by Lily Brett
A Mixed Marriage
From the day that Lola fell in love with another man, her husband smelt bad. The smell was like stale, sweet cheese. It came from his body and hovered in a thick net around the bed. It made Lola feel bilious.
She began sleeping with the window open. For thirty-five years she had lived with deadlocks, combination locks and iron bolts; her home security system was updated annually. Now, her fear of rapists, burglars and murderers paled next to the horror of the smell.
It came from his ears, his feet, his hands and his neck. She could smell it in the bathroom when he showered. In the kitchen, it crept across the breakfast table. It soaked into her coffee and filtered itself through her grapefruit juice.
Was Rodney suspicious? Was this his body’s reaction? Like a skunk putting out a stink when it feels in danger?
But Rodney didn’t know that she was in love with anyone but him. She had been devotedly faithful to him for thirteen years. More than that, they were the ideal couple. Lola loved the image of herself, a dark, wild-haired, large-eyed Jewess, standing next to the tall, pale son of the city’s establishment.
The smell lodged itself in Lola’s throat. She was unable to eat. She got up and called to her children through the intercom system. ‘Kids, we have to leave in five minutes or you’ll be late for school.’ Lola had never been late for anything. In all her years of psychotherapy, she had not missed one minute of one session. Lola liked to deliver her children to their schools an hour early. This allowed time for possible delays due to heavy traffic, a flat tyre, a mechanical failure or other emergencies. Lola felt that she would be able to tackle any emergency clear-headedly, secure in the knowledge that she would still be on time.
The night before Lola’s first day at school, her mother had sat her down for a talk. The family had been in Australia for three years. Mr and Mrs Bensky worked behind sewing machines in a factory during the day, and behind sewing machines at home at night. ‘Lolala, my Lolala,’ Mrs Bensky said, ‘You will be in a school now with Australian children. I want you always to remember that a Jewish boy will make you the best husband. Australian boys, they learn from their fathers to drink beer and to smack their wives. My Lolala, what do you know what it is to be smacked? To be treated worse than a dog?’
Lola couldn’t imagine anyone smacking the beautiful Mrs Bensky. She knew that the Nazis had. They had tattooed a number on Mrs Bensky’s slender strong arm. Lola told anyone who asked that this number was their new phone number.
‘Lolala, look at Mrs Stein’s daughter. She married someone who is not Jewish. A nice man he seemed. An accountant. Look at her, Lolala. Three children, no money, dirty everything. He is in the pub every day straight after work, then he comes home and gives her a nice klup on the head. That’s what will happen to you, Lolala, if you marry an Australian.’
Lola wasn’t surprised at this prospect of violence. Lola knew that she didn’t yet know half of how frightening the world was. She did know that there was danger everywhere, and that life was a series of narrow escapes. By the time she was thirteen she had a highly evolved, complex system of warding off evil. She had to touch all the doorknobs and cupboard handles in her bedroom ten times each in the correct order, from left to right, before going to bed. Then she could sleep.
On Sunday nights the world looked better to Lola. In the afternoon Mrs Bensky would bake a sponge cake. It always came out with a soft brown covering, like lightly spun velvet. Next she laid out the bowls. A bowl of dark, shiny chocolates, a bowl of delicately sprigged branches of muscatel raisins scattered with almonds, a bowl of black, fat prunes, and a bowl of fruit-flavoured boiled lollies.
Then she prepared supper. It was always the same. Grated egg and spring onion salad, schmalz herring, smoked mackerel, chopped liver, dill pickles, radish flowers, sliced tomatoes, some rye bread and some matzoh. After that, she unfolded four card tables and chairs and arranged them in the small lounge-room. At four o’clock Mr and Mrs Bensky had a nap for an hour. By eight o’clock the air was scented with heady perfume and cigarettes. Mrs Ganz’s long, polished nails sparkled as she dealt the cards. Lola loved Mrs Ganz’s husky voice and the way that her breasts moved with her breath.
