Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Here in sunny Melbourne, Galina saw happy faces and carefree children; there was freedom and opportunity in this country, but most of all there was an absence of fear. Yet she was all too aware that she, a Russian Jew, was formed by Russia — the Russia of her lifetime and the earlier Russia of her mother and grandparents. She might well be surrounded by freedom and delight, but she carried her past with her. It was as if she were inhabiting two lives simultaneously, and much of the time they were not an easy fit.

  To know her past was to go some way to knowing her, so perhaps it would help if she were to share it with some Australians. Andrew perhaps. Take him back as a guest through the Brezhnev years to Khrushchev and her own birth, back to Stalin, the war, the terror, the revolution, back to the beginning. This, she might say to him, this is how I came to be who I am. She considered this only for a moment before letting it go. She suspected that to speak in Australia of her past was as impossible as it had been in the Soviet Union.

  7

  LANDMARKS OF A LIFE

  A few days after their trip to Victoria Market, Andrew telephoned Galina — not to arrange a visit to his studio as she had expected, but to invite her to his parents’ place for dinner.

  ‘It was my mother’s suggestion,’ he said.

  Inviting strangers to your home and feeding them was a Russian gesture, not an Australian one, and Galina wondered why the mother would invite her. What could she possibly want?

  ‘She thought you might welcome a home-cooked meal.’

  As so often happened in this new life, Galina didn’t know what she wanted to do about this dinner invitation, nor what she should do. Exasperated with herself — why did everything have to be so complicated? — she decided to take the invitation at face value.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Tell your mother I am happy to accept.’

  Andrew proposed a number of dates. Galina chose an evening a couple of weeks away to give herself time to prepare — not that it helped, because when the day finally arrived she was more rattled than she would have thought possible. It was a simple dinner, she told herself, and while it was at an Australian home with strangers, she had managed far more difficult situations in the past. She needed to calm down.

  Andrew said he’d pick her up early to show her some of Melbourne — ‘My Melbourne,’ was the way he expressed it — and at exactly five o’clock he arrived. She had bought a new dress for the occasion. It was a colourful Asian design, light and pretty, and typical of what Australian girls were wearing this summer; she had teamed the dress with a pair of red sandals. (She had tried the thongs so popular here, but the bit between the toes might have been a tree trunk, for all the discomfort it caused.) As soon as she opened the door, she realised she would need a jacket; the sun was still bright but the wind had swung from north to south and it was quite chilly. Too bad about the summery casual Australian look she was aiming for. She had given up on her hair, having first tried it loose (it reminded her of a giant dandelion), then half of it tied back (like a giant dandelion half blown away), then a plait (too Russian), and a bun (too severe), and in the end bundled it loosely in a clasp at her neck. She grabbed her coat from the hook — not what she had planned at all — and locked the door.

  Andrew, stiff and silent during the walk to the car, started talking before she had belted herself into the seat. He talked as if he couldn’t stop. Today, less than an hour ago, a lone gunman had marched into the central post office and killed eight people.

  ‘Here, in Melbourne, in 1987, for God’s sake. We’re not fighting a war, we don’t have ethnic disputes. Yet eight people are dead. The gunman, too. Jumped from a window. It’s a massacre. Eight innocent people. Random targets.’

  His words were boiling over. It was hard to make sense of them.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, turning up the volume on the radio.

  There was mayhem in central Melbourne. Witnesses to the tragedy spoke in staccato gasps, a relay of shock, horror, and incomprehension.

  ‘We’re turning into America,’ Andrew said, manoeuvring the car for a right-hand turn into Hoddle Street. His words seemed squeezed through a too-small throat. ‘And just a few months ago a young guy, younger than me, pulled out a gun and killed several people, just up the road from here.’ Andrew jerked his head to the left.

  ‘What motivates someone to act like this? Such senseless violence. Although does any violence make sense?’ He paused as a driver cut in front of them. ‘What makes these guys think it’s okay to kill? Kill randomly. What is it? A sense of power? Uncontrollable anger? Insanity?’

