Sylvia Petter
The Man on the
Moon
© 1997 by Sylvia Petter and gangan books australia
It was 1969, the
year of the man on the moon. When Samantha had left Australia
she'd winked at him not knowing that before the year was out he
would not be alone - not knowing that she would be very much
so.
She thought of Jake. She missed him. It wasn't
that his absence left a hole; it was just that there was so much
more when he was there. Samantha stared out of the train window as
the countryside chugged by.
She'd come in from the East from Vienna via
Prague. After the awful experience with Fritz, her need to run had
been so suddenly strong - the need to get out, find her family,
her roots, safety. She'd been so tough when she left Sydney. She
hadn't thought twice then either. 'But the first setback scares
you and you want to go home.' But home was far away, always too
far.
The train screeched to a halt on the Czech/GDR
border. Two puffed up grey uniforms entered the compartment. Each
took an aisle.
'Passport,' one florid face sighed at her, took
the navy booklet and flipped through to the Czech visa as if to
make sure she could really leave. The other passengers proffered
their papers and the officials swung down on to the platform as if
they had run out of air in their exhalation. The train lurched
into motion over an expanse of grey barren terrain and then
screeched to another halt.
'Passport,' clipped a new uniform. 'Koffer
aufmachen!' Samantha didn't know whether she was expected to first
show her papers or open her suitcase. She held out her
passport.
'Koffer aufmachen!'
Samantha took down the suitcase, now grubby
beige, with the liner stickers - CABIN - ANTONIA LAURETTI
plastered willy-nilly on the lid and peeling off at the corners.
She opened it.
'Was ist das?'
'A koala,' she said, 'a koala bear.' As if the
word 'bear' would bestow it more innocence. They weren't bears of
course, but he wouldn't know, Samantha thought. The dour faced
uniform took out a knife from the instep of his boot, slashed the
stuffed creature in a clean rip right down the belly. He put the
knife away again and dug his fingers into the synthetic entrails,
spilling them into the suitcase. Samantha gaped, her eyes wide -
she could feel perspiration on her palms.
With a flick of his wrist, he threw the fur
carcass into her case. 'Books? '
'No,' Samantha whispered.
'Books?'
'No!' Samantha trembled inside as she fought
back the tears. She stared straight ahead as the uniform went on
to the next passenger.
'Passport!'
Samantha was glad to alight. The physical
exercise of changing platforms in Halle and boarding the local
train had calmed her as she took a seat in the almost full
compartment.
She glanced at the teenage girl sitting opposite
her. She was struggling to open a bottle of - the label said 'Malz
Kola'. The deformed word drew Samantha's hand down to her
suitcase. The koala gift was inside. What had they been looking
for? Samantha swallowed - so cute, the only gift she had for her
family and they had to ruin it.
The blonde girl in her knee socks, white blouse
and skirt started worrying the bottle cap on the side of the metal
armrest. Samantha shook off her first taste of shock and rummaged
in her bag.
'Bitte,' she said and held her hand out for the
bottle. The girl gave it to her with a look of surprise. The
bottle was warm. Their Coca-Cola, Samantha thought. Warm coke, she
shuddered. She plucked off the top with a pocket knife and opener
and handed the bottle back.
'Danke,' the girl said and began to sip and
then, as an afterthought, offered the bottle to Samantha. Had she
done it spontaneously, Samantha might not have noticed.
'Nein, danke,' Samantha said and continued in
German. 'How many stops is it to Sibigrode?' Six fingers, Samantha
thought, as the girl switched the bottle to her left hand and
tucked her right hand in the pocket of her pleated dark-blue
skirt.
'Just one more,' the girl answered.
She must have noticed the difference in accents.
Samantha's German was not fluent, but it was clear she would get
by - as a stranger would, and the girl with the ice-blue eyes had
seen that. Yet Samantha found the girl's accent and the words more
familiar, more innately known than the speech and dialect of
Vienna. German was many things, she thought.
And the girl must have felt a certain ease as
well. 'Where are you going?' she asked.
'To the Friedrichs. Do you know them?' Of course
she doesn't, Samantha thought. She remembered how she'd laugh when
asked if she knew someone so-and-so in Sydney. Now she was doing
the same thing.
'No. But the town is small. They'll know at the
station.'
