Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  Kerry O’Brien is at this time a reporter on TDT: thirty years old, terrifically competent, and charismatic in a good way. I adore him.

  Now, Kerry is exasperated, and, taking matters into his own hands, says ‘Fuck this,’ grabs me and heads for the ABC car park. ‘We’re picking Fraser up from Nine and bringing him back to Gordon Street.’

  Really? ‘Does he know?’

  ‘Not yet,’ says Kerry.

  So why am I being hustled along to Channel Nine? Almost certainly, to fulfil one of my time-honoured functions as the sultry charmer. I don’t even have to ask. Also, Kerry knows the Nareen story – that I’ve met Malcolm, flirted with him, drunk his wine, laid down my famous wager. Malcolm may not climb into the back of a taxi with Kerry alone, but he may be willing to do so with saucy Vera.

  And yes, that’s the deal exactly. Kerry storms down the corridors of the Nine studios, finds Malcolm just completing an interview for A Current Affair with Michael Schulberger. Kerry slips into the studio, seizes Malcolm, tells him that it would be unthinkable for him not to appear on Australia’s premier current affairs show, and is met with a wintry smile.

  Schulberger is flabbergasted. ‘What? Who? Really!’

  Kerry says, ‘Mister Fraser, you’ve met our Vera. She’ll be coming with us to Gordon Street.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  I say, ‘Sure. Gordon Street. It will be a pleasure.’

  ‘Vera, I remember you very well.’

  I say, ‘Down at Nareen, we had a bet. Do you recall?’

  Malcolm smiles and nods his great noggin. ‘Yes, I do recall. So you’ll be riding with us to the studio?’

  Malcolm’s minders are furiously semaphoring him messages: ‘No! No! Not the Trotskyite Syndicalist TDT! Tell them to fuck off!’

  But Malcolm gets into the back of the taxi with the Polish siren Werunia. Malcolm can’t resist. We chat cheerfully in the back seat all the way to Ripponlea.

  Werunia performs her small role in this battle of the Titans. Well done, me.

  When, years later, I take possession of the wine, I’m still baffled about my Delphic moment. What the hell? I’m lucky if I can predict what will happen in the next ten minutes, let alone years ahead. And yet, and yet, well … lo!

  I receive an email from Robert. He wants me to list all the celebrated people who appeared on TDT over the eleven years of the program. Is he insane? Everybody was on TDT. He thinks I should devote the rest of my life to making this absurd list? No! No list, no list. They were all on the show; they came and went; many came back again. I spoke to most of them off camera, one way or another, but – except in the case of a special few – the words were mostly inconsequential.

  I say, ‘We’re talking about this and this, is that okay?’

  And they say. ‘Sure. And you’re Zarah, are you?’

  ‘Vera. Do you need anything? A drink of water? Do you want to go to the toilet? Do you want to use the facilities?’

  I stay with the talent in the Green Room, offer biscuits, Coke, and chatter away, trying to judge how nervous this person is.

  A book full of this nonsense? No.

  Robert has written, ‘all the famous people, like Germaine, let’s hear about her, about everyone. You must consider, Vera, that readers love to hear about celebrities, their foibles and enthusiasms.’

  Do they, then? Do readers enjoy such nonsense? Readers, I’m ashamed of you. I will tell you about Germaine and then be satisfied.

  Dear God, first Robert tries to persuade me to describe orgasms, and now intimate moments from the lives of the famous. I’m worried about Robert’s sex life. I’ve met his wife. She seems perfectly capable of keeping a man busy in that way. But Robert appears to harbour the appetite of a voyeur. What’s wrong with him?

  Okay, Germaine. She’s doing a big publicity tour for her book The Female Eunuch. I’ve read the book. It’s okay. Nobody’s going to rave about the subtlety of her thought, but it’s okay. Men want their nonsense to last forever, and it can’t. Women need her polemic.

  Germaine is on the show with Bob, who’s President of the ACTU at this time. Bob believes passionately that he’s the most brilliant man on the planet. Germaine believes that she’s the most brilliant human who ever lived. They’re fascinated with each other, and also insanely competitive. Bob shows he’s on the side of women, up to a point. He says complimentary things about Germaine, and also a few condescending things. Bob’s schtick is better for television than Germaine’s, but she’s keeping up.

