Things Could Be Worse

by Lily Brett

  Things Could Be Worse

  Lily Brett is the internationally acclaimed author of six novels, four collections of essays, and nine volumes of poetry. She has been the recipient of many literary awards, including France’s Prix Médicis Étranger in 2014 for her novel Lola Bensky.

  Brett was born in Germany in 1946 to two Auschwitz survivors. When Lily was a small child, she and her parents migrated to Australia as refugees. She started her writing career in the 1960s as a journalist for an Australian rock music newspaper. She interviewed scores of musicians, some of whom became legends, such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger.

  Today Lily Brett lives in New York City with her husband, the painter David Rankin, who created the illustrations for Things Could Be Worse. Brett’s work frequently explores the lives of Holocaust survivors and their children, the experiences of modern women, and life in New York City.

  By the same author

  Fiction

  Lola Bensky

  You Gotta Have Balls

  Too Many Men

  Collected Stories

  Just Like That

  What God Wants

  Essays

  Only In New York

  New York

  Between Mexico And Poland

  In Full View

  Poetry

  Wenn wir bleiben könnten (If We Could Stay)

  Liebesgedichte (Love Poems)

  Blistered Days

  Mud In My Tears

  In Her Strapless Dresses

  Unintended Consequences

  After The War

  Poland And Other Poems

  The Auschwitz Poems

  For David, forever

  Contents

  It Was After The War

  Loti Luftman’s Daughter

  An Illness

  A Drive

  A Family Portrait

  What Do You Know About Friends?

  I Wonder Why She Looks So Happy

  Every Death

  The Holiday

  The Children

  A Mixed Marriage

  You Will Be Going Back To Your Roots

  Chopin’s Piano

  Friday Is A Good Day For Fish

  I Heard You Got Another Husband

  If You Live Long Enough

  Things Could Be Worse

  Technical Trouble

  It Was After The War

  It was only after the war that Renia Bensky became obsessed with death.

  In Germany in 1945, Renia had contemplated suicide. Her baby son was dead. Her mother and father were dead. Her grand-parents were dead. Her brothers and sisters were dead. Her aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces were dead. Everybody she had belonged to was dead.

  Her girlfriend, Basia, after surviving Stutthof and Auschwitz, had thrown herself off the top of a five-storey building. But Renia Bensky was too tired to die.

  She sat in the barracks of the displaced persons camp and sewed. A British soldier had given her part of an old parachute. Renia was making a blouse for herself and a skirt for Rooshka, the young girl in the next bunk.

  Rooshka screamed for her mother every night. As soon as Rooshka began, Renia would run out of the barracks with her hands clamped over her mouth. She was frightened her own screams would fly out.

  The rhythm of the stitching reassured Renia. The skirt was taking shape. Some things were still predictable.

  Renia didn’t know where her husband was. She had been separated from Josl when they arrived in Auschwitz. She learnt later that he had been sent to a labour camp. Lists of the dead and the living were posted up regularly in the DP camp. Every day, Renia read the lists. But Josl’s name had not yet appeared. Renia didn’t know if Josl was alive. She didn’t know if she was alive.

  Renia was suffering from a bad cold the day she found out that Josl had survived. She hadn’t had a cold in her whole year in Auschwitz. Nobody had had a cold. There had been plenty of typhoid, and the Gestapo recorded diseases among the prisoners that had previously been seen by the SS doctors only in medical textbooks. But there were no cases of the common cold. Now Renia’s nose dripped, her voice was hoarse and she had a harsh cough.

  She could hardly look at Josl when they met. She felt separated from him by what she had seen, and what she had breathed. She felt poisoned. She could hardly accept who she was now. Her new knowledge was embedded in her. It seeped through her every thought. Sometimes it attacked her in her sleep and she would wake up crying. She knew it would always be like this.

  How could she embrace Josl? How could she let him embrace her? She was not Renia Bensky, wife of Josl Bensky. She was someone else. She was a stranger to Josl. She was a stranger to herself.