The train pulled in to a simple grey platform
with a low one-room building and outhouse. With her suitcase in
hand and her hessian carry bag over her shoulder, Samantha got off
with a wave of 'Auf Wiedersehen' although she knew she would not
see the girl with the strange hand again. One never knew. Who was
it, Samantha wondered. Oh, yes. Anne Boleyn. They'd taken her for
a witch. Well, she could always have it removed. Plastic surgery
here, at the end of the world. Samantha smiled to herself, now
where was down under? She shrugged and walked towards the small
squat building.
'The Friedrichs' house is the last one on the
road to Gorenzen - about twenty minutes on foot,' a man said in a
low flat voice. He must have been the station master. He was the
only person there, the house would not have had room for anyone
else and his grey uniform and cap gave him an official look.
It took Samantha thirty minutes to walk down the
dusty road that had been tarmacked, but never repaired. There was
no footpath, just rubble and sand seeping into rough grass. The
houses stood aligned, grey after beige after grey. Any garden they
had must be in the back. Behind the houses were fields, flatness
and in the distance copses of trees. Further off the low hills
rolled and even further she could see peaking forests - the Harz,
she thought. She remembered her mother speaking of the Harz
Mountains. The last house had trees, tall elms, two of them and
there was a tiny garden in the front. Just a few bushes,
hydrangeas behind a peeling picket fence. All the houses had
peeling picket fences, but this one peeled more.
Samantha opened the gate and walked up to the
front door. She looked about her, placed her case on the ground,
took a deep breath and hit the knocker.
The door opened and a stout old woman in long
skirts and apron, her grey-white hair pulled back in a bun stood
before her. She had a round flat face with high cheekbones. Her
wrinkles bore witness to smiles and sorrow.
'Tante Klara? It's Samantha, Samantha from
Australia. Helga's daughter.'
'Helga? Australia? Samantha?' With each word the
old woman's face softened and her smile seemed as if it would
envelope Samantha as her arms opened in greeting. 'Samantha. How
did you get here? All the way from Australia! Otto, come look,
it's Helga's Samantha.'
An old man, a head shorter than Klara, shuffled
to the entrance. He had a full head of sparkling white hair and a
bushy moustache clipped short. He wore a grey hand-knit jumper
that was neatly darned in a spot past his stomach. His gaze was
strong from steely blue eyes as he smiled and said: 'Yes, it's
Helga's Samantha.'
Samantha stepped forward to his tentative
embrace, then pulled back and grinned. She didn't know what to
say.
'So will you stay with us? You can have the room
your mother had before she left,' Klara said.
Samantha nodded and followed her aunt up the
narrow creaking stairs. The room was small with an attic window
and scrubbed wooden floorboards. A bed with a dark wooden
headboard, decorated with a rose and two symmetric swirls that
opened upwards, like curling vines, stood pressed against one
wall. A small dresser stood opposite. It had the same carved
pattern around the mirror fixed on top of it so that it looked
like a dressing table. The mirror was blotched brown with age in
the corners, and on the dresser stood a large white china jug in a
china basin.
As Samantha opened her suitcase on the linen
bedspread, she heard her aunt's steps creaking up the stairs.
'It is simple, but clean,' she said. 'The toilet
is outside. It's an old house, Liebchen.'
'That's OK, Tante Klara,' Samantha said. It was
like being sent back in time with fragile things useful for years.
But, running water would have been nice ...
As if reading her thoughts, the old woman said:
'Oh, but a lot of people have very modern things these days -
can't see the use of it all myself, though. But there's Irmgard,
my daughter - your cousin, you know. Well, she and her husband -
they're up in the Harz, they mind the venison, and even up there,
Irmgard has running water and shiny taps, even an enamel toilet
inside the house. And she has a refrigerator. We put everything in
the cool cellar. Oh, I remember ...'
Samantha smiled. She loved stories. 'What, Tante
Klara?'
'Oh, it was when your mother started school
...'
This was wonderful. It was hard to imagine her
mother having started school. 'Yes?'
'Well, it did cause some talk in the village.'
The old woman skirts began to jiggle as a belly laugh stifled into
a chuckle. 'You know, here in Germany, the children on their first
day of school, well, they receive an enormous cone filled with
sweets, bonbons ...'
