The Water Diviner Page 11

  Hilton strides down to join Dawson, who hands him the binoculars and points to a spot far below on the rippling black waves curling towards the sand. A small fishing boat is approaching the beach, rowed by a single man working the oars as another man stands at the bow. Incongruously, the tall, broad-shouldered man at the front of the boat is wearing neat pants, a suit jacket and tie, and a broad-brimmed hat. In his hands he’s holding a small brown suitcase.

  Connor vaults from the bow, the beach just a few feet away. The water is deeper than he expects. Scrabbling with his bare feet to find purchase on the slippery pebbles, the waves soak into the trousers he has rolled above his knees. Attempting to keep his pants dry is an impossibility; one hand holds his boots and socks above his head, the other his suitcase. He wades through the water past the carcasses of wrecked landing craft, shattered timber crates and hollow, spent ammunition shells, feeling the cut and tug of sharp objects digging into the soles of his feet.

  Reaching the shore, Connor puts down his luggage and looks up. Looming above him is a heavily eroded cliff, pockmarked by craters where shells have blasted away great chunks of earth, and deep scars where men have gouged paths and trenches that zig and zag up to the summit. The beach isn’t much to speak of – only a couple of hundred yards long – and the cliff face is so close that Connor’s head spins as he looks up at the escarpment. He shuts his eyes, steadying himself, but the imagined sounds of war intrude – the crack of rifles and pounding of guns, bullets whizzing and whipping through the air, explosions, the soft, wet thud of targets hit, the harrowing screams of dying men. Connor shudders, opens his eyes. All is quiet save the lapping of water on the stone beach and the unmistakable sound of horses’ hooves.

  Four men on horseback in military uniform are cantering along the beach towards him. Connor notices that one of the men is wearing an Ottoman uniform. The tall man leading the charge draws his horse to a halt and dismounts, marching determinedly, if a little awkwardly, towards Connor. His high black boots, polished to a mirror-like shine, slip and sink in the wet pebbles. The man’s lips are pressed into a thin line of frustration, and his high cheekbones are flushed with anger. Without breaking stride, he snaps an order at the men who accompany him. ‘Don’t let that boat go anywhere!’

  While the men hail the fisherman, who has turned his boat and is hoisting the sail, preparing to return to Chanak, the tall man advances on Connor.

  ‘Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Hilton. Who in the blue blazes are you?’

  Without turning to look at him, Connor addresses the soldier.

  ‘This is where they landed?’

  Hilton is incredulous. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘. . . Sitting bloody ducks. What idiot would land an army here?’

  ‘I asked you who you are, sir!’

  ‘Joshua Connor. From Rainbow – hundred miles southwest of Swan Hill.’

  ‘Surely they told you this was a restricted zone?’

  ‘Someone may have mentioned it.’ Connor shakes his head, trying to digest the Herculean task that faced his sons when they landed here in 1915. ‘Back home the papers kept telling us we were winning.’

  ‘Mr Connor, is it? I’m at a loss. You’ve turned up here unannounced. For what? A tour? A pilgrimage? We are trying to work here, putting names to ten thousand dead men.’

  Connor looks up to the gullies in the escarpment above them, where tiny figures work amongst a growing field of white crosses. ‘Good. Because I’m only looking for three.’

  He can see Hilton’s attitude soften immediately as the extent of Connor’s loss registers on the soldier’s face. ‘Your sons?’

  Connor nods.

  ‘There are eight square miles of collapsed trenches, bomb craters and barbed wire around here,’ Hilton explains gently, ‘and more than enough unexploded shells to blow us all to high heaven. You simply cannot stay.’

  From his coat pocket Connor draws out his map of the peninsula. He jabs his finger at the creased paper.

  ‘Yep, I know it’s tricky. But I know where my sons were killed. Here at Lone Pine. Around 7 August.’

  Hilton’s reply is firm and clear. ‘You don’t understand what you’re asking. Those battles in early August were some of the most intense and bloodiest of the whole campaign. Finding your sons amongst the thousands of bodies at Lone Pine is a fool’s errand.’ Hilton draws himself up. ‘Rest assured, Mr Connor, I aim to identify every man out there, including your sons. But you cannot stay. Sergeant! Escort Mr Connor back to his boat!’

