by Gee, Maurice
I admired Wilf’s washing. I could never get my sheets as white as his. When I asked the secret, he said, ‘Boil ‘em hard’, and when I told him I already did, he said, ‘Boil ‘em harder.’ Wilfred White was his name. He lived in the next-door room. The vegetable garden was his and it took all his time except for late afternoons when he walked down Mulgrave Street to the Thistle Hotel and drank two or three beers with a mate – and got away before the six o’clock swill. I liked Wilf – liked his industry and quietness, and his seventy years which somehow made him neutral in a world that was largely hostile to me. He had been in the Boer War, which I had never heard of. ‘You fellers wasn’t in it,’ he said. I had explained that I was an Austrian but the only Austrians he had come across were Dalmatians and I plainly wasn’t one of them – so German I became (and Austrian Dalmatians remained), and although I did not like it there was nothing I could do. But where I came from ‘didn’t matter a damn’ to Wilf. I became his friend when I showed that I understood gardening. So my work on Somes Island and in Pahiatua won me a good neighbour straight away.
He let me do some weeding when his back was bad. He let me pick peas and now and then a tomato after he had told me which one. I learned to hang my clothes on the line so they would not flap against his beans – his runner beans on bamboo poles shaped like a wigwam. Then I sat in the sun outside my door and watched him work until pub time. The garden was the size of a bowling green and produced enough vegetables to feed a barracksful of men. Wilf gave them away – some to our landlady, who perhaps reduced his rent, some to neighbours up and down the street, some to me. I never had to buy vegetables, even potatoes. I think perhaps he sold some in the pub. Once or twice he went off with a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins and marrows and came back with it empty and I heard coins jingling in his pocket as he went by.
Horse racing was his only interest outside the garden. (His unit in South Africa had been a mounted one.) He placed his bets with a bookmaker in the pub and when that man was arrested took the tram to Newtown on a Saturday morning, where another bookie worked in another pub. He left the door of his room open and turned his radio up so he could hear the race descriptions, but dug on impassively until the horses entered the straight, when he would stand up and face the door. If he won he gave a little nod and went on digging. If he lost he made no sign at all. I tried to follow racing too but could not work an interest up, and Wilf did not want horse talk with someone like me, so I gave it away. I sat on my kitchen chair while the copper boiled and read a book, deaf to the commentator’s voice until the climax of the winning post, when I watched to see if Wilf had won. I rinsed and blued my sheets and put them through the wringer and hung them out to dry with my shirts and socks and underpants; came back to my chair, read a page or two, looked up at Tinakori hill and down again at Wilf among his silver beet and corn, and realised that I had reached a sort of contentment, although the war went on, although my parents had died horribly. Sometimes I seemed monstrous to myself, at other times no more than natural. I developed a passion for innocent uncomplicated things which I need do no more than stand and watch. I did not want to be, for that time, any more than a man who lived in a lean-to shed and went with a basin now and then to pick runner beans. I walked to the end of the potato patch and stood one-footed on an upturned bucket, which raised me to chin height against the wall, allowing me to look down into a bowling green. Men dressed all in white rolled heavy black and brown balls in a curving line on the smooth green grass and made them cluster far away about a smaller white ball. It seemed futile and beautiful to me. The clicking of the balls and the calling of the players made a small music, as much as I could bear.
Was I sick? In a way, but not mortally. And there was a sort of cure when one day I recognised Dowden playing there. He stood on the rubber mat and wiped his bowl with a cloth and bent his knee and sent it on its way and I made an exclamation of disgust and the world fell into focus again. I stepped down from the bucket and saw Wilf crush a snail between his finger and thumb. He wiped his hand on his trouser leg. I went into my room and closed the door and sat on my bed. ‘What do I do now?’ There was no answer except Keep going and Wait, which brought me no comfort, but allowed me later in the afternoon to go outside and feel how my sheets were drying. I made myself a cup of tea. Wilf made one for himself (We did not offer each other tea because of rationing.) We drank silently, he sitting on his doorstep, I on my chair. Now and then I’d say, ‘Those marrows are looking good’, or, ‘Do the snails eat much?’ and he’d answer yes or no.
