The Last of the Bonegilla Girls Page 22

  Food had become a great comfort to Berta and she wrapped herself in its nourishment, which was revealed in her plump cheeks and her wide hips. Baking was a routine that helped her mother get through every day, or so it seemed to Elizabeta.

  Berta had taken to her granddaughter with such love, such fierce possession, that Elizabeta let herself believe that the birth of Little Luisa had worked. She let herself think that a new life had been able to wash away the grief of a lost one and, on some days, there was no lurking memory of her sister. On other days, grief was like the taste of bile in the back of her throat. Some days, she saw her mother look at her with a sharpness and hardness in her eyes. The question was unspoken but as sharp as a knife’s blade: why do you have your Luisa when I lost mine?

  Perhaps it was not possible to get over the grief of losing a child. It had been six years between Luisa’s death and Little Luisa’s birth. They had never been back to Bonegilla, to Albury, to visit Luisa’s lonely grave. Elizabeta still had the framed photo that Frances had sent her, but it was hidden away in the top drawer of her china cabinet. She could never put it on display. Her mother was at her house too often for it to be safely on the mantelpiece in the living room above the gas heater. Nine years gone, and buried so far away. There was immense pain and loss at that distance, too.

  The world was full of the ghosts of dead people, Elizabeta thought.

  She turned and levered herself up.

  Nikolas came back into the bedroom. He leaned down to kiss her on the top of her head. ‘You going to your mum’s?’

  She nodded, yawning. ‘Today we are making spätzle. And there are pork chops in the fridge.’

  ‘My favourite.’ He smiled and turned to go. ‘Have a good day. Kiss Little Luisa for me.’

  ‘I will,’ she said and looked up at her husband’s back as he left. Something clicked into place.

  The front door opened and closed. The cover of the door chime, a circular sphere on the inside of the wooden door, rattled and echoed. The screw needed tightening. Elizabeta added it to the list in her head of all that needed doing before this baby arrived.

  There were tiny little running footsteps in the hallway. ‘Mutti! Mutti!’

  She held out her arms and Luisa fell into the space between her knees and her stomach full of baby. She hugged her daughter tight, sniffed her hair—baby shampoo—and let herself have this moment. A moment between mother and daughter that had been taken from her own mother. She would always love and hold her own Little Luisa in honour of all her mother had lost.

  ‘Bist du hungrig? Willst du etwas zu esssen?’

  ‘Ja, Mutti.’

  Nikolas didn’t like that she spoke to Luisa in German. ‘What about when she goes to school?’ he’d demanded to know. ‘She will already be behind. How can she do well if she doesn’t know English like the other Australians, huh?’

  She had never argued with Nikolas, but she wanted Luisa to be able to speak with her grandparents, her Oma and Opa. Berta and Jozef had barely any English and what little they had was almost impossible for Australians to understand. Their accents were thick and they put the words together in a way that made sense in German but seemed to confuse Australians. Not that they tried very hard to understand. Elizabeta heard the whispers when they left shops.

  ‘Why don’t they just speak English?’ It was usually uttered out loud, as if Elizabeta and her mother were invisible.

  ‘How will they ever get on if they don’t,’ someone else would reply, tut-tutting.

  Little Luisa tugged Elizabeta’s hand. ‘Frühstück, Mutti.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ She pretended to let Luisa pull her out of bed and they walked hand in hand to the kitchen. Nikolas’s coffee cup was on the sink, next to his plate and knife. She stared at it, trying to make sense of it.

  ‘Your father’s shirt smells like another woman’s perfume,’ she said.

  Little Luisa looked at her, puzzled. She didn’t understand. Neither did Elizabeta.

