The Fighter

by Arnold Zable

  She is a fierce guardian. She puts her arms around her infants, and sings a lullaby. In Yiddish: ‘Shlof mein kind’. ‘Sleep my child’. It is Paul, the youngest son, who will recall this, years later.

  Only when her children are adults will Sonia hint at one of the sources of her madness. But she will not name it. There are things that cannot be spoken. The horror was perpetrated during her time in Siberia. Or was it elsewhere? The territory is infinite.

  The enemy was man: man on the hunt; soldiers on the rampage, let loose on the spoils of war. It is an ancient story. In times of chaos, women are there for the taking.

  Henry has made it explicit: ‘Mum was raped. She told me.’ But at other times he has shaken his head: ‘I don’t really know, perhaps it’s true. I can’t say for certain.’ Then, unexpectedly, one day in the Port Diner, he brings it up again.

  Workers at neighbouring tables are bent over meals, absorbed in private reveries. Road trains are pulling up and departing, brakes yawning. From the inner room, afternoon soapies are blaring. Henry is hunched over a milkshake, strawberry and chocolate. ‘A great combination,’ he says as he drinks the full measure.

  A grey haze of dust clouds the parking lot. Late afternoon shadows lengthen from the thick columns supporting freeway overpasses. Crows land on the gravel; seagulls scavenge for crumbs beside the diner. The sun is low in the heavens.

  All is movement and traffic, and Henry is telling me, again. Matter-of-fact. Insistent. ‘Yes. Mum was raped. I don’t know where, or when, but I am sure of it.’

  *

  The post-war years are a time to forget dreams and dark remembrances. There are no clinics specialising in trauma, no services for survivors of torture. No sisterhood to combat her growing sense of isolation. Nothing on offer except medication to dull the rage, and electric shock to convulse her back to reality.

  It is sink or get on with it, bury the past or be buried by it. Yet it must be articulated. Sonia was raped.

  16

  In later years, the adult Sandra, the only daughter, becomes Sonia’s main carer. She is the witness to her final rages, always alert to the sounds coming from the bedroom. She is quick to call the ambulance, and she sits by her mother on the way to hospital.

  She stands close as Sonia is lifted out and placed on a gurney. She follows her as she is wheeled through the entrance. Sonia’s gaze is fixed on ceilings as she is rushed to emergency. She barely registers the urgent chatter of those who tend her.

  ‘If I survive, I will try again,’ she says.

  This is no idle warning. Sandra has long known how to read the signs. She has known her entire life. As a child she once woke to a feeling that her mother was unwell, and decided not to go to school. Sandra knew what was happening. Hours later, she heard Sonia gurgle and found her lying in bed, comatose.

  The episodes come and go like winds gusting and returning to silence. Now, years later, mother and daughter are alighting from a bus and stepping onto the footpath. The telltale symptoms are clear in the daylight. Sonia’s muscles are twitching. Her skin is paling, and her pupils are shrinking. Her eyes are wild. Sandra holds her arm. She keeps her steady as she guides her homeward.

  Familiar houses are a passing blur. The outside world is in retreat. The day is mild, but Sonia is trembling. She is an ageing woman being led along the streets like a blind mendicant by her dutiful daughter.

  Sandra takes her into the house, and helps her to the bedroom. Sonia lies down. She gives in to the softness, and sinks her head into the pillows. Sandra covers her with a blanket. The daughter has become the mother, and when Sandra is done, she too is exhausted. She falls asleep and is woken by the sound of choking. In the bathroom she finds her mother on the tiles, and the emptied pill bottle beside her. Again she is rushed to hospital.

  It is impossible to know what will trigger an episode, other than the effects of waning medication. There are times when it appears Sonia will not pull through.

  Sandra comes to know the routes to the city’s asylums and psychiatric units. The car seems to know the way of its own volition.

  In her final months, Sonia starves herself. She pushes away food, and shuts her mouth tight in defiance. She becomes emaciated. The district nurse is called. Sonia wards her off. The ambulance is called. She resists, and backs herself into a corner. She is teetering on the edge of violence. The police are called. She lashes out at them, throws punches. The force in that frail body is extraordinary.

