Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  And then I’m producing. Being virtuoso dogsbody prepares you perfectly for producing. It’s like taking a degree in journalism at Warsaw University, where you learn every damned thing there is to learn about creating television.

  I’m tired of daily current affairs. I wake up one morning and I think, ‘Enough.’ The news is the news forever, it rolls on endlessly: this man’s ambition, that man’s, sometimes a woman pops up for the sake of variety, a thousand social issues with arguments on both sides that have come to seem tedious to me.

  I speak about this exhaustion here and there, including to Di Gribble, that marvellous woman, who sits on the Board of the ABC.

  She says, ‘Hmm, let me think.’ And she thinks. She says, ‘You could apply to produce this arts show the ABC is thinking about for Monday evenings, Review. Whoever they appoint will do the research and also produce. Could you contemplate that? You’d have to go through the interview process.’

  I say, ‘Okay, I’ve contemplated. Sure!’

  I apply, I have my say before a panel of intelligent people, and I’m appointed. It means leaving behind friends in politics and current affairs, but what the hell. I have to find the stories for the show, get them shot, oversee the writing of the script, get the footage edited, usually overnight, and have everything ready to run by the Sunday before the Monday broadcast. It’s hectic, but heaven. Shooting an arts show, meeting artists, writers and musicians: what better employment is there on earth?

  Creative people are unusually sensitive to sympathetic qualities. They – well, the people who are invited onto the show – hear hyperbole all the time, and they respond to it, as we all do, make allowances for it, but their hope is that they will hear something different, not simply fulsome endorsements but actual recognition. Many things I have no talent for, no knack, it’s true. But, if I may say so without conceit, I know how to enter into the sensibility of the artist.

  This is never more the case than with theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. We meet when he appears on Review, at a time when he has a reputation as an enfant terrible. He directed The Knot Garden, the Michael Tippet play at the Spoleto Festival when he was twenty-two, then established the Gilgul Theatre in Melbourne in 1990. For the Victorian State Opera, he staged The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, each of them distinctive, a little crazy. A little ahead of the time I first met him, he staged The Exile Trilogy for the Gilgul, including Ansky’s The Dybbuk. He’s a genius: mad, bad, an inveterate show-off and wonderful to know. I enjoy flamboyance.

  He comes to dinner at Loch Street, other friends join us, and it’s a pleasure to watch him playing up to his reputation, but also, at quieter times, to listen to his introspection. He’s taking a greater interest in his Jewish roots and heritage and will one day – a few years from this time I am talking of now, in the early nineties – listen to me when I encourage him to go to Warsaw and look at the Jewish Theatre, in fact Polish theatre altogether.

  This is living. Meeting and working with creative people. Let me do this forever.

  24

  JAN

  Marek is becoming more critical of Jan’s boozing. My son is becoming absorbed by the life of the spirit. At university, he studied mathematics; away from the university, the esoteric. This must have been dwelling in him since birth, this fascination. But it’s not inherited from me or Viktor. Nor from Jan. Perhaps, when he was very young, Marek looked at Jan and me and thought, ‘My mum and dad are not from the same mould as me.’ And from the age of twelve he has known that Jan is not his father. But I don’t think his criticism of Jan’s drinking has anything to do with discovering that Jan is not his father: it’s just that now that he’s in his twenties he can see the waste of talent more clearly.

  I’m not among those who are critical of the boozing. When Jan met me, when we fell in love, he said, ‘I will never try to change you.’ He meant that whatever my appetites – and some of them another man would have found difficult to deal with – he would not interfere, if that’s the right word. If I had an adventure in mind, okay, have it. We would stay loyal to each other. And there was an agreement, unspoken, that I would not nag him about his drinking. In fact, that I would not nag him about anything. And may I say, among the many vices I might be accused of, nagging is not one of them.

  Dear God, when I hear nagging – some of my friends are guilty of it – I’m perplexed. I want to say, ‘But why bother? If your husband (or your wife – men can be the worst of nags) irritates you so much, then leave him, find a man you like better.’

  I have been known to worry aloud in front of Jan that a man who drinks as much as he does is bound to die young, or relatively young – I will concede that. Because I don’t want him to die young, or ever. I love him; nobody could be loved more.