  At which point, Galina had to interrupt. ‘Do not use the insane excuse.’

  She spoke more sharply than she intended, and immediately saw his confusion, his hurt, too — his was such a transparent face. Quickly, she explained how in Soviet Russia labelling someone insane was a method of silencing and removing dissenters. ‘There was a time,’ she shrugged, ‘I expect it still continues, when mental asylums in the Soviet Union were full of dissidents, all of them as sane as you and I.’

  ‘All right then, not the insane excuse —’

  But she hadn’t finished. ‘Tyrants from Caligula to Hitler, and Stalin too, are often described as insane. When you label someone mad, you release them from responsibility. But these men know exactly what they are doing. Brutality, it seems to me, is a distressingly common human attribute.’

  It was a conversation stopper, and whatever Andrew had planned to say was left stranded. The radio station was still covering the massacre; more onlookers were being interviewed, and specialist commentators consulted. After a while, Andrew turned the volume down.

  ‘What makes a sane person,’ he paused, ‘or rather what makes a sane man — it’s always a man — think he has a right to kill a whole bunch of strangers who’ve never done him any harm?’

  Andrew seemed so upset that Galina wondered if he’d known someone killed at the post office. She was about to ask when he spoke again.

  ‘Do these appalling acts, these lone-men massacres, happen in your country?’

  The irony did not escape her: she might wait weeks for someone to ask her about Russia, and when finally a question is pitched her way, it lands in territory she’d prefer not to enter. She was framing an answer that would shift the conversation to more neutral ground, some sort of disinfected version of Soviet killings, when he turned towards her and she saw a man struggling to understand what was to him utterly incomprehensible. She wanted to comfort him, to lay a gentle hand upon his arm; instead, she clasped her hands together and attempted an explanation.

  ‘Our massacres are different,’ she began. ‘Our massacres tend to be committed by our political leaders, not rogue gunmen. And the deaths are likely to be in the thousands, even millions.’

  She was aware of a skirmishing of emotions: shame because these atrocities happened in her country, anger and resentment that she and all ordinary Soviet citizens had been so thoroughly duped, and bewilderment at the warped morality that would permit fellow Russians to act in so barbaric a manner. She was filtering information, wondering what details would best bring the topic to a close, when Andrew solved the issue for her.

  ‘That’s my old school,’ he said, pointing to a huge place on a hill.

  It looked like an English castle, replete with turrets and battlements. As if he had guessed her thoughts, he added, ‘It’s known as “The castle on the hill”.’

  The place looked extremely grand. ‘Your parents must be very rich.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. We’re what we in Australia call middle class.’ He paused before adding, ‘It’s a government high school for boys.’

  She gazed up at Andrew’s school, and felt a twist of envy — nothing to do with the grandeur of the place, it was its mere presence. She couldn’t pass a school and say ‘That’s the school I attended’; she couldn’t identify an apartment buil
ding and say ‘That’s where I grew up’. She couldn’t point to the granite embankments of the Neva where she watched the ships, or the Tauride Palace where she went for the children’s concerts. Without her own landmarks, her Soviet self, still so dominant in her, became impossible to share with others, and what they saw was an amputated version of who she believed herself to be. There were times when she felt a stranger even to herself.

  Leningrad landmarks, experiences and friends explained who she was and how she had come to be this way. Forced to live detached from all that had formed her, she had tried so many ways of melding her Russian experience of self with the Australian one she was struggling to construct. After a while, she suspected her Russian connections were somehow sabotaging the nascent Australian ones. So a few months ago, like a pumice applied to calluses on the feet, she had rubbed and scraped at her Russianness. She rationed her time with other emigrés, she shed most of her Soviet clothes, she restyled her Soviet hair, she applied less make-up to her Soviet face, she removed throatiness from her Australian speech and installed articles into her English sentences. She shed, she rubbed, she scoured until she was sure that if she were seen walking in the street or shopping at the supermarket, she would be taken for an Australian.