I did not stop watching the bowls but I never saw Dowden again, although I saw men who looked quite like him.
My work was at a joinery factory in Petone. I might have been forced to take a room out there, but the clerk in the National Service Department did no more than raise his eyebrows when I told him I would sooner live in Wellington. I did not mind going to work on the train, I said. I did not tell him Wellington was where I meant to spend the rest of my life. It would, I guessed, have annoyed him rather than pleased him. He reminded me at the end of our interview that my performance would be watched and reported on. I was still up for deportation, he said.
I walked to the station and sat with other workers on the train as it side-stepped through the shunting yards and turned along the harbour front to Kaiwharawhara and Petone. Soon Somes Island came into view and I watched it with an easy knowledge that it was mine – and with puzzlement that Willi should still be there, behind the cliffs, behind the wire. When would they let Willi out?
The train turned away and stopped at Petone, and I got off and walked to the factory. There were nine other men but no production line. Each tradesman finished what he began, whether window frame or door or set of cupboards or shelves. One made scotias and cornices on a moulding machine, an iron monster running half the length of a wall. There was a planing machine and a lathe and circular saws and band saws, which I tried to be away from when they worked. My hearing was damaged at Barton’s Joinery. The other noises, hammering, hand planing, panel sawing, I could stand. I did not mind the thump of the mortising machine. And noises that I made, they were mine.
I grew expert at filing saws and sharpening planes and chisels. Most of the men liked to do their own – it was a skill and part of being a joiner – but one by one they began to bring them to me; and tested them on their wrist hair when I gave them back and never complained. One or two even let me reset their planes. I swept the floor at night, rolling the shavings ahead of me like a wave. I helped unload the trucks that came with timber and load the ones that took the finished joinery away. Keeping my eye on each job, keeping the men supplied, was a skill I learned. Soon no one had to shout at me; I was there with the gluepot when they wanted it. ‘Thanks, Joey,’ they said, ‘Good on yer, mate.’ So I grew confident, and stronger and quicker than I’d been on the island. I wanted a good report, but also I enjoyed doing something well; and I began to hope that I might train as a joiner.
Only one man gave me trouble. He was a Joe like me but no one called him Joey. A thickset man, bald-headed, middle-aged, with bushy eyebrows that turned white with wood dust from the sander. Joe was a Christian – but I suppose they all were, more or less. I can’t say what his church was, but something off centre, fitted with the Bible, buttoned in. ‘Language, tut tut,’ Joe would say when someone swore. He had a picture of Jesus tacked over his bench and he wiped it clean several times a day with his handkerchief.
Joe would not take his timber from me. He never let me help him carry away his finished work. If he saw me coming down the shop he would turn and go by on the other side. How did he know I was a Jew? If he had had a sign to make, he would have made it against me as I passed.
‘Don’t take him serious,’ the other men said. ‘You just do your job, Joey. Keep out of his way.’
I managed that for several months, and tried not to meet his eye. But it seemed the more I ignored him the more he became aware of me. I began to hear a sound between us
, a buzzing underneath the screech of the saws. I felt his eyes pass over me, simple and certain and half blind, and knew I should not be working with him in a room full of tools for cutting and hitting.
We had a new man, Wally, just back from the war. He bubbled with soldiers’ slang, shufti and bint and kaput, and stories of Italian girls he’d had. He puzzled me, repelled me, for I could not see how a man who had been in the war could be so cheerful. I kept clear of him, although he did not seem to mind working with a ‘Jerry’. Joe was the one he could not take: ‘I’ll clobber that stupid bastard if he says tut tut once more.’ I hoped he would take Joe’s attention away from me – but no, Wally might blaspheme and mock and swear but Wally was not a Christ-killer, not a Jew.
One morning when Joe was in the yard fetching his timber Wally drew a speech balloon coming from Jesus’s mouth. ‘Well bugger me, tut tut,’ Jesus said. As soon as I read it I knew that Joe would fix on me. I considered walking out and not coming back, but I liked my job and, besides, I might be deported; so I moved to the far side of the workshop and stood with the foreman and Barton, the boss.