  The police have no option but to restrain her. They put her into the divvy van. Sandra sits beside her. The back of the van is cold and metallic. There are no seatbelts to secure them; seatbelts have been used in attempted suicides. Sandra steadies her mother as they round the corners. Sonia clings to her daughter, and Sandra wonders, not for the first time, why do I persist in making her relive shit? Why not let her take leave of those infernal voices?

  It is a human right, Sandra will say, years later, to choose whether to live or die. Why did we prolong her life? Why the need to keep her alive at all costs? To live is to hear, and my mother heard too much. To live is to see, and mother saw too deeply. And what she heard and saw terrified her. So why did we force her to live? The questions still plague her long after her mother is gone.

  Yet even as she ponders it, Sandra knows she would do it again. She knows she would try to keep her alive, and would do whatever she could to lift her spirits. Despite it all, she longed to put it right.

  After Sonia died, Sandra obtained and read her birth files, and discovered that Sonia had aborted several pregnancies in the nine years between the birth of Paul, the fourth child, and her own birth. The reports do not reveal how she did it, but they do say that when Sonia was pregnant with Sandra she was confined to hospital for months and carefully monitored for fear that she would try again to miscarry.

  ‘Mum,’ says Sandra, all these years later, ‘we loved you. And we tried. We tried so hard. But we could not save you.’

  The bouts of madness, interspersed by periods of medicated calmness, continue till the end of Sonia’s life. On her deathbed she says to her daughter, ‘It’s good you did not have children. I never got to do what I wanted. You have a chance. You have time to find out what you want in life. You can make something of yourself.’

  Amid the madness there were, says Sandra, flashes of an inquiring mind and a fierce independence. A sense of rebellion, and an alertness to the treacheries of life—an intelligence that endured despite the years of medication, and the erosion of hope and memory.

  Sandra wonders what might have been had Sonia not been imprisoned by demons. And if that which was caged within her had been released. Brought to light. Exorcised.

  Sandra was there at the very end, in the Alfred Hospital. Sonia’s mental illness was compounded by cancer. Simche, Solly, Paul and Leon had been with her during the morning. Henry and Sandra took up the vigil in the afternoon, taking turns sitting closest to her.

  In the last moment, Sandra said, ‘Henry, I need to hold her hand.’

  ‘I knew what was going to happen,’ Sandra says. ‘I haven’t got the words for it, but I knew.’

  Sonia died as soon as Sandra touched her. ‘Just like that,’ she says. ‘It was a light touch. So light, and her spirit left her body.’

  The final exchange between a mother and daughter. And the final witness, Henry, seated behind her, in silent prayer.

  On the way to Sonia’s funeral Simche breaks down. ‘I could have done more,’ he says. He is distraught. Weeping. ‘I could have been a better man,’ he adds. ‘I should have been a better husband.’ After Sonia gave birth to the twins he had wanted to get away, to Russia, for a holiday, he confesses, and leave her in Belsen to take care of the children. How could he have been so irresponsible?

  Simche’s declaration shattered his stoic silence. He is a man of few words, but now he cannot stop talking. He is disoriented, anguished by his youthful transgressions.

  Henry and his brothers and sister are u
nnerved by the power of his grief. They are overcome by his confessions. They have long been accustomed to his self-possession. They console him, and assure him he is a good man, and a much-loved father.

  The family walks with the draped coffin as it is wheeled from the chapel into the daylight. The contrast is sharp, the sun abrasive. They lead the cortege to the assigned plot, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, and stand by the graveside. They take turns shovelling the dirt over the lowered casket, as is the custom.

  When they are done they step back. Each child is lost in private thoughts and images, while, one by one, their friends and acquaintances step up to the shovels. All is quiet, except for the dull thud of dirt on the coffin.

  When the burial is over, Leon recites the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. The words evaporate into the sky, leaving behind a blessed silence.

  Within two years Simche is dead. Again the journey from the chapel into the light of day: the casket is wheeled along the route they had followed just twenty-two months earlier. Simche is lowered in the reserved plot next to Sonia. Husband and wife now buried at the ends of the Earth. Together.