  Josl looked almost the same as when she had last seen him. He was much thinner, but he had the same childlike, optimistic smile that used to make her want to cry. He looked at her quietly for a few minutes. Renia now saw that he looked exhausted. He kissed her on the cheek.

  In Auschwitz the prisoners were pressed so closely together on the bunks that they could only turn over if the whole row turned together. Often prisoners’ vomit or diarrhoea dripped through the bunks.

  In Germany after the war, when Renia watched Jewish girls flirting with soldiers, she wondered how they could think that there was any comfort to be had from somebody else’s body.

  When Renia kissed Josl, he wept. She knew that he understood something. She didn’t know what. She went to her barracks and vomited and vomited. Josl sat silently and watched her vomit.

  When she arrived in Australia in 1948, Renia Bensky hated it. Melbourne was so empty. And the food! The cheese tasted like wax, and the bread was like cotton wool. The people at the Jewish Welfare Agency were kind. They found the Benskys a room in Brunswick, and gave them a bed, four blankets and two pillows. But Renia felt so alone. More alone than she’d felt in Auschwitz. More alone than she’d felt in the ghetto.

  Renia and Josl were taken out by Josl’s cousin, Max Borg, who had come to Australia in 1933. Max’s friends, who were mostly assimilated Jews, looked at Josl and Renia strangely. Renia felt that she was an embarrassment to Max’s wife, Esther.

  Max and Esther were lesser lights in the Jewish social life of Melbourne. Renia could see that Esther looked down on her. One of the first things Esther had said to Renia was: ‘You should buy yourself an Australian dress. Here it is called a sunfrock. It will help you look like an Australian. We Jews are just beginning to be accepted, and you shouldn’t cause trouble for us. Last week the bank manager did come to us, to our house, for a cup of coffee. He had coffee and a piece of cake, and he saw that we are normal, just like everybody else. It is important to be normal.’

  Josl tried to tell Max what had happened to Max’s niece in Poland, but Max stopped him. ‘I know, Josl, she had a terrible time. You know, Josl, we didn’t have it so easy here in Melbourne during the war. We couldn’t get any herring. It wasn’t so easy.’

  Renia tried once to talk to Frieda. Frieda was the nicest of Esther’s friends. Frieda had taught Renia to make gefilte fish, and she always talked to Renia with tenderness in her voice. ‘Frieda, do you know that I saw some terrible things in Poland,’ Renia said one day. ‘In concentration camp, I wanted to keep living so I could tell somebody what I saw.’ Frieda interrupted her. ‘Renia darling, it is over now. You are here, safe in Australia. It is best to put those things out of your mind. It is best not to disturb yourself with those thoughts.’

  Esther’s daughter, twelve-year-old Rivka, once asked Josl why he had big holes in his back. Renia and Josl were at St Kilda beach with the Borg family. Josl began to answer. ‘It was …’ he began. Esther grabbed Rivka by the arm with such ferocity that the girl began to cry. She dragged Rivka away.
Fragments of Esther’s conversation with Rivka floated over the tea-trees. ‘He could have a heart attack if he talks about such things. You should know better.’ Rivka returned red-faced and swollen-eyed.

  After one month in Australia, Renia wanted to leave. But she had nowhere to go to. She remembered how she had begged Josl to get them out of Germany. From the moment Josl and Renia were reunited, all Renia’s thoughts were focused on leaving Europe. She hated Germany. Every German sounded like a Kommandant. Josl gave her ten American dollars for her twenty-third birthday. With her birthday money, Renia bought four extra locks for the door of the room they were renting in Bayreuth. When Renia found out that she was pregnant, she bought another two locks.

  One morning Renia was alone in the room. She was stitching the edges of a square of woollen material to make a blanket for the baby. The baby was due in one month. At a quarter past ten there was a soft knock at the door. Renia silently walked to the cupboard next to the bed. She got in and closed the cupboard door behind her. When Josl came home at half past six, Renia was still sitting in the bottom of the cupboard.

  Josl would have been happy to stay in Germany. For a while, at least. He was doing business on the black market and making a little money. With his first bit of profit he bought Renia a black leather jacket. He felt so proud when he looked at Renia in her new jacket. It was a moment of pure joy. Josl thought that there couldn’t be many higher levels of happiness than the happiness he felt looking at Renia in her leather jacket.

