He calculated. Thanks to Aunt Lily and his parents, he was extremely well educated about women’s bodies, theoretically at least. ‘Seven weeks. You don’t think you might just be late? You’ve been through a lot.’
‘I’m sure. I was sick yesterday and this morning.’
Suddenly he felt overwhelming joy. A baby! Like calving season but a million times better, new life filling up the war cracks in the world. ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? You and Paul are engaged.’ The matter seemed to have been decided even before Rose was able to sit up in bed. As soon as Paul had come down to Thuringa to finish his own recuperation she had appeared with an endless smile, and an engagement ring.
Rose was too young, of course, and Pa almost certainly wouldn’t have given his permission till he’d known Paul much longer, though he and the sailor had spent a lot of time talking. Paul had even joined Pa on his nightly walks along the wombat tracks into the bush, or along the river, and had proved a crossword fiend at breakfast, just like Pa. But there had seemed to be an understanding that while Rose’s and Paul’s lives were now bound together, there’d be no wedding until that vague destination, ‘when the war was over’.
‘Have you told Paul yet?’
‘How? Send a telegram to the ship? Am pregnant stop please inform me of when you next have a 24 hour pass in Sydney stop will get married then. I can’t have a baby, Danny!’
‘Why not?’
‘Give up everything I’ve worked for? Just like the girls at school who planned to announce their engagement on their twenty-first birthday, but I’ll only be eighteen. My life over at eighteen.’
‘Mum’s life wasn’t over.’
‘No? She was away from Higgs for years when we were born. She left just about everything to the Slithersoles to manage. I can’t afford to be away from work for years! The war will be over, and the men will come back, and women like me will all lose their jobs. Once a man takes over as chairman I’m done for — I’d lose all support if I was seen as doing a man out of his job.’
‘Unless Mum comes back. When she comes back, I mean.’ The two years since he’d seen his mother, incredibly full years, had begun to seem like half his life. Mum had not even contacted them when Rose had nearly died. She seemed to have vanished. Even Aunt Lily’s letters gave no hint about where she might be, much less a message from her, though Aunt Lily did still use phrases like ‘when your mother returns.
‘Mum will never have seen what I can do!’
‘You’re not planning . . .’ He knew there were places in Sydney, even in war-time, perhaps especially in war-time.
‘No, of course not.’ She put a protective hand on her belly; he thought she didn’t even know she’d done it. ‘I . . . I just don’t want to be a housewife. I could keep working while I’m pregnant of course, lots of women do. But I can’t lug a baby or a toddler to the factories or board meetings, even with a nanny. A baby needs a settled life. A home.’
And suddenly it was obvious. ‘She has a home. Here. Or he has a home. You may have to settle for a boy, you know.’
‘I couldn’t leave her — or him — here with a nanny either. Paul couldn’t be here either.’
‘But I would be,’ he said eagerly. ‘I’d love a baby!’
‘You and Annie would take a baby?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You hardly know her!’
I’ve spent more time with Annie than you have with Paul, he thought, amused. ‘No, just me. Maybe me and Annie will be together one day, but she wants to do medicine, and that’s six years, at least. But I can look after a baby. I’d love to look after a baby! There’d be a nanny for feeds and stuff, but I’d be there morning and lunchtime and evening.’ He grinned. ‘The baby can watch us drenching the cattle. It’s never too soon to learn the art of getting drench down a cow.’
‘But Paul and I —’
‘Will be the parents. But who says a kid can only have two parents? I’ll be like Aunt Lily was for us. She was as close as any parent.’ And might again be after the war, he thought, for then he could take over responsibility for Shillings too, or help with its management at least, leaving Aunt Lily free to return to Thuringa.
Her letters were still written weekly, or even more frequently, even if they sometimes arrived half-a-dozen at a time, her elegant handwriting on the familiar cream parchment, still with the same scent — she must have put a stock aside before the war. Danny found he relied on their quiet advice more and more.
