This is My Song Page 13

  Joe had finished calibrating. He said gently, ‘Mum, World War Two, the concentration camps –’

  His mother’s eyes flickered. ‘You know about the numbers?’

  ‘Read about them in History. Jews were stamped –’

  ‘Yes.’ She pushed away her half-finished coffee. ‘I’ve never seen Dad’s arm before,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that ridiculous? He has to die before I get to see – but he always wore sleeves. When I was a kid, when we lived in the north-west of Canada, it was cold and windy so people wore sleeves. It wasn’t unusual, you know? And he was so private –’

  Joe nodded.

  ‘I always suspected that something was different,’ she mused. ‘Or at least out of place. People would say, Ullmann, must be German, are you? I’d say no, Canadian, and they’d say, but your father’s accent, he must be from someplace else, and I’d say maybe, but he’s just my dad. We live here, that’s all I know. Joe, my parents never discussed the past. Never. Sometimes that worried me but I soon forgot about it. I was a kid, self-absorbed. For me, our lives started when I was born. They didn’t bother with anything before that so I didn’t either.’

  It was more air gust than laugh, brief and throaty.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t want to know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I preferred to keep the comfortable story. Keep it undisturbed, and safe.’

  ‘Are we Jewish?’ he asked, but she didn’t reply, didn’t look at him.

  Clattering from the kitchen, someone hitting a bell.

  ‘Mum,’ said Joe cautiously, ‘the stuff I read, those numbers were only issued at one camp –’

  ‘Yes, yes, I –’

  ‘Auschwitz,’ he said, the word cutting at his lips.

  ‘I know.’ Her face was flushed. ‘God,’ she said, ‘what now?’ and Joe couldn’t answer.

  He lay in bed that night, mind too busy to allow sleep.

  B4198. His grandfather’s arm was tattooed. The ink was old and the numbers were crude, blockish and unaligned, as if drawn by a child. Applying logic –

  Probability number one: unless there was another, crazy explanation, during World War Two Rafael Ullman had been in a concentration camp, the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Poland.

  Associated facts: the websites Joe had looked at earlier that evening indicated that groups of people such as gypsies, political prisoners, criminals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were drafted into the camps; however, Jews were the principal target because the camps had been built for them.

  Probability number two: Rafael Ullmann was a Jew, meaning that his daughter, Annie Ullmann, and only grandson, Joseph Edward Hawker, also carried Jewish blood.

  Two big probabilities there. Very big.

  Brain over heart, he thought. Your usual way – further proof required. He rolled over, smacked his pillow a couple of times and bent his mind to specifics. World War Two happened from 1939 to 1945. Before she had trailed into her bedroom, exhausted and still nonplussed by what had happened, Joe’s mother had said that she thought Grandpa Ullmann was around seventy-nine, eighty, maybe eighty-one years old.

  ‘Mum, it’s weird. Not knowing –’

  ‘I know, but Joe, he refused to acknowledge his birthday. Ever.’

  Some people preferred that, he supposed. Still weird.

  ‘What about your birthday?’

  ‘Mine? As a child, always celebrated. I can remember getting presents, books and clothes mainly. A camera, when I turned twelve. I loved that camera.’ She’d smiled and said, ‘Mum’s birthday was also celebrated. She would have been eighty-two this year, bless her. But Dad’s birthday, never. He refused, and he was not the type to change his mind.’

  Go with eighty. Born 1930-ish, a child turning teenager during the war. Were children at the camps? Yes, definitely. Even at a place like Auschwitz? Yes again. But usually not alone. They arrived with one or more parent, meaning that Joe’s great-grandparents, whoever they were, must also have been there.

  Big question to go with the probabilities. What happened to them?

  He squeezed his eyes. Brain over heart. Children at Auschwitz … Most children were taken straight to the gas chambers upon arrival. The Final Solution was about stamping out an entire race; one website had even made the grim comment, ‘No better place to cut the plant than where it flowered.’ During the latter years only those deemed fit to work had survived the brutal Auschwitz selection process. If he had been there, as the tattoo suggested, Joe’s grandfather must have been an early arrival, or if he’d come later he’d somehow convinced them that he was old enough, strong enough, fit enough.

