Riverslake Page 10

  Randolph and Murdoch sat on the bed and watched Radinski while he poured generous drinks of wine into plastic glasses. The tortoise-shell cat lay on the mat at their feet, unconcernedly washing herself, and a soft unintelligible voice crooned from the wireless.

  “Felix,” Murdoch said, “why have you got such a big wireless. Couldn’t you get a mantel model? It’d take up a lot less room.”

  “Please?” the Pole inquired, looking politely over his shoulder.

  Murdoch fell back on sign language. “Wireless,” he said, pointing to the machine. “Very big. Better small, I think.” He indicated the size of a mantel model with expert motions of his hands.

  “Ah, yes, radio,” Radinski said. He proffered them a glass each. “Pros’!”

  “Mud in your eye,” Murdoch muttered.

  “Please?”

  “Oh, forget it.”

  They drained their glasses and set them down.

  “Big radio, better,” the Pole explained. “From America, speak Russia language for Europe people.” He grinned at Randolph and cupped his ear in one hand. “I hear.”

  “You speak Russian?” Randolph inquired.

  “Yes, I speak. Russian, German, Yugoslav, a little, and Polish. I speak.”

  Murdoch pointed to a photo of a fair pretty girl. It was framed in polished wood, and stood on the table beside Radinski’s bed.

  “That your sheila?” he inquired. Catching the Pole’s uncomprehending glance, he said, “Your girl—you know.” He kissed the air noisily.

  “My girl, yes.” Radinski looked at the photograph. His glance softened, and he said again, “My girl.”

  “Here, in Australia?”

  “Yes—in Kingston, live.”

  “Nice and close, eh?” Randolph had been studying the face in the photograph. A young face with an old and wise look about it, appealing and in a way defenceless, and yet wary; pretty, even beautiful, but a little sharp with its high cheek-bones and slightly tilted eyes. He had come to know Radinski fairly well in the month he had been working at Riverslake—as well, he realized, as he might ever get to know any of them except Murdoch—and he liked the Pole and respected him. But this was the first time he had ever visited his room. Somehow, he had never associated him with a girl.

  “Did you know her in Europe, Felix?” he asked.

  “No, in Europe not. On ship, I know her, and Bathurst camp. Ah—Bathurst!” He shook his head and smiled, like one contemplating something puzzling but only mildly annoying. “We come in Bathurst, and three days, we sing ‘Waltzing Mat-tilda’. Waltzing Mat-tilda, waltzing Mat-tilda, waltzing Mat-tilda, all time this song. Bodies say———” he looked quickly at Randolph and grinned—“people say, ‘What for?’” He shrugged. “I don’ know, I cannot, but Marika, she very good. Teach me, and now I can sing.” He sang a couple of lines, jerkily and with the sing-song intonation of a child repeating something memorized but not understood. “See?”

  “Very good!” Murdoch said, looking sideways at Randolph.

  “What is this song, please?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Felix,” Randolph said, feeling slightly uncomfortable. Waltzing Matilda—the damned idiots! “It’s just an Australian song.”

  “Ah—like ‘God Save the King’? Is Australian song, too.”

  Murdoch changed the subject. He looked pointedly at the cat on the floor. “Did you say your girl’s name was Marika?” he said. “Your cat is Marika, too, isn’t it?”

  “Yes—yes. Marika, one, here.” Radinski pointed at the cat. “Marika, two, for Hotel Acton.”

  “Works there?” Randolph asked.

  “Make bed,” the Pole explained.

  “At the hotel, Felix,” Randolph suggested, with a smile. “Not for the hotel, but at the hotel.”

  “Ah, yes. At hotel.” Radinski sighed so tragically that Murdoch laughed. “Very heavy, this English speak.”

  “Very hard,” Murdoch corrected him, restraining a grin. He picked up one of the chairs, pretending to struggle. “This is heavy. English is hard.”

  Radinski looked at him for a moment and then burst into laughter. Randolph, watching him, realized with swift pity that it was the first time he had seen the Pole really laugh.