‘Paul wants to design boats after the war. We might move away.’ But he could see a breath of hope on his sister’s face.
‘He can design them here. You don’t need to be near the sea to design ships. He’s got the river, hasn’t he? You can have a house near the sea too. But you’ll live at Thuringa. Build a house up on the hill, where little Danielle can run from home to home.’
‘I am not calling my baby Danielle.’
He grinned. ‘That’s negotiable. But living here isn’t. Rose darling, it can work. Pa will give his permission for you to get married now, and you and Paul are head over heels. Have a quiet wedding on Paul’s next leave in Sydney —’
‘People will still count the months.’
‘People who count don’t count. Work from Thuringa while you recover from having the baby, just like you’ve done the past few months.’
‘I could make Higgs head office at the Bald Hill factory,’ said Rose slowly. ‘It’s what Mum should have done years ago. There’s no reason it has to be in Sydney.’ She looked at him, suddenly imploring. ‘Paul will be safe, won’t he?’
‘He’ll be safe. You probably know better than me that our ships are getting through now.’ He gave her his grin again. It was hard to stop grinning. A year ago Mum and Pa were gone, in their different ways, and Aunt Lily and even Rose, most of the time. But now the house would be full of family again, a family growing bigger, a deeply happy family. ‘I bet Paul will be tickled pink that he doesn’t have to wait years to marry you. You and he can have Grandpa’s old suite till you build a house or do up one of the cottages. Pa’s going to love having a baby in the house. He and I can do up the old nursery in our spare time.’
‘What spare time?’
‘We’ll make time. I’ll even hire the nanny for you. You just manage Higgs and breed.’
‘You make it sound like I’m one of your cows. I don’t suppose you can hire someone to actually give birth, can you?’
‘Sorry. That bit you’re going to have to do yourself.’
‘It’ll be interesting,’ she said philosophically. Her face softened. ‘I do like babies. Just . . .’
He put his arms around her, calf squits and all, and hugged her, felt her fit perfectly in his arms, as they had fitted together all their lives. A twin thing, maybe. Of course the proper brotherly thing to do would have been to be shocked, and to promise to take a shotgun to Paul if he wouldn’t marry his sister. But they had never been that kind of family.
Something Aunt Lily had said came back to him, as clearly as if he could hear her voice. ‘There are so many kinds of love. Never waste a single one, simply because it might not be conventional.’
‘We’re going to have a baby!’ he yelled, throwing his hat in the air, and failing, as he always did, to catch it. But catching it was not the point.
‘Well, don’t tell the world yet. Not till Paul and I are married.’ But Rose was grinning too, exactly the same grin as he’d seen in the mirror for nearly eighteen years.
A baby to love, to see grow, years before he might have his own children. Maybe Paul and Rose would have more, too. A mob of kids, steps and stairs, his kids and her kids all standing by the stock rail in their boots and hats. A family, not quite a normal one, but as Aunt Lily said, normal was overrated, as long as there was love.
Thank you, dear Aunt Lily, he thought.
Chapter 45
Cabbage Soup
Serves 200.
Take 12 cabbages, 24 potatoes, 24 turnips. Chop and boil in water till needed.
SEPTEMBER 1944
HANNELORE
Hannelore had heard of the camp, of course. Dachau was where the enemies of the Reich were sent, the communists, the writers who did not extol the party, the movie producers who snickered they would not make propaganda when they’d had too much schnapps. She had seen graffiti way back, in 1935 perhaps: Lieber Herr Gott, mach mich stumm, Das ich nicht nach Dachau gehe. Dear God, please make me silent, so I do not go to Dachau. She knew that the rebellious from the conquered territories were sent here, and Jews as well.
She even knew, vaguely, for one did not concern oneself with matters of business, that the labour for her own factories was supplied by the prisoners of Dachau. And why not? It was a labour camp and factories needed labour. Dachau was one of the first of the labour camps, the model on which the other camps were based. Dolphie had told her that.
