Despite her size Allegra dominated the life of the women in the Katz household. Not that she was loud, forward, brisk or sharp. Equipoise was what she had; everyone else took up their position relative to her. And through her body language, which consisted both of quiet invitation and of subtle territoriality which would always keep this particular princess in her tower, she enticed Viva to sit beside her and be her student.
Allegra seemed somehow able to read Viva’s situation and, without exchanging any words at all about it, to give a perfect demonstration of the tactics to which Viva should resort to overcome her qualms.
Poise was the thing, a certain front of maturity and wisdom in the presence of which Claude assumed her status as an adolescent. Allegra did Viva a favour by showing her how to French-plait Claude’s hair for school. Viva learnt that one confessed to Claude’s beauty and treated it as part of the pride of the house. She was relieved to see that Henri treated Claude this way, too, as if she were his little sister. Weaving the thick, dark hair into its plait, Viva could seem to conspire with Henri, to share something with him from which Claude, being just too young, was excluded.
Viva knew she must learn, and learn quickly, to give substance to these mock conspiracies. She must both court Henri with discretion and learn as much as she could about his situation. She began to pick up Allegra’s mannerisms, not very subtly she supposed, but she would work hard to carry them off. Allegra seemed to like her, particularly as she had news of Uncle Nicola, and Uncle Nicola in turn had written to Paris about her and about her little brother, Leslie.
Allegra was less enthusiastic than Uncle Nicola had imagined about coming to Australia. Nevertheless she asked Viva all about it, how Rose was settling in, whether Uncle Nicola was in good health and what means Viva would use to bring her brother to France, particularly since she herself would have to become a French citizen first. It was all very well to be here under the auspices of a French guardian, but she was an Australian citizen and would need to do more if she wanted to become French.
In the meantime, said Allegra, since Viva had picked up French so quickly she must now learn Italian. If she wanted to work for the Concentration, people with Italian, French and English were in demand, and there was a particular project, with a small salary attached, for which Viva might be very well suited. It would be fairly hard work involving a lot of perseverance, but she was sure Viva would cope with it, since she had already coped with what Allegra understood to be considerable travail.
Allegra set aside a small amount of time each day to teach Viva the basics. These learnt, she set her up with an English–Italian dictionary and put her to work directly on a project of growing importance since Hitler’s accession to power in the March of 1933, that of alerting the international community to what the accession meant.
Though no one would say where the heap of papers in Allegra and Viva’s bedroom came from, the content of the material spelt out the message that Carlo Rosselli’s group, Giustizia e libertà, wanted delivered to the world.
Carlo was now the person the refugees thought of as their leader. His brother Nello was still inside Italy, spending his time in and out of jail. He was a young historian who felt himself being marginalised by the fascists every time he put forward an idea. At one stage he had wanted to establish an international journal for young historians to debate politics of any kind. For a while he was indulged by established pro-fascist historians, but he soon learnt that antifascism was only tolerated from one quarter, that of the eminent professor Benedetto Croce, whose international stature had to be respected on pain of criticism from the rest of Europe.
The translating would be a test for Viva, but Allegra showed her some knacks to it. She learnt to accustom herself to style and found a good deal of truth in what Allegra said about people using certain recurring word patterns. Viva would translate literally into English from the papers and would pass them on to Allegra, who would then put some shape into them, translate them into French, and hand them back to Viva with the object of her learning for herself what the work was all about.
The finished translations went to Henri, and from Henri to a press in Paris, another in London and a third, Italian, one, in Geneva. There they would be typeset before being distributed clandestinely by the International League for the Rights of Man.
So Viva was drawn into the deep waters of a highly political life where, essentially, it was swim or drown. She had invested too much in this venture to give it up now, nor would she have given it up for it was fascinating to a young woman who hungered after a life of the mind. Here were people who believed in something, who were not bowed down by the things that oppressed them, who did not give in to their infirmities or defeat at the hands of providence. People like this had their lives on the line.
Viva dared a little happiness and was surprised to find such a thing in herself. It was a sensation that could bathe her from head to foot, a River of Jordan. She felt sometimes that she’d been freed from unjust imprisonment. Sometimes she even felt cleansed of Julius Lichtblau, though there were nightmares from which she would wake up feeling contaminated all over again, for she couldn’t have survived in Paris if Julius hadn’t sent her a small allowance.
The allowance came to her every four weeks, accompanied by a letter saying how Julius missed her and hoped she would soon come back. She would reply there and then in the post office, so she wouldn’t have the duty hanging over her, studiously avoiding giving away the happiness of her life in Paris because she might yet need Julius to help her rescue Leslie.
She could not think how to write to Leslie to let him know her life had changed, and his prospects with it. She knew of no one whom she could trust to act as an intermediary. She felt quite helpless as far as he was concerned and could only hope he would go looking for her in Melbourne, starting with the Italian woman, of whose existence he knew. She would quite probably direct him on to Rose. The Italian woman had no idea Viva had gone to Paris and Viva was not going to let her know for fear of her father finding out and destroying her plans. Some days she would think that Leslie had the courage to run away from their father, something he could legally do when he turned fifteen, and that he would have the sense to trace her to Rose. At other times she despaired, because he was a soft, introspective boy who tended not to act things out.
