Silver Wattle (14 page)

Other intellectuals would have come to Australia and baulked at its working-class ethic and the lack of cultural institutions. Klara and I had been disappointed by the dearth of art exhibitions, theatre plays and philosophical lectures in Sydney compared with Prague. But Ranjana and Uncle Ota saw what was required and created it for themselves.

While Klara and I set out the chairs for the inaugural meeting, I wondered who would show up. At exactly seven o’clock, I heard the gate open and footsteps come down the garden path. Within minutes our back room was filled with an eclectic mix of people: a university professor and his wife; an artist; three shopkeepers; a grazier who was in town for the week; and an SP bookie who had seen Uncle Ota’s advertisement in the window of the local grocery shop asking for ‘interested people to travel the world and expand their minds for one evening a week’.

That first night, Uncle Ota gave a talk on African tribal masks and their spiritual meanings. The talk was well received, and word spread so quickly about the Tuesday lectures that for future meetings we had to take advance bookings due to the lack of space.

When Uncle Ota needed a break he invited a ‘guest’ to speak about their area of expertise. Ranjana gave a lecture on vegetarianism along with a cooking demonstration, while Klara talked about Chopin’s hand technique. Uncle Ota made me give a lecture on ‘Pictorialism versus Modernism in Photography’, which went well but caused me so much gut-twitching agitation that I refused to do one ever again.

We invited Esther to the meetings. At first she declined, but one evening she arrived in a neatly ironed dress with a butterfly brooch on her shoulder. Although she shied away if anyone tried to speak to her, the physical transformation was dramatic—aside from the leaves in her hair, which Klara subtly picked out when she was not looking.

The next Tuesday, while Ranjana and I were in the kitchen preparing the supper, we saw the kitchen window of Esther’s house open. A few seconds later, Esther clambered out. That explained the leaves—she had to make her way through the overgrown back garden instead of taking the front path.

‘She’s sneaking out of the house like a naughty adolescent,’ Ranjana said.

‘Wonderful!’ said Uncle Ota when we told him. ‘A few hours away from the dragon will do her good.’

We never mentioned to Esther that we knew her secret for fear it would embarrass her and stop her from coming. But Uncle Ota was sure to hang some lamps in our garden and prop a ladder against the fence so Esther could find her way home without tearing her clothes.

O
ur first Christmas in Australia was our second without Mother. In some ways it was easier because a summer Christmas was different from any we had experienced before and we could not be nostalgic. The eighty-six-degree heat wilted the tree, and us along with it. Uncle Ota cooked ‘billy can pudding’ over a fire in the back garden and Ranjana made spicy samosas and tongue-burning curry. I cooked a dish of mushrooms and barley called
houbovýkuba
, but the mushrooms were not as sweet and I realised that Uncle Ota’s subversion of traditions and creation of fresh ones was based on sound reasoning: better the novelty of the new than the shadow of the old.

‘I’m enjoying my Australian Christmas,’ Klara told me. ‘I don’t have to look at the poor carp at the markets.’

I wondered what she would have said if she had seen the fly-speckled leg of ham that the butcher had delivered to Mrs Fisher down the road that morning.

It was four days into the new year when the notes from Mrs Bain on piano technique stopped. She’d had chest pains before Christmas, but we were still surprised when we saw the undertaker and his assistant leave Esther’s house with a coffin. Esther was nowhere in sight, but we could imagine her watching her mother’s departure from behind the curtains. There was no obituary or funeral notice in the newspaper and we were at a loss about how to approach Esther to show her our support.

‘Esther may not want anyone else to be involved,’ suggested Uncle Ota.

‘I know Mrs Bain was not kind to her but she must feel the loss,’ I said.

We became alarmed a few days later when a furniture removalist arrived at Esther’s house and began carting away chairs and tables.

‘I hope Esther’s not in trouble,’ said Uncle Ota. ‘We must visit her and see if there is anything we can do to help.’

We planned to pay Esther a visit the next day but she turned up on our doorstep that afternoon. She twitched nervously when she spoke but there was a light in her eyes that was new.

‘I have cleared the top floor of my house,’ she said. ‘I never use it. Would you like to live there instead of in this house? I’ll reduce your rent if you help me clean the house and fix up the garden.’