  Unless – long shot – the Mengele twins. Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor who surgically experimented on people at Auschwitz. He’d been particularly interested in conducting his cruel tests on twin children because he’d wanted to find ways of medically inducing multiple births and thus rapidly increasing the population of Hitler’s proposed super race. In Auschwitz, twin children were given a better place to live, better food and a playground. Mengele even provided lollies and encouraged them to call him ‘Uncle’.

  Some of these children had apparently survived Mengele’s madness and the death camp itself. Joe rolled over, trying to push himself into sleep, but the thought kept reverberating. Was Grandpa Ullmann a twin? And if so –

  ‘Sorry to hear about –’ Piers wrinkled his nose.

  Joe nodded.

  ‘Really,’ said Piers. ‘I mean, he was old and sick but, you know. Family.’

  ‘Family,’ agreed Joe. Sticky word, came out in a croak.

  Period Four, study. They were wandering towards the gargantuan, pastel-painted library when Joe heard his name called. He turned to see Ms Wicks, a shimmer of blue emerging from the light, and thought of a dragonfly, its wings bronzed by the sun.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she trilled. ‘Here.’

  White envelope, his name typed on the front.

  ‘Entry form,’ she told him, as if nothing could be more important. Then the killer phrase, ‘Bel Canto.’

  ‘Miss?’

  ‘Joe, have you forgotten? I mentioned it a while ago. Bel Canto is coming up and I think you’re ready to give it a go. Ready to win! We’ll have to work hard but I have every faith –’

  Last year she’d shown him the YouTube clips, the statewide competition where, one after the other, singers filled the giant cathedral with their giant notes, young professionals invoking the angels with graceful, accomplished ease.

  ‘Miss, the people who do Bel Canto, they’re really good. Much better than –’

  ‘Every faith, Joe.’ She patted his arm, nodded to Piers and floated away as another bell rang, the discordant measuring of their lives.

  The funeral occurred inside a small room with honey-coloured walls. Joe sat with his mother. Nash, in dark suit and tie, had his arm looped around Rebecca on the other side of the room. She was wearing dark stonewashed jeans, a Mojo-style necklace and black metal-band t-shirt.

  Joe jiggled his legs. He was irritated because he knew that choosing clothes was, for Rebecca, a matter of careful deliberation. This was – she was disrespectful.

  ‘Joe, please.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He stopped jiggling and looked to Essie, slumped into her push-stroller. She was licking a raspberry lollipop then yawning. Licking, yawning, a simple life.

  Envious of that …

  The only other attendees were Mrs Fox and David, and their neighbours from the farm, Mr and Mrs O’Keeffe.

  The coffin, surprisingly small and narrow, sat on a cloth-covered dais in an alcove. Lamps glowed from beneath the architraves. The air in the room was warm and bready; the flowers on and around the coffin could have been plaster moulded.

  At eleven o’clock exactly a thin-faced man adjusted his cuffs and began to speak. Joe wanted to stay alert but the cumbersome air and the man’s low, slow intonations made it difficult. He drifted into an illogical regime of visions: children in stripes and mountains wit
h goat-like gods capering at the summit and cows wandering unchecked across continents to the ‘Panis Angelicus’ soundtrack –

  Soundtrack? No, for this was a funeral without music. He recalled their conversation, two days before –

  ‘Because it would be wrong,’ she’d argued. ‘For whatever reason, Dad disliked music. I think he saw it as artificial.’

  Nash had grumbled and hawed like a frustrated donkey.

  ‘Why would anyone dislike music?’ he’d asked. And Joe had semi-agreed with him; it was certainly unusual, and some – most – might see a world without music as a stagnation, even a form of collapse – although Joe wondered whether he’d really miss it. Really? Ms Wicks, but sometimes he thought, with all this big, fuzzy, discoverable stuff in the world and beyond … music was just sauce.

  ‘That’s just how it was,’ Annie had said. ‘I don’t know why. I grew up with the idea, never really questioned it.’

  ‘You like music.’

  ‘Yes, I do, but that’s hardly relevant.’

