Australia is over the horizon. In four more days, we will stop at a city by the name of Fremantle, before we go under the bottom of the continent and dock at Melbourne.
Australia, may I introduce my happy family. I bring you gifts: my clever brain, Jan’s writing, Marek’s sunny disposition. Also some less-welcome cargo stored in a dark cellar of my memory. Germans in black uniforms and polished boots that come up almost to their knees. A line of small children stands before the Germans. The officer in black points with his finger at one child, then another, another, and many more. He says, ‘Dieser Mann … das Mädchen … Dieser Junge …’ He does not point at me. I am not in the line of children. I am hidden away.
But I am watching.
It is the watching that I bring with me.
14
AUSTRALIA
What if you sailed on and sailed on, heading for a land that might be anything, you just don’t know, but your hope is that you will walk down the gangplank with a huge smile on your face, gazing out at a city that exceeds everything you had attempted to imagine?
Perhaps I allowed optimism to take the place of sense. I thought: People will embrace me. The Australians will say: ‘Werunia, all this way from Poland? We welcome you.’
I hold the hand of my son. He, too, is smiling. And Jan is laughing. ‘My darling,’ he says, ‘like cats we leapt from a window, turned in the air and landed on our feet.’
Well, the place that the gangplank leads to is not paradise, but it’s okay. The architecture is dull, but who lives her life, or his, for the chance to study interesting buildings? Not such a problem. But, you know, better if the architecture was a little more engaging.
The Australians themselves are cheerful, very cheerful, very friendly, maybe a bit too much, as if they were gloriously unaware of anything in life that needed to be hated, scorned. I like the Australians. Men wear their shirt sleeves rolled up. They say, ‘How you going, love?’ They think football is more important than food and shelter, than anything. Who cannot love people like this?
They are children. The sun shines on them all day long, for the whole of their lives. Australia is like a playground for them. Who among them has seen a man in a suit and tie hanging from a lamppost outside his shop? Here, soldiers have never been permitted to grab children in the streets, throw them to the ground and put a boot heel on their throats. Hell is in other lands, as far away as the planets.
I love these Australians who cannot imagine hell. May all the world be like this sunny place of men with their sleeves rolled up, men who lean against anything close by – a wall, a doorway, a telephone post – lean and smile and say as you pass, ‘How you going, love?’ Men who slouch so beautifully.
Even the women, I love. They wear terylene dresses, they perm their hair, their skin is sunburnt. They don’t care. Like the men, the women say, ‘How you going, love?’ And if you have a troubled look about you, they say, ‘Cheer up, dearie – might never happen.’
Is it true that I saw all this in ten minutes? Maybe not. Maybe I am thinking more of the first hour than the first ten minutes. More likely, the first week, the first six months.
My mother does not live with us in the Chapel Street apartment. She wants her own place. Good. She is not my friend; I am not hers. There is an unspoken agreement between us that we will see little of each other. She is in a number of ways an extraordinary woman, but not in my life.
The love and admiration many women have for their mothers – I will never know that. I don’t yearn for it. If ever I yearn, it is for my father to return to life, walk through the door of our apartment and say, ‘Werunia, sit at the piano, beloved; play me some Chopin.’ We don’t have a piano, and my father will never walk through the door.
The Jews of Melbourne – we meet them, many of them, Jews that Jan’s aunt and cousin and his mother know – they are a different matter. Dear God, so bourgeois that they define the word! We are invited into houses where Mrs Wife has covered the sofa and armchairs with plastic sheeting to avoid any wear. The path across the carpet from the front door to the sofa and armchairs is itself covered in plastic matting. All the ornaments in the house are polished insanely. Everything glitters. If you can’t make it shine, Mrs Wife doesn’t want it in the house.
In one home, I ask where the toilet is to be found. Mrs Wife wears an expression of censure. I’m speaking Polish. I say, ‘Chcę siusiu, I want to pee.’ Mrs Wife says in English, ‘You want the WC.’ I raise my eyebrows. Mrs Wife frowns. ‘Down the corridor, on the left.’ In the toilet, it’s a hospital, on the top of the cistern a bottle of something left open that spreads the scent of the carbolic they use to scrub operating theatres. Who could shit in here? It would be a sacrilege. I feel guilty for urinating, guilty for creating the sound of piss striking the water below. When I return from the prized WC, Mrs Wife studies me as if I were a refugee from some cesspit in the pagan backwoods of Poland.
