Chapter 4

October – early December 1964

We were up and left the immigration centre early in the morning, arriving at McDonnell & East in plenty of time. Once we’d changed into our uniforms, we waited in the women’s staff room for Mary Winterbotham. A bustle of people arrived and some realised we were new and introduced themselves. Most gave us a quick glance and went about their business, not unfriendly, but busy. Mary arrived a few minutes before eight o’clock with an older teenager in tow.

“Karlota, Victoria here will show you the ropes on the Candy Counter.” She turned to Victoria. “Take Karlota to clock-in, Victoria.”

“Come along.” Victoria turned and walked out. I gave Mutti a quick wave as I left. Victoria walked fast and I scurried to keep up.

We clocked-in and she led me through the ground floor of the shop to the Candy Counter. Once there, I helped her restock the shelves and fill the glass jars with the correct boiled sweets. Victoria pointed out the prices and register category as we went. Near the end of that task, a loud bell rang.

I raised an eyebrow in question as I replaced the lid on the jar of Lemon Drops.

“That’s the ten-minute warning – doors open in ten minutes.” Victoria told me.

A minute later, a lady appeared at our counter and placed a tray on it, calling out to Victoria. “Cash drawer.”

“Thank you, Miss Jones.” Victoria signed the sheet and slid the drawer into the cash register. “This has our float in it. They’ll come round and collect the drawer and register roll at the end of the day.” She pointed to the paper roll on which the register recorded every transaction.

As it was a weekday, trade at the Candy Counter was slow. This gave Victoria time to show me the subtleties of the cash register, which sweets went against which category on the register. As we worked, she thawed and we exchanged stories. My fake background slid from my tongue and caused no comment, despite my unease.

Would that fade with time?

Victoria had left school at sixteen the previous December and had worked at the Candy Counter since then. She wanted to move to Ladies Fashion; I didn’t tell her that Mutti was working there.

Mary Winterbotham came round about halfway through the morning. “Here’s your roster, Karlota. You’re working Tuesday afternoons along with Thursday mornings and Saturday mornings.” She handed me a printed form with my shifts written in. “Mornings you clock in by half-past eight and for the afternoons by a quarter past twelve.”

“Thank you, Miss Winterbotham.”

“Everything going OK, Victoria?”

“Yes. Kal’s catching on well.” Victoria gave me an encouraging look. I smothered my relief – she’d been guarded until now.

Miss Winterbotham headed off.

We had no customers and Victoria leant against the counter, checking her lipstick in a compact mirror from her handbag. “Why aren’t you starting school until next year?”

I shrugged. “The school year in England finished in July and started in September as we were about to come here. Your school year is about to finish and starts again in January. I have to wait for it.”

Victoria was no longer concerned with school, but I added, “Anyway, I’m taking an English and a Maths test soon, to put me in the right class.”

“Oh.” Disinterest washed through her voice.

Victoria pursed her lips to spread the lipstick and checked in the mirror again. “Have you started wearing makeup yet?”

“No...” I corrected myself. “Well, last Christmas Eve, Mutti helped me with a little lipstick and blush when my boyfriend came for a special meal.”

“Ooh. You have a boyfriend?” Victoria’s interest perked up.

“Had ... he’s in England and I’m here.” I heard my voice crack.

Victoria didn’t seem to notice and snapped her compact shut. “Never mind, there’s lots of nice boys here. I can fix you up with someone.”

Her off-hand comment slammed into me and I turned away, trying to prevent a collapse into tears. After a moment, her hand squeezed my shoulder. “I’m sorry Kal.”

I leant on the counter before turning, blinking to control incipient tears.

Victoria searched my face. “It was serious?” I heard the empathy.

Had her heart been broken, too?

My shoulders slumped as tears started down my cheeks. “It still is.”

“Oh, dear.” The hand squeezed my shoulder.

“I’m sorry.” I sniffed. “I thought I had control of it ... b ... but I don’t.”

Victoria made an apologetic face. “Here,” she produced a hanky from her handbag. “I’ll be okay by myself for five minutes. Go to the toilet and sort yourself out.”

