Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  ‘Don’t ask,’ Mrs Lipschitz said. ‘I couldn’t sleep last night.’

  ‘She was thinking all night about Willhaus,’ Mr Lipschitz said. ‘Obersturmführer Willhaus was the commandant of the Janovska Camp, Lvov. He did live there with his wife and daughter.’

  ‘I did hear about him,’ Edek said. ‘He did like to stand on his balcony with his wife and his daughter and shoot at the prisoners. It was a bit of fun for them.’ The Company went very quiet. ‘Lvov is maybe three-hundred-fifty miles from Lodz,’ Edek said to Lola, who had been watching Edek play. Lola wasn’t sure why Edek thought she needed the exact geographical location of the shootings.

  ‘Sometimes Willhaus would order someone to throw three- and four-year-old children in the air while he did shoot at them,’ Mr Lipschitz said. ‘When he did shoot a child, Willhaus’s daughter, who was nine years old, would clap her hands and cry out, “Do it again, Papa.”’ Mrs Lipschitz started to cry.

  ‘Have a chocolate,’ Edek said to her. ‘The ones with a prune in the middle are very good.’

  ‘In 1943, on Hitler’s birthday, Obersturmführer Willhaus did count off fifty-four prisoners and did shoot them himself,’ Mrs Lipschitz said. ‘Hitler was fifty-four that day.’

  Lola was sure that Willhaus was depraved.

  ‘I think the journalist accusing me meant decadent,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘I may be decadent, but I’m not depraved. I try to look after myself. I don’t eat much meat. I prefer fish. I don’t drink milk or eat a lot of starchy foods.’

  Lola was going to ask him why he didn’t drink milk, but she decided against it.

  ‘I believe in that adage, you are what you eat,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘If you eat an enormous amount of potatoes, you end up looking like a potato.’

  ‘I don’t eat a lot of potatoes,’ Lola said.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about you,’ Mick Jagger said, looking surprised.

  ‘I eat a lot of chocolate,’ Lola said. ‘I should look flat and rectangular. But I do look more like a potato.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ he said.

  ‘I am fat,’ said Lola.

  ‘You’re very pretty,’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lola.

  That was nice of him, Lola thought. He probably wasn’t even decadent, let alone depraved.

  Lola wanted to move the conversation well away from food or body size or shape.

  ‘What made you leave the London School of Economics?’ she said.

  Mick Jagger’s tutor at the London School of Economics had described him as ‘A highly promising, intelligent pupil’. Mick Jagger shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I suppose I was just drawn into being an entertainer,’ he said.

  Lola thought ‘entertainer’ was an odd word for him to use to describe himself. Rock star, musician, singer would have been more appropriate words to use.

  ‘I like entertaining,’ he said. ‘It helps me, as a person, to get rid of my ego.’

  How could he or anyone else separate themselves from their ego, Lola wondered. Unlike toes or knees, egos were not easy to locate.

  ‘If I get rid of the ego on stage, then the problem ceases to exist when I leave the stage. I no longer have the need to prove myself.’

  Mick Jagger’s tutor had said that he was welcome to return to the London School of Economics at any time. Lola didn’t think Mick Jagger would be taking up his offer. ‘He would certainly have graduated if he had stayed,’ the tutor had added.

  Lola had not graduated from her high school, a high school for gifted children. She had failed the final year. Well, she hadn’t actually failed, failed – she hadn’t sat for two of the compulsory exams. She had gone to see the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho instead. And then been shocked to see her exam number missing from the published list of graduating students.

  Edek didn’t say much about Lola failing to finish high school, except for mentioning, again, that she would have been a better lawyer than Perry Mason. Renia had said nothing at all. All year Renia’s sole focus had been on the fact that Lola was twenty pounds heavier than Renia thought she should be. At the beginning of the year, Renia had enrolled Lola in a slimming program where a thick vibrating rubber belt was strapped around her hips while an electric current jiggled the fat around. After eight weeks, the vibrating rubber belt had failed to remove even half a pound from Lola’s hips. Halfway through that final year of high school, Renia had announced, as she packed Lola’s pyjamas and a dressing-gown, that she was putting her in hospital for a week. Lola spent a week in the Royal Melbourne Hospital on a 500-calorie-a-day diet. At every meal, the menu would have no butter, no oil, no cheese, no toast, no jam, no sauce neatly handwritten across the top. Lola was also allowed no visitors.

