Silver Wattle (12 page)

I was intrigued by the people on the footpaths. Some were dressed in dove grey suits or pleated drop-waist dresses, but most looked like workers. There were men in checked shirts with their sleeves folded to the elbows, and women, both young and old, in aprons and white stockings. We passed a grocery store where a man in overalls was painting a window with an advertisement for Bushells tea, while opposite another man was scraping away one for Mother’s Choice flour.

Before long we found ourselves passing along serpentine lanes lined by terraced houses whose front doors opened straight onto the street. There was something seedy in the reek of damp and mud and the way the pale children stared at us from gutters and doorways.

‘There are slums in this city as poor as those in London,’ Uncle Ota explained over the noise of the engine. ‘You’d never come this way at night. Gangs roam the streets, ready to slit your throat with a razor for a bit of money.’

I gulped, my fingers instinctively reaching to protect my neck, but before I knew it we were out in the open air again. My glimpse of the dark side of Sydney was forgotten as we travelled along a road bordered by walls covered in ivy. Beyond them we could see mansions with shingled roofs and bay windows. There were forty-foot-tall maple-like trees on either side of the road, crimson in leaf, and pink-orange-barked trees with sinuous limbs that Ranjana said were called red gums. Before long the vegetation thinned and we found ourselves passing through rocky terrain. Bungalows sat on blocks of lawn with nothing to differentiate them except the position of their rusty water tanks. The only relief from the starkness was an occasional glimpse of the sea.

A few miles on, Uncle Ota directed the driver to turn into a narrow street with houses on one side and a low forest on the other. Dozens of brightly coloured parrots squawked and somersaulted on a tree with leathery leaves and golden flower spikes. Two broke away from the group and swooped low over the taxi’s bonnet.

‘Rainbow lorikeets,’ said Klara, pressing her face to the glass.

‘We studied the book you sent us,’ I explained to Uncle Ota and Ranjana.

The taxi stopped outside a weatherboard cottage bordered by a picket fence. A large black bird with a white nape and underwings sat near the letterbox. ‘Magpie or currawong?’ Ranjana asked Klara.

‘Magpie,’ Klara answered. ‘Currawongs have black necks.’

The driver removed our luggage from the boot while Uncle Ota opened the passenger doors for everyone. He gestured towards the house. ‘Welcome to our humble home,’ he said.

Paint curled in flakes from the cottage’s walls. The roof was mottled with rust patches and the stairs to the front door were cracked. But the house had a strange charm. A camellia tree with soft pink flowers decorated the tiny front yard, with a cheery border of marigolds along the fence. The two front windows were framed by green shutters which made it look as if the house had a face with eyes and the door was its nose.

After Uncle Ota had paid the driver, Ranjana opened the front door and we tramped in single file down a corridor whose sole light came from the kitchen at the end of it. The kitchen had been painted primrose yellow and had a modern stove, but when we were seated at the table I noticed the ceiling was soot-stained and that the enamel cups Ranjana placed before us were chipped. I glanced at Klara and wondered what she was thinking. The house was a few steps down from the way we had lived in Prague. But my sister seemed happy and did not take her eyes from Thomas, who Uncle Ota was bouncing on his knee.

Ranjana set down a plate of scones on the table along with vanilla slice. Klara picked up the pot of sweet-smelling jam that Ranjana had placed next to a bowl of cream. ‘It’s lilly-pilly,’ Ranjana told her. ‘To put on the scones.’

‘I am a vegetarian,’ replied Klara, in English and with so much dignity I wanted to laugh.

Ranjana patted her head. ‘I made it from the berries of the lilly-pilly tree in our back garden. I’m a vegetarian too, so we’ll get along fine.’

After we had finished our afternoon tea, Ranjana showed Klara and me to the room we were to share. It was the second-largest room in the house and faced on to the street, but it was still tiny. Two single beds had been crammed against each other but there was barely room to open the doors of the battered armoire. I could see Ranjana had tried to make the room cosy with a vase of marigolds on the side table and a magenta sari in place of curtains at the window. My legs trembled and I sat down on the bed.

‘Are you all right?’ Ranjana asked.

‘Just sea legs,’ I said, trying to shake off the fainting spell. I knew my lack of balance was not because my legs were unused to land, but because the room was confirmation that this was our life now; Prague was far away and Mother was gone forever.

