St Kilda Blues (Charlie Berlin #3)(33)

He had built the bookcase that held her trophies and winners’ ribbons for netball and running and the javelin throw. Framed certificates of academic achievement on the wall sat above the collection of Famous Five and Secret Seven books and more recently published scholarly works on what was starting to be called the Holocaust. When she was eight, the Secret Seven books had made her yearn for shiny black court shoes to wear on adventures, and at age eleven the television and newspaper coverage of the capture of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann in Argentina and his trial and subsequent execution in Israel in 1962 had led her to ask her mother questions about her grandparents and to explain what it meant to be Jewish.

Rebecca’s parents had died in a car crash on the notorious Pretty Sally Hill outside Melbourne on a lovely Sunday afternoon just after Christmas in 1960. They were secular German Jews living in Stuttgart before the war, and Rebecca had been born there. Her father was a successful commercial photographer but the growing influence of Hitler and the Nazis had concerned him enough to make him sell his share of the business to his gentile partner. The family immigrated to Australia in 1934, settling in the country town of Ballarat. Her father made a decent living there, doing wedding photographs and studio portraits, assisted by his daughter. Rebecca attended the local Catholic school until the war came and she had joined the women’s auxiliary air force when she was old enough. The family’s religion, while not a secret, was not something they made a lot of, even though the town had a substantial Jewish community and had built a synagogue decades earlier. The rapid rise to power of the Nazis and their institutionalised anti-Semitism had made Rebecca’s father a very wary man even before the war.

The discovery that she was Jewish because her mother was had sparked something in Sarah, a need to find out more. Always a voracious reader, she’d borrowed books on the subject, and consulted with a rabbi. At sixteen she had joined a Jewish youth group to learn more about Judaism, and in December of the previous year she’d announced she was saving up to go to Israel when she turned eighteen.

Growing tension in the Middle East in early 1967 and talk of the possibility of war between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states had started discussions in her youth group about volunteers travelling to Israel. In February while Berlin fought with his bosses over the case of the three missing girls Sarah compounded his problems by announcing she had brought forward her decision about going to Israel. She carefully laid out her reasons for wanting to be a volunteer, saying it was partly as a tribute to her late grandparents and also partly a way of learning more about her Jewish heritage. She also explained she could pay her own way with part of the inheritance her grandparents had left her. In return for her parents’ permission, Sarah promised she would come back after a year abroad and do her very best to get into Medicine at Melbourne University when she finished high school.

It was totally out of the question, of course, and Sarah was too young to get a passport without parental approval, so that was that. But Sarah was her mother’s daughter and she gradually wore them down with historical precedents, logic and well-reasoned argument. They finally capitulated after Rebecca’s discovery through friends that the Australian government, at the urging of leaders of the Jewish community, had agreed to withhold permission for members of volunteer groups to leave the country for the Middle East. The plan went awry when the Arab/Israeli war was over and won in just six days. The government decided that the waiting Australian volunteers could go to Israel to assist with rebuilding and recovery. They would also temporarily replace the men and women still away serving in the armed forces. Sarah held her parents to their word and, with the danger of fighting now passed, they finally gave permission.

Both Berlin’s wristwatch and stomach told him it was well past lunchtime so he walked into the kitchen. He always cooked dinner on Sunday evenings to give Rebecca at least one night off, and last night he’d made Kai Si Ming, Sarah’s favourite – forgetting or choosing to forget that she was halfway around the world. With just the two of them for dinner there was plenty left over for lunch. Kai Si Ming was supposed to be a Chinese dish but he’d never seen anything like it in the local takeaway.

All the neighbourhood women made their own version of the dish because it was easy, cheap and filling: beef mince and cabbage and curry powder or soy sauce and spices, with a stock cube and rice and water mixed in. Berlin liked to add diced carrot, dried chilli and red capsicum when Joe next door had some to spare from his garden. Amongst the neighbours his version was considered to be quite exotic, though Peter didn’t care for it.

He filled a saucepan with the leftovers and put it on the stove over a low flame. While it warmed through, he used a paring knife to cut the twine holding the pile of newspapers together. He rifled through them, looking at the titles: Gas, Music Times, Beat, Teenybopper, Go-Set. He knew Go-Set because Sarah had brought it home several times. He was more interested in the photographs than the stories, most of which he knew would make no sense to him. If Sarah was here she could explain them to him, since it was definitely more her world than his. The missing persons folders were his world, and the things that were in them he knew he could never explain to Sarah, or to anyone else.

There was the smell of something burning and he quickly lifted the saucepan off the heat. He should have added some water, he realised. He ate his lunch straight from the pot with a spoon, leaning back against the kitchen sink. Rebecca would have been appalled. But Charlie Berlin ate whatever was on offer and a dish of partly burned mince and cabbage was still food.