  He was a good man, say Henry and Leon, says Paul, says Sandra. He was straightforward in his dealings. He kept his counsel. He drew a curtain on the past and did not dare lift it. He spent his spare time watching the soccer and attended meetings of the Communist party. He marched in anti-war protests. Politics and sport were his passions, and tailoring his duty.

  The children insist: our father was a good man. And Mum was a good woman. Do not reduce her to madness. Do not over simplify it. In her periods of calm she raised us. She got us off to school. She clothed and fed us. She survived the miscarriages, and she withstood the years of impoverishment.

  ‘She was a fighter,’ says Henry. ‘It’s amazing that she could still fight.’

  And there is the lullaby:

  Sleep my child, my treasure; my dear one

  Ai-le-lu-le-lu

  Blessed is he who has a mother, and a cradle too

  Ai-le-lu-le-lu

  17

  The lullaby unlocks another Sonia. She is retrieving a chocolate sponge from the oven. The buckled linoleum crackles beneath her feet. She has baked the cake for one of her children’s birthdays. She has squirrelled away the money over weeks to give as a present.

  The memory will lie dormant, obscured by the darkness. Only years later will it make its way to the surface. It is Paul who recalls it first, and then Sandra who remembers the aroma, and the sight of Sonia mixing the batter, her fingers dusty with flour and cocoa.

  The table is scattered with eggshells, a jar of sugar, whisks, a bowl of sultanas. Sonia is opening the door of the oven. This is no faded black-and-white memory. There is colour in the picture. She takes out the two halves of the cake and places them on the table. The sponges are warm and the surfaces nicely rounded. She allows them to cool. Then she places one on top of the other, with an ample layer of chocolate-cream between them.

  She has not skimped on the sultanas, but she has forgotten to dust them with flour and they have sunk to the bottom. Never mind, this aberration has its advantages. It’s Sandra’s favourite part of the cake; she cuts the slices in half, and eats the bottom portions.

  There were times, in between periods of illness, when Sonia walked Sandra to school, and she was there by the school gate to pick her up six hours later. ‘How fortunate I was to have a mother waiting for me,’ Sandra says.

  Mother and daughter are making their way home, side by side, falling into step, in harness to each other’s rhythm. Sandra is elated. They stop at the bakery and Sonia buys cream buns, a treat for her daughter. They continue homeward. Sandra greets friends with pride, and smiles at neighbours. Look, her demeanour says, I have a mother too, and she cares for me.

  ‘In this there was love,’ Sandra says. ‘And courage.’

  With Sandra’s birth, there are seven people in the family. The house sings with the voices of five children returning from school, from work, and from their daily forays. The outside world enters with them. They are cutting through the living room, trailing the day’s chatter into the kitchen. Their voices overpower the silence.

  Sonia is standing at the kitchen table. Her apron is stained burgundy. She is chopping vegetables, sliding them into the pot, and stirring the mixture: chopped carrots, thinly sliced beetroots, potatoes and peppers.

  She is immersed in her task. There is purpose in her movements. She adjusts the pot on the stove. The element whooshes to life. The flames are a transparent blue and violet, shot through with yellow. The kitchen is filled with warmth.

  The borscht simmers. The lid rattles.

  When the soup is done, Sonia brings the pot to the table. She ladles the steaming mixture into white bowls and adds a dollop of cream: burgundy in white, and white upon burgundy.

  She stands in the kitchen, spoon in hand, the task completed. A small woman. Slightly hunched. Feet firmly planted. Her fingers stained with beetroot. And on her pale face, a faint smile, edged with defiance.

  Henry has found a new photo, a black and white, taken soon after he was born. He had overlooked its existence. Or forgotten it. He is eager to show it to me. He pulls up at the Port Diner.

  The day shift is over and evening is falling. He walks across the gravel against the din of peak-hour traffic. The ground vibrates to the rumble of road trains. The ferris wheel, returned to life, rotates slowly. On the rail crossing at the back of the lot, a locomotive shunts coils of steel cables from wharf-side storage sheds. Truckies and dock workers stroll to and from their parked vehicles.

