by Miriam Sved
And a pair of hands descending into the memory to pull her away. Her mother. Probably Eszter was right to do it. Grown-up Illy, knowing what she does of her father’s thresholds, can see that she might have been saved by the hands; probably András was about to launch her onto the hard ground. But this memory that has risen to the surface is full of bitterness for what feels like a lost opportunity. She can almost convince herself that it might have been the time, the crack in her father’s hostility that she could have wriggled through to stay there in the warm bowl of his lap, his arms coming down around her. A tipping point? She might have had her own touchstone to compare with the András Voigt her mother writes about: a real person rather than a semi-occluded spectre, vast but nebulous.
It’s ridiculous to be dwelling on an incident that she has just remembered from decades ago, but she can’t help it, she is choked up with anger at her mother: controller of access and of information. Eszter is as unrecognisable in the notebook as András, if not more so. The mother Illy knows is full of mind games and manipulations, covered in spikes, an agenda behind every word and a judgement behind every agenda. This younger one she is reading about, who seems lost and vulnerable, is at once tantalising and infuriating, and the trace of this other Eszter makes the mother Illy knows, the one she has, more jagged and inexplicable.
She still has the notebook open in front of her, half reading while she thinks about her mother, and she is momentarily shocked out of her trajectory when the professor starts spouting anti-Semitism. It is jolting and strange. Her father was unrepentantly racist about anyone who didn’t look like him – one of those old-school bigots for whom dark-skinned was adequate short-hand for everything from stupidity to kleptomania – but to Illy’s knowledge he was always a vocal supporter of Israel and in that context had seemed proud to be Jewish, although he wasn’t religious.
Even this, András’s anti-Semitism, feeds her anger at her mother. How could she have married a man who hated her own people? The question she would like to pose to both Eszters, past and present, is: Why? Although the specific content of the question is slippery and difficult to hold on to. Why did you marry that man? Why did I never get this version of my mother? Why did you not protect me? Except when she did: hands descending to lift Illy off her father’s lap (perhaps Eszter deliberately sabotaged Illy’s relationship with him?). Her mother, always taking the wrong action. Or the right action at the wrong time.
Illy forces herself to keep reading. Her mother and Pali Kalmar in the train carriage, their not-quite coming together. And Eszter giving him the problem with the dots and shapes. So Pali didn’t steal the work; she gave it to him. An ill-considered gift that he appears to have picked up and run with, big implications for something called combinatorics spinning out behind him. He must have grown famous off the back of Eszter and Ildiko’s idea. Did he ever acknowledge them for it? Maybe that was why Eszter left without him.
And then the professor’s letter arrives, and she wants to yell at her young mother: Don’t do it. Don’t even think about it. This pure capitulation. Get out, but not like that, not with him.
She puts the book down again. She is being ridiculous: seeing everything through a layer of regressive teenage spite. She can’t blame her twenty-year-old mother for the terms of her escape from the Holocaust. But the pall of resentment hovers, a gathering precipitation of her hurt. Because the more she trawls for understanding, for clues that might help her solve the problem of Eszter, the more confused and disorientated she becomes. She thought this book might help her grasp her family in a new way, comprehend the patterns that shaped her. Instead it is doing the opposite. She has finally lost her father and now she feels that she has never known her mother. She feels … the only word she can conjure is orphaned.
Absurd. Illy rubs her face. The adolescent anguish she has worked herself into has to stop; she is much too old to be an orphan, with a living, geriatric mother to take care of and a grown-up daughter upstairs.
Zoe. The thought of her daughter comes to her fresh. The fight she has been having with Zoe. Does her daughter see her like this: as someone needlessly blocking her path? Is Illy needlessly blocking her path? She has become conservative in her middle age; there is no denying it. The word conservative meant one thing in her youth – the fascists and bully boys of ’68. It sits inside her in a different way now. She is just trying to protect her daughter; to keep her safe in some established order. To conserve.
But is it worth conserving this order? What has it done for the rest of them? For her mother? And for Illy herself?
She finds herself back at that rampart she reached in the car with Zoe’s girlfriend: pulled up short by the great close structure of her marriage. The same arguments rise up: she is not in a bad marriage; it is nothing like her parents’ marriage. But that blood-borne itch is there as well, some tremulous doubt making its way through Illy’s nervous system. She thinks suddenly of the way Russell dropped her in the shit with her mother yesterday. Did he even notice? Where is he now? At the office? With another woman? Again, the possibility of Russell having an affair presents itself like a thought experiment, and this time there is more emotional charge in it. But the kickback is not so much from Russell cheating on her. It’s that he would get away with it. This is the crux: her husband, who according to all the standard matrixes is a perfectly nice guy, does whatever he wants and gets away with it. He always has.