I sniffed and slipped out through the staff door. In the toilet, I washed my face and stared into my mirrored reflection, stifling the churning inside me. I leant on the handbasin and closed my eyes.

This was hard.

My anguished reaction to Victoria’s statement had surprised me – had all but overwhelmed me. I couldn’t keep falling apart like this.

The outer door banged: someone else was coming in. I ran my hand through my hair, blew my nose, straightened my uniform and headed to the Candy Counter.

Victoria gave me a caring smile. “Better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Victoria turned away to serve a customer. Once she’d finished, she turned to me. “Want to talk about it?”

Did I want to share something precious and deep with someone I barely knew?

I shook my head, but realised I was being hard. She’d reached out to me. “Not right now.”

Victoria’s lips thinned. We were subdued for the rest of my shift.

My relief arrived before my shift ended and Victoria introduced me to Carol before shooing me off to clock out. Once I had done that and changed, I headed into the store to find Mutti in Ladies Fashion.

She was busy with a customer helping her choose a blouse, but I caught her eye. After about five minutes, she wrapped one up, placing it in a McDonnell & East bag. She rang up the sale and the lady walked off, swinging the bag.

“Finished for the day?” Mutti asked.

“Yes. Can I go to the Valley Baths and find the times I can swim there?”

“OK. You’d better have some money for trams. My purse is in our locker. Take two shillings. I’ll see you at Yungaba for tea.”

“Thanks, Mutti.” At our locker, I raided Mutti’s purse and checked the tram map. If I walked down George Street to Adelaide Street, I could catch a 60, 70 or 71 that would go past the Valley Baths.

When I got to the pool, I stood and gaped: an Olympic 50-meter pool – I could do proper lengths. That hadn’t been possible since Leipzig. I checked the times with a smile on my face. General swimming happened from 5 to 8 in the morning and 3 to 6 in the afternoon on weekdays; entry was thruppence for each session. I’d have a talk with Mutti this evening about going three times a week – or maybe more. I didn’t think I could run in this heat. Whilst I was earning, I could afford that, but once school started, it would be difficult. I sighed; in Leipzig entry to the pool had been free. Could I work some hours on the Candy Counter once I started school? I’d have to ask Mr Chapman.

I decided to see how long it would take me to walk between my school and the pool, something I would do often. I couldn’t afford to be paying for trams all the time. The person in the pool kiosk directed me to Gregory Terrace and I set off. It turned out to be a reasonable walk. From a student at the school gate, I got directions to McDonnell & East, but got lost. I confused myself thinking the sun would be south of me in the sky, but of course it’s north in the southern hemisphere. I had to ask for directions again. Once outside McDonnell & East, I walked to Yungaba.

The reaction I’d had to Victoria’s off-hand remark had been muttering at me from deep in my thoughts as I walked through the city. Cooling down in the bath, I tried to make sense of my feelings about Willi now we were far apart – and likely to remain apart for quite some time.

Not forever ... don’t even think that.

My attachment to Willi was an unfamiliar experience. Before I met Willi, I had no friends: my father was Stasi, a secret policeman. That threat kept people distant in east Germany. Then Mutti discovered my father was a Nazi war criminal and we defected from east Germany to escape from him. When I met Willi, he was troubled to the point of attempted suicide because of his abusive father. Somehow, sharing our fear of our fathers and a deep, mutual craving for companionship pushed us together. This energised our language lessons into friendship. From there, our shared curiosity propelled our learning and drew in Lili.

Willi’s suicidal tendencies scared me to the core – and my shame at goading him to get on with it under the cedar tree still burned. But that scare had driven us closer and we had revealed our dangerous secrets. For him, I sloughed off the deception of being a boy and our relationship changed and deepened.

Then Willi revealed his unbelievable story and his composite nature ... a seventy-year-old mind from some other future in a twelve-year-old body.

That afternoon, I had branded him a pervert and chased him away.

I sank down into the bath, letting the water surge over my face, trying to cool the blaze of shame. After about half a minute, I sat up and leant forward on my knees, gasping for breath. Somehow, he forgave me and we drew closer. I took another deep breath and blew it out, scattering mingled drops of water and tears. Our separation was an open wound, scoured by my tears.

