Bob rose and walked around the table towards Danny. “I’m your brother, Danny. I’m here for you.”
As he walked closer to Danny, Danny landed a punch squarely in Bob’s stomach. Bob curled over from the pain. Danny had left before Bob could recover from the force of the blow.
That night, Bob went into Patricia’s room and lay on her bed, watching as she sat in a chair by the open window and embroidered a scarf. “This would look good on our Daisy,” she said sadly, holding her handiwork up for Bob to admire.
“Danny doesn’t seem very happy,” he said, his fingers tracing the flowers on Patricia’s bedspread. “I don’t understand. He wanted to leave the home so badly and now he seems to hate being here. And everything I do seems to make him more upset, more angry.”
“I know how you feel. I tried so hard with Daisy and I still don’t know what I did wrong. I keep wondering what I could’ve done differently. Things were much harder for her than they were for me.” She stopped her sewing and looked at Bob. “Danny has always been much quieter than you, a bit more sensitive. And remember, he was so young when Mother … passed away. And younger than you when he went into the orphanage. You were only six so he can’t have been more than four. So little. We have to be patient with him.”
Bob nodded in silent agreement, placing a hand on his stomach where it was still throbbing from Danny’s punch.
Danny was changing the mood of the household. His absences required as much of their attention and energy with worrying as did fretting over him when he was there. Bob began to believe that it was because of his dark feelings about his brother that he could not shake his bad dreams.
The man beckons, his face of peeling paint intimidating. He is just a man. He cannot hurt him. Bob wants to move forward. He knows he must. It is his fate. There is something waiting for him. But he cannot cross the fire. He is too afraid.
Bob knew that sometimes changes in life happened without notice, and only afterwards is the change recognised. Like being in the orphanage when you are six and believing it will be only for a short while, until one day it’s your eleventh birthday and there is no sign that things will change. But other things that change a life occur quickly. Like his mother dying, and his going into the home with Danny and Daisy. Like seeing the sign that changed his life: See the World and Get Three Meals a Day.
Bob’s eyes stuck to the words: Three Meals a Day.
He circled back and, standing astride his bike, read the ad in full: Join the Navy. See the World and Get Three Meals a Day.
On Saturday he presented himself at the recruitment office and signed up for the test. He passed the English component of the entrance examination easily but failed the maths — it had been his worst subject at school. He returned the next week to undertake the test in front of the same officer, to pass the English and fail the maths again. On the third weekend, he arrived at the office and stood in front of the same officer. He passed the English and failed the maths, by one mark. The recruitment officer took the failed exam, moved by the determination and disappointment of the skinny youth, rubbed out an incorrect answer, placed the correct one in its place, and began the process for Bob Brecht’s admittance into the armed services in the summer of 1955.
And so he came back into a secure world of institution and routine. He thrived on the order, and after the regimented life in the home, he found the discipline of the Navy easy to adjust to. He was better able to navigate the strict regimen of daily life, and less afraid of the consequences of breaching rules. It was his physique that handicapped Bob. He grew stronger with better feeding and regular meals, but he remained small-framed for his age.
Although he joined the Navy to earn better money, part of the reason was that he could no longer bear the anger that Danny constantly directed towards him.
22
1960
THE PASSAGE OF TIME could never diminish the pleasure that filled Thomas Brecht every time he gently turned an Attic vase in his hands. At thirty-six, he had become an expert on the glossy black pottery. Thomas admired the way the Greeks had created ideal physical and moral types in their art. As Aristotle had written, even if it is impossible for a man to be as perfect as he is in a painting, he should be painted that way so that people have something to aspire to.
Art critic Kenneth Clark wrote something that had also stuck with Thomas. He compared a Greek sculpture of Apollo to an African mask and noted there was no doubt the sculpture embodied a higher state of civilisation. Clark wrote that the mask showed that the Negro imagination was filled with fear and darkness, ready to inflict punishment for the smallest infringement, while the sculpture of Apollo showed that the Greek imagination was a world of light and confidence, governed by reason and the laws of harmony.