An upsurge of heat in her chest. What does she want? She isn’t sure, but the question propels her from the kitchen table to the stairs and up to her daughter’s room. It has become an ellipsis in her house these last few months, a space she passes quickly in the hallway, no longer knowing what it looks like inside.
Now she stands at the closed door for a couple of seconds before knocking and opening it a crack.
Zoe is on the bed, reading. She looks up, her face neutral.
‘Can I come in?’
Zoe nods.
Illy closes the door behind her and looks around. Photos everywhere, Zoe’s photos. Illy hovers awkwardly for a few seconds, then goes to the desk and sits. There are two large black-and-white photos framed above her head, a study in contrast. The first is from the women’s circus, two of Zoe’s friends doing that superman trick where one lies on her back with her legs in the air and the other balances on her upturned feet. Pure concentration on the flyer’s face, her body taut. The other picture is of a moving crowd – it looks almost like a stampede, photographed from the front with a slightly fish-eyed perspective, many fists stretched upwards and bodies moving together, a woman close to the camera reaching forward as though there is a barrier there, something they are all about to push through. Illy sits at the desk and looks at these images next to each other, and is surprised by a moment of lucid pride washing through her: to be able to capture both the poise of individual concentrated energy and the explosive chaos of a pack, this is impressive. What was the last thing that she, Illy, worked on in her own art? She had been obsessed with sticking domestic objects together in strange combinations, the layering of scavenged treasures, but there is a blank when she tries to conjure any specific work. She has always put such stake in Josh’s achievements, which are remote from anything Illy wanted to do with her own life, while up here her daughter has been making herself into an artist. The notebook has realigned her allegiance somehow, and with this shifting of perspective she is able to turn to Zoe on the bed and say, ‘I had an interesting conversation with your friend Sal yesterday, did she tell you?’
Zoe sits up straighter, still holding her book. ‘She did.’
‘I liked her a lot. She’s quite different, isn’t she? I mean, in a good way.’
Zoe smiles – her face is transformed when she smiles, from a somewhat austere landscape into an open and sunny one – and puts her book face down on the bed. ‘She wouldn’t tell me what you two talked about,’ she says. ‘She said I should ask you.’
‘Oh, I made a complete fool of myself,’ Illy says without hesitation. ‘I actually started crying.’
‘What?’ Zoe crosses her legs and leans forward. ‘Mum, what about? What happened?’
‘Oh, it’s hard to explain. Partly about your grandfather, I suppose. Perhaps I’ve been more affected by his death than I expected to be.’ She looks back up at the photos and goes on. ‘And something else. I’ve been reading a kind of journal that Nagymama gave me. Or more like an extended letter. She wrote it when she was young, before the war. I haven’t finished it yet, but when I do I think you should read it. I think I’ll translate it into English.’ Knowing only now, as she says it, that this is what she should do; perhaps this is why Eszter gave her the book in the first place. ‘It might explain some things about our family. Or not at all.’ She laughs, feeling free and unconstrained: it is like a drug, this trick that the notebook has worked on her. The drug of perspective.
‘I’m sorry for how I reacted last week,’ she says, as though saying this is nothing at all, as easy as good morning or pass the salt. ‘When you told me about you and Sal and your arrangement. I don’t want you to think that I don’t understand what you’re trying to do.’ She stops here, unsure how far she wants to go: unusual for her to have entered such a conversation without a plan, only feeling her way along. She still has a tremulous unease about the lifestyle Zoe told her about: even about the word lifestyle, which implies a rejection of certain tenets of regular old life that Illy is not used to thinking about as contingent. The normal ordering of the world, which is there for a reason, isn’t it? The unease is partly in the fact that she has apparently not considered this question before: the one on which so many of her choices are based. She is not sure, now, if Zoe’s rejection of what has seemed right and normal is the disturbing thing, or if it is the existence of these concepts of right and normal, and how much they have informed everything. Perhaps this too is the notebook, unstitching the naturalness of right and normal. The mess and confusion of her mother’s younger self showing her that the welter of human relations was always the main force, that what Zoe and her friends are trying to do is not causing the mess but only living inside it.
All of this is too fleeting and tenuous to be able to say, but she wants to say something, to use this unexpected connection between herself and her daughter as a bridge across the gulf. So she says, ‘Is there anything I can do to help with the rally today?’
Three hours later the boot of Illy’s car is full of an impressive amount of homemade signs and placards, and the car itself contains Sal in the front seat and Zoe squeezed in with three other young women in the back. One of them – Tali, small and blue-haired with an alarmingly flat navel that is not so much clothed as framed by a delicate net top – is sitting on the lap of another one of them (the androgynous one – LJ? RJ?) and is having a heated debate with Zoe, who has started volunteering for the Labor Party as part of the campaign to oust John Howard.
