Which was why she married Alan Schwarz despite having been aware of her preference for girls practically since kindergarten. To present her parents with a female partner would have been beyond the pale. Not that she had used Alan: neither of them was particularly good marriage material, she had her lesbian tendencies and he had his drugs. And they had truly loved each other in their grossly imperfect ways, understood each other too, coming as they did from similar backgrounds. Then there were his looks: Alan had the face of an angel; on appearance alone butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but as Laura would soon discover, anything with a kick in it would. Alan loved her and he loved drugs, and with parents so indulgent of their only child, he had plenty of money for the top quality stuff even while still a student.
By the time he and Laura started dating he had finished university and was working in his father’s bias-binding business, with neither commitment nor reliability it should be said. As for drugs, they were a central feature of his life, although Laura thought he confined himself to grass and an occasional trip with the safer hallucinogens. And while there were plenty of warning signs even in those early days, so intent was she on keeping her parents happy, she failed to notice.
On one of their early dates Alan took her to a party. She remembered entering a basement flat (later she would wonder where on earth it could have been, given that basement flats were not common in Melbourne), a dark place with an odour of dope and sweat and people who had not moved for a long time. Ashtrays were overflowing and burgundy-coloured candles were burning, and she remembered dirty hands with black-rimmed nails and assumed that the dirty hands resulted from playing with the dark candle wax. Everyone was slow and vague and laughed a lot, and even though she felt out of place, she decided it was her fault for not being cool enough. Lou Reed waiting for the man played interminably, but so naïve was she in those early days, she had no idea why he was waiting. She smoked a little dope and thought that was all Alan did too, although when he disappeared into the bathroom with another guy she did wonder what they were doing in there together.
She and Alan were married before she recognised his heroin look: the pallid, clammy skin, the eyes that looked straight through her, his manner so disengaged. Heroin provided a shortcut to his soul, rendering her own determined attempts pathetic in comparison.
He died from a particularly pure batch at a time when he was supposed to be clean. He had left the house to do the shopping and two hours later he was dead. Laura still loved him – she was always loyal in love – and he had loved her too, although not as much as he loved heroin. Living with Alan had been shot through with problems, not the least being Laura’s determination to conceal the truth from her parents. However, when Alan died, it turned out they already knew, but loving her as they did and believing she was ignorant of his problem, had chosen to speak privately with him while assuming a protective silence with their own daughter.
Love, protection, silence, it’s a dangerous brew, yet Laura was never in any doubt her parents loved her, and never did she waver in her love for them. And if at times it became a little murky, that was simply a side-effect of so much love. Over the years she had watched with amusement as many of her friends had gone into therapy, each of them spending thousands of dollars trying to understand why they hated their mother or resented their father or felt betrayed by both. They would complain about not being loved enough, or being loved too much but the wrong sort of love – like the wrong sort of cholesterol, Laura once joked to Nell – and as damaging as if they had experienced no love at all. Her friends would compete for the prize of unhappiest childhood. Each would toss their childhood into the circle, then rummage through the pile, prodding, pushing, running the quality through their fingers, and in the end would retrieve their own damaged rag: it was best for being the worst. These were women and men in their twenties and thirties and forties who, with tears running down their face, would describe how at the age of four or five or eight or ten, this brother or that sister was given the book, the bedroom, the beach holiday, the bike they had coveted; or the best clothes, the front seat in the car, the mother’s attention, the father’s approval. ‘How can you still be upset about such things?’ Laura would ask. ‘None of it matters any more.’ But it did, it did. They were as fiercely possessive of their miserable childhoods as a miser of his bank account.
Then there were the friends who were children of survivors, all in their own way lugging around their parents’ horrors whether these had been revealed or not. Laura would not condemn as she watched them negotiate a crooked path into the future, often with a great gaping chasm behind. Certainly she had never condemned Alan, although she wished he had chosen a different way. And she tried not to condemn her brother with his religion, even though Daniel’s opiate was just as effective in separating him from her as Alan’s had been.
How different it was for Nell who, with her gratifyingly ordinary background, could not have predicted what trouble she had brought herself in choosing a Jew.
‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground?’ she had remarked in the early days of their relationship.
Just a handful of words but a mighty insult, not only to Laura but to survivors like her parents. It was indecent what her parents had paid for their survival and no one had the right to trespass. Her relationship with Alan had been far from perfect, but clearly, she realised, a non-Jewish partner was out of the question.
It was their very first holiday together and sparking with the usual excitement and fragility common to all new relationships. She and Nell had driven for hours from Melbourne to the high country of Victoria, had booked into a motel at Omeo and were taking a stroll through the main street of the historic town. It was late in the day, and although there were people about, there was that sense of space and emptiness so typical of country towns in Australia, and an odd spongy silence against which voices, birdsong, even the grating of an old ute sounded newly polished. They were passing by a stately old bank building when Nell spoke.
‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground? Complete with an electric fence around it for all eternity?’