Esther’s offer stopped us in our tracks. She rubbed her chin and her eyes darted from her feet to our waists before she could settle her gaze on our faces. ‘It’s time for a change,’ she said. ‘I could do with some company.’

Esther’s house was more comfortable than the one we had been renting from her. There was a sitting room upstairs with a view of the street, and I could observe people at the front gate without them seeing me. Klara and I shared a bedroom, which overlooked the garden and had a silver gum outside the window. I would have liked to climb onto one of its branches, but Ranjana forbade it.

‘You want to break your neck, you can do it out of my sight,’ she said.

Ranjana and Uncle Ota slept in the bedroom next to ours with an alcove for Thomas’s cot. Esther remained in her bedroom downstairs, but cleared the parlour so we could put Klara’s piano there along with Uncle Ota’s artefacts. I thought it was generous of Esther to give us so much space, especially as she already had a piano in the sitting room at the rear of the house.

‘And, of course, you must continue your Tuesday nights,’ she said.

The camel-back sofas, burgundy velvet chairs and tapestries downstairs were Victorian in style and when I passed them to go to the kitchen or bathroom, I knew what Klara meant when she said, ‘We are living on the set of an Oscar Wilde play.’

One night I woke up and could not go back to sleep. I went to sit in the room with a view of the street. The bush across the road was silver in the moonlight and I saw a tawny frogmouth swoop down on some prey. Then I noticed the man standing by the gate. He wore a khaki military uniform and a high-domed hat with a narrow brim and a strap under his jaw. The man had a pale, youthful face and innocent eyes. He seemed to be looking into the garden for something. I reached for the latch to open the window so I could call to him, but he vanished into thin air.

The following morning I told Klara about the ghost. We had been brought up in a superstitious culture and the existence of a spiritual world that paralleled our own was something we were at ease conversing about. After all, our house in Prague had been full of spirits.

‘He might be one of the young men who did not come back from the war,’ Klara suggested.

I stood at the window in the sitting room every night for the next week to see if the man would appear again. But he did not.

The Tuesday night meetings grew in size and Uncle Ota could now afford to invite a paid guest lecturer each week. The first was a palaeontologist who showed us prehistoric vertebrate fossils that had been discovered in Western Australia. He was followed by a member of the Horticultural Society who espoused the wonders of kikuyu grass, and an architect who implored us to ‘stop promoting Romanticism in a modern city’. The most fascinating of all, however, was the talk by a lecturer from the University of Sydney’s anthropology department about his travels in Outback Australia. It was not just the subject of his address—the Aboriginal tribes of the inland—that captured our imagination but also the medium he used to convey it. Doctor Parker turned up on our doorstep with two suitcases and a screen. Uncle Ota and I helped him set up his projector and, after his introduction, Ranjana turned down the lights. The reel began with a train journey through mountains. The picture had been shot from the front of the train and gave us the sensation that we were travelling on it. I stifled a scream when the train zigzagged around a tight bend with a precipice on one side, so real did the illusion appear. We saw open plains with kangaroos bounding across the grasslands, and isolated homesteads in stark but beautiful landscapes. Finally, Doctor Parker showed us footage of Aboriginal corroborees and tribal women preparing food on sheaths of bark. If we had seen photographs, we would have been engaged by such exotic sights, but it was the film that brought them so vividly to life. When the images shook and the tape came to an end with a ‘click’, it was a shock to find myself sitting in the parlour.

After the screening the audience asked questions about the Aboriginal tribes Doctor Parker had studied, and Uncle Ota and I also questioned him about the filming: what kind of camera he had used; what kind of film; how he had kept the camera steady during motion shots. He was flattered by our interest in such details and spoke with us long after the other guests had left, about varying shot depths and how to edit scenes for maximum impact.

‘I’ve seen kinetoscope parlours and nickelodeons at fairs but nothing like the quality production we saw tonight,’ Uncle Ota told me. ‘They say it’s only a passing fad but I believe moving pictures will be the art form of tomorrow.’

