River

by Shira Nayman

  Finally, we turned onto a road with a loose-stone surface that ran alongside the small airport. We passed a series of simple hangars: makeshift affairs each consisting of a wooden hut with a light aircraft parked alongside. Grandpa Jack slowed as we approached the security gate; the sign read Moorabbin airport. The guard, sporting a friendly grin, raised the beam.

  “G’day, Prof,” he called out as we sailed by.

  “G’day, Bazza,” Grandpa Jack said, raising his hand through the open window.

  We pulled up to Hangar Number Five and came to a halt by a small blue-and-white plane: Cessna 172 was painted prominently on its tail.

  “How’s my girl!” Grandpa Jack said as he leapt from the car. Talia turned to me with a sheepish smile.

  “He only just bought this plane,” she said. “It’s the latest love of his life.”

  She gazed proudly over at her father, who was walking around the plane, eyeing it appraisingly.

  “My dad collects interests. Did I tell you about his farm? He raises cattle in his spare time—his steer actually win prizes. He also has a passion for ancient Greek and Roman coins. He started an International Numismatic Society. But flying is his number one. Mum hates it. These dinky little planes scare her—and she vomits terribly, every time she goes up. But Michael and I love it. Not sure how Liora feels—I guess she thinks it’s okay.”

  “Where are your brother and sister, anyway?” I asked. What fun it would be to see Uncle Michael as a boy and Auntie Liora as a teenager!

  “Michael’s sleeping at a friend’s house. Liora’s away at camp. I thought I told you that already …”

  Talia looked at me again in that sideways manner, as if wondering something, frown marks between her hazel eyes.

  “Of course,” I said. “I just forgot.”

  Talia brightened. “Come on! Don’t you want to get going?”

  We jumped out of the car. A wiry young man carrying a clipboard emerged from the hut, and Grandpa Jack greeted him with the same exuberance he seemed to have for everyone. They exchanged pleasantries, Australian style: G’day Mate, ‘Ow’s it goin’? And Grandpa Jack asked after the man’s wife and baby. Then it was all flying jargon—longitudes, latitudes, headwinds, tailwinds. Grandpa took the clipboard, then climbed into the pilot’s seat and immediately began checking the instruments and fiddling with dials.

  We climbed into the four-seater plane after him. I’d never been in an aircraft so small. As we wedged our way into the back, I was struck by how flimsy it all seemed. The windows opened outward with a silver lever, like old-fashioned car windows. The smell of new leather mixed in with the repulsive odor of airplane fuel.

  “Okay, kids. Are you ready?” Grandpa Jack asked.

  “Ready for takeoff, Dad!” Talia said. Grandpa Jack hand-signaled to the young man waving triangular flags on the ground, then began to turn knobs and pull levers. The engine whirred to life.

  Soon we were taxiing down the runway, which was much shorter and narrower than the commercial runways I was used to. The body of the plane rattled, the engine roared and the propellers whirred. As the plane lifted from the ground and we glided up into the air, the rattling diminished. The intense smell of airplane fuel sent a wave of nausea through me.

  “Don’t worry, it gets better!” Talia said over the roaring engine. I could see Grandpa Jack’s strong, handsome profile from where I sat diagonally behind him; he had a marvelous look in his face—a combination of intelligence, concentration, and joy.

  The landscape unfurled beneath us. The boxy orange-brick houses soon gave way to countryside: a raggedy mix of brush, undergrowth, and towering eucalyptus that opened out into an uneven patchwork of cultivated fields in rich shades of browns and greens.

  The little plane rode low over the fields. I could see all kinds of detail: trucks and cars crawling along dirt roadways, farmhouses and outbuildings dotting the fields, even miniature people, going about their business.

  We flew for some time in silence. The nausea lifted and I was able to enjoy the feeling of speed. Talia looked intently out the window. The fields spread out beneath us in seemingly endless supply, as if the whole world were fertile ground, freshly tilled and sown.

  “Hey,” Talia said, her voice now audible over the grinding hum. “Let’s play a game!”

