The Truth & Addy Loest

by Kim Kelly

  She said to Addy along the tail-end of that sigh: ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘Worried about me?’ Addy prickled with all her own complexity; she didn’t like to worry anyone, and she was determined not to worry about it herself. Not this morning, please.

  ‘Yes,’ Roz said, cutting her toast straight down the middle. ‘You’re like a balloon cut loose at the moment, and I don’t know how to yank you back.’

  ‘I’m all right.’ Addy prickled only more: Do you need further instruction on why you should never drink again? She still couldn’t remember Roz helping her undress the night before last; Roz would have been drunk, too, drunk and speeding like a bicycle without a chain, but she was never drunk the way Addy got drunk. Roz only ever enhanced who she always was; while Addy – what had she been doing? Only replacing one confusion with another – one that was, at least temporarily, a little less awful.

  ‘Guh.’ Roz waved away bad feeling as though it were a blowfly. ‘Not for me to be yanking anyone anywhere, unless they’d like a taste of my own mayhem. I just want you to know that if you need to talk, you can talk to me. You know I love you, Addles.’

  ‘Aw.’ There was a blast of brightest sunshine. ‘I love you too, Rozzie. I’m sorry I’m such a freak.’

  ‘We’re all freaks.’ Roz rolled her eyes and bit into her toast: ‘Nothing too special about you, Loose Balloon. Except …’ She chewed and Addy moved towards the teabag tin by the stove. ‘Dolly Ackerman is full-on mad for you.’

  Sunshine glittered up the back of Addy’s neck and through her hair; she hid her smile in her armpit, reaching into the cupboard for a mug. He’s not ‘Dolly’ to me, she held the thought so close, she was cheek to cheek with it: He’s Dan. Dan the Man. The beautiful man who came to see me at work, after his work, came to buy fuzzy-felt for his niece.

  ‘Try not to break his heart, won’t you?’ Roz said over another mouthful.

  ‘I’m no heartbreaker.’ Addy filled the old stovetop kettle; she filled her head with the cool rush of the tap water whooshing around inside the steel.

  ‘Ha!’ Roz snorted. ‘Don’t mention that to Luke. I’ve heard he’s no happy chappy at his newfound freedom – crushed since you broke up with him.’

  ‘Crushed? Come on, Roz.’ Addy wasn’t buying any of that. Just kids doing kids’ stuff, that’s what he’d said. No one got hurt, hey? ‘We weren’t really ever on. Not seriously. He hardly seemed devastated by the breakup.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Roz shrugged. ‘How someone seems and how someone is can be two different things. And it takes two people to have a relationship, you know – you don’t get to decide what the other person feels.’

  The wisdom of that struck Addy: how very true it was. It was also perfectly reasonable that he’d said one thing to her, to save face, and another thing to some friend. Don’t we all do that all the time? She also realised she still hadn’t washed and dispatched Luke’s jumper; she would do that this afternoon; she would send it off with a kind and loving note; not too loving. Just kind. The thought that she might actually have hurt him — Oh. It didn’t seem possible but — Oh.

  ‘And that extends to HRH, Addles.’ Roz returned to the central concern of this kitchen-sink chat: ‘She’s been having a hard time the past few weeks herself – Maaahrtin’s got an offer to do some graduate exchange thing at Haaahrvard for next year, and he’s going. Who wouldn’t? But he told Harriet – just over Easter, at dinner with her parents – that any plans for them getting engaged would be delayed indefinitely. And then last night – whammo – he says to her that he wants to be free to “explore other options” while he’s away. How brutal is that? Selfish shit of a man. Yes, yes, I can say, boohoo, good riddance, get another one. She’s really suffering, though, Add. It’s all relative, hey? She can’t help who she is. Do something nice for her, will you?’

  Addy knew this was about more than Roz not wanting the hassle of Harriet moving out; this was about not being a selfish shit. For all that Addy had her reasons to despise HRH, for all that HRH had deserved and would always deserve that dirty food-processor bowl in her bed, the one German thing Addy could never do was Schadenfreude. She could never take any pleasure from someone else’s upset. She’d get Harriet a bunch of nice, apologetic sunflowers or something on her way back from Newtown today; she’d make peace; she’d move on.

