Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  It’s no great ordeal, but in my daydreams I have left Australia and taken a ship to Israel and taught myself Hebrew. I am restless. It’s madness. I escape the Poles who want to build a new Auschwitz, I come to this country where nobody has even heard of the Holocaust – nobody but the Jews – and where the sun shines all day, where there is fresh fruit in the Victoria Market, not expensive – and all I can think about is running away.

  I despair of myself. No wonder people think I am strange. It’s true. I am strange. Sometimes I am sick of myself. But what can I do? Best to be true to yourself, and wear your awkward features like medals.

  Maybe not in Klotzman’s factory, though.

  Here is Werunia, bent over her sewing table, humming tunes from American movies – South Pacific, Some Enchanted Evening, Dites Moi – she’s a regular gal.

  South Pacific you could speak about with anyone, even in the factory. But I went with Jan to a little cinema in the middle of Melbourne, where foreign films were shown with subtitles, and here I saw Virgin Spring, the Bergman film: wonderful. A more bleak film you couldn’t imagine, but it made me happy.

  For a week after, I don’t think at all about Israel, or about London, a city I’ve also singled out as a place we might flee to. I want Jan to practise his craft of journalism. He is known to some in London as a fine journalist. He could work there; he could write in English. It is his passion: good writing, good reportage. A man you love, you wish to see him working with passion.

  In any case, why am I yearning for Israel? I have heard from Jews who have visited that it is completely philistine. They don’t say that it’s philistine; they say it is wonderful. But since they themselves are philistines, it’s not difficult to draw conclusions.

  This is what I think: Vera, Werunia, you have come to Australia. Make your stand here. That’s what you should accept, Werunia. Make a stand. Are you listening?

  15

  STITCHING

  Klotzman and his wife watch me at my sewing table with suspicion.

  What’s the big problem? I’m sewing as fast as a crazy person, I’m making good stitches, I’m humming pop songs – never the Allegro from Mozart’s Symphony No. 28. Bergman, I never mention.

  But I gather that my normal expression is satirical. The look on my face says, ‘May God give me the strength to kill myself if I cover my furniture in plastic.’ Mama Klotzman thinks I look down my nose at her.

  Of course I look down my nose at her. She’s a moron.

  She says, ‘My son is marrying Rachel, the daughter of a rabbi; two hundred people are invited to Temple Beth Israel.’

  And I say, ‘Two hundred? Hmm. A wonderful thing.’

  Mama Klotzman says, ‘In this city, there has never been a wedding of this size for a Jew.’

  I say, ‘Well, good luck.’

  Mama Klotzman says, ‘What? You think we need luck? You think maybe we can’t afford a wedding of two hundred? Is this what you think?’

  ‘I’m very happy for you. May the Rabbi of Jerusalem himself bless Rachel and David. On his wedding night, may your son burst with joy.’

  Mama Klotzman has the feeling that I am not sincere. She narrows her eyes. She says, ‘Okay, back to work. This is not a charity.’

  I’m in charge of skirts, and Jan is making Holden cars on the assembly line.

  In university, I read all that Marx had to say about the English working class. Now Jan and I are in the Australian version. It’s not so bad. But to accept that you are in the working class forever, you must be born to it. Then your eyes never seek out something new on the horizon; you don’t notice that there is a horizon. Maybe you look for a better job, but still in that same class.

  I am not working class, and neither is Jan. We can take a holiday here, but we can’t live here.

  I am a journalist. I think, ‘Werunia, you have never in your life considered the working class inferior to your own. Don’t start now; don’t disgust me. Sew the skirts; that’s okay for a time. Make no complaints, but in some way return to journalism.’

  All the same, without even knowing it, I am wearing that satirical look, that mocking look.

  Mama Klotzman asks me, ‘Why so high and mighty?’

  I pause over my sewing. ‘High and mighty?’

  ‘Always so haughty. Who knows what’s in your head? Communism, maybe.’

  ‘Well, since you ask, yes.’

  ‘You admit it!’

  ‘Yes, I admit it.’