  “You bastard, you!” he cried, merriment bubbling in his words, “You make joke for me!”

  “Don’t you call me a bastard, you bloody Balt!” Murdoch growled with mock severity, and the Pole laughed again.

  “Yes, yes!” he agreed. “Me, bloody Balt! All man say, maybe is true!” He turned to Randolph. “Mister, tonight, what you do?”

  “Do? Oh, I don’t know, Felix.” Randolph looked at Murdoch. “What are we doing tonight, Kerry?”

  “Nothing that I know of.” Murdoch looked at the Pole. “Why, Felix?”

  “I like you come for me,” Radinski said shyly. “Tonight, make party.”

  “Party?” Murdoch said eagerly. “Where?”

  “For Marika,” Radinski explained. “For my girl. She have———” He stopped, feeling for the word. “Ant, something? Her mama, sister.”

  “Aunt,” Randolph said. “You mean her aunt has a house in Kingston?”

  “Not house,” Radinski said, shrugging. “Room, only. Too much money for house. Aunt for Marika, husband in Australia long time, soon finish contract. Small party—not big.”

  “Perhaps they mightn’t like us to come,” Randolph suggested gently. “They don’t know us.”

  “For my friend, O.K.,” the Pole said with touching pride. “I like you, Marika like you, aunt for Marika, too. Small party is some eat, some drink, some sing songs. Please—you come?”

  “Be in it, Randy,” Murdoch urged, speaking swiftly and colloquially. “You’ve got to be in it to win. They reckon these Balt do’s are the berries!”

  “We were going round to Linda’s, remember?” Randolph reminded him. “What about that?”

  “Ar, we’re always going round to Linda’s. Let’s have a change. I’ve never been to a Balt do.”

  Randolph shrugged. “All right,” he said. “You think up the blasted alibi—she’ll be mad as they come.”

  “I should worry,” Murdoch snorted. “Anyway, we didn’t say we’d go for certain. I’d just about forgotten it.”

  “I hadn’t really forgotten it, but I wasn’t very keen.” Randolph looked up at the Pole. “Thanks, Felix—we’d like to come, if it’ll be O.K. with Marika and her aunt. What time?”

  “Good, good!” Radinski said enthusiastically. “Ah—time.” He held up his wrist and pointed to his watch, counting up to seven. “Seven o’clock, O.K.?”

  “Yeah, that’ll be grouse,” Murdoch said. “Just give us time to change and get over there after we finish tea. I’d better go and shave now.”

  “Yes, go on. You’ll have time before tea.” Randolph had shaved during the day. “I’ll see you in the kitchen, after.”

  As he stepped out of the hut Murdoch ran into Bellairs, who, though a thin chill had crept into the air, was lounging on the lawn in the late sunlight. He had been sitting in his room all day playing cards and swilling rot-gut wine from a sly-grog shop in the Causeway. His face was red and bloated and his eyes bloodshot as they leered at Murdoch.

  “You gettin’ pretty bloody thick with the Balts, ain’t you, Kerry?” he demanded tipsily. “Wha’ you doin’ in there?”

  “If I thought it was any of your business, I’d tell you,” Murdoch replied, staring down insolently at him.

  “You wanta keep away from those bastards,” Bellairs advised him. “That’s the bloke ’at sconed Jerry with the pot, that day.”

  “Jerry asked for it. I would’ve done it myself.”

  “Tha’s different—you c’d do it, but not one o’ them,” Bellairs reasoned laboriously. He clambered to his feet. “That little Balt bastard’s a spy!”
<
br />   “Don’t talk such damned rot!” Murdoch snapped. “What’s he spying for—the plans of the flaming kitchen?”

  “Shouldn’t go crook, Kerry—I’m jus’ telling you.” Bellairs swayed closer, and Murdoch reefed his head back sharply to escape the stench of his breath. “We got to stick together, or those bastards’ll have our jobs off us, an’ we’ll be out on the track.” He spoke confidingly, his chapped lips drooling the words. “You’ll see. You wasn’t in the last depression.”