  Lola couldn’t remember how she got through those seven days. She had no memory of eating anything, no memory of reading or talking on the phone. She had no memory of showering or brushing her teeth or walking or talking to anyone. She had no visitors. She couldn’t remember either Edek or Renia visiting her.

  What she could remember was the humiliation she felt when she went back to school. Apparently the school had been told that Lola had been in hospital, but no one knew why. Lola whispered to anyone who asked her what had happened that she had had a throat operation and couldn’t speak. At home, even though it was unnecessary, Lola kept up the charade. She hardly spoke. Renia didn’t notice – they weren’t a family who chatted much, anyway.

  Lola could also remember eating two family-size blocks of Cadbury’s chocolate the day after she got out of hospital. She had lost seven pounds in the week she’d been in hospital. Those seven pounds didn’t remain lost for long. They found their way back to Lola’s hips and thighs as though they’d never been away.

  A recurring nightmare of having to go back to high school and pass those exams would haunt Lola for years. She would have decades of dreams in which she was back at school and in a big mess. But she didn’t yet know this. She didn’t yet know she would spend years and years in analysis trying to figure out, among other things, why she went to see Psycho instead of sitting for her exam. She was sixty-two when she woke up one morning and realised she was too old to go back to high school.

  The phone rang in Mick Jagger’s apartment. ‘Can you excuse me for a moment?’ he said, and got up and walked to the phone. He had a very ordinary brisk walk. There was no evidence of sexually charged gyrations in his pelvic area. He didn’t half-skip, as he sometimes did on stage. He just walked. He answered the phone. ‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Not great. I didn’t get much sleep last night. The session didn’t finish till early this morning. It didn’t go well.’

  Lola knew that Mick Jagger had been brought up a Catholic, but he sounded so Jewish. That list of what was wrong was very Jewish. Asking any Jew how they were inevitably resulted in a series of grievances. Yiddish phrasebooks never included ‘I’m excellent’ or ‘I’m very good’ as an answer to the question, ‘How are you?’

  In most Jews, merely being asked that question provoked both an anxiety and an opportunity to complain. ‘Nish-koshe’, ‘not too bad’, and ‘a-zoy’, ‘so-so’, as well as ‘s’ken alemol zayn erger’, ‘it could always be worse’ or ‘s’ken alemol zayn beser’, ‘it could always be better’ were considered positive replies. The responses were always accompanied by a pained facial expression, a weary shrug or the wringing of hands.

  Lola used to love the list of complaints that came out when any of her parents’ friends were asked how they were. ‘My children are giving me a heartache.’ ‘I have a pain in my head.’ ‘My Harry is killing me. He won’t study.’ ‘My husband works too hard. My own feet are swollen.’ ‘How should I feel?’ These were not atypical answers.

  When Lola’s school friends’ parents in Australia were asked how they were, they would inevitably reply, ‘Very well, thank you.’ What did that tell you, Lola thought? Nothing. You had no idea whether they were very well, or on the verge of death. If you said how are yo
u to a Jew, you usually learned something about them. Renia’s friend Mrs Littman, when asked how she was, mostly had the same reply. ‘What Yitzhak wants from me every night, dear God, don’t ask.’

  Nobody ever asked.

  Lola liked Mrs Littman. She was blond and busty and wore tight tops and even tighter skirts. On card nights, Mrs Littman always passed Lola a slice of cake, or a chocolate wafer, when Renia wasn’t looking. For years, every time Lola saw Mrs Littman, she wondered whether Yitzhak was still wanting whatever it was he wanted every night.

  ‘No, it was really bad, man,’ Mick Jagger was saying on the phone. ‘The session was a mess.’ He looked very bothered. Lola was drawn to people who were bothered, people who talked about what was wrong. People who were worried. She thought that being cheerful, too much of the time, was unnatural.

