What Was Left, page 18
That night, in her bottom bunk with the creaks and slow breath of other sleeping bodies, Rachel feels light, like she could float, if she wanted, out of this bed and through the window, over the clouds and seas and snow-covered mountains. She thinks about being in the sky with birds and bats, crossing international date lines, looking down at the shadows of trees at night. Where is she going, floating like this?
There is only one place to go, so she does. First, she surveys the house—the yellow and red-lidded rubbish bins parked against the gate, the corrugated iron roof, the way the gutters are clogged with dark wet leaves. It all seems so quiet and serene. She floats down to the bedroom window and sees him asleep, the man who is her husband. How can you know someone so intimately and yet, still, not at all?
Peter sleeps on his stomach, sheets and blankets in a tangle around him, his mouth open against the pillow. She floats past the window to the room next door, the room where her baby sleeps.
Can something you have left still belong to you? Lola never did, though; Rachel knows that much. The problem was not recognising that—not realising, from the start, that these were Lola’s terms.
Her daughter sleeps on her back, arms and legs spread wide, long eyelashes a dark blur beneath closed lids. She sleeps as if she has dropped to earth, entirely trusting this world to catch her, to break her fall.
Rachel’s biggest fear is this: in leaving, she has done her daughter irreparable harm. But as she watches her now, the way her small chest rises and falls with sleep, white jarmies emblazoned with yellow ducklings, Rachel knows there are still things she can do. She can come back. She can take Lola in her arms, hold her against empty breasts. She can try this again, this motherhood thing. Perhaps with smaller expectations.
In the dark, someone sneezes in the bunk across the room, and Rachel drops, as if from a great height, back into now. If she could only just blink and be back there, with Lola, if only it were that simple. Gunther is gone, along with everything he could give her—why he left, and what and who he was. She will call his brother, Hans, but she has little hope of him giving her anything now. If only she could help Eli the way he has helped her. In the dark she gets up and pads down the hall in her socks, her loose flannel pyjamas flapping around her legs. She hadn’t thought about the possibility of him staying at the hostel. She will check, but he’s probably already gone to see Ben and Ava.
Ava has been writing Rachel emails—short letters where she talks about school, books and bands she likes. Rachel is careful in her replies; there is not much she can give, but what there is, she will. Ava does not mention Lola, but in each letter there is a reminder. A secret poke, like a small, soft knife between the ribs.
At the front desk is the woman who helped her before. Rachel is self-conscious in her pyjamas, but it is late, nearly midnight, and there is no one else around. Rachel asks after Eli, whether a tall, olive-skinned Israeli guy with a shaved head and sad eyes is on the register of guests.
‘I’m not sure what his name was but someone came down about an hour ago asking where the laundry is.’ The woman smiles at Rachel. ‘He looked like who you just described. Go, see if he’s still there.’
Rachel takes the lift to the basement and walks down a grey, concrete hall. Fluorescent tube lights buzz and flicker on the ceiling. The laundry is the second door on the left.
Eli is there. He sits on a dryer, notebook in lap, pen in hand. He looks up. ‘Rachel.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘What I said before, it wasn’t nice. You’re probably right, you know, to want to tell Ben the truth.’
Eli hops off the dryer and walks up to her. ‘No, you had a good point. I didn’t want to hear it, but this is selfish. It’s about me, rather than about Ben. And I’m a hypocrite too, I’m going on about the truth and I haven’t been honest with you.’
‘What do you mean?’
He stands in front of her now, so close that Rachel looks down at her hands. There is dryer lint scattered on the floor.
‘It’s not the only reason I came, Rachel. It’s what I was writing just now, in my notebook.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘Okay.’ He holds up the page.
She glances at it. ‘Yeah, but I can’t read Hebrew. What were you writing?’
‘That I came to see you.’ He gazes at her now, it is intense, and Rachel looks away again.
‘Why?’
‘Because you are lovely. Because you aren’t taking anything for granted. You’re asking questions. I can’t help it. I am—what’s the word? Infatuated.’
Rachel steps backwards against the cinderblock wall of the laundry. ‘But Eli, I’m not… I’m married.’
‘You’re here.’
‘There’s Lola.’
Eli approaches softly. He puts his hands on the sides of her face and runs his thumbs down the soft skin beneath her ears. ‘Rachel, you are a good mother. You are a wonderful mother, I know it, here.’ He taps his own chest.
She closes her eyes. There is the banging of the dryer, Eli’s breath, the buzz of the lights above her. There is her heart beating in her ears, Eli’s mouth against her, the coarse bristle on the skin above his lip. The wall behind her holds her up as he kisses the line of her jaw, up to her earlobe and then down her neck.
‘From the moment I saw you at the teachings, I had to sit beside you,’ he whispers, his thumb across the inside of her palm. Something flaps against the walls of her chest.
‘But I’m leaving, Eli, that’s what I came to tell you now,’ Rachel says, when she finds her voice, his mouth still wet on her throat. ‘Gunther has nothing to tell me. He has a brother, who I’m calling in the morning, but then I have to go. Home.’ As soon as the word leaves her mouth she realises the weight of it. It is the first time she has used that word for Sydney—the first time she’s called it home.
