries. Here rested the remains of the ashes of the three kings who visited Jesus. Here the Mailander Madonna from the thirteenth century lay. Here he sensed a tradition, a heritage, as though Cologne was the beginning of all civilisation. The beauty of what ordinary men could build hypnotised him. He consumed life, experiences and people, moving selfishly, proprietarily, through the streets of a place that felt like a physical manifestation o
f his persona. He would return home from his adventures with descriptions and sketches, and excitedly describe his discoveries, as though he were the first soul to encounter them.
As he grew into his late teens, he was drawn to the less affluent parts of Cologne, to the Reihenhausers filled with working-class families. He marvelled at the stoic nobility of the poor, was fascinated by those who had to work, those who centuries ago would have had to carve the stone for cathedrals and spend a lifetime making tributes to God. His home had provided seclusion from this part of the world, and once he discovered them he was intrigued by all those outside of his wealthy realm.
Grigor could not express his sense of wonder at the working class until he read the words of Marx and Engels — a language that articulated the principled humanity of oppressed struggle. He found his truth among the well-worn pages: “Communists were the allies and theoretical vanguard of the proletariat.” And as he read the text, he knew that this was him, identified and described: a communist — ally and vanguard, friend of the proletariat, unmasker of his own bourgeois culture.
Much to Grigor’s frustration, his mother and father were far more tolerant of his ways than he would have liked.
“You are right, of course, Grigor,” his mother would sigh. “It is a crime that we have this big, comfortable house and fine food on our table and a library with so many books in it to fill you with ideas. I shall speak to your father and ask him to do something about it.”
His mother, who had been a nurse before she married, had seen the face of human misery that Grigor romanticised. Grigor resented her gentle ribbing and its undertone of greater life experiences. His father, a doctor, had a less sarcastic view of Grigor’s socialism: “Grigor, we all start out as idealists and end up cynics. It is only natural,” he would say with a paternalistic slap on the back.
Amongst his friends, he would rail against his parents, labelling them as part of the problem of class exploitation and disassociate himself from their legacy. While he continued to eat the plentiful food at their table, read the plethora of books in their library and sleep in his comfortable bed, he showed rebellion by dressing in second-hand clothes that were far from fashionable.
“No one looked so poor who lived so well,” his mother would call after him as he skulked out the door to meet his friends.
Karl Marx published his first article in a newspaper, Rheinische Zeitung, in Grigor’s home town almost fifty years before Grigor was born. Marx later became an editor of the paper but was forced to resign because of his vocal criticism of political and social conditions. He went to Paris, where he collaborated with Engels but he returned to Cologne and in 1849 was arrested on charges of “incitement to armed insurrection” for his writings in Neue Rheinische Zeitung. After his acquittal he was expelled from Germany. The injustice of Marx’s persecution infuriated Grigor and he despised the elite of his town even more for the stain he felt this history left on all of them. He felt different and detached from the privileged class he was born into by his understanding of social injustice. His family’s comfort began to embarrass him and he began to avoid family events and occasions. He sought to enrage his parents by missing dinner and birthday parties, even one held in his honour, relishing the conflict his behaviour created and savouring their anger.
Grigor embraced the socialist rhetoric as though he were embracing the people themselves. He captured them — with photographs, another luxury his background could afford him. He wanted to document these silently dignified workers, their worn eyes staring blankly back at his open lens. He collected books like John Thomson’s Streetlife in London with its images of London’s working class and Jacob August Riis’s studies of the slums in How the Other Half Lives and Children of the Poor. He was drawn most strongly to the American Lewis Wickes Hine, whose work publicised the poverty of immigrants, miners, ironworkers, steelworkers, and child labourers. That these books had led to social change placed such photographers on the same footing as Marx for Grigor and through them he could see his own future: to document the quiet suffering of the masses.
In his youth, when photography was the domain of only a few because of the cost of large cameras and glass photographic plates, he could pursue his passion without much competition. Even when the introduction of roll film and the box camera brought photography within the reach of more and more people, the freedom to pursue a profession in snapping shots as one felt like it was still only open to few. Grigor found his calling in documenting the disadvantaged and dispossessed; he found a livelihood in the increased demand for photographs to illustrate newspapers and magazines, and for advertising and publicity.
Grigor’s fascination with the working classes culminated in his liaison with Esmeralda, a kitchen maid. This lesson ended when Esmeralda became pregnant and named Grigor as the father. Far from keeping his whispered promises to the young coal-eyed girl, his parents gave him money and arranged for him to go abroad. He had been curious about Esmeralda but, faced with having to look after her, realised he did not want to marry her, did not want to be a father and did not want to live in the poverty that would await him if he did.
