Riverslake Page 11

  Radinski stood up and came close to him, looking into his face.

  “You are good man,” he said simply. “All bodies—all people—say, you are best man for kitchen, for new-comers. Novikowsky, Schmidt, Gummow—all say same.”

  “Australia’s the same as any other country,” Randolph said, gruffly to disguise the emotion the other’s words had loosened in him. “Many good people, many bad. This———” he swept a hand round the room, but its arc took in the camp outside and the city beyond. “This isn’t Australia. When do you finish your contract?”

  “Eight month,” Radinski said.

  “Well, when you do, you get to hell out of this place, away from Canberra. And when you find Australia, you won’t want to go back to Germany, I’ll bet my bottom dollar!”

  “Please?”

  “Oh, come over to tea!” Randolph said, and walked out of the room.

  Condamine scooped into the big urn on the press and let a dollop of vegetable fall onto the plate in front of him. It dropped, as he had intended it should drop, into a pool of thin gravy, and spots flicked out onto the trousers of the man holding the plate. He jumped back with a muttered curse and glared hotly across the press at Condamine.

  “Hold your damned plate up, and you won’t get splashed!” Condamine said sharply.

  Charlesworth was standing alongside him.

  “That’s a lousy trick, Condy,” he said shortly. “One of these days you’ll do it to an Aussie by mistake, and I hope he’ll kick your guts out. Don’t come screaming to me for help if he does.”

  “Trick?” Condamine ejaculated, feigning surprise. “That’s no trick—I couldn’t help it. If the dumb Balt bastards won’t hold up their plates, what’m I to do—hold the damned things up for ’em?”

  “Do the right thing, if you know how,” Randolph advised him shortly. He was on the other side of Charlesworth, serving the cabbage.

  Condamine shot him a sour look and turned his attention to the line. He scooped a dollop of the coarsely mashed turnips he was serving, but the man in front of him hurriedly pulled his plate away.

  “What is?” he demanded, trying to look into the urn.

  “Never mind what it is,” Condamine barked, waving the ladle. “D’you want it or don’t you?”

  “What is?” the man repeated. He nervously shoved his plate forward, and Condamine slapped a helping onto it.

  “Turn your nose up at good tucker, you Balt bludger!” he snarled. “Turnips ain’t good enough for you now, but a year ago you was crawling over the paddocks in Poland scratching for them, I bet!”

  “Perhaps that’s why he’s turned off them,” Randolph suggested blandly. “Anyway, I never see you eating anyone else’s share!”

  Condamine ignored him. The last man he had served had paused in the race, and was peering at the vegetable on his plate. He wrinkled his nose sourly and looked at the cook.

  “For schwein!” he said shortly. He took a potato from Charlesworth and passed along the line.

  “The cheeky bastard!” Condamine said viciously. “A man oughta slap it into his ugly mug!”

  “A man might,” Randolph observed, and Charlesworth gave his short, hard laugh. “You stay on this side of the press, Condamine, and reserve your abuse for the kitchenmen. Then you might live to collect the pension.”

  “Mind your own bloody business!” Condamine snapped. “I wasn’t talking to you!”

  “That wouldn’t spoil my holidays,” Randolph said coolly.

  Murdoch, standing on the other side of Condamine serving spaghetti, looked at him through narrowed eyes.

  “Forget it, Randy,” he said.

  The enmity between Randolph and Condamine was as open as it might be without their coming to blows. Everyone in the kitchen was aware of it. Randolph, in his first days at the kitchen, had taken an instant dislike to the thin, bitter Condamine, and it was deepened by Condamine’s treatment of the foreigners in the kitchen. Most of the cooks, drunk or sober, abused them from time to time, cursing them vilely and saying things to them that they would not have thought of saying to Australians in the same circumstances, but Condamine’s vicious tongue was never off one or more of them, and he seemed indefatigable in devising ways of insulting them and enraging them; he was safe in the knowledge that they could not come back at him. Randolph despised him for it, and let him know it; on more than one occasion he took the part of one of the Balts against Condamine and shouted him down.