With Leslie almost always in the back of her mind and the thought that he may feel she had abandoned him, she found herself battling certain jealousies of which she might otherwise have been more in control. On the walls of the room she shared with Allegra were photos of a past of which Viva knew next to nothing. She envied family photographs, mementos of times that appeared to have been happy; there’d been nothing like that where she came from. She recognised Uncle Nicola, Henri, Allegra, Lev and Rose, snapped in the summer of 1922 in Milan, and she felt excruciatingly jealous of them and the occasion. She knew she had to cast off jealousy if ever she were to free herself of the past, but the effort was enormous and, combined with her anxieties, there were times when she was desolate.
She tried very hard to actually be impressive, instead of just dreaming that she would be one day, but there was a stiltedness to her character she was very rarely rid of. Consciousness of it made her envy the people she was now sharing her life with, not one of whom was given to daily self-crucifixion.
Sometimes Viva found her only escape from these feelings in work, but in work she had only one source of self-esteem, Allegra. If Allegra found she’d been mistaken in construing the meaning of something she would feel mortified, knowing at the same time that mistakes were part of learning and experiences to build on rather than regret. She would say these things over and over to herself as if repetition would build something into her character, but it seemed sometimes that all she was capable of was building an unassailable moat around herself.
Much of her energy, she knew, was expended in suppressing negative feelings about herself. These tended to grow and encompass others, particul
arly Claude, whose beauty never disappeared no matter what she was doing. Viva would look for imperfections, attempt to see them and make them subtly known, but Claude could not be brought down. The family loved her summer freckles and in France women were much less conscious than Australians of body hair, of which Claude’s was very visible, being black. There were no rewards in looking for imperfections in Claude, so she would discover herself trying to find them in Allegra.
Love would teeter on the edge of hate for this woman who, without seeming to, ruled the roost. This was how Viva would have liked herself to be. She put up a good facade. Simone deferred to her, recognising in her a better brain, something, more aplomb, maybe. Viva tried to make it sustain her.
She did not spend her whole life translating, of course. There was Paris to be out and about in. At the nearby Café Dôme the artists used to congregate. Picasso was to be seen there, and once Matisse, sitting alone at a small table, his back turned on Picasso and his entourage. Sometimes Simone, Claude and Viva would have coffee there. Simone and Claude knew a lot of the locals and even had a nodding and waving acquaintance with Picasso. On those occasions Viva could lose herself in the sheer excitement of being alive and would know, as she came down to earth again, that excitement had made her attractive, playful and young. She would flirt and be flirted with and get caught up in the breezy talkative moods of Claude and Simone.
Even so, Claude was an obvious favourite with the cafe society and Viva wondered how she would go among these people on her own. Artists drew her just as frequently as they drew Claude, and told her she had an interesting face, but she could feel herself being pushy on the occasions when Claude had all the attention, and the sight of Simone being pampered brought out the worst in her. Viva could be wittily and caustically sarcastic, and the artists would draw her being so, a sharp-edged but not unattractive harpy. Claude, on the other hand, was all flowing lines, the child-woman, the beauty ready to bloom. Once a painter came up to her at the Dôme and kissed her for being beautiful.
Viva feared what she took to be an inevitability: Henri and Claude. The more she feared it, the more it seemed to happen before her eyes. They, innocently happy and marked out for one another by virtue of innate beauty; she in an agony of suppressed spite. She felt compelled to learn not just about Henri’s life but about his art as well. She talked art to him when and where Claude could not. She kept up with the movements, read copiously and had opinions. She could see things in Henri’s work, and he soon noticed her sensitivities. He would invite her to come and look at work in progress in his attic over the technical school. There she talked to other young painters as well and they took notice, suddenly wanting her near for her acuity.
But the more sophisticated she became about art, the more her relationship with Henri resolved itself into something she didn’t really want. He respected her good eye and her intelligence, but he did not love her or even appear to think of loving her. He loved Claude, she could tell. When Claude dropped in to see his work he’d romp around with her, bringing out her dazzling laughter. Claude did nothing wrong, her every act enhanced her, so that Viva felt the pain of unregarded love.
THIRTY
Faking It
IN 1935 THE mealtime talk in the Montparnasse apartment, when it was not of Mussolini and his African ambitions, was of Hitler and his program to sterilise undesirables. On one occasion Grandfather Grafman was there, and he couldn’t see why it shouldn’t be done. If idiots didn’t breed, he said, there wouldn’t be idiots.
It was a good job Grandfather Katz wasn’t there at the time but even so, Lev weighed in with examples of intelligent couples with idiot children, and by the dessert had Grandfather Grafman claiming that such children were the offspring of faithless women and it was God’s will being done. That evening ended with the diners storming away from the table in eight different directions, resulting in much door-slamming and the vigorous slinging of plates through the sink in the kitchen. Rivkah was angry with Lev for inciting her father, Lev was angry with her father, her father would not back down from his opinion, Allegra stormed off at the arrogance, and Henri and the three girls took to their heels, each thinking of something else they had to do.
