The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  In choice of career, it seemed Nell’s blatantly ordinary past had eventually triumphed, but not so when it came to lovers. Here, too, her experience could not have been more different from Laura’s. The boyfriends who had passed through Nell’s adolescent heart were a motley assortment, and while none of them was out-and-out bad, she could claim more than a sprinkling of no-hopers. They prepared her well for Husband Number 1, a mistake by anyone’s reckoning, although a charming mistake by Nell’s. When he absconded with their joint savings and her electrical appliances, Nell said it was worth it: the savings were meagre, the appliances replaceable and she’d had a great deal of fun.

  Husband Number 2 was her PhD supervisor. They started sleeping together in the same week Nell began the final draft of her doctoral thesis. The end was in sight, she said as she pulled Edouardo to the floor. The last draft was accompanied by abundant sex of the quick, illicit kind, much of it occurring on university property and in university time. The thesis was finished well before the sex wore out, and by the time Nell was appointed to her first teaching job at another of the city’s universities, she and Edouardo were married.

  Cinema studies is not a large field. When two of the local luminaries share the same bed even if not the same university, it can become very crowded at home. Nell rose quickly through the ranks. Those who wished her harm, and within the sleazy underworld of university departments they numbered quite a few, passed prim remarks about pretty beginners with shallow charms needing neither brains nor books to facilitate their advancement. And while it was true Nell had slept with exactly the right person at the right time, and equally true she was very attractive, she was no intellectual slouch. Within six months of completing her doctorate she had converted her thesis and had it accepted by a mainstream publisher; another two years saw her celebrating the release of her second book.

  Meanwhile Edouardo had slowed down. No one it seemed was interested in his latest manuscript described by Edouardo as groundbreaking, but considered inaccessible by the rejecting publishers. Edouardo believed it was too much to expect that the backwater which was Australian publishing would recognise a work of genius so he decided to go offshore. While waiting for offers to arrive in the mail, he lounged around the house expecting Nell to show her gratitude for his seminal role in her success. Nell was happy to ladle out gratitude for Edouardo’s carpentry skills, his home-distilled vodka, his nasi goreng; indeed, she was grateful to him for a multitude of things, but not her publications. Even as her supervisor his input had been minimal: he had refused to read her thesis until it was finished. As for her books, his first and only scholarly comments were reserved for what he called the ‘commodified vulgarity’ of the covers.

  As home and hearth grew increasingly chill, Nell discovered in herself a poor tolerance for other people’s envy; nonetheless, she continued to love Edouardo and to share his belief in his intellectual might. In fact, if there had been any less love or any less belief, or if she had simply listened to the warnings from practically all her friends, she would not have proposed that she and Edouardo write a joint book. By the third of the planned twelve chapters, Edouardo’s envy had all but evaporated, but his attitude of unquestioned authority was, quite literally, making her sick. One evening, on the way to the Moroccan Soup Bar to meet her husband for dinner, Nell stepped off the tram and vomited. If she were vomiting at Chapter 3, she feared terminal illness by Chapter 12. Clearly something needed to be done.

  Nell used to say that Edouardo’s envy coated the marriage like plaque, and was just as hard to remove. If he’d been a physicist or an historian, even an accountant, the marriage would have survived. ‘Such a stylish man,’ she would say. ‘And of course very clever.’

  But Laura would have none of it. ‘The luxury of sentiment is the luxury of she who has moved on.You left Ted –’ Edouardo from Melbourne’s outer north-east was definitely Ted,‘you left him because you were bored, he was driving you mad, he was old enough for prostate problems, and –’ a triumphant pause, ‘you seduced me.’

  Laura was supposed to have been Nell’s trip on the wild side, a one-night stand or a long weekend at most. But somehow the long weekend stretched into a week, then months and finally years.

  ‘Do you think I’m a lesbian?’ Nell asked Laura on their second anniversary.

  Laura had laughed, ‘Either a lesbian or taking a very long detour.’