‘Yeah Joey, what is it?’ the foreman said.
‘We’ll need to get a truck here for the sawdust,’ I said.
He looked at me impatiently – I’d told him the same thing earlier in the morning. Then Joe came in and saw the speech balloon. He dropped his timber on the floor, and the clatter helped save me, for everyone turned to see what the accident had been. Joe looked for me and found me. He chose from the tools on his bench and started across the shop with his two-inch chisel pointing at my face.
‘Hey, Joe. You stupid bastard,’ Wally yelled.
I remember best his eyes that never left me, and the dust that puffed from his eyebrows as the other men wrestled him to the floor. The chisel sliced Wally’s palm wide open. And quickly, with an abnormal quickness, Joe was still.
‘Let me go. I’m all right now.’
‘Keep sitting on the bastard,’ Wally said.
‘He was going for young Joey,’ the foreman said.
‘I’m quitting,’ Joe said. ‘I won’t work with a Jew.’
‘It was me that wrote that stuff on his picture,’ Wally said.
‘I forgive you,’ Joe said. ‘Let me go.’
Barton wanted no trouble. He told Joe to get his tools together and clear out, even though some of the men wanted to call the police. Wally went off to the hospital for stitches. And Barton was sour with me for a week or two. He’d lost two good tradesmen ‘because of that little kraut’, I heard him say.
I walked between the factory and the station keeping a lookout for Joe. I expected him to come from a sidestreet with a knife. His madness was not the sort that would go away. Then I saw him on a train travelling into Wellington, where he must have taken a job. It pulled up opposite mine at Kaiwharawhara and we looked at each other from facing windows. He turned away. He took out his handkerchief and spat on it and polished his scalp. I shifted to a seat on the other side of the carriage and never laid eyes on Joe again.
Willi was released in September. He had gone to Somes Island nine months before me and stayed nine months longer at the end. There was never a more violent anti-Nazi.
I got off my train from Petone and found him waiting in the station tearooms. He was at a centre table eating a pie, and he greeted me without getting up.
‘Look who I found waiting,’ he said.
The woman turned her eyes on me and turned away. She was Norma Cooksley, whom I’d last seen six years before, walking off into the dark along Milford beach.
‘She’s been coming out to see me,’ Willi said. ‘She can’t keep away.’
‘Speak in English, Willi.’
‘Sure. OK. You have been out a year, Josef, and Wellington is as far as you have got?’
‘I like it here. Where are you going? Have they put you in a job?’
He scowled. ‘Forestry. I have a brain so they send me somewhere to thin trees. I have always told you they are mad.’
‘Are they going to deport you?’
‘Maybe not. They have won the war, they are getting lazy.’ He gave a wolfish grin. ‘Hoch and von Schaukel, they will go.’
‘What about Steinitz?’
‘He is gone already. He wanted to go home and find his girl. I always said he was wrong in his head. Lopsided, eh? There are plenty of girls.’ He made a contemptuous nod at Norma Cooksley.
‘Why didn’t he come and see me?’
‘Ah, still sentimental? You wanted to hug and cry, perhaps?’
‘We were friends,’ I said. ‘But never mind. Where is this forestry job?’
‘I get off in …’ He looked at Norma.
‘Frankton,’ she said.
‘And go to a place called …’
‘Kaingaroa.’
‘Another camp. These New Zealanders are trying to dig a hole and bury me. They have no chance.’
‘So you’re going up on the train?’
‘In –’ he looked at the tearoom clock ‘– two hours. It will be like Pahiatua, it will freeze my balls off. I think when it is done I will go up north. Into the mangroves and the mud. Find little Phyllis and Dulcie, eh? Listen, Josef, how far do you live?’
‘Up the street in Thorndon. Ten minutes.’
‘So, we can have an hour. More.’ He spoke to Norma Cooksley, not to me, and although her cheeks reddened she gave a little nod and sipped her tea.
‘We can use your room, Josef. You can guard the door.’