  All of it had been futile. A year after arriving in Australia, and nearly two years since leaving Leningrad, she was coming to believe that home was to identity as blood was to the body. Yes, she had her own home at the saddlery, a domicile, a physical sanctuary; but home in the sense of identity, home in the sense of belonging, still eluded her here in Australia. She felt adrift in some never-never land, caught between the familiar yet no longer possible, and the new and far-from-secure.

  How different it would be if her mother were with her and they could, with their shared past, tread this slippery sprawling present together. And again she found herself wondering, as she had so many times before, whether the loss of her mother was shaping all the other losses. She wasn’t missing Leningrad, she was missing the city she had lived in with her mother. She wasn’t homesick for Russian, she was homesick for conversation with her mother. She wasn’t pining for Russian food, she was pining for meals with her mother. She wasn’t suffering the absence of landmarks, she was suffering the absence of her mother. She wasn’t struggling in foreign Australia, she was struggling with foreign grief.

  She glanced at Andrew and wondered if he would ever be the sort of friend with whom she could discuss these issues. In different circumstances she would have allowed herself to hope he was, but now she did not grant herself that kind of licence. It would, she believed, save her from future disappointment.

  He had made a U-turn, and it seemed to her that he was heading back the way they had just come. After a couple more kilometres and a few more turns, he was parking alongside the Botanic Gardens.

  ‘Here’s my favourite place in Melbourne.’ He was blushing. ‘Excluding my favourite mosaic places.’

  She had visited these gardens with Zara and Arnold. So different from gardens at home, there were flowers in both winter and summer, and such a variety and lushness of growth that she wondered if there was something other than heat to make the Australian air so much more productive than the Russian variety. Zara and Arnold had favoured the huge multicoloured camellia section, and the azaleas, too, whose blooms were so abundant they glazed the entire bush with colour. Andrew, in contrast, headed straight to the oak lawn.

  There were oak trees at home, both in the city and the nearby countryside, and several times she and her mother had made an autumn visit to Tsarskoe Selo to see the colours. These oaks at the Botanic Gardens were huge by comparison — an introduced species, according to Andrew, but they clearly thrived in the Australian climate. She should take lessons from oaks.

  ‘This is my favourite tree,’ he said, stopping by one of them. It was not the largest, nor the most shapely. ‘Look.’ He was pointing at the exposed roots. A hollow about the size of a man’s fist had formed, and it was filled with rainwater. ‘I’ve seen birds drinking here,’ he said.

  Not sure how to respond, she chose silence. He, too, remained silent, and a minute or two later led her back to a path, around the lake and up a steep, green slope on the far side of the gardens.

  He guided her to a seat high on the hill. ‘This is the Hopetoun lawn,’ he said. He liked it because, being so far from the café and kiosk, it attracted fewer people. ‘Yet from this spot you can see over the lake and across the gardens, all the way to the suburbs beyond. On a clear day, you can even see the mountains at Melbourne’s eastern perimeter.’

  Apart from an elderly couple seated on one of the other park benches, and a few of the glamorous Australian magpies foraging in the grass, they had the area to themselves. Andrew rolled a cigarette and lit up, while she, acutely aware of the evening ahead, took the opportunity to ask about his parents.

  He did not look at her as he spoke, rather gazed out over the gardens. She had noticed that he seemed to prefer a point in the middle distance when he talked.

  He began with his father, a businessman. ‘His name’s Leonard, and he owns a company that manufactures library supplies: metal drawers for catalogue cards, shelves for books, storage units for tape cassettes, trays for documents, display cases, dividers for the shelves.’ Andrew shrugged. ‘Pretty much everything for the modern library, except the books and documents.’

  In all the time Galina had spent in libraries, she’d never given a thought to library supplies. So many jobs that are rarely considered: the removal of smells from animal hides, cleaning dust and dirt from tram tracks, and, closer to home, drawing designs on sewing patterns. She could create a children’s book — yes, that was an idea — called ‘Special Jobs’, or ‘What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?’. Cinema-screen cleaners and ice-cream churners, gem polishers and street poets, there was no shortage of contenders.