  The rations that Josl and Renia received in Germany were enough to keep them from starving, but not enough to stop them being hungry. Josl began looking for ways to make more money.

  He felt alive. He was no longer tired. He had a beautiful wife, and a child on the way. He had something to live for. God had given him a second chance. Nothing could stop him now.

  Josl discovered a supply of extra food. The US army base. Josl waited outside the mess hall. When the soldiers had finished their meals, they scraped their plates into a large rubbish bin. Josl took the best scraps from the bin. He took potatoes, carrots, sausages. Sometimes he was lucky enough to find eggs. The food was so tasty. He carried it home, trimmed some of the chewed edges, and arranged the food nicely on plates. Josl never told Renia where this bounty came from.

  Josl’s business dealings with the US base expanded. He began buying cigarettes from the soldiers. He sold the cigarettes at a substantial profit. Josl used this profit to buy more cigarettes, and then some tea and coffee and chocolates.

  He decided to branch out further. He hid himself on a freight train going to Pilsen in Czechoslovakia. There he did some shopping. He invested the bulk of his money in small electric hotplates.

  Josl sold the hotplates to the Americans for cigarettes. He sold the cigarettes to Germans, who paid for them in Allied marks. Josl sold the Allied marks to the Americans for US dollars.

  He bought an Opel Kadett. It was black, snub-nosed and very shiny. Josl hadn’t driven a car for six years. He thought he would burst with pride when he first drove Renia around Bayreuth.

  He bought a small white fur coat for baby Lola. This coat would keep her warm in the coldest winter. And he bought a small diamond for Renia. A new engagement ring. A new engagement with the future.

  One day Josl was stopped by an American military policeman. The military police, Josl always told Renia, were gangsters, not normal people. ‘You just have to look at them and you can see they are not normal,’ he would say. ‘What normal person wants to be a military police? And they are all so big. Big gangsters. Big criminals. That’s what they are.’

  The military policeman accused Josl of driving over the speed limit. The Kadet didn’t go over sixty kilometres an hour, but Josl didn’t argue. He was wondering what he would have to pay this giant to avoid being charged with speeding when the MP ordered him out of the car.

  Josl knew he was done for. It took the MP two minutes to find the kilo and a half of butter that Josl had hidden in a box of old papers. Grinning with delight, the MP said, ‘Today I am in a particularly good mood. If you eat this butter up now, in front of me, you can go home a free man. I will not report you for trading on the black market.’ Josl ate the butter. He was sick for a week afterwards.

  Every day Renia asked Josl when they could leave Germany. She begged him not to do business on the black market. Each time Josl travelled to Czechoslovakia, Renia prepared herself for news of his death.

  Finally, Josl couldn’t bear to keep Renia in Germany any longer. They packed up. Josl gave his business tips to his old friend Moishe Mittelman, and Renia, Josl and Lola set off for Australia.

  Moishe Mittelman remained in Bayreuth for another three years. In 1951 he migrated to America. He arrived in New York with $50,000.

  Soon Renia Bensky became acclimatised to Australia. She no longer felt blinded by the harsh light. She owned sunfrocks and sunglasses. In the summer of 1948 she bought a pair of bathers.

  Renia’s next-door neighbour, Mrs Brown, taught her how to make an apple pie, and soon Renia’s apple pies were the toast of many Sunday card evenings.

  Renia became patriotically Australian. She hummed ‘God Save The King’, and wouldn’t let anyone voice any criticism of the country or its people.

  Renia began to feel happy. At the same time, a new feeling edged its way into her consciousness. She felt that she was going to die.

  In bed at night, Renia began to feel small pains in her chest. She went to see Dr Johnson. He examined her and sent her to the Women’s Hospital for tests. ‘There is nothing wrong with you,’ he told Renia. ‘I think, Mrs Bensky, it’s your nerves. It is definitely not your heart. Why don’t you relax a bit? Do you have a dog? I find that taking the dog for a walk takes my mind off things. Why don’t you get a dog?’