  ‘Don’t bother.’ Connor folds up his map angrily, shoving it back into his pocket. ‘Thanks for all your help.’

  As Connor turns to leave, the Turkish soldier steps towards him, holding something in an outstretched hand. With a shock Connor realises it is the photograph of his boys. The Turk is staring at it.

  ‘Your sons,’ the man murmurs in accented English, lifting his gaze to meet Connor’s. ‘It fell from your pocket.’

  This man is the enemy and everything about him sets Connor’s teeth on edge. The despised Ottoman uniform, the flourish of his elaborately coiffed moustache, his dusky complexion and eyes as black as pitch. That he has in his hand the photograph of Connor’s sons – the sons who were cut down by Turkish bullets in this cursed terrain – only makes it worse. Connor snatches the photo wordlessly from the man’s hand and storms down the beach to where the fisherman waits.

  Dusk descends upon the Aegean as gently as a sheet of silk. It’s one of the things about this land that Hilton has come to appreciate. He sits on a camp chair, hands intertwined behind his head, legs outstretched and resting upon a log, and watches the sky as it glows an implausibly peachy pink. The distant lofty purple peaks on the island of Imbros float on a mauve sea. Everything is still, impossibly calm. Not so much as a puff of wind.

  From behind him drifts the clatter and chatter of the soldiers settling in for the night, tending fires and heating army rations. He hears footsteps, the crunch of heavy boots on gravel. Hilton looks over his shoulder at Tucker.

  ‘Sir, something you might want to see.’

  Hilton reluctantly gets to his feet and follows the sergeant over to the cliff’s edge. He looks through a pair of binoculars at the beach below. A small fire flickers on the pebbly beach. Sitting on his haunches, lifting the lid on a billy, is the pigheaded Australian father, Connor.

  Hilton is astonished. He is caught halfway between anger and admiration – there is no faulting the resolve of the stubborn fool.

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘Want me to arrest him, sir?’

  ‘And then what? No. Take some food down to him. And a blanket.’ Hilton turns and walks back to the camp. ‘We’ll sort him out tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Water sprays in curtains as a group of naked soldiers splashes about in the sea. Warm, briny droplets bead on forearms and foreheads tanned as brown as boot leather, in stark contrast to their fish belly–pale torsos. Greeves bobs about on his back like a barrel, his corpulent midriff providing an easy target for Tucker and Dawson, who skim flat skipping stones across the waves at his roly-poly profile.

  ‘Incoming!’ Tucker launches a missile, flattened and burnished by the tides. It hits its target, glancing off Greeves’ gut.

  ‘Steady on, fellas!’ the New Zealand lieutenant protests, on his feet now, arms flapping impotently at his sides. The temptation’s too great. Greeves is bombarded with a barrage of pebbles, shells and dried seaweed from shore, most hitting the mark.

  Hasan sits some way back from the water’s edge, coolly observing the Anzac soldiers gambolling in the waves. He has half an eye on his sergeant, Jemal, who is absorbed in his work at the base of the cliff, gently fanning a small stack of glowing embers. Rummaging in his mess kit, Jemal takes out a brass cylinder ornately engraved with foliate designs and unscrews it. Hidden within is a hinged, detachable handle that he removes and sets aside. He fills the bottom half of the cylinder with glossy, chocolate-brown coffee bean
s and screws the lid back on before attaching the handle to the lid. Jemal rotates the handle vigorously, nodding his head when he deems the job done and opening the grinder to appraise its contents. He holds the open bottom half of the cylinder to his nose, smiling with satisfaction. Meticulously, he measures the correct amount of coffee into a tiny copper pot that has a small amount of water in it from his canteen, along with a teaspoon of precious sugar. He rests it on the embers until the coffee begins to froth – a thick, bubbly foam – then pours it into a delicate, gilded coffee cup. Jemal inspects the coffee critically and raises his bushy eyebrows, satisfied with the product of his labour. Holding the fragile cup in his mitt-like hand, he treads apprehensively across the beach towards where Hasan sits.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’

  Hasan raises his head. ‘Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.’

  Jemal’s eyes are fixed on the coffee, careful not to spill a drop into the saucer, as he hands it to his major.