  More than a promise, she felt something shift within her as she strode up to King Street, a lightness in her feet, an unusual clarity of mind. As she passed those tatty band posters along the hoarding of the building site, she might have blown them and all the hard-hats beyond them a kiss, if she’d been that kind of girl. Instead, she thrilled at the idea that the next time she’d see Elbow, she really would hear Dan’s songs sober for the very first time.

  How romantic! She laughed at herself, out aloud, and the sky seemed to laugh back at her, with her, from today’s crisp, cold blue.

  Small steps were required, she knew; small, careful steps were needed before she could even imagine kissing him without the assistance of alcohol; but by the time Addy got to The Curiosity Shop, she had already rented them a cheap apartment in West Berlin and gone shopping for bread and milk. He’d go travelling with her, wouldn’t he? Of course he would. She would spend her days writing; he would spend his days being an amazing sound engineer for the Berliner Philharmoniker, and in the evenings, he would come home to their flat and read her words back to her, cherishing every one of them. They would make music that no one had ever heard before. And then … And then everything would be unimaginably perfect. She almost waved an assurance of this at Mr Olympia Café, sweeping the front step of his shop; she almost ran across the road, as though she ran towards this destiny, and not from the onrush of a westbound bus.

  She could have sworn the zebra winked as she approached. She was so excited, so ordinarily, justifiably excited, that it didn’t even really trouble her that the lay-by receipt for frock heaven had seemed to have disappeared from her purse, sometime since Wednesday morning, about a thousand years ago. The old woman in the shop would remember her – hopefully. Hm. Addy remembered only now that the woman had been a little doddery, having got her name wrong – writing Anna on the receipt, instead of Adrianna. Never mind. It doesn’t matter, Addy told herself, feeling so capable it was uncanny: We will work it out.

  As it was, the woman appeared to recognise her immediately. ‘Ah. Good morning,’ she said, from her perch behind the jewellery-display case, closing her magazine to do business. There was, however, a wariness in her clear, sharp gaze as she added, unsmiling, ‘You are looking very pretty today.’

  Addy looked down at her happy-morning outfit: she wore a white ruffled broderie blouse sashed with a red scarf over a soft grey peasant skirt. She’d thought it romantic; present second thought suggested she probably looked like a reject from a Duran Duran video clip, dismissed for boring hair. She felt suddenly untidy under the old woman’s stare; she felt as if this woman could see that she was only ever playing dress-ups, bereft of her own style. But Addy said, ‘Thank you,’ nevertheless, and after another stretch of strangely loaded silence, she added: ‘I’ve come to pay some more off my lay-by. Please.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ The woman turned to pick up the ledger book on the little chest of drawers behind her, but she didn’t open it when she placed it on the glass top of the display case in front of her. She held one hand, her left hand, upon the cover of the book, as though to keep it there, prevent it from floating away. Stories drifted around them like slow motes from every curio in the shop, from its shoes and chandeliers, its tiffany panes and the zebra’s mane, the books and bric-a-brac, its racks and racks of clothes; Addy glimpsed a real romance in the woman’s plain gold wedding band; real style in the set of her hair, the cut of her collar and the fabric there – dark green today with a faint turquoise check – pinned mid-lapel with a brooch, an abstract splash of pearl and marcasite. The woman was a study in dignity and grace; dread whispered at the edges
of all Addy’s wonder, for how she might have displeased her.

  The woman seemed to take her own deep breath before she spoke again at last, asking Addy: ‘Is your father’s name Peter?’

  ‘What – I beg your pardon?’ Addy wasn’t sure if she’d heard her correctly, if her accent hadn’t tricked —

  ‘Your father,’ the woman repeated her question. ‘Is his name Peter Loest?’

  ‘Yes.’ Addy’s heart raced with excitement of a different kind, another new kind: no one knew her father, not outside his small circles of steelworks, union, pub and boxing ring. He didn’t have any German friends, apart from Beethoven, not close friends, or not that she knew of; his mates were Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Yugoslav, Polish, British all-sorts and general, white-bread Aussie; he never went to the German Club at Wollongong, either, said it reminded him too much of happy times when he was young, going to dances there – presumably with Elke, her mother. Addy could hardly believe she was asking the question in return: ‘You know my father?’