Eli holds her a little tighter, but nods, the crown of his head beneath her chin. He is all sinew and long limbs, soft mouth and sharp teeth. His touch is like a feather. ‘I know. I never thought you would stay,’ he murmurs into her throat.
Part of her knows that she could step out of her clothes, there and then, and forget everything else. She knows what her body could do—how it could be made to feel light again, how it could be her own again—but there is Peter, and there is Lola. There is the familiar ache in her tailbone, a counterpoint to the sweetness of Eli’s breath on her neck.
‘No,’ she says, and steps away.
Eli looks at her with those dark eyes. ‘Okay. I’m sorry.’
‘No, don’t be.’ She puts her hands behind her. She won’t reach out for him again.
Eli sighs. ‘Talia was right about me.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That I go for the wrong women. The ones who are only going to cause me pain.’ He rubs the back of his neck.
‘You know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘Where would I be without you, Eli? Not here, not having found my father. Possibly not alive. And think of what you gave Talia. She would have died happy, on her way to meet you.’
A flicker of a smile crosses his face before it settles back into a frown. ‘Will things work out—with your husband?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want them to?’
‘I want to give it a chance. I want to live in the present, rather than trying to always make sense of the past.’
Before she leaves, Rachel kisses Eli again, on the cheek—a last touch of skin, filaments of her hair brushing against him. ‘You’re not angry?’ she asks.
‘No. Just sad. But you are right. I can see you are right.’
As she walks out of the laundry, she turns for a last glance. Eli is gathering his clothes from the dryer, bent over on his knees. As she says goodbye again, he turns, kisses his fingertips and breathes across them and across his flat palm. This is how she will remember him.
How close she came, Rachel thinks. This is what Talia lost herself in search of. That moment when it’s all about you. That blind joy. That hollow beauty.
After her first year in Sydney, Rachel returned to the US for a month. She had to leave Australia in order to apply for a bridging visa so that she could eventually get a permanent one. It was so strange to arrive back in Washington DC. It was as if life had been on hold for the past year and it was just the same old, same old—she drank beers in the Adams Morgan bars with friends and slept late in the sparse guest bedroom of her mother’s Capitol Hill townhouse. Peter hadn’t been able to get away from work but negotiating Judy’s moods and their strange relationship, all the things they didn’t speak of, turned out to be easier without him anyway.
But the familiar rhythms of speech, the food, even driving on the right side of the road came back to Rachel in no time, as if she’d never gone. It seemed natural, and she felt as if she was undoing the button of a too-tight pair of jeans.
It only took a week or so, though, until Judy began to drive her crazy again. ‘What exactly are you doing with yourself over there?’ she asked, and ‘How are you using your degree?’
Rachel said that she planned to use her degree as soon as she had a visa that made it legal for her to work, but that wasn’t enough for her mum. Judy sighed and brushed imaginary dandruff from the shoulders of her blazer. ‘If only you’d done something practical in college—like law, or medicine, or engineering,’ she said. Rachel could think of a hundred responses, but they all spiralled into the same familiar argument. It was easier to change the subject, turn on the TV, or leave the room.
Her friends, after the initial catch-ups, were busy with work and life, and Rachel missed Peter coming home in the evenings, his hand on her hip as she slept, his shaving cream ringing the basin of their bathroom sink. Her evenings, his mornings, they talked on the phone, and he told her how hard he was working and updated her on conversations with the immigration agent.
‘I wish they would just let you back in already,’ he said, his voice so low it was almost a growl, and she was surprised by how much she wished for the same, how much she missed not just him but Sydney. Being away from it. She missed the piercing light and strange birds, the gnarled figs and the sound of sail rigging clanking against masts in the wind on the harbour, water in glittering sheets of blue. She wanted to eat mangoes and queue for Yum Cha on weekends, ignoring the rude waiters in their black suits and scalding her tongue with the hot broth of dumplings, cooling it on lukewarm tea. Why is it that wherever I am, she thought, I miss the place that I’ve left behind?
After three weeks, the visa arrived, and she went into the Australian consulate to get the passport sticker that said they were considering her for a permanent visa, and in the meantime she was allowed to work, and benefit from Medicare and all of the other government agencies she didn’t understand. Peter met her at Sydney Airport; he was easy to spot, towering over the Asian families who were waiting with flowers. His hands were empty—‘The better to grab you with,’ he explained later, as he drove them along the Cahill Expressway, into the glaring morning light that made Rachel’s eyes ache.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Rachel asked, and Peter grinned in his lopsided way, his hand on her thigh. He’d taken the morning off work.
‘It’s a surprise.’
Twenty minutes later they sat across from each other in a cafe beside the beach, which was empty except for a jogger pounding the hard sand. Seagulls ducked beneath the tables that fringed theirs. A waiter brought them coffees, the foam in perfect swirls.
‘I wanted to take you straight home but then we’d never talk,’ Peter said, that grin again. ‘God I missed you.’