  “Sure,” I said, wondering what kind of game we could play up here in the noisy, vibrating plane.

  “Let’s do Where, What, With Whom.” Talia was wearing a mischievous expression I of course knew well—open, fun loving, and a bit outrageous.

  “I’ll start. Let’s use the first letter rule.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, though I had no clue what she was talking about.

  “Go on, you galah, give me a letter!”

  Galah. A word Mama had used in jest ever since I was little.

  “M,” I said, entranced by the fun in Talia’s face.

  “M,” she said, then without missing a beat: “‘Merica, Manuscript-maker, Mind-worker. There! Now the questions.”

  “‘Merica doesn’t count,” I said. “You can’t just drop a letter like that to make it work!”

  “Yes, I can,” she said. “Truth rules—and that’s the truth, I feel it. As long as you can shoehorn the truth into the parameters, you’re golden.” She gave a quick wink. “Kind of like life, don’t you think?”

  The truth, I thought. America, Manuscript-maker—a writer. That was on the money. Talia—my mother—would move to America and become a writer. As for the With Whom, which I took to mean the person who was to be one’s life partner, she’d uncannily gotten that right as well. Talia was going to marry a professor—mind-worker was a perfect descriptor!—the man I knew would be the love of her life, the words my mother had used when she told me how she and my father had met, perhaps my favorite of all my mother’s personal anecdotes.

  “Mind-worker … what exactly is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “You know, someone who earns their living with their mind.”

  “A thinker, then,” I said.

  “Bingo. I don’t know—a professor, maybe?”

  There was a quick reversion in Talia’s eyes to opacity, as if she were looking inward. Her face grew serious. “Yes, it’s right. I can feel it—I’d be willing to offer a guarantee. You can call me one day to congratulate me—I don’t know ten, maybe fifteen years from now! Course, it will be long-distance, so you better have a career that throws up lots of dosh. Other questions?”

  “How many kids? What sex? What will they be like?” The words shot out of my mouth before I had time to consider.

  “Two. A girl and a boy. The boy will be quirky—funny, a bit of a rogue. The girl, well, she’ll be more serious. An artist of some kind.” Her smile had turned soulful; she eyed me with an unwavering gaze.

  “Kind of like you, Jasmine,” she said, grabbing my hand and giving it a squeeze. “I hope so, in any case. Your turn. Letter Q.”

  “No fair …” I said.

  Talia let out a ripple of laughter. “Come on, give it a go!”

  “OK. Quebec—I don’t have much choice about that. What other place is there? Queen of the Artists, as you suggest. And Quintuplet-maker. There, I’ll be marrying a fertility doctor! You’ve boxed me into Quite the future!”

  Below us, the richly colored patchwork melted away, replaced by long stretches of dry yellow grass and clumps of grayish-green vegetation. We flew in silence, aloft in clear blue skies streaked with foggy cloud.

  Looming ahead, I saw the rise of stony brown mountains.

  I turned to see that Talia’s face was alive with excitement.

  “This is my favorite part,” she said. “Heading toward the Barrier Range.”

  I craned my neck to take in the impressive sweep of the landscape, which now showed true desert of the most extraordinary color—bright orangey-red, with outcroppings of similarly colored rock. Along one ridge were the signs of a small city, its patches of green a startling interruption to the a
ridness all around.

  “There it is. Broken Hill,” Talia said, pointing to the town.

  Grandpa Jack began a burst of renewed activity at the controls.

  “Coming in for a landing.”

  A landing strip appeared, at the side of which stood a tall pole with a large wind sock that thrust out forcefully in a horizontal direction.

  “We’ve got a strong headwind!” Grandpa Jack said. “I’m going to circle around and come in from the other side.”

  The plane swerved in a U-turn; I clutched onto the chrome handle above my seat.

  “I’m bringing her down!” Grandpa Jack said. The intense rattling resumed, the propellers increased their whirring, and the engine heightened its roar. There was another sickening blast of fumes. My stomach lurched, and I grabbed for the sick bag in the seat-back pocket. Talia smiled sympathetically as I heaved into the bag. She reached over and held my arm.