  One day Condamine lost his knife and abused Gummow, a quiet, middle-aged little Latvian, for having taken it. Gummow, who knew less English than any of the kitchenmen, stood bewildered by the bitterness of Condamine’s attack; the other cooks looked on appreciatively, the Balt kitchenmen glaring hostility at them. Randolph had seen Condamine’s knife sticking in a rack against the wall behind him. He walked quietly over, took the knife down, and flung it on the bench in front of Condamine where it stuck quivering in the wooden surface.

  “There’s your knife, Condamine,” he said coldly. “Carry on the way you’re going, and one of these days you’ll get it stuck fair in that great gaping hole where your guts should be. And lay off Gummow—if you feel like spreading yourself on the Balts, have a go at Novikowsky, or Schmitty. But you wouldn’t, you gutless bastard—any of them would knock your teeth down your yellow throat.”

  The mere act of talking to Condamine unleashed a tide of dislike in Randolph, and he lashed the other cook with a torrent of abuse as foul and scathing as Condamine had used on Gummow. Zigfeld walked between them, ponderously judicial, and Randolph stalked outside to cool off. Warner joined him, and they stood smoking by the wall of the boiler-room.

  “What’s wrong with you and Condamine?” Warner demanded at length. “You’ve been at each other’s throats ever since you came here—or rather, you’ve been at his throat. What is it, Randy?”

  “I hate his guts,” Randolph replied coldly. He gave no reason, and Warner asked for none. He had seen the same thing happen a dozen times before. It was inescapable where numbers of men had to work together for any length of time in the narrow confines of a kitchen.

  “You want to try to get on,” he said. “Con’s got some funny ways, but he’s not such a bad little joker.”

  “I’d as soon get on with a leper,” Randolph said brutally.

  It was impossible for him to explain to anyone, even, almost, to himself, why he hated Condamine. He was a quiet and in a way a secretive man, whose greatest love was for the country of his birth. It was not an abstract love that might burst into patriotism and courage in the event of war, or a fiery pride in whatever achievements and natural endowments might be counted Australian. It was a deep and unquestioning love of the very ground that was the country’s body, the hills and the valleys and the plains and the rivers that so peculiarly belonged. This love was inarticulate, but it filled him, at times, as water might fill a vessel, choking his breath and running out of his eyes in bewildering tears for which he might find no reason. Once, at night, while he stood on the bank of an inland river to watch the soft plop, plop of a gambolling platypus that sent widening rings over the satiny water, he had laid his lips against the cool, smooth bole of a gum-tree, wonderingly, because its roots fed at the heart for which his own heart beat.

  He wanted above all things to be proud of his lover, and Condamine, more than anyone he had ever met, belittled her in the eyes of these strangers who had come from so far away for so little a share of her limitless favours.

  Chapter Five

  The girl Marika, though she worked and slept at the Hotel Acton, spent as much time as she was able with her aunt and uncle in the room they rented in a house in the shopping centre of Kingston, a ten-minute walk from Riverslake. On the Saturday afternoon when Randolph had sat in Radinski’s room at the camp and talked to him about his mother and brothers, she and her aunt prepared for the party to whi
ch Radinski invited Randolph and Murdoch.

  There was a lot to do, and even that was made more difficult by restricted space and makeshift furniture; but towards the evening they stood together in the doorway and surveyed the room. The afternoon’s work had dwindled to last-minute, needless twitching of cloths and re-arranging of dishes and flowers, and then to nothing. They stood arm in arm and searched for something to touch or polish or re-arrange, but could not find it. The girl turned to the woman with a tired smile.

  “It is ready, then Mama,” she said, using the affectionate title that, her own mother being dead, she had bestowed on that mother’s sister. “We can do no more.”

  She was so fair and slight as to appear almost a child; the appeal and defencelessness that were so touching in her Randolph had noticed in the photograph in Radinski’s room, but no photograph could reproduce the bright, flecked green of her slightly tilted eyes, or the clear transparency of her pale skin or the clean goldenness of her hair. The smile on her lips deepened to a quiet contentment.

  “That was Felix who phoned,” she said. “He’s going to bring two men with him tonight—two Australians who are his friends at Riverslake.”