  For Laura, and irrespective of Alan, there had never been any doubt. From the time of her first proper kiss she knew she was in trouble. It had happened at one of the last drive-in theatres in Melbourne to survive the property boom, with Laura easing into a yawn just as the boy bent to kiss her. Suddenly his tongue was writhing around in her mouth like a motorised sponge. He loved it and wondered why she had never kissed like that before. Laura thought it served her right for not having covered her mouth when she yawned.

  Then there was Stephen, the son of two very silent survivors. Stephen, burdened by much blame and self-hatred, had a penchant for punishment – giving it, although in hindsight Laura suspected he gave only to receive. Whatever his rationale, she could tolerate big, bloody bruises for only so long. And there was the problem of his five o’clock shadow even before lunch. With skin as fine and fair as hers, being with Stephen meant perpetual beard-rash.

  Things hardly improved with penetration, although given it required so little attention, at least her mind was free to wander. But after a well-known stud from Melbourne’s Polish-Jewish community failed to get an erection with her, Laura decided she had collected enough heterosexual experience and capitulated to her interest in girls.

  This was better, much better, although because of her parents it made her feel guilty. Unbearably guilty. So after an all-too-brief respite, she returned to boys, or rather she turned to Alan Schwarz, her future husband. She liked him, he was fun, the sex was tolerable, she could think of worse compromises, and it made her parents so happy.

  There are pivotal events of childhood, events which crystalise complex and immutable situations. Laura could be so sure of her parents’ reaction to a lesbian daughter, or rather her mother’s reaction, because of an incident when she was just fourteen which would forever remind her that Etti had pride of place in the suffering stakes. No pain, and certainly not the pain of staying with Alan, would ever equal what her mother had been through; and no pain would ever justify adding to her mother’s woes.

  It became one of the most embarrassing moments of her childhood. A group of students at her school had been picking on her, the usual sort of school bullying but nasty as bullying always is. After several months of terror and no longer wanting to go to school, Laura decided to tell her mother. A few sentences into her tale she realised her mistake, a few sentences more and Etti had seized the narrative. When she was fourteen, she said, people were so mean to her they tried to kill her. Laura swallowed her words. What had induced her to speak? And over such a paltry matter? She listened in silence to her mother’s familiar story and hoped it would end there. But Etti, who knew suffering better than anyone, also knew love. The next day she stormed into the principal’s office and subjected him to a tirade about the suffering of her daughter at the hands of students who were behaving like Nazis. That this could happen in Melbourne, Australia, in 1972, she said, was beyond the pale, and unless the principal punished the students responsible Etti would go to the police. The principal’s office was in screaming distance of three portable classrooms. By morning recess everyone knew what Laura’s mother had done. By morning recess Laura wanted to change schools.

  ‘For my children I would do anything,’ Etti said at dinner that evening. And to Laura,‘No need for thanks, darling.’

  Laura did not risk speaking again. Not then, nor several years later when she turned away from temptation and married Alan. She watched his drug habit grow, she dedicated herself to protecting her parents from the truth, and three years later she buried him. And only at the end did she discover her parents had known
all along. But a heroin-addicted son-in-law still seemed more acceptable than a lesbian daughter, so she maintained her silence. However, a couple of years after Alan’s death, when wildly in love with big, butch, out and proud Colleen, it was difficult to hide the fact she was living with a woman in a one-bedroom flat located in the next street to her parents. The time had come for Laura to say something.

  On the very evening she decided to raise the topic, or rather not the topic but perhaps a more general discussion about the alternatives to marriage, it was her brother, not her, who found himself the focus of the family’s attention. Ten years older than Laura, well married to Melissa, father to Nick and Sophie, multimedia mogul in downtown Melbourne, Daniel had developed an interest in Judaism, or, to be more accurate, was galloping towards the Yeshiva.

  In a secular Jewish family like the Lewins this was tantamount to conversion. You were Jewish, no need for advertising, no need to flaunt. So when Daniel turned up for dinner wearing a yarmulke, Laura knew to postpone her coming-out speech.

