Refuge

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Thomas Shapcott

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Emre always rises at five. His palliasse has to be slid beneath the couch so that Frau Losberg might use the tiny room through the day for her piecework sewing. Emre is sincerely grateful for this space. It is much more tolerable than the migrant hostel. His wife and daughter are still in the women's quarters but he is quite determined that must end. This present sit­uation is only temporary, though he has been living in Frau Losberg's front room for 10 weeks. An apartment – even if only two rooms – must be found somewhere. Adelaide, he has been told and he believes it, has many houses split up into flats sharing kitchen and bathroom space but they are at least preferable to the dormitories and those inedible meals at the hostel.

As soon as he escaped the hostel, Emre was able to drag his precious typewriter from the leather suitcase, which was all he was able to bring with him. Its keyboard is Hungarian but he can manage English on it. Early on, he typed out, on thick white paper, many repetitions of his calling card and then cut them carefully to size:

Dr Emre Halasz Ll.D
Translator and Linguist.
Personal letters and documents
Typed and prepared to order.

Frau Losberg's address was given. She had agreed to that, on the promise of clear typed copies of her tenancy agreements with all her lodgers, expressed as "reimbursement of outlays and maintenance" to avoid Aus­tralian taxation watchdogs. Emre's typing has always been meticulous, though he worries about the cost of a new typewriter ribbon. Every postage stamp has to be a consideration.

By 5.15 he is washed, shaved and dressed, his goatee scrupulously trimmed. No breakfast. The woollen suit still looks presentable. Frau Losberg turned the cuffs and collar excellently (in exchange for labour in painting the front exterior) and had assured him there were years of use there, if he did not wear out the pocket linings with objects. He pulls on his almost-new homburg (a miracle from Anglicare) and snaps on his bicycle clips. His first acquisition once he got out of the migrant hostel had been the attaché case. He keeps it oiled and polished and has made his own attachment in front of the bicycle to carry it to work. The bicycle was the major investment and he is still terrified – he has nightmares of it being stolen, or smashed, or there being a bomb exploding in the very street, even though he has been assured, with rough but easy laughter by his workmates that bombs do not go off in Adelaide. "This isn't Europe, mate."

Each time he rides it is a dare. He will be paying it off over the next two years. In his entire life he has never committed anything this far in advance. The past seven years have been lived a day at a time, sometimes an hour at a time. Even when he and Marie had married, last year in Milan before embarkation, they had both thought of it as being, not an insurance or a certain future, but a vow to stick together for whatever time might be granted to them. The concept of a child had been almost unbearable – but real enough once the signs began to manifest themselves. Marie had been more stoic than Emre. "We shall see it through," she said, knowing there was no alternative. By the time Kotie had been born – somewhere between Aden and Australia – they had both somehow come to the realisation that they were on a very long journey indeed and nothing they had been through might prepare them, either for parenthood or for the forthcoming tribulations.

Emre had been the first to consider plans. Marie had absorbed herself in the immense routine of feeding, bathing, comforting and accommodating the baby. Even the separation of the male and female quarters in the hostel did not seem to concern her overmuch.

Emre had fretted, right from the outset. Fatherhood may have taken him somewhat by surprise, but it also galvanised him in a way that was much more energising than the effort of their survival, which had been the only possible aim over these times. The voyage seemed endless but out of it Emre had found time to think. And, thinking, he had begun to plan.

TO ESCAPE THE GRIM PRISON-LIKE REGIMENTATION AND ANONYMITY of the hostel had been the first task. This achieved, the second had been to find some means of earning income. Emre had been directed to an employment agency assisting migrants. He had filled in forms, in English, and listed his qualifications. The university degree and his years (1936 to 1943) as a newspaper journalist counted for nothing. Neither did his command of seven languages or his typing skills. He was allocated a shiftwork labouring job in a vulcanising works – 6am to 4pm.

On his first day there, fresh from the excitement of locating a corner in Frau Losberg's rooming house, and nervous over the audacity of committing himself to the bicycle with its fixed terms and outrageous interest payments, he had arrived 10 minutes early, following the directions supplied by the employment agency on the back of an old printed circular on the Australian taxation "deduction at source" system for employees. He had to stop under several streetlights to confirm road names and turns. He felt elated when he made it.

But his new workmates were another hurdle. They made noisy and dis­turbingly obscene comments on Emre's clothes – the suit, the white shirt and tie (borrowed), his leather gloves, the homburg and his attaché case. Some­times it is a hindrance rather than a help to understand a language. Emre did not catch all the new words, or the slippery, congested accents, but the general impression was clear.

One older man with grizzled short hair directed him to the clerical section to fill in employment particulars and then to the change room, where Emre disrobed and picked out of his briefcase a fresh laundered pair of overalls (he had been given previous instructions). His hands were soft and pale, true, but would harden up ("Piss on them," his new foreman had said). In the refugee camps in central Europe he had done his share of hard manual labour.

The vulcanising works was a place of extremes. Extreme heat. Extreme labour. Extreme language. Emre only had to ask a few times for directions to be repeated or explained. He was always willing, too willing. His workmates rebuked him but he found it difficult to slacken his pace to meet the unspo­ken but definite requirement for minimum performance not maximum efficiency. In the lunch hours or at tea breaks Emre was educated in the finer points of industrial restrictions. He kept his own counsel and at the end of each shift, while the others slewed off to the pub and a few beers, Emre thor­oughly washed himself in the showers and dressed in his formal attire. He put on his clips and unlocked the gleaming bike from its safe place, pulled on his gloves and set the homburg at a firm angle before pushing off, back to the boarding house.

Only once had he been enticed to the pub with the other workers. That was after his first pay and some of the group insisted he must shout them all a round. They had beers. Emre quietly asked for a white wine. He was chi­acked ruthlessly, but even by the end of the first week he knew where he stood, and it was outside.

The gibes about his hat and his gloves and his "bloody briefcase" had subsided. Within a month they would be proprietorial, proud of their resi­dent Perfesser on the vulcanising floor.

But that first payday, in the pub, Emre paid for his difference. To show his conviviality, he began quoting several mildly salacious limericks from his university days (his English tutor preferred them to Keats and Shelley). His accent broke them up. Before the session was over a couple of the younger ones had memorised his limericks and his accent.