  I know from talking to her in the Green Room before the show that Germaine’s great subject is not truly women’s liberation but Germaine, and after the show I’m interested to see her coming on to Bob, not waiting for him to show he adores her. Bob’s going to be prime minister one day: he knows it; she knows it. Their mutual fascination is an acceptance of equality. They’re twins in their vanity, also in their immaturity. Both are adolescents, forever.

  Most days we drive to Molino’s at the Brighton Hotel in Church Street for lunch, push tables together, all of us, a dozen or more, eat and drink in a thick fog of cigarette smoke, say the things that can’t be said on air, gossip, complain, brag, make arrangements for the afternoon’s assignments. People arrive and join us; Joe is hailed for another chair, and another. It’s something like Warsaw, the Kamaralna nightclub, there’s a bohemian spirit here, if you can draw a salary and take paid leave and still be a bohemian.

  Have it your way: it might be fanciful to think of these employees of the national broadcaster as bohemians, but do you know this about the best political journalists, that they are at heart anarchists? They’re restrained by a code of ethics as severe as that of priests and clerics, but deep down they really want to give it up and interrupt the Minister for Whatever It Is and say, ‘What a steaming heap of elephant shit.’ And then they want to shoot the minister through the head. They never act on this impulse, but it’s in their hearts.

  At Molino’s, we have a few drinks, a few more, and this urge gets closer to the surface. They laugh, they jest, and for a moment you glimpse the madman inside, with his puritanical desire to redeem the world by destroying bullshit forever. It’s a beautiful thing.

  It can happen during these lunches – they might go for three hours – that we answer a call from the studio.

  It has happened to me: ‘Vera, what the fuck? You’re supposed to be here. I’ve got so-and-so waiting to pre-record. What do you want me to tell him? You sound pissed! Jesus Christ! Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  I am, in fact, pissed. What can I say? I forgot about the illustrious So-and-So. I make my apologies, ask Joe to call me a taxi, crawl to the door, struggle into the vehicle, slur out the address, barely manage to light a cigarette, but somehow – a miracle! – I am almost coherent by the time we reach Gordon Street.

  And I remain there until 8.00 pm, as I do every weeknight, still a little pissed, but okay. If you can’t work while you’re semi-inebriated, journalism is not the profession for you. Any kids considering a career in my trade: teach yourself to drink and think simultaneously. Beer, wine, hard liquor. Start now.

  Now and again, we go out to dinner, the TDT staff, to one restaurant or another. There are many toasts; the evening wears on: more toasts. We find ways to avoid going home, until someone says, ‘Must get back to Penelope, keep the suitors at bay.’

  And then you are left with the six diehards, then five, then two. The secrets come out; advice is given. Phrases first spoken thirty minutes earlier are repeated with more emphasis: ‘What am I going to say? I mean, what am I going to say? “I’m sorry, I didn’t plan it, it just happened”? What am I going to say?’

  A farewell on the footpath, a kiss, a hug: I take a taxi home past the Rivoli Cinemas, where Scenes From a Marriage is showing, and here I am with Jan in the Banff. Marek is in his room. I am given the affectionate greeting from Jan that is always so welcome. I tap on Marek’s door, and ask what he’s doing, what he’s already done during the day. He can see that I
’m a little the worse for wear and keeps his responses brief. I say, ‘I’m a bad mother,’ and he replies in his cheerful way, ‘Yes, Mum.’ To myself I say, as I saunter back to the kitchen, ‘Werunia, bad mother, I despair of you.’ And then, ‘I never promised to be a good mother, no. I said very distinctly, “I’m not going to sacrifice myself for the child.” And I haven’t. Dear God, this life.’

  21

  MIRKA

  Mirka, my sister in crime. Mirka, I can talk about with joy. When people talk of ‘the artistic soul’, all of that nonsense, what they are attempting to describe is Mirka. I spoke to Robert months back about bohemian Warsaw, but Mirka is a true bohemian. To her, it is natural, no affectation; she doesn’t say, ‘Look, here is a Bohemian, me, Mirka.’ It’s just her, what she was born with. I’m not even sure she is a human being; she seems at times to come from some pagan land of dryads and nymphs and satyrs and river gods. And never in my life have I known a woman or man so hostile to cant, nonsense, sentimentality and sanctimony. Look at those black eyes. She is the sanest person on earth, and at the same time, mostly mad.

