Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

Enid Durance! Sally thought and was resistant to the title. Her two big boys, said Naomi when Sally had finished reading. I imagine now she’ll combine her farm with ours. Quite a fancy piece of land it will make. And she—being younger than the old man—well, she’ll get it. And her “two big boys” too, I suppose.

Do we want any of it? asked Sally.

No. We left it behind, didn’t we?

Damn her though, said Sally. Damn her for writing a nice letter.

The new situation put their mother a degree further from them now. She was growing dimmer and less plaintive out there in the space where the dead floated and wavered in memory. Yet she had the capacity always to come back to them sharper than a knife’s edge and keener than the apparent world.

In the meantime they couldn’t say too much that was snide against the Presbyterian seductress—honest and unfussed and philosophic as she’d proven to be. The size of the campaign—and the scale of stupidity at whose altar the colonel was but one regional bishop—had shown them the size of the world’s sins. Mrs. Sorley seemed minor in that regard. She was crowded out by the sequence of amazing, cruel things, by that compounded element in which time and horror occupied the same line and time’s arrow was horror’s arrow too. And all else in life was hazy as infancy.

Naomi said suddenly, You could have cooked him all the meals in the world and stayed at home and still he would probably have married her!

The thought of her father and Mrs. Sorley lying together in the bed where they had finished their mother was best not to be entertained.

Well, it is done now, Naomi said.

Freud had her stylish and knowing air that was above mere fashion. She could also elegantly pass on the sort of gossip about Melbourne in 1914 which passed for knowledge with most of them. Melbourne was so despised in New South Wales and Sydney that contempt sent its way by Sydneysiders was itself a sort of awe—a kind of applause and a suspicion of undue sophistication. And Freud seemed to stand for the Melbournianism which people from elsewhere condemned but envied.

When they found her in the mess at dawn, however, all that was gone. She sat hunched with a blanket across her shoulders. Leo and Sally came in together from their night duty and paused when they saw her.

Are you tired? asked Leo.

Leo was a member of the blessed for whom sleep remedied all fret. Freud raised a tear-muddied face. A blue-black brow and blood-engorged eye and bloodied and swollen lip were obvious. Sally and Leo swooped in with consolation—hugging and assuring her and asking her what had happened. But she howled and they couldn’t get her to say anything. Other women arrived—Naomi too. Freud still answered no inquiry. It was Naomi who went to get brandy for her and who made her drink it. Freud choked on it and then vomited on the floor. At this manifestation they realized there were too many of them offering too much help. Some stepped back and hovered by the tent flap and others cleaned the mess with towels and fetched a bucket of water and ammonia. Freud gasped and composed herself, turning inward as Leo tended to her lip with a swab, saying, Sorry, Freud, whenever Freud flinched. Naomi bent towards Freud’s blanketed shoulder and Freud reached her hand across her body and—shivering with grief—took Naomi’s wrist.

It was to the few nearest that she confided she’d been attacked. She’d been attacked not only in the face but afterwards by penetration. It could not have been a patient. The man was strong and angry in the predawn—it had happened after she left her ward and while it was still dark. She had been punched and had fallen. From behind, her blouse was dragged up and her undergarments down. She was penetrated violently while the man talked and hissed. Yes, an Australian.

One of the orderlies then, it was decided amongst the women on the basis that Freud had said he was healthy and his body had a strong odor but not that of the Dardanelles. At the memory of his smell she was ill again.

How the news of her having suffered this ultimate ordeal got around was not known. Naomi and the others who heard Freud speak swore it was too important and unhinging a matter to pass on. But the details emerged like smoke from a flame and entered the air under the force of their viciousness. It was obvious straight off that if the colonel so beloved of orderlies should declare Freud was lying—or that if the orderly’s crime were lessened or dismissed by him—then Freud would be brought to madness.

Naomi, Honora, and Sally went to speak first to their too-timid Australian matron. They found her in the shadow of the postoperative ward. They were pleased to see that this was not a matter on which she had to call on the colonel to approve her sense of outrage. She said it couldn’t be tolerated for a second. She wanted to interview Freud. En masse—in probably too many sisterly numbers—they accompanied Freud to the matron’s tent. She balked at the idea of going inside, so Naomi offered to accompany her. Naomi was somehow up to her gravity.

They decided they needed to call as the first male ally the ward doctor—the doctor who had shown himself more than a cipher when he spoke low to the colonel about chlorinated lime. After a while those not on duty and still waiting outside the matron’s tent saw the ward doctor arrive, glum-faced, for the obligatory inspection. This would be the worst aspect of it, Sally believed—that so soon after being mishandled and possessed by the form of man, the victim must face a magistrate of the body who inspected with a purely clinical interest the same flesh that had been attacked with raw, savage force.

When he emerged he would not answer any questions. The details—I’m afraid—are for the colonel, he told them.

They were frazzled by the idea that the colonel was the sole possible punisher of the crime.

Naomi escorted the shattered Freud back to their tent and sat by her camp cot grasping her right hand. Provosts arrived at eight o’clock. An officer and a sergeant-major. Freud was sleeping—the doctor had given her barbital. But the officer told Naomi that she must be awoken. Like the ward doctor they were not unkind. If there was a small tinge of hostility, it seemed to Naomi to be related to embarrassment. This was an alleged crime of the kind they thought they’d left behind on the streets of cities.

They stood back from the cot. Naomi was permitted to rouse Freud. Karla, she whispered. These gentlemen…

The gentlemen moved in. The officer dragged a stool into place and sat at a distance from Freud’s thunderous dark eyes. They seemed—the clear one, the bloodshot—engorged with imminent tears. But Freud refused to let them flow in front of these men. She would await a private hour.

The officer asked her, would she know the man who attacked her if she saw him again?

Yes, she said after a wary consideration. Yes, she could tell him again. By some light from the ward she glimpsed aspects of him as he first hit her. Then—at the end—he stood over her for a second and she turned her shoulders and saw him. The rest of the time, nothing but earth.

When they asked if she could tell them about him, Naomi hoped Freud would keep silent. What if Freud surrendered these toxic details and nothing was done? Or the man was proclaimed not to exist on Lemnos? The risks seemed gigantic at that second.

He was young, said Freud. She rushed to get it over. Maybe as young as eighteen. He had a broad face. What people call moon-faced. He had not washed lately.

She half-gagged on this remembered odor.

His hair seemed to be fair, she concluded.

The officer made notes and then looked up wanly at her.