When I felt better, Ranjana continued with the tour of the house. Uncle Ota, Ranjana and Thomas shared the room next to ours. The bath was in the laundry shed in the long, narrow garden at the rear of the house. Next to this, standing in a shed of its own, was the toilet. I was the first to use it. Considering it was only a seat with a pan, it did not smell as bad as I had feared and the chilly breeze under the door seemed to ventilate it. A picture of a white-tiled and brass-fitted bathroom from
Home
magazine was pasted to the back of the door. I took it to be an example of Uncle Ota’s humour. Next to the toilet was a basket filled with squares of torn-up newspaper, the use of which I did not need to guess. A hairy spider had fixed itself in a web in the corner of the roof. No doubt Klara would be fascinated by it, but I sat the whole time with the fear that it would spin down a line of web and land on my head.

After Klara had made use of the ‘dunny’, as Uncle Ota called it, Ranjana showed us the room at the rear of the house. It was the largest room and, from the joins in the walls, it looked as though a sitting room, a third bedroom and an enclosed balcony had been combined. Here, between its Victorian-style red walls, Uncle Ota kept the treasures he had collected from his travels. There was a Turkish pipe and an African drum leaning against a stone elephant in one corner, and an ostrich egg perched on a stand in front of a gold mirror in another. On the shelves stood miniature wooden dolls with primitive faces and human hair. Glass cabinets held collections of books, African masks, maps, Chinese scrolls and shells labelled into their classification families. Two cabin trunks served as side tables. Uncle Ota opened them to show me his collection of glass-plate negatives stacked together. From the number of photographs of temples and palaces that adorned the walls I could see he was as keen about photography as I was. The most macabre object in the room, besides the medieval cauldron, was a set of jaws four feet high and five across, with serrated teeth. Uncle Ota saw me looking at it and explained that it had come from a shark that been caught off the shore from Gibsons Beach, which was down the road. I shivered at the thought of such a monster lurking under the surface of the sea. I was surprised when Uncle Ota said, ‘The fishermen should have let it go. Sharks are the keepers of the ocean.’

Uncle Ota tapped the floor in the corner of the room nearest the back window. ‘We shall place your piano here when it arrives, Klara,’ he said. ‘The acoustics will be good and the floor won’t give way.’

The following day, because he did not have to work at the Australian Museum—where he was ‘in charge of dusting shelves and mopping floors’—until the afternoon, Uncle Ota led us on an expedition around the harbour shoreline and showed us rock pools where we found anemones, worms, sponges, snails and fish of every colour living amongst the ribbon-like seaweed.

He also took us to the Royal Botanic Gardens, where we stretched our necks to look at the fig trees and Norfolk Island pines and wandered around the lawns, duck ponds and rose gardens with the backdrop of the harbour beyond them. Klara was captivated by the grey-headed flying foxes that gathered in the palm groves. There were so many of them that the trees looked black.

‘They are intelligent animals and vegetarians like us,’ Ranjana told her. ‘They eat berries and blossoms and are pollinators of native plants. If you look closely you will see some of the females have a young one tucked under their wing.’

‘They invite sporting clubs in after the park closes to shoot the poor creatures,’ said Uncle Ota.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because they eat the exotic plants,’ Ranjana answered, hoisting Thomas higher up in her arms. ‘But there are other ways to deter them. They hate sudden loud noises.’

‘I’ve never understood why my sex finds it so terribly manly to slaughter harmless creatures,’ said Uncle Ota. ‘If you want my opinion, women are superior in respecting life.’

‘Because we are the ones who work so hard to bring it into being,’ said his wife.

Klara did not take her eyes from the colony of bats. She leaned against the trunk of a giant angophora. ‘Australian trees are so beautiful, why would you want to plant anything exotic?’ she said. ‘I wonder what would happen if the hunters were hunted.’

Uncle Ota gazed at Klara for a long time. I thought he might be intrigued by her perception of things. Her commitment to vegetarianism had forced me to examine my own attitude to animals. ‘Everything on this earth is connected,’ she had told me. ‘If we harm other living creatures, we ultimately harm ourselves. As long as we show them no compassion, we ourselves will continue to suffer in our minds and bodies.’ As it turned out, her belief protected us from the only outbreak of disease on our voyage to Australia—an eruption of food poisoning attributed to the salted beef.