  The woman shook her head slightly: ‘No.’ She reached behind her into one of the drawers, taking out an ashtray and a packet of cigarettes, and with her face still turned away, she said: ‘I knew your grandmother, Anna, and – well, that was a long time ago. I have not seen your father since he was a small boy. He is well, your father?’

  He is an overworked, overbearing stressed-out chain-smoker, was the description that came to mind, swirling around and into the coiled chignon on the back of the old woman’s head, but Addy nodded: ‘Yes.’ You knew my grandmother? Addy was too awed by that idea to say another word.

  The old woman seemed somehow stricken as well; she lit a cigarette, and then turned to Addy once more, offering the packet to her with a nod, but Addy shook her head.

  The woman took a deep draw on the cigarette and said, exhaling: ‘You look a little bit like her – Anna – your grandmother.’

  Addy remained mute at that, too; she’d always thought she resembled her own mother, and that was that, from those few photographs she had; there were no photographs of anyone from her father’s side, nor her mother’s. Life had begun for the Loests at Balgownie Migrant Workers Hostel, and that was that.

  ‘Do you know much about your grandmother, your father’s mother?’ the old woman asked her, cautious at the question.

  Addy shook her head. She hadn’t even known this grandmother’s name – nor any of her grandparents’ names. All she knew was that her father had been born in 1935 and had been orphaned – his father dying just before the war, and his mother during, and her father said he couldn’t remember either of them. He spent his childhood in an orphanage, too young for too much Sieg Heiling – a bitter joke told to snip off any further inquiry. After the war, by the age of fourteen, he was on his own, digging latrines in a displaced persons’ camp waiting for a ship out of there – anywhere. America, Canada and Australia, the only options, wanted children under seven or young men as labourers; or, for obvious reasons, Jews who couldn’t or wouldn’t return to their homes; he’d had to wait another four years, and then took the first ticket on offer – Australia wanted lots of ditch-diggers for the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, but when he got here, a recruitment officer from the steelworks bagsed him first. He was strong, thick muscled – still was – though never as strong as Nick, because of his years of malnutrition. That was all she knew of his Germany; a brief, fragmented chapter of a thousand sorrows; a story of how precarious life could be, even for a small-town solicitor’s boy. Addy told the old woman: ‘I only know my grandfather was a lawyer, from Lindenfels.’

  The old woman looked as if she might choke on that cigarette; she swallowed hard; her voice rasped: ‘A lawyer from Lindenfels?’

  ‘Yes.’ Dread now rocketed through Addy as she waited to be told her grandfather was really an SS officer, on the run for war crimes; she didn’t want to know; she wanted to turn around and run away herself.

  But when the woman asked her: ‘Would you like to know about your grandparents?’

  Addy could only nod once more and whisper: ‘Yes. Please.’

  Whatever the woman was going to say, it would be her own story that Addy would hear, one answer to the everywhere, every-moment question that sat in the centre of her heart like an empty room: Who am I?

  The woman got up from behind the display case to shut the shop door, turning the ‘closed’ sign around. She said: ‘I think we had better sit down together, dear.’ She picked up her ashtray and cigarettes and beckoned with a jut of her chin: ‘Come.’

  Addy followed her down through the shop, past the shelves of shoes and handbags, to a tapestry chair, its faded zigzag pattern making it almost invisible there between the colourful racks of skirts and blouses. ‘Sit down, sit down,’ the woman told her, disappearing behind a bookcase Addy hadn’t noticed before, either, one filled with encyclopaedias and other weighty-looking hardcovers. When the woman came back a moment later, she was carrying her stepladder, unfolding it as she approached, and appeared to be about to sit down on it herself.

  ‘No – please.’ Addy stood. She couldn’t take the comfortable chair ahead of an elder.

  ‘Sit,’ this elder insisted.

  Addy sat, and the woman sat too, even managing to make her stepladder seem stylish, knees to the side over the pointed toes of her shoes; and so she began:

  ‘You look quite a lot like her, really, your grandmother – your colouring, the gold tint of your skin, your small frame. Your grandmother was like a sister to me, a little bit older. And you are probably wondering who I am, hm?’

