7

Hilda sat in the orderly study, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelving stacked with boxes, books, scientific journals and various implements and artefacts, each carefully labelled with string and a stiff paper tag. Her father had retired to a neighbouring room for a ‘small glass of schnapps’. He was talking with a colleague of Herr Hagenbeck’s, the man who, several years earlier, Hagenbeck said had gone to great lengths to bring Abraham and the other Eskimos to Germany for the Völkerschauen. Earlier, Hilda, Louis, Herr Hagenbeck, his wife and the visitor, Jacobsen, had dined together at Hagenbeck’s table, a soup of beer, raisins, spices and grated bread, followed by a dish of baked pork, sauerkraut and potatoes. Hilda found the fatty meat difficult to eat, the image of the pig carcass alongside the ship in Hamburg bobbing in her mind as she chewed. She longed for the clean, white flesh of fish.

When her father had come to fetch her from her room for dinner, she asked him why he hadn’t woken her for the afternoon performance and he answered, as she guessed he might, that he thought it best that she catch up on sleep. ‘There will be plenty more shows,’ he said.

She replied, ‘I hope they’re not asked to eat in front of an audience each time. What would Mama have thought of that?’

He thought for some seconds before responding. ‘I’m afraid we are to some extent beholden to Herr Hagenbeck and his wishes, Hilda. We need his support if our journey is to be a success. And he is a good man. He cares for the people he has brought here.’

Now, Hagenbeck placed in front of Hilda a deep pile of accounts by Professor Virchow to the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte. He stood nearby, arranging books and papers on the crowded shelves, as Hilda read several of the accounts: records of the Eskimo group’s hair and eye colour; their body measurements, with a particular focus on the head and face; and notes that compared Abraham and his family with a group of ‘wild Eskimos’ from further north, who were darker skinned. She read Virchow’s claim that this last observation was in opposition to theories about dark colour being the result of temperature or the effect of light. The professor’s tidy handwriting continued for pages. It was not what Hilda had asked to see, and she was not sure why Herr Hagenbeck was showing her. Professor Virchow, it seemed to her, was exactly the sort of scientist her mother had criticised for being so focused on measurements that he missed seeing the human.

‘He is very thorough,’ Herr Hagenbeck said.

Hilda agreed. ‘But, if I am to be honest, mein Herr, his account seems to me cold. I understand he is a scientist, but these are people he is studying.’

‘I am sure he sees that. Telling the human side of the story, that is our role here at the thierpark.’ He passed her a newspaper article praising the thierpark’s Völkerschauen for providing German society with an opportunity to meet such ‘rare human specimens’.

‘And the diary?’ she asked.

Finally, he took a box labelled ‘Labrador Eskimos’ from the shelf. He opened the lid and from under a stack of letters extracted a slim volume. Abraham’s diary had been translated from Inuktitut into German by a Moravian missionary, Hagenbeck said. The showman closed the box and returned it to the shelf, pushing it to the back.

‘Abraham wished to come to Europe to pay off his and his late father’s debts,’ Hagenbeck explained. ‘And he longed to travel.’ He began to read aloud. ‘Once we have been to church, in a big community in Berlin … we have been happy until late night; yes indeed, we didn’t want to go to sleep. The Lord seemed to be with us for a long time. Even as we went through the streets we sang praises and were astonished.’ He handed the diary to Hilda and wiped his eyes, turning away.

‘Thank you,’ Hilda said, unsure what else to say. She was accustomed to her father hiding his emotions and thought it best not to indicate that she had noticed Hagenbeck’s sadness. She opened the journal and read:

Herr Hagenbeck has done much good to us: he gave us beds and a violin and music to me. Now we will travel to different cities; therefore pray for us, especially when we are in Catholic countries. We will suffer a lot from homesickness. We will go to Dresden, Paris, England, Herrnhut, Petersburg and Vienna, if it’s true what they say …

Hilda flicked ahead several pages and read quickly, skipping sections to get a sense of the whole, concerned that at any moment the record could be whisked away.

I will have faith in God here in Europe that nothing bad will come across; that even the evil people, who surround us all the time, can’t harm us … Our child Sara is ill … At 9pm we had left Hamburg, at 6am we arrived in Berlin at our house that we built ourselves … To wipe the floor of the house was nearly impossible because of all the people … immediately everything was filled with people and it was impossible to move anymore. Both our masters Schoepf and Jacobsen shouted with big voices … but most of them had no ears … So I did what I could. Taking my whip and the Greenland seal harpoon, I made myself terrible … I chased them out … Ulrike had also locked our house from the inside and plugged up the entrance so that nobody would go in, and those who wanted to look in through the windows were pushed away with a piece of wood.