  Henry pauses on the way and glances at the weed-flowers and thistles on the embankment above a ribbon of water. A cormorant alights on a wooden pylon. Mosses and shrubs and swathes of long grass disappear in the falling darkness. A patch of daisies glows beneath the creek bridge, beside a row of lights switching on at nightfall.

  Henry joins me at a formica table overlooking the parking lot. He places the photo before me.

  Sonia’s right arm is curved around the waist of Solly. Her hand rests upon his stomach. She holds him close. Her grip is firm, yet gentle. Solly is about two years old. He wears a striped jumper. Her left hand holds the handle of a pram in which lie the twins, Leon and Henry, one asleep, and the other, eyes wide open. They are dressed in white. Their heads are slightly elevated on white pillows.

  Neatly parted on the left, Sonia’s black hair falls in waves to her shoulders. She has taken care over her appearance. She wears a floral dress, evoking summer, and she looks directly at the camera. She is beautiful.

  A barely visible coil of barbed wire in the background suggests it was taken in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Person’s Camp. It is one of the few photos of her taken ‘over there’.

  There are no inklings of the demons that would come to possess her. There is no hint of the pale tormented being she would become. No indication of the voices that would hold her hostage in a distant continent.

  Henry is grateful the photo exists, that it has been uncovered. Brought to light. Sonia’s expression reveals an unexpected sensuousness. It suggests contentment and passion expended. Her smile is mild and inviting. Knowing. She appears at ease, both worldly and dreamy. She is quietly determined, a woman with expectations, looking forward, but also wistful. She has a subdued radiance.

  The photo suggests what might have been, and, perhaps, what had been. It suggests a time when all hung in the balance: the ghosts of the past, for the time being, in abeyance. And it suggests romance, if only for fleeting moments.

  ‘If only…if only.’ Henry repeats the words, insistently: ‘If only…if only…’

  Henry brings other photos in a black plastic bag when we next meet. He spreads them out on our usual table: Sonia at family gatherings surrounded by grandchildren. They are sturdy men and she, dwarfed by them, pale and hesitant.

  There are photos of the grandchildren as infants, the Nissen clan expanding. The boys and their wives and gir
lfriends are seated at dining room tables covered in white cloths, with birthday cakes and grandchildren leaning over to blow out candles; and beside the cakes, white plates stacked in readiness for distribution.

  A photo of Sonia by the kitchen stove, tending the food, an apron over her dress, her hair covered by a scarf. She looks like a babushka. And a group photo of the Nissens: Simche and Sonia standing behind the sofa, ageing patriarch and matriarch. Simche leans in towards her. Their cheeks are almost touching, and Sonia is almost yielding.

  A photo taken in earlier times: the family on a summer outing in forest surroundings. Solly, Leon and Henry in shorts and sandals. Paul kneels in front. His arms are wrapped around Sandra, the toddler. Between the older boys are Simche and Sonia. She wears a cotton dress. Her shoulders are slumped forward. Her face is pale, and ghostly. She stands slightly in front of her husband, yet she appears to be receding, fading into the forest behind him.

  Sonia is both present and elsewhere. Her image suggests another dimension, a state of limbo. She is a bewildered soul in search of a way home, a foundation.

  There is a photo of the family at the beach: Sonia and Simche with the pale faces and white bodies of the inner-city dweller, the factory worker. The children are darker. They are of a newer world. Henry remembers none of this.

  And a photo of a wedding party, taken outdoors. It is summer. The men stand in open-necked shirts, and the women in light dresses. Henry, the groom, is dressed in a white shirt, white trousers and white jacket. He stands between his bride and his father. Simche wears a light grey suit, with a white carnation pinned to the lapel. Sandra, in her teens, is seated in front, cross-legged, and a bearded Leon stands in the back row, holding one of his two infants. The other is snuggled against Sandra.

  Sonia stands in the back row beside her husband, enfolded in family. She wears an off-white dress and a matching jacket, with padded shoulders. She is more present than she appears in other photos. Almost grounded. This has been, her wan smile implies, a day worth living.