The Last of the Bonegilla Girls Page 12

  When the big clock in the kitchen announced it was five o’clock, it had been time for Elizabeta to go home. She made sure to finish her piece of bread first. She hated the crusts, so thick and hard that they hurt her teeth to chew them, but she knew there would only be flour soup for dinner. Hard crusts were better than flour soup.

  Elizabeta had waved goodbye to Greta, called out, ‘Bis morgen’—see you tomorrow—and stepped outside into the snow. There had been a fierce wind disrupting the snow from its drifts and it swirled around her feet like fog. She had quickly turned her head left and right so she could search both ways up and down the street, ever vigilant for Russians. Her mother and Greta’s grandmother—all the women of their village—knew to be scared of them. Some women in the village had been desperate for the Russians to invade, figuring nothing could be worse than the Hungarian Nazis or the German Nazis. But now they were more scared of the Russians than the dark. The Russians hadn’t needed the cover of darkness to hide their crimes. They would come at any time of the day or night. The women in their village knew the stories, had warned every young girl, ‘The Russians will take you away to peel potatoes. They always need young girls to peel potatoes’.

  They had very quickly learned that girls weren’t taken away to peel potatoes. Those taken away by soldiers would return as shadows. One girl, three houses down, had jumped from the roof of her family’s house. Another girl in their village had hung herself in a barn, and had been discovered by her mother, dangling lifeless in between two milking cows.

  ‘Women and girls aren’t safe,’ Berta had said, scolding Greta’s grandmother when the old woman scoffed at the stories. It was the only power women had, to warn others, to spread the word, to convince mothers to hide their daughters in cellars or attics until the soldiers were too drunk to do anything but sleep. ‘Don’t go out on the street. Warn your girls. And those women who are happy the Nazis are gone and that the Russians have come? Crazy. The Germans. The Russians. The Hungarians who’ve locked up my husband. They’re all as bad as each other.’

  Elizabeta had never told her mother or anyone, but she’d seen for herself what the Russians had done. Before the winter and the snow, she and Greta had walked into the forest looking for flowers. They’d been chattering away, counting trees and looking for birds, when they’d heard shouts from nearby and then pop pop pop echoing through the forest. It seemed to be coming from the river to the east, near where they’d gone fishing with their fathers in the summer, before the soldiers had come and taken their fathers away. The girls had crept cautiously, trying not to make any sounds, until they found a spot where they were able to look through the trees and into the light and see the river below, flowing fast and clear until there were more shots and then the river ran red. The Russians had lined a group of German soldiers on the ground by the riverbank and shot them, pop pop pop, one by one, and the dead Germans tumbled down into the water below. Pop pop pop then splash splash splash. The water had become swirls of grey and red like bobbing apples.

  Her feet suddenly hadn’t worked, and she wasn’t able to make a sound with her mouth. She and Greta had made themselves as small as they could and hidden until there was no more shooting, and then they had stealthily crept back to the path that led them into the light and home. She and Greta had kept their secret.

  On the doorstep of Greta’s house, Elizabeta had checked four times and when she had been certain there were no Russians, she ran the twenty steps to the front door of her family’s cottage. With two rooms and a thatched roof, it was small, but it would be warm inside if her mother had already lit the fire. She had rapped her knuckles on the front door waiting for her mother to unlatch the lock and let her in, but with her knock, the door had eased open.

  ‘Mutti?’

  The house was quiet. A bag of flour lay on the table in the middle of the kitchen, opened, a scattering of white around it. A slotted metal spoon and a sharp knife lay on a worn wooden cutting board. A cast-iron pot of water sat on the wood stove, boiling over, the water hissing and spitting on the heat of the plate.

  ‘Mutti? Where are you?’ Elizabeta crept around the table. She heard a muffled noise from her parents’ bedroom and stopped.

  Her chest pounded with excitement. Was her father home? Had the soldiers let him go? She’d skipped to the door to her parents’ bedroom. ‘Vati?’

  She put her hand up to the wooden door. Light came through the splits in the timber.

  ‘No, Elizabeta,’ her mother cried. ‘Don’t come in. Go to the kitchen.’