  She was also drawn to anguish. She could detect anguish at a distance. From the other end of the house, from the other side of the street, possibly even from a block or two away. She could spot anguish even if it came in the disguise of a smile or was hidden behind a grin.

  A few days ago, she had been walking in Carnaby Street with Cat Stevens. They were on their way to Cat Stevens’ manager’s office. There was, Lola felt, a small hint of anguish waiting to emerge in Cat Stevens.

  Cat Stevens already had two smash hits with ‘I Love My Dog’ and ‘Matthew and Son’, and was about to have a third hit with ‘I’m Gonna Get Me a Gun’. He was eighteen, almost two years younger than Lola.

  Carnaby Street was awash with bright colours and mini miniskirts. Lola had told the readers of Rock-Out that young women and girls were wearing fluorescent pink, yellow and green mini-dresses with matching shoes. They also wore silver, gold and bronze eye make-up and had earrings and brooches made out of old belt buckles, table-tennis balls, old necklaces and even plaited shoelaces. Some of the skirts and dresses were so short they barely reached the wearer’s thighs. Lola saw several young women with bloomers that matched their dresses. Now that the weather was warmer, girls were also decorating their bare knees with glued-on pieces of jewellery or artificial flowers.

  This was definitely not the year to have fat knees, Lola thought. She had been contemplating seeing a Harley Street specialist who guaranteed a minimum weight loss of four pounds a week. His weight-loss program consisted of daily hormone injections and a diet of five hundred calories a day. Lola wasn’t sure she could afford to have herself injected and starved. It was bound to be expensive.

  Cat Stevens knew these streets well. He’d grown up in the area. He lived above the Moulin Rouge, the restaurant his Greek father and Swedish mother owned. He seemed much older than his years. He had a thoughtfulness and an introspection you didn’t usually see in eighteen-year-olds. It wasn’t quite anguish, but it looked as though it could maybe head in that direction later.

  Lola liked Cat Stevens. He had a straightforward, yet quirky seriousness about him.

  Lola asked him if he got on well with his mother. She didn’t know why she asked him that question. She wasn’t sure if she knew how to tell whether she was getting on well with her mother or not. How could you tell? She had left home when she was eighteen, but she used to speak to her mother three or four times a week and visit her at least once or twice a week. Was that getting on well? She and Renia didn’t argue. Maybe that was getting on well.

  Renia had cried for over a week after Lola had moved out, Edek had told her. Lola had felt bothered. But she didn’t think that Renia was crying because Renia was missing her. She thought Renia’s crying had more to do with no longer having Lola there. Lola knew that there was a distinction between these two things, she just found it hard to pinpoint exactly what that distinction was.

  ‘Do I get on well with my mother?’ Cat Stevens said. ‘I like both my parents very much. I get on well with them, but I haven’t always. If you get on well with them in the beginning, maybe you won’t get on so well with them later on.’ Lola thought that was probably a shaky principle to operate on. She thought getting on well in the beginning sounded more promising, as it could possibly give you a backlog of goodwill when things started to go wrong.

  She wasn’t sure when things started to go wrong between her and Renia and Edek. She wasn’t even sure if things were wrong. When Edek spoke about her as a baby, he always said what a beautiful baby she was. But as Lola got older, there didn’t seem to be a lot of praise or admiration coming from either of them.

  They were horrified when at fifteen she decided she was beatnik. She dyed her hair black and found the palest, whitest face make-up she could. Already looking ghostly, she practised and perfected a suitably sombre expression for a serious beatnik.

  ‘My parents got divorced when I was eight,’ Cat Stevens said.

  ‘Really?’ said Lola. She didn’t know many people whose parents were divorced. Maybe divorce was less common in Australia. It was certainly less common among Jews. Maybe there was already too much loss in Jewish genes to be able to willingly part with another person.

  ‘I sometimes wish my parents would get divorced,’ Lola said to Cat Stevens. ‘They never disagree about anything. They never argue or contradict each other. Well, my father never contradicts my mother. I might be able to get a second opinion about something, anything at all, if they were divorced.’

  ‘A second opinion about what?’ said Cat Stevens.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lola said. ‘It would be good, occasionally, just to get another view. About anything. About me being fat.’