  Elizabeta had married Nikolas two years after they’d met, in a Catholic ceremony at the church where their fathers had become friends. The new priest, an Irishman, had had trouble pronouncing her name. During the ceremony, he called her ‘Elizabeth’, like the queen. They had taken a bus to Mount Gambier for their honeymoon: three nights in a new motel, a look at the Blue Lake, and then home. They rented a house between her parents and his in Adelaide’s western suburbs. They owned an old Austin, which Nikolas drove to work every day. There was a Hills Hoist in the backyard and a washing machine with rollers on the top that squeezed clothes flat. Elizabeta had a frying pan that plugged into the power point because the oven in the rental house didn’t work, and they ate from an old dinner set because the new one they’d received as a wedding present was on permanent display in the china cabinet in the corner of the living room.

  They only used the good dinner set at Christmas time and on birthdays when her parents and Nikolas’s parents came to dinner. There was a new television in the corner of the living room, on which they watched The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights and Bob Dyer’s Pick a Box each Monday. There were neighbours on each side who didn’t speak to them and tut-tutted when she and Nikolas spoke in German. She heard the grey-haired lady at number 87 whisper about the Germans once. There were two voices out by the back fence, near the patch of dug earth in which Nikolas grew potatoes. Elizabeta heard a scraping on the fence, as if a garden implement had gone wild and was trying to escape.

  ‘You’re joking.’ She heard the scrape, scrape, scrape against cement and the wooden slats of the fence.

  ‘I’m not, Beryl. We went to war with the buggers and now they’re bloody well living next door.’

  Elizabeta had stilled, listening. Would there be any use in explaining the complications of who she was? About what the Nazis had done to her and her family, too?

  Elizabeta often thought of the German soldier. She wondered where he was living, if anyone else knew the truth about him. In her mind, he was the man who knocked on the front door selling the Funk and Wagnalls encyclopaedia. He stood next to Nikolas on the assembly line at Holden. He delivered the mail that was slipped through her letterbox first thing every morning. He was the man slicing carcasses into chops and grinding meat into mince at the Continental butcher on Tapleys Hill Road. He was the baker smoothing freshly whipped cream onto Black Forest cakes at the German bakery on Port Road. He could be anywhere. Or nowhere.

  Or everywhere.

  Elizabeta had never talked of the German soldier again with her mother, not after they’d left Bonegilla. They had tried to bury the memory of him there too. Talking about him meant bringing him back to life and they both wanted him to be dead.

  Elizabeta propped her elbow on the kitchen table and rested her chin in her palm. Her legs were spread wide to make room for her bulging stomach, distended, tight, full. Little Luisa sat opposite her, eating her scrambled eggs, her child’s fork scratching against the melamine of her plate. She would start kindergarten the next year. How odd. Elizabeta and her family had come all this way to the other side of the world to something in German. Pre-school was kindergarten—children’s garden—in South Australia. Or kindy. If a name was long, Australians liked to make it shorter. If it was short, they did the opposite.

  She’d bet the lady next door was even suspicious of kindergarten.

  The bile rose and she swallowed. Heartburn from the pregnancy had made her life a misery in the past few months.

  ‘That means the baby has lots of hair,’ her mother told her. Little Luisa had been born bald and had been like that for twelve months. Now, Berta plaited and pinned and clipped her hair in different ways every day, but never in looped plaits. Never like her own daughter’s.

  ‘Genug?’ Enough?

  Little Luisa nodded and slid off her chair. She skipped to her bedroom and returned to the table with her favourite doll. Elizabeta took the plate and fork and slipped them into the hot sudsy water in the sink. The lemon
scent of the detergent wafted.

  Who is she, this woman who leaves her perfume on my husband’s shirt? Who is she, this woman whom I must keep secret too? Naming the wound would not heal it, she knew that. Naming Little Luisa had not stopped the pain they all felt at losing the first Luisa.

  Later that night, after Little Luisa had gone to sleep, Elizabeta sat in the living room. Her feet, ankles swollen like freshly cooked dumplings, were propped up on the low laminate coffee table. Nikolas still wasn’t home. The thin gold hands of the clock above the mantelpiece told her it was eight o’clock. All the pubs in Adelaide were already closed, the six-o’clock swill long over. It wasn’t her business to think about where he was.