It was only when he left Cologne, at age twenty-one, and he found himself in another landscape, that he came to realise his sense of self. His Marxism had defined his character but it was shaped around a solid core — the heart of who he was. This would, he realised, carry with him wherever he went, whoever he spoke to, whatever else he chose to be. He was the descendant of Celts, Romans, Gauls, Charlemagne, Teutonic knights, Lutherans, Huns, Visigoths, Saxons, and Carolingians. He had the tradition of Bach, Handel, Herder, Goethe, Musil, Hadyn, Mozart, Beethoven, Hegel, Engels, Marx, and Nietzsche. All that had seemed to merely touch him on the outside as he walked through the intertwined streets of Cologne now seemed embedded in every fibre, hair and skin cell. No matter where he was, this history remained unchanged.
His exile made him long for stability, something solid and reliable; a place to belong. In Australia, a new society still building its traditions, he had floated until he met Elizabeth.
He had seen her before their encounter in the Chinaman’s store. Grigor would have stepped in and saved her that first moment he saw her rushing towards the railway station. A slender, almost nothing figure, she passed him, a bursting rose-coloured welt across her dark cheek. He followed her and stood from a distance, watching as she stood on the station platform, crying and looking down the tracks, as if expecting a train. She, in her distress, did not notice him. He was about to step forward, offer solace and sanctuary, but was cut off by an older woman with honey-coloured hair who led the downcast girl away.
When Elizabeth appeared in the Chinaman’s shop, Grigor could not let her slip by him again. His fascination with the shy, sweet-chocolate girl — she was still a girl — was not unlike that which had drawn him to Esmeralda. It was not just her distress that compelled him to intervene; she was the oppressed class he longed to rescue. She was the outcast he wanted to prove he accepted. His intellectual superiority and Elizabeth’s peculiar cultural beliefs, her darkness, her solitude, her need for him, gave him the opportunity to be benevolent. He knew that he was her best hope for a better fate and that she knew that too. He had saved her in a way that he now realised he should have saved Esmerelda but for his youth and immaturity. He could look into Elizabeth, almost through her, as though she were smoky glass. She was easily possessed — her acquiescence betrayed her need for him — and, he had to admit, he had, for the first time, found someone whom he loved, albeit in his own private, introverted way.
Grigor found stability and a sense of belonging in his small Lithgow home. He assumed Elizabeth had found it too. His wife, his dusky rescued girl, tugged at something inside him and he could not understand how familial attachments such as Elizabeth professed could not have been supplanted by their own union. He had been so easily able to let his own go, had no need to get back to his parents and a life he had left in shame. As Elizabeth ceased mentioning her f
amily to him, he assumed that she had found her centre elsewhere, just as he had.
At night, into the chilled air, Grigor and Elizabeth would still talk, but rather than reminisce, their conversation was full of the minutiae of their daily lives and their modest hopes for the near future. Grigor was happy with how things had turned out, though anyone who knew him, even saw him passing in the street, would not believe that in his sturdy seriousness he was capable of contentment, let alone joy. He had grown into a man who needed very little and he welcomed the comfort and the ease of Elizabeth: a wife who worked hard, asked for little, and, now that they were married, never said no to his needs.
Over the years that she would share his life, her body would grow soft in places from childbirth and hard in others from the work of motherhood. The children were for her, not him. He hated the noise, the trivialities, and the neediness of the children. He liked that she wanted them, that maternity made her happy. He had promised to give her a home and a family, and he believed when he saw her fussing over the needs and wants of her children that he had been true to his word.
Grigor found his strengths outside the family — within his union meetings, his Party meetings and through the vigilant lens of his camera. He was still, at heart, a man moved by ideas and images. The 35-millimetre camera had arrived—as he liked to note — from Germany. Through his work he explored its compactness and its economy. He experimented with finely powdered magnesium as an artificial illuminant — the powder, sprinkled in a trough and fired with a percussion cap, would throw a brilliant flash of light against the coal-darkened miners, their stunned image preserved amongst a cloud of acrid smoke.
12
1942
THROUGH THE YEARS Elizabeth came to love Grigor deeply, and such faithful affection can forgive character flaws and human failings. She understood him and knew he would feel betrayed by her desire to return to the very life he felt he had saved her from. She had sought escape from the Howards; Grigor had sought to rescue her not just from servitude to the Howards but also from what he perceived to be an earlier life of drudgery. And, with her children around her, she could never say that life with Grigor had not made her happy.
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