  ‘You’re okay,’ Cat Stevens said. ‘It’s probably your thyroid.’ How did Cat Stevens know about thyroid glands, Lola wondered.

  ‘My mother had my thyroid tested when I was twelve,’ Lola said. ‘It was fine.’

  There was a loneliness about Cat Stevens, despite his jaunty black hat and round, wire-rimmed, dark glasses. In less than a year’s time, he would be hospitalised for months with tuberculosis. That hospitalisation and the yearlong convalescence would change his life. He would become vegetarian, take up meditation, write very introspective songs, read about different religions and question every aspect of his life.

  ‘Do you have a lot of friends?’ Lola said to him.

  ‘I don’t have any really close friends,’ he said. ‘There are people I meet and talk to. But close friends, no, I don’t have any.’

  Lola wondered if Cat Stevens was lonely. She herself didn’t feel lonely. She wouldn’t feel her loneliness for years. She would wait until she was living with a man who told her he loved her every morning and every night and, often, at several other times during the day, before she could feel her loneliness. Once she felt that loneliness, it would feel limitless, immense and immeasurable.

  ‘I don’t go to clubs,’ Cat Stevens said. ‘I don’t like them much, really. I like home life, anyway. I’m a funny sort of person. Even as a little kid I could never mix with people. I was different from the other kids.’

  ‘How has fame affected you then?’ Lola asked.

  ‘I don’t really notice it,’ he said. ‘As I said, I was a queer kid and people pointed and stared and laughed anyway. The other day I suddenly thought, Gee how many people know my name? It was a gas thought.’

  Lola couldn’t understand what could have been so queer about Cat Stevens and why people would have pointed and stared and laughed. He was often described as being nervous. Maybe that’s what they were pointing at. Journalists had written descriptions of him tapping his knees or hugging cushions or shredding napkins. Lola didn’t think any of that was weird.

  Lola mentioned the knee-tapping she’d read about and asked Cat Stevens if he was a nervous person. ‘People keep telling me I’ve got nerves,’ he said. ‘I did tap my knees all the time and twitch a bit, but I’ve lost that habit. I don’t think I’m nervous.’

  She asked him why he changed his name. She knew he hadn’t been born Cat Stevens. ‘Can you imagine people asking for a record by Steven Demetre Georgiou?’ he said.

  ‘Probably not
,’ Lola said. ‘Do you like Cat Stevens?’

  ‘I’m getting to know him more and more every day,’ he said. ‘I’m looking forward to growing old. There’s so much you don’t understand when you’re young. Getting older brings wisdom, and wisdom is a beautiful thing.’

  Lola had never thought about acquiring wisdom or getting old. It never occurred to her to think about the future. The future seemed nebulous. How did you know you were going to have one, anyway? ‘Do you think about the future a lot?’ she said to Cat Stevens.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I want to build a house in Greece one day.’ Lola thought that not many eighteen-year-olds would be thinking about building a house.

  ‘Being half-Swedish and half-Greek and living in England, you sort of get to wondering where your home is,’ he said. ‘I went to Greece two years ago, and I’ve been dreaming about going back ever since. It’s a great land. I’m going to build a house there one day made of stone. I like the idea of stone. I don’t know why. I’ll have a melon vine, a stream, a tape recorder, a piano, a guitar and a flute, and live there forever with my woman.’

  Lola thought this seemed to be a much better ambition than her own plans to lose weight. She wondered if Cat Stevens was referring to a particular woman he planned to live with in Greece.

  ‘Are you thinking about getting married soon?’ Lola said.

  ‘I never think about marriage. Yet I want to love someone desperately,’ he said.

  For a long time after she had left him, Lola thought about Cat Stevens’ need to love someone desperately. She had never thought about loving someone desperately. There was an intensity to the word ‘desperately’ that Lola had never coupled with love.

  Lola walked along Carnaby Street. She knew every store in the street. Carnaby Street was in the Soho area, where many managers, publicists and song publishers had their offices.

  It was also the epicentre of the teenage-fashion industry. Lola didn’t even try to shop for clothes there. She knew that nothing would fit her.