  There was something angry in her mother’s voice and Elizabeta did as she was told. She had walked back to the kitchen and, using a cloth to wrap around her hands as she’d seen her mother do, she lifted the pot from the fire. Then she sat at the table and waited. She traced shapes in the flour dust. A cat. A wild flower. A fluffy cloud.

  It had seemed like a long time before Elizabeta heard the bedroom door creaking open. She looked up. Her mother walked towards her, but the figure behind her wasn’t her father.

  This man was wearing a uniform, grey trousers and a jacket with a dark green collar. On each shoulder there were epaulets with silver buttons. There was a black cross sewn in white on the left breast pocket and a silver eagle on the right. He was buttoning his jacket, but his trousers were still tucked inside his jackboots. The man had a gun in a holster at his hip. He looked around the room and his eyes fixed on Elizabeta sitting at the table.

  ‘Deine Tochter?’ Your daughter?

  Her mother didn’t say a word in reply. There was blood on her bottom lip. One eye was turning purple. Her thick woollen dress was ripped down the front and her skin was pale where it was exposed. Her head was still wrapped in a woollen scarf. She seemed to stumble towards Elizabeta. ‘Sagt nichts,’ she whispered when she leaned down to kiss the top of her daughter’s head. Don’t say anything. ‘I’ll make soup in a minute.’

  Then she raised her voice, half turned back to the soldier. ‘You came here for food. I don’t have anything but flour. And one potato.’

  He stormed across the room. ‘Give it to me.’ The potato was sitting half-peeled on the wooden cutting board on the table and he lunged for it. Elizabeta remembered the muddy strips in a spiral next to it, her mother’s brown fingerprints on the pale flesh.

  He shoved it against his teeth, biting a huge chunk and chewing fiercely. He was a wild animal eating the carcass of another, spittle flying as he used his other hand to tuck in his shirt. That’s why he didn’t see Elizabeta’s mother grab the knife from the cutting board; didn’t see her spin around and lunge at him, so fast he only had time to lift his hand with the potato and not his gun, trying to shield his face, his palm out, his elbow out, but Elizabeta’s mother’s arm was high and she slashed downwards with the knife, along his face, and the potato dropped to the dirt floor.

  When he screamed, Elizabeta froze, then something inside her stomach began to make her whole body tremble.

  The soldier slammed both hands to his face and she saw a trickle of blood dribble onto the flour on the table, all over her cloud. She hadn’t dared move. She’d practised becoming invisible that time in the forest and she did it then.

  Her mother held the knife in the air, her panicked breathing fast and loud.

  The soldier lifted his hands from his face. Blood had dribbled down his wrists into the cuffs of his dirty grey uniform. His breath was fast, shallow, rasping.

  ‘Die Huren ist vurückt,’ he’d snarled. The whore is crazy.

  ‘And if you don’t get out, I will use this again.’ Berta was primed, ready to lunge at the soldier again, waving the bloodied knife from side to side as if she were smearing icing on a cake. ‘Get out! I will tell the Russians. They like killing German soldiers. Or I’ll tell the Germans. I know what they think of deserters. They’ll find you!’ Her shriek reached right inside Elizabeta’s body and squeezed her bones.

  The man stood dazed, unmoving. Berta jumped forwards and lunged at him again a
nd he stumbled backwards to the door. Berta opened it with her one free hand and kicked him out. When the door was slammed and bolted, she dropped the knife to the stone floor with a thud.

  Elizabeta was still invisible but she saw the blood on her mother’s hand, and then more blood. A bright red trail trickled down her legs, to the inside of her ankle, catching and staining in her baggy grey socks.

  Elizabeta looked at her mother. Berta looked at her daughter. A lifetime passed between them in that moment.

  There was movement at the window. Elizabeta slipped silently from her chair and hid under the table. The soldier was coming back to kill them. She knew it. She’d seen his gun. She knew what guns could do. She covered her ears with her hands and squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to pray but had forgotten the words. She had forgotten all her words in the dark behind her closed eyes. Where was her father?

  There was a tap tap tap at the window.

  Berta jumped. ‘Veronika,’ she whispered. Greta’s grandmother.

