Dissonance (2 page)

‘You won't.'

Stand-off. Nothing but the sound of a clock slicing time into paper-thin fragments. The baby was full, and asleep. Madge wrapped him up in a blanket and rocked him. Jo extended his hands to take the boy but Madge wouldn't ­surrender him.

‘Magda.'

‘My name is Madge.'

‘Please.'

‘He's my son.'

‘He's ours.'

‘He needs to be loved.'

‘He will be.'

But Madge wouldn't let him go. ‘Erwin then,' she said, as a compromise, as a way of keeping the mortgage paid. ‘Erwin Hergert … the great Australian pianist.'

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Erwin.

She wasn't about to let Jo within smelling distance of the boy. Which meant that he spent the next days, months and years praising God at Tabor church beside a reluctant wife (who only agreed to come as part of their Compromise) – returning home from poker nights and kegel to find her standing on their porch, brandishing the whip she made sing like a thousand angry angels. Then he'd crawl off to his shed, leaving his work-clothes on the front porch for his wife-by-name-only to iron before the dew of another Tanunda morning woke him for work.

Back at the piano, Erwin had moved on to Mozart's
An Chloe
. Madge had read about the lives of the great pianists – their genius had extended beyond the concert repertoire to orchestral transcriptions, chamber music, concerti and lieder. So here she was, warbling the words in her best Barossa Deutsch, raising her chin and reaching for the high notes as Erwin's finger's clunked away on the almost child-like arpeggios, the trills, the heavy block chords and runs of thirds and fifths. ‘Louder here … softer here,' she called, holding her bamboo stick in the air.

Madge had run to seed. She'd started off as a fresh, green lettuce, but she'd wilted; softened with cellulite that hung, melted and ran like fat from the still twitching pigs that Jo hung in his smokehouse. Her tomato-stake legs had turned to telegraph poles and her ankles had swollen, but her feet had got no bigger. So now she found it hard to walk – a sort of side-to-side hobble, stopping to rest on fallen logs and lean on shaky fences.

Time and egg noodles had taken their toll – years of waffles and honey cakes, roast beef cooked in recycled fat, pickled pig, cabbage and dill pickles – things she'd developed a taste for during the Hergert years (although, again, Grace had warned that cold climate food would ruin her).

Food was part of the Compromise: meals left at the shed door, rained on, dried out, forgotten if Jo was staying in town with a ‘friend', picked over by birds and rats, the empty dishes left until he stacked them neatly at the back door beside a barrel of water with a soup ladle attached with twine. She couldn't let him go hungry. He had work to do.

Madge dropped the octave. Erwin looked at her, smiled, and she raised her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘Mozart, not me!' They finished and Madge sat down. Her chair groaned as its legs moved apart on the unsealed floorboards. ‘Schubert,' she said.

He looked at a timer on a shelf above the piano and tried to read the minutes – thirty-five, forty – he was nearly there. Soon it would be time for his warm-down: a Liszt etude, a Czerny study and more scales. And then a walk in their garden of weeds, or perhaps an hour of sketching his father's nude paintings or Madge's Greek statues, or a watercolour of horses and sheep to send to someone on the Bray side of the family.

Madge was wondering if she should make him work harder. She had an image in her head of other mothers making their sons and daughters practise longer – training them to take the opportunities that were Erwin's birthright. Still, she guessed, you had to keep a sense of balance; it wasn't like training a monkey. That would be missing the point entirely.

Once, standing in front of a stall at the Goat Square market, she'd overheard a woman say, ‘Well, yes, fat women are always insecure.'

‘Yes, they overcompensate, don't they?' came the reply. ‘But you feel sorry for the child.'

Madge turned around and looked at them. ‘He loves the piano,' she said, but they just looked at her as if to say, We have no idea what you're talking about.

Insecure my arse, she thought, as she walked home, turning to Erwin and saying, ‘Hurry up!'

He practises for four hours, she fumed. What else would he be doing? ‘I don't make you practise too much, do I?' she asked her son.

‘No, Mum.'

‘You want to get good, don't you?'

‘Yes, Mum.'

‘The world's full of hack pianists. You may as well be a plumber as one of those. You don't want to be a plumber, do you?'