Controlling my emotions had been difficult in Lancaster, but there I had hoped we could reunite. Now our separation measured half a world and shrouding our future in uncertainty. We had shared everything and now I had much to share – and I couldn’t even write to him.

How do I live with this constant ache? How do you forget someone who is as integral to you as ... as your hands? How to un-love someone?

I sat bathed in the cool water and yet scalding in frustration at what had happened to us.

“Hey. You gonna be in there all day?”

It jerked me out of my fugue of misery. I was sitting on the veranda when Mutti walked up, perspiration almost dripping from her. She paused beside my chair, fanning herself with her hat.

“How did you go to the swimming pool?”

I roused myself, trying to smile. “It’s an outdoor Olympic pool. They have public sessions every morning and afternoon for thruppence.”

“And?” She gave me a sympathetic smile, sensing my downbeat mood.

I tried to put my despondency over Willi to one side. “Well, I was thinking of going three times a week, like in Lancaster. I walked from the pool to the school and to here. We can’t afford trams and trolley buses all the time and besides, the walking is exercise: hot, but exercise.”

“Well, we’ll have to see where we are living, but for now, that seems OK.”

I summoned a morsel of enthusiasm. “I’ll go tomorrow afternoon?”

“Okay.” Mutti wiped some sweat from her brow.

“Why don’t you have a cool bath? There’s time before tea.”

“Good idea.” And Mutti headed inside.

I sat on the veranda, surveying the different trees along the riverbank. Australian trees – eucalypts – seemed disorganised and scruffy compared to European trees. It was summer, but bark hung off some and others had new leaves growing and falling off without respect to the season. Amongst them were other trees, lacking leaves but covered with profuse purple blossom. Every day, I was seeing things I wanted to share with Willi, things I wanted to talk over with him. He had lived somewhere in Australia for decades during his old life, but we’d never talked about Australia. After the cedar tree incident, when we had come close to disaster, he hadn’t blinked when I suggested ‘Gundagai’ as our ‘stop everything and talk about it’ word. I sighed at the memory. Gundagai is a town in New South Wales, mentioned in a song my geography teacher played to us.

I could feel my mood spiralling down, but the gong went for tea. I stood up as Mutti came downstairs and we went into the dining room. As we sat there, Mutti produced a note from Mrs Rivers someone had slipped under our door.

“It seems like our house will be ready this weekend, after all. Would you like to come and inspect it with me tomorrow evening?”

“Yes, please. Shall I meet you at McDonnell & East?”

“I’ll ring the agent tomorrow morning and confirm the time. If you come up to Ladies Fashion by five o’clock, we can both go. I’ll let Mrs Rivers know we may be out for tea tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

When Mutti arrived in our room after speaking with Mrs Rivers, she had a flyer about the German Club in her hand, which she handed to me.

I read through it. “Are we going to join?”

Mutti shook her head. “I’d like to, for your sake, to keep up your connection with our culture, but don’t think we can. There will be people there who know Frankfurt and I don’t, though I’m supposed to be from there. Our story would be uncovered as a lie and we can’t risk that.”

We’d have to keep our German going between the two of us as we worked on all our languages – but I ached to be sharing them with Willi and Lili.

The following morning, carrying my duffel bag with lunch and swimming things, I walked down to the German Club in Vulture Street and stood opposite. A surge of longing, of wanting to be part of something, to belong somewhere, ran through me. But belonging to anything was going to be difficult.

Walking towards the city, I found a German butcher and a bakery. It had Schwarzbrot, Mutti’s favourite dark rye bread – something to remember when we got our own house. I walked into the city and wandered around. For my sanity, I needed this place to be my home – but my heart was telling me something different with each beat. For all its sunshine and welcoming, open nature, I hated Australia.

No, Col. Not hatred...

Mutti had taught me the dangers of hatred. I gusted out a deep breath. I resented Australia even though I was here to be safe from the killers my father would send after us.

But I longed to walk round to Willi’s house in the morning and meet up with Lili on the bus to school and chat in our various languages and do that again on the way home; to sit in Mrs Wisniewski’s kitchen, the three of us working on our homework in the day’s language. I ached to sit with Willi, wrapped in blankets against the winter as we read and read and read. I yearned to snuggle and explore our feelings, as we had on those few delicious, dangerous occasions after Willi returned from east Germany.

