Hannah & Emil (41 page)

The man nodded towards one of the beds where there was a man in uniform, as dishevelled and forlorn in sleep as the men around him. His friend, it was Solomon now, said something to Emil's neighbour who put out a hand to keep Emil upright in his chair while Solomon approached the sleeping medical officer. Emil saw one man stand over another, could not establish who they were. It was a ship, with soldiers. But one of those men was a friend, trying to help him. Without his help he would die. Something had gone wrong inside his body. His blood was poison. He recognised the feeling, but he did not know from where.

The man Solomon was shaking jolted, sat upright immediately, and Emil lurched forward, thinking to save his friend from a blow. He was falling forward. The man with his hand on his arm pulled him back onto the chair.

His friend was talking to the man he had woken and was pointing to Emil. They approached him together. The man placed his hand on his forehead. The hand was very cool and dry. How was this man so cool in this furnace?

‘Could it be malaria?' Solomon asked the man in English. ‘I think he was in Palestine, and Turkey.'

The man nodded thoughtfully and said something from deep underwater and they began to manoeuvre themselves under his arms, to take him somewhere. The man in the chair next to them began to grumble. He was upset about something. ‘Hours,' he said. ‘Hours and hours.'

No one had a chance to answer him because just then a thump hit the ship low down behind them and several of the men fell off their beds and started screaming. Emil was wrenched from the grasp of Solomon and the doctor and fell to the floor. It smelled of ammonia but it was cold. A nice cold, hard surface under his cheek. A second strike shook the floor and he saw the blur of feet rushing towards the door. Solomon and the doctor steadied themselves and pulled Emil to his feet. There was an English voice in the corridor. ‘Stay below! Stay below!'

When they had grappled Emil back onto a bed, the doctor went out to the stairway. ‘What's going on? Are we under attack?' he called up to the guard. ‘Shouldn't we get ready to evacuate?'

‘Orders are to stay below! Just do as you're told.'

Then there was a soldier in the room, hurtling from the stairwell into the infirmary. A big man like a stupid bull, pushing patients from their beds onto the floor. The soldier crashed through the beds towards Emil, face red, and then he was pulling him onto the floor and kicking him in the head, once, twice, screaming at him. Do I know this man? was all Emil could manage to think. There was a feeling amid the assault that some old trouble was surfacing, something he'd believed himself done with.

His head flashed with bright light, as though something had detonated inside it. He heard someone scream as the explosions in his head came one upon the other. ‘Filthy German swine have torpedoed us. We will all die, you filthy kraut.' He felt liquid in his ear. Saw nothing. Then there were men on every side, German voices, gathering around his attacker, bearing him away.

He felt his friend help him onto the bed. He recognised his voice and when he opened his eyes he saw him, knew him. It was Solomon Lek, the man with the books, the man who didn't drown. If this man stayed with him, he would be all right. He was lucky. Solomon pulled a chair alongside the bed and rested on Emil's legs, arms and head, pinning them down, so that he would not fall off. Solomon fell asleep instantly. At some point the medical officer returned and gave him quinine, he knew the smell as it came towards his face. Ah yes.

Emil closed his eyes and felt the doctor touch his ear, pat the dried blood with something that stung. When he had gone Emil slipped inside himself into a place where the man kicked him until he could not see. For the rest of the night Emil understood that the screaming man was a Nazi, that the British army was run by them now, and that none of them would ever see land, nor even daylight, again.

Emil mended, slowly, and was transferred back into the cavernous hold with the other men, still shaky, with the cleared-out lightness of recovery. He suffered their jokes about his holiday in the infirmary without comment, not sharp enough to offer a response. He slept one night a little better than the other, rocked in the hammock, enclosed within his cocoon. Several days into the voyage, they were called on deck at dawn. It took two hours for two and a half thousand men to shuffle out, blinking under a pink sky, onto the deck. Everyone could clearly see from the position of the great red orb breaking free of the ocean that they were heading south. Emil looked at the men around him, their faces lined and hairy in the pink light, and wondered where in God's name they would all end up.

‘Men,' came the voice of the captain through a loudhailer from way up ahead, ‘now that we have left Europe behind us, I can inform you of our destination. It is Australia, where you will remain for the duration of this war, and will pose no more threat to the security of the British Isles. Dismissed.'

As the men shuffled and mumbled to each other, a word, repeated over and over in an incredulous whisper, hovered above the crowd:
Australia!
Emil watched the sun at the horizon finally lift free of the water with a viscous drop and absorbed the information. They had all included Australia on their list of possible destinations but now that it was a certainty it was an incredible thing to take in. But so then would be Shanghai, or India. He tried not to think of the number of mines laid across the vast spread of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

He had heard the voices of Australians in the trenches at night, had taken plenty with his rifle. The Australians had been brown, dirty, scared, mad and vicious, just like them. They looked the same inside when their intestines were spilling out into the mud. Their faces looked the same when they lay in a shell crater, wounded, as good as dead. And there had been a group of them at the hostel once. Louder than the English. Taller. More energetic. They had given the impression they ate a lot of beef and lamb, and spent their spare time swimming and playing cricket. No doubt there was more to it.

