Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance (7 page)

His face turned serious.

‘It is a tango, Louise.'

He watched her to see if anything registered.

Then, ‘Here, look. Why don't I show you.'

She moved away from the door. The piano tuner stood up and met her midway across the floor. She moved inside Schmidt's arms. She hadn't danced since school. Boyd had invited her to a big wedding out at one of the farms, and they had danced there, after a fashion. But this was different.

The piano tuner directed her with a series of feints and light shoves. They danced around the room, and then when the song he hummed in her ear showed signs of petering out he would dash back to play a few more bars, rekindle his memory, then return to her with the retrieved melody. Back and forth he went between the piano and her. He played up his forgetfulness and she laughed. They danced and danced until the late afternoon shadows spread over the lawn outside.

At some point, feeling a need for air, they went out to the garden with Louise pulling her cotton shirt away from her clammy skin.

The piano tuner looked well pleased. She remembered her father looking the same way after he had finished building something. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

‘A drink is what we need, Louise,' he said.

At this hour only Egger's was open. She didn't want to go there. But then she remembered another place that sold lemonade and ice and they set off on foot, leaning into each other, in no hurry. She asked the piano tuner about his travels. It seems he had been everywhere.To France, to Uruguay and to Argentina; to Australia.

‘The name Schmidt,' she inquired carefully.

He seemed to know what she was getting at.

‘My grandfather was from Bavaria. I was born in Bournemouth.'

She felt herself relax.

They were near the lemonade shop when they heard in the near distance a man shout, ‘There he is!'

The voice left a violent arc in the air. They stopped and turned in time to see a figure disappear inside the hotel. The piano tuner gave a shrug. They walked on, thought neither one spoke until a little further down the road when they heard something that diverted them. This time a number of men spilled out of the hotel—it was like watching salt poured. Louise saw one with a pick handle. She recognised old Jackson; the old fool, she thought, he should know better; and a number of others who were regulars at the Little River Cemetery. The piano tuner fingered his tie. Without any panic, more as though an unexpected change of weather had forced a cancellation of plans, he said, ‘I think we might go back now, Louise.'

One of the men shouted, ‘You dirty Hun bastard!'

Schmidt looked perplexed. His hand went to his tie again, he placed it on Louise's shoulder to set them on their way.

A number of men had already started across the road. Their intention was obvious.They aimed to cut them off. Louise felt the piano tuner slow at her side. He whispered in her ear, ‘The railway station or the police station. Either one.'

The railway station, she thought. It was nearer. Also, the stationmaster might still be there. He had been kind to her; for several months after her father drowned the stationmaster hadn't allowed her to buy a train ticket.

The moment they stopped to alter their course the status of the situation changed. They were quarry now, and awareness of this released new spite and hostility in the shouting that followed them.

They walked faster and faster until Schmidt took her arm and began to run.

They could see the tracks at the end of a long street, but when they arrived there they discovered the station another two hundred yards away. It was too far. They wouldn't make it. That's when Louise saw the railway jigger.

A year ago, Billy Pohl had taken her for a joyride at night on a jigger. Billy, who had introduced her in to the ways of silence, had wanted to show her the thick comforting silence of the countryside at night. At a certain point Billy had let the lever go and they had rolled through the darkness, the two of them, sitting side by side on the back, trailing their feet, shoulders touching, and Billy quoting to her from the Quaker
Book of Discipline
, George Fox's injunction to ‘walk cheerfully over the Earth, ministering to that of God in every person.'

She remembered to release the brake and to raise the arm. She could barely lift it—when she did the front wheels of the jigger creaked slowly forward. The shouting grew louder. Now Schmidt leapt to. Together they worked the lever until they began to build up speed. They were fifty yards north of where they started, and gathering speed, when the mob arrived. Bottles were thrown after them. But none of the mob gave chase. A number of them were railwaymen who knew you couldn't outrun a jigger.

They passed the backyards of houses. Dogs barked from their kennels. And where the tracks came out in farmland a cow burst from the fence line. The lever was effortless now. There was no resistance whatsoever and Louise was able to do it on her own. Schmidt sat down to rest in a muddle of sweat and confusion. Once the lights of a farmhouse came on and he jumped up to help with the lever. At Jackson's Crossing she pulled on the brake. As they eased to walking pace, she saw Schmidt look warily around at the shadows. She told him not to worry. She knew a place that was safe and where they would never find him.