And all these were barred to me.

A clock tower striking one roused me; I’d been walking on autopilot and I found myself outside the City Hall. I sat for a while, watching people flow around me. Their joys and sorrows carried past without touching me.

After a while, I pulled out the sandwiches I had made in the Yungaba kitchen after breakfast. As I finished, I saw a sign advertising the City Library on the noticeboard. I went over to read it: the main library was in William Street, towards the Botanic Gardens.

Make the effort to like this place, Col.

I put the library and Gardens on my mental exploration list. But today was for swimming.

I was at the pool before three o’clock and changed in time to swim as soon as the school students were chased from the pool. The water soothed and I lost myself in the extended rhythm of 50-meter lengths, which hadn’t been possible since we fled from Leipzig. I did two sessions of about thirty minutes with a break between them, pushing myself for the last couple of lengths each time. I left the pool tired but less anxious. The rhythmic exercise helped me deal with the separation from Willi. And I wondered how he was coping. He still had Lili – and a spike of jealousy pinned me to the hot pavement.

Would Lili try to move in on Willi now I was not there?

I could see frowns as people sidestepped around me. I dropped my head and started walking again, thinking about Willi and Lili. Lili was a beautiful, talented girl.

How would Willi react if Lili made a move on him?

She had wanted me as a boyfriend when she thought I was a boy and she had joked about me stealing Willi, the second-best boyfriend (after me) when I revealed I was a girl. But not once had I thought that she could envy me with Willi. I had asked Lili to watch Willi’s moods and let me know if they darkened. I had skirted the issue of suicide, but Lili could have realised what I was not saying. My disappearance would have hit Willi hard, throwing them together; he would need support that caring, generous Lili would provide.

They were my close friends. How would I feel if they became a couple?

A confusion of emotions propelled me to Yungaba. Willi would need Lili’s support, but...

The previous day’s emotional confusion was still with me when we met the agent to inspect our potential house, a modern version of a style referred to as a Queenslander. This meant a single storey, weatherboard house on concrete stilts with shaded verandas. To a European, it seemed an odd design, but all the houses around were the same. The agent explained it allowed the air to flow above, below, around and through during the hot summer months. I wondered what weather was to come if we were still awaiting the hot weather.

The sight of the concrete stilts caused a memory to bubble up from Russian children’s tales I’d heard in Leipzig. “It’s Baba Yaga’s house on chicken legs, Mutti.”

Mutti laughed. “Which Baba Yaga am I – the good Baba Yaga or the wicked one?”

“Oh, Mutti.” I summoned a smile. “You’re the good one, rescuing people and animals lost in the forest.”

The agent stood there, bemused by the strange culture of these new Australians. She shrugged and turned us towards the house. We climbed the stairs to the front door, which greeted us with a blast of hot air on opening. The agent opened windows and doors and the evening breeze blew through the house, demonstrating the reason for this strange design as it cooled.

According to the agent, this was a standard Housing Commission house – three bedrooms, lounge room, bathroom, toilet, kitchen. We were lucky as this area already had sewerage, which was not the case yet for all the suburbs.

“What do you mean?” I could hear the surprise in Mutti’s voice.

“Not all the suburbs are on the sewer system – at least not yet. They have dunnies – outdoor toilets,” she added as she saw our puzzled looks.

In the capital city of Queensland, there were houses without indoor toilets?

We walked round the house, opening cupboards and drawers. Everything seemed clean and in good order, although the house was not new.

“What do you think, Kal?”

I shrugged. “It’s fine.” I didn’t care where we lived in Australia, as I didn’t want to be here. This house was bigger than the one we had in Herne Bay and both differed from the Leipzig apartment. But the Herne Bay house was home; though we’d lived there for less than two years: it held all my dearest memories.

Mutti held my eyes for a second – she must have sensed my mood. I looked away and Mutti turned to the agent to fill out the paperwork. I wandered down the back steps into the garden as the light in the sky faded. The land sloped: the rear of the house was a meter off the ground, but most of the house was high enough to walk under. Beneath the house was a dim forest of concrete stumps, screened from the road by bushes in front of the house. As I walked amongst the bare concrete trunks towards the front of the house, the bushes growled, chittered and shook with violence. I dashed out and round to the veranda.

