The Year It All Ended (19 page)

Tiney watched as Paul crossed the driveway and collected his bicycle from the garage. He wheeled it out into the street, swung a leg over the seat and pedalled off to his job at the chemist’s shop. Then Onkel drove off in the Studebaker to visit his vineyards. Tiney lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. In
the distance a magpie sang, but inside Vogelsang all sounds were muffled. She shut her eyes and slept.

When she woke, she found someone had come into her room and unpacked her things. Her books and letter-writing folio were neatly arranged on the dresser. Tiney flipped open the folio and took out the photograph of Louis to prop beside her bed, alongside the family photo of her parents and sisters. She felt a twinge of guilt as she rearranged the remaining photos and papers. The night before, she had crept into Papa’s study and rifled through his desk drawer to find the photo of the mysterious woman and child. Papa claimed he had read through Louis’ diary and carefully reviewed all his letters but could find no mention of anyone like them. He disdained putting the photograph in his precious scrapbook of Louis’ life. What if the woman in the photo was really a person of no consequence, someone who had no true connection to Louis? Was there ever any way of knowing what she had meant to him? Tiney put the photo in an envelope and tucked it into the back of her writing folio.

The days fell into an easy rhythm. Tiney spent much of them sleeping. It was as if all the restless nights of the past year had caught up with her, for within an hour of breakfast she had so little energy that simply getting dressed and eating left her exhausted. All she could do was creep back to her room and lie down again until the bell rang for lunch.

Tante Bea wanted no help from Tiney, despite her frequent complaints about needing a daughter. Two girls came every morning to sweep and dust and to boil the big copper kettle in the back laundry. They helped Tante Bea in her endless rounds of pickling and preserving. They brought in the spring harvest from the kitchen garden and the orchard, and peeled and
chopped, salted vegetables and stewed fruit to fill shining glass jars while Tiney sat reading on the return verandah, saving her energy for the evenings.

Dinners at Vogelsang were much more formal than at Larksrest. Tiney missed the chatter of her sisters and the easy tenderness between her parents, though she took pleasure in the easy way everyone spoke German here, without Nette to scold. Though her uncle and aunt sometimes smiled at her mistakes, she was grateful for their patience and unstinting kindness. Tiney felt as if the most important way she could repay her uncle and aunt was to make them laugh. She had the feeling that no one had laughed at Vogelsang for a very long time.

When the table was cleared, Tiney and Paul sat at the piano together and played duets. It was soothing to have music to cover the terrible silences between Paul and his parents. Paul was a much more accomplished musician than Tiney, and she loved sitting beside him watching his hands racing up and down the ivory keys. He also had a beautiful baritone voice and when he sang Schumann’s Dichterliebe song cycle, Onkel Ludwig would grow teary. Tante Bea would hand him her handkerchief, which always made Tiney smile.

But by far the best part of the day, as far as Tiney was concerned, was when Paul came cycling up the driveway in the late afternoon. Tiney would try to make sure she was in the garden when he arrived so they could talk without Tante Bea listening to every word. In the presence of his parents, Paul’s face closed over like a darkening sky, but when it was just the two of them, he would tell her stories and jokes to make her laugh, and tease her affectionately. It made him seem more like his brother Will. It made her want to trust him.

It was while they were sitting beneath a plum tree in the orchard on a December evening, eating the first blood-red fruit of the season, that Tiney showed him the photo. Paul wiped his hands on the yellow grass and took it from her carefully.

‘It was in Louis’ things that were sent from the Front. Mama and Papa won’t let us talk about it but I can’t help wondering if this could be Louis’ child,’ said Tiney, leaning forward and pointing to the baby.

‘It could be anyone’s son,’ he said dismissively, handing the picture back to Tiney.

‘Do you think it’s a boy? I really couldn’t tell. But why would he keep the photo? It must be someone he knew well. And the woman is very pretty, don’t you think?’

‘For a Jewess, I suppose she is,’ said Paul. He stretched out in the long grass and stared up at the summer sky.

‘Now you’re teasing me. You can’t know she’s a Jew,’ said Tiney. ‘You’re simply guessing. We can’t know anything about them and we probably never will. She belongs to a different world.’