  He says, ‘Werunia, it’s a sickness. It won’t go away. Not today, not in a month, not in a hundred years.’

  When he says this, he isn’t drunk. In his face, I can see all the intellect, all the gift of insight that I have admired over our years together. Admired is not the word: I am besotted by the power of his mind, by his conversation. Nothing he says is savage. But of all the men in the world I have known (and yes, Robert, there have been many) and all the women, Jan’s intellect, his ability to see to the heart of any matter, any issue, I have never seen equalled. Who cannot love such a man? And to have him love me in return, to understand me so completely – this is something I don’t want to lose.

  I can’t cajole a man like Jan into pouring the booze down the plughole. It would be an insult to his intellect. Addiction is a choice, not something that overwhelms you while you’re unaware. Whether it’s booze or heroin, at a certain point you know that the road you are on will reach a stage beyond which you will no longer have a choice. And Jan made that choice – the choice to forego any further choices; he chose addiction.

  Most things in life you get better at with practice. Drinking isn’t like that. You become steadily worse at it. All the little schemes and devices you once employed to help you get through the week fall away. You restrict yourself to three drinks before starting work in the morning, and the three drinks make it possible for you to get through to midmorning, when you take yourself off to the toilet and drink from a flask. You suck a mint before you leave the toilet. Then you’re okay until midday. And so on. Your life is dominated by strategies that disguise addiction. All those around you know that you’re an alcoholic, but they recognise the effort you’re putting into remaining functional. They make allowances that fit into your regime. Then the three drinks in the morning become four, and your visits to the toilet or the cleaner’s cupboard become more frequent. Sometimes you go home at midday and don’t return to your office until four in the afternoon. If you’re out on the road – and Jan was now working for Yencken’s Glass as an assessor – you’re boozing as you drive to an appointment and all the way back. That regime that your friends and colleagues understood and tolerated, it turns to shit. They give up on you. But they are a long way behind you, because you gave up on yourself months or years earlier. Sometimes it amazes you that your friends and colleagues don’t yet grasp what you yourself have well and truly conceded: that you’re fucked.

  Nagging, no: I don’t nag. But I encourage Jan to try rehab. I say, ‘Give it a chance. Maybe you will like being sober.’

  He tries it a first time. It doesn’t take. He tries it a second time. No better.

  I think an alcoholic looks at a full bottle of liquor, the cap still unscrewed, the label celebrating the wonder of what is contained inside the glistening glass, and he experiences something like love, genuine love, in the same way that a smack addict glances down at the syringe in his hand and thinks, ‘You and me, forever.’ If you throw away the syringe, if you smash the bottle of Ballantine’s, you’re breaking a heart and destroying a loyalty. Of everything you can accuse yourself of, at least let it not be this. The bottle, the sharp: be loyal to something in the world.

  It’s 198
2, and Jan no longer has a job at Yencken, or anywhere. He’s fifty-eight. I support him. But I don’t support the liquor, or not at the volume that Jan craves. I’m researching at Nationwide, long hours, fairly intense. Marek is up north, exploring immortality. Jan is at the start of a period of unemployment that will never end. He can inhabit the rooms of Loch Street, he can read, he can watch television.

  In a situation such as Jan’s, the term ‘the future’ always has to be expressed inside inverted commas. But he returns to Poland for a visit, to see old friends, old Poland, old Warsaw, and perhaps also to experience a legendary binge. Among his old friends, some still think of him as one of the finest journalists of his generation, an ornament of Polish political culture.

  When he returns from Poland, what money he might have taken away from Yencken – savings, super, severance – is gone, and it is acknowledged between us that my income will be the only income in our two lives from this point on. I am not distressed. Jan will drink and drink until the intervention of death, and I will love him regardless. How could I not? Was I to find this wonderful man in a bar in Warsaw, to hear him shape the world with words, to live with him in the way I have, see him sharing the love of his heart with my son, feel his arms holding me, the intimacy of his voice in my ear – all this, then turn away? Not on my life.

