Silver Wattle (16 page)

The new cinema we attended was a smaller affair and shabbier, but the selection of films was interesting. We saw a flashy version of
Camille
, starring Rudolph Valentino and the Russian actress Alla Nazimova, who we all agreed resembled Klara. But most of the time it showed a selection of quality European films and local productions.

One Saturday night, when we were leaving the cinema, Klara voiced her disappointment that there had not been a live pianist to accompany the program, only a gramophone.

‘I agree,’ said Uncle Ota. ‘The story was flat without a musician. A pianist can make or break a picture.’

‘Perhaps Klara should have offered her services,’ Ranjana said with a smile.

‘Could she?’

We turned to see the cinema manager in the doorway of his office. We shuffled our feet, embarrassed because we had not seen him standing there.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Could she?’ The manager’s facial hair was trimmed to follow the line of his chin. He looked like a wizened Abraham Lincoln. ‘I cannot get anyone for Saturday night. The big cinemas offer too much money.’

We chuckled at the suggestion. Mother had instilled in Klara and me a sense of dressing well and, although she wore no make-up, Klara appeared mature for her years.

‘My sister is a fine pianist,’ I replied. ‘But she is only twelve years old.’

The manager’s mouth opened as if he were on the verge of apologising when he was seized by another idea. ‘What a novelty that would be!’ he said. ‘No one in Sydney has a pianist as young as that.’

He introduced himself as Mr Tilly and urged us to return to the auditorium so he could hear Klara play. We obliged him. Klara rarely declined an opportunity to play and the acoustics of the cinema would be a new experience for her. Mr Tilly led Klara to the piano while the rest of us took seats in the front row. He opened the fallboard and Klara warmed her hands with a scale. I marvelled at my sister. If I had been put on the spot like that, I would have fallen to pieces.

Klara commenced Chopin’s Mazurka No 23 in D major from memory. Mr Tilly’s jaw dropped. Something about Klara’s poise and her ability to concentrate gave her the air of a serious musician, but I doubted he was expecting her to be as good as she was. When Klara finished the piece he could not contain his excitement.

‘Bring this young lady back for a proper audition on Monday night,’ he said. ‘Some of the Hollywood films have scores she can practise, but for most of the films we show here the pianist needs to be able to improvise with whatever comes out of the projector. If she can keep up with the intertitles, she can have the Saturday night slot. I will pay her a fair wage and you can have free tickets.’

The offer was tempting, but I had doubts. ‘It might ruin her chances of being taken seriously as a concert pianist,’ I whispered to Uncle Ota.

‘On the contrary,’ he replied. ‘She can put the money towards extra tuition at the Conservatorium High School.’

‘Please let me take the audition, Adelka,’ Klara said.

Klara was excited by the idea of playing for films and she practised all the next day to the neglect of her homework and household chores. The city cinemas had orchestras and chorus lines but Mr Tilly’s suburban cinema relied on a single pianist. The Saturday night session was the most important of all and it was obvious he was going to use Klara’s age as a drawcard. Klara selected pieces from her repertoire to suit different moods—suspense, romance, weariness, confusion. She wrote out captions on pieces of cardboard—‘The villain escapes’, ‘The heroine enters’—and asked me to swap them quickly until she could slip from one piece of music to another without hesitation.

On Monday evening Uncle Ota and I accompanied Klara to the cinema for her audition.

‘My father was a picture showman,’ Mr Tilly reminisced while guiding Klara to the piano. ‘My mother and I travelled with him to the country towns where he’d set up his posters and limelight projector. They never wanted us to leave. It might be months before they saw another moving picture.’

Mr Tilly nodded to the projectionist. The lights dimmed and a picture we had not seen before appeared on the screen,
The Man from Kangaroo
. It was full of drama and romance as well as fight scenes and horse chases. The film turned out to be a six-reel feature. Mr Tilly already knew that Klara had the talent but he wanted to be certain that she had the stamina. Klara matched the action without a slip and even continued to play during the reel changes.

When the lights came up, Mr Tilly’s face was flushed with excitement. ‘I’ll have posters made,’ he said. ‘
The youngest talent in Sydney plays at Tilly’s Cinema
.’ He turned to Klara. ‘What’s your last name?’