  In her lap was a stack of recent letters from Iliana, from Frances and from Vasiliki. She had read them all at least twice but needed them now, in the loneliness of Adelaide, so far away from the only friends she had in Australia. She hadn’t seen them all together since her wedding, that surprise visit four years before.

  There had been so many letters over the years that she had a special place for them all. It was an old suitcase, brown and battered, one clasp having failed years ago, that she had brought with her from Germany. Crammed inside it was almost a decade’s worth of correspondence.

  There had been times when the letters had become infrequent, and Elizabeta was saddened to think that their friendships had faded and frayed, unable to survive the geographical distance and the burdens and responsibilities of marriage and children. A few years back, letters from Frances had stopped. Nikolas joked that maybe she’d gone on that adventure to Africa or the South Pole that she’d always talked about. But just as mysteriously as they had stopped, one day there was a letter from Frances in the letterbox. She was in Sydney again and she sent a photo of her standing by the Harbour Bridge, wearing a patterned scarf tied around her head and dark sunglasses, a broad smile on her face. There were photos too of Vasiliki’s girls, sitting on the low brick fence of her house in Melbourne, with matching dresses and identical hairstyles. Elizabeta had a photo of Iliana with her brother Massimo making snow angels in the front yard of their house in Cooma. When Elizabeta had told them that Luisa was born, Iliana had sent knitted pale yellow booties; Frances a copy of Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner; Iliana a white rattle with bells inside that chimed as Luisa chewed its hard edges when she was teething.

  They were women now. Two of them mothers, two still single women.

  Elizabeta pulled Iliana’s letter dated two weeks prior out of its thin envelope. There was good news in it and it cheered Elizabeta to read it again. Iliana’s father and her older brother Massimo had started their own construction business in Sydney, having finally left Cooma for good. Iliana worked in the company’s office and her job was called ‘secretary’. Elizabeta remembered the secretary girls walking up and down Rundle Street past the cafe in the mornings, their white gloves neat, their handbags in the crooks of their elbows, giggling at their Australian jokes and stories, as if they owned the place. She liked that Australian expression. People had accused her of walking around Woodville as if she owned the place. She had heard it said often. Did that mean she belonged now in this place of meat and three veg on a plate for dinner and schooners of beer in the front bar for the men and being shunned in the suburbs if you were a woman from somewhere else?

  Elizabeta had searched Iliana’s letter for clues about a boyfriend or a wedding but there were none this time, nor in any letter in the past. Elizabeta’s immediate flash of pity transformed into something else in a blink. Iliana was lucky. She would never have to decide what to do when she smelled another woman’s perfume on her husband’s shirt. Elizabeta had no friends in Adelaide. The girls she knew from the Rundle Street cafe had drifted away. Nikolas’s sister Angelika, who might have been a friend, worked on the production line at the Phillips factory at Hendon making small electrical components with thousands of other women, and had found it easy to make friends. She was always going to the cinema or Glenelg to eat ice cream or to dances on Saturday nights at the Semaphore Palais.

  Today, there had been another letter from Vasiliki—Vicki—to add to the collection. Elizabeta still had to remind herself to call her Vicki. She and her husband had four children now, all girls: Aphrodite, Elena, Stavroula and Euphemia. Her husband had a cafe of his own and was working very long hours. Vicki was busy with her girls, two were already in school, and she was excited to share the news that they had a new television set. She expressed her disappointment that Six O’Clock Rock with Johnny O’Keefe had ended but was quite enjoying Bandstand with Brian Henderson. Elizabeta didn’t know who she was talking about. She and Nikolas didn’t watch those kind of programs.

  A key searched for the lock at the front door. She put down her letters. Nikolas came inside, unsteady on his feet.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ Elizabeta replied.

