‘Kangaroo,’ Luisa said out loud and began to giggle.
‘And my teacher told me we will see natives wearing grass skirts, too. And that there will be beaches and swimming and big, blue skies full of sunshine.’
Elizabeta slipped an arm around her sister and they lay quietly, listening for more of the mysterious sounds, waiting for their parents to wake up. Luisa’s breath was hot on her neck and Elizabeta pulled her close.
There should have been another sister in between them, bridging the seven-year gap in their ages, but Angela hadn’t survived two months. Elizabeta didn’t know how she’d died. One day she was there and the next day she was gone, and then they were in church and she was buried in the cemetery alongside it. She still didn’t know how to ask to her mother what had happened. There had been so much suffering in those years that she wondered whether they had simply run out of ways to talk about loss, about war and displacement and a dead baby. There had been a decade of grief circling around their lives like a crow.
Almost three years after the baby died, when the war was over, after they’d been deported from Hungary and were living in Germany, Luisa was born. She had immediately made everyone so happy. Elizabeta had loved her from the moment she’d first held her. Her arrival had created a fresh start for the family. Jozef had work, and so did Berta, and there was food on the table and enough money left for little things. A string of pearls for Berta for her birthday. A new pipe for Jozef and a leather pouch for his tobacco. New shoes for Elizabeta and a new blanket for Luisa. A brand-new set of aluminium pots and pans for Berta’s kitchen.
They had lived a simple and quiet life until the day, a year ago, when Jozef had arrived home brandishing a pamphlet, Gluck in der neuen Heimat. Happiness in your new homeland. They had been looking for happiness in a new homeland and hadn’t found it yet. Germany had never felt like home to them. That night, her parents had had serious discussions around the kitchen table. Elizabeta found the pamphlet on the kitchen table the next morning and had pored over it, reading all about the Australian way of life. Her parents had continued talking into the night on many nights that next week. Finally they decided to apply to migrate to Australia. Elizabeta hadn’t wanted to go. She liked going to school and she liked her friends. There was even a boy in her class, Aleksander, who smiled at her and walked her home two times a week. Her life was just beginning and her parents had decided to wrench her from it, and she had cried when they’d left their village and got on the train and cried when they’d walked onto the Fairsea at Bremerhaven, all their worldly belongings in four suitcases and a trunk. They’d left behind most everything—but the brand-new pots and pans came with them across the other side of the world.
Once they were on the boat, Elizabeta made the decision to stop crying about having to leave. It had only made her parents upset, particularly her mother. Elizabeta was old enough by then to understand and remember what they had been through already. Her father said they were going to Australia for a better life, and she had decided to believe him. After all that had happened, perhaps it would be best to leave everything behind and not look back. It would be nice to finally belong somewhere, to know there was somewhere in the world that wanted her family.
Elizabeta had never felt the tug of loyalty to any country. She’d never truly imagined she belonged anywhere. In Hungary, where she and her parents had been born, they were treated like Germans, with suspicion. When her family had been deported to Germany, real Germans looked down on them as refugees. But they had German names and spoke German, didn’t they? She was still as confused as ever by it. When she’d asked her father about it once, he’d told her that when the war was over, important politicians carved up countries and decided what to do with German-speaking people like them from countries that didn’t want them any more.
‘They think we are Nazis because we speak German,’ he’d said. ‘That’s why we were put on those cattle trains in Budapest by the soldiers. That’s why we are in Germany.’
But all that was past now. Today was to be her first Australian morning.
She wondered, as she curled up on a thin mattress on a camp bed in a small room in an ex-army hut, swathed in blankets and warmed by her sister’s breath, what Australia would feel like when she opened the door and saw the big blue sky full of sunshine for the first time.
By the time the Schmidts left their hut for the walk to the mess hall, Elizabeta felt as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. There had been sandwiches on the train the day before, on the journey from Port Melbourne, but she’d shivered them away all night in the cold hut. She was impatient for her family to gather up their trays and plates and bowls and spoons and cups and walk across Bonegilla for breakfast.
Their shoes crunched on the frosty grass as they walked. The sky was a pale blue and as she followed her parents and kept an eye on Luisa, it struck Elizabeta that for the first time in six weeks the air wasn’t filled with the smell of salt and the sound of waves. She took in a deep breath. Bonegilla smelled like something new, like fresh air and open fields, and the spindly trees dotted here and there, with almost-white trunks and leaves long and thin and grey-green, had a scent like peppermint. And there were birds, black-and-white birds, in the branches of the tree, singing, as if they were calling out hello to everyone below.
There was a low hum from the conversations happening all around them as people walked to breakfast. They had to stop and wait as a truck rumbled past on the road, black smoke spewing from its exhaust. There was a picture of a ram with curling horns sticking out of its woolly coat and letters and words painted on the side in English. Elizabeta tried to spell them out, but her reading was still too slow and it went by too fast.
The camp was big. In the dark of the night before, there had been dim street lights and a chill wind blowing in from somewhere cold. This morning, she couldn’t seem to see the end of it, no matter where she looked. The camp was filled with accommodation huts like theirs, neat row after row of pale green corrugated iron buildings with the same red doors. In the distance, there was a collection of bigger buildings and one in particular seemed to be the centre of people’s comings and goings. The mess.
And there weren’t only buildings but people, coming out of every building and walking along every road and in every direction. The camp had come to life while she was waking up. Two women walked by, laughing, their hair wrapped in coloured scarves knotted at the back of their necks, with fabric bags over their shoulders, stuffed to the brim with clothes, the sleeves spilling out as if there were arms inside trying to crawl out. A group of young men jogged past, dark-haired and wiry, wearing T-shirts and canvas shoes, bouncing a ball, speaking Greek. Three young women walked by arm in arm, smiling.
Elizabeta took it all in, dawdling behind her parents. When they called out her name, she scurried after them and when they reached the front door of the mess hall, they waited politely at the end of the queue.
ISBN: 9781489273956
TITLE: THE LAND GIRLS
First Australian Publication 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Victoria Purman
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