Okay, plastic on the floor, on the sofa – who cares? It’s not a good sign, but who cares? What about the conversation? It doesn’t exist.
After that hour or week or six months, I am in shock. This is a big land, huge, I had expected vigour, crazy appetites, madness possibly, but everyone is sleeping or else drifting, drifting. It won’t be long before the first of a thousand Australian Jews will tell me that I’m an intellectual snob. They will say, ‘Vera, Vera, you complain too much. Okay, maybe we’re self-satisfied and uninspired, and we’ve never heard of Bergman and don’t care, but what about you? Do you think Bergman and Fellini matter so much? Please. Take the time to admire my sofa under the plastic covering. Take the time to praise my world-class toilet in which you are forbidden to shit. Bergman? A depressive. You want to make films, something happy is better.’
And in these houses, no books. Maybe something about Moses leading the Jews out of captivity. Nothing else.
I say to Jan, ‘How can people live without books? Do these people ever read? Nobody has even heard of Samuel Beckett. I want to kill myself.’
Okay, I’m exaggerating. Not all the Jews of Melbourne were philistines. Some were clever, even brilliant. Quite a few. And I admit that I sound extravagant when I talk about the need I have for books in my life, for art of every variety, literary art and every other sort, and of my need to see something exciting in the architecture around me. I can’t help it. It is important. Listen, do you think that our talent for murdering each other in very great numbers is what we should proclaim as a great hallmark of our species? Do you think that kicking a football up and down a big patch of greenery makes us special? Okay, football makes us special in a certain way, I admit, but can you see the point I’m making? God, Adonei, Abraham, Moses, Jesus the gentle hippy of Galilee, Mohammed, even Buddha – imagining them makes us a bit special, sure, but it is art that really lifts us up higher than the angels (also, why do we never hear of books being published in Heaven? Why the hell not?) and justifies this whole insane business of being human. If you walk past a theatre where Waiting for Godot is playing and you think, ‘Too busy for that,’ what hope is there for you on earth?
When the Jews tell me that I am an intellectual snob, will you hear what I want to say – did, in fact, say every so often? ‘Good for me. There’s only one sort of snobbery you should be proud of and that’s intellectual snobbery. May there be more of it.’ I can forgive people almost anything so long as they will take the time to sit and read Anna Karenina from start to finish, and then walk up and down shaking their heads in wonder and saying, ‘Dear God! Dear God!’
Listen to me. I am Jewish, I should be happy if people don’t form mobs and beat me with clubs. If they just leave me in peace. But I’m not. I need more. I need books and plays and paintings. Everyone does. Why do I even have to insist in this way? Isn’t it obvious?
The Australian Jews of Melbourne, some of them – they want to get by without art. They haven’t got the time. It bores them. I hold my tongue, sometimes. But here I am in this stupid, big land, and it mak
es me want to buy a gun and shoot all the people who won’t read Beckett, then shoot myself.
Not a good idea. When things like this come into my brain, I wonder if I might be mad. I have said that in the ghetto I pictured in my mind a box of coloured pencils and stayed sane. But maybe I actually went mad in the ghetto and have been mad ever since? People look at me as if I’m mad, often. I always think, ‘What’s the matter with them – are they retarded?’ It might be me.
Well, what of it? I have enjoyed myself. Who do I know who has enjoyed herself as I have? A few, not many.
Craving the reader’s patience (just a little bit of it, why not? – is there somewhere else you have to be?), I want to go forward for a minute from the late 1950s to the 1990s. By then, Australia had been transformed from a musty parlour smelling of lamb chops and cabbage into what we have now – many, many people with ideas that thrill me, people with brains like my box of pencils. I was asked by Cheryl Healzewood, a friend who was once in the theatre, to pose as Carmen for a poster advertising the show.
I said, ‘Any day you like.’