Thomas had always had the disadvantage of one skin too few and Clark’s characterisation of civilisation against the primitive made him feel raw. It reminded him — seemed to accuse him — of the part of himself he had tried so hard to move away from.
Thomas could still remember the time, before his youngest brothers and sister were bom, when he felt like the centre of his mother’s world. He loved her tenderness, how she would talk to him while she worked, let him lick the spoons filled with biscuit mixture. As she became distracted with mothering Daisy and Bob and awaiting Danny’s arrival, Thomas found more of his life was concerned with the goings-on outside of their family home.
Thomas was tall for his age, handsome with his fresh light tan skin and thick curly hair, and popular with the boys at school. When he was little, he would hold the interest of his friends by talking about planes. “The Halber Stadt CL IV had three machine guns and could fly over a hundred miles an hour. But I’d fly the Fokker DVII. It could go at over a hundred and twenty miles an hour and fly as high as twenty-three thousand feet.”
Thomas gained confidence from his popularity and took for granted the easy acceptance of others. He was always happy when he was in the company of other boys, his circle of friends, especially Dennis Walsh.
Thomas’s brother, William, was not as tall as he was. William’s skin was much darker and he had their mother’s nose. He was chubby when he was a baby and as he started to grow became muscular. The brothers, although close in age — with Patricia born between them — seemed so different: different features, different colours. Their frames were so different that William could not wear Thomas’s hand-me-downs.
Thomas had been wary of his brother’s quick temper. It was more often directed at Patricia, whose attempts to boss both the boys seemed to only antagonise William. “Why don’t you ever let her have her way?” he would ask his younger brother after William had ridiculed Patricia’s attempts to get them to tidy up their clothes.
“She’s not our mother. I don’t know why she has to act like she is. I don’t like being bossed around.”
Thomas would shrug, but William’s anger, his unwillingness to do small things to appease others, made Thomas uncomfortable. When he could feel William’s mood brewing, his back would get tense and he would try to make himself scarce. When they were young boys, he tried to keep William away from his own friends, afraid that his little brother would be surly and embarrass him. Thomas knew his own easygoing nature was what drew other boys to him.
Thomas had thought himself very different from his brother, as different from himself as his father was from his mother. Although he was in charge of walking William home from school, he encouraged his brother to run ahead so he wouldn’t be seen with him.
Walking home from school one cool autumn day, Thomas noticed that William, who had run ahead, was in a field near their house, yelling at other boys. As Thomas approached, he could see his friends — Dennis Walsh, Harry Tanner and Bill Thompson—talking heatedly with William. This is what he had long feared: a display of anger from William towards his friends. He felt rage towards his brother rising in his chest.
“What’s going on here?” he yelled at Dennis Walsh.
“And h
ere’s the black bastard’s black bastard brother,” shouted Harry.
“What are you talking about?” Thomas asked Dennis Walsh again. Harry picked up something from the ground and threw it at William. Thomas looked at William’s soiled shirt and saw it was covered in cow dung.
“Here’s some more stink for you dirty black Abos!” Harry yelled.
“Dennis?” Thomas asked again.
This time the cow dung hit his shirt.
Thomas looked down where it had hit and began to feel tears forming. William ran towards Harry, knocked him to the ground and began to punch him. Thomas was too scared to move. He watched as Dennis and Bill jumped on top of William, hitting and kicking him. William kept punching all three, swinging wildly, throwing Dennis to the ground and kicking him. Harry remained curled over on the ground, nursing his bruises. “You crazy black bastard, dirty crazy Abo,” yelled Dennis as William’s fist smashed into Bill’s face. Bill reeled backwards, crying in pain. William turned and began swinging at Dennis. Dennis backed away from him.
“Get your crazy brother off me, Thomas, you Hun black bastard.”