When Viva joined Allegra in their room Allegra did not look up from her work, at which she was jabbing her nib and sighing, her lips in a firm straight line with the blood pressed out of them. Some minutes went by, during which water slapped and gurgled down the pipes outside and the sounds of the house jangled and scraped against each other, as though striving to make quirky, percussive music. By and by, this was added to from outside. Some extraordinary clicking and baying noises started coming up from the area of the yard where the bins were kept. Looking down four storeys, Viva saw a drunk, drenched in moonlight, gesticulating deftly as if conducting the whole soundscape. Hearing the hullaballoo, Allegra clacked her pen down on the wooden desktop, rubbed her weary eyes and joined Viva at the window.
‘That’s a sane kind of insanity,’ she said, as the lunatic continued to caterwaul and bow. ‘He’s getting a lot of pleasure from it: like a footnote in a high drama.’
It was September. At the vast rally just held in Nuremberg Hitler had forbidden Jewish–Aryan marriages and there were reports that some Aryan girls found walking in the streets with Jewish boys had been carted off to a concentration camp. Shopkeepers in Germany would no longer take the risk of serving Jews in case they were victimised for doing so. Jews were being deprived of German citizenship and their rights to pensions. They were being banned from public service, journalism, and the entertainment industry. Anti-Jewish graffiti was beginning to surface even in France.
‘He’s a silly, rigid old man,’ said Allegra of Dan Grafman. ‘He doesn’t realise that what’s happening in Germany is a threat to him.’ Allegra was uncharacteristically frazzled and feeling deeply frustrated that the Italians, though they worked hard at it, hadn’t managed to get across the meaning of Fascism. People were too apathetic to take any notice.
‘It’s a disease,’ said Allegra, ‘it kills our capacity to live with each other.’ She despaired of the world which, she said, was full of ordinary people who didn’t seem to care who governed them. The trouble with Democracy was that few people used it, indeed were capable of using it, with the vigilance it demanded.
‘It’s wrong to think our lives are insignificant,’ she continued. ‘We’re all part of the fabric, and all of us have a moral duty to the future, even that poor clown down there, reminding us not to take ourselves seriously all the time. Even so, each person’s actions matter, and that is the only constant in history.’
There was no archetype for good behaviour or good society, she went on. The human race was not degenerating from some master plan towards chaos and ruin, nor was it evolving towards perfection. It was just a species of animal whose survival depended on one of its characteristics more than on others. The means to adapt were in human heads. Humans had to be both against nature and with it at the same time.
Viva found this an odd observation for Allegra to make, since she was a creature of cities and her professional concerns had been artifice. But she’d read Darwin, as many educated Marxists had, and had come to see cities as accretions of the human habitat. Viva found it hard to guess what was actually in her mind, since the ideas she had of the animal kingdom seemed to come mainly from lithographs in books. Allegra did study the human condition, nevertheless, and saw that it was often wretched, much more wretched than the condition of pigeons, cats, dogs, sparrows and horses, practically the only animals with which she was acquainted.
Earlier in the month she had gone to the ski resort of Chamonix in the Massif, near the Italian border. Ostensibly the trip had been a skiing holiday, but the real reason she’d gone was to pick up a drop of propaganda material that had come in from Italy, hidden in the seat of an imported sleigh. She had taken Viva with her so as not to attract attention as a woman travelling on her own. Viva posed as her niece. Her orders were to go
to a particular shop to get herself and Viva fitted out with rented skis. While she was there, she was to ask to see the shop’s Italian proprietor on the pretext of an old friendship, and he would hand the material on.
The man wasn’t there. According to his assistant, he’d been out skiing the previous day with a group of Italian tourists, but the group had failed to turn up at nightfall. The locals had become worried that they had had some accident or become lost, and so a party had gone out searching for them as soon as it was light. There was no news of them yet.
Allegra and Viva rented their skis and returned to their chalet to think out what might have happened and what they ought to do. Supposing it were an innocent misadventure, the best thing would be to wait and behave as though on holidays; but if it were sinister, then the last place Allegra would want to be found was in Chamonix enquiring after the ski-shop owner, let alone displaying an interest in sleighs. She and Viva were covered to a certain extent by counterfeit French identification papers, bearing different Paris addresses, but it was worrying that they themselves were obviously not French. They’d been taken for Englishwomen at the chalet, yet according to the papers they’d had to show to identify themselves at the hotel, they were Parisians. They’d had to invent a story about both of them having spent long periods in England, hence their accents, and Viva’s occasional difficulties in conversation.
The man who ran the chalet was inquisitive about them. At another time, he might have seemed charming, but his curiosity about England stemmed from his having spent a long time in London himself, and Allegra, who didn’t know London at all, had made the mistake of saying they had lived there. When asked where, she’d said Kensington, an area the chalet owner knew well, while all Allegra knew about it was that it had some gardens.
Mad Meg Page 44