It seemed beyond belief that they would reach the other side of the world intact. Even if he did, Hannah could not reach him. For the duration of the war, the captain had said. Hitler and Churchill might fight forever. They seemed to have an appetite for it. He drank in the acres of ocean knowing that at any moment they would be ordered below. He could not see what was coming and he could not think of what was past. He was still light with illness. Too much thought would knock him off his feet.

Solomon squeezed through to him as they reached the stairs. ‘What do you think?' He was smiling. He looked young. ‘I have a cousin in Melbourne. I should not say it out loud—' he dropped his voice low among the babbling of the other men ‘—but I
do
feel lucky! To survive two torpedo attacks, and now this!'

Emil saw in Solomon's face his own response as a younger man when he discovered the destination of his next voyage with Siemens. He rarely knew a thing about the place printed on the paper, it was the names that were exciting. Reykjavik. Caracas. ‘Do you think letters can be sent from Australia, in wartime?'

Solomon turned to him. They were being sucked into the door with the crowd. They would not see each other's faces clearly again for a long time. ‘Oh yes, I had one from my cousin. She said I should come.'

Emil felt a hand on his arm, a soft pressure, as they went back into the darkness, and the stench of themselves.

At Freetown they smelled the sharp barbecue cooking and the sweetly rotten tropical plants. The place was lit up like a tree at Christmas after their months of blackout in England and at sea but they glimpsed the lights only through the gaps in the porthole or on the gangway, through wire. They took extra trips across to the putrid latrines to breathe in Africa and see the black silhouettes of the immense palm trees stirring in the breeze before the collective odour of their own insides overwhelmed them. Emil had been here before, was free then to roam the alleyways and marketplaces and bars, scramble up the red slopes behind the town for a view of the pale ocean, and did not know whether he was luckier than the younger men, who were desperate to see it, or worse off, knowing the strangeness and wonder they were missing, right there on the shore, close enough to smell, to feel. As they departed the coast of Sierra Leone, the men who ruled this floating kingdom, for a reason known only to them, opened the cases they had not thrown overboard and distributed clothes and towels at random. Perhaps the stink of the internees had become too much for them. Or perhaps they had already taken everything they wanted.

At first the men would not use them, not wanting to sully each other's possessions, but the soldiers refused to make any attempt to assign items to their true owners, and so the men at last took the supplies and changed their clothes for the first time in three weeks. And then they were all briefly cleaner, their shirts and underclothes whiter and still smelling of the laundries of their landladies, wives and mothers, but they became an odd collection of souls whose clothes did not fit them, worrying constantly that they would chance upon their owner at exercise or dinner and cause irredeemable offence. They were ordered to throw their discarded, lice-infested clothing overboard, and so behind their ship, strewn back towards the lush, mountainous coast of Africa, they left a wide wake of trousers, shirts and hats that drifted momentarily on the foamy green surface before sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic to create an exotic garden for the creatures that lived there. Emil watched as his group returned from their dumping expedition on deck, wondering which of the litter stranded behind them was his, how much of Hannah's translation fees it had cost.

He spent the rest of his journey in the trousers of a man with legs a couple of inches shorter and the shirt of a man with broad shoulders, a thick neck and long arms, hoping particularly not to meet the owner of this shirt, giant that he must be. Only a very few razors were distributed, and no shaving cream or mirrors, and so hardly any men attempted to shave. Emil wore his ill-fitting clothes and itchy, lice-ridden beard through another five weeks of dry biscuits, thin soup and no fresh fruit or vegetables, three rounds of dysentery and the loss of a stone in weight. He had just enough energy to feel sorry for the kosher Jews who appeared to live on little more than the occasional dash of lime juice in their black tea. His hair, still for the most part black when his journey began, was almost entirely grey by the time they reached Fremantle. He knew this because Solomon commented on it one morning when the angle of the ship allowed a sliver of morning light to fall upon his head in the hammock. His teeth ached with the intensity of a nail lodged in his brain that someone occasionally moved around a little for good measure.

To pass the time he listened to Solomon's talks on literature and helped whittle the bottom of table legs into tiny, match-like sticks for one of the boys who was building a steamer with real matches and scraps of wood gathered from the men and one or two of the kinder guards. He ran a book on how many days Solomon could go without being sick. His record was three. The internees owed him fifty-seven pounds, fifteen shillings and fourpence, which he promised to split with Solomon, if he ever received it.

After they rounded the southern tip of Western Australia, glimpsing from the gangways the grey-green scrub and red dirt, they sailed off into nothing again, until they reached Adelaide, its dry hills in the distance beyond the flat dusty suburbs. These places, these far-flung outposts of Englishness with corrugated tin roofs. It was bewildering to see such domesticity perched on the edge of the desert with dust skimming along the streets in the warm, dry wind.

Of Melbourne they saw nothing. Most of the men were not allowed to disembark, or to move about, though some were taken off, including a group of Nazis, offloaded for God knew where. The others cheered as the Nazis were ordered on deck. ‘May that be the last we see of your kind!' the man in the hammock next to Emil shouted, a usually quiet chemist who had given his own daily lectures from his table for the past two months. But you always saw Nazis again, Emil thought. More rose up to replace them. Here they were, on the other side of the world, and still there were Nazis.