Refuge - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Thomas Shapcott
EMRE MIGHT HAVE PROVED HIMSELF "A GOOD MATE" but his pay packet was frighteningly depleted and he spent the bike ride home calculating where he must economise to make up. Breakfast was out. Now lunch must be eliminated also. Fortunately, he had discovered a Hungarian "social club" where he could get proper food quite cheaply, if he did not indulge in the overpriced barak palinka.
His weekend "business" as a translator and letter writer was moving only in fits and starts. He had initially made contact with others in the migrant hostel, men who needed to fill out forms, or to write letters of supplication and appeal, or who could not even write. He supplied verbose and lying epistles to loved ones or distant families, in Italy, in Austria, in Hungary.
But though Emre had busied himself in those early weeks of freedom with following up those contacts – and had even performed innumerable tasks of translation, or transcription, or letter writing – when it came to payment everybody was in the same boat. It was not going to earn him anything, except the burden of confidence over awkward confessions. Finally, he tore up the remaining business cards. The typewriter was put away.
His languages had failed him. For so long they had seemed an almost certain passport to small favours or to negotiable concessions. "They can take everything but your education," his mother had insisted. Here in Australia, education seemed to have been reduced to a fine sense of irony. "What did you used to do?" one of his workmates asked him one day. When he replied that he studied languages they crowed, almost as an ensemble: "No, work. What work?" He had pretended not to understand, but that only brought ribald jokes. And it was true: the dialect they spoke was often enough a different tongue to what he had studied even in Dickens and Somerset Maugham.
Frau Losberg has been insidious. Although she keeps offering suggestions for possible new accommodation and even allows Emre to peruse her Saturday Advertiser or News, the leads always turn out fruitless – rent too high, distance from his job too far, rooms too cramped or too squeezed for a family of three – and always when he returns, glum from another search, Frau Losberg almost inch by inch increases her attention. Emre finally begins to understand.
IN A SUDDEN MOVE HE CHANGES EVERYTHING: HE TAKES AN APARTMENT IN THE CITY. It consists of three upstairs rooms above a hairdresser's and can only be reached through the shop itself. It is illegal. And it has no kitchen and no water – three bare rooms at the top of a creaking staircase. He has had to find a bed, a mattress, coverings, pillow, as well as things for the baby. And what about water?
With the help of a Czech plumber who owes him for a series of duplicitous letters to his wife, an Italian still waiting for him to send her the voyage money, they manage to tap into a water main in the back lane and pass a copper pipe up the external wall (hidden by an overgrown creeper). At least, now, there is a tap. His plumber friend suggests a small spirit stove. There is no electricity upstairs either, he also discovers. Well, he could pick up a couple of kerosene lamps. Marie's cottage in the Austrian Tyrol had only such lighting.
When he feels he can do no more for the present he takes a bus to the migrant hostel. He returns with his family.
Frau Losberg is incensed when she hears, and threatens to tell the authorities. Emre keeps her pacified only by promising to paint the remaining external walls of her place. That means another month of weekends, which could have been more usefully employed, but it's worth it.
Marie looks at the apartment with its dusty green walls and bare boards and smiles at Emre shyly. From the window they stare out onto a brick wall across the alley.
"Look," she says, and points to a small fern growing out of a crack in the bricks near the top. The baby keeps grizzling: she is teething. They spend their first night together for more than six months in the creaky bed with dusty blankets and only one pillow. The child seems to be restive between them and wakes almost every hour. It shits in the bed. Emre has no sleep. He knows that he must rise at 4.30 in order to cycle the extra distance to the vulcanising works.
Between bouts of feeding and soothing the infant his wife sleeps solidly. Emre tries to remember when it was, how it was, that they first got together. Marie had fallen pregnant so quickly. For the first time he wonders: was that accidental?
BACK THEN, HE HAD NO THOUGHT OF ANY COHERENT FUTURE. He only knew that his past had disappeared utterly. The apartment in Budapest had long since been taken over by the authorities and nationalised. His parents had not survived 1943. Today he knows only the blowsy woman who runs the "Hungarian club" and two peasants from the voyage over who speak his language. Marie speaks German and has stubbornly refused to master English. Emre now tosses uncomfortably and tries not to rouse the stranger sharing his bed. A streetlight throws a yellowish rectangle upon the wall opposite. The prickly smell from the hairdresser's below cannot be ignored.
For a brief moment he thinks of Frau Losberg's cosy, crowded front room. There are two oil paintings with huge frames: alpine scenery, a secluded chalet. She has heavy drapes on the windows. It always reminds him of an aunt's apartment in Buda. He has no idea where his aunt is now, or what has become of her much-loved furnishings. Frau Losberg's little room had the musty warmth of memories. He knows he must never allow memories to crowd him. But for these moments he has seemed almost to be back there, though of course nothing can be the same.
The vulcanising works is his life now. And for the foreseeable future. This is his existence and it seems almost as tangible as razor wire fencing. Except that circumstances change. Even he has recognised that. One step at a time. One step then one step and even now he can look back and see the burden of despair and dulled endurance receding. The walls of this place, caught in that glare of light, carry echoes he will not remember. They will be simply one further item in the list of things he will not remember. But after his next pay he will take Marie to look for cheap curtain material. Unless she has other priorities. Which might well be so...
In all those years of servitude, flight, desperate and sudden displacements, transit camps, barracks, odd jobs and odder black market dealings, he has never thought of such simple but clearly articulated beginnings. Only endings. Each moment has been an end. Every new change is an end. His seven languages were all ends, interchangeable, isolating him internally while at the same time giving him fluency others envied him for. He will cast off things here, as well as take things on. Language is a commodity; he has learned that. It is a tool of barter, not of emotions or feelings or human warmth. Warmth? There is only body warmth. Or body cold.
The first encounter with Marie: even that had another ending, really leading nowhere, except for instant gratification. Instant sleep. Sleep.
It was the beginning.
Preparing to rouse himself, Emre thinks of the hot labour ahead and the rough and ready badinage of his workmates, and he realises his life has always been only beginning. It has taken him this long, and so many endings, to realise that he might, at last, be granted the luxury of looking forward. And that beginnings always lead onwards. Two years' time, he thinks. One year. The thought has him out of the bed (quietly, carefully, so as not to disturb the child. Or the mother) and the cold water for his shave pours out of the rickety tap like hopeful chatter.
The strange surroundings are already part of him, of his new present, and he realises that to remould this space will not be a task, it will be a discovery.
He laughs out loud so that the baby gives a startled cry and Marie reaches out her hand – not to Emre. Six months, he thinks. I will write this down, this room. No, I will get a camera and photograph it. In six months' time we will look back and see how far we have come.
Has he even had such a thought before?
He wheels the bicycle down the bumpy stairwell, careful not to scratch the walls. The cold air outside stings his eyes, but he wonders why he should be weeping. ♦