Dolphie had not told her this.
The bus took her from the prison, where finally her interrogators accepted she knew nothing of Dolphie’s plans, except that they existed. Yes, yes, he had planned to kill the Führer, not just one plot but at least three times. No, she knew nothing more because he would not tell her, he kept her imprisoned at the Lodge so she could tell no one. ‘Ask the people who had worked the farm if you do not believe me. My uncle would not even let me walk beyond the farm gates or the forest nearest the farm. The Führer himself will tell you how I have always supported the party. I could not inform the SS that my uncle was a traitor. I lived at his mercy.’
She felt Dolphie smile at her at that.
The prison was bad. A single room; a straw mattress for a bed; filth caked on the walls and a bucket for sanitation; cabbage soup twice a day and some substance that might be bread. But they did not torture her. They even left her with her clothes and jewellery.
She heard the word ‘prinzessin’ whispered as she was marched to interrogation and back again. No one even thought to ask the one question that would have condemned her: did you support your uncle’s plan?
She would have answered honestly. Death was likely, either way. This way she’d die with pride.
They did not ask. Perhaps they knew the answer. More likely they did not care. They only wanted men’s names, collaborators, army generals or colonels. When it was obvious she could not have known them, isolated in a lodge by a lake, they had no use for her. Or rather, it seemed, another use: to go to Dachau, the labour camp, to do the kind of work Nazis believed even women were good for. She was marched in a line of women to a bus already crowded with other women, most in rags, so thin their rags seemed thick against their flesh. They crammed together, four to a seat instead of two.
The women did not talk. Nor did the guards, except to bark out orders.
The bus drove out of the prison gates, along the road. Hannelore gazed out, because if this was her last glimpse of beauty she must see it: poplar trees, already clothed for autumn, as yellow as the Star of David, then a pile of bodies, untidy as if they had just been thrown together and then another.
And then an end to beauty.
Dachau. A smell of ashes and burned meat and the overpowering stench of people. Concrete walls, topped with barbed wire; a gate, with the words Arbeit macht frei. Gun towers, a mud-glazed ditch, more barbed wire, a glimpse of skeletal figures in faded stripes or dull grey clothes before she and the others were led into a room, crowded with many others, where she must strip off every garment, every possession, her ring, her wristwatch, and stand naked among naked strangers.
Were Simons and Grünberg already here? Grünberg had managed to speak to her briefly as they’d been led from the Lodge to separate cars. Simons had betrayed her, either from hatred, or perhaps hoping it might win some concession for her family, even their lives. Sophie, it seemed, would stay as cook. Sophie might survive. Dear God, I have little to live for now, but please let Sophie live.
The crowd about her moved and she moved too, one naked organism. More orders, yelled, as if they had lost their hearing with their clothes. Hands, a razor, her hair shaved or half tugged out. She felt blood drip onto her face. Her pubic hair, the hair under her arms. The women became one again and moved into another room. Disinfected. Bathed . . . A pile of rags. Like the others, she grabbed the first that she could find, glad she was small and smaller still now, and any rag would fit. The rags here had red tags, not yellow.
Outside, to line up once again in a large square. She could see huts, and staring men and skeletons that had once been men and yet still walked and stared. The huts had words inscribed upon the roofs: There is one road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Diligence, Honesty, Orderliness, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Self-Sacrifice and Love of the Fatherland.
I do not agree, she thought. Miss Lily would not agree. There are so many roads . . .
She must not have heard the order at first, for the voice had the irritation of repetition.
‘The Prinzessin von Arnenberg! Komm her!’
She stepped forwards.
A man in a captain’s uniform smiled at her. He seemed genuinely amused. ‘You look like you could work.’
Work makes you free? She answered, ‘Yes, mein Herr. I can work.’
‘Good. We have the perfect job for you.’
