An approaching storm

On a grey, thundery day in 1971 my brother, Anton Gerlach, drove his car south along Naumburger Strasse, forty minutes west of Leipzig. Past plantation forests, a patchwork of pasture and cattail, soil-warmed rhizomes running down to the muddy shores of Rundsteter See. To his left (as I imagine it), bare-limbed birches and fat sheep, the lake stretching out blue and boatless to the west; and on his right, the Geiseltalsee. Smoke from a distant trinity of stacks, an old tractor stirring fresh soil for turnips, smashed-up glass houses catching early snow. Sitting beside him on that cold December morning was his four year old grandson, Max. I imagine him (I’ve never seen a picture) Gerlach-faced, blue-eyed, fine, pink lips saying something like, ‘Mama says we should bring home apples.’

But Anton doesn’t reply. He’s busy with his own thoughts.

Sometime before 9.38 am my brother drove up a hill, across train tracks, and either stalled his car, or stopped it. No one will ever know. Less than a minute later the train from Merseburg came around a corner, tried to stop, but didn’t have enough time. The old BMW was pushed a hundred metres south, the train ground to a halt, the driver got out, examined the wreck and noticed a big body (Anton was overweight) and a small body inside an unsolvable puzzle of steel and glass. He knew they were dead. He called along the tracks to the head conductor (who was running towards him), ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

Anyway, that’s how the letter (from Anton’s son, Deiter) explained it. I never checked the details. I didn’t care. Sitting in my small, hot lounge room in Adelaide – listening to Marcus Welby, sweating (in an old singlet), cataloguing sacred stones and dilly bags with my wife (at the time) Kate – none of this seemed real. After I’d read the letter, I said to Kate, ‘What a place to stall a car.’ And she (she was always perceptive) said, ‘You really think he stalled it, there, then?’

The reason I tell you this so early in my story is that as a creaky eighty-eight year old I’ve worked out the longer you live the less you understand, or at least, can know with any certainty. According to Deiter, Anton had always been moody, suffered from depression, spent time in a sanitorium in Grunewald. He’d had three wives, six or seven kids who wouldn’t talk to him. I knew he’d had it rough. But I didn’t know him. I didn’t (couldn’t) understand who he was, what he sounded like, the look in his eyes. I hadn’t seen him or my other brothers or sister since 1911, since me and Mother and Father climbed onto a cart and drove away from Opa’s house in Leipzig. So long ago. The people who’d been closest to me, played with me, flicked food at me, were complete strangers.

As I sit in my fibro house in Hillcrest. Listening to the drills and presses over my back fence. The Monaro across the road that Wayne (Esmay’s eldest) tinkers with all afternoon. The bike gang of eleven- and twelve-year-olds that appears after school, riding down the road, throwing lemons into my yard and calling, ‘You old poofter!’ Tom, my grandson (and motivator, editor, advisor, scribe, cook) went out the other day (in his Scotch College blazer), said he’d fix it. He waited for them, and when they went past (and called him a poofter) he accused them of playing around (luckily Jack, my son, wasn’t there) with their sisters. They came back, he ran after them, they rode off. He returned, puffed out, and we sat on the front (dead) lawn laughing for ten minutes, until Mrs Wren came past and asked what was so funny and Tom said, ‘Just playing around.’

I’ve been having plenty of fun since Tom came back into my life. In a way, replacing lost siblings. Anton, Alwin, Michael, Julius and Charlotte – five broken satellites orbiting my old, wheezing planet, never getting any closer, never becoming visible.

I remember playing with Julius in the cattle yards at Hermannsburg. Dust, and shit up to my ankles; Ludwig and Oskar telling me not to stand behind the steer. And later, throwing snow at him in Opa’s Leipzig backyard. According to what I learned from Deiter, Julius never felt right in his skin. He met some girl, got married, moved to Hamburg, but then started wearing dresses, hanging about the Alster Pavilion on a Sunday afternoon. In 1962 a few sailors tried to beat him up somewhere in St Pauli, he defended himself, there was a fight and he was arrested, photographed and charged as ‘Justina’. The photo leaked, and he was in the papers (Deiter sent me a clipping). But I never heard what happened to him after that.