‘You’re being naive,’ Tali is saying. ‘They’re all the same. They’ll say one thing before the election, but as soon as they get a bit of power it’ll go out the window. That’s why we have to bring the whole thing down, not just change parties.’
Illy thinks: But then who will we replace the whole thing with, and won’t it be another party? She turns onto Anzac Parade.
‘At least Rudd will get us out of Iraq,’ Zoe says. ‘And he’s talking about closing the detention centres. Isn’t it our responsibility to work within the system if it’ll help end some suffering?’
Tali snorts. ‘Listen to you: work within the system. It’s the system that’s the problem. Capitalism will always trample the ones at the bottom, it’s built into a system that privileges capital above people. If you get inside it, you’ll end up just like all those people out there.’ In the rear-view mirror Illy sees the girl make a sweeping gesture towards the window. ‘All the people who are just going about their lives, going to work and going shopping and buy buy buying to distract themselves from everything that’s happening, pretending we’re not destroying the environment and killing children with drones and locking innocent people up in camps in the middle of the ocean.’
She is genuine, that one, you can hear it in her voice, which goes high-pitched and quavery at the end.
The others are silent for a minute, and Illy sneaks a look into the back seat. Zoe has reached up and is holding Tali’s hand.
She is very aware of Sal in the seat beside her, who has been quiet since they got in the car, looking out the window and occasionally glancing at Illy. Now Sal says, ‘You could try Cleveland Street. I don’t think you’ll get far along Oxford.’
They are travelling towards the city, hoping to get close to Hyde Park for Illy to drop off Zoe and her friends for the rally at Town Hall. They are running late. As Russell predicted, in this week of visiting international dignitaries traffic is a nightmare.
She gives Sal a small smile and turns onto Cleveland. At least the rain is holding off for now. It has been drizzling on and off all morning.
They manage a decent crawl along the first stretch of Cleveland Street, but once they reach Surry Hills the cars are barely moving, and traffic diversions keep sending them into a circling warren of side streets. After a few abortive attempts to get further north someone in the back says, ‘We may as well get out and walk from here.’
The traffic surges forward a few metres and stops again. ‘I’ll find somewhere to pull over,’ Illy says.
Even this far out of the CBD there seems to be a steady stream of people outpacing the traffic, weaving between cars with proprietorial confidence, people idling outside corner shops, smoking outside buildings. People taking ownership of the city.
‘There,’ Sal says, pointing towards a parking spot.
They pull over and the young people pile out of the car, Illy getting out to help unload the placards.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Zoe says, the two of them hefting the largest banner out of the boot together (Illy saw it before they rolled it up: Australia welcomes war criminal Bush, in blood-red paint across a black background).
‘Yes, thank you.’ It is Sal, coming to stand beside Zoe and linking an arm through hers. ‘It was really nice of you to help us out.’
‘No problem at all.’ She makes a point of meeting Sal’s eyes, still trying to overcome the embarrassment of having cried in front of her.
‘You could come with us,’ Zoe says. ‘To the rally.’
The human traffic flows around them and Illy thinks she can hear drumbeats in the distance, or perhaps she can feel them through the soles of her feet. The thought of returning to her suburban house, empty except for her mother, causes a kind of bereftness to rise up in her chest, but she is sure Zoe doesn’t really want her at the rally and nor would the rest of them: a middle-aged interloper cramping their activist style. She is already moving backwards towards the car when the blue head of Tali inserts itself between Zoe and Sal’s shoulders. ‘Yeah, c’mon,’ she says, ‘we need bodies at this thing. And people to help with all these signs.’
Illy looks at Zoe, who smiles and nods.
‘I suppose I could help carry some of the signs down,’ she says. She has not been on a protest march since the eighties.
‘Great,’ says Zoe, hoisting the large banner off the ground and presenting her with the front end of it to hold.
She is sure there are drumbeats, and more people around them already, as if humanity is thickening from the centre outwards to encompass the whole city.
The six of them walk down Elizabeth Street, coming quickly to the first traffic blockade, cars stalled in an angry honking mass behind it, and they duck beneath and around with the smug flow of foot traffic. Now there are only people, a bobbing mass all the way down and into the park. ‘Wow,’ Zoe says behind her. ‘It looks like a good turnout.’
‘We could set up near the
park,’ Sal says. ‘We’ll have missed most of the speeches anyway.’
‘Nah, let’s get closer,’ Zoe says. Then, ‘Somebody grab the banner, I want to start taking photos.’
Sal takes over the back half of the banner and Zoe climbs up onto the low wall that borders the park and swings her camera around to her face, and as they keep moving Illy sees her framing shots, hanging on to a telegraph pole with one arm and lowering herself towards the street looking for angles. There are a lot of police – some walking around the outskirts of the crowd, a line of them on the north side of the park, white vans blocking the intersections. Two helicopters circle the city overhead.
