Silver Wattle (11 page)

Pan Milota asked me about my camera and mentioned the photographic exhibitions that would be showing in the warmer months. He was trying to relieve the tension but his conversation made me sad. I would not be seeing exhibitions in Prague for many years.

We heard a car pull up in the street and readied ourselves to leave. We were startled when Marie entered the room with Milosh. ‘Pan Dolezal is here,’ she said, looking annoyed that Milosh had not waited in the hall to be announced, even if he had lived in the house previously.

‘I came as soon as I heard,’ said Milosh.

‘Heard what?’ asked Aunt Josephine, keeping her voice steady.

‘About Klara’s illness.’ Milosh stepped towards Klara and knelt beside her chair. ‘I wish I had heard it from you first, Josephine,’ he said. ‘She
is
my stepdaughter.’

We had not seen Milosh since Christmas. He explained his absence as a business trip but I suspected that he was lying low until his assassin had finished with us. It is a dreadful thing to face the killer of one’s mother, and my hatred of him sent my heart thumping in my chest. I glanced at Klara. Her mouth was pinched into a tight ball. We were so close to foiling Milosh; I prayed she would not do anything to give us away.

Milosh put his arm around her. ‘I have a better offer than boring old Doksy,’ he said. ‘I will take my stepdaughters to Venice.’

I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a quarter to ten and Doctor Holub would be arriving at any minute. The train to Genoa was due to depart at twenty-three past the hour.

‘They can’t go anywhere with you without a chaperone,’ said Aunt Josephine. ‘And I am not going to Venice.’

Milosh had taken this into account. ‘But you weren’t going to Doksy either,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that pan Milota and his wife would prefer Venice?’

‘The main concern is Klara and her health,’ said paní Milotova. ‘Venice is full of rats and cholera. She needs fresh air.’

Milosh turned his back to us. ‘What do you have to say for yourself, Klarinka?’ he asked in an affectionate tone that he’d never used on her before. ‘Where do you want to go?’

Klara lifted her chin and looked into Milosh’s eyes.

‘Stepfather, you are kind. But perhaps we can go to Venice in the summer?’

‘Well, that’s an idea,’ Milosh said, a victorious note in his voice. He was oblivious to how Klara had triumphed over him with self-control.

Marie opened the door and Doctor Holub strode into the room, bringing us back to our senses. His eyes narrowed on Milosh. Aunt Josephine explained that he had made an offer to take Klara and me to Venice. Doctor Holub’s expression remained calm but I wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was: Milosh had intended to arrange some sort of ‘accident’ in Venice.

Doctor Holub put our suitcases and those that paní Milotova and her husband had brought as decoys in the car. Milosh lingered and I thought he was going to offer to join us for the drive to Doksy. But after Doctor Holub had turned the motor he waved and said, ‘See you in the summer then.’

It was difficult to be sure how much Milosh knew about our plans. He had read Mother’s letter to Uncle Ota before destroying it, and Mother had said that if we were in danger she wanted us to go to Uncle Ota. But did Milosh know that Uncle Ota was in Australia or would he believe he was in America? It was terrible to be making the long journey without being sure that we would be any safer in our new home.

Milosh’s unexpected visit had left us with little time for goodbyes at the station. Klara and I had only a few minutes to farewell the people who meant so much to us and who we would not see for many years. I pulled out my camera to take a picture but the conductor whistled and called us aboard. Hilda too, as she was accompanying us to Genoa.

‘Goodbye!’ Klara and I called from the train window. My last glimpse of Prague was Aunt Josephine weeping on paní Milotova’s shoulder and the stained-glass windows of the station.

For nearly two months the first things I saw on opening my eyes every morning were the fan above my bed and the thermos flask that sat in a holder above the washbasin in our cabin on the ship bound for Australia. We had boarded in the morning after a night in a backstreet hotel in Genoa, where we had sat with the lights off. In my dreams I saw Milosh hiding in the crevices behind the armoire and under the desk, waiting to snatch Klara away from me. It was a relief when we finally stood at the gangway to the ship and saw the steam flying from its funnels.

‘Look after your sister,’ said Hilda, adjusting my scarf to fit more snugly around my throat. She took the cross from her neck, kissed it and placed it in my hand before bending down and stroking Klara’s cheek. ‘And God be with you both.’