  Murdoch laughed shortly. “If any bloke can get my job off me when he can’t even talk English, he can have it,” he said. “I wouldn’t deserve to hold it, and that goes for any other Australian, too. Anyway, I’ve got no time to stand here batting the breeze with you.” He turned abruptly and started to walk away. “Come an’ see me when you can talk some sense!”

  “You’ll see!” Bellairs called out after him. He added a string of filthy oaths. “You think you’re a smart bastard, you and your mate Randolph. We’re not all so dumb. You’ll see!”

  God almighty! Murdoch thought. I’ll sky this mob one of these days. Jerry and that ape and the rest of them. When I get away from this blasted place.

  He spat viciously at a post, as if to rid his mouth of a dirty taste.

  Alone in the little room with Radinski, Randolph felt embarrassment, and wished that he had gone out with Murdoch. He found conversation difficult enough at any time, unless it might be the quick colloquial way of the kitchen, about things that either didn’t matter or were of such common interest and knowledge that discussion of them went no deeper than the surface of thought.

  Now, with the Pole seated on a chair a few feet away from him and looking earnestly at him as if expecting him to say something wise or funny or both, and with the noises of the camp drifting as though from another world through the small, high window, he found himself tongue-tied.

  He looked round at the bike, hanging on the wall, the crucifix and the medals, and then at the rows of photographs. His eyes stopped at one, battered and creased, that leaned against an ornamental vase on the table, next to that of the girl, Marika. It was of a group of people, three fair and stolid young men arranged stiffly round an elderly woman, one on either side of her and one behind, his square dark hands resting on her shoulders. Leaning against her knees, staring into the lens of the camera from a face that was unchildishly pale and pinched, was a little, fair boy.

  The woman was all in black, with a black shawl over her hair and framing a strong, plain face that bore the ravages of time or of hardship in every deep-cut line. The thin mouth and the deep black eyes, the high cheek-bones that seemed ready to cut through the seamed cheeks were, somehow, all that Randolph had imagined of a Middle European peasant. He found himself trying to reconstruct the scene and the circumstances when those five people had sat and stared so emotionlessly into the camera that would record them for this little cubby hole half the world away. And, with an unpleasant thrill of intuition, what had happened to them and where they might be now, what their flesh might be doing and enduring as they stared back at him from their photograph. The little boy, he felt, must be Radinski. But the others? He pointed to it and raised his eyebrows in query.

  “My mother,” Radinski volunteered, “and my brothers.” His tone gave no intimation of what Randolph wanted to know.

  “Where are they now?” he asked. “In Poland, still?”

  “Dead,” Radinski said, still speaking with a strange, impersonal tone as though about people he had never really known, or as though he were relating a tale he had by heart. Watching him, Randolph felt that if he had wept or cursed, it would have been easier to bear. “Dead, my brothers.”

  “God,” Randolph breathed. “All of them? How—in the war?”

  “In the war, and one a prisoner for Russia.”

  “And your mother,” Randolph asked gently, feeling that he should not, but driven by some inexplicable desire to learn what had happened to the dark sombre woman who sat on the table in front of him amongst her dead sons. “Is she—dead, too?”

  Radinski shrugged. “I not see for eleven, twelve years,” he said. “Maybe dead—I do not know. I send letter, sometime parcel, but not answer. I hope my mother dead.”

  “You hope your mother’s dead?” Randolph demanded in amazement. “In God’s name, why?”

  “Russia,” the Pole said, expressionlessly.

  So they were dead, the sons for sure, the mother, maybe. And better off if she were dead. Randolph stared at the photograph. Love and labour and hope and courage there must have been, but it had ended in this crumpled print; four lives that had accomplished nothing by living and taught nothing by dying, epitomized in this four-by-six bit of pasteboard that stared back at him from the table. His eyes strayed from it to Radinski’s face, and found it expressionless as before, pale and composed.

  Randolph had hardly been touched by the war. It had taken six years out of his life, but he had lost none of his family, and few even of his close friends. He could not even begin to feel the depth of sadness, almost of despair, that was in Radinski’s flat and unemotional words.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, and looked into the Pole’s pale eyes.

