Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

The road beyond the town ended above a bay. They gathered their bags and their bathing costumes—borrowed from the Canadians—and accompanied Dankworth and Shaw down a pathway over which sheltering trees cast shade. So they came to a long white building with a tiled roof and a disused-looking open-air café to one side of it. The bathing party milled inside while Demetrios bought tickets from an old man in a glass booth and—in a heavy atmosphere of sulphur from the baths—feverishly distributed them while pointing to the doors for men and women. Shaw apologized for the smell. I believe, he said, it’s not your normal baths. Demetrios told me it’s about smearing on mud. Some Greek saint used to do it and it cured his gammy leg or some such. I suppose it all adds up to an experience, anyhow.

An elderly woman in a scarf, with gentle, hooded eyes, smiled at the women and—holding a stack of aged but clean towels—led them into the women’s baths. They were half blinded by the miasma of hot sulphur. The foreyard of the baths seemed to be dominated not by a water pool but by two pools of gently stewing mud. The old lady mimed rubbing the mud on her body and—when the women looked mystified—smeared some on her arm and then traversed the room to a small pool above which was placed a tap and its handle. She turned on the tap and rinsed her mud-streaked arm under steaming mineral water. Then she left—satisfied that all was now clear.

There was a debate about whether they should ignore the chance of this sacred mud bath. But Carradine said that, having been brought so far by the courteous officers, a few of them ought at least to have a go. A further conference developed on the damage the sulphurous mud might do to the bathing costumes they’d borrowed from the Canadians. But Naomi pointed out that they could rinse the mud out in the surf below. Freud settled it. Still in her shift—not having changed into a bathing costume at all—she stepped forward to one of the mud pools and got to her knees. Testing it for temperature, she then lowered both her hands into the viscid muck and scooped it up and daubed it across her cheeks and forehead. Slipping off the strings of her shift, she loaded it on her shoulders and—when the bodice of the shift sank to her waist and hips—plastered her breasts. She worked fixedly. There was no cure in what she was doing.

Naomi understood at once this attempt at self-obliteration. She ran up, pulled Karla Freud upright, and held her by the shoulders, receiving broad smears of mud on her own costume. She helped Freud away and across the room to the water pool and sat her down by the tap and washed her thoroughly with a towel. Naomi left the face till last. She murmured reassurances all the time. She was telling Freud, You mustn’t blot yourself out. He is the one to be blotted out.

As a sort of duty the other women coated a few of their extremities with the mud so that they could report to the men that they had done it.

They could hear that next door Dankworth and Shaw were asking each other raucous questions and answering with barks of laughter. A mud fight had obviously developed. Since the women felt they should not leave their room until the men left theirs, Carradine had time to tell them that there had been such an improvement in her husband that he’d been to London with a theatre party. They had worn their proper uniforms. And then Sally found herself announcing as a marvel that she and Naomi had a stepmother.

He was just waiting for his daughters to get out of the way, suggested Leonora.

She’s a strict Presbyterian, Sally explained. She’s made our old man a Presbyterian as well.

But that won’t kill him, said Carradine.

I can’t imagine anyone being willing to marry my old man, said Honora. Now that he’s old and bitter. Just as well my poor mother’s still alive.

They were relieved in the end to clean themselves off and change and climb the few steps out of the baths. Dankworth and Shaw emerged ruddy. Somehow they had had a wonderful time in the fog of sulphur. What a place to bring you! said Shaw. You can get mud anywhere you like. But we brought you all this way as if it’s a treat!

This is holy mud, Demetrios reminded him.

The women exaggerated the delight of the experience. In the outdoor café, a dense coffee was served with pastry full of honey, and cakes with fruit at their center and their dough teased out into strands. All this revived the day. The chatter became hectic, and Freud—holding Naomi’s hand across the table—took trouble to keep up with it and occasionally contributed a smile. But she did not seem certain about whether it belonged at the particular point she bestowed it.

Sally saw Shaw wince as he unwisely crossed his legs. She leaned towards him.

How long were you there? On Gallipoli?

Three months or so. Hard work, positioning the guns.

Was it terrible? she dared to ask him.

Well, he said, it was hard achieving elevation for the guns. They allowed only thirty percent elevation. And we just had to try to haul them up the ravines to level ground. That was the worst of it.

He was determined to make it a problem of terrain. He wished to abstract from the blood. She did not dare push him any further on the matter.

Did you happen to know a man named Captain Hoyle? Naomi asked—still holding Freud’s wrist across the table.

Shaw’s eyes tried to measure how much grief the name might carry for her.

No, she said, he’s not a relative. Nor anything else. But I went riding to the pyramids with him once.

Captain Hoyle fell on the first day, he said. Just after we landed.

It shocked me at the time—he left his watch to me. I didn’t know what that meant. I knew him socially but that was all. The watch puzzled me and upset me at the time.

As she spoke she stroked Freud’s wrist.

Shaw had become solemn. Solemnity didn’t sit easily on him.

Instantaneous, I promise you, he said. There was a lot of “instantaneous” that first day.

They sang all the way back to Mudros. They were exhilarated—even Freud—by wildflowers, the reaches of the Aegean, the mountains of Thrace. And the holy, sulphurous mud was forever part of their comic repertoire. On the final ascent to the hospital Sally saw distantly the military stockade and men shuffling across a reach of gravel to collect a meal of what she hoped was bitter bread.

On Monday morning the colonel and both matrons came to fetch Freud from her place at the mess table. The colonel said he wished to invite her to what he called in their hearing “a parley” in his office. Naomi—given the lopsidedness of numbers between the authorities and Freud, the single victim—had risen, expecting an invitation. But the matron-in-chief said with a confident measure of scorn that Staff Nurse Durance could sit again. Sally’s suspicion was that in some way they were taking Freud onto their own ground to make her prey again.

Only those still there in the mess tent at eleven o’clock that morning saw Freud come back with a mute face and utterly dry eyes. Sally was not there. According to the chanciness of rosters she had been placed on day duty. So it was to only a few of her fellows that Freud announced they had posted her to Alexandria. But there has to be a trial, one of the nurses said. Freud’s face knotted and melted then into some ageless and unredacted mask of rage.

There will be no trial, she told them. They were all in agreement on that. They say the boy was too easily persuaded by his mates. So he’s been sent—you won’t believe it—to Gallipoli. And it’s considered good enough for me to be sent to Alexandria. The orderlies return to their ways, and the monster and I are removed.

She reflected on the inequity. Her face was almost abstracted.