Empire Day Page 3

  Ted was bewildered by the babble of voices, all speaking different languages. This was what the Tower of Babel must have been like, he thought, and made a note to include that observation in his article. He went over to a group of passengers who were sitting on bright green leather chairs in a corner of the lounge. Taking his notebook and pencil from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket, he cleared his throat, smiled brightly and introduced himself.

  ‘I’d like to tell Australians about your impressions of the voyage,’ he said. ‘What it was like?’

  Most of them stared blankly at him or shook their heads to indicate that they didn’t understand, but a small blonde in a little head-hugging hat pushed forward.

  ‘There are many Communists on this ship,’ she said in a ringing voice, her sharp features contorted with fury. ‘It is very shocking. I come from Lithuania to get away from them and they are here with us. Every day they sing the “Internationale”. In Russian!’

  A stooped man behind her spoke up. ‘And I can tell you another thing about this ship,’ he said. ‘Too many Jew Communists.’

  Now that these two had broken the ice, others began to air similar grievances. Some came from countries Ted couldn’t place on the map, like Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Estonia. A tall, thin man planted himself in front of him. ‘Those are bad peoples. They should not be allowed here. You will see, this is Fifth Column. They come to spread Communism and destroy Australian government.’

  Ted’s heart was racing. Communists coming here by the boatload! Gus Thornton wanted a sensational story and he would give him one. Ever since the war had ended three years ago, the Reds had overrun much of Europe. Some people said that one war had ended and another had begun. Everyone was on the alert, watching for signs of Commies trying to worm their way into power. Especially now that Mr Chifley had won the election, and they had a Labor government supported by trade unions which, as everyone knew, were riddled with Commies.

  Gus often said that Eisenhower shouldn’t have pulled out in 1945 but should have gone on and fought the Bolsheviks, to stop them taking over most of Europe. ‘The next war will be between us and the Soviets,’ he predicted whenever they heard about Communist repression in eastern Europe. Although Ted, like most people, was suspicious of the Reds and their agenda, he wondered if people were going overboard with this Communist hysteria.

  Only a few weeks before, he’d been sent to interview an Australian pianist who had refused to play ‘God Save the King’ at the beginning of her recitals in the Town Hall. ‘Make sure you get her to admit she’s a fucking Commie, or at the very least a fellow traveller,’ Gus had ranted. But she’d looked at Ted with bewildered eyes and told him that she had performed all over the world, and nowhere else had she been expected to play the national anthem at her concerts.

  Within a few minutes he was besieged by people complaining about Communists on board. Some of them mentioned Jew Communists, which to Ted seemed a contradiction in terms. From what he’d always heard, Jews owned gold and property — not the kind of people who’d be Communists.

  The comments were becoming repetitive, and apart from accusations about Russian songs, no one had any proof. He needed to find people with a different point of view.

  Out on the stern deck, a small group of passengers sat huddled around a pile of battered valises.

  ‘You look for Communists? Here?’ A woman with short curly hair looked at Ted in amazement. ‘Nazis you should look for!’

  He thought he had misheard. ‘Nazis? On this ship?’

  She was nodding so energetically that the curls sprang out and bounced around her face. ‘Moshe, come and tell this gentleman what people we had on this ship.’

  A slightly built young man glanced around and motioned for Ted to follow him inside. ‘You want to hear about Nazis? Come with me.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Ted broke in. ‘I don’t get it. You said Nazis. But we’re not allowing any Germans into Australia unless they’ve been cleared by immigration, so how can there be Nazis?’

  Moshe gave a derisive laugh and said something to his companions. Turning back to Ted, he said, ‘Not German Nazis. Nazi helpers in Lithuania, Hungary, Ukraine and Croatia.’

  Ted felt he was getting out of his depth. This didn’t make any sense. The only Nazis he’d ever heard of were Germans. Moshe looked Jewish, so maybe he was paranoid, as Gus used to say. Ted knew that Gus had no time for Jews. ‘Fucking troublemakers,’ he called them. ‘Money-grubbers. Always complaining of being persecuted.’