  “So?”

  The old woman was tired, and her heavy shoulders sagged, but her face lit up with interest as it turned towards the girl.

  “Yes. He asked me to tell you, and to ask your permission.”

  “If they are his friends, they will be welcome here. He knows that.”

  “Dearest,” the girl murmured fondly, kissing her.

  “They must not expect a palace,” the old woman said, looking round the room.

  The two single beds were pushed hard back against the walls, and disguised with bright covers and heaps of cushions. A dresser and a wardrobe and a table with a small electric stove were ranged along what wall space was left. The table stood in the centre of the room, under the single hanging globe; the space around it, even with the chairs pushed well under, was hardly sufficient to allow movement behind them. The old woman sighed; one room where once there had been ten; one table where before three would not have held the elaborate supper; a radio where once there had been a small orchestra to play the waltzes and the mazurkas and to accompany the singers. Ah, Gott! She sighed again.

  The girl squeezed her gently. “It’s lovely, Mama!” she said. “And the table—you’ve made everything I like best.”

  “No sauerkraut,” the old woman said disdainfully. “I could not buy anything. No paprika, no caraway seeds, no capuchins. What sort of a shop is this—no pickled herrings, the cheese like soap, and the salami———!”

  “But look, Mama!” The girl left her side and skipped over to the table. “Pork! Brawn! Chicken!” She stood off, like a child confronted by an unexpected treat, her lips pursed, her eyes shining. “And the napoleon, Mama—and the mushrooms! Some you dried from last year?”

  Mama Kasnik nodded, her weary face relaxed with the love that flowed into it. The girl, slim and delicately fair, hovering over the table, brought back to her the picture of another Marika. The girl’s mother had done exactly the same thing on a hundred party nights in that life which seemed now like something she had read in a book. Sometimes she wondered if she were dreaming that she lived in this crowded little room in this strange Australian city, but at other times, she wondered if she had always lived in Australia, and had dreamed her life in Europe—the trips to Vienna, to Warsaw, to Prague and Buda; the holidays in Polish forests and at German spas; at home, parties and picnics and musicales, the opera and the cultured and fascinating talk of her father’s diplomatic friends who brought the excitement and intrigue of the wide world to a sleepy little town on the banks of a Lithuanian river.

  She might as well have dreamed it, for it had gone, never to return. It had not faded gracefully from the life of the world, but had disappeared when the country disappeared, almost overnight in a tide of fire and noise and terror. The other Marika, so slight and fair and delicate, who had played Chopin and Strauss with a dreamy lilt of her slender white shoulders that made the music sing, was crushed when the house caved in. For a day, somewhere in the rubble, she had cried and moaned, and then stopped; her sister would never cease to hear her cries until she ceased to hear everything.

  The girl left the table and slipped like a kitten into her aunt’s arms.

  “Mamulka,” she whispered, “it’ll be a lovely party. Thank you.”

  “It’s so crowded,” Mama Kasnik complained. “Everybody in the one room—the food, the drink, the smoking—ach!”

  “Why, no!” The girl looked up at her quickly, and then round the room, her eyes stopping on the small Lithuanian flag high on one wall. It hung between a silver crucifix and a photograph of two husky youths in brief shorts who stood knee-deep in water beside a long canoe. She dropped her eyes again to the table, and then sought the old woman’s face.

  “This is ours, Mamulka,” she said gently. “Here, we are at home.”

  At home. Here we are at home. The old woman’s eyes flickered up to the crucifix and the flag, and to her two sons who grinned down at her across the years and the grief. Here, at home.

  “Yes, child,” she said softly, stroking the girl’s fair hair. “This is ours.” Suddenly she looked at the clock on the dresser. “Gott!” she exclaimed, pushing the girl from her arms. “The time! Child, call Papa from the bathroom—tell him that our friends are already here!”