  An addict who intends to remain an addict will sooner or later absolve himself of any obligation to tell the truth. Jan begins to draw money from my bank account – the arrangement with the bank is such that he can do this – to cover the cost of the liquor he cannot do without. I keep finding that there is less in the account than I believed there was, and then much less.

  One fine day I discover that the bank intends to take me to court to recover a large sum of money, more than twenty thousand dollars, that I am said to have borrowed against the house in Loch Street and have not repaid. I say, ‘I never borrowed such a sum.’ But Jan had. The bank manager, who knows me well enough (and what does this mean about me, that at the age fifty I am on quite friendly terms with a bank manager?), says this: ‘Vera, we won’t try to recover the sum. I know your situation. But alcoholics, Vera – I’ve had experience of them – you can’t ever stand between them and a big pile of money. They’ll tunnel underneath you to get to it, jump over you, and if necessary, shoot you. You must establish an entirely separate identity. You must divorce Jan.’

  I can see that I must. I say to Jan, ‘It’s a formality. Do you see?’

  Jan says, ‘Go ahead.’

  I say, ‘It changes nothing, except that you can’t rob me, my darling.’

  And so we are divorced. My friends say, ‘Vera, this was something you had to do. It was forced on you. You had no choice. Jan would have cleaned you out.’ I say, ‘Sure, I had no choice.’ But it wounds me. Maybe it wounds Jan, too, but he doesn’t say so.

  I am down at Sorrento with my friend Kate Baillieu. It’s 1986. Sorrento is lovely, as everyone knows. The green sea, the pier. Kate is fine company. Jock Rankin and Mary Delahunty are here too, staying in a hotel.

  For the past two days, I’ve been ringing Loch Street to talk to Jan. He doesn’t answer. Why not? He always answers. So I’m concerned. Kate and Ted and Jock suggest that Jan might be too drunk to answer. No, no. Jan can function no matter how pissed. I’m troubled – there is something in my heart, like a foreboding.

  I call David and Leslie, the neighbours in Loch Street and ask them to check our place, see if Jan is around. And the neighbours call me back. Jan is lying on the floor.

  I ask, ‘Asleep?’

  The answer is: ‘It doesn’t look good.’

  I ask David and Leslie to call an ambulance. Now Jock offers to drive me back to St Kilda – it’s evident how distressed I am. And it is a long, long drive up the Nepean Highway to St Kilda. Jan is dead. He is dead. I sit in the car beside Jock, preparing myself for the confirmation of what I know. Someone soon will say to me, ‘Mrs Wasowski? I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband has passed away, Mrs Wasowski. Yes, passed away.’

  I think, ‘This is what many people have to endure, someone they love suddenly dead. And now it’s my turn.’

  Jock takes me to Loch Street, where David is cleaning up in the kitchen. Jan had been preparing Atlantic salmon, a favourite of his, and at some stage must have collapsed, the salmon left on the kitchen bench.

  David says, ‘Vera …’ and doesn’t know what more he can say.

  I say, unnecessarily, ‘He was making salmon,’ and I, too, don’t know what more I can say.

  Jock says nothing at all.

  Grief is an odd mixture of the profound and the prosaic. At home over the next two days, I am in pain when I stand at the kitchen sink making tea and cannot ask Jan if he would also like a cup. If I walk into the living room, I won’t see Jan with his hands in his pockets and his head raised, scanning the book shelves for a volume he needs. Five days ago, if I heard the toilet flush, that was Jan; or if I heard a door closing, or a chair squeak, or a window being raised – that was Jan. Such commonplace things. Now, the only sounds I hear are those I make myself. That phrase ‘a house in mourning’, I know what it means. The comings and goings in these rooms, all that is familiar to them, welcomed by them, abruptly reduced by half, and the half remaining, my half, is altered, diminished in tone.

  In fatalistic moments, I think of answered prayers, which got rid of my vile Uncle Maniek, and of the cosmic evening-up that might take decades, and cost you a person you dearly wish to keep forever.

  I phone Marek and tell him the news. He is not distressed. In Marek’s scheme of things, we move from existence to existence, taking on new forms. For him, Jan is not dead but enjoying a renewal of some weird sort. I’m certainly not going to debate it with him. He’s coming down for Jan’s funeral with his partner, Vedika, and Pani.