  From under the table, still as the dead, barely breathing, Elizabeta watched her mother’s shoes shuffle across the floor, her socks red with her blood. A hand picked up the knife and there were footsteps and a clatter in the sink.

  ‘Elizabeta,’ she whispered. ‘You can come out. It’s Frau Hermann. Can you open the door?’ Her mother’s voice shook, broke.

  Elizabeta slid out from under the table and scurried to the door. When she unbolted the door, Frau Hermann swept in with a cold gust of wind and a flurry of snow at her back. Berta lunged at the door and slammed it shut.

  ‘I heard screaming. What is going on?’ She looked Berta over. Her ripped dress. The blood.

  ‘The Russians?’ Frau Hermann gathered her apron in her hands and kneaded the worn fabric.

  ‘A German,’ Berta stammered.

  Elizabeta pressed her back to the cold stone wall by the front door. Frau Hermann went to the pot on the stove, took a piece of cloth hanging on a hook by the steamed-up window, and dipped it in the water. She squeezed it out on the floor and went to Berta, dabbing the blood from her hand. From her face. She gently patted her bruised and swelling eye.

  ‘Oh no, oh no.’ Frau Hermann knelt down and wiped the blood from Berta’s foot and swept upwards to her knee. A fresh flow trickled down in another rivulet. ‘What did he do to you?’

  Frau Hermann turned to Elizabeta, her voice catching, crying, tears in her eyes now. ‘Go be with Greta. Go now.’

  She wasn’t invisible any longer. She didn’t want to be sent away from her mother. Her mother was all she had and there was blood on her body and she might be dying and I can’t be next door playing with Greta when my mother is dying. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Go,’ Berta said. ‘I will come and get you soon.’

  Elizabeta’s memory was confused about the time after that. She remembered that she had spent the night at the Hermann’s, snuggled up tight with Greta to ward off both the cold and the soldier. But the days and months after that were a blur. The war ended, but things hadn’t gone back to the way they were before. Soldiers had taken the Hermanns away in a truck and soon after, Elizabeta and her mother were interned and then sent to Germany on the train just as Jozef had found them.

  ‘The Americans and Russians and the English have decided,’ Jozef had told Berta. ‘I heard it in the camp. All the Volksdeutsche are being deported from Hungary. Some to Russia. We’re going to Germany.’

  ‘But we were born here. My parents and yours, too,’ Berta had answered.

  Almost ten years later, a world away, Elizabeta saw it all again. Frau Hermann and her stale rye bread smeared with lard and snowed with paprika. Greta with her books and her pretty hair. Maybe Greta was in America, eating those things called hot dogs and listening to Frank Sinatra records. Wherever she was, Elizabeta hoped it was somewhere warmer than Bonegilla. California would be warmer. She’d seen photos in magazines of young people on long wooden boards standing on the waves at the beach. She hoped Greta was as far away as she was from home. From everything they’d seen.

  Elizabeta turned on her side and listened to possums leaping across the tin roof of their hut. In the thin moonlight through the window, her breath made a cloud. She crossed her fingers for luck and wished her little sister was having happy dreams.

  She tried to sleep but couldn’t. There was much to forget about the war. Elizabeta would need a whole lifetime to forget what she’d seen.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Berta and Elizabeta arrived at the hospital the next morning, directly after a quick breakfast, Klaus, the German porter, was in the hallway of the isolation ward. When he saw them, he sloshed his mop into the metal bucket and came quietly to them in the hallway. His eyes were sad. Elizabeta clutched her mother’s hand but Berta shook her off as if she was swatting a fly.

  ‘My Luisa? What is it?’

  Klaus dipped his chin. His voice was quiet and low as he spoke German to them. ‘I’m sorry to tell you, Frau Schmidt, that your daughter is very sick. She has pneumonia.’

  Klaus caught Berta in his arms before she hit the floor. He called something out loud and then there were nurses and doctors running from every direction. They lifted Berta onto a bed with wheels and pushed her into a small room. There was a chair and Elizabeta was pressed into it and given a cup of warm milk with Milo, and she watched and tried to listen as Klaus stood by the end of her mother’s bed, watching her and discussing something with the doctor and the nurse in the white cap. Elizabeta was too confused to translate the words in her head but she understood they had decided that Berta was in no state to take in any more bad news, no matter the language in which it was delivered. She was given something to calm her and Elizabeta watched while her mother fought sleep and then finally succumbed to it.