  Naturally, Addy was, but she could not so much as nod to indicate it.

  The old woman explained, mostly to her cigarette: ‘My name is Frieda Stevenson – that’s who I am now, a grandmother myself. Then, when I was young, I was Elfriede Falke – Elfie. Your grandmother was Anna Engel. We were Elf and Angel – she was the good one, I was the bad one. We were inseparable. Our fathers were partners in a law firm in Darmstadt, which, if you don’t know, is a city not far from Frankfurt.’

  Addy knew precisely where Darmstadt was, having pored over the map of Germany in her Jumbo Family Reference World Atlas, among others, so many times the locations of most major towns and cities were imprinted on her retina, but still she did not move to nod; she did not want to move in case this woman, this Frieda Stevenson, stopped talking.

  She went on: ‘Your grandfather, Adam – Adam Loest – came to work at the firm as a clerk, in 1922, after the first war. I was only a little girl in plaits, thirteen years old, but Anna was sixteen – and she fell in love with him instantly. He was much older, about twenty-four or twenty-five – a man to me – and he had been a soldier in the war. Of course, it was a war that Germany had just lost. It wasn’t a good time for many. There were a lot of angry men in the streets, gangs and fighting, that sort of thing. There were food shortages and not enough jobs, and much confusion about how to fix things. Your grandfather had been much more fortunate than most. He was from an ordinary family, from Lindenfels, yes, a small town, not far from Darmstadt, and his father was only a saddle-maker, no one in particular, but Adam had distinguished himself in the army, as brave and very intelligent, and so he had been given the chance to better himself.’

  The old woman ashed her cigarette as carefully as she delivered every word, continuing: ‘Adam and Anna were completely in love with each other – so much that I wanted to push him under a train. I was so jealous, such a silly child.’ She gave a little shudder of regret at the memory. ‘Anna’s parents felt even less happy about it. They were, to say the least, quite snobbish, and did not think Adam was a suitable husband at all. Adam had to work very hard to win them over, and even so, it took him almost ten years. He was under the nose of his would-be father-in-law every day, and still he managed to hide his true colours. Most of the firm’s clients were factory owners and other kinds of businessmen, and Adam would spend all day working for them, then in the evenings, at a café near his apartment,
he would go and have his meal and give free legal advice to poor men who needed it. Not even Anna knew what a good man he was, not then.

  ‘It was only after they married, in 1931, that Adam confessed to her he was a member of the SPD – the Social-Democratic Party of Deutschland. Anna was terrified of anything political. Anyone who was comfortable was terrified of anything political. Just as things had started to get a little better, the Great Depression then destroyed any peace – destroyed the economy, destroyed everything. The whole country was a ship with no rudder. It felt like anything could happen. But that was also why Adam refused to give up his work with the SPD. He wanted a better future for everyone – where the men who had sacrificed so much for their country as soldiers would be rewarded with good jobs and good wages, education and opportunities for advancement. He presented himself as proof of this logic – a simple case of justice and quiet perseverance.

  ‘He wasn’t any radical, not at all, but he defended some of those types when it was becoming more and more dangerous to do so. First, Anna’s parents disowned them, which was terrible enough for her, but she knew something worse would happen. She always said that’s why it took her so long to have a baby – so long for her Peter, your father, to come. When she did become pregnant, Adam moved them back to Lindenfels, so she could feel safer. It was only thirty kilometres away, and such a pretty town, a postcard town. The streets and houses wind around two hillsides, covered with linden trees, and one of them has an old castle on it. And it was safer, for a time. She had her mother-in-law there, who was a good woman, even if they didn’t have so much in common, and I stayed with her often, too – I could do as I pleased. I wasn’t interested in marriage myself, and certainly not with any member of the Nazi Party. By then, the Nazis had banned everything except themselves, and I was – no one needs to know what I was. Anyway, Peter was born, he was healthy and perfect, and Adam was in love with his little son. They were very close, your father and his father, from the first moment. They are like a photograph in my mind of how a man and boy should be. Such happiness together, that little boy would laugh and laugh.’ She shook her head.