  ‘The communists in Poland are killing the Jews. A shame that you even speak of them!’

  ‘That’s not the communists. Marx was a Jew. That’s just the Poles being stupid.’

  ‘Aiee! Now she is saying that Marx is a Jew!’

  But why am I claiming that I’m a communist? Maybe a bit. I have more sympathy with communism than most. Not with the communism of the Russians and the Poles, though: I mean nice communism. From each according to his ability, and so on. I’m an ‘each’. That’s about all I can say. I’m not about to do anything about it, though. I’m not likely to seize Klotzman’s factory in the name of the proletariat and issue demands. I don’t have the stomach for a struggle that would require generations of raised voices, lock-outs, strikes. I’m a rubbish communist. I want to work as a journalist. I want to become a salaried employee of a good newspaper owned by a fat capitalist.

  Meanwhile, will you look at this floor, the floor of the finishing room? It’s covered in dust. When it was last swept, God knows.

  I am a person who wants well-swept floors wherever she goes. In Pine Street, I keep a tidy house. I’m obsessive. I visit the household of Mrs Wife and scorn the vigour with which she scrubs every surface in the place. But I am as bad. I take a broom to the floor, humming tunes from South Pacific.

  Mama Klotzman stands at the doorway, her face a mask of horror.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she shrieks.

  What I’m doing must be obvious. I say nothing.

  ‘Sweeping?’ says Mama Klotzman. ‘Are you sweeping?’

  ‘Yes, I am sweeping. You see the broom?’

  She runs at me and seizes the broom. ‘Are you mad, Wasowski? Don’t you know? Sweeping is bad for business! What? Do you want people to think we have time to sweep the floor?’

  I say, calmly, ‘Mrs Klotzman, what are you talking about?’

  ‘It’s bad luck, idiot! You want to ruin us? Is that why you came here?’

  Her face is pink. The tips of her ears are red. The expression on her face is that of a peasant who has been cursed by the evil eye.

  It’s the Hungarian way: on the surface, very sophisticated; underneath, seething with peasant superstitions. The Hungarian Jews, they go out at midnight and dance naked before pagan idols. They believe that witches ride through the sky on broomsticks. They have so many superstitions you’d need an encyclopedia to explain them all. You have whooping cough? Catch a fish in a stream, cough on its fish face and throw it back in the stream. Then the fish will have the whooping cough and you will be cured. Such things, the Hungarians believe. Also, so it appears: never sweep the floor of your factory, or business will suffer.

  I gaze at Mama Klotzman with a mixture of pity and humour. It drives her crazy. She says again, ‘So high and mighty.’

  Very well, I have to accept that I will stitch skirts with a carpet of dust under my feet. Also, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, cobwebs forming roads and tracks and highways for spiders on the window panes. I am like Cinderella, sitting among the ashes on the hearth. I laugh to myself.

  When Mama Klotzman walks through the finishing room, I raise my face from the sewing and smile.

  At home, it’s okay.

  It makes me happy to see Marek so cheerful in his school in Elwood, so pleased with this new life. In his school uniform, his face aglow, he goes off to school, with never a word of complaint about this Australia we’ve crossed half the world to embrace.

  But I miss the life I led in Warsaw; I miss being a European. The Poles are
attracted to the idea of their unique status as a nation. They say, ‘Sure, we’re Europeans, but the poetry in our bones is older than Europe, older than the Russians, stupid, clumsy bears with blocks for heads that they are. We are the heirs of the Lusatians, the bards of olden days, and of a better class of Slavs, more nimble, not so arse-about.’ This is a fairy story the Poles tell themselves. They’re Europeans, a little less ridiculous than some, more ridiculous than others. And I am European.

  You know, when Europeans come face to face with the new world in English novels, in American novels of the nineteenth century, those I have read translated into Polish – come face to face with an American businessman, an American heiress – they experience a certain degree of alarm, or disgust, or pity, also some fascination, but by and by they settle into a fairly tranquil sense of their European superiority. They are often wicked, these Europeans, but in a calm way, wicked without much outward malice. Well and good. When the Europeans meet the Australians? Not so many novels. But this is what happens. We are at first baffled. Such good-natured people, such friendly people, what is the cause of all this geniality? And we think, as I’ve said, ‘Like children, how wonderful.’