‘Yes, the real world,’ said Paul, bitterly.

‘It’s no more real than here,’ said Tiney.

A murder of black crows flew over the orchard and wheeled towards the river. The silence between Paul and Tiney stretched out like a chill wind.

‘Do you feel strong enough for a stroll?’ asked Paul suddenly. ‘Or we could take the car and go for a drive, if you don’t feel like walking.’

‘Why don’t we do both?’ said Tiney. ‘Let’s drive and then walk. You keep telling me you’re going to show me all the magical places in the Barossa. It’s about time I got the Paul Kreiger tour.’

Paul smiled. ‘So you’re feeling brave, little cousin?’

‘I always feel brave,’ replied Tiney.

They drove through Nuriootpa, past an old cemetery and along a dusty track. The sky was splashed with coppery clouds but the evening was warm and there were still many hours before darkness. After driving through valleys green with grapevines and over dusky golden hills, they parked beside a towering, white-barked gum tree.

‘So, my courageous cousin, are you ready to face the black heart of the Barossa? Do you know that a
Zauberer
, a sorcerer, fought the devil not very far from here?’

Tiney laughed.

‘No, it’s true. My father used to scare me and Will when we went hiking here as boys. The end of the world was nigh and the
Zauberer
fought the devil to save us all.’

‘On Mount Kitchener?’ asked Tiney.

‘You know it’s not Mount Kitchener,’ said Paul, his tone changing. ‘It’s Kaiserstuhl – the Emperor’s seat. Sixty-nine names from the map of South Australia have been changed this year. Sixty-nine! Even poor little Schuber is now Stuart. Ridiculous.’

Tiney sighed. ‘Let’s not fight, Paul. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Nette insisted on using the British names, you know that.’

‘How can you listen to her?’

‘Because she’s my big sister and I love her. But I don’t want to argue with you. Tell me about the sorcerer and the end of the world.’

‘Have you heard of old Kavel, the Lutheran minister who brought out hundreds of Germans back in 1838? Your mother used to hear him preach when she was growing up in Tanunda. Some say he was the sorcerer in this story. Kavel was always
predicting the end of days. Some say he practised grey magic, others say that’s rubbish. Perhaps it was someone else. Who knows? When our people left their old homes, they brought more than themselves to this country.’

‘But for us, it’s different, isn’t it?’ asked Tiney. ‘We were born here, you and me. We’re part of the new country, not the old.’

Paul shrugged. ‘Do you want to hear the story or not?’

Tiney nodded and Paul’s voice dropped into storytelling mode.

‘So this old
Zauberer
, this man of grey magic, he brought his powers with him from Germany. And when he came here, to this place and saw the mountain and the ravine, he knew that when the devil was about to ascend to the world it would be from Kaiserstuhl Mountain. He also knew that when the devil came, he would transform himself into the red-bearded troll, Barbarossa.

‘So the
Zauberer
ordered the blacksmith down in Nuriootpa to make chains so strong they could bind the Devil. Then the citizens shored up the sides of Tanunda jail in preparation for his capture.’

‘Why?’

‘For when the
Zauberer
succeeded, of course, and came down the mountain with the Devil in tow. Eight men dragged chains up steep roads, with the
Zauberer
leading the way. It was the blackest night of the century. Some say they came back down the next morning shamefaced. But there is another story about what happened on that dark night.’

Paul opened the car door and jumped out, striding up the path ahead. Tiney ran after him, catching his arm. ‘You can’t
leave off there!’ she said, breathlessly, trying to keep pace with him.

Paul grinned. ‘Some say that the
Zauberer
and his apprentices climbed the mountain in a wind so strong they could barely stand. Then blue lightning struck the chains and . . .’ Paul clapped his hands loudly and Tiney jumped. ‘The apprentices were vaporised. But the
Zauberer
stood his ground. All night, he fought from inside a
Hexenkreis
that he’d drawn on the ground with the charred leg-bone of an apprentice. And he read from a
Zauberbuch
, his magical book of sorcery. At dawn, when the
Zauberer
came back down to Tanunda, he was scorched black.’