  Moshe walked over to a fellow with a shock of fair hair who was sitting on a worn case tied with string. ‘Hey, Peter, he wants to know about Nazis,’ he said, pointing to Ted.

  Peter nodded. ‘At my table in dining room, mens from Lithuania, they talking to Ukrainian mens in German, so I understand. They say they in militia, they shoot Jews in Kaunas. They say, too many Jews on ship, why we did not kill them all? Also man from Ukraine say his group kill Jews in sandhills near Lww.’

  Ted felt dazed. All these extraordinary stories and strange place-names. Could he believe these people? Their intensity was certainly compelling. He’d never heard of those militias and had no idea that they’d collaborated with the Nazis. Surely men who’d done things like that wouldn’t be allowed into Australia? This was far more complicated than he’d expected. He’d have to talk to someone from the Immigration Department and check it out.

  Back in the office, he knocked on Gus Thornton’s door, eager to tell him what he’d heard.

  The editor was enthroned on his raised dais, surrounded by a fug of cigarette smoke. With his mountainous body dressed in a 1930s American gangster-style suit with wide stripes, big padded shoulders and a red polka-dot bow tie, Gus Thornton reminded Ted of an underworld character from a Dick Tracy comic. He listened to Ted with narrowed eyes, puffing on the thin black Sobranie in his gold cigarette-holder.

  ‘Bloody waste of time,’ he roared when Ted had finished. ‘Just rumour and hearsay. Can’t trust anything these people tell you. They all hate each other.’

  Then he shrugged. ‘Go with the “Red Menace arriving on migrant ships” story. Three hundred words, no more. Write a lead that will grab the readers by the balls, and keep it snappy. I don’t want a fucking novel.’

  ‘But what about the Nazis?’

  ‘What about them?’ Gus shouted. ‘If you want to write a story about the kikes, find out how come they arrive here with enough dough to buy blocks of flats before they have time to say Ikey Solomon.’

  Ted took a deep breath. Trying to keep his voice steady, he asked, ‘If I find proof, can I run the story about the Nazis?’

  His editor’s reply could be heard at the other end of the building, but it wasn’t fit to be repeated in polite company.

  Chapter 4

  Verna Browning was hanging Ted’s white shirts on the line, but her mind had wandered back to her wedding day twenty-five years before. She had been close to thirty by then, already on the plump side, and she’d been resigned to staying on the shelf, when one of the English girls in the office had introduced her to her brother. ‘He’s a bit on the quiet side,’ she’d said, as though apologising, but Verna liked the lanky bloke with the slow Somerset accent who only spoke when he had something to say. She knew from the moment they met that this was a man she could rely on. He was solid. Alf wasn’t given to compliments but he told her that he liked her because she wasn’t empty-headed like other girls he’d known. And he liked the way she listened when he talked. A few weeks later he asked her to marry him.

  Verna was daydreaming about her wedding day when Maude McNulty poked her head over the loose palings of the wooden fence which separated their backyards.

  ‘Did you know that some new reffos moved into the house on the corner yesterday?’ she said. ‘A young couple they were. Their suitcase was held together with a bit of rope. I wonder where this lot came from.’

  Verna took the wooden peg from her mouth and continued hanging out the wash
ing. Maude McNulty never missed a thing. ‘That woman should join the police force,’ Ted often said. ‘She’d catch more crooks than most of the cops I come across.’

  ‘There are four reffos living in that place already,’ Maude McNulty was saying. ‘How come they’re allowed to let so many rooms?’

  Verna shrugged. ‘That’s what boarding houses are for, I suppose.’ She took another shirt from the wicker basket, shook it several times to loosen the creases, surveyed it and decided that next time she’d add more Reckitt’s blue to the rinse water.

  ‘It’s not right,’ her neighbour persisted. ‘There should be a law against it. This isn’t India. Anyway, they’re taking up all the rooms and flats. No wonder the boys coming home from the war can’t find anywhere to live.’

  Verna put another peg in her mouth and nodded. It was true. Just the other day she’d got talking to a young woman who told her that she and her husband had to live with his parents because they couldn’t find a place of their own and they couldn’t afford key money for a flat. Every day she read angry letters in the paper from people who blamed the government and the migrants for the housing shortage, and the Women’s Weekly was full of articles advising women how to deal tactfully with the mothers-in-law they were living with.

