Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  I take on interviewing for Spielberg’s Shoah Project. Robert, you know about it; you’ve seen my Shoah interview. The mission of Spielberg is to hear the full stories of all living survivors of the Holocaust, to record them for the Shoah archive. Those who conduct the interviews – it was Max Wald who interviewed me – complete training sessions that make you familiar with the techniques of questioning. Believe me, Robert, you would not agree to do this if you merely wanted to fill in time or make yourself seem useful. It upsets me badly to hear these stories of murder and torment, of families torn to pieces. Even if I had not myself experienced what is detailed in the stories, it would be a nightmare, but I know what all these people endured and it is revived in my memory, just as this book of yours, Robert, sets dancing the phantoms of Lvov. The worst thing is to be reminded of what is possible when people get their teeth into an idea, such as the idea of a Final Solution. Who wants this knowledge? But all these survivors must be heard.

  When Max was interviewing me, I was in pain, but I didn’t weep, not on camera. I was in a room full of beauty, my living room in Loch Street; everywhere I looked I could find consolation in the things I had treasured for decades. But the Jews of Lvov, before the Nazis came, they also had rooms full of things they loved, and memories of love and friendship. All that they loved did not save them.

  Mirka is among those I interview. She is a lion, but the stories she tells wrench her about.

  I say, ‘So, my love, shall we start?’

  Mirka says, ‘Okay. Sure.’

  And I hear everything, some of which I have heard before: the Rue Nélaton, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which became an echoing hell, the camp at Loiret, the years as a fugitive in the forests. The intimacy between us is such that Mirka’s story, drawn out of her with one question and then another and a hundred more, rouses a pity in me so strong that I have to overcome an urge to spare her the next hundred questions. We are sharing a tale of man’s inhumanity to man; there are none worse. Surely this will become more than Jews talking to Jews, with indifferent billions who are not Jews filling the air with the clatter of their more important business? Because that I could not bear. All through Mirka’s story, and nine others, I yearn for some ultimate victory of sweetness and light. This anger that has to express itself in murder: for the love of God, enough.

  Marek, from a fairly young age – eighteen, nineteen, twenty – had a sense of destination very different from my own. Out of the ghetto, I wanted everything in life that rebuked the Nazis, which is to say everything that wasn’t vicious, cruel, disdainful; I craved light and love. The Nazis detested life, if you think of life as teeming, endlessly various and gloriously polluted.

  I want the life I can see, taste, embrace; Marek sees something beyond that, something spiritually essential that you more honour by abstinence and contemplation than by flinging yourself about, as I do, drinking myself into a stupor, smothering the faces of gorgeous men with kisses. Temperament and demeanour are hard to predict; it would have been more in keeping with the life that was being lived around Marek if he’d become a student radical at university and spent his nights off his face on liquor and dope. But no. He remains loyal to this gentle, Eastern vision of a life lived with an ear tuned to the low, sweet, enigmatic music of the cosmos.

  At university, he studies mathematics, and does well. In those days, your children did not continue to live at home into their early thirties; they moved out into a house they shared with other boys and girls, other students. And this is what Marek does.

  He had taken up guitar at the age of fourteen, but in the years after university, he becomes attracted to the shakuhachi flute, a Japanese instrument, and through diligence becomes a master of it. He goes north to find a home that suits him, making a living by busking with the flute and later by teaching the shakuhachi to earnest young students, and some older ones.

  He is a devotee of the Eckankar philosophy of life, something you might get involved in if you were seeking out higher states of being, a Hindu flavour to the whole thing. Marek visits me and Jan in Melbourne, often with Vedika, his partner, who is German but has taken the name we know her by to better complement her spiritual attachments. Vedika is – what will I say here? – not devoted to sexual exclusivity in marriage, but who am I to be critical? I’m not critical. Am I? Not so much; a little. It seems not to concern my son. He hasn’t taken the path he is on as a fad; he’s profoundly committed to a life, in its way, far more unconventional than mine, but at the same time deeply conventional in a different way: the non-materialist, family-of-man way. If you look at photographs of Marek from the age of eighteen onwards, the expression on his face evolves from an alert cheerfulness to a transcendental calm. But they are all the expressions of a single journey, as if he has grasped from an early age that his life would be a quest of a certain sort along a single path.