Laura stopped, a partly exposed landmine could not have produced a sharper response, and grabbed Nell’s arm tight enough to hurt. And there in front of the red-brick bank, the sky blooding with the closing day and an icy chill oozing down, she took Nell on, not shouting but talking with venomous intensity. Two tall women in a country town, one startlingly fair with a mass of long blonde curls and the other equally tall, but angular and boyish with closely cropped dark hair, women who would have occasioned notice in a bustling city mall, but in this location were as obvious as performers on a brightly lit stage.
Laura, a fine arguer at the best of times, gained eloquence under pressure. It was as if a sluice gate were opened and a stream of sparklingly fluent, finely honed arguments released. With cutthroat logic and perfect delivery she ranged from trespass and betrayal, to appropriation and moral boundaries, on to ancient scapegoats and Christians with blood on their hands.
‘You Jews don’t do forgiveness, do you?’ Nell said when Laura finally was silent.
Laura was incredulous: Nell had clearly understood nothing. And would never understand. She stomped back to the motel, leaving Nell standing in the main street of Omeo. There she collected the car, her car fortunately, and stormed off. She drove for hours, drove herself through the dark country, out of her rage and into the impossibility of this new relationship, only two months old after all and the two of them knowing so little of each other: Nell from her Anglo-Saxon Protestant background and Laura a Jew right down to her linen cupboard.
‘Such precision,’ Nell had said through her laughter when first she saw the linen cupboard.‘It deserves nothing less than posterity,’ and had returned the next day with a video camera.
Laura, too, had laughed, but not any more. As she negotiated the narrow, nervy curves of this unknown region, she cursed her heritage. Other people needed to concern themselves only with a small cote
rie of family and friends, but Laura, Australian Laura, found herself defending and arguing on behalf of all those millions of European Jews who had been silenced, all of them strangers but nonetheless included in her soul’s address book. It was not a role she wanted, but she seemed to have no choice. She and the six million were affronted by Nell’s comments, and even though she knew Nell intended no malice, she had no right to speak in a way that on someone else’s lips would be nothing less than murderous.
Hours later, having driven through ski resorts preparing for the season, down steep mountainous byways, along roads flanked by a sticky darkness, around the curves of the Tambo and the startling flash of water when her headlights found the river, she sped along the low, twisting road, could not go fast enough for the boiling inside, until in the glare of her headlights she saw a mound of dead wombat. And at last she slowed down.
Once before when driving through the country at night, she had hit a big brown male, the poor thing catapulted to the side of the road but still alive, and Laura crying and quivering and hardly able to stand but knowing she had to finish the job she had so carelessly begun. She had taken the crowbar from the car’s toolkit and beaten the poor animal’s head until she was sure he was dead. Would never forget the crippling horror of it all, the awful resistance of bone, the blood catching the warm fur, the legs jerking with each strike. Still shaking and crying and sickened with herself, she had dragged the animal away from the road to bury him. Her fingers proved useless against the hard dry earth, even the crowbar failed to make an impact. She pulled the poor creature a little further into the bush, rolled him into a shallow gully and covered him with twigs and leaves, and did not travel alone in the country for more than two years.
Now she kept her speed low, slipped a cassette of Bach’s cello suites into the tape deck and made her way down to the coast. It was ten o’clock when she drove into Bairnesdale and the streets were quiet. From a public telephone she rang the motel at Omeo and asked for a message to be delivered to Nell’s room. Then she drove back, arriving after midnight.
Wrapped in the sort of calm that feeds off tidy decisions, she informed Nell they would be leaving in the morning. But Nell would have none of it. Laura might be a neurotic Jew, she said, but she was actually quite taken by her.
They were to spend the rest of that long night talking – in later years they would call it their Isabel Archer night – and by the morning had decided to stay together. It was Henry James as psychotherapist and the only therapy Laura would ever countenance for herself.
‘You’re scared what you might discover,’ Nell had said.
But Nell was wrong;Laura’s memories of childhood were acute. Rather she was afraid what therapy might do with those memories, and she wanted to keep loving her parents. She knew about their flaws, she knew about her own flaws and she knew about the flaws in their mutual love. There was pathology aplenty in her background, enough for a lifetime of therapy, but she had made a decision long ago to live her life rather than suffer it. Being a victim, as popular as it was among many of her generation, had never held any appeal for her. Her situation was simple: there were elements in her past she could not change – the Holocaust and the cost of her parents’ survival for a start – and a closer perusal would only pollute the relationships she now enjoyed.
She used to joke that her attitude must be genetic, for neither of her parents would ever contemplate therapy, although for very different reasons from Laura. Neither believed in seeking help from a stranger.
‘Only yourself can you rely on,’ her mother used to say. ‘And your family too – although even they can die.’
Despite her family’s emotional self-sufficiency, privately Laura had thought her mother might actually benefit from a little professional help. Depressions, sleeplessness, a gastrointestinal tract which helped keep the medical profession afloat, and a story of personal loss and torment too great for a multitude of people seemed sufficient to justify the services of a specialist. But Etti was of the opinion that you don’t wash your dirty linen in public – or Etti’s version: better the dirty clothes they stay at home – and besides, what sort of world would it be if every time you have a little problem you run off to the doctor?