  ‘Health be on your head, effendi.’

  Hasan responds with the customary reply, ‘Health be on your hands.’

  He takes a small sip of the piping-hot drink, savouring the bitter sweetness as it slips down his throat. Hasan sighs, shuts his eyes for a moment.

  Further up the beach, a solitary figure stands, shin deep in the shallows, trousers rolled above his knees. Hasan and Jemal watch Connor as he bends and picks up a handful of pebbles and sand, running it through his hands.

  ‘Are all Australians this stubborn?’

  Hasan looks up, following Jemal’s line of sight.

  ‘It is a matter of national pride for them. You would fit in well there.’

  Behind them they hear the crunch of hooves on the beach. The two Turks turn to watch Hilton dismounting his bay mare, leading her over to where the men sit.

  ‘Not swimming?’

  Hasan smiles wryly. ‘We have bathhouses for that.’

  ‘Sergeant!’ Hilton hails his second-in-command.

  Tucker bounds up the beach, stark naked, whippet thin and ungainly. He draws to a halt in front of Hilton.

  ‘Let’s split the men. I’ll take the Nek, you take half a dozen chaps up to Quinn’s Post.’

  Tucker snaps to attention with a textbook click of his waterlogged bare heels, hand raised to his forehead. ‘Sir!’

  ‘Don’t salute me like that, Sergeant.’

  Grabbing a towel, Tucker covers himself and saunters down the beach to rouse the troops.

  ‘Gordon, Mac, Les, Larry and Len! It’s not Bondi! Rattle your dags. You’re doing Spooks Plateau!’

  Hasan looks again at Connor, who is now crouched by the water, chin covered with a thick lather, holding a small mirror in one hand and a razor in the other. ‘What are you doing with your farmer?’

  Following his gaze, Hilton winces. ‘He stays here – out of our hair till the supply ship comes.’

  ‘Maybe we could help him.’

  ‘You know what the chances are of finding his sons.’

  ‘We have the day they were killed, I know the area.’

  ‘We both know it – half my regiment is still there, but I couldn’t tell you whose bones are whose. Why tip everything on its ear for one farmer from the Mallee who can’t stay put?’

  ‘Because he is the only father who has come looking.’

  Hilton screws up his face, exasperated. They both know that the major is right; where they choose to dig today is of little consequence – it will make no difference in the scheme of things. Hilton relents, shouting out to Tucker and the motley gang of soldiers now drying themselves on the beach. ‘Sergeant! Change of plan.’

  A spent cartridge sits warming in the palm of Connor’s hand, one of the infinite number that wash back and forth in the gentle waves that lap the shore. Hilton stands before him, his fists clamped testily on his hips.

  ‘There’s a supply ship back to Constantinople in two days; you may stay with us till then.’ Hilton has capitulated, but his tone of voice makes it clear he’s none too happy about it.

  ‘Two days isn’t enough,’ protests Connor.

  ‘Two days, two years; whatever it is you are looking for, you won’t find it.’

  ‘I can find things that other people can’t.’ Connor replies.

  ‘I hope you can see underground?’

  ‘Sometimes. I find water, I’m good at that.’

  Hilton turns and begins walking back down the beach towards his men. ‘This isn’t water . . . Two days.’

  Connor looks up at the escarpment, a glimmer of hope in his eyes.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he murmurs. ‘We’ll see.’

  A line of mounted soldiers snakes along a goat trail, up a gully between a scatter of scrawny bushes and mean grasses. The horses’ hooves turn over clods of dry dirt, exposing lead bullets, the odd tin can and flecks of bone. At the head of the column is Hilton, who rides beside Major Hasan. Jemal rides alone behind them, tugging on the reins and kicking to keep his horse from straying or stopping to gnaw on grass roots.

  A string of ten Anzacs follows. Tucker leads with Thomas and Connor riding behind him and Dawson trailing at the rear. As they reach the crest of a ridge they wind past a ghastly monument to the calamity of the campaign – a mound of hundreds of human skulls meticulously stacked like apples on a fruit stand. Beside the pile are neat rows of pelvises, scapulas, femurs, radii and ulnas; a medical student’s dream. Protruding from the hideous collection is a rough wooden sign in Arabic.