  I can’t say that I ever feel attracted to travelling with him towards whatever distant star draws him along, but I certainly don’t attempt to point him in another direction. He interests me. I love him – well, of course – but over and above the love of a mother for her son, he interests me. I am glad forever that I can say that.

  This is Marek’s life in the north: seeking; making music with his bamboo flute; meditating; eating fruit and berries, lettuce leaves, tofu, maybe a few bananas; doing no harm; communing with his friends and his partner; cultivating an inner tranquility; fulfilling himself in ways that seem esoteric to me.

  He comes down from the north for Jan’s funeral, as I have said; he doesn’t grieve as I do. But he comforts me. Death to Marek is not death but the commencement of a new stage of existence, yet he knows that death is pretty much death to me, and that I am in pain.

  He heads back to the north, to Kuranda on the Atherton Tableland, the wet tropics, inland from Cairns. A river runs down to the sea from Kuranda, a torrent. The town – the region around it, the rainforests – is full of neo-hippies, neo-bohemians, Buddhists of a fashion, acolytes of various Hindu holy men. Why they should all be attracted to the tropics is a mystery. It’s the country of the Djabugay people, and those who remain must wonder what the hell is going on, white people from everywhere sitting under trees with perspiration pouring off them as they court enlightenment.

  My son is there with his wife, and later a son – my grandson – is born: Pani, fair-haired, beautiful. I visit Marek ever and anon, and that mama joy I experience at seeing my son is further enhanced by seeing Pani. He’s growing up as a sort of neo-hippy: semi-feral, tanned and healthy, a complete stranger to Mars Bars and Cherry Ripes. I wouldn’t have anticipated just how much I relish being a grandmother. I’ve said – confessed, what you will – that I was a very ordinary mother to Marek, but I’m better at it now. Better at mama love, at least. You know what it was like when Marek was a baby and then an infant? It was as if I were so intent on never becoming a conventional mother, every damned thing for the baby, that I somehow closed off the channels of good, old-fashioned mama love. Sure, I adored Marek when he was a baby, but there was always an asterisk that led you down to the bottom of the page: ‘Don’t define me as a mother.’ Now, it’s different. Define me as a mother and grandma if you like. Up to a point.

  But the relationship of Marek and Vedika falls apart, for reasons never explained to me. She’d become a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru, later known as ‘Osho’, so maybe that had something to do with it. This is about 1988, 1990.

  Marek leaves Kuranda for Nimbin, which has a better climate, not so humid. Then from Nimbin he moves to Byron – or rather, New Brighton, not so far from Byron. New Brighton is a suburb of a sort of Ocean Shores, the land all around it once owned by a cabal of American investors headed by the American singer-turned-motivational-speaker Pat Boone: what the hell?

  I visit Marek in New Brighton, more than once. Pani is with him if he’s not with his mother. The boy is a delight, as I say. Hazel comes with me, very much in sympathy with Marek’s embrace of the r
ole of seeker. Marek has a new girlfriend, Ela: like Vedika, a German.

  It’s a beautiful place, New Brighton, lush vegetation, the ocean stretching out to the east. Marek and Ela buy a house there, and marry. At the wedding, I think, ‘This man, now almost forty, how extraordinary the life he leads, and he’s my son.’ I think of my own journey: Lvov, the Beckstein, the murders and the murderers, Warsaw, Kotarbiński, the intersection of my life and Viktor’s, and then the baby who is Marek. Marek’s journey takes a path that branches off from mine, leading from the snows of Warsaw to the glittering coast of eastern Australia, to a flute first invented in China, perfected by the Japanese. This is astonishing, the journeys of our lives, the poetry of those journeys, the music. And he remains my son, Marek, married this day to a girl born in Germany.