They tried to push the jigger off the tracks but lacked the strength. So they left it as it was, abandoned between a herd of heifers and sheep. Under early evening skies they crossed a paddock on the seaward side of the road. Near the bluffs they heard the gratifying sound of the sea surging in at the rocks. It was pitch black in the nikaus. They had to push ahead of themselves, blindly feeling in the dark for the lighter built trees. Once when she told him not to worry—just in case he was—that no one would ever find them, she heard him say, ‘I can well believe that.'

They came out at a different place to where she had scampered down with Billy Pohl and Henry Graham. In the dark it was rougher going. Schmidt hurt himself, not badly, but enough for him to forget the mob and raise his voice in anger. They crunched along the beach. ‘This is ridiculous,' she heard him say. ‘I mean, it's not as if I'm German.' And further on, ‘I've never been to bloody Germany.' And more irritably, ‘Just where the hell are we, Louise?'

She was shocked when she saw the others. Only three days had passed but in the uneven light of the cave Billy Pohl and Henry Graham looked like they had been marooned for weeks. They hadn't shaved. Their faces looked strained. They were relieved to see her, though when they saw Schmidt they leapt up. Billy Pohl was first to speak. ‘Louise, just who the hell is this?'

She told them what had happened. Their going out for lemonade. And how the day had suddenly turned on them. Their escape on the jigger pleased Billy especially.

But she also felt their resentment. Where had she been all this time? Why hadn't she brought them food? Henry wanted to know if she had spoken with his parents. What about Tom Williams? Had he given her any news to pass on? Had she remembered to bring tea?

She said, ‘I wasn't thinking of tea when we left the house, Henry.'

She walked to the mouth of the cave and stared at the moonlight on the water. Now that they had stopped running she started to notice the night chill. It condensed along her spine. The embers from the fire behind the log in the entrance had died down. She folded her arms and began to think aloud. It was too dark to go back home tonight. She didn't want to climb up the cliff or walk all that way without light.

‘Go back?' said Billy Pohl. He sounded amazed. ‘You can't go back, Louise. What's the matter with you. They saw you. They saw you with our friend here.You can't go back.'

‘Go back,' said Schmidt. ‘Of course we must go back. I have appointments. There are pianos to see. People are…Oh Christ,' he said. ‘Oh Christ.' He plonked himself down dejectedly in the sand.

Billy ignored the stranger to concentrate on Louise. ‘You go back, Louise, and we might as well walk back with you to our graves. You do know that, don't you?'

9

She did not know Billy Pohl or Henry Graham that well. Isolation added to the mystery of the Grahams who lived outside the town boundary in almost derelict circumstances. A wooden shack folding into the bush, a solitary square of pasture, the white-freckled trunks of kahikatea. They were bee-keepers. Also, they didn't eat meat or so it was rumoured.That was more or less Henry, then. Billy Pohl she knew as a man of casual habits. Sometimes he would appear on the brink of growing a beard, then, the next time she saw him he was shaven, clean as a whistle, the line of his jawbone sporting and gleaming. With Billy you just never knew what lay around the corner. It was usually Billy's chair you heard scrape the floor at the Meetings. Some are able to occupy silence and rug themselves up in it. Billy was not one of them.

She joined the circle by the fire. Against the cave wall played the flickering shadow of their bowed heads as they sought the comforts of silence. Habits are what you fall back on in a moment of crisis.

She made room for Schmidt but he stuck his hands in his pockets and took himself off to the mouth of the cave to sulk.

That first night, they lay their heads on their folded arms. Sleep came and went. She heard Schmidt get up in the night and move around. She closed her eyes and drifted off again. The next time she woke she raised her head—the mouth of the cave was evenly divided between sky and sea—and she saw him telescoped, sitting on a rock, the moonlit tide washing around him.

Later that morning she was gathering firewood when she heard footsteps in the shingle behind her. She turned, and there he was, holding his hands to her, advancing with an expression of distress. ‘I'm sorry, Louise. This is all my fault. I am so sorry.'