  It’s damned silly, he thought, but what else can I say? If there’s three hundred of them in the camp, here, then two hundred of them would have the same tale to tell. My brothers, dead; my mother, I do not know.

  Radinski stared back at Randolph, this dark man who sat in his room talking to him with compassion about his dead brothers and his lost mother. He was the first Australian to take any notice of him, apart from the normal words of greeting that would as carelessly be thrown to a dog—the first to show the kindness of understanding what he felt and why he felt it, and of showing plainly, without embarrassment or pity, that he did understand. He was the first Australian who had come into this room, the first even to want to, and he came not with condescension, but in simple friendship, as one friend visiting another. Radinski’s mouth worked and he spread his thin hands tensely in front of him. A knot formed in his throat and threatened to block his breathing.

  “Ah—I cannot!” he muttered softly, shaking his head from side to side in despair. “English, I cannot, what I say to you.

  Randolph thought of the Dummy and his desperate efforts to make himself understood. “Don’t worry, Felix,” he said, “one day you’ll be able to do it.”

  “One day?” Radinski echoed him bitterly. “Perhaps not stay so long!”

  “Not stay? What in the name of hell are you talking about?”

  “Not stay,” Radinski repeated harshly. “Bodies not happy, un’erstand? No good work, all time, ‘You bastard! You bloody Balt!… Mister, I am Pole, Pole—not Balt, not black-man, not dog! Ach!” The exclamation was thin with bitterness and frustration and disappointment. “I t’ink, better for stay in Germany!”

  “That’s damned silly,” Randolph said flatly. “Whatever happens, you’d be better off here than you would be in Germany. I wouldn’t be happy if I were in Poland; maybe one year, or two, and I’d be all right, but not at first. It’s the same with you here—you don’t understand us, and we don’t understand you, and we can’t even talk to each other, much. You’ll be unhappy for a while, but God almighty, not as unhappy as if you were in Germany!”

  “Why?” Radinski demanded. “You can tell me why is better here, yes?”

  “Well, food for one thing. You can eat here, and eat plenty. You’ve got a job, and money to spend and things to spend it on. That’s enough for a start, isn’t it?”

  “Food, money?” Radinski said. They were the only words that he had understood, but they were enough to give him the trend of Randolph’s words. He looked at the Australian in such a way that Randolph felt the red rise into his face. He knew what Radinski was thinking—how could there be a man whose life had been so little that he did not know there were things
of greater importance than food and money?

  “This is nothing,” Radinski said gently. “In Germany, I am hungry, but I am happy. In Germany, I have maybe one piece of bread for day. Sometimes, I get a loaf for many days. I say, then, eat it now, for in two days, you might not be here, and other man eat it. In Germany, I have not money, but I am happy.” He paused, looked up at the little window and nodded his head slowly, as though surprised to remember that he had been so happy. “Yes, happy. Not money, not food enough, but I am happy in Germany.’ He dropped his gaze again to Randolph’s face. “In Germany, Mister, I am not bloody Balt. I am Pole.”

  While they had been speaking, the cold early dusk of spring had seeped into the room, and Randolph could only just see the outlines of Radinski’s pale face. He had to listen for the words that, like moths, seemed to beat on the gloom. Not food enough, but happy. Not by bread alone. There was no answer to that one.

  These men, Radinski, Novikowsky and the rest, had spent their boyhood and youth in the shadow of a war that had finally overwhelmed them and destroyed their countries. But not their blood. Russia, far more bitterly hated and feared, and with far more tragic reason than ever Germany had been, engulfed Poland in incredible treachery and cruelty, but wherever Polish hearts still remembered their homeland, Poland still lived—be it in Germany or in Australia. It had happened before, the rape of their country, and Poles had endured. They would endure again. But as Poles—they loved Germany and Germans little more than they loved the Russians, but if in Australia they must forgo their blood, then starvation in Germany would be preferable to most of them.

  “Come on, Felix,” Randolph said, standing up. “Come on over and have tea—food mightn’t be everything, but by God, it helps.”