  Marek and Ela sell the New Brighton house and buy another, this time in Byron, around the time that I cease to be a salaried employee of the ABC, to put it politely. I visit Marek and Ela in their new home. They suggest that I might move up to Byron, make it my home. I’m not repelled by the idea. To be close to my son would be enjoyable, and Byron itself is attractive, particularly its climate. Oh, it has its affectations, of course it does – it has a population that at times seems to be attempting to create a monoculture of dedicated languor – but it’s nothing I can’t tolerate.

  So, maybe Byron. I could sell Loch Street, pack my suitcase, and go. I would have to accept that I am – well, what can I say? – that I am ‘retired’. I don’t know how to be ‘retired’; nobody does. The word carries with it a freight of suggestion that I am repelled by. Retired from what? From life? You no longer receive a salary, so that’s it? Reduced to scanning the supermarket shelves for home-brand variants of items you used to fling into the trolley without the least concern about price? All of that shit?

  Okay, not retirement, but maybe Byron. I can’t stay at Loch Street any longer. The neighbour on one side wants to erect a wall the height of the pyramids; all the view will be lost. I’ve tried to fight it but he, Tutankhamen, is going to win. And the boarders I have at the house, they’re an ordeal. On the other hand, my Melbourne friends, especially Mirka, they’d be here, I’d be there: how would I cope? It’s like what’s-his-name says – who am I thinking of? The writer, American, bullfights and the Spanish Civil War – who the hell is he? Hemingway! Ernest Hemingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yes, him. He said, ‘Life is just one damned thing after another.’ Well, it hasn’t been like that for me most of the time, but it is now. One damned thing after another.

  Maybe Byron. Let me think about it.

  26

  LIGHT

  The house is full of Byron light that floats in off the sea, very thick and creamy. In my Lvov, there was no such light as this, and sometimes no light at all. I have developed a taste for the Byron light. I like to sit in an armchair in the dining room and gaze out the glass doors at the garden glittering in the sunshine, the myrtle vines, the flowers. Bush turkeys come into the backyard at times, big clumsy birds that drop from the sky with all the grace of a winged wombat.

  I’m listening to Leonard Cohen, the song I was on the verge of sending to John Howard at a time of more than usual disgust and anger, ‘Everybody Knows’, a poetic dirge cataloguing injustices, hypocrisies: I thought he needed to hear it. In the end, I didn’t send it to the prime minister. I was probably stoned, and really, what was I thinking: that he would undergo some radical conversion of the soul after listening to a Jewish baritone from Montreal pouring out scorn like a lava flow? No, let me keep him, Leonard, to myself. My God, there was never a voice so soaked in sex, never lyrics so witty and so moving at the one time. I’m at that age when consolations – like Leonard, like art, like books – matter more than ever, as consolations for aching joints, for diminished powers of all sorts, and for friends I can’t embrace anymore.

  Okay, if I’m not researching or producing anymore, what exactly am I good for? I look around in Byron. They have a writers’ festival: good, I’ll be a volunteer or whatever it is they want to call me. I meet the director of the festival, Jill, a wonderful woman, brimming with intelligence. How do I manage to keep meeting such people?

  I say, ‘Vera Wasowski. What do you think, do you have some work for me?’

  Jill says, ‘Your résumé is fabulous. You must know everything about pampering writers.’

  And I say, ‘Sure. Show me one, I’ll demonstrate.’

  I see lots. Many of them, I’ve read. This impresses a writer. Some of them want to cry. A few come to the festival to meet girls, or boys, but most writers are highly conscientious creatures with a sense of obligation to their readers and are only too keen to follow instructions. ‘You talk for fifteen minutes, read something from your book, let the audience ask questions, then you go to the bookshop and sign copies of your novel. You’ll have a jug of water, but best not to drink booze on stage. Or smoke.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Fifteen minutes?’

  ‘Fifteen. Then you read.’

  It’s enjoyable. So long as I can be involved with writers, who’s complaining?