I thought back to an afternoon in Prague when I had been running errands and had passed a cinema with a poster of Pola Negri starring in
Gypsy Blood
in the glass display case outside. The actress’s smoky eyes seemed to me the essence of glamour. Milosh had forbidden us to go to the cinema—he described it as ‘cheap entertainment for the masses’—and even Mother had said she would prefer it if we went to the theatre or opera. That afternoon I watched the people line up at the box office and longed to follow them up the stairs and into that secretive world where stories were told in moving pictures. I had enough coins in my pocket to cover the ticket. No one would have noticed if I disappeared for a few hours. But I remembered Mother’s warning never to attend entertainment on my own and could not disobey.

Uncle Ota announced that we would be going to the cinema the following Saturday. Esther volunteered to mind Thomas.

While our landlady’s personality was eccentric, her dedication to my cousin’s welfare was not. When Thomas started crawling, Esther was vigilant that nothing was left on the floor that he could choke on and any sharp surfaces were either turned to the wall or padded with wads of brown paper. Thomas could not be left in safer hands.

Although we could only afford tickets in the stalls, we were going to the Saturday night session and dressed for the occasion. I wore a cocktail dress trimmed in turquoise sequins, while Klara dressed in a voile blouse with lemon piping and a matching skirt. Uncle Ota put on pinstriped trousers with his black tails and, to hide their worn appearance, added a new top hat and polished shoes. Ranjana did not own an evening dress, so I bought her one a few sizes larger than I could wear and pretended I had brought it from Prague with me. ‘It’s too big,’ I told her. ‘And I haven’t had time to take it in.’

Ranjana lifted her chin and stared down her nose at me. I did my best not to flinch. She was proud and I was afraid to offend her. She and Uncle Ota would not take anything material from me. They said my contribution to the housework was enough. I had never cleaned anything in Prague—although Mother had taught us to sew, cook and be tidy—but I did the sweeping and dusting of Esther’s house and most of the gardening. Ranjana had also lived a privileged life in her first marriage, and Uncle Ota had been born into a wealthy family; it was ironic that we should have all ended up washing our own underwear and scrubbing the floors. But I did not mind it. I enjoyed the meditative quality of housework.

‘Thank you,’ said Ranjana, trying on the dress.

The red satin sheath I had chosen was stunning against her dark skin.

‘You look like a queen,’ I told her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Let’s just see if they let me in.’

Although in Prague we had regularly attended the opera and theatre, a ripple of excitement ran through me when we entered the foyer of the cinema. My eyes took in everything: the green carpet, the brass trimmings, the glittering chandeliers. Uncle Ota picked up our tickets and we lined up at the marble counter for our box of Fantale chocolates and malted milk. I took a breath when we stepped through the red curtains to the stalls and an usherette in white gloves led us to our seats. The entry to the stalls was flush to the screen so it was not until we reached our seats that I could make sense of the images on it. Slides for local businesses popped up in succession. While the others chatted, Klara and I read the slogans aloud: ‘Lipton’s Green Label Tea—only sixpence a pound’; ‘Nutone nerve tonic will cure all your ills’.

When the patrons were seated, the curtain closed over the screen and the usherettes shut the doors. The house lights dimmed. A door under the proscenium opened and a man with sheet music under his arm stepped out. The audience clapped and the man sat down at the piano and flexed his fingers. The audience rose when he began the national anthem, ‘God Save the King’.

After the last crescendo was reached and the pianist lifted his hands from the keys, the audience reseated themselves. The usherettes opened the doors to let in latecomers. A couple took the seats in front of us. The woman placed a presentation box of chocolates on her lap. ‘All the ladies who came with a man have one,’ Klara whispered. She was on the brink of adolescence and showed romantic inclinations. Her observation was correct. The women accompanied by a man had chocolate boxes with pink bows on their laps while the families and single people were content with Jaffas, Jujubes and Columbines. Uncle Ota guessed what Klara and I were whispering about. When the lolly boy came by with a tray of sweets strapped around his neck, Uncle Ota purchased three presentation boxes. He gave one to Ranjana, one to me and one to Klara.

‘Some men here only have one lady companion,’ he said with a smile. ‘I am lucky to be escorting the three most beautiful women in the room.’