  She didn’t think the migrants could be blamed for all the housing problems, though, and, tired of the complaints, she turned back to the clothes line, hoping that her neighbour would take the hint. From the corner of her eye she saw Maude McNulty was still there, her sharp eyes darting all over the yard.

  ‘The Johnsons are clever, letting out all those rooms, I’ll give them that,’ the old woman said. ‘With this flood of reffos, I reckon they’ll soon make enough to retire.’

  Picking up the empty basket, Verna retreated inside, letting the door close behind her more loudly than she’d intended. She wondered what had turned her neighbour into such a misery, and what Maude McNulty had been like in her youth, although she couldn’t imagine her ever being young.

  She sniffed as she passed the mountain of newspapers piled up in one corner of the passageway that ran between her semi and the one Hanny and her mother were renting. Ted bought every newspaper and magazine and insisted on keeping them all, though when he’d get round to reading them, heaven only knew. Moisture had rotted the tattered edges, and from the musty smell that rose from the yellowed papers, she suspected that the neighbourhood cats had sprayed them to claim their territory. Exasperated, she decided to get rid of the papers once and for all.

  The houses on her side of Wattle Street backed onto a narrow lane where the rubbish bins were kept, and she was stuffing the papers into her bin when a woman appeared at the other end of the lane, looking rather lost. Verna had never seen her before, and she wondered if this was the one who had just moved in.

  ‘How’re you going, love, all right?’ she called out.

  The woman seemed to be looking at the rubbish bin.

  ‘The garbo’s coming tomorrow,’ Verna said and, seeing the woman’s puzzled expression, mimicked tipping the rubbish out. ‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, tomorrow,’ the woman repeated in a foreign accent.

  Verna walked down the alleyway towards her, picking her way among the long grasses and the vines of morning glory draped over the fences. In spring, nasturtiums sprang up in the grass, exuding their strange metallic scent, and in summer the grass was sprinkled with the yolk-coloured weeds the kids called wet-the-beds. When honeysuckle climbed on the vines, they’d pull off the scented flowers and suck the nectar from their stems. Every afternoon after school, the lane resounded with the noise of children playing in the paddock on the other side, but in the mornings the lane was quiet.

  Verna was panting by the time she reached the newcomer. ‘Anything you want to know, just ask me, okay? I’m Mrs Browning. I live down there,’ she said, and pointed. ‘Number seventeen.’

  The woman nodded and said something that Verna didn’t catch. Perhaps her name, which sounded something like Sal or Sally. She was about twenty-five, Verna thought, tall and pleasant-looking, with curly brown hair pulled back from her wide forehead and rolled up at the back. She had a wistful expression. She probably missed her homeland and the people she’d left behind. But at least she had a husband, according to what Maude McNulty had said.

  Verna sighed. Her married life had come to a sudden end with an artillery barrage in Tobruk. Alf had been under no obligation to enlist in the army at his age, but she hadn’t been able to stop him. ‘Have to do my bit for the Old Country,’ was what he’d said. It still made her angry to think of it. She admired his patriotism, but she felt angry. For him, for herself, and for Ted. What a waste of a good man.

  She would have liked to talk to the New Australian woman, to tell her that she understood how hard it was to adjust to a new way of life, but the woman had already gone back inside the house.

  Sala Wajs sank onto the lumpy mattress and looked around at the room they were renting for a guinea a week. In the entrance hall she could smell the sweetish odour of mice, and the greasy smell of rancid lamb fat wafted from the door that led to the landlady’s place at the end of the hall. In their room, the bedding smelled of stale sweat. Tattered blinds that wouldn’t keep out the light or give any privacy hung from the small window. On the beige wall, where the paper was peeling away at the joins, someone had hung a fly-spotted photograph of a caravan of camels walking into the brilliant sunset of an Arabian night. Dejected as she was, Sala couldn’t help smiling at such an incongruous scene in this dismal place.