  “The first time is the worst,” she said above the noise.

  Then, we were bumping over the tarmac. The engine shut down, the whirring stopped. I crumpled up the sick bag and listened to the sudden, intense silence.

  “Great flight, girls. What do you think?” Grandpa Jack said with a grin. “Sorry about that, Jasmine,” he added, nodding toward the sick bag I was holding. “You’ve been inaugurated. It will only get better.”

  We clambered down, to be greeted by another man, this one older than his Moorabbin counterpart.

  “G’day, Prof. ‘Ow’s it goin’? J’ave a good flight?”

  “A beauty.” Grandpa Jack clapped the man on the back.

  “Welcome to New South Wales!” the man said, helping us down from the plane.

  There were three rickety taxis waiting at the large wooden hut that was the Broken Hill Royal Flying Doctor Service airport. We climbed into one of them and headed for the town. I marveled at the redness of the desert soil as we drove—even richer in tone than it had seemed from the sky. The clumps of dry vegetation were subtle shades of mauve and dusty green.

  We drove through the residential outskirts—simple fenced-in houses with sparse, rocky front yards—and entered the commercial district, passing several hotel pubs boasting the impressive Victorian wooden and wrought iron balconies I’d seen in Melbourne. In front of each were several horses hitched to posts. We decided to have lunch in one of the pubs and then head toward the Miners Memorial.

  After a lunch of hot meat pies, an Australian specialty, followed by a bowl of vanilla ice cream, we set out along Federation Way toward the Line of Lode, the central mining location. It seemed that from anywhere in the town, one could see the towering structures of the mining industry, some rusty and ancient, others modern and new.

  I asked Talia about Broken Hill’s history; having flown here many times with her father—I had to keep reminding myself that he was my Grandpa Jack!—she had lots of facts at her fingertips. She told me the structures were called “dumps” and “headframes,” and that it had been here, in the mid-nineteenth century, that Australia’s mining industry was born. Part of the country’s leap from a largely agricultural society into the industrial age.

  “Did you know that the eight-hour workday came into being right here, in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia? The rest of the Western world has us to thank for that.”

  Beneath Talia’s enthusiasm, however, I sensed a sadness, which I found a little confusing. It was a lovely day—hotter, here, than it had been in Melbourne—and there was much to see and do; to me, it was a grand adventure. Perhaps she was a little bored with the place, having been here so many times, though I sensed there was more to it.

  At the end of Federation Way, we stopped to examine the Miners Memorial. Talia rattled off the local history; every now and then Grandpa Jack jumped in to add some point of interest.

  I realized what was troubling in Talia’s descriptions. She lacked the pride that was clear in the voice of the taxi driver as he described the sights, or in the manner of the man at the airport who’d welcomed us to New South Wales. For all her knowledge of the place, Talia sounded like a tourist—as if, like me, she were merely a visitor from some foreign place and time. As if all the things she was talking about were just facts from a history book with little to do with her.

  Grandpa Jack went off in search of a men’s room; Talia and I sat on a bench, watching the other visitors to the memorial as they milled around, enjoying the early-afternoon warmth.

  “You know an awful lot about this place,” I said.

  Talia shrugged. She was watching a group of children playing tag ahead on the path.

  “Dad likes to come here. It’s an easy flight from Melbourne. Mum’s sick of going with him and my brother and sister are always busy—he plays sports, she does music and dance. So, I come along.”

  “I noticed something earlier,” I said. “It struck me as a little strange.”

  “Oh?”

  “It was like you were talking as a tourist.”

  “I am a tourist, really. I don’t live here, after all.”

  “No, I mean like you’re not—I don’t know, an Australian.”

  “Well I’m not Australian. Not really.” She looked a bit startled, as if her own words had come as a surprise.

  “But you’ve spent your whole life here!”

  “We’re immigrants. You know that. I was born in South Africa and came here as a baby.”