Hagenbeck was quiet beside her, arranging and rearranging a stack of paperwork he had taken from a nearby shelf. Hilda felt sick. What had she and her father done bringing Bonny, Dorondera and Jurano here? She had thought they were helping. She had hoped the crowds would look upon her friends with the admiration the three had been denied in their own country and that they would be treated well. Her heart sank as she read:

7 November

Had sorrow again. Our companion, the unmarried Tobias, was beaten with a dog whip by our master, Herr Jacobsen.

Hilda heard herself gasp, and Hagenbeck looked at her. She said nothing, coughing to hide her shock and disapproval. A whip? Christel had hated cruelty above all else and insisted that it be opposed. Hilda bided her time and continued quickly, holding her breath:

If Herr Jacobsen does that twice I shall write to England as I am told. Afterwards, he was very friendly towards me so that I don’t write. Even our two wives were immediately bought silken ribbons … After this incident, Tobias was very sick.

Hilda pressed her feet hard against the floor to still her shaking legs. How could Jacobsen have done such a thing? Her upset and horror turned to anger. Had Herr Hagenbeck known of the abuse at the time? Perhaps only after it occurred. She pinched the page firmly between her trembling fingers and thumb. Had she led her friends into a terrible trap? What would her mother do if she were here?

‘So, Mädchen,’ Hagenbeck said, ‘you see he was a sensitive and gifted man. Herr Jacobsen and I were very much distressed that his time with us ended as it did. He was, of course, given a Christian burial, but we were deeply shocked to have lost him, and his family.’ He reached up onto the shelf and brought down a violin. ‘This was the instrument I bought him. I miss his tunes very much.’

Hilda couldn’t speak.

Hagenbeck continued, ‘I should go and join your father and Herr Jacobsen. As you heard over dinner, I owe our Norwegian friend a great debt for his troubles. He feels very bad that he neglected to vaccinate the group straight away. He was unwell himself at the time …’

A debt! How could he say that? Hilda thought. She wanted to go and talk to the man herself. To tell him what she thought of him for whipping Tobias, but she wanted to know more about the Eskimos’ time here and didn’t want the diary taken from her yet.

‘So, if perhaps you …’ He looked at the door.

‘May I borrow this?’ She held up the diary. ‘Just for this evening. To take to my room. I’d like to finish reading it. As you say, it is quite extraordinary to read of Abraham’s time here in his own words.’

Hagenbeck hesitated. ‘It is most precious, but yes. That is fine … As I indicated earlier, the Laps who visited wrote a little too, but I do not have copies unfortunately. Their impressions, I can inform you, were very favourable.’ He ushered her out and bade her farewell as he joined her father and Herr Jacobsen, who were talking and laughing. Hilda could not comprehend how the Norwegian could laugh after such recent tragedy.

In her room she flicked to the last page of the diary.

… little Sara stopped living in peace, with a great rash and swellings … After two days of being sick, she died in Krefeld. While she was still alive, she was brought to the hospital, where I went with her. She still had her mind, while I was there. She still prayed the song: ‘Ich bin ein kleines Kindelein’ (‘I am a little child so small’) … When I left her, she slept; from then on, she did not wake up anymore. For this we both had reason to be thankful.

Hilda was too sad to cry. She remembered her mother tending sick infants on K’gari, singing them hymns and praying for their souls at night.

A knock on her door saw her quickly compose herself as Herr Hagenbeck’s wife entered saying she was retiring to bed with a headache.

‘Sleep well,’ the woman said.

Hilda allowed half an hour before making her way back down the stairs, clasping the diary to her chest. She could hear the men talking ever more loudly and was surprised to hear her father slurring his words.

Quietly, Hilda reentered the room where Herr Hagenbeck kept the boxes of letters and photographs. She took down from the shelf the box labelled ‘Labrador Eskimos’. If Herr Hagenbeck heard her, she would say she was returning the diary. He could not object to that.

She opened the box and took out a letter addressed to a man by the name of ‘Elsner’ in Bremen. A note pinned to the letter’s top corner said the man was a Moravian who had visited Labrador but since returned to Germany. Hilda quickly began to read.

My dear teacher Elsner!