‘No, Mum.'

‘I tell you, Erwin, there are maybe five or six pianists in the world that everyone knows. That's who I want you to be: Erwin Hergert, Australia's greatest … hurry up! The more you practise …'

‘I know.'

‘These people, these people here, Erwin, they're ordinary. They want everybody else to be ordinary. You don't want to be like them, you want to be special, don't you?'

‘Yes, Mum.'

‘It's because I love you, Erwin.'

‘I know, Mum. I love you.'

‘More than this Valley. More than Australia.'

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. Eventually she said, ‘This is a second-rate country, Erwin. Remember that. One day we'll have to move on.'

‘Where to?'

‘Europe … Germany.' She smiled at him. ‘Isn't that ironic?'

‘How?'

‘I tell you what,
these
Germans have been in Australia too long. Not much of the Beethoven left in them. They've become ordinary. Ordinary. This place is death … stupid bitches.'

‘Who?'

‘You know why I make you work harder? Because the pieces are getting harder. You can't master Liszt on two hours a day. And think of what we've got ahead of us – Rachmaninov. Five in the world, Erwin, maybe six.'

‘I know, Mum, I know.'

Meanwhile, Erwin's practice was coming to an end. The timer rattled and Madge hit it with her stick. ‘I suppose we should go shopping,' she said.

Erwin took the stick from her hand and laid it across the keys. ‘I'll get the basket,' he said.

Half an hour later, Madge was driving Jo's old truck along God's Hill Road. Her body arched over the top of a large steering wheel that she fought to control. Erwin helped her turn it on tight corners as she changed gears and pumped an unreliable clutch. There was no glass in the windows (although the wipers still worked) and the cabin roof had rusted through, leaving a sort of latticework skylight. There were holes in the floor big enough for a man to fall through and the passenger door only opened on one hinge. But apart from that … As Madge often said, ‘A pianist only needs ten fingers … all the rest is for show.'

The Dodge was a monster, but she had tamed it. After Jo died in 1931 it sat in the sun and rain for two years – rusting, hosting foxes and pigeons – as she called for taxis to take them to Tanunda. But in the end that got too expensive. A neighbour told her what needed doing and she ordered the parts: filters, spark-plugs, new oil, the lot. She let Erwin off piano for a whole afternoon to help fix it. She found a 1919 service manual in the shed and lay under the truck in her husband's old overalls for hours, wiping grease from her face and hands, cursing Jo (for dying of cancer, among other things) but slowly bringing the beast back to life.

‘Did I tell you about Bartsch?' she asked her son, as she drove, pointing to a large Federation homestead surrounded by sugar gums and a series of small, dry dams, flying a ­swastika from a flagpole that was set a few degrees from the vertical.

‘His wife?'

‘Yes. They're meant to be Lutheran …' She almost laughed. ‘He stood up at church and denounced her. Called her a hound of Satan.'

‘Who was she on with?'

‘What does it matter? They're all the same. Lucky I got you out in time.'

Just. Sunday school had been part of the Compromise. As was church – Madge dutifully attending every Sunday, holding her husband's arm and making small talk over coffee and honey cakes in the vestry after service. All the time wanting to say, ‘You people make me sick.'

Grace had spent years warning her about Lutherans, about the difference between what they said and did, about their arrogance and intolerance of anything new, of anything outside the Valley.

This part of the Compromise had lasted until Erwin was about eight or nine, until he emerged from Sunday school one morning with a picture he'd drawn of Jesus-as-Luther casting thunder from his finger tips like a Silesian Zeus, striking down a crowd of hook-nosed Jews selling vacuums, fridges and stoves at the Goat Square market.

‘Who told you to draw this?' she asked, as Erwin pointed to Pastor Bartsch, standing smiling at the doorway to the vestry.

‘Let it go,' Jo said, holding her arm.

‘I will not.' She stormed over to Pastor Bartsch and held up the drawing. ‘Was this your idea?' she asked.

Bartsch put his hands behind his back and examined the picture. ‘Yes,' he replied.

‘And who are these?' She pointed to the rat-like Jews.

‘I think it's quite clear,' he said, as the congregation ­muttered approval.