‘Did he have the Devil with him?’ asked Tiney

‘Well, the people of the town asked him whether he had caught the Devil. He told them he had chained the beast and cast it into the devil-pit at the foot of Kaiserstuhl.’

Tiney glanced around the bush uneasily.

‘So the Devil is beneath the ground, right here in the Barossa?’

Paul shrugged. ‘If you try hard enough, you can imagine it’s true.’

Tiney tried to picture the sorcerer with his face scorched black. All she could conjure was exactly what she saw – Paul, gazing broodingly over the landscape.

Paul raised his hand and pointed upwards. ‘That gorge, over there, that’s where the Devil stays chained.’ He grabbed a broken branch and began bashing his way through the long grass and scrub towards the fissure in the rock. Tiney followed. When they reached it, they stood and stared at the deep, black opening in the stone.

‘It’s just a story,’ said Paul. ‘There’s nothing there. There’s
nothing here at all. They try and mix the old stories with this place and it doesn’t work. You can tell it has its own stories – ones that we don’t know, stories that don’t belong to me just as I don’t belong here.’

‘I can imagine the Devil crawling out of the darkness here,’ said Tiney.

‘No,’ said Paul. ‘The Devil has been too busy on the other side of the world.’ Paul dropped the branch and slumped onto his knees.

Tiney put her hand on his shoulder. ‘What’s wrong, Paul?’

Paul’s shoulders rose and fell, as if he was gasping. ‘I need to leave, Tiney. I need to leave the Barossa.’

‘But this is your home. You were born here, grew up here.’

‘I have these other places in my head. It doesn’t work, to lock the old gods up in this place, the old stories. They don’t fit and I don’t fit either. I can’t get Germany out of my mind or out of my soul.’

‘You’ve never even been there,’ said Tiney.

‘That doesn’t change how I feel. I keep thinking of Will. I think of what he went through. It could have been both of us. I was only a year off following him to Heidelberg.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t go,’ said Tiney.

Paul turned his face away from her. ‘If I had gone, maybe it would have been me, not Will, who died. He might have come home.’

‘You mustn’t even think that, Paul.’

‘You don’t understand!’ he cried.

‘But I do! I do understand. Grief can make you think mad thoughts. When Louis died, it was as if a big black hole opened up and swallowed all my family and we broke into tiny little
pieces as we fell into it. I had a dream, that if we could all go to Europe together, me and Mama and Papa and all my sisters, then somehow we would be made whole. But I couldn’t make it come true. Everyone kept breaking away – first Nette, then Minna and finally Thea. And Mama and Papa, they’ve grown so much older in only a year. Then I fell ill. And that was the end of it all.’

‘You could still go,’ said Paul, his eyes feverishly bright. ‘We could go together. My trust money could pay for both of us. We wouldn’t have to come back here, ever.’

Tiney felt faint. The sun was low on the western horizon and sunlight cut through the leaves of the trees, blinding her.

‘I only wanted to go for a visit, Paul, not forever! You’re all Tante and Onkel have left. It would break their hearts if you left them. They’ve already lost one son. They mustn’t lose another.’

Paul scuffed the ground with the tip of his shiny black boot. A shroud of golden dust coated the leather.

‘So you won’t come with me?’

‘To France?’

‘No, to Germany.’

‘But it’s not safe in Germany, not even to visit. Haven’t you read about the terrible revolutionaries and riots? You know Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht were murdered, and other socialists too! And what if the Russian civil war spills over? You’re lucky you weren’t extradited with the other German prisoners. You’re lucky that you’re really Australian.’

‘They should have extradited me instead of half the good men they’ve sent back. Some of them were more Australian than I will ever be. I wish I was with them. They arrived back in Germany in September. They’re building a new Europe and here I am, like a child, playing in the bush with my baby cousin.’

Paul thrust his hands into his pockets. Tiney leapt to her feet, and stood squarely facing Paul with her hands on her hips. ‘I am not a baby, Paul. One day, I’ll find where Louis is buried. And maybe Will too. But then I’ll come home and help build
this
country.’

Paul said nothing and they walked in stormy silence back to the car. By the time they reached Vogelsang, darkness had fallen. Tiney went to her room and lay on her bed, her mind as thunderous as the night the
Zauberer
fought the devil.

Ready to fly