I write to you, because I’d like to tell you the following. We are greatly sad … I prayed to the Lord continuously that He might teach me, if it really was a mistake …

I often prayed to God to help me to free myself from this and to hear my sighs, because I even wasn’t able anymore to take care of my relatives … In different kind of ways we have been lured … But as I was in doubt to pay all my and my late father’s debts from kayaking, I thought (at this chance) to collect some money for discharging them …

But I remember to have wished to see Europe and some of the communities over there for a long time …

Hilda felt the room sway. We have been lured. Was that how Bonny, Dorondera and Jurano already felt? Hilda reminded herself that Bonny had revelled in the crowd’s reaction to his spear throwing. He had smiled. Laughed even.

She needed to know more, to learn whatever lessons she could, and doubted she would have the chance to be alone in this room again. She dug deeper and found lecture notes by Professor Virchow to the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory from an examination of the Eskimo group conducted at the Berlin Zoological Garden. Hilda read of the difficulty of examining one of the ‘wild’ females, Paingu, the shaman’s wife and a shaman herself, according to the notes. The woman, a mother, fell into a ‘psychic cramp’ when the professor tried to measure her with her arms outstretched. Hilda was horrified by the thought of the woman’s distress and read that the fit lasted ten minutes, confounding the professor, who wrote that he studied the Eskimos mostly ‘through their furs’. She read on:

I find the skin, in covered parts and not only among women, unusually tender, soft to the touch, fine, and with the particularly smooth texture that characterises Africans …

The professor must have managed to examine some of the women under their clothing, Hilda concluded. Perhaps just their forearms or the top of their chests, she told herself. Still, the idea of Dorondera succumbing to any such investigations against her will chilled her. She remembered the women on K’gari holding her own arms and stroking her skin when she first arrived and how she had hated it. Hilda skimmed Professor Virchow’s description of Paingu’s daughter and was relieved to read that the girl had not been present for the physical examination the adult Eskimos had endured. She scanned the report:

… the young 15-year-old girl … her thick lips are also very red, her face shows a freshness we are not accustomed to see in coloured people.

But Hilda could not shake the idea of the girl’s mother, Paingu, being so disturbed by the experience as to have a ‘fit’. What will her father say when she tells him? Hilda consoled herself that at least she was now forewarned, and that she and her father could ensure Dorondera was protected from such invasions. She found a newspaper cutting from the Magdeburger Zeitung and was surprised to read that its author was critical of the practice of ‘displaying our equals in zoos’. The writer claimed that many in the audience shared his views and that it was the scientists and the showmen who were to blame. Hilda searched for more articles or letters in the same vein but found nothing. There was, however, a copy of a speech Professor Virchow had delivered in response to the criticism. In it the professor encouraged Herr Hagenbeck to continue with his shows, claiming they were of great benefit to the scientific understanding of humankind. The professor added that German audiences had also learned much about the civilising influence of Christianity, having seen how well educated and capable Abraham and his family had become in comparison to the ‘wild’ heathen Eskimos.

A door opened and closed somewhere in the house, and Hilda stilled herself for a moment. Perhaps it was the maid going to her quarters at the back of the residence. Sinhalese music had just started in the garden, and Hilda wondered if the maid would go to sit with the performers as they played their instruments. She wished she could do the same.

She took an envelope from the bottom of the box and was deeply saddened to find inside it the Paris hospital records confirming the deaths from smallpox of Abraham, his wife and second child. Tobias and the remaining Eskimo from further north had also died.

Hilda found a final envelope, which contained two folded pages. The first was a list of three names and numbers. A note at the top read, in French: I am a worker at the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris and felt you should know the fate of three of the Eskimo group. Hilda stared at the list for some time before suddenly realising what she was looking at: the weights of the brains of Abraham, his wife and the young man, Tobias. The note said casts of the brains had also been made.

Hilda looked for a name or return address, but there was none. Her fingers shook as she removed the last item from the envelope. It was a French newspaper cutting announcing that the group of Eskimos had ended their tour and had boarded a vessel to return to their homeland.

In Queensland, Hilda had seen a fire start when the summer sun shone through a fragment of discarded glass. The intense sun burned a black-rimmed hole through a fallen eucalyptus leaf, and the dry grass that grew above the K’gari beachline was quickly alight. She had watched it burn and had been surprised how quickly the fire was beyond her control. If Bonny had not arrived to kick sand on the flames, the camp might have been destroyed.

She had planned to go to her friends tonight, in secret if need be, to congratulate them on the afternoon’s performance but could not face them now. Instead, she restored the diary to the box and placed the box back on the shelf, returning upstairs with no memory of how she arrived there.