  When her mother’s breathing steadied, Elizabeta lay her arms on the crisp white sheets and buried her head against her mother’s thin body. Where had her mother’s strength gone? Elizabeta didn’t know what to do now. She had been witness to her mother’s suffering before but this time seemed different. That strength had drained from her over the years, like grains of sand through a clenched fist. Elizabeta saw her again in her mind’s eye, waving the kitchen knife at the German, wild, her eyes flared, her words spat out of her mouth like shards of glass. Bit by bit, that fierceness had disappeared, one day at a time, one year at a time. Perhaps from now on she would be like this, asleep and small, pressed into a bed between the white sheets. Maybe her mother had already used up her lifetime’s worth of courage and perseverance. What would Elizabeta do if her mother had nothing left now?

  Elizabeta wished for home, but where was home now? Here at Bonegilla? With her father in the place called Adelaide?

  A hand pressed gently on her shoulder. Elizabeta looked up. Frances was holding a small bunch of flowers.

  ‘Hello.’ Frances paused, wiped a tear from her cheek with her free hand. ‘Here.’ She presented the bunch. ‘They’re for you and your mother.’

  Elizabeta took them wordlessly, and pressed the blooms and the gum leaves to her nose, searching for the scent of fir trees and wild mushrooms.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear about your sister,’ Frances said.

  Elizabeta watched as tears welled in her friend’s brown eyes.

  ‘The doctors and nurses here are very good and they will be doing all they can for her.’

  ‘Yes.’ Elizabeta concentrated on the English words but she didn’t need to translate the expression of sympathy on Frances’s face. Her bottom lip quivered.

  ‘I was here myself, remember?’

  Elizabeta made a fist and knocked her forehead. ‘Your head,’ Elizabeta said. ‘It was hurt.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The click of a woman’s heels on the shiny linoleum echoed and they looked up. Mavis Burley walked towards them.

  ‘Mum,’ Frances said. ‘This is my friend, Elizabeta Schmidt.’

  ‘Hello, Elizabeta.’ Frances’s mother touched her s
houlder too, patted it three times. Then she turned to her daughter. ‘Frances, bring Elizabeta. We’ll take her home and give her some lunch.’

  Elizabeta felt the tug of Frances’s hand and they didn’t let go of each other until they’d crossed the camp and reached the director’s house.

  That evening, just as people from the camp were heading to the mess, the task fell to Mavis to tell Elizabeta that her sister was dead.

  They’d just had a light supper of tomato soup and toast and were still sitting at the table in the kitchen when the phone rang in the hallway. Mrs Burley had excused herself and answered the call. Frances heard a gasp.

  ‘The poor family,’ her mother whispered, but Frances could still hear every word through the thin walls. ‘What’s to be done? Yes, of course I’ll tell her but I don’t know if she’ll understand much of anything. She’s barely said a word all day. I’ll do my best.’ Frances heard the Bakelite click of the phone being returned to its cradle.

  A moment later, Mavis returned to the kitchen. She smoothed down her tweed skirt with jittery hands and then cleared her throat. Her pearls sat neatly at her neckline, just above the collar of her pale green twin-set. Frances searched her mother’s face for a clue about what had just happened.

  ‘Elizabeth, I have something to tell you.’ Mavis pulled out her chair and slowly sat down.

  ‘Her name is Elizabeta, Mum, not Elizabeth,’ Frances said.

  Mavis glanced at her daughter and nodded. ‘My apologies, Elizabeta. That was Frances’s father on the phone.’ She sighed and turned to her daughter. ‘Can she understand me, Frances? Does she speak much English?’

  ‘A little,’ Elizabeta said. Frances reached for her hand and covered it with her own. Elizabeta’s fingers were stiff and cold.

  ‘Your sister …’ Mavis linked her fingers together in a steeple under her chin. ‘Dear girl. I’m very sorry to tell you that your sister has passed away.’