Every morning they wake up with the sound of the ocean roaring in their ears. It is the sound of the world in these parts—huge, unpopulated, lonely. They lie there, for the moment too stiff to move, too cold to make the effort even though they know that once they get up and start moving their aches will disappear. They wake with sand in their ears, up nostrils, a grit on their fingers, hands and arms. Skin like sandpaper; their hair stiff. An irritating graininess in their scalp. The itching never stops. Billy Pohl and Henry Graham complain of their filthy trousers; the awful drag of material on their skin is even changing the way they walk. They complain of sores on their legs and soon the discomfort is working its way into their faces, stretching the skin, focussing the eyes, souring mouths.

They raise their heads a few inches and look past their bent knees to the ocean. Another December day lies exhaustingly ahead. By midday Louise is ready to lie down again. She's done everything there is to do. She is ready to lie down and sleep. By midday she finds herself wishing for nightfall. The afternoon is no use to her. There is nothing to do but to wait.

Meanwhile the hills, the tireless ocean, the broad sky all carry the same message. Look at where you are. You're all alone.

At night when the wind blows down off the hills they lie in their sand beds with the thought that they are as powerless as the cows that stand in their dark paddocks. As vulnerable as the land peaking out to sea. Anything could happen. An earthquake. A giant wave might engorge the cave and suck them out to join the echo of the ocean and of nothingness.

By the fourth day it is clear to Louise that things are not going to pan out the way she thought they would. The world hasn't missed them at all.The world isn't even out searching. Either that, or they've done too good a job of hiding and now they are left with just themselves. Louise in her fraying dress. Paul Schmidt with that secret country he carries within. Self-sufficient and the least ruffled of them, always he seems locked in his thoughts, travelling between the here and there. Billy, cat smart, watchful. And Henry, glum, bored with the adventure, like a child in his persistence, asking every hour, why hasn't Tom come for them? Why hasn't Tom brought the good news that he's sorted out things and they are now free to return to their other life? Why have they been left to hang here like this?

The same question preoccupies them all. Billy is given to standing in the mouth of the cave where he quizzes the sea.

Schmidt has made a particular rock his own. He can spend hours sitting on it, alone, knees, chin and elbows. The moment he senses anyone's eyes on him he returns their interest with a smile. Louise hasn't heard him complain once—even in the morning he never joins in the chorus of groans. She watches him sitting on his rock and thinks he is like a man waiting for a late-arriving train. Most days a trawler is seen out to sea. A single vee slicing a line for farther up the coast. It is always Billy who hisses at her to get down from the rock. Billy is always on the lookout. Every morning he climbs the cliff behind the cave to check their position in case in the night there has occurred some rearrangement. Billy is the one most suspicious of the world. She doesn't get down from the rock, though. She doesn't believe that the trawler has seen them. She's convinced of their invisibility. Besides, she's been out on her father's boat and knows about the bulge in the sea and how the shoreline disappears from view.

One night Schmidt tells a story about South American animals with magical powers who at night turn themselves into ghosts and sneak into villages, passing through the front door of houses, searching the shelves for food.

In the ensuing silence it is Billy Pohl who speaks up. ‘We're not about to do that,' he says.

Of the unmentionable things, of all the things she is sure preoccupies Billy, it is this. What if Henry bolts? What if one morning they wake up and find him gone? That would be it then, wouldn't it? That would mean the end. It would only be a matter of time before a sheepish-looking Henry led the authorities to their whereabouts.

The prospect made her smile. A sense of relief loosened within her; for the moment it was as if Henry had already gone and done that and now there was just a short period of waiting to get through before the dogs and handlers showed up. She looked over at Paul Schmidt sitting on the rock, crossed arms, locked in a dream.They would let him go, and he would say adieu.To where? Abroad? He wouldn't stay a piano tuner. Or if he did, it wouldn't be here. Europe? Not with all the fighting. He would go to Argentina. He would go to that place he describes at night around the fire. He would go there and lose himself in a new language. She thinks how wonderful that would be, to simply leave and arrive, and in time become local. It makes her feel a little sad, even envious. And what about Henry and Billy? What would happen to them? Well, that's easy, isn't it. They would be marched off to the war to be killed out of fairness to old classmates.