Samantha had heard of the tradition. She had
even seen photos in the West German Burda magazines her mother got
months late and used for her dressmaking patterns. At school begin
there would be photos of children in street clothes - not uniforms
like she had to wear. The children held bright coloured cones
almost as big as themselves. No doubt, mothers would make bright
skirts and shirts and jackets for the first school day. So it went
that far back.
'So! What happened?'
'Well, the teacher - all the classes were
together in one room - he told the children that the tree with the
cones grew in his cellar.'
'So...?'
'Well, your mother, oh, that Helga ...' Tante
Klara started to chuckle again and held her hand on her stomach as
if that would stop her petticoated skirt from jiggling. 'Helga and
one of the boys from the village thought the tree would grow
bigger and have bigger cones if they fertilised it. So they poured
a bucket of ... cow piss ...' Tante Klara's skirts jiggled more
and more, '...into the cellar window of the teacher's house.'
Her aunt wiped tears from her eyes with the
corner of her apron. '... he kept the freshly baked bread just
under the window on a stone ledge ...'
Samantha roared with laughter. 'And he couldn't
get mad at the children?' She loved this new mother of hers.
'No, he couldn't get mad with them. He should
never have told them such a lie.'
Samantha and Klara smiled at each other, then,
as if it had all gone on too long, Klara said: 'Well, I'll let you
unpack. Then you come down.'
That afternoon Samantha took an old bike from
the shed.
'It still works. I take it now and then ... when
the sun shines,' her uncle said.
Samantha biked to the next village along a
deserted country road to fetch fresh bread rolls for supper. They
were firm and brown and smelled of malt. A gingerbread world of
malt - malt bread, malt coke, everything malt.
The countryside with its grey houses in huddles,
its copses of trees peppered through tilled fields bore no scars
of bygone wars and no greasepaint of modernity. It was not the
regime, Samantha thought, but time that held it suspended, as if
in aspic. There was no talk of Stasi then although the slit koala
bore witness to the closed claws of the border.
The following day, Samantha's cousin Irmgard and
her two young sons came to visit Tante Klara. Samantha knew the
word had spread fast that Helga's daughter from Australia had
dropped in on the village. It was Sunday. Onkel Otto donned a
white shirt with a stiff stand-up collar. He wasn't going to
church. There were no churches - or they were not used as such. He
just went out to the gate. It was still an occasion for he even
had on his black Homburg hat.
Irmgard was a tall woman, well into middle age.
She had gone to great pains with her clothes. She wore a white
blouse nipped a notch too tightly by a dark-blue skirt that
spilled over thickening hips. Irmgard tweaked at her waistband as
she approached the gate with a large paper carry bag and two boys
in tow.
'Samantha, my dear, you're just like your
mother, Aunt Helga. This is Rolf and this is Helmut,' she said
pushing a sullen 12 year-old and a friendlier-looking 8 year-old
before her.
The photos she had seen of her mother in her
youth had shown a slim dark-haired woman. Samantha was blonde; her
mother used to call her hair California blonde as it darkened in
the winter and lightened in the sun. But she did have her mother's
dusting of freckles.
Helmut thrust out with both hands a large
box-like contraption. 'This is for you. A gift. I made it myself,
'he said.
'Danke.' Samantha took the object. She had
nothing in return. She couldn't give him the ripped koala. 'I'm
afraid they took away the gifts I brought - they took them away at
the border,' she lied. 'Your gift is lovely. What is it?'
'Take off the paper. It's a windmill. Made of
match sticks.' The boy blushed. His older brother watched
impassively, the first sprigs of acne peppering his cheeks.
'Thank you, Helmut,' she said. 'I shall put it
inside, it looks fragile.' Turning to Irmgard, she said with a
smile: 'It must have taken him ages.' Then she carried her prize
up to her room. What the hell am I going to do with it, she
thought as she placed it on the dresser.
When Samantha came out again her Aunt Klara and
Irmgard were busy setting a wooden table under the shade of the
elm tree behind the house. There was coffee, malt coffee, and
baked cheesecake and Samantha recalled the waft of sour sweet that
had tickled her nose that morning.
'I don't believe it,' Otto said.
'But it's true, Onkel Otto.' Rolf slammed his
fist in the air.
'Yes, they did,' chirruped Helmut.
'A man cannot walk on the Moon. That's
impossible. They're telling us stories again,' Otto said.