  To Tolarno, everybody in the art world comes: Melbourne artists, those from overseas who are visiting. The food and art are fabulous, but more important are Georges and Mirka. Tolarno is just across Fitzroy Street and often enough we wander over from the apartment, Jan and I – sometimes Marek, too – and let Mirka and Georges’ chef do the cooking. Getting home from Gordon Street at eight in the evening, who wants to pull pots and pans out of the cupboards? Mirka has decorated the walls with her murals, a paradise of pagan creatures, most of them smiling as if they were born with a blissful secret they never speak.

  In November 1968, a year after I started work with the ABC, I’m eating at a table with Mirka one night, when Phillip Adams and Barry Jones arrive, Arthur Koestler (as it turns out) and his wife, Cynthia Jefferies, in tow. Phillip, I know, and Barry: I adore them both. I have read some of Koestler’s books. I don’t know Mrs Koestler at all, although I’ve heard that she has a reputation of her own. Koestler seems petulant, pissed off, and indeed I’ve heard that Barry, who has brought him out from England to appear on his Encounter show on the ABC, is struggling to keep the old goat under control.

  Now Barry calls us over to sit at the Koestler table, and the conversation becomes much more animated. This has nothing to do with anything Mirka and I are contributing in an intellectual way, but is because Koestler has two new women to focus on. Cynthia is attractive enough, well past anything risqué, a picture of patience with a mildly satirical smile at the corners of her lips. Old Arthur is now full of gestures and smiles; he is almost licking his chops. He has a big, Hungarian head, with neatly trimmed grey hair, and is wearing a slightly dated suit and waistcoat, like a venerable Cambridge professor. He talks about everything: art, science, social issues, capital punishment, sex, food and wine, Leonid Brezhnev and his eyebrows, Richard Nixon, Prague, London, Isaiah Berlin. But for the fact that he speaks so brilliantly, Mirka and I would try harder to get a word in edgeways. It’s difficult enough for Barry and Phillip, who are masters of getting words in edgeways and from every other direction.

  What Old Arthur has in mind for me and Mirka is so coarsely conveyed that I can’t help but feel flattered. Mirka too. But not attracted. What does he think, old Arthur? That I’m going to say, ‘Maestro, take me out into the alley and have me up against the wall,’ something like that? Under the nose of Cynthia? I am not a predator.

  Mirka, maybe. She considers the sexual attention of men perfectly natural and nearly always welcome. She considers it her right to be gratified in her lust. If you were to give her a role in a play, she would be Tatiana, caressing the gorgeous ears of Bottom. But the prey she normally has in mind would be forty years younger than Arthur and infinitely more beautiful. Whatever lustful conclusions to this meeting with Arthur may or may not have been entertained by Mirka, they are not acted out. Arthur and Cynthia depart for their hotel in good spirits. Then Phillip and Barry take their leave. And much later, me.

  I first met Mirka somewhere – where? – then later in a gallery, when we were both taking an interest, independently, in the works of a couple of young Melbourne painters. We glanced at each other, spoke ten words and knew immediately that we were sisters.

  Such contrasts in her face! Her eyes were as wide and innocent as a child’s, but lined with kohl, like Cleopatra’s, so that her gaze took on a spooky intensity. Her mouth, with those full lips was, well, complicated – wilful and dangerous, yet always about to assume a smile. I thought she was both beautiful and something of a monster, and I loved her within five minutes.

  She was creating a whole court of soft, sculptured creatures at that time: angels, cherubs, rabbits, dogs, ducks, of the sort that she depicted in her murals. Her studio in Tolarno – I saw it soon after meeting her – was a teeming mess of fabrics and paints and inks. On the walls, perhaps hundreds of framed pictures, hers and others, and everywhere the debris of a thriving creative life.