Rachel smiled. She missed him too, but already the goodbyes from her friends, her mother, the sleepless flight—it was pilling like an old sweater in her head.
Her head ached, her mouth was gummy and dry, but she ate Vegemite toast, heaped sugar into her coffee, and drank it before it grew cold. Peter ordered another coffee and she sipped water, wondered if it was too early to fall asleep once they were home. Peter paid the bill and took her hand, led her along the empty beach. It was July, low tide, and snakes of seaweed lay in clumps along the damp sand. Rachel shivered when the wind kicked up and Peter led her to a sunny spot, a rock that would leave sand on the seat of her jeans.
‘You’re cold,’ he said.
Rachel nodded. ‘Just getting used to winter again.’
‘I missed you, Rachel.’
‘I missed you too.’
‘I couldn’t get you out of my head. I just wanted to have you back, to keep you here forever.’
She frowned.
‘Not like that. I mean, I want you to be able to go back, I just want us to go together. I want us to be together.’
She crossed her legs. He was talking in circles, and the coffee meant she needed to pee. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could sit there.
She started to stand, but Peter put his arm over her knees, gently. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘Do you think we should get married Rach? I mean, would you like to? Marry me?’
Rachel nearly peed her pants there and then. It was what she least expected, and about as romantic as the cold, wet sand. But she smiled in spite of herself. It was Peter, and she’d missed him.
‘Are you for real?’
‘Yeah. What do you reckon?’
‘I’ve got to pee,’ she said, and jumped up. He walked with her to the toilets and waited outside while she hovered above the damp, dingy seat.
She felt ethereal in her jetlag—still trapped between two worlds, belonging to neither, not even knowing which one she preferred. Her thigh muscles burned. She stood up, washed her hands under a rusty tap and walked outside, blinking at the sudden glare. Peter was gone, and she looked around, a ghost of worry in her chest. She began walking down the gravel path and he appeared from behind a tree, zipping up his fly. He grabbed her, rubbing the sides of her shoulders as if that could warm her.
‘What do you think? Want to be my missus?’ he asked, and Rachel stared out at the horizon, leaning her head into his chest.
‘I didn’t want to buy a ring you didn’t like, so I thought we could go pick out something together, if you want.’
Far out in the ocean there were sprays of seawater. It could be a whale, Rachel thought, or just wind.
Truth was, she didn’t trust her own instinct to know what she wanted. But she couldn’t say that. She blinked away the water that gathered in the corners of her eyes and looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said, shutting her eyes, momentarily blinded by the sun.
Chapter 16
Rachel waits at a table by the window, fingering a peeling laminated menu with descriptions that she doesn’t understand. She called Hans that morning, half expecting him to be useless like Gunther, but he was coherent. He was perfectly happy to talk to her, he said—in fact, he could meet her at a cafe for lunch. He is in Stuttgart as well, it turns out, which is not what Rachel expected. Now she is frowning out the window, and instead of going over what questions to ask him she’s thinking of Eli, her face hot as she remembers their kiss.
She looks up and a man wearing a brown sports coat stands above her, holding out his hand, bushy white eyebrows lifted.
‘Rachel?’ he says. She shakes his hand and stands, and he gives her an awkward embrace. His breath is beery, though it is just noon. ‘So, my niece! Doesn’t life bring late surprises?’
He tucks his ample frame into the chair across from hers and studies her from behind thick glasses. He is fair, as Gunther had once been, but fleshy as well. Long eyebrows but no hair above them, his scalp pink and scrubbed. He smiles to show small, even teeth.
‘You’ve seen him, I take it?’
‘His nurse gave me your number.’
‘Ja, the Tunisian. I am glad. I don’t go now. It makes him angry, to see me, because he is like a child again. I was the oldest, a bit of a bully, I’m afraid, and now he won’t remember me any other way.’
Rachel studies the menu. It makes her anxious to look at him and she wonders if Gunther was right to fear him—if there is something she cannot trust.
The waitress comes and Hans orders for both of them, watching the girl walk away with a small smile on his lips. It disappears when he sees Rachel watching him.
‘You want to know, then, about Gunther?’
‘Well, yes. There’s so much I want to know, but I’m leaving tomorrow, so I haven’t got much time. I have a little girl. I have to get back to her.’
Hans nods.
‘Congratulations.’
Rachel cringes at her own dishonesty, but keeps talking.
‘My mum, Judy, always said that Gunther just disappeared when I was six, after he came back here. After his mother died.’
‘Our mother,’ Hans interjects, picking his teeth with a toothpick that he has pulled from his wallet and unwrapped.
‘Of course, I’m sorry.’
‘Go on.’
‘So I knew nothing. Only now have I found out that he was involved with the RAF. And possibly in jail.’
Hans nods. ‘And so you want to fill in the blanks, as you Americans say.’
‘You speak perfect English.’
‘We all learn it in school here. Do you speak any German?’
‘A little,’ Rachel says, hoping he won’t test her lie.
‘Gut.’
Hans puts down the toothpick and looks out the window to the street. ‘You don’t look much like him, you know? You look like your mother.’
‘Have you met her?’