  ‘Not that I care,’ Nash had told her in a voice that suggested otherwise, ‘but with funerals, ceremonies generally, a bit of convention is not a bad thing. Surely a hymn or two wouldn’t hurt?’

  ‘A hymn? Nash, my father was utterly against anything churchy. You know that –’

  ‘Anti-music, anti-religion. Anti-fun. Jesus, did he like anything?’

  She’d refused to answer. Nash had apologised before playing the opening bars of ‘Amazing Grace’ on his laptop.

  ‘Generic,’ he’d said. ‘Put it on at the end?’

  But Annie was not to be moved. Her father, her decision. The traditional music had been replaced by a CD of sounds of the forest. As the thin-faced man stepped away from the podium, the funeral processed to a backdrop of plaintive bird calls, the tweets and hums of insects, burbling river water and the wind sifting leaves and distant tides. Joe, glancing across, saw Rebecca whisper to Nash, roll her eyes.

  Annie went to the podium. She spoke quietly of her childhood in Canada – Joe had never quite got used to the fact that his mother, who looked and sounded so, wasn’t actually Australian – saying that the prairie landscape reflected her father’s character. ‘Difficult,’ she said, ‘often uncompromising, but rich beyond the surface.’ She described her father as ‘private and dignified,’ then lowered her head and said, ‘He taught me about forgiveness.’ Joe sensed the past overwhelming her when she said, ‘We never doubted his love,’ and, ‘He always protected us.’ There was a break while Annie gazed into the uppermost recesses of the room and searched for words, for the resurrection of her voice. Finally both came. ‘I regret, I have always regretted, not returning,’ she whispered, before sitting down and dabbing at her eyes.

  The russet curtain slid without sound. Soon the coffin was hidden, the forest silenced, the lamps brightening. The thin-faced man also slid without sound as he opened double doors and gestured. The congregation trooped obediently into the bright sunshine and noise of the city; to Joe, it was the amplification of jangling keys.

  Mrs O’Keeffe hugged Annie and said, ‘Socrates is doing well.’

  Their elderly border collie, sacrificed in the move.

  Annie said, ‘That’s good to hear.’

  ‘Visit anytime,’ Mrs O’Keeffe told her.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Annie. ‘But I think I’d be too sad.’

  Essie had finished the lollipop and begun to cry, so Rebecca wheeled her away. People shook hands, Nash clapped Joe on the shoulder.

  ‘Okay, kiddo?’

  Joe nodded. He’d been thinking, his grandfather had never been here, in Australia, and then suddenly he was, in a limited way, then just as suddenly he wasn’t again. Parallels; you know nothing about a place until you visit. When you leave, no matter how long you’ve stayed, the place goes on, you go on, little has changed.

  Nash said, ‘Come around next weekend.’ He pushed his new glasses closer to his eyes and said, ‘Saturday?’

  Saturdays, when Joe used to visit Grandpa Ullmann. A train pushing through tunnels and suburbia towards long uncomplicated silences.

  ‘Actually, let’s do lunch,’ said Nash. ‘There’s something I’d like us to discuss. Pick you up at midday, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Joe, hot from the sun, indifferent.

  The box and the brown case both sat in a corner of the kitchen. Neither had been opened.

  ‘I can’t,’ said his mother. ‘It seems so final.’

  They ate a bits-and-pieces dinner then went into the lounge room to watch TV, detectives who squabbled all the time but actually wanted to marry each other. Annie rote-asked about homework and Joe said none, a lie but only small. On the day of her father’s funeral, his mother needing solace and company, he didn’t think she’d mind too much. Besides, practising the factorising that he’d long mastered, learning ten spelling demons that were not at all demonic, a Q and A about genes and heritable characteristics when he’d already completed the assignment – none of it could be said to be of any genuine use.

  What was? He rotated his feet, heard his ankles crack. Getting through, he supposed, minute by minute. That was useful. Avoiding idiots. The heritage of cows. Time spent with Ms Wicks.

  He blushed as he remembered the unopened Bel Canto entry form.

  Annie, distracted, turned down the TV. She said, ‘I’ve never told you much, have I?’ then spoke in brush strokes of her early life in Canada. Joe liked how she painted it … the enormous emptiness, winds with fierce fingers that snatched at the landscape, snow versus heat, flowers in springtime, the flat biscuity haze of autumn. Their desolate log cabin with its swinging lanterns and heavy doors. The nearby town, school in a barn.