  Neither Etti nor Henry could look at their son much less ask him to explain himself. Instead, after a whispered exchange with Henry, Etti took Melissa into the kitchen and demanded to know what Daniel was doing. Melissa, it seemed, was as unimpressed with her husband’s slide into orthodoxy as were his parents. He was unstoppable, she said. It had been a mere six months since the rabbis had first arrived on their doorstep.

  ‘Just doing a routine door-knock,’ Melissa said. ‘Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and expecting the usual curt dismissal. But fortune was shining,’ she raised one impeccably plucked eyebrow, ‘Daniel opened the door and they hit the jackpot. Now we receive weekly visits from bearded, hatted, black-suited men, ostensibly enquiring after our welfare but really keeping an eye on us.’

  Apparently Daniel had wanted Melissa to keep kosher. When she refused, he became a vegetarian. ‘And now he wants the children to go to Jewish schools,’ she said. ‘Not just any Jewish schools, but meshuggeneh frum ones.’

  ‘And the hat?’ Etti said.‘What’s with the hat?’

  At first he wore it only at home and a baseball cap outside. For work he went bare-headed. But a baseball cap on a pudgy man in his thirties piqued even Daniel’s sense of the aesthetic. ‘The yarmulke is now a fixture,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Even when he goes out he wears it?’

  Melissa nodded.

  ‘And to the office he wears it?’

  Another nod.

  ‘And the children? Doesn’t he care what his children think of their father?’

  ‘They’re treating it like another of his fads,’ Melissa said. ‘Like jogging and learning the trumpet.’

  Etti called Henry to the kitchen, filled him in and told him he had to do something. Henry, always happy to leave discipline to his wife when the children were growing up, felt very differently now. He took Daniel aside and told him he was providing a poor example for his children.

  ‘My own son reminds me of those Östjuden who lived in Berlin before the war.’

  ‘And you remind me of those Yekkes you’ve always despised,’ Daniel replied. ‘But when you’re scratched –’ and he touched his yarmulke,‘scratched very lightly, you’re no different from any other German Jew.’

  Laura stood back and observed the proceedings. She’d been brittle with nervousness all week over her decision to come out to her parents, and here they were inconsolable about their son being too Jewish. She interpreted their response as yet another residual Holocaust fear; after all, the Jews who copped it first and worst under the Nazis were the visible, observant ones. Daniel’s thoughts must have been on the same trail, for he was now spelling out the obvious: that Melbourne, Australia, circa 1983, while not free of anti-Semitism was nothing like Berlin of the thirties. It was important, he said, that Jews made their presence felt. ‘We must appear strong to the outside world.’

  ‘What’s with this outside world?’ Etti’s voice was booming, her face all red and glossy. ‘Only meshuggeners who live in ghettos would do this inside–outside stupidness. Normal Jews live in the world of their host country –’

  ‘Don’t give me this bullshit about host country.’ In the process of exploding, Daniel resembled his mother to an uncanny degree. ‘They’re lucky to have us. Look at America, it’d be nothing without its influx of European Jews. Australia too.’

  He was in the process of reciting a list of familiar names from business, the professions, politics and the arts when Laura stepped in and set about smoothing the waters. Daniel’s religious choices were not hurting anyone, she said.

  ‘But they are,’ Etti was close to tears. ‘My son is exposing his children to ridicule. His business will suffer. How will he provide?’ Her moon face had crumpled.‘What would have happened if your father and I had dressed ourselves in yarmulkes and wigs? Do you think people would have bought our cakes then?’

  The conversation went on for hours. Melissa said very little, Henry seemed to be in a state of shock, Etti attacked, Laura appeased and Daniel remained firm.

  Over the next few months there were many similar conversations, all to no avail. Daniel became more religious, the children transferred to Jewish schools, Melissa led an increasingly separate life from her husband, Etti and Henry fretted, and Laura lived with Colleen in the one-bedroom flat and lied through her teeth.

  Twelve months later, after she and Colleen had parted, Laura delivered her coming-out speech to her parents.