  Their suitcase stood on the torn lino floor, between the bed and the dressing table with its tarnished mirror, still locked and tied with rope. Sala wondered if she’d ever have the energy to unpack. The woman she’d just met in the lane seemed kind, with her soft white hair and plump face, but she hadn’t understood much of what she’d said. What was that strange word — garbo? At first she’d thought she meant the film star, but then she’d said something about tomorrow.

  In between frequent bouts of seasickness on their seemingly endless voyage, Sala had tried to learn some English, but she’d never come across the word garbo. Curious, she pulled out the English-Polish dictionary from her large leather holdall, but after a few moments she slammed it shut. The word didn’t exist.

  Everything had happened so fast since they’d arrived in Sydney three weeks ago. With their ready smiles, Australians seemed quite ingenuous, almost childlike. Even strangers she passed in the street smiled and said, ‘How are you?’, but they never waited for a reply. As far as she was concerned, the best thing about Australia was that it was at the other end of the world. From what she’d read, she’d expected something exotic, so she had been surprised to find trams rattling through the city, and not a kangaroo, snake or horse buggy in sight.

  She looked disconsolately around the room. Szymon had grabbed the first place they could afford, and with his typical ebullience he had enthused about its advantages, taking no notice of her comments about the dreary decor and horrible smells. Close to Bondi Junction and the shops, only ten minutes from Bondi Beach, and just around the corner from the tramline, he’d said, and he’d handed over the first week’s rent without waiting to see if she agreed.

  She had set her heart on the spacious, airy flat they’d seen in Bondi Road, where the sun streamed in through the balcony that reminded her of home, but the landlord had wanted two hundred pounds key money before letting them move in. ‘Don’t worry, Sala,’ Szymon had said with the bravado that she had once found so comforting, ‘one day I’ll buy you the whole block. But for now, this will do us.’ And without waiting to unpack he’d rammed his hat on his dark wavy hair and shot out to look for work.

  With arms that seemed to weigh more than her whole body, Sala started unpacking. There wasn’t much. She’d been told that the climate in Australia was hot, but apart from the cotton dress she was wearing, the only light clothes she’d brought were a printed skirt and two blouse
s made from parachute silk, which was so popular in Poland after the war. She laid them on the bed beside the navy shantung suit still wrapped in tissue paper.

  Szymon had bought it for her in Marseilles just before they boarded the ship. When they’d seen it in the window of a boutique, she hadn’t even wanted to try it on. They couldn’t afford it, she’d argued, and anyway, it was too sophisticated with its New Look peplum jacket and long pencil skirt, but he’d insisted, and, worn down by his enthusiasm, she’d tried it on. Standing awkwardly in the centre of the shop, she looked in the mirror and saw a woman in an outfit that didn’t suit her, but from the way Szymon’s eyes lit up when he looked at her, she’d realised that he was seeing something totally different. She was still protesting that it was far too expensive while the saleswoman wrapped it up in swathes of tissue paper. It was the most stylish outfit she had ever owned, but now she knew she should have stood her ground and bought something lighter and less formal.

  Sala had spent much of the time on board ship lying on her bunk in the airless cabin she shared with fifteen other women, or pretending to sleep on one of the stained canvas deckchairs. She’d told Szymon she felt seasick, but it hadn’t only been the smell of sump oil, vomit and the heaving of the ship that had made her feel ill. It had been the sinking feeling in her stomach, the growing conviction that she should never have married this man who was her opposite in every way. It was strange that the qualities that had attracted her in the beginning irritated her so much now, but she knew why she had needed him. She had felt desperate for someone strong to cling to after the war, when all that remained of her past life were aching memories and bitter regrets.

  Sala pulled up the torn Holland blind and looked outside. The windows of the other houses had their curtains and blinds drawn, shielding their inhabitants from the light, and from the unwelcome glances of passers-by. But although the windows were covered, some of the front doors were wide open. Funny people, she thought. It was all right to walk in, but not to look in. Streets in European cities bustled with people walking, talking, shopping and meeting friends in cafés. Everyone lived in apartment blocks, but here people seemed to live lonely lives in separate houses on empty streets.