Hannah & Emil
Hannah
& Emil
BELINDA CASTLES
First published in 2012
Copyright © Belinda Castles 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
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Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
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ISBN 978 1 74175 516 9
Internal design by Lisa White
Set in 11.5/17.3 pt Minion Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Author
's note
While this novel is based on the events of my grandparents' lives, it should be considered fiction. The main episodes of this novel happened, but almost all of the detail is imagined, and some elements of the narrative have been deliberately altered for the author's purposes. None of the characters in the book, beyond the protagonists, are intended to bear resemblance to specific individuals.
For my father and all the descendants
of Heinz and Fay,
in memory
Contents
Emil Gallipoli peninsula, May 1915
It was the humid heart of summer and Flora had been wading through thick, wet air for days, dreaming of a cool change. She was newly, invisibly pregnant and sometimes found herself kneeling on the floor of the Customs House library, head on the cool metal stacks, waiting for this light-headed exhaustion to pass. Even the air conditioning did not seem to lessen the weight of the air.
When her day ended she walked downstairs to the huge entrance hall, where the model of the city lay beneath the glass floor. She had begun to take a later train home so that she had time to study the model, which took up the floor space of a large living room. She walked above the fanning train tracks of Central Station and along the length of the city centre to Circular Quay, and the Customs House. I am in there, she thought. There's a little Flora, standing on the ground floor of that building, looking down past her feet at an even tinier Customs House, imagining an even tinier Flora. But it was like the concept of infinity, too mind-bending to sustain.
Perhaps she should have been an architect. She would love to make these miniature buildings, to hold a form of her imagined structure in her hands, to shape every detail: to angle the roof carefully between forefinger and thumb, to mould the trees that would be placed around it. Then put it out into the world of other people, let it grow into something thousands of times the size. But she felt her own part in such a process every time she placed exactly the right book in the hands of a visitor. She sent its recipient off with it out into the city and they took it home into their lives, sat down in a quiet place, opened it up and stepped through into a room, a house, a world they had never known.
She trailed her memory along the streets beneath her feet and through the little buildings. She had arrived at Central Station from the airport with her backpack, her excitement spreading and rising, filling the noisy high-ceilinged hall. I am in Australia, she thought. What sort of life will this be?
There was the block at the edge of Kings Cross where she had found her bedsit. From the window she could see the tallest of the gleaming curved points of the Opera House from behind, poking out above the trees.
The Flora she imagined, her miniature, walked down the cool, damp-smelling steps from the Cross down into Woolloomooloo, the city soaring up out of the Domain ahead of her. At first she had walked to a café in the dark windswept tunnel of Kent Street, where she made coffee and counted change, and in quiet moments had spread open the paper on the back counter to look at the jobs section. She was a librarian by training. Surely every city needed librarians? After several months she had seen the ad lift off the page of the
Sydney Morning Herald
like a banner, cracking in the breeze. They were moving the city library to the Customs House and needed new staff.
And so began her new routine, her new life. Joining the morning flow down into the trains, burrowing beneath the city, emerging above the Quay and disappearing into her own allotted building, like everyone else. Emerging later into the fading day, tired and light, part of the great movement of the city.
The most wonderful thing about this model beneath her feet was that it was always changing. A building had gone up at Darling Harbour and no sooner had it been completed than the workmen came in early and inserted into the model city the building's replica. The city changed while Flora slept.
Two years now of this place. She had come from England, just for a look, because of her family history. She was, after all, half Australian. And she had loved the endless sky, the salty harbour breezes and the hard reflective surfaces of the city's buildings. The lightness of not really knowing anyone, of not being at home. She felt so free it made her dizzy. But now there was David, and this new being inside her. She looked beyond the edges of the model buildings to where the tracks ran out from Central and imagined herself on one of the little trains, carrying the dot inside her home to their house in Newtown.
The light in the hall dimmed and she looked behind her, out to the street. People were hurrying by, bent over. It must be raining. She walked out over the northern tip of the model city, across the void where the harbour would be, if the model didn't end, and through the door towards the real harbour. She stepped into an instant drenching as she crossed the road between buses towards the Quay, the ferries a yellow and green blur in the grey air beyond the station.
Flora let herself into the cottage, knowing at once that David was not home yet. She was glad. She liked to be in an empty house before anyone came home, just long enough for a cup of tea, a space between the sound of voices, then company and warmth.
She dropped her bag on the horrible vinyl sofa that creaked when you sat down and made for the kettle. There was a note on the bench.
Picked up a parcel for you. It's huge! In the spare room. Don't try and
move it on your own. Stupid dinner tonight. Late.
It would be the last of her books and photo albums from England. Her mother was moving out of her lovely, messy old house in the country, into a flat. If all my stuff is here, Flora thought, then I suppose it's home. She imagined her mother's new flat as a depressing place on a bland estate and felt briefly bereft. She took her hot mug down the dark hallway to the room where they stuffed their folders of bills, David's toolbox and boogie board, those of her books that wouldn't fit on the shelves in the living room. On the single bed was a parcel the size of a suitcase, wrapped in brown paper and string like something from another age. She found some scissors in the desk drawer and cut her way in to expose a patch of worn brown leather. It
was
a suitcase.
She sat down on the bed next to the ruptured parcel and touched the leather, left her hand there for a moment, and she was small suddenly, eight perhaps, lying between clean-smelling, striped flannel sheets looking at the old brown suitcase next to her pillow. There was a lamp on it, and her bookâthe Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen or some old English thing about fairies. Her grandmother Hannah was reading it to her, had just laid it down, the page marked for the following night. It was the moment before sleep, in Hannah's flat in London. This was Hannah's case.