Free The Fighter by Arnold Zable

returned tosilence. The children, back in their bedrooms, can hear their father pacing the passage and the living room. He is weeping. But the next morning he is back at work. He must work. He can only cope while he is working.
    The children are fostered out to strangers. Henry and Leon are allowed to stay together. They learn the art of adaptation: to regulations and communal dining halls, bunk beds and dormitories; to the restless tossing and sighs of other children, and lights turned on and off at stipulated hours.
    They adjust to temporary friendships. They chat with cooks and cleaners. They get used to the smell of bleach and formaldehyde, and of breakfasts prepared in industrial kitchens.
    They await their father’s Sunday visits. They stand by the gate and run to greet him when he appears in the driveway. They spend the afternoon together, and learn how to cast him from their mind as soon as he leaves them.
    Mother is discharged. The children are returned, and the family is reunited. For a while all is well. It can be weeks. Months. Up to a year. The voices are dormant, but ever-present. They are embedded in the walls, lurking behind the plaster. They are in the mantelpieces and skirting boards, and in the cold grates of disused fireplaces. Waiting, with infinite patience.
    The children learn to read the signs: the creases deepening at the corners of her eyes, her voice rising a pitch higher before slipping into silence. She is a quiet woman, but she becomes quieter still, like a breeze subsiding into an unnerving stillness. Her eyes become distant, glazed over. Her entire being is in freefall.
    She moves in and out of her distress until, finally, she is fullypossessed. She lashes out. The children cower under the kitchen table. Their father and mother are locked in battle. Crockery smashes; slivers of glass skate across the linoleum and come to rest in dark corners.
    Again, a police van and an ambulance draw up. She is being led out. Again, the children watch from the doorway. Again, their father stands in the passage, weeping. It is the one indulgence he allows himself. Then it is over. Again, he loses himself in work.
    He works late into the night, rises before dawn and makes his way to the Lygon Street tram stop. He greets those he passes with feigned cheerfulness. The tram takes him twenty minutes south to the city. He alights at Flinders Lane, spends the day in the factory and returns at nightfall to the front bedroom that doubles as a tailor’s workroom. He is tamed by the routine. His anguish is tempered by the familiar, and by weariness, a shield from unwanted memories.
    Again, Leon and Henry are farmed out to homes for the troubled and orphaned. They are returned to the Frances Barkman House for Jewish children—a home run by Jewish Welfare. Months later, they are moved to the home of an Anglican priest who fosters children from distressed families. Leon and Henry attend church on Sundays and sit in the front pew with the priest’s wife as he delivers sermons from the pulpit.
    They have one advantage: the other’s presence. The twins are a unit. Their mutual company tempers their sense of abandonment. They protect each other from isolation. Through the incessant shifts, and abrupt changes, their bond remains the one constant.
    As they grow older there is no longer a need to send them to strangers. Leon and Henry, and their older brother Sol, are strong enough to prise apart their warring parents. They join their father in deciding when to call the police or an ambulance. When their mother is put away, the children cook and clean and keep the house in order.
    They visit her on Sundays. They make their way by train and bus; the family does not own a car. Over the years they have come to know all the asylums—Royal Park, Larundel, Kew, and distant Sunbury, an hour by train from the city. These names evoke unease. They conjure up houses of the damned, brick-walled enclaves of misery and mystery, where people