  Morris Lurie, the writer, who was close to Jan, arranges the cremation and the service. I’m consoled by all my friends, and I am a woman rich in friendships: Hazel, more than anyone, and Mirka, and Mary Delahunty.

  Hazel has what might almost be called a genius for avoiding platitudes. Often, she says nothing, but there is a universe of empathy in her eyes. And love. How many people understood this about Hazel, that if she loved you she gave you everything she had, with no economy of feeling. If she had to plunder her soul to find the solace you craved, she would do so without a second’s hesitation.

  I continue to talk to Jan. And as a matter of fact, he answers. I’m not crazy. It’s one of the consolations that the death of someone we love cannot deny us. It’s a consolation I certainly will not deny myself.

  25

  ‘DEAR VERA …’

  I receive a telephone call from ABC management. I’m to come in (it’s one of my days off) and talk to such-and-such a fellow. So I go. I talk to such-and-such a fellow, who tells me to go to another place and talk to another person altogether.

  I’m anxious. Well, of course. I’m not in the first blush of my youth. Is it possible that I will be asked to go elsewhere in the ABC, where everyone is beyond the first blush of her or his youth? Oh, my prophetic soul! And yet, not quite prophetic enough, for this second such-and-such says, ‘Dear Vera, We love you, of course we do, invaluable contribution over thirty-five years, regret to say that from today onwards, we’ll have to cope without you, most unfortunate, enforced retrenchments, sure you’ll understand, best of luck in the glorious future that awaits you.’

  There’d been rumours of the sort that make you sick to your stomach, and rumours have never been, for me, the harbingers of anything good, and damn them. In Lvov, ‘The Russians might pull out.’ And the Russians do pull out, these people who admired my piano playing and wanted to send me to Moscow to become a genius. Also in Lvov, ‘The Nazis might invade.’ And the Nazis do invade. ‘The Nazis might kill all of the Jews of Lvov, they’re capable of it, maybe not the children.’ And the Nazis do kill all of the Jews of Lvov, including the children – but they don’t kill Werunia. In Wars
aw, ‘The police will maybe permit the charming, romantic post-war Poles to murder Jews, that’s what they’re saying.’ And yep, that’s what happens. Then, less dramatically, rumours all over Gordon Street of retrenchments, and now, Mr Such-and-Such himself: ‘Dear Vera, We love you, of course we do …’

  I am a journalist. The first thing I do is write a document, a letter of protest to the ABC. I wonder if ever in the history of the world a letter of protest such as mine has succeeded in reversing an injustice? Probably not. This one didn’t.

  At sixty, I’m unemployed. I sit in the living room at Loch Street and look around at the paintings, the drawings, the books. It’s a beautiful interior, largely fashioned in my years at the ABC, but can I keep it? I have a spooky few minutes imagining poor Vera out on the footpath with a rack of dresses and various well-stocked bargain tables, bric-a-brac, bibelots, a few first-class objets d’art, and there I am with my little cash box, hailing passers-by, bargain day in West St Kilda, come one, come all, Werunia needs the dough. Oh God, has it come to this? The Madame Wasowski Garage Sale? No, no, no. I’d rather shoot myself.

  Replete with edifying figures of speech, I tell myself to cut my coat according to the cloth. I take in boarders at Loch Street, not with a full heart. This house that has seen such merriment, that has known the high spirits of a hundred friends, a house saturated with memory – this house is now divided up among myself and various strangers who know nothing of its history. I am now an ageing Jewish landlady, like a character in a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Counting my pennies when I was a kid at university in Warsaw was one thing – anybody young and gorgeous can make a holiday out of impecuniosity – but it’s another thing when I’m at the age I am now, capable of attracting the courteous sympathy of young people on trams and offered a seat. I buy the cheaper cuts of meat and cook them slowly, for hours. I mostly avoid glancing too much further down this road I’m on, but when I do, I find myself muttering: ‘Old and cold, oh wonderful, what a future to look forward to.’ What was it I told Hazel? ‘Don’t sit at home, go out’? It’s as if I’ve been jilted by fortune, and need to show that I still have the wherewithal to rouse myself to happiness. But who can afford concerts?