  Thomas turns to Connor. ‘Don’t worry, mate. Those are Abdul’s. Not ours.’

  Connor’s gaze is firmly fixed on Hasan and Hilton. He is offended by the relaxed way in which they converse. As far as he knows, the Turks are the enemy.

  Tucker doesn’t take his eyes off the despised Ottoman officer for a moment. The first and last time he shook hands with a Turk was here at Gallipoli, at Johnston’s Jolly. The day – 24 May 1915 – lives in him like an inoperable piece of shrapnel, impossible to dig out. Five days before, the Turks launched a disastrous counterattack on the Anzac line. Turkish bodies were piled up in no-man’s land, so high the Turks had to stop advancing. His .303 was so hot from firing he had to wrap his hand in an undershirt to slide the bolt or remove the clip. The next day both sides agreed on a truce to recover the dead, who had been lying amongst the wild thyme and myrtle for nearly a month, swelling, rotting and liquefying in the spring sun.

  The day of the armistice was uncommonly grey and overcast. The whistle sounded at 7.00 am and men on both sides tentatively poked their heads over the sandbags. Before long the land between their lines was teeming with officers and gangs of soldiers spiriting away the dead on stretchers, their faces covered in a vain attempt to mask the stench. Tucker was cutting the ID discs off the corpses and recording their names before they were dropped into shallow graves. Plenty he could put a face to when he read the name etched on the tag.

  The day was eerily quiet. It was the only time he recalls the peninsula being silent for any length of time. When he could not sleep in his dugout he used to play a game, timing the interval between gunshots, mortars or artillery. Any sort of ammo fired anywhere along the line – as long as you could hear it – counted. In a perversity peculiar to war he would lie awake hoping for a shot, giving no thought to where the bullet might finish up. Or in whom.

  On the day of the truce the officers were tramping up and down the line trying to stop any fraternising with the enemy. Tucker still managed to swap a tin of jam for a green plum, using hand signals. He was so delighted by the fruit that he forgot himself for a moment and shook the young smiling Turk by the hand. While their hands were locked the Turk turned and started spitting Turkish at one of the Australian medics beside him.

  Tucker and his mates had always been a bit dubious about John James, who spoke a bit of Turkish and wore an Ottoman medal on his chest like some morbid souvenir. The Turks took offence at this too, crying bloody murder and accusing him of looting from a dead hero.

  James was indign
ant, explaining in broken Turkish that he had earned the Sultan’s Award for fighting shoulder- to-shoulder with the Turks against the Russians a few years earlier. Watching James and the Turks shaking hands and kissing cheeks made Tucker realise what an imprecise gesture a handshake is, and he vowed never to bother with it again. When 4.00 pm came that day, they all clambered back into their trenches to start killing one another again.

  Connor breaks into Tucker’s reverie. ‘Who is the Turk? What’s he doing here?’

  Tucker turns and speaks under his breath. ‘That’s “Hasan the Assassin” – saw us land, saw us off. The dog wiped out half my battalion, including my brother. He would’ve killed your sons, for sure.’

  In an instant Connor has spurred his horse with a swift kick to the flanks. Just as the horse takes off, Thomas reaches out and grabs a fistful of its bridle, and reins both horse and rider in.

  He has obviously caught the gist of the conversation. ‘Whoa there, you two. Where are you going? We’re all best mates now. I get to serve the Major breakfast every morning. I always add a bit of Anzac allspice.’ By way of illustration, Thomas hacks up a spit ball and fires it onto the ground beside Connor.

  Tucker watches Connor settle but can see the Australian father is emotionally charged. The enemy now has a face, a target for the years of pent up anger and grief. Like the jam tin grenades that Tucker and his brother used to hurl at the Turkish line, Connor was set to explode without warning.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The loose chain of horsemen winds around the rim of an enormous mine crater and up the adjacent ridge.

  ‘Wouldn’t have wanted to be standing here when that went off,’ Tucker calls over his shoulder to no one in particular.

  At the summit the party reins to a halt near a fledgling Turkish pine. The scraggly tree stands four foot high with its thirsty limbs hanging limply, most of its needles lying about the base of its trunk.