Uncle Ota looked as if he were going to ask Klara to elaborate on what she meant, but Ranjana reminded him that he had to be at the museum in ten minutes.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Uncle Ota, shaking his head as if Ranjana had woken him from a dream.

I looked from Klara to Uncle Ota and wondered what it was about my sister that so entranced him.

P
rior to our arrival in Australia, Uncle Ota had received a letter from Aunt Josephine dated two days after our ship had departed from Genoa. It had been prompted by Hilda’s report of our safe boarding. Klara’s piano arrived not long after we did. According to the shipping notice it had been sent by Doctor Holub three weeks after Aunt Josephine’s letter. Since the letter and the piano we had heard nothing. I waited for the postman every day, twice a day, for news from Aunt Josephine. Each time I was disappointed. By July, I had stopped waiting and started praying that she was safe.

For the first month in Sydney, Klara and I had been nervous. We jammed our bedroom window closed and jumped each time we heard someone open the front gate. But we soon learned that in Sydney there was always someone opening the front gate. Firstly, at dawn, the milkman arrived with the ‘clink’ of glass bottles. He returned in the afternoon with butter and cream. Then there was the iceman, who came rain or shine with a slab of ice on his back. The postman blew his whistle twice daily and the baker’s visit was heralded by the scent of fresh bread and the ‘clop, clop’ of his draughthorse. The clothes prop man sold us gum saplings to support our washing line, and there was also the scissors and knife-sharpening man, the cobbler, the sanitary man, the newspaper boy and the travelling salesman who arrived each week with a suitcase filled with fountain pens, sponges, candles, needles and threads and mosquito coils. Once a month the bottle man announced his beer delivery at the gate with the cry ‘Bottle-oh!’ Like most Czech men, Uncle Ota preferred beer to wine or spirits.

‘You can’t be a hermit and live in Australia,’ Klara said.

‘No,’ I agreed.

In Prague, we had become used to not going anywhere alone. So when Klara began attending school, I rode with her on the tram to Waverley every morning and was there to pick her up at three o’clock each afternoon.

‘You have to stop that,’ Ranjana told me one afternoon when she was showing me how to bake naan bread. ‘You must stop living in fear.’

That was impossible to do. Uncle Ota had not written to Aunt Josephine because he wanted to wait until he had word from her. Each morning I awoke with questions running through my mind. How did Milosh react when he found out we were gone? Did he threaten Aunt Josephine? Was he trying to trace us? Had he been tricked by the decoy tickets to America or was he on his way to Australia right now?

‘You can believe me,’ Ranjana said, kneading the dough. ‘I know about fear.’

I watched her divide and roll out the bread. Ranjana had beautiful hands, strong but graceful. I had seen pictures of Indian people in books and had thought they looked fragile. But not Ranjana. She was like a tree rooted in the ground. I could not imagine her being afraid of anything. But I understood that the sati pyre had left scars; if not on her body, then on her soul.

To ease my mind, I threw myself into photography. I took pictures of the native birds and Ranjana collected leaves and flowers for me to photograph for her botany books. I also did portraiture.

‘You capture the essence of your subjects beautifully,’ Uncle Ota told me. ‘As well as things others perhaps would not notice, such as Ranjana’s penetrating glance and Klara’s sylph-like hands.’

He was surprised to learn that I had never developed my own photographs and relied on studios to produce my prints.

‘My dear Adelka, development is half the art,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

Uncle Ota led me into the back garden to the laundry shed. Next to the copper and washtub was an enlarger fashioned from tins. The windows and doors had black curtains on them to block out the light.

‘The chemicals and trays are here,’ Uncle Ota said, indicating a crate on the floor. ‘I’ll give you a lesson in the process, but the art you can learn by yourself. Use this room any time you like, except Mondays when Ranjana does the laundry.’

Ranjana returned to work at the stocking factory and left Thomas in my care. She and Uncle Ota took afternoon shifts and Uncle Ota worked some evenings as well. I had put some of the money Aunt Josephine had given me aside to pay Klara’s school fees and for musical tuition once we had found a suitable teacher. I wanted to give the rest to Uncle Ota but he refused to take it.