  Of course each of us saw in the other a kindred spirit. Of course. For one thing, we had survived the same ordeals. She had been a Jewish girl in Paris, fourteen, when the gendarmes rounded up thousands of Jews and packed them into the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium on Rue Nélaton, a nightmare, then shipped her and her mother off to Loiret, on the way to Auschwitz. Her father, a Lithuanian, not Jewish, somehow managed to arrange for the release from the camp of his wife and daughter. At the same time that I was living like a famished rat in Lvov, Mirka was living like a sister rat in the forests. I outlived the SS and the Lithuanians; Mirka outlived the SS and the Wehrmacht. We emerged from all that with the same mad desire to feed ourselves with both hands on the life that had almost been snatched from us. And for Mirka, also to make and make and make with paint and ink and pastels and fabric, with every material she could master, until she’d fashioned a world she could inhabit, under gods she could honour.

  How many lunches and dinners at Tolarno did we have: Mirka, Georges, Jan and Werunia? Some hundreds. Europeans talk with great ease, more so than Australians, and we were all Europeans. We could never exhaust our interest in each other, four people who could never shut up, never come to the end of our curiosity. Eating with my friends in this way was like theatre, with the script being written even as we sat over our food and wine, salmon in Provençal sauce, lamb sept-heures, bouillabaisse, camembert-stuffed pork, roasted ratatouille, cassoulet, bacon and leek quiche, Normandy apple tart, aniseed and chocolate parfait, George producing one wine after another depending on the main course: Cheverny Rouge, La Deveze something-or-other, a malbec from a place close to where Georges was born, lovely things from South Australia.

  Sometimes in the midst of the chatter and laughter, the clatter of crockery, the hubbub of other voices at other tables, I would pause and sit back and glance at one face then another, Mirka’s particularly. I would think of the SS officers striding two abreast down Janowska and I would allow myself to jeer silently, ‘See, you bastards! Mirka and Werunia at Tolarno: this is everything you hated!’

  Many times we meet alone, Mirka and Werunia, just the two of us, and chirrup together like parrots about what she’s working on in her studio, other painters, politics, sex, drugs, rock and roll.

  At such times she is herself. Only herself. ‘Mirka’ is a creature she has invented, partly to engage the public, partly because she’s theatrical by nature and it delights her to fashion the material of her life in this way. But with me she is not her invention, she is Mirka who stepped out of the forest one fine day in the first month of the European spring of 1945, when the Vichy were being hunted and hounded by the Resistance and bombs were falling on Berlin day and night. She was as thin as a pencil but with enough strength to meet Georges and marry him, cross the ocean, give birth three times, rouse from her brain the shapes of her fantasies, reach out in her generosity to a thousand other artists, and above all, delight me. Yes, delight me.

  A story of Mirka: we are hav
ing lunch in the house Jan and I bought in Loch Street, St Kilda, just down from Fitzroy Street – the house we moved to from the Banff in the early seventies, a most beautiful place; it used to be a rooming house, very big. At the back, a dining room with windows that open over the neighbour’s yard, and the neighbour is insane with curiosity not long after we move in. ‘Who are these people?’ he wonders. He hears laughter, he hears music, he hears people coming and going in a great stream, he hears madmen, madwomen, shrieking raucously. He can’t help himself this day and sneaks up to the fence, looks over at us, Jan and me and Mirka. We can see him clearly, his puzzled pink face, and we might if we choose wave to him, blow him a kiss, but instead Mirka stands and lifts her loose summer dress to her shoulders, no underwear, and shakes her tits at him. He’s shocked. He ducks out of sight. We chorus, ‘Bye-bye!’

  And that is Mirka’s greeting to the wide world, at least to all of those who sneak about with a pink face to peer over fences, those whose appetites embarrass them. It pleases her to shock, but it’s not theatre; she has no time for the timid bourgeois who cannot open himself to the hurly-burly of life. If she hoists her dress to her shoulders, her message is this: ‘Come to the door, come to the table, give me your name, ask me your questions.’ I never in my life knew another woman or man who was less indulgent of nonsense. Sisters, you see. I can’t put up with nonsense either. Okay, a little, if I must.

  Neither Mirka nor Werunia is as promiscuous as you like to imagine, Robert. Both of us discriminate, Mirka a little less than me. Okay, a lot less. And there are no spectaculars – threesomes, foursomes, fivesomes, that kind of giddy nonsense. There are quite a few invitations to romp around naked in a room full of naked people – but no.

  I’ll give you an example, and oh, this will please you, Robert – another famous person. We’re having lunch at Tolarno – Robert Hughes, Mirka and I, and Kate Baillieu, who’s my friend and a well-known journalist.