Mr Ganz argued with Mr Berman: ‘Chaim, you are an idiot! You walk with your eyes shut. You will be finished if you go into partnership with such an idiot like Felek Ganzgarten. You mustn’t do it.’
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ Mr Bensky admonished them in his most formal English.
Mrs Small sang in a low voice as she played. ‘Motl, Motl, vos vat sein mit dir, der Rabbi sogt du kanst nisht lernen,’ she sang – ‘Morris, Morris, what is going to become of you, the rabbi says you are not learning.’
And Mr Small, as usual, slipped Lola a couple of very expensive, large, chocolate-covered liqueur prunes. Mr Zelman whistled an old Polish lullaby as he smoothly swept his winnings over to his corner.
Sometimes the hum of the room was low and calm, and other times the atmosphere was feverish. Moves were disputed, news was dispensed, rumours were scotched or debated, advice was given and taken, and money was won and lost.
Mrs Bensky never played cards. She made cups of black lemon tea, refilled the glasses of soda water, emptied the ashtrays and served the supper.
Driving the children to school, Lola remembered Rodney, twenty-three years old, his speech almost a stutter that was expelled in short bursts. He had looked much happier when he was not speaking. And Lola was then free to imagine his thoughts.
One day, Rodney told her that he was never going to marry. He said that he would be too worried that his wife would leave him. This revelation was at odds with Lola’s understanding of Rodney. She saw him as independent, self-contained and peaceful. The thought of not being the one who had to worry about being left appealed to Lola. Six weeks later they were married.
Lola and Rodney became good friends. They laughed together. They blossomed as parents and were bound together by a fierce pride in their two beautiful and clever children.
For the first few years of the marriage, Lola was captivated and wholly satisfied by Rodney’s blondness. She would lie awake next to him for hours, looking at the golden hairs glinting on his arms.
Lola dropped the children off and parked the car in the supermarket car park. She walked to a taxi rank and caught a taxi to Garth’s apartment.
In the taxi, the lies, the deception and the tension of the last month visited Lola briefly, but her happiness crept up and covered her.
Garth was waiting for her. His smile looked as though it might lift him off the ground. He trembled as he held her. He had prepared coffee. She watched him pour the coffee.
The first time they made love, Lola had felt like a virgin. She and Rodney had shuffled in and out of sex comfortably, companionably. Now she ached. She had forgotten what it was like to ache for a man. It felt like a violin screaming between her legs.
That evening at dinner, Rodney said, ‘I think Garth Walker is in love with you.’
‘What?’ she said.
‘I’ve seen the way he looks at you,’ Rodney answered. ‘He doesn’t take his eyes off you. He talks to the kids and he looks at you. He talks to me and he looks at you.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lola. She felt bilious.
‘It’s infatuation,’ said Lola’s closest friend, Margaret-Anne. ‘It wears off. After a few years you and Garth will be like you and Rodney. It’s not worth the bother.’
Lola fantasised about finding another wife for Rodney. She would find someone intelligent, well-read and with a good sense of humour, and they could all be friends. They could buy a small block of flats and create two large apartments. They could eat together. They could share holidays. And the children wouldn’t miss out. The prospect of this happy communal life made Lola feel exhausted.
Lola knew it wasn’t going to be easy to tell Mrs Bensky that she was going to leave Rodney.
‘So, Hitler didn’t kill me, now you are going to do it for h
im!’ screamed Mrs Bensky.
Mr Bensky said: ‘I lived through the labour camp to hear this news? I wish I would have died.’
Mrs Bensky rang Rodney to tell him that she would do his laundry. She said she didn’t want Rodney to suffer the humiliation of having his clothes washed by a wife who was in love with someone else.
Lola had not had such an effect on her parents since the day she told them that she was going to marry Rodney.
‘Lolala, Lolala, how can you do this to us?’ Mrs Bensky had wailed. ‘What will our friends say? They will say that we didn’t bring you up properly. They will say that we should have sent you to Mount Scopus, not to an Australian school. Lola, get me some Stemetil. I feel sick.’