“Mutti, Mutti. There’s a wild animal in the bushes in front of the house.”

The agent listened for a moment. “Oh, that’s possums having a domestic.”

Mutti and I exchanged a glance. “Possums?”

The agent chuckled. “Umm ... like large squirrels? They won’t hurt you – unless you corner them. They’ll try to climb you like a tree – and their claws are sharp.” She listened as the growling and chittering died down. “Out here you’ll get wildlife – mostly possums, but there’s koalas around in the trees and wallabies some mornings on the playing fields. Koalas mostly sleep, though.”

They finished up the paperwork and Mutti wrote a cheque for the month’s rent. We walked round, closing the house. Out on the veranda, the agent paused, glancing around.

“You’ll need to watch out for redbacks under the house and there could be snakes around as well.”

“What’s a redback?” Mutti asked, a nervous tone to her voice.

“They’re black spiders with a splash of red on their back. They won’t kill you – well, they haven’t killed anyone yet, not like the Sydney funnel webs. But a bite can make a kid quite sick.”

Spiders I thought I could handle. “Snakes?”

“Well – around here you’ll get carpet pythons – they’re big, six feet or more. They can bite if you scare them – but they’re not venomous. Mind you, they’ll eat a small dog – or a child.”

I swallowed at that thought.

“It’s the red bellied blacks and the browns that are dangerous.” The agent gave me a comforting smile. “But not to worry – we’ve got anti-venom for all the snakes now. Get to the hospital fast enough and you’ll be fine.” From her face, she wasn’t joking about that.

Mutti’s eyes were as wide as mine. I was getting the feeling that this was a different sort of country from Europe.

The agent chuckled at our reaction. “Most snakes run from you if you’re noisy. Anyway, don’t wander down by the creek unless you’re wearing boots and long daks – er ... long pants ... as that’s where the snakes like to go when it’s hot.”

As we walked down the front steps behind the agent, I found my eyes scanning the ground below.

At the foot of the stairs, the agent turned to Mutti. “You need a lift into the city?”

“Thank you, that would be most kind.”

We climbed into her Holden station wagon and she dropped us off outside Yungaba. We were in time for tea, after all. After the clean-up, Mutti and I sat and talked about what we’d need to organise for the house. By the time we’d made a list, I was getting worried.

“Can we afford all this, Mutti?”

Mutti reassured me with a smile. “When your father was killed, we received a payout from the army; we have enough to equip a house.” She winked. “And I think I can get a staff discount at McDonnell & East.”

Mrs Henderson, or someone in MI6, had been more generous than I expected.

“Okay.”

“I’ll start getting this organised tomorrow during my lunch break and see if we can move in over the weekend.

Mutti went through McDonnell & East on a whirlwind buying mission. Once Mr Chapman heard she was setting up a house from scratch, he took her down into the damaged furniture storeroom. Mutti acquired our beds, a chest of drawers each, a sofa, fridge, kitchen table and chairs at a substantial discount. The store truck would deliver these on Saturday morning. Mutti also organised enough sheets, towels, crockery, saucepans and such to get us started and they would come out with the furniture as well.

We arranged to be off shift for Saturday. We packed up at Yungaba, said our goodbyes to Mrs Rivers and headed up to our house in Kedron by tram early in the morning, hauling our suitcase and three bags with us. By the end of the day, we had a house. A bit basic, but that evening we showered in our own bathroom before cooking our tea. Mutti had bought lamb chops from the line of shops round the corner in Leckie Road. Tonight, we would sleep in our own beds in our own house for the first time since April.

Lying in bed that night, I realised that, in spite of my misery at separation from Willi and the threat of spiders and snakes, Brisbane felt safe. In Herne Bay, I always felt that father’s eyes were out there, seeking us. Underneath Willi’s – and later Lili’s – friendship existed a thread of fear in my life. Sometimes that thread was imperceptible in the warp and weft of my life. Yet it could also be a coarse, dark line threatening to wreck the careful weave we were making. Somewhere on the oceans we crossed to reach Australia, that thread had thinned to gossamer. But I yearned to be in Herne Bay despite its tinnitus of fear.