  This is patronising, I suppose. But it’s true that there’s not much sophistication. So what? No great loss. Let the world be like the Australians; that would be a big improvement. The Australians have put aside so much that is false in favour of being cheerful. Then you begin to realise that a bit too much has been set aside. Nobody has fashioned the subcultures that I knew in Warsaw; there are no niches, no nooks, no layers. What the Australians welcome is a man or a woman willing to embrace the ethos of Australians: don’t put on any airs, don’t get fancy, don’t show off, don’t pretend you know something that nobody else knows; we’re all easy-breezy here; you might be a Pole or a whatnot, but here you’re the equal of the Prime Bloody Minister, so relax. Maybe the Australians think this sounds like heaven, and it is, in its way, except that something’s hiding underneath the big, warm welcome: a fear, a timidity. It’s mostly bluster on the surface and a horrible, ashamed fear underneath. Fear and resentment, like a friendly dog that jumps all over you and wags its tail but at the first hint of complaint lurches off and watches you from round the corner of the house with a scheme in its brain: it intends to bite you on the leg. There is, in Australia – I have noticed this – a limitation of sources of delight, and of the things that might be honoured, the people who might be honoured. Don’t get fancy, don’t put on any airs, don’t get arty-farty.

  I had not heard that term, arty-farty, before I came to Australia: not even in a Polish equivalent. Really, this is wonderful, this Australia in which you must not put on any airs, in which you must not come over all arty-farty. It is wonderful, except for that thing underneath, that fear and shame. And that sneering. That dog that intends to bite you on the leg.

  In Warsaw, when we gathered in the nightclub or at a bar – often the Journalists’ Club – we thought our tastes and appetites and frenzies and phobias were different from those of other people, but we didn’t think we belonged to some higher group. And the people, the ‘other people’ might have thought we were peculiar, or weird, or stupid, but they did not think we were affected. They shrugged, that’s all. And that’s what I miss – that shrug.

  Mama Klotzman – all the Mama Klotzmans, all the Papa Klotzmans – they come to Australia and do what the oppressed and dispossessed always do on their great journey over the face of the globe. It is this. They take on the complexion of the culture and society in which they have settled. They disrobe and stand under the waterfall of the local culture and let the colour of the torrent dye them blue or green or red or crimson. It might take a couple of generations, but in the end the dispossessed are happy to jump into the waterfall. The Armenians jump in, as do the Assyrian Christians, the Kurds, the Black Irish, the White Russians. The Jews have had more experience of jumping into waterfalls than anyone else, and that’s why it’s such a crazy thing when the Jew-haters write in their pamphlets, ‘A disgrace! The Jews keep to themselves! The Jews are secretive!’

  Secretive, my arse. The Klotzman Jews can’t wait to show how conventional they are, how supportive of any society that abstains from murdering them. Always, when something happens, some event, they ask, ‘Is this good for the Jews? Is this bad for the Jews? It makes them accept us? Best if it makes them accept us!’ Mama Klotzman, Papa Klotzman, do you think they want to tear the society in which they have found a haven into little pieces? They love it! The warmer the embrace of the new neighbours, the more they return the hug. Mama Klotzman adores the Australians. ‘Lovely people. Completely mindless, but lovely. Suits me,’ says Mama Klotzman, and she settles with great relief into the happy culture of the sun-loving Australians. Sure, she is still a Klotzman Jew – she goes to shule, she buys her bagels at Glicks in Carlisle Street, at Chanukkah she buys latkes and doughnuts, maybe a cheese dish to honour Judith who cut off the head of Holofernes – but of Australia she has nothing bad to say. If she had to, she would put on a pullover of black and white stripes and big boots and white shorts and kick a football to Papa Klotzman.

  The dispossessed of Armenia? Same thing. Pomegranates and apricots and dolmi three times a day; in front of the church, a fire for the bride and groom to jump over; nothing nasty to say about Australia.