  But the festival doesn’t take up the whole year. I have a few meetings with Jill leading up to the event, a week of being busy, a certain amount of correspondence to write – then the rest of the year.

  Time to look around again. They want volunteers at the Salvos shop, at the community centre and other places. It’s Vera the Fairly Good Samaritan.

  I’m sympathetic to the people who come to the community centre looking for help. Some are crazy, some have no idea how to negotiate their way through life, some are a bit addled, some have a strange sense of entitlement that makes them think life is a sort of holiday, punctuated by brief periods of paid employment – which it should be, of course – and some have simply been mucked up by life. I don’t judge. I do what I can without limitations; now and again, I listen to bizarre tales that focus on the malevolence of certain dark deities that float around in the air.

  I answer telephones, too, not always patiently, to those who call wanting to talk to the director about something trivial. I say, ‘She’s too busy. Call back after Christmas. After Easter.’

  And I organise fundraising lunches, dinners, what you will, sometimes at my place.

  I have to mention this now, in case you ever come to my house, reader. Do not say: ‘Goodness! So many books!’ Dear God. As if shelves full of books were a strange and rare phenomenon. If you say that, I will put poison in your tea.

  It’s not so bad. The Byron climate suits me. Marek is close by, half an hour away. When I go down into the town, there are lots of attractive people, the women and girls in loose-fitting stuff, all perfectly tanned, attractive men everywhere. But perhaps there is not so much intellect per square metre as in other places.

  There are many people in Byron with, frankly, insane ideas about the world, but the insane ideas are all to do with butterflies and flowers and trees and astonishing diets, free of fat and sugar and protein and carbohydrates that allow you to live forever (essentially, lentils and dried bananas). But that’s okay – their insane ideas do not include murder.

  Live and let live, says Saint Vera of Byron.

  27

  FAREWELLS

  Somebody could write a history of our species guided by a theme of unavailing prayers. It is 7 December 2006. Marek has died. He had just turned fifty-three. My prayer, ignored, was the same as that of countless other parents: not to outlive my child.

  Nobody needs the summer heat of Byron to be hotter, but Marek was in a sauna on his property at Kyogle, north of Byron, on the Richmond River, when he died. I’d given him a big bag of money to buy the property – God knows where I found the money, but I did – which he and Ela were fashioning into a spiritual retreat. In addition to playing the shakuhachi, he had become a spiritual teacher, and a writer. I paid for the sauna in which his life ended. I don’t mention it bitterly, only to record the grotesque sensibility of the forces that intervene in our lives.
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  I was out shopping in Byron and when I returned home a police car was waiting. A policeman approached me with an expression on his face that seemed – what? – wounded. He had removed his cap. ‘You’d better come inside,’ he said.

  And so we went inside. By this time, I was numb in mind and body. The policeman said, ‘You may want to sit down.’ I sat down, and the policeman explained that Marek had died while in the sauna at Kyogle; the cause of death had not been determined, but heart failure seemed most likely.

  The policeman said he was terribly sorry, and asked if there was someone who could be with me: a friend, a relative, perhaps my husband.

  There were people who could be with me. And they came, as they had after Jan died. I am rich in friendships, as I have said, but the grief is awful. Hands hold mine, hands circle my shoulders, phrases of love are whispered into my ear. For the time being, all the vigour has left my body. I allow tea to be made for me, and again my shoulders are circled, again those words are whispered.

  If Marek is gone, and he is, then I am being asked to accept what cannot be accepted.

  Hazel is also gone.

  My last sight of her was at the nursing home near Liverpool, or in that direction, a place, dear God, very lowering to the spirits. She had Alzheimer’s, had been resisting it for years – fifteen years maybe – a fight she was always going to lose. Each time I saw her over that time, the disease had made gains. At the nursing home, on this final visit, the matron said, ‘Hazel is not in her bed.’ Very well, then where is she? She had lost her way, so it was discovered, and had settled into another bed. She was returned to her own room. I sat at her side.