Refuge

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.
Eventually, though, he found he could remember several mildly salacious limericks from his university days (His English tutor preferred them to Keats and Shelley) and, to show his conviviality, he began quoting them. His accent broke them up. Before the session was over a couple of the younger ones had memorised his limericks and his accent.
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 an Hungarian ‘social club’ where proper food could be obtained quite cheaply, if he did not indulge in the overpriced Barak Palinka.
His weekend ’business’ as a translator and letter writer moved 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. He tore up the remaining business cards. The typewriter was put back in storage.
His languages had failed him. For so long they had seemed almost a certain passport to small favours or to negotiable concessions. ‘They can take everything but your education,’ his mother has insisted. Here in Australia education was reduced to a fine sense of irony. ‘What did you used to do?’ one of his workmates had asked. 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 was insidious. Although she offered suggestions for possible new accommodation and even allowed Emre to peruse her Saturday Advertiser or News, the leads always turned 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 returned, glum from another search, Frau Losberg almost inch by inch increased her attention. Emre finally began to understand.
In a sudden move he took an apartment in the city. It consisted of three upstairs rooms above a hairdresser’s, and could only be reached through the shop itself. It was entirely illegal. And it had no kitchen and no water. Three bare rooms at the top of a creaking staircase. He had to find a bed, and coverings, mattress, pillow, as well as things for the baby, and what about water?
With the help of a Czech plumber who owed him for a series of duplicitous letters to his wife, an Italian still waiting for him to send her the voyage money, they managed 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 there was, now, a tap. His plumber friend suggested a small spirits stove. There was no electricity upstairs either, he also discovered. Well, he could pick up a couple of kerosene lamps. Marie’s cottage in the Austrian Tyrol had only such lighting. When he felt he could do no more for the present he took a bus to the Migrant Hostel. He returned with his family.
Frau Losberg was incensed when she heard, and threatened to tell the authorities. Emre only kept her pacified by promising to paint the remaining external walls of her place. That meant another month of weekends which could have been more usefully employed, but it was worth it.
Marie looked at the apartment with its dusty green walls and bare boards and smiled at Emre shyly. From the window they looked out onto a brick wall across the alley.
‘Look,’ she said, and pointed to a small fern growing out of a crack in the bricks near the top. The baby was grizzling, she was teething. They spent their first night together for more than six months in the creaky bed with dusty blankets and only one pillow. The child was restive between them and woke almost every hour. It shat the bed. Emre had no sleep. He knew 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 slept solidly. Emre tried to remember when it was, how it was, that they first got together. Marie had fallen pregnant so quickly. For the first time he wondered: 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 been long since taken over by the authorities and nationalised. His parents had not survived 1943. He knew only the blowsy woman who ran the ‘Hungarian club’ or two peasants from the voyage over who spoke his language. Marie spoke German and had stubbornly refused to master English. Emil now tossed and tried not to rouse the stranger sharing his bed. A streetlight threw a yellowish rectangle upon the wall opposite. The prickly smell from the hairdresser’s below could not be ignored. For a brief moment he thought of Frau Losberg’s cosy, crowded front room. There were two oil paintings with huge frames: Alpine scenery, a secluded chalet. She had heavy drapes on the windows. It had reminded him of an aunt’s apartment in Buda. He had no idea where his aunt was now, or what had become of her much loved furnishings. Frau Losberg’s little room had the musty warmth of memories. He knew he must never allow memories to crowd him. But for those moments he had seemed almost to be back there, though of course nothing could be the same.
The vulcanising works was his life now. Or for the foreseeable future. This was his existence, and it seemed almost as tangible as razorwire fencing. Except that circumstances change. Even he had recognized that. One step at a time. One step then one step and even now he could look back and see the burden of despair and dulled endurance receding. The walls of this place, caught in that glare of light, carried echoes he would not remember. But after his next pay he would take Marie to look for cheap curtain material. Unless she had 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 had never thought of such simple but clearly articulated beginnings. Only endings. Each moment was an end. Every new change was an end. His seven languages were all ends, interchangeable, isolating him internally while at the same time giving him a fluency others envied him for. He would cast off things here, as well as take things on. Language was a commodity, he had learned that. It was a tool of barter, not of emotions or feelings or human warmth. Warmth? There was only body warmth. Or body cold.
The first encounter with Marie: even that had seemed another ending, really leading nowhere, except for instant gratification. Instant sleep. Sleep.
It was the beginning.
Preparing to rouse himself, Emre thought of the hot labour ahead and the rough and needy badinage of his workmates, and he realized his life was only beginning, it had always been only beginning. And that beginnings always lead onwards. Two years’ time, he thought. One year.
And he laughed out loud so that the baby gave a startled cry and Marie reached out her hand – not to Emre. Six months, he thought. 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.
Had he even had such a thought before?