‘Rose,’ she replied. That was Uncle Ota’s anglicised name and, in a way, it was Father’s name too. Uncle Ota seemed pleased. I decided I would make my surname Rose too.

Uncle Ota and Mr Tilly discussed the terms of Klara’s employment while Klara and I ate coconut macaroons in the cinema office. When the two men had agreed on a fee, Mr Tilly offered Uncle Ota a cigar and they sat back, blowing smoke rings into the air.

‘Who was the director of the film we saw?’ Uncle Ota asked Mr Tilly.

‘Wilfred Lucas. An American,’ Mr Tilly answered. ‘Caroll-Baker Productions brought him and his scriptwriter wife to Australia. They hoped that using American talent would secure an American market for the film.’

‘Did it?’

Mr Tilly shrugged. ‘The picture show business isn’t like it was before the war. Australian pictures were cheap to make then, and Australians wanted to see their own country. We had a bigger local industry than France or America. Now we have permanent cinemas and the overheads that go with them, as well as the largest picture-going population in the world. Showmen need a constant supply of films and the only ones who can give us that are the Americans.’

‘I should like to make a film about Australia one day,’ I announced. I was surprised by my own words. Where had that idea come from? I enjoyed taking pictures with my camera but I did not know the first thing about making a film.

‘Why not?’ said Klara. ‘You’ve always been good at telling stories, Adelka.’

Mr Tilly smiled at me. ‘Make it a good picture then, young lady, and I’ll screen it for you.’

After announcing my intention to make a film, I was obliged to follow through, especially as Klara had shown faith in me. It never occurred to us that being nineteen years old and a foreigner might hamper my progress. Mr Tilly gave me a list of Australian directors and I wrote to them asking where they obtained their cameras and for how much, and how they found actors. I kept their suggestions in an indexed journal. Most of them advised me to use sets sparingly to save money, and to film outdoors to take advantage of Australia’s bright sunlight rather than using costly studio lights. Raymond Longford wrote that if I kept my technical team to a maximum of four, I could make an acceptable film for two thousand pounds. Beaumont Smith undercut this with suggestions on how to make a box office smash for a thousand pounds. In Prague I might have had access to that amount of money, but I could not afford to be frivolous with our funds here in Australia.

One thousand pounds, I sighed to myself. Well, that’s the end of that.

Mr Tilly’s posters featuring the ‘young virtuoso Klara Rose’ drew in the crowds, not just from the eastern suburbs but from other localities as well. The
Daily Telegraph
took a picture of Klara. Her performances were so popular, Mr Tilly asked to extend her performing nights, but I would not hear of it.

‘She’s still a young girl. She needs her rest,’ I told him.

In winter that year, Klara complained of headaches and I wondered if she needed glasses. One afternoon she came home early from school looking pale. ‘You need fresh air,’ I told her. She agreed to come to Nielsen Park with Esther and me.

When we arrived at the park, we found the gardeners busy planting Moreton Bay figs and brush box along the pathways. The park had been cleared of bushland and the caretakers had realised too late that the result was stark and there were no trees left to give shade. We spread out our picnic blanket near one of the few remaining tuckeroo trees. Klara and I tugged off our shoes and strolled to the water while Esther lay on her side on the rug. A blue butterfly landed on her hip. I was intrigued why Esther was a magnet for butterflies, and remembered that it was unusual to see butterflies this time of year.

Esther had changed since her mother’s death. She was still quiet but she enjoyed going to the pictures with us. She gushed over sheiks, swooned at Pacific Island romances and cheered for the dancing girls. Perhaps having been robbed of her chance for love, Esther was living vicariously.

‘It’s good to look at the horizon,’ I told Klara when we reached the shoreline. ‘I had eye weakness when I was your age from too much reading. Aunt Josephine told me that close work tightens the muscles and I needed to relax them by looking into the distance.’

The wind off the water was chilly and there were no swimmers, but dozens of boats bobbed in the waves. A musical chirp trilled in the scrub above the rocks.

‘Look!’ I said, pointing out a blue bird flitting amongst the branches. ‘A superb fairy-wren.’

My mind drifted to Mother sitting at the table in our Prague house with her paints and water jars. The picture of homely bliss lifted my spirits. Then I was hit by a pain in the pit of my stomach that struck whenever I thought about Mother. Milosh had not only killed her, he had also destroyed my happy memories. If I remembered Mother, the joy was blighted by the thought of how she had died.