Thomas ran towards his brother. “Come on, Will!” he yelled at him. “Let them go!”
William had caught Dennis, grabbed him by the hair and brought Dennis’s head down to smash into his knee. Dennis crumpled to the ground. William walked back over to where Harry was lying on the ground and gave him a kick in the legs. He then leaned over and spat on him.
“Will!” Thomas said. “What are you doing?”
“Giving them what they deserve,” William said, looking at his brother.
William was breathing heavily and Thomas grabbed his arm and walked him back towards the house.
“What’ll we tell Mum?” Thomas said, looking at the bruises on William’s face and arms.”
“That I fell out of a tree.”
Thomas looked at William’s shirt. “That doesn’t explain the cow dung.”
“I guess it doesn’t explain yours either.”
William lent on Thomas’s arm and limped home. “White bastards,” he growled. “I’ll beat the crap out of them next time, too.”
“I don’t know why they called us Abos,” Thomas said.
William laughed, then clutched his side in pain. “Look at us, Tom. Look at me. Look at Mum. If we’re not Abos, what are we? Anyway, that’s what everyone thinks we are.”
“But there must be something that we can do?”
“Well, you weren’t much help back there. Besides, we can’t help that we are Abos. Can’t change it.”
“We could tell them we’re something else. Hawaiian or something,” Thomas suggested.
William tried to laugh again. “I don’t mind being an Abo. What difference does it make whether we’re Abos or something else?”
It was Dennis Walsh’s betrayal that hurt Thomas the most. He had always liked Dennis and used to think of him late at night; he liked the blue colour of his eyes and his red hair. Dennis’s disgust made him feel ashamed of his mother’s darkness. Despite the strong love he had for her, he was shamed by the heritage she had given him. He felt caged by the implication of his family’s birthright. No wonder she always looked so sad, he thought, with all that shame heaped upon her. No wonder she never breathed a word about her family. He didn’t pry, for he carried his own secrets and knew how uncomfortable too many questions could be.
Even at the age of twelve, he withdrew from his friends and spent most of his time in the library. There he found respite from the taunts of the boys in his class and he also found books about Greek life and art. He liked the clean lines and finely crafted male bodies and copied them faithfully into a notebook, with annotations. He had an outsider’s caution and knew that these fascinations should be kept private. If other boys knew what he found fascinating, they would want to throw more cow dung at him. He would be even more despised.
By the time Thomas was close to his seventeenth birthday he felt suffocated by the secrets he kept. His box of treasures contained marbles Dennis Walsh had given him, tattered pages from The Phaedro, a secret notebook of his drawings of Greek antiquities, and his attempts to copy the inner pessimism of da Vinci’s drawings.
When the war arrived, Thomas turned his eyes to the sky. He wanted to fly, he felt that he could puncture the sky his mother studied so wistfully. Flying wasn’t freedom of movement, it was shattering forbidden barriers. He didn’t enlist in Australia. He had heard that Aborigines couldn’t enlist and though he would not identify himself as such, he didn’t want to suffer the humiliation of being labelled and excluded. His plan was to travel to England, enrol there, and flee his darkness.
On the passage to London he met Mark.
“Tell me something about yourself,” Mark had said, smoking a cigarette and stretching back on a steamer chair.
“Well, my parents are dead. They were from Greece, though I’ve lived in Australia all my life,” he said, surprised at how easily the lie slipped from his lips. “I’m off to join the war effort.”
“Why not do it in Australia?” Mark asked.
It was a good question and Thomas scrambled to find an answer that would fit in with his falsehoods. “I want to join the Air Force. I thought there would be better training in England.”
Mark looked at him suspiciously, then shrugged, “It’s the Scouts whose motto is ’Be prepared’. But it is a good idea in other contexts too.”
Mark continued to smoke his cigarette and kept his gaze on Thomas. Thomas kept looking back. “It would be a waste to lose you,” he said to Thomas.