Samantha placed a hand on her uncle's elbow. The
old man was sitting on the bench, upright and proud, his Homburg
straight on his head. Samantha imagined that he must surely look
like that at a funeral, only there he would stand to bid farewell
to an old friend. 'It's true, Onkel Otto,' she said quietly. 'A
man, an American, has walked on the Moon.'
The old man shook his head: 'I don't believe
it,' he muttered over and over again. How hard it was for him to
accept things others took for granted. But she was that way too.
Jake, he had taken it for granted that she loved him. She did, of
course - or did she? But the gifts? She'd been so sure she could
breeze in with strange antipodal stuffed animals - who would
mistrust a koala?
'Samantha,' Irmgard said in a voice that snapped
her back to them. 'I was wondering if you needed something like
this? They're the best in the GDR, 'she said proudly. 'My
brother-in-law sells them in his, well it's not his ..., ' her
lips tinged with bitterness as her voice softened. '... his
Kaufhaus. We are known for good quality.'
Samantha didn't know where to put her face as
her cousin held out a floor length red flannel horror of a
dressing gown. 'You will need this in Europe,' Irmgard added.
'It's colder than in Australia.'
Samantha nodded and stretched out her hands. No
way would she wear it. She hated dressing gowns. But they were
gifts, gifts from her family - here on the other side of the
world. She could always give it to the Caritas when she got back
to Vienna. 'Thank you, Irmgard. I'll make good use of it.'
Samantha turned to fold and place the gown on the bench.
'And Samantha,' Irmgard glanced sideways as if
to block out Otto who was still nodding sadly to himself. 'These,
too, they're of superior quality. You can always fill them with
hankies, but I think they should fit.'
Samantha stared and tried not to laugh out loud.
Irmgard held out a pale dusty pink bra, polyester, sewn in
concentric circles and ending in a point where a nub should be.
They were burning their bras back home and she would place a
pencil under her breast once a week - the pencil always fell. Her
breasts needed no support, not for a long while yet, she
thought.
'I have a white one too,' Irmgard said.
God, I'd never wear those, Samantha thought as
she said 'Thank you' in a warm soft voice. Her reward was
Irmgard's proud glow. They were the closest she would get to a
family. Yet they were strangers, as distant as the man in the moon
- but she didn't want to walk on their faces.
'We had our chance,' Irmgard said. They had gone
up to the Barbarossa caves to see the king whose beard grew into
the ground through a massive table as a sign of his sorrow. 'Did
your mother ever tell you the story of Barbarossa, Kaiser
Friedrich?'
'Something about him trying to unite all the
German dukes, bring peace? Didn't he fall in the crusades?'
Samantha said.
'Legend has it that he didn't die. He hid in the
caves with his flaxen-haired daughter and members of his court.'
Irmgard's voice dropped to a whisper. 'And there he stays sleeping
until Germany becomes one.' Her whisper hoarsened. 'Hitler
imagined uniting all German people.'
'And look what that led to,' Samantha said. 'It
looks like Barbarossa will go on sleeping forever.'
Irmgard's eyes caught Samantha's. For a long
second her gaze was straight. 'We never thought they would really
put up a wall. We should have left then,' she said. Samantha
watched the tears glisten in her cousin's eyes. 'But this is our
home, Samantha. Do you understand?'
Samantha shifted from one foot to the other and
then walked off a few paces in that height of the Harz. She wasn't
the one Irmgard should be telling such things. How could a
tumbleweed understand? She had no roots; well, they weren't in the
GDR.
'There's a joke.' Irmgard's voice broke in to
her thoughts. 'Ulbricht, our leader, loses his wallet one day. He
offers a reward - any wish - to the finder. A pretty 18 year-old
girl finds the wallet and he asks her what she wants. She says:
'Open the wall for 24 hours.' Ulbricht laughs and says: 'You
naughty girl, you just want to be alone with me.'
Samantha smiled weakly. There was more to her
cousin than her too-tight waistband. But what about the running
water and the shiny taps?
On the train back to Vienna via Prague, Samantha
soon forgot the shiny taps. As the countryside pulled by and she
drew further away from people she had always been told were her
family, she pondered on the meaning of the word. Blood coursed in
her veins. It was hers. Not theirs.
At the Austrian border she paid little attention
to the words the inspector said as he stamped her passport.
Extract from TILLANDSIA
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