I was safer because Europe and its troubles were half a world away. But the care with which MI6 had constructed our lives engendered a part of my feeling. I did not like Mrs Henderson and her cold-hearted, abusive attitude, but her organisation had done well for us, and been generous too. The money Mutti was using for the house and my scholarship were evidence of that. I drifted off to sleep, with images of Will and Lili flickering through my dreams.

On the following Tuesday, our trunks arrived, and we spent an evening unpacking them. We needed a bookcase — I still had my schoolbooks from Canterbury — and a wardrobe in each bedroom for clothes. After another visit to the damaged furniture storeroom, two wardrobes, a bookcase and a desk arrived on Friday morning before I left for the pool.

With my schoolbooks here, Mutti insisted we restart school – hence the desk which we set up in the third bedroom. Mutti declared that each day would be a different language at our house and we rotated through English, German, Polish, French and Russian. I had used Willi’s books for Latin and it had to drop by the wayside. Now we had a home address, we could join the library with its foreign language collection. We didn’t want to advertise that we spoke Russian, but I asked about Polish books. The librarian told me that the Polish club in Milton had a library: another place for an excursion.

We established a rhythm to our lives, with both of us working at McDonnell & East and me swimming as often as I could. The exercise worked to soothe my pining and those occasional pangs of jealousy threatening my thoughts.

I went into the school and took the Maths and English exams, getting some curious glances from the third form girls. These would be the girls I would be with for the rest of my education and I offered them a wary smile.

The house on one side of us was empty, but on the other there lived an Italian family with two small children. The mother’s English was almost non-existent and when the father discovered we were German and not English, the atmosphere chilled. I wished I could explain that Mutti had been a prisoner of the Nazis, not a supporter, but that was impossible. A low wire mesh strung on star pickets marked the border between our properties. The backyard next door was half grass and half cultivated, with a riot of things growing in neat rows. I recognised tomatoes but nothing else. I had seen the man of the house working in the vegetable patch – studiously avoiding us if we went outside.

As I took a bag of rubbish out to the bin one morning, the two children were playing in the grass alone.

The girl, about five years old, looked up at me. “Hello.”

I replaced the dustbin lid and walked over to the fence, smiling. “Hello.”

“I’m Calista and this is my little brother, Giorgio. What’s your name?” By this time, she had walked up to the low fence between us – quite self-assured. Her English was surprising, as I had only ever heard the family speak Italian.

“I’m Karlota. But you can call me Kal.”

The girl gave the fence a shake, frowning. “No, that’s my name.”

I crouched down to put us at the same height. “Well, can we share a name?”

Calista paused, thinking about this. “All right,” she conceded. By now, her brother was taking an interest and wandered over to hide behind his big sister, his nappy drooping.

Calista’s face took on a serious mien. “Our father says you are nasty Germans.”

I rocked on my heels. Had he meant a Nazi German? “Well, I’m half-English.” How easily the lie slipped from my tongue, although accompanied by a stab of discomfort.

“You’re not a nasty German?”

“No.” That was the truth.

Their mother walked onto their veranda, calling out in Italian to the children. Calista smiled and turned towards her mother, calling out something in Italian and pointing to me.

I saw the mother blush beneath her dark hair. She walked across, flustered by what her daughter had said. She seemed young to have a child as old as Calista.

“Scusi... I ... sorry.” She frowned down at her daughter. “You not... tedesca ... German?” Her accent was strong and her English limited.

I smiled. “I’m half-English.”

She cocked her head, as if to understand more.

“My mother is German, but my father was English.” I spoke slowly.

“Inglese?”

I scratched around for words. “Father ... umm... padre?”

“Si, padre...” She smiled in encouragement.

“Padre inglese.”

“Ah.” She smiled in understanding. “E tua madre?”

Context is a wonderful teacher. What was it she had said before... tedesca, that was it.

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What happened to Col and Mutti Frida when they disappeared?

Through different Eyes

Robert Hart

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Through different Eyes

Robert Hart

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