“We are all certain of death,” he told Mark. “It’s only the hour of which we are uncertain. Just think of me as carrying on a great Greek tradition.”
By the time Thomas arrived in London to make his contribution to the war, he had fallen irreversibly in love with Mark, but he had caught himself in a trap. He’d told Mark that he was Greek, an orphan with no known siblings. He said this lightly when they first met, never imagining the lies would hold him in a trap for the rest of his life.
Thomas trained as a pilot. The ability to integrate himself with a machine, to be subsumed by something larger yet to be an integral piece of it, thrilled him. He loved the incongruency of being in a lump of metal that rationally should not be able to leave the ground, yet could fly with the same mathematical laws that, by appearance, allowed birds to fly. He often thought of how amazed da Vinci, with his passion for understanding the world as it moved towards destruction and decay, would be if he had lived to see such things.
Yet the freedom of flying was laced with the horror of war. He had to shut down feelings about the explosions and ensuing wafts of smoke left in his wake; all he might be destroying with his Hurricane. He tried, without success, to be unfeeling about the loss of men who had become friends.
East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain
Lovely lads are dead and rotten
None that go return again
London life during the war was a desperate time. The Blitz, food shortages and, later, avoiding V-2 rockets put a strain on life that was hard for everyone to bear. The V-2 rockets were referred to as “Bob Hopes” — you had to “Bob” down and “Hope” for the best. One ripped through the Knights-bridge flat of Mark’s parents, killing both of them.
The bars that he and Mark frequented — Le Boeuf sur le Toit, The White Room, The Captain’s Table — were filled with men in uniform from all ranks. Here, married men preferred to have sex with other men rather than cheat on wives with prostitutes. The late evening raids of these bars were to remind them all that their behaviour was against the law. There was an uneasy tolerance of homosexual activity: dislike of it was pronounced and the enforcement of its illegality often violent.
“We can’t be quiet about it. I can’t snap shut like you do. Always looking over your shoulder as though it’s an embarrassment,” Mark would say in frustration at Thomas’s attempts to placate him.
“It’s keeping quiet that allows people to get away with laws that lock us up.”
Thomas believed that Mark had no idea of what people really thought, how dangerous people’s hatred of what they do not like can be. Thomas always felt the way he did that day when he had been frozen in fear as William attacked their tormentors.
He thought about his hidden darkness when he saw the way the Americans treated their black GIs. There was a saying amongst the English troops: “I don’t mind the Yanks, but I can’t stand those white chaps they’ve brought with them.” While the English lads seemed happy to mix with ’the coloureds’, the US soldiers treated them with contempt and maintained a philosophy of segregation. Thomas knew that the Australian troops would treat their Aboriginal soldiers, sailors and pilots the same way.
As a supposed dark Greek on English soil, he was as close to being a white person as he could be. He played on it, inventing stories of parentage, each more elaborate and unbelievable. It proved as easy to slip into his new identity as into intimate affection with Mark. He had built his life on a lie that had slipped so easily from his lips. His once-upon-a-time family was relegated to oblivion. He felt he had become a da Vinci painting in which the shadow was more powerful than the light.
After the war, Mark took Thomas to Paris, a wonderland where men wore green carnations and danced with other men, unashamed. The death of Mark’s parents had left him a large fortune and the freedom to spend it in the company of Thomas. Mark and Thomas stayed at the Hotel d’Alsace and strolled up and down the rue des Beaux Arts, but for all the seductions of this vibrant life, post-war homophobia was becoming more intense.
During the war, some fifteen thousand people wore the pink triangle. Nazi doctors performed barbaric operations in efforts to transform homosexuals into heterosexuals. After the war, the first French anti-homosexual law in a hundred and fifty years was passed and would remain in place until 1981. People freed from the death camps were re-sentenced; many would commit suicide rather than spend more time in prison. In Germany, similar laws saw some homosexual survivors charged after the war — here, too, many preferred suicide to further incarceration.
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