  ‘The Jeffersons,’ she sighed. ‘Poor Nancy.’

  Joe waited, and soon enough she told him of Nancy Jefferson, sent to Calgary at the age of sixteen for being no more than bold, working in a theatre as costume-maker, mender and prompt until that day when they’d unexpectedly needed a walk-on, and that walk-on had been Nancy.

  ‘Who could act,’ said Annie, still amazed, or so it seemed. ‘Next thing, her name was on the billboards. I saw her play Laura in The Glass Menagerie and she was mesmerising. That scene where she danced with the suitor … I couldn’t believe such tenderness in someone who had been so hard-shelled, so –’ She searched for a word and found – ‘querulous. I waited for her after the show thinking, where did that come from?’

  She shook her head and said, ‘We were childhood acquaintances, teenage enemies and adult best friends. Funny how that can happen. People who’ve been clearly, obviously separated come together without knowing how or why. So there we were, taking on the world in Calgary – until I lost my job. There was nothing else going so I went to Vancouver. Nancy wrote, said she’d soon be following. She had a contract with a major agency. She was going to be a star. But she never arrived. Car accident. Lost control, skidded off the mountain. Only had her licence a matter of weeks. She was about to turn twenty.’

  TV off. They drank cocoa and Joe nibbled a Tim Tam. His mother asked if he was sad about Grandpa Ullmann and he said yes, feeling guilty that his response was automatic rather than heartfelt. He was a son and grandson – there should’ve been more.

  Shift back. He asked, ‘Why didn’t you return?’

  To the prairie. To the tumbling air and swatches of deep, protective green.

  To B4198.

  She said, ‘I didn’t know how,’ then hunkered down like an animal in its burrow and told him, ‘Being away from people is easy. It’s being with them that’s hard. When you’re with them, you’re forced to see how they ache and deteriorate. You see them hurt and that hurts you. You watch the bigness of the world take over and weigh them down, then you see them squashed and frittered and it’s agony. Love is a kind of agony. Whereas when you’re away there’s none of that. You can imagine they’re okay. They don’t age, they don’t fall down, they don’t get rolled on.’

  Joe was silent. His m
other lifted her lovely cow-eyes and said, ‘I was away for long enough to get myself to the stage where I didn’t want to go back because of what I might find. That damned agony, in layers.’

  That night there was no noise – no traffic, no dogs. Joe looked out his bedroom window, searched above the city’s skyline and saw a screed over the moon that changed its luminosity to milk. He lay down and eventually dreamed of a cathedral. At the back of the cathedral was smoke. The smoke came from a burning pile that looked like a man.

  Ms Wicks said, ‘Joe, this is Soraya.’

  The dark-skinned girl with the heavy bag. Unburdened, she was straighter, taller, with hair clamped into tight braids. Neutral eyes, neutral expression.

  Soft murmur, ‘Hello.’

  Joe nodded. It was ridiculous, but already he resented the girl’s presence, the way she created a new heat and scent and light. This was his Green Room. And now –

  Ms Wicks smiled encouragement. Her usual state of being was cat-in-a-lap, but today, Joe could see, she was zooming towards a new level of happiness, a place where the sunshine was so pure that shadows dared not enter. He sneaked a glance at her profile as she prepared song sheets, saw wisps and curls that refused to conform, the smooth ease with which her brow led into her nose, cambered lips, long neck … swan on a lake, he thought, gliding graciously, ripple-free wake, the envious breeze and dappled shadows parting to allow her passage –

  ‘Joe? Are you listening?’

  ‘Sorry, miss.’

  ‘The entry form?’

  He looked down. ‘Left it at home, miss.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then.’ She patted his arm – electric tingle! – and said, ‘Soraya will also be singing at Bel Canto. Isn’t that fantastic?’

  Joe nodded, shifted his feet back and forth as he waited. He felt uncomfortable and overheated. Smelly. Male.

  Ms Wicks suggested that they warm up by singing ‘Rose Red’ as a round.

  ‘Three, two –’