Madge looked back at her husband. ‘I won't have him exposed to this,' she managed. She returned and reclaimed her son, storming out of the hall, calling, ‘We are meant to be Australians.'

‘We were here first,' someone shouted.

‘Why? Because of Wakefield – an English gentleman. You'd never see this in a Church of England,' she cried, throwing down the poster.

‘Bartsch,' she reminded her son, as they drove through a cold, autumn afternoon full of fresh, green grass and naked lambs shivering on granite-pocked hillsides, ‘is a horrible little man. A small man. Your father loved him, of course.'

Erwin looked at her, unsure what to say. Sometimes it seemed his father was the cause of every problem, past and present. And death hadn't excused him of blame.

‘This gearbox …' Madge cursed, almost kicking the clutch. ‘Why couldn't we have a car like everyone else?'

‘Dad's deliveries,' Erwin ventured.

‘A van perhaps …'

And there was more to come. The Hergert family shop. She believed her husband had made a mess of that too. When his parents gave it to him in 1926 it had been one of the most profitable stores in Tanunda. It had sold the best of everything: Laucke flour and Wieck's egg noodles, pickled cabbage, beans and turnips from the Homburg farm on Moppa Road and sauerkraut from the Nuriootpa Co-op, the best blutwurst in the valley, pickled pig in long, warm salted strips and boiled lollies from Angas Park.

But no, Jo had other ideas. The modern way was biscuits in tins, flour in packets and beans in cans. He decided to buy cheap from a warehouse in town and sell with modest mark-ups, thereby undercutting every shop in the valley. He'd get rich. People wanted reliability, longevity. They didn't want food going stale in cellars. And if there was a war (and the Germans were always at war) this is how people would buy.

‘This is the future,' he said to his wife one cold, winter's day, standing at the back door of his home, scraping old food from a plate into a bin as he listened to Erwin practise.

‘If it's not broken, don't fix it,' Madge warned him, barring his way.

‘Wouldn't you like to get rich?'

‘Why?'

‘Dad couldn't see the future, but I can. I can buy ten types of soap powder, corned beef in tins.'

‘Jo.'

‘Shaving cream and – '

‘Please don't disturb Erwin's practice again.'

Madge parked in front of the shop. She climbed down to the footpath and straightened her dress. ‘Erwin, you have the list?' she asked.

‘Coming, Mum.'

They walked into the shop and it was warm. The remnants of a fire hissed and popped in a bluestone fireplace; wurst hung from racks above the counter and barrels of fresh flour, bran and nuts lined a wall that had lost most of its plaster.

‘How are you, Madge?' a woman behind the counter asked.

‘Fine, Mrs Collins. And you?'

‘Busy.' Smiling.

Jo had made changes to his shop. He'd modernised; he'd created aisles and put down lino; he'd placed his cans and packets and tins in alphabetical order for ease of selection. Then he'd sat back and waited.

By the time he realised his mistake he was sick with bowel cancer – shit everywhere for six long months. Madge let him back in the house but warned Erwin to keep his distance. Once a bad seed always a bad seed, cancer or no cancer. That's why you had to be vigilant. Like Grace always said, ‘The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.' Well, this one will, Madge thought.

The store was closed for six months while she nursed her husband. After he was off her hands she re-opened it but it took up too much time. Some days she'd only turn over a few pounds. And for what?

So there was an auction, and the Collins picked up the Hergert family shop for next to nothing. They reversed Jo's renovations and soon had lines out the front door, producers pleading with them to stock their produce. Madge would visit, to stick her nose in, to criticise her husband's folly in front of anyone who'd listen, to buy bread and jam so fresh the syrup was still bubbling.

Madge banked the proceeds of the sale. This was Jo's way of making it up to her: doing in death what he could never do in life. The day after he was buried she gathered the last of his things in a box and put them in the shed. She took down the ‘Posen' sign from beside the front door and took it to a signwriter. ‘What will it be, missus?'

‘Killalah. Enough of that German claptrap.'

Meanwhile, Erwin handed over their list and Mrs Collins filled it, writing down the prices and sub-totals on the edge of a local paper. When she was finished she said, ‘Oh, I forgot, I have something of yours.' She went into the back room and returned with a shoebox full to overflowing with old letters.