Cheryl dressed me up as a type of gypsy slut (I use that term with the greatest affection): a lot of cleavage, jewellery around my neck, a cigar in my gorgeous mouth. I felt at home.
I identify with this firecracker from Seville who pours out her philosophy of life in the ‘Habanera’. Carmen is mad, of course she is; nobody can live the life she has chosen without driving some bourgeois moron like Don José beserk with jealousy. And we have to remember that what enrages Don José is not Carmen’s promiscuity but her freedom – he can’t imagine freedom, it is beyond him, it is beyond every bourgeois, and so he kills her. I have pleased myself in life, with more kindness than Carmen, certainly, but we are kin.
So if I am mad, I’m mad in the Carmen way.
Please don’t think of her as a trollop, pure and simple. Liberty always courts its own destruction, and never more so than when the one who is free is a woman.
You’re free; you hate boundaries. You go further and further in your freedom. Finally, someone comes after you with a knife.
Don José should have thought, ‘This astonishing woman opened her arms to me. It’s enough.’
We went to live in Pine Avenue in Elwood, next to St Kilda. All the Jews lived in St Kilda – Jews who had been here for years, some of them. And Jan and Marek and Werunia, a little further east. Elwood was quiet, tame, full of houses from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Also apartment blocks, from the same era. Along the streets, London Planes grow, with their patchwork bark and heavy, whispering foliage. Gardens, small parks. To the south, the beach, brown sands, a pier. Bathing boxes, too, such as you find on the Lido in Venice. Here and there all over the suburb, shops are arranged on each side of the street.
Among each group of shops, there is what is known in Australia as a ‘milk bar’. When you open the door to one of these milk bars, a bell tinkles and a man or a woman looking weary and bored appears from a parlour or something at the back of the shop.
Sure enough, you can buy milk in the milk bar, in one-pint bottles, and milkshakes, lollies, ice-creams. And bread: loaves with a high dome, or square ones called ‘sandwich loaves’. On the shelves, there are cans of baked beans or spaghetti for sale. On the counter and behind it sit open boxes of lollies: little shapes like mint leaves, small chocolate-coated somethings known as ‘bullets’, other chocolates called ‘cobbers’ – which I will come to learn is a slang term in Australia for ‘friends’.
A cobber is always a man. Women do not have cobbers. Women have ‘girlfriends’. Even if you are a hundred and fifty years old, your female friends are ‘girlfriends’.
The milk bar. Who runs these milk bars? People who are prepared to work sixteen hours a day without employing anyone. In Australia at that time, 1958, Greek immigrants ran milk bars. Greeks and Italians. Also a few immigrants from freezing places like Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. These immigrants wanted to make money, so they were ready to work sixteen hours each day. After ten years, they do something else – for only ten hours a day.
When the Greek guy and his wife, the Italian guy or the Estonian first buys the milk bar, he smiles like crazy at every customer.
‘Mister Smith, how nice to see you, ha ha ha! – lovely day. A loaf of bread, Mister Smith? A pint of milk? For the kids, maybe some cobbers, what do you say? Ha ha ha!’
After one year of this, the smiles have withered away. It’s the most boring job on earth. The man behind the counter – he or his wife – has seen you three hundred times, and he knows exactly what you will buy and what you will not and, in all honesty, he’s sick to death of you. He’s sick to death of all of the Mister Smiths. Secretly, he wants to buy a gun and shoot you. Or if not you, then himself. A sandwich loaf, a pint of milk, once a week four cobbers. Never four pink musk sticks or four mint leaves – always four cobbers. Of course he wants to shoot you. Of course he wants to shoot himself.
But he doesn’t. He sticks to the sixteen-hour days, he saves his pennies, and then one glorious day he sells the milk bar to a Vietnamese guy and takes a holiday with his wife and his kids in the sunshine of Queensland. Dear God!
The Jews of Melbourne say to me, ‘Don’t worry about Bergman. Don’t worry about Samuel Beckett. Losers! Open a business. Get some respect.’
I feel like throwing up everything in my stomach. But I say, ‘Okay, open a business. Get some respect. How do I open a business?’
‘You do what we did. You roll up your sleeves. You work like a crazy person. Sixteen hours a day. Maybe seventeen, who can remember. Ten years. You save your money. Then you start a business.’