Once we had climbed the gangway, Hilda did not wait to see the ship depart from the dock. That might have drawn attention to us should Milosh have a spy among the crowd bidding farewell to their relatives. I watched Hilda’s stout figure disappear into the throng, my hand clutching the cross that was still warm with her body heat. When I could no longer see her, and the ship began to move, I felt like a drowning person being washed out to sea.

‘
Buon viaggio! Buon viaggio!
’

The passengers were mostly Italians making their way to Australia for work or disembarking at one of the ports along the way. We would have liked to speak to them, even though their dialects were often different from the literary Florentine our mother had taught us, but fear of being traced and found out made us reserved about who we spoke to, even amongst the other first-class passengers.

Our journey passed slowly, measured in sunrises and sunsets. Aunt Josephine had asked us not to leave the ship to visit the ports, so Klara and I wrote a list of activities to keep ourselves occupied. We crammed the schedule with as many occupations as possible and listed them at breakfast as if each one were a delight to look forward to, although we did them every day.

Walk the promenade deck.

Read
The Wind in the Willows
out loud to each other to practise English.

Two games of shuffleboard.

Two games of quoits.

One game of chess.

Listen to ship’s orchestra at afternoon tea.

Take a photograph of something we have not noticed before on the ship.

Klara to read and hum music for an hour.

Adela to write a page in her journal.

To dispel our boredom and relieve our fears, Klara and I mostly relied on our imaginations.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked one afternoon when I woke up from a nap to find Klara sitting before her berth and lifting and dropping her fingers on the side of it.

‘I’m playing Chopin’s Nocturne Opus 72,’ she answered. ‘What are you doing? It looked like you were sleeping.’

I sat up and wriggled my feet. ‘I wasn’t sleeping. I was at the markets.’

She smiled. ‘Which markets?’

‘The ones in Colombo. See,’ I held out my arm to her. ‘Smell my sleeve. It’s infused with the scents of saffron and turmeric.’

‘Did you bring me back anything?’

‘Of course I did.’ I took the clasp from my hair and handed it to her. ‘I brought you this silver engraved bangle.’

Most of the time Klara and I were content in our self-contained world. But at other times the isolation of our existence and our fear of our stepfather became unbearable. Once, after the ship had docked at Port Said, Klara was convinced that Milosh had boarded.

We were walking along the promenade deck when she clutched my arm. ‘It’s him.’

‘Who?’ I asked, looking at the passengers sitting in the deckchairs, reading books or sleeping.

‘Milosh!’

My heart skipped a beat. I examined the faces and found no one who resembled our stepfather.

‘Klara, are you all right? Have you had too much sun?’

Klara did not answer me. I tugged her sleeve and she stared at me as if she did not recognise who I was. There was a distant look in her eyes. She was like a stranger and that was even more frightening to me than being pursued by Milosh.

We sailed into Sydney Harbour on the last day of May. The sky was the same brilliant duck-egg blue as the sky in Prague, but the sunlight was brighter. It sparkled off the crests of the waves that swirled around our ship, the funnels and the decks. We leaned over the railing to catch a glimpse of the city. The intensity of the light made me squint. I searched the foreshores for the buildings Uncle Ota had described. But all I could see were stone outcrops from which sprouted trees with white trunks and silvery-green leaves. Some of the headlands had been cleared but many were lush with shrubs and trees.

I gripped the railing. This is our new home for the next ten years, I told myself.

The customs procedure at the port was not as arduous as I had feared and we were not given the dictation test. Having Uncle Ota as our guarantor and the letter of support Doctor Holub had obtained from the British Consul General had helped. Klara and I were the first passengers to emerge into the sea of faces waiting to greet the ship.

A man moved towards us. He was so tall he had to stoop under the arrivals banner. Following him was a woman with dark skin holding a baby. Until that moment, Uncle Ota had been a man with his arm around my father in photographs and in stories read out by Aunt Josephine. Ranjana and Thomas had been characters in a dream. Now Klara and I were about to meet them in the flesh.

When they reached us, Uncle Ota removed his hat and clutched it to his chest. It was frayed at the edges and there were dark spots on the crown. ‘Gentleman’s spots’ Mother had called those marks on a man’s hat, because they suggested that the wearer was prone to lifting his hat frequently, especially to passing ladies.

‘You are the image of your mother,’ Uncle Ota told me. ‘I could see straightaway that you are Marta’s daughter.’