  Half-way through the evening, when the party had been in progress for a couple of hours, Murdoch leaned back in his chair and watched his host, Papa Kasnik, with an amused smile. Kasnik was a swarthy and shrivelled little man of incredible energy and appetite. While he was speaking, which seemed to be all the time, his hands and shoulders and saturnine features all worked overtime. He pursed and twitched his long lips, his bean-black eyes snapped and sparkled, he mimed and acted and postured, portraying half a dozen different characters in as many minutes, but let none of it interfere with his eating and drinking. As soon as his plate was even half empty someone piled it high again and he attacked it as though he had not seen food for a week; if someone passed him a glass, whether of beer or wine or spirits, he would shoot a wink and a grin and a string of automatic-fire words back in exchange and toss it off at a draught. Someone had taught him to say “Bottoms up!” and it was the death penalty for any liquor that got into his hands.

  Now he was carrying on two separate conversations, on one side of him in Lithuanian and on the other in Polish, but in between he managed to keep up his assault on his plate and glass. Murdoch grinned; the old boy seemed to have one throat for letting out the words and another for taking in the grog, and both at the same time. Kasnik looked up and encountered the Australian’s grin. He grinned widely in reply, pushed back his chair and struggled and squeezed around to Murdoch.

  “Ah, Mr Kerry!” he cried. Everybody at the table stopped eating and drinking and talking to look at him. “Make Bruderschaft!”

  There was a lot of merriment round the table at his suggestion, and Murdoch, in spite of himself, blushed. He had observed the custom during the evening—every now and then one would turn to his neighbour, link arms, drain glasses and kiss with resounding vigour and enjoyment; he had even participated, on her suggestion, with his own neighbour, a dark, squat little woman with coal-black eyes and a fierce black moustache. Her name, he discovered, was Pani Pudinska. She toasted him solemnly, saying in a guttural voice, that came right up from her shoes, “Good fluck!” Then she kissed him with business-like fervour, tickling him with her moustache until he squirmed and had trouble to keep from dragging his face sharply away from hers. Now, he thought, looking up at Kasnik, I’ve got to smooch the old man. Momma!

  “O.K., Papa,” he said, because he could say nothing else. “Bruderschaft!”

  The old lady, Mama Kasnik, applauded vigorously from the far end of the table, smacking her thighs and lau
ghing until the tears ran down her seamed cheeks. The girl, Felix’s girl, who was sitting opposite Murdoch, clapped her hands and cried out, “Bravo! Bravo!” She dropped her glance to her plate when Murdoch’s eyes, meeting hers across the table, left her in no doubt as to whom he would rather be kissing.

  Kasnik leaned over the table and swiped a bottle of wine. He filled their glasses and linked arms with Murdoch. Here we go, the boy thought. They drained their glasses of the glowing wine and he felt the quick pressure of the old man’s mouth against his own. Like kissing a bloody horse-rug, he thought. One that smokes a pipe!

  In the uproar that followed the demonstration, while the old man, grinning widely and smacking his lips in a travesty of evil delight, edged his way back to his own place, the old lady called out in German to Radinski, who was seated next to the girl Marika, opposite to Murdoch. The Pole stood up and raised his hands for silence.

  Randolph, seated at the far end of the table from the old lady, looked at her through the haze of cigarette smoke, and then at the Pole, standing up with flushed face and sparkling eyes. Then he looked slowly round the crowded table. Besides himself and Murdoch, the two old people, Radinski and the girl Marika, there were four others—the dumpty little woman beside Murdoch, her husband and another young couple, a young, dark Lithuanian named John and the girl he had recently married. She was a fair, buxom Latvian girl who had done nothing all night but giggle and make Bruderschaft with her willing husband.

  They all looked happy enough. Randolph dropped his gaze from their faces to the table where, despite the fact that they had been eating for the best part of two hours, there was still a good meal left. He thought of what Condamine had said earlier in the evening, that not long ago they had been crawling over the paddocks looking for turnips. Surely they must realize the significance of it, that they were well fed, housed at least as well as a lot of Australians? Surely whatever set-backs and slights, they would fit in happily somewhere in Australia? They must! he thought. They’ve got to! A thin glow of certainty stole over him that in the end it would work out. Radinski’s glance caught his from half-way down the table, and in an instant his thoughts raced back to the afternoon, dismayed. Not money, the Pole had said, and meant it, not food enough, but I am happy. In Germany, not in Australia.