Then there was the second-eldest, Alwin. By the time Hitler’s war came along he was too old to fight, but he was assigned to an artillery regiment in the east as some sort of clerical officer. At the end of the war the Russians got a hold of him and no one, according to Deiter, heard of him for years. Then, in the early fifties, Michael received a telegram saying your brother, Alwin, died in a Russian POW camp in 1949. No name. No return address. And despite letters and phone calls and help from the Red Cross, that was the end of Alwin, gone, somewhere into the fog of history.

All of this time, me, my first wife, Terese, were out in the Western Desert making films and taking photos of sacred ceremonies, or back in Adelaide, painting our Prospect house (this, years before Kate came along). Or back at Hermannsburg, lost in a world of my father’s making – the Aranda, their stories and songs, their cut feet dyed purple with Condy’s, their fighting and anger at the things that had been done to them – the whitewashed walls of German Lutheranism made real in the desert. I grew up minus these strangers, these child-ghosts of middle-europe. Siting with Father beside the shallows of Alitera, notating the language, collecting ephedra for mother, watching for the night parrot.

You can never know. What Anton was thinking as that train came at him, braked, tried to stop. Did he hold Max, try to protect him? Did they try to get out (too late)? Or did he just sit there, waiting? There was a rumour (there’s always a rumour) that Max was his son. A strange, wasn’t-meant-to-happen moment with his twenty-eight year old daughter-in-law, Eva. Deiter had heard, but never believed it. He and Eva continued until she died in a head-on collision in 1979. Meanwhile, Deiter patented some sort of food wrap, made millions, and never spoke about his son. But apparently the proof was in the pudding. Max’s face was Anton’s: his nose, his ears, his eyes. Anton had just been diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea. He’d already started shaking, forgetting. But maybe it had nothing to do with that. The fact remains, either that car stalled, or stopped. 

Complexity. After all of the dramas in the desert, the intervening years, my high school and university, Mother returned to Germany, to Leipzig. Although, by then, her children had grown up, made their own lives. Out of all of them, Julius was the only one who went to see her. Except me, one time, when I was lecturing about Aranda traditions in England. I got the boat over, the train to Leipzig, arrived at her front door and said, ‘Well?’ She just looked at me and said, ‘And this is because someone paid for you to come?’

Pastor Martin Gerlach was the most complex of all. The most distant. He insisted, but doubted; worked, but wondered why; converted, but came to see that people were better off with their own, familiar, uncertainties. As I stood beside him on the deck of the boat back to Australia, I said, ‘At least I’ve got this,’ and took out a photo of me with my brothers and sister, standing in our prickly-pear yard in Hermannsburg. Father took a moment, bit his lip (as he did when he was thinking) then pulled the photo from my fingers and dropped it into the North Sea. I asked why, but he just shrugged. I never asked again. There was no point. So maybe my final, fumbled thesis (written on Tom’s Commodore 64) will make things clearer, to you, if not to me. Why my father gave love in such small, sparing doses. And why, up to and including the end, he conceded nothing to that grey, rumbling sky.

1922

Red Rover

On the first day there was fourteen year old Benjamin ‘Benno’ Gerlach (me), Lucas, Oskar, maybe six, seven of the black kids, and Ludwig. And ‘Blind’ Silas (not his real name), dressed in his soiled white suit (pants, shoes, socks, shirt) standing in the middle of the dusty compound at Hermannsburg Mission. Imagine. A few stray dogs (covered in sores), Mother sitting in a rocker on the porch of our old house, examining a specimen from her classground, writing in her notebook: ‘Ephedra pedunculata woody vine grey bark leaves opposite 0.12 long seed cones 0.3 long with 2 seeds 0.4 long’. Looking up and calling, ‘Careful, Benno. It doesn’t seem fair.’

And Silas (minus his cane) standing with arms outstretched, like it might help him catch someone.

On the first day there was Father, thirty yards away, cleaning out the church with buckets of water. I can’t remember why. Maybe someone had been sick? Maybe he just liked the smell of laurel, of hospital antiseptic, the stink of God and Jesus and hymn books and acid-eaten, red-rot sermons from his homemade pulpit.