‘But how do I save money? What are you talking about? Sixteen hours a day?’
‘Vera, listen with all your ears. You buy a milk bar. After ten years, you sell it. A milk bar. Loaves of bread. High-dome loaves, sandwich loaves. Spaghetti in tins. Baked beans. Ice-creams. Lollies. You understand? A milk bar.’
Later, I tell Jan. ‘They say, “Open a milk bar”! Can you believe it? Am I one of those women you see in such shops? Like someone who has not seen the sun for a hundred years? Am I such a woman, do they think?’
Jan laughs, maybe at me, maybe at the idea itself. ‘Calm down. It’s funny.’
He amazes me. He says, ‘It’s funny’? Every day for sixteen hours, that little bell ringing when someone comes into the shop? Am I supposed to sit out the back with a magazine, waiting for the stupid bell?
I have seen the sort of magazine the Australians read. It is called Women’s Weekly. Dear God, on the cover there is a picture of Queen Elizabeth with her children and her husband at Balmoral, a tartan blanket spread on the grass; they’re having a picnic. The husband is standing, looking down at the family; he’s wearing a kilt with a pouch hanging over his genitals – obscene! Inside the magazine, women are making cakes, knitting cardigans. A famous woman tennis player, an Australian, is engaged to be married. Here she is smiling with her fiancé at the net on a tennis court; he has a round, pink face and an untrustworthy ginger moustache. Is that what Jan thinks is so hilarious?
In two weeks, I would burn the shop down then shoot myself.
Well, no. There is Marek to think of. He likes everything about Australia. What does he know? He’s five years old. But he would still have Jan. He adores Jan; Jan adores him. I adore them both. I’m ashamed of thinking of burning down the non-existent milk bar.
About Jan. He takes a job in a car factory at Fishermans Bend. They make Holdens. In Poland, he’s famous; he’s a journalist of genius. In Australia, they give him a job making cars at Fishermans Bend. Okay, it’s better than nothing. Off he goes to the factory five days a week, never a word of complaint. I admire his stoicism. In a way, it suits him to be surrounded all day by men of the working class; he’s there in solidarity; it’s the proletariat, maybe a few communists, working alongside him. On a ‘smoko’, as the Australians call it, a mid-morning break, he probably sings th
e ‘Internationale’ with them, also a verse of ‘The Red Flag’. He works on an assembly line. He uses a spanner. It would drive me insane. But it is harder to drive Jan insane than me. He has a very welcoming personality and never thinks of burning milk bars down.
My job – well. I meet a man by the name of Klotzman, who has a clothing factory in Prahran, a solid building of red brick. Skirts, dresses, blouses. Klotzman is middle-aged, middle-class, a Jew from Łódź, quite dapper, in the Hungarian way, but otherwise conventional.
Klotzman says to me, ‘Vera, tell me this, can you sew by hand? I mean sew properly, good stitches? Can you?’
‘Sure.’
I can’t, but how is he to know?
‘Okay, listen to what I have to say. You can work in my factory. Good wages for hard work. Tell me this: can you do this job?’
‘Hard work, good wages? Sure.’
So I start work in the clothing factory. Four years at university, such professors as Kotarbiński and Kołakowski, and now I’m working hard for good wages, stitching skirts in Prahran. Too bad for me. Boo hoo. I roll up my sleeves, as they say.
Fortunately, I have never been afraid of hard work. Any Jew who walked out of the Lvov ghetto is never afraid of hard work. We have already had the hardest jobs on earth for zero wages, and lived to tell the tale.
There are not so many people working at Klotzman’s factory. Mostly he sends out the fabric to have the garments made by women working at home, and the women send the garments back to have the difficult stitching completed by me. I am the finisher.
Here I am, a cliché, a Jew in the rag trade.
The other finishers are not Jews. They are migrants from the Mediterranean.
I have to lecture myself: ‘Werunia, do not mention political philosophy. Marx, no. Proudhon, no. You shut up, or when you have something to say, talk about the Queen, and what’s-her-name, the sister with the breasts like cushions, Margaret. In fact, about the breasts, say nothing.’
Vera Page 13