  They were sad – ‘Such a beautiful girl,’ Etti said. ‘You could get any boy.’ – but not all that surprised.‘Didn’t I say, Henry? Didn’t I say after Alan? What sort of boy now for our Laura? Didn’t I say?’ And because there had been Alan, they hoped the situation would change.

  It didn’t. After Colleen came Barbara, then Rebecca, then Tanya and finally Nell. Laura introduced Nell to Etti not long before her mother died. ‘A nice girl,’ Etti remarked. ‘A little more hair, a little make-up, a nice dress and she’d look just like Audrey Hepburn, although she doesn’t speak so nice,’ this last a reference to Nell’s broad Australian accent. ‘But the job is good.’ Etti and Henry, like so many European Jews, regarded an academic position as the pinnacle of achievement.

  Her parents would have loved a professor in the family, Laura was now thinking as she sat on the couch with the cat fast asleep in her lap. They would have been so proud. For just a few weeks after Henry’s death, Nell had been promoted to associate professor. How Laura missed sharing these joys with her parents. How she missed them, period.

  She checked her watch. Nell would be home from her barbecue soon. Laura moved the cat to one side and flipped through a couple of the files; it really was too late to start on them now. She should spend an hour at her parents’ house, there was still so much to do.

  Etti had been such a hoarder and Laura couldn’t bear to throw anything out. Just yesterday she had brought home a tablemat made of shells, a chipped mother-of-pearl butter knife, butterfly clips to tame Etti’s frizz, her mother’s ‘at home’ shoes – comfortable scuffs that were in tatters – and her peg bag made from the material of an old floral dress.

  When Etti died Henry had wanted everything to remain the way she had left it. Not that he was being morbid, he said. Rather he was a man of habit and he’d always liked the way Etti did things. In fact, he liked everything about her. Which was how it had always been from his very first sight of her, a scrawny young girl all alone at the DP camp at Landsberg.

  ‘From the beginning,’ he would say,‘Etti was the one for me.’

  Daniel and Laura used to joke about their father being a cradle-snatcher, but Etti would always spring to his defence. She believed Henry had saved her life.

  Laura made herself a cup of coffee and went outside. There was a honeyeater fluttering in the grevillea, she watched it as she sipped her drink. Etti had accepted everything about Henry, including his silence on the past.

  ‘Your father has his reasons,’ she would say.

>   Henry was beyond criticism as far as Etti was concerned.

  ‘If not for your father,’ she repeated down the years, ‘who knows what might have happened to me.’

  Rough Wisdom

  Etti believed that Henry had saved her – not from death but an endless, accusing emptiness. She had survived the years of persecution but at an indecent price, for at war’s end she had no one. She would say it over and over, incredulous: I’m the only one left. If not for Henry, she said, her future would be fit only for the scrap heap.

  It was in 1945, at the American displaced persons’ camp at Landsberg that Henry first met her. By this time Etti had so immured herself against further loss and horror she existed in her own separate space. She refused to see, she refused to hear, she shunned other people. She walked with her head down, her gaze drawn to some middle distance in the dust. She sat alone, she ate alone. She was shrivelled into herself, all bone and crevices. Everything about her said: stay away from me.

  Life was astonishingly cruel – or God or the Germans, it didn’t really matter, for this survival she’d suffered so strenuously wasn’t worth a kopek. There was no one left and life at all costs simply wasn’t worth it.

  It had been a long trek from Lodz to Landsberg. While she had been moving there had been a sense of hope, of striving towards something: one of her sisters, her brother, an aunt, an uncle, a cousin, it mattered less who it was just as long as there was someone. Onwards she went, travelling from one transit camp to the next, on trains and trucks and wagons. And walking, so much walking through that spring and summer of 1945, along with a sweeping convoy of human remains from the east. She had no idea with whom she was walking, no idea whose body jerked against hers on the trains; the whole continent was moving, mostly westwards like her, but not always. She would look closely at those going in the opposite direction, desperate to find a familiar face. And at the slightest recognition she might have turned around and accompanied the person home to Lodz. But would not go back alone. Not now. Not again.