  ‘In truth,’ Andrew continued, ‘my father would prefer to write books than house them.’ Andrew now turned towards her and, with lowered voice, said, ‘My father has an artistic temperament.’

  ‘So why did he not become a writer? What happened?’

  ‘His own background happened. My grandfather in particular.’ Andrew gave a wry smile and returned his gaze to the lake. ‘When my father revealed his ambition to be a writer — actually, a poet, which was even worse — my grandfather said the only money to be made in books was in publishing them, selling them, or storing them, and certainly not in writing them. And even though my father left Perth and his family while still a young man, a good many of my grandfather’s beliefs travelled with him.’ Andrew paused, and in the silence a flush filled his face. ‘My father capitulated to his own father. He’s not a fighter, although he did put up a tremendous battle when I told him I wanted to be a mosaicist. For a while he turned into his own dad.’

  Mindful of the passing time, Galina asked, ‘And your mother? What does she do?’

  ‘My mother, Sylvie, had the brains to do anything. But in her family, girls, particularly pretty girls, didn’t pursue a career.’ He sighed. ‘She’s a housewife.’

  ‘No other job?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘She was working in the Myer department store’ — Galina’s favourite shop! — ‘when she met my father. She married at nineteen. That’s what girls did in the 1950s.’

  ‘Then you came along.’ But as soon as she spoke, she realised this could not be the case. Andrew was twenty-seven, a year older than she was, which gave him a 1960 birth.

  ‘I was their final attempt after several miscarriages,’ Andrew said. He was about to say more when he checked his watch. ‘If we’re going to walk the circuit of the gardens, we should start now.’ He smiled. ‘We mustn’t be late. My mother is a domestic queen; she’s the domestic queen. Right now, she’ll be putting the final touches to the culinary counterpart of a collection of Old Masters.’

  At that precise moment, Sylvie
Morrow was in the act of breaking and entering a derelict house in the next street to her own. The dinner preparations were complete, Andrew and his new girlfriend were not due for another hour and a half, and, most crucially, this might be her last chance. She’d had a hunch about this house from the moment it went up for sale. And even if her hunch were nothing other than a strong desire to add to her letter collection, it didn’t matter. Hunch or hope, she had to investigate.

  Affixed to the rickety fence was a placard, WHELAN THE WRECKER IS HERE. Sylvie had noticed it that morning when driving home with the shopping. There was as yet no demolition equipment on site, but she’d been given due warning. The gate was half-open and wedged tight in a tangle of rubble and grass; with a quick glance up and down the street, she slipped in.

  The once-beautiful garden was in ruins. How sad old Mrs Payne would be. Not that Sylvie had known her, in this neighbourhood people kept to themselves, but she had nodded to her a few times and complimented her on the garden. It had been one of the district’s best, with an exuberant array of bulbs and annuals, a raised circular bed of roses in the middle of the lawn, and mature camellias, hydrangeas and rhododendrons lining the fences. Daphne bushes and gardenias had been planted close to the front gate, and when Sylvie was passing, she would pause to take in the season’s perfume.

  All that was now gone. Brambles and vines had invaded, sticky sprawling webs clasped the bushes like hairnets, leaves drooped with dust and thirst. It was fortunate she didn’t share Leonard’s spider phobia, Sylvie thought, as she picked her way through the tangle towards the front door. The garden was so out of control, she doubted she could be seen from the street; but even if she were, no one would guess she was about to break in. Leonard wouldn’t believe her capable of doing anything out of the ordinary, much less something illegal, while Andrew saw her exclusively as over-protective mother and devoted wife. As for anyone else, she was Sylvie Morrow, wife of Leonard Morrow and mother of Andrew, a good resident of this good neighbourhood. Respectability: it was a perfect alibi.