  ‘Luisa is in bed?’ he asked as he ran a hand over his Brylcreemed hair.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will have a shower.’

  Elizabeta stared at the clock, tried to hear its ticking. She wished the girls from Bonegilla were in Adelaide with her. She wished she could tell them about the woman with the perfume and her husband, that she could ask them what she should do. She resolved to write her letters tomorrow. After a good night’s sleep, she might be of a mind to craft a letter full of happy lies in broken English. She was practised at it. She had been doing it for years, after all.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  ‘Mamma, how many bridesmaids does she need?’

  Iliana folded up the pages of La Fiamma, and moved the newspaper to the other end of the kitchen table. Her empty coffee cup stared back at her, the grounds in the bottom probably an omen. She crossed her arms and sat back in her chair. For months now, every conversation in her family had been about the wedding. How many sugared almonds in the bomboniere? What should the bridesmaids wear? How beautiful will her wedding dress be? One flower girl or two? Or three? How soon before they will have children?

  Iliana’s mother, Agata, turned from the stove, pots and saucepans laid out in front of her like a drum kit. Her tomato sauce-covered spoon waved in the air. ‘You don’t want to be a bridesmaid?’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s just that …’

  ‘Stop with your complaining. You will be her sister-in-law so of course you should be in the wedding. No matter what that mother of hers says.’ Agata tsked and went back to stirring her ragu.

  Iliana thought about making another coffee but there was no room on the stove top now her mother had begun the weekend’s cooking. Her only choice was to sit at the table and try not to think about exactly how ugly her bridesmaid’s dress going to be. The one she was going to wear as fifth bridesmaid for her brother Massimo’s wedding to Domenica Marinelli.

  Fifth bridesmaid. Fifth. The afterthought bridesmaid. The woman the bride had been forced to include to appease her husband’s family, something that did not come naturally to Domenica. Iliana knew that much about her. Apart from the matron of honour, who was Domenica’s already married sister, there were Domenica’s two other sisters, a cousin, her best friend, and her soon-to-be sister-in-law. Oh, poor Iliana, Massimo’s spinster sister. Iliana had imagined the conversation.

  ‘Put her in the wedding, Domenica.’ She was confident Massimo would have stood up for her.

  ‘But she’s ugly, Massimo. She won’t look good in any dress. I don’t want her to ruin my wedding. Or the photos.’

  ‘She’s not ugly. She’s … interesting. Have some sympathy for my sister. It’s as close as she’s ever going to get to the real thing.’

  No, that’s probably not what Massimo would have said. He was the kindest, most loving big brother in the world. But that’s how Iliana felt these days. How could she not? She was twenty-five years old and still not married, still living at home with her parents, who were increasingly worried about what was going to become of their only daughter. Iliana was c
ertain they hadn’t worried about Massimo the same way, even though he was older than her by two years and was only just now getting married himself. And hadn’t he found himself a perfect wife? Domenica was beautiful, slim, younger than Iliana at twenty-three years old, from a prosperous Italian family in Sydney, and she seemed determined to be the perfect Italian wife. To the outside world at least. Domenica batted her heavily mascaraed eyelashes and agreed with everything Massimo said, as if having no opinion of her own was a measure of her own devotion. Iliana loved her big brother, but he wasn’t right all the time. She knew that because they worked together in the family business. She kept the books in order, paid accounts including wages, answered the phone, met new clients who were looking to build their first home, and mediated between her father, who still had little English, and the banks and suppliers who spoke no Italian. In fact, she ran the show.

  The only thing Iliana could claim was that her family had become what some might call prosperous. Her father’s construction business—now Agnoli and Son, for Massimo was officially a partner with his father—had quickly become successful. They’d ridden the housing boom of the early sixties to prosperity.

  Massimo had become a partner the day after he’d announced his engagement. He was doing what a son was supposed to do. Iliana had failed in doing what an Italian daughter ought to do.