  Then Renia’s periods became irregular. In Auschwitz, Renia had been grateful that her periods had stopped. Her first and only period there had left her with blood-streaked legs and feet. Now, Renia was sure that this irregularity was a symptom of something terminal. Dr Horowitz was kind to her. ‘Mrs Bensky,’ he said, ‘we usually only worry when women bleed too much. Irregular and slight periods are nothing to worry about.’ Renia’s next period was so heavy and painful that it reminded her of her adolescence.

  Renia began to diagnose and prescribe remedies for herself. Her bathroom cupboards contained antibiotics, antihistamines, diuretics, tranquillisers and sedatives. She lectured friends on the difference between a viral and a bacterial infection, and sometimes dispensed medicines to them.

  ‘I won’t live long. You won’t have me forever,’ Renia used to say to Lola. Sometimes she screamed at Lola: ‘You are killing me. Hitler didn’t manage to kill me, so you want to finish me off. You will cry on my grave.’

  Renia went to a lot of funerals. She went to the funerals of people she hardly knew. She went to the minyans. She looked after the bereaved. But it was not enough. Renia couldn’t feel as though she had buried her dead.

  During the day, Renia was not alone. She carried the cries of orphans in the ghetto, and demented mothers, and lost fathers. At night when she went to bed all the dead came to visit her. The dead were all unburied. They were all in limbo. Renia often screamed in her sleep. Her screams were the screams of dying Jews. The screams had left the bodies of the dead and lodged themselves in Renia Bensky.

  At lunchtime at the Renee of Rome factory, the machinists ate in the staff kitchen. They shared cups of tea, sandwiches, sadnesses and happiness. Renia liked the women. All the sewing machines were pushed together in one corner of the factory, and Renia felt snug sewing in the middle of that crowd of machines. But at lunchtime Renia stood out in the hallway, in the dark corridor on the fourth floor, in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Australia, and talked to her mother.

  ‘Where are you, Mama? Are you in the air here in Australia? Or did you stay in Poland? I am frightened, Mama, that one day I won’t be able to remember your face. Mama, there are no photographs. No photogr
aphs of you and Papa. No photographs of Shimek and Abramek, Jacob or Felek. No photographs of Bluma or Fela or Marilla. I tried to go with you, Mama, but somebody knocked me on the head and pushed me into the other line. The line of life, Mama. I don’t know if you saw, Mama, I don’t know if you knew that I didn’t want to leave you. Oh, Mama, I am so lonely.’

  Sometimes some of the younger girls at Renee of Rome complained about their mothers. This one’s mother didn’t understand her, and that one’s mother was unfair. Renia used to block her ears and plan what she would cook for dinner.

  Renia often said to Lola, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to have parents.’ And Lola didn’t know.

  After a few years in Australia, Josl had his own small clothing business. Josl and Renia also had another daughter, Lina. Lina was born with one leg shorter than the other. Renia felt responsible for this. She thought that it could have been due to the fact that she had been bent over a sewing machine eighteen hours a day through the pregnancy. She felt consumed with guilt. She stopped working and stayed at home with Lina. At home, Renia washed and cooked and cleaned and looked after Lina.

  She had a beautiful garden. A garden with rose trees and apple trees and lemon trees. Renia loved her garden. Early every morning Renia went outside and fed the birds in the garden. There had been no birds in Auschwitz, and no birds in the ghetto. For six years Renia hadn’t seen a bird. Now, about a hundred birds waited for Renia every morning. There were seagulls, sparrows, starlings, willy wagtails and sometimes pigeons.

  Renia never went shopping with her friends. She never went to charity luncheons or to fashion parades. She didn’t play cards or bridge. She belonged to no clubs. Renia sunbaked.

  On sunny days, Renia did her housework faster than usual. She then took the telephone off the hook. She rubbed Nivea cream over her face and her shoulders, and she lay down in the garden in the sun.

  Even if it had been raining and the grass was damp, Renia didn’t lie on a towel or a beach mat. She lay on the grass.