Over and over she would insist: you can do anything you set your mind to if it’s a matter of survival. Even when her cancer was diagnosed Etti was quite matter-of-fact: she’d survived worse.
Etti was just seventeen years old at the end of the war and entirely alone. Both parents had perished, together with her two sisters and brother, her aunts and uncles, most of her cousins, and her two grandmothers who would have died happier if, like their spouses, they had died before Hitler had marched into Poland. All alone at seventeen, minimal formal education yet a doctorate in survival. Human beings can live in a hole if that’s their only option, she used to say, and feed on paper if nothing else is available. You can train your body to shut down, not to feel hungry, not to feel the squeezing of your bowels, not to smell your own filth. You can train your eyes not to see, your poor heart to go numb, your brain to go quiet.
Throughout her life she continued to believe that a person can do anything if there’s a chance of survival. Although it clearly didn’t work with her cancer, as the once-buxom woman with the smooth rounded face faded, too busy fighting the disease to have time for depression, too busy fighting the disease to realise she had lost this one. And still telling her past.
‘I remember everything,’ she said.
Etti remembered in Polish, Yiddish and English.Three languages to try and puncture the silence.Three languages better to tell the world.Three times the ammunition with which to fight evil.
With each new revisionist she despaired. ‘No one else has to prove their own suffering. No one but the Jews.’
As a child, Laura used to shut herself in her wardrobe because her mother had spent half a year in a space the size of a cupboard. She would push the shoes to one side and crouch in the dark and remain absolutely still, scarcely breathing according to her mother’s account.
‘My feet they were always going to sleep,’ Etti had said. ‘My fingers I thought they would break from the cold.’
Laura’s feet did go to sleep, but Melbourne was never cold enough for her fingers to freeze.
‘And to know you are still alive, you have to keep thinking.’
So Laura would think: I am thinking so I must still be alive. And rolling word sequences silently over and over: days of the week, months of the year, forwards then backwards. I am still alive, she would think as she crouched in the wardrobe, counting by twos, and when she was older by threes, and older still, by sevens and nines. I am still alive, she would think as the darkness droned on.
There were times when she fell asleep in the wardrobe and knew if this were for real she might have died.
‘Never a proper sleep,’ Etti said.‘Always on the alert.’
And decades later, right up to the time of her death, Etti still slept poised for flight. Even the sleeping pills worked only for a couple of hours. Sleeping, Etti believed, was a state of mind which her own mind could not afford.
Laura, too, was not a good sleeper, although like so many aspects of her life, better since she’d been with Nell. In the early days of their relationship Nell would wake in the middle of the night to find Laura on the couch hitched to her walkman and the all-night broadcast from the BBC World Service. Nell would take Laura back to bed and stroke her while she concentrated on falling asleep.
‘Stop concentrating,’ Nell would say. ‘And forget cupboards, forget darkness. Think colour, glorious colour. Think Jackson Pollock in gorgeous rivulets. Feel it slither down your spine.’And would stroke her gently to sleep.
Everyone said it wouldn’t last, Nell and Laura were simply too different.
‘Why on earth would you want a partner a carbon copy of yourself?’ Nell said.
Over the years Laura had come to the same opinion as friend after friend introduced their l
atest love, a version of themselves right down to their mother problems, or, in a recent case of two adopted women getting together, their absent mother problems.
Their differences were mostly useful and often entertaining, although Laura’s lack of interest in cultural theory (‘Postmodernism, poststructuralism. When does post become passé?’) created tensions when it came to entertaining Nell’s friends. And Nell, much to Laura’s exasperation, would never learn how to stack the food in the pantry, or file the towels and sheets in the linen press. But these irritations aside, Laura liked finding what she lacked in a lover.
Coming from the the sort of background that could look after itself, Nell had always pursued a range of more creative futures. As soon as she had finished school she swapped Nell for Gaia and headed north to a commune on the central coast. But after three of the worst asthma attacks she had ever experienced, she was forced to concede that collective living close to nature fortified by love, meditation and organically grown dope was poison to sensitive lungs. Nell headed home and to university, an arts course of the English–history variety, pleasant enough but providing no future whatsoever. In her third year she enrolled in a film unit and enjoyed it sufficiently to stay for an honours year, completing a thesis on cartoons and social subversion.
Around this time she began collecting old movie posters. Her earliest acquisitions included Some Like It Hot, South Pacific and Rear Window, and over the years she had maintained the high standard. These days her poster collection was considered one of the finest in the country. Currently it was filed in fireproof trays in her study, but one day, she said, she would purchase some space and have her collection on permanent display. Nell was full of such plans.
On leaving university she bought herself some smart clothes and for a short time worked as producer–fundraiser for a number of worthy film projects. She soon discovered that hustling was not her forté, so discarded the suits for black on black and the more artistic side of filmmaking. After two years of too much wine, too much teamwork and abject poverty she did as many had before her and opted for the halls of academe.
The Prosperous Thief Page 19