  The children she’d been watching wandered off; Talia cast about a distracted gaze. “You seem to know a lot about my family,” she said, a flash of confusion in her face.

  “Only what I’ve learned from you,” I said, thinking of the times my mother had talked to me about her early life.

  “It’s funny, being a Jew. I always feel somehow like we’re, I don’t know—well, temporary.”

  Two enormous black-and-white magpies plopped from nowhere onto the path in front of us, and set about their nonchalant, hoppy bird-walk.

  Talia’s face relaxed into a faint smile. “Quirky little chaps, aren’t they,” she said, watching the magpies poking about in the clumps of scraggy greenery at the edge of the path.

  “I suppose it’s silly of me … World War II is already history … it’s weird … but I feel like I have to be on guard … ”

  I didn’t fully understand what Talia was talking about. And yet I recognized something—the dark brooding that came over her, along with a familiar shadow of anxiety in myself.

  “My brother got beaten up one time—not badly, but still. And someone in a pastry shop once told me to Go Home. I said—where? Where should I go?”

  Talia gave a forced, humorless little laugh. “Hardly counts as serious anti-Semitism. But it kind of bites into how you feel about a place. Do you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t really know what she meant, so I remained silent.

  “It’s nothing compared with the racism here. It makes me sick the way the First Australians are treated. As if they don’t count at all.”

  I knew that look in Talia’s face—I’d seen it in Mama’s. Talia—it hit me afresh: Mama as a girl!

  “The Jews have been exiled so many times,” she said, her voice far away.

  I tried to remember what I knew—the Babylonian Exile, the expulsion from Spain, decades of pogroms, the Holocaust. It was all jumbled up in my mind. Not only exiles, but murder, mass murder, genocide. How little I knew about any of it—the child of a Jewish mother, and yet I knew almost nothing about Jewish history.

  “It doesn’t make any sense, does it,” she said. “White Australia is all about exile—not just criminals, but poor people who might have stolen a bit of bread for their kids. Sent away—Beyond the Seven Seas—forever, forbidden to return to England, their home. I should feel a kinship with that. I don’t know…”

  Talia was staring at the magpies with an intensity I recognized; I was here with Mama, after all, though she was not yet my mother …

  The magpies flapped their wings then lifted off; Talia followed t
heir movement with her gaze, her face softening into an expression of appreciative calm.

  “Hey,” she said, brightening. “Wanna race?” She jumped up, scanned the surrounds. “Okay. Over to that tree, around it five times, across to the pub with the veranda, up and down the steps three times, then back over here.”

  Not waiting for a response, she crouched to a racing preparation position. I assumed the same position then repeated the instructions she’d just given.

  “Ready … set … Go!”

  I glanced across to see Talia’s long, dark hair flying behind her, heard the rippling laugh I knew deep in my bones, though the tone was lighter, the pitch of a girl’s voice. A raw feeling of joy took hold of me, intensified by the sheer pleasure of rapid motion. My legs pumped beneath me and all thought fell away; in my vision were blurred swatches of faded color against bright blue and cloud, the rusty color of dessert clay, and people turned to fluid streaks.

  We arrived back at our starting place and collapsed, laughing.

  “Incredible,” Talia said through soft gasps. “Dead heat. You’d think we were twins!”

  I tried to return her broad, unselfconscious grin, but found myself constrained by pangs of longing: for that different-same person—my mother, as I knew her—who was both here and not here. Just then, Grandpa Jack returned.

  “Sorry, girls. Got carried away talking to a nice chap—he’s also a pilot. He told me about a different route to Melbourne; might be fun to have a change of scenery on the way back. Let’s go visit the base of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, first. It’s not far.”

  He paused, looking at our reddened faces. “What’ve you girls been up to?” he asked, tousling Talia’s hair. “Shenanigans, ey? Flying around in your own way.”

  Another pang—a wish that Grandpa Jack would tousle my hair, too. A moment later, he did.

  My mother had told me about the famous “flying doctors” of Australia, who responded to emergencies in the Outback. Grandpa Jack, himself a surgeon, had visited the base many times and knew people there.