Christine Scheiner has won this month’s Bellarine Writing Competition prize with her story ‘The Dash’.
Christine moved to the Bellarine Peninsula with her husband, two children, and various horses, cats, dogs and guinea pigs in 1998. She worked in the health insurance commission and later in retail at Horseland. She is retired and now lives a much quieter life with just her husband and dog in Barwon Heads.
THE DASH by Christine Scheiner
The grooves in the memorial brass plaque tell of her existence here on earth and I feel pieces of my heart catch as I run my fingers along the edge of the wooden bench.
It’s like all the parts of my life that mattered have seeped away into nothing, leaving an empty shell where I once used to be. I want to cling to the memory of sitting here high on the Bluff with my mother and not think of her in a box laying in the ground.
I close my eyes and trace my fingers along the etchings in the brass, dates and a name I already know, but it’s like I need to reconfirm the ending really happened.
I think of the bones and dust she will become and know this cannot be what defines a mother, but it is all that will soon be left.
Flora Rosenthal
Born Dukla, Poland
Died Barwon Heads, Australia
22/03/1928 – 14/11/2024
The brass feels warm beneath my fingers as I follow the numbers, knowing that it is the dash in between these dates that matters the most. This little dash represents all the time Flora spent in this world.
From the mid-1950s a fair amount of that time was spent in Barwon Heads, and especially around the Bluff. I know my father proposed to her here, long before the sightseeing platform was built, back in the day when the Bluff was accessed by a track most goats would hesitate to explore, and the view was taken in from a small clearing amongst the thick scrub.
In later years I spent countless hours by her side sitting on this wooden bench listening to her stories, and it was here that she told me of her terminal cancer diagnosis.
She scolded me for my tears, hugged me and laughed, telling me she should have died a thousand times over during the war. Then she asked me to help her put a picture book together of her life.
Months after her death, I still feel dismantled by loss. It feels strange to grieve until I am broken with it and my hand closes around her book. I fold open the pages and shine a light into the dash that was my mother’s life.
I want to travel across the bridge between the living and the dead and hear her voice once more. But for now, I must make do with the contents of the book.
On the first page there is an old black and white photograph of her left forearm, its youthful skin soiled by six roughly tattooed numbers and on the second page a photograph of the same forearm, older by quite a few years.
The second colour photograph shows only faint traces of the numbers partially concealed beneath a tattoo depicting a spray of forget me not flowers.
Long ago on a beautiful summer’s day, I remember touching those flowers as I sat on this very bench and asking my mother about them. Her eyes went somewhere else when she told me the numbers shut the living out and the flowers made her feel closer to the dead.
It’s a grim story written on a young woman’s body, an important detail that stays with her forever from a Polish concentration camp on to her new life in Australia.
Running my thumb over the picture of my mother playing violin on stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, I hear echoes of Mendelssohn and she looks wild and fierce, exactly as I remember her. The photo of her standing on top of the Great Wall of China, covered in snow and barely distinguishable beneath layers of clothing makes me smile, and the image of her sitting uncomfortably lop sided on a camel with the Pyramids in the background, actually makes me laugh out loud. I flick through the book and find a glimmer of sun in the shadows.
Suddenly, I realise this book was always meant for me. These moments I’ve found bring colour back into my life, and in the palm of my hand I can hold all the pieces that made Flora my mother. How she lived and loved, how she hid her scars and how she stretched that dash.
The unfurling of her history is like a careful calculation of what to reveal and what to leave unsaid. It’s a blessing that makes it a little easier to hold back my tears.