‘Blood!’ cried Klara, lifting up her hand.

I grabbed her wrist, thinking that she must have cut her hand on an oyster shell while my mind had been distracted. But there was no cut there. No sign of blood.

‘Blood! Blood! I can see her face!’ Klara screamed.

‘Whose face?’ I asked.

Klara took a step back and stared at me with the same vacant eyes she had shown me that day on the ship when she thought she had seen Milosh.

Esther ran up to us. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.

‘Blood!’ Klara cried again.

I grabbed her arms. ‘Klara!’ I said, shaking her.

‘Klara!’

Klara began sobbing.

‘Come,’ said Esther, putting her arm around Klara’s shoulders and nodding towards the road. ‘We’d better go home.’

We would not have been able to get Klara back to the house in that condition on the tram, so Esther found a taxi. I was glad she was there to think for us. I helped Klara into the taxi and wrapped my coat around her.

‘I was her older sister but I did not watch her closely enough…Emilie started hearing voices in her head.’ I remembered Mother’s description of her sister’s madness. ‘After I am gone, you must protect Klara and keep her safe…Do not lose sight of Klara the way I lost sight of my sister.’

Klara muttered inaudible sentences and tugged at her hair. It cannot happen so suddenly, I thought. It was as if the balance of the world had shifted and my sister and I were standing on the edge of a cliff, about to topple off.

D
octor Norwood’s rooms in Macquarie Street were as quiet as a church. Uncle Ota and I watched the clock tick minutes away into an hour. Every so often the secretary tapped out something on the typewriter. Uncle Ota’s lips moved silently as he read the framed certificates on the walls. Psychiatry was not a well-known specialty in Australia. It had come into practice during the war, to treat the soldiers who were ‘shell-shocked’.

Despite the elaborate names that were now being used for it, the word ‘madness’ frightened me. Visions of the asylum in Prague with its high walls and barred windows loomed. I had found the rumours of rat-infested dungeons and hapless patients shackled in chains chilling then. Now that Klara had become ill, I could not stand the thought of it.

‘That’s not where your Aunt Emilie was sent,’ said Uncle Ota when I told him my fears. ‘Your grandparents put her in a private asylum in the countryside. But her mind weakened her body and she caught pneumonia.’

The tortured expression on Uncle Ota’s face when he mentioned Aunt Emilie worsened my anxiety. Surely Klara is not insane, I told myself, although that was the first thing that leapt into my mind when she had her attack. Since then I wondered if she had simply suffered a nervous breakdown. After all, our mother had been murdered, we’d had to leave our home, and she had witnessed our family being attacked by a group of thugs.

I was grateful that Uncle Ota and Ranjana agreed to find Klara the best help they could. Ranjana and I wanted to care for Klara at home but the local doctor who saw us the afternoon of her episode would not hear of it. ‘Should she wander outside in her present state of mind, she might be reported to the police,’ he said. ‘Then she will be certified to a mental asylum and you will have trouble getting her back.’

Doctor Norwood called us into his office and invited us to sit in the Chesterfield chairs. The oak-panelled walls and lace curtains gave the room a sense of coolness but my heart was racing and I broke into a sweat. Through a crack in the door to the examination room, I caught a glimpse of Klara lying down on a bench with a nurse leaning over her.

Doctor Norwood was in his early fifties with skin the colour of old ivory. His manner of speech was decisive. ‘A sudden episode of psychosis,’ he said. ‘A delayed reaction to a shock.’ He went on to tell us that if we did not get hospital treatment for Klara, her health would become worse. ‘I will write you a referral to Broughton Hall. It is much better that Miss Rose goes to a voluntary clinic rather than a mental institution. I do not think the company of incurables does anything for one’s equilibrium.’

The following day we took Klara to Broughton Hall in Rozelle. The weather was overcast and the grey sky matched the gloominess of my thoughts. Doctor Norwood had sedated her for the journey, which we took by taxi, not willing to risk any outbursts on the tram. She slept most of the time, her head resting on my shoulder. Each time Uncle Ota looked at her, his eyes clouded over as if he were remembering something painful.