Silas said, ‘Red Rover all over.’

Ludwig and us kids ran, straight past Silas, who moved sideways like a crab, hoping he’d catch someone. When we’d all made it over, Mother called, ‘It hardly seems fair. Silas, come in out of the sun.’

‘It’s alright, Mrs Gerlach. It’s fun … eh, kids?’

Fun. Like my grandson, Tom, running into my room a few weeks ago, showing me his latest computer game (Desert Fox), starting it up and saying, ‘See, you got to rescue the soldier from the desert.’

‘Go on.’ Watching him pushing his buttons.

And before long: ‘Is this what it was like at, what was it, Hermannburg, Grandpa?’

‘Hermannsburg. And no. decidedly not.’

‘Why?’

‘We didn’t have any wars going on … except for Hitler.’

‘Did you fight Hitler?’

‘No. That was a long way away, and a long time ago. We didn’t have any of this’ – indicating a soldier with a machine gun killing a few dozen enemy. ‘We just had a lot of boredom.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Read. Played games. Searched for night parrots.’ And what I wanted to say, but didn’t, because he wouldn’t understand. The outback (as Hoges called it) was a load of nothing. Walking east for a mile, turning around, realising there was nothing there, anywhere, except lemongrass, and perhaps a bronzewing, or skink. No cars, no houses, no people. Just sand and sky and the feeling you were the last, the only person on earth. ‘Growing up like that gave you a sense of … resilience,’ I said.

He fired a bazooka, and jumped about.

‘I was alone.’

‘That musta been crap.’

‘That’s how it was. But we entertained ourselves.’

‘How?’

I smiled. ‘Silas, remember, I told you, he was blind …’

Red Rover. We ran past Silas again, Mother complained again, Father emptied another bucket and called for Adele to fetch more water (although we were low).

‘Red Rover!’

This time it was like he could see me, went straight for me, and when I moved left he moved left, right, right, back and forth, till all the other kids (and Ludwig) had got past and Mother called, ‘Benno, stop teasing Silas.’ I said I wasn’t, but she said it was cruel. I stood, waiting, shooshing the other kids and taking a few silent steps. But even then, he heard me. I said, ‘It’s not fair.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re picking on me.’

He smiled. ‘Come on, Benno. There’s a time limit.’

Left, but he sensed, or saw? Right, and he smiled and said, ‘You know you can’t do it.’

‘Why?’

‘You just can’t. Cos you don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘And he that sees the world …’

‘Bible’s not gonna help you now,’ I said.

‘The Bible always helps, Benno.’

I took off my shoes. I took off my socks. Mother, Ludwig, the kids, everyone waiting. Then I found the softest sand, and walked around him. But he turned his head, smiled, sprinted towards me, brought me down, laughing, tumbling, talcum hair and face, and Father saying, ‘Nice that some people have the time.’

Silas sat up, brushed off his suit and said, ‘You wanted to be caught, Benno.’ Oh, and that bit about the desert. Me, standing miles and miles from home, nothing but a blue sky and warm breeze. I can’t remember what I was doing there, or how I’d got there, but I remember being alone. And I remember seeing this small speck coming towards me, and waiting, for minutes, maybe half an hour, before I worked out it was a donkey. It got closer, stopped, looked at me. It was old, its fur and skin all ratty, big ribs, red eyes. I reached out, rubbed its head and said, ‘Where did you come from?’ I turned and headed back to Hermannsburg and it followed me. I told it to go away, but it (she) followed me. When we got back to the mission I put her in the yards, gave her some feed, and water, locked her in and said, ‘I think I’ll call you Himmel. Is that okay?’

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The Night Parrots is available from Wakefield Press (AU). You can order a copy here.

Stephen Orr was born in Adelaide in 1967, studied science and education and taught in a range of country and metropolitan schools. One of his early plays, Attempts to Draw Jesus, became his first novel, shortlisted for the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. Since then he has published ten novels and two volumes of short stories. He has been nominated for awards such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the International Dublin Literary Award.