‘No,’ I said. I felt my eyes shining, hot and sore. All day I had thought how Willi and I would take up our friendship and tell each other what we meant to do – and all he wanted was that I should stand guard at the door while he fucked his girlfriend in my bed.
Today I don’t find his behaviour outrageous. He had not had a woman in six years. He reminded me of this soon enough – in a savage rattle, in our tongue, while Norma Cooksley wiped lipstick from the rim of her cup with a hanky.
‘I don’t talk German any more,’ I said.
‘Bourgeois, Josef. You are a little bourgeois Jew.’
‘I’ve got a landlady,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a friend in the next-door room. And I don’t want people fucking in my bed.’ It was the first time I had spoken that word. ‘If you call me Jew again I’ll knock your bloody block off.’
Willi laughed. ‘You are swearing in front of a lady. Listen, Josef. You know how I am. Will you make me hire a room?’ He went on in German: ‘She is dying for it. See how she has to let the cold air in her crotch.’
‘I’m sorry, Willi. Not in my room.’
‘So.’ He made himself smile. He raised his palms. ‘I will find a hotel. It is not the first time.’
‘They don’t have Stundenhotels here.’
‘You want to bet? I’ll bet you a pound.’ He lifted Norma’s face with his finger under her chin. ‘You look like a nice girl, you can get the room. And maybe I will let you have some sleep on the train.’
‘Is she going with you?’
‘Why not? She will find a job in Kaingaroa.’ He switched to German again. ‘It is not for ever, Josef. The world is full of women. Still you don’t learn.’
I stood up and said, ‘I’m in the way. Let me know when you’ve got an address.’
‘You’re not his friend,’ Norma Cooksley said.
Willi laughed again. ‘Freunden für immer, Josef,’ he called as I walked away.
And of course he was right. I was not ending our friendship, I was just letting him know I was a different person now.
He wrote to me from Kaingaroa, his first uncensored letter in six years, asking for the pound he’d won. He told me Norma Cooksley was ‘a pain in the neck’ and he would ‘send her packing before long’. Polite language for Willi, but he wrote in English – practising, he said. He no longer thought the government would deport him. He would stay in New Zealand and ‘make a big splash’. ‘One day,’ he wrote, ‘I will be the boss. You wait and see.’
In politics? In business? In crime? He did not say. And why do I think of crime? I’ll say right now, Willi did not go in for that.
Elizabeth said, ‘Does it help remembering this stuff?’
I gave a sharp answer: ‘It’s not stuff, it’s my life’ – and might have asked, ‘Help with what?’ But I apologised when I saw how my impatience wounded her, and I tried to explain: that memory is in nature, not in history (nature, where I tried to put myself in my early days in Wellington). ‘We’re not only here,’ I said, and went on to declare that tomorrow would not come unless yesterday had been. It seemed true at the time but I’ve lost its meaning now. Elizabeth answered, ‘Ho!’, which meant that she had heard enough of that, I should climb down. So I asked her how she was getting on in the garden and she said it needed a couple of years before any real improvement showed.
‘You can take all the time you want. I like having you here.’
‘What I’d like,’ she said, ‘is someone to do the heavy work. And mow the lawns. I can’t push that rattletrap out there.’
I can’t push it either when the grass has got away, and I won’t have one of those filthy machines with a motor, so I said, ‘Hire a man. As long as he’s quiet.’
‘Of course,’ she said, and went away. I drank my coffee and returned to the thing troubling me: the reappearance of Norma Cooksley in my story. As soon as I remembered her with Willi in the tearooms I knew I could no longer put off talking to Mrs Lloyd. I wanted to go but did not want Kenny’s business muddying things. It was bound to be taken as my reason for a visit – and my proper reason, how could I explain it when I did not know myself? All I can say is, I felt a kind of hunger for Norma Cooksley; and a fear of seeing the old woman she had become.
I drove out in a taxi yesterday. Miramar is a suburb I have no liking for. No sea view in spite of its name, nothing except low hills and the house next door. Mrs Gummer answered my knock.
‘Is it about that mortgage?’ she said.