I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. Uncle Ota’s voice was just as I had imagined it would be: warm, debonair, charming. He looked young for a man in his late forties, with a smatter of freckles across his cheeks and a mass of tousled hair framing his inquisitive face.

‘Yes, I am Adela,’ I said, standing on my tiptoes to receive his kiss. ‘And this is Klara.’

Uncle Ota turned to Klara and stopped in his tracks. His eyes danced over her face as if he were in some sort of dream. ‘Emilie?’ he muttered.

Klara climbed on top of her suitcase so she could put her arms around Uncle Ota’s neck. He must have noticed the puzzled look on my face and recovered himself.

‘I am pleased to meet you, lovely Klara,’ he said, returning her embrace. ‘My sister often writes about your exceptional talent.’ Uncle Ota turned to the woman and child. ‘Let me introduce you both to my wife and son.’

After the exotic images I had kept in my head about Ranjana, I was surprised that she was wearing a simple floral dress, flat shoes and spectacles. Rather than the Oriental princess I had imagined, she could have been the librarian of a ladies college if she was not so dark-skinned. But the proud tilt of her chin and the way she stood with her feet balanced on the ground and her shoulders straight did give her a regal bearing despite her plain clothes.

‘
Dobrý den, moc me teshi, zhe Vas nebo Tebe? Poznavam
,’ she said in Czech. She was pleased to meet me. I was astonished to hear perfect pronunciation from someone whose native language was so different from my own.

‘
Dekuji. Jsem rada, zhe jsem tady
,’ I replied. ‘Thank you. I am glad I am here.’

Ranjana held up Thomas, who was fat and, although not as dark as his mother, had her bright eyes. He gurgled and swiped at my cheek.

Uncle Ota suggested that we take a couple of hansom cabs to his house. ‘There is no more elegant way to be transported in Sydney,’ he said, leading us to a line of horses and ebony carriages. ‘Watsons Bay,’ Uncle Ota told the driver at the head of the line. The doors to the cab were open and Klara and I peered at the shabby leather seats and faded carpet.

The driver swung his head and saw Ranjana. He shut the cab doors, almost catching Klara’s fingers. My cheeks burned with shame but I acted as if I had not noticed to avoid embarrassing my aunt. Ranjana stood with her eyes straight ahead, as if the driver’s reaction had nothing to do with her.

Uncle Ota put his arm around his wife. ‘What a rude fellow!’ he said. ‘Horses are nice but I don’t think we want to give someone of that level of intelligence our money, do you, my dear?’

Before Ranjana could answer, a voice came from behind us. ‘I can take you.’ We turned to see a man with a red face and an upturned nose leaning out of a motor taxi. ‘I can fit you all in here.’

I tried to place his accent: Russian? Polish? It was hard to tell because some of his words had taken on a nasal tone that was not part of either of those languages.

The taxi was newer than the hansom cab and in better repair. The seats were plush and the chrome trims were polished so brightly that I could see my reflection in the wheel guard.

‘Ha!’ said Uncle Ota. ‘Never stoop to answer a slight and soon the truth will come to light.’

Ranjana’s face broke into a smile and Uncle Ota stepped towards the taxi. He offered the driver a price and they haggled good-naturedly until they agreed on the fare. The driver stepped out of the car to open the doors for us and put our luggage in the boot. Ranjana and Thomas sat in the front with Uncle Ota while Klara and I climbed in the back. Uncle Ota opened the window and said loud enough for the hansom cab driver to hear, ‘I have changed my mind about the most elegant way to travel, and this is it. In a hansom cab, one feels oneself too close to the horse’s backside.’ He let out a booming laugh. The hansom cab driver’s nostrils twitched and he turned away.

The taxi driver put his foot on the accelerator. Klara clasped my hand and squeezed it. At first I thought she was frightened, but she stared out the window, fascinated by the chaos that was unfolding around us. The streets were congested with every form of transport, all travelling at different speeds. At one intersection a policeman tried to exert control over the mayhem, but his gestures were futile. The barrowmen, pushing their trays of fruit and flowers, got in the way of the cars, whose drivers beeped their horns and shook their fists to no avail. A tram rattled across our path with a horse and dray clomping after it. And everywhere were blockboys, risking their lives to dart among the traffic and shovel away horse manure.