Another line. Women, like her, in rags, like her, who still had strength, like her, because their starvation had lasted weeks or months, not years.
Another bus. This time she recognised the road. This time, she knew, when she arrived at the factory, there would be no small girl in a dirndl skirt and hair ribbons out front to curtsey with a bunch of flowers, no workers lined up to bow, no one ushering her to an office for coffee and cream cake.
The bus pulled up at the side entrance of what had been her factory. The women filed out, not just because they were ordered but because it was all that they could do. Still in single file, to the door, then separated by men she vaguely knew as foremen. If any recognised her, they made no sign. Each prisoner was taken to a different bench, one to each, like others where thin women in dresses of no colour but well-made caps that hid their hair, worked with wires and machinery.
She stood at the bench she was assigned to, but somehow couldn’t hear when the woman next to her explained what work she had to do. The horror held her and made her deaf, her fingers numb. She looked at the bench but did not see.
This all was hers.
‘Hannelore.’ The sound of her name woke her. She looked, and saw Grünberg, taking the place of the woman who’d been by her side. Grünberg had never used her name before.
‘Hannelore, you must work. The first mistake will get you a beating. At the second they will take you out and probably kill you. No one who is taken out is seen again. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Grünberg.’
‘My name is Judith. Use it, if I am to show you how to live.’
Still she could not move.
‘Move your hands!’ hissed Judith. ‘If I cannot teach you they may kill me too.’
Hannelore’s hands began to move.
Their job was to attach the wires in detonators. The women did not know if the detonators were for bombs or other weapons. They only knew that red wires must go to red, and green to green, and black to black, twisting and attaching while other women soldered, a job that women did not do, yet did do here.
They worked when it was light, for power was scarce now. They stopped when it was too dark to be accurate and were led out, into the shadow land, into huts that had grown behind the factory since Hannelore had last been here. Perhaps they had always been here and she had not seen. There had been much she had not seen.
They slept on tiered bunks, three women to each bunk. Judith shared hers the first night, guiding her in the dimness; battling through a sudden throng of women, as if they had become rats, scrabbling at two large pots. Judith emerged with two pannikins of cabbage soup and two slices of not-quite bread.
‘Eat,’ she ordered.
‘Why should I bother?�
��
‘I will show you tomorrow, if you eat.’
Judith gave the same order the next morning, after they had lined up in the dark for two hours to be counted, though the counting took only ten minutes.
‘Eat.’
It was cabbage soup again, with shreds of turnip and potato.
They lined up on the factory benches. Judith spoke almost without breath, not looking at Hannelore. ‘If the wire is broken, the detonator fails. If the detonator fails, everything it is in fails. The fourth wire is the one to break, just under all the others. Not every time — if all the detonators fail they will know it’s sabotage. One in twenty. Count them, to be sure.’
‘Do the other women know this?’ They were the first words she had spoken.
‘Those of us who have been here the longest. Who still live.’
‘But if the guards are told we do this —’
‘Those who speak to the guards do not live,’ whispered Judith calmly. ‘No, we do not kill them. But somehow a traitor does not reach the food pots.’
‘Truly?’
‘I do not know,’ admitted Judith. ‘Only what was said. No woman has spoken privately to a guard since I have been here.’
A guard passed, inspected. Hannelore’s hands stayed busy.
‘Simons?’ she whispered, after he had gone.
‘I do not know.’
She should tell this woman that the factory belonged to her; that the soft bed she had slept in at the Lodge came from the money from this factory, and others like it; her gardens; the hothouses where cucumbers and strawberries grew even in the war; the life that had allowed her the luxury of collecting information for the enemy, feeling of value for it, came from factories like this.
She could not say the words. But when her fingers touched the twentieth bunch of wires, she twisted the correct one until she broke it.
Chapter 46
War-time Christmas Cake
4 ounces margarine
3 ounces soft brown sugar
Legends of the Lost Lilies Page 33