  Me, no.

  No niches, no nooks, no layers. Not the home that Werunia was hoping for. Let me go back to Poland. Or it could be Israel. Or London. Why not?

  One fine day, Mama Klotzman bites me on the leg.

  Well, I expected it. I could see her around the corner, with her aggrieved and resentful look, judging the right time to strike.

  She says, ‘Wasowski, I want you to clean my house. You want to sweep floors and destroy Klotzman’s business? Better you should sweep my house.’

  She is standing in front of me with her chin raised defiantly; I’m sitting at my work table, with a skirt to sew.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want you to clean my house. Extra pay.’

  ‘Clean your house?’

  ‘Too high and mighty, Wasowski? Too high and mighty to get your hands dirty?’

  ‘Mrs Klotzman, I am not going to clean your house.’

  ‘So what are you telling? Communists don’t clean houses? You see a Swedish movie, now you can’t do some ordinary work with a vacuum cleaner?’

  ‘How did you know I saw a Swedish movie?’

  ‘Someone told me. In black and white, Technicolor is not for communists, is that what you’re saying from Stalin? Clean my house, Wasowski. Extra money.’

  ‘No,’ I say, on the brink of laughing out loud, and it would be genuine mirth if I did, not satire. ‘Are you mad?’

  Off she stalks, the cheeks of her arse swaying like giant watermelons. I settle down to work once more, chuckling happily. ‘Communists don’t clean houses’ – that’s wonderful.

  I think back to Kołakowski’s lectures on ‘a humanist communism’. I wish I could raise my hand in that lecture hall and say, ‘Professor, a question: are communists permitted to clean the houses of the bourgeois and the rentiers?’

  A few minutes later, Mama Klotzman returns, her face flushed with triumph. She stands before me with her arms folded under her bosom. At first she says nothing – she wants me to feel menaced by her happiness.

  I say, ‘Mrs Klotzman?’

  ‘I have been speaking to my husband. You can take off your apron. You’re dismissed.’

  ‘Dismissed? For what reason?’

  ‘For the reason very well you know it, Wasowski! For the reason you are not taking orders!’

  ‘You mean for refusing to clean your house?’

  ‘For the reason always you are so high and mighty! The communists, you love? Okay, Wasowski, go and work for the communists!’ And she stalks off for a second time. The watermelons.

  I remain where I am, in a shaft of sunlight that angles down from a dusty window. I am amused. I stand and
take off my apron, saunter to the locker room, fetch my handbag.

  I stop at the accountant’s office to inform him of my finishing time.

  ‘Vera, you are leaving us?’

  He’s a nice guy, Harold something-or-other; he has colourless hair, wears thick-lensed glasses and, in an attempt at adding some much-needed flair, a polka-dot bow tie.

  ‘I am leaving, Harold. I was sacked.’

  ‘This I don’t believe!’

  ‘It’s true. It appears I am a communist infiltrator. Maybe I am.’

  I blow him a kiss, and depart.

  I am unemployed. No work, no pay. At times like this, I see more vividly than ever the virtues of communism.

  All the same, it’s true that at this time in Australia, 1958, any man who wants a job can find one. But women? Not so much is expected of them. If women want to work, okay, so the thinking goes, that’s perfectly acceptable. But a woman should never take a job away from a man. Women are homemakers before anything else. A second job in the one family is a luxury.

  But here’s the funny thing: most employed women are working class. They make sandwiches in cafés, clean motel rooms, attach Part A to Part B in certain factories. There are only a few women in the professions: teachers, nurses, a couple of doctors. There is still an old-fashioned attitude to female employment in Australia, an old-fashioned way of dealing with women altogether.

  In Poland, much less so. It is capitalism that preserves this vision of women as homemakers and weaklings; under communism, we put a rivet gun in the hands of a woman and say, ‘Get to work.’ Not so sentimental. In Poland, women still wish to be distinguished from men, but the differences do not have to be enforced by laws and limitations. After all, the idea of what a woman might be is much older in Poland than in Australia – the white part, at least – though not always in a good way.