Now, Mr and Mrs Bensky were hysterical. ‘Lola, you and Rodney were our big hope, our example of how a mixed marriage can work. Everyone says what a wonderful man Rodney is and what a wonderful couple you are. Lolala, wake up!’ Mrs Bensky screamed.
For most of her adult life Lola had had trouble waking up. She used to daydream while she was cleaning, while she was driving, while she was reading or watching television, and while people spoke to her. She would nod from time to time, and on the whole no-one noticed.
She had a whole set of fantasies she could slip into. When Mrs Bensky delivered her regular lectures about losing weight, Lola would plug herself into the dream in which she had just completed her fifth best-selling novel. A novel that had made millions of readers weep. A novel that had earned Lola hundreds of thousands of dollars. A novel that had caused passionate debate in dining rooms in Paris, London and New York. Last week, when Mrs Bensky finished her speech, Lola was being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight show.
When she was with Garth, Lola was wide awake. So awake she could feel every part of her body. She could feel her nervous heart. She could feel her knees. She felt as though she could inhale the earth and touch the stars.
Garth taught her about art. He played her music. Mahler, Satie, Berg, Poulenc, Glass, Stravinsky. He read her poetry. Poems by Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Brodsky, William Carlos Williams. Poems by Anne Sexton. And he never stopped looking at her. He looked at her as they walked. He looked at her when they talked. He looked at her while they ate. He looked at her as they made love. And he painted her. He painted her happy and he painted her sad. He painted her pained and he painted her exuberant. He painted her as a madonna and he painted her as a warrior queen, a Boadicea streaking across the canvas. Hundreds of portraits of her were stacked around the walls of his studio.
Mr and Mrs Bensky had observed every detail of Lola’s life. What she ate, how often she changed her underwear, who she spoke to in the school ground. Mrs Bensky would watch Lola every lunchtime, after she had delivered her daily hot lunch. Later on, Mrs Bensky kept a record of Lola’s menstrual cycle on a chart inside the pantry cupboard. And the intercom system that connected all the rooms in the house was always switched on.
Everything was a potential catastrophe. A sneeze indicated pneumonia, a cough was a sign of asthma, a stomach ache pointed towards kidney and liver trouble. An unexpected knock at the door would leave Mrs Bensky breathless, and if Lola was ever late home from school, Mrs Bensky prepared herself for the worst.
Lola, who still complained that nothing she did escaped her parents’ scrutiny, became an observant parent herself. Lola adored her son, Julian. For the first year and a half of his life she recorded his every bowel movement. She drew up a chart and headed the columns ‘Time’, ‘Size’, ‘Consistency’ and ‘Colour’. Another chart recorded every mouthful of food baby Julian swallowed. This was headed ‘Food’, ‘Description’, ‘Amount’, ‘Time’ and ‘Attitude’.
By the time her daughter, Paradise, was born, Lola was not so intense about being a parent. She allowed Paradise to pat stray dogs and to eat her food from the kitchen floor. Paradise spent hours smudging her meals into the brown quarry tiles under the table before scraping the food into her mouth.
Lola worried about the consequences of allowing Paradise to eat off the floor, but she consoled herself with the thought that at least Paradise was a good eater. Julian was such a fussy eater that Lola had had to pretend that everything she fed him was chicken. Most of Julian’s chicken chocolate custard or chicken fruit salad or chicken chops went into Lola.
Mr and Mrs Bensky spent the Saturday afternoons of most summers at St Kilda Beach. The whole gang would go. Mrs Bensky always brought cold boiled eggs and rye bread, and Mrs Ganz made her special carrot and pineapple salad. The Zelmans brought ham and Mr Pekelman brought long cucumbers from his garden.
They sat under the tea-trees on the foreshore, on thick, soft rugs, and ate and drank and talked. The Italian man who sold peanuts was always happy to see them. They bought twelve large bags. Enough peanuts to last until dinner.
Every now and then, someone would go for a dip in the water. Most of the gang couldn’t swim. Mrs Bensky was the only good swimmer. She would stride into the water in her gold lame bikini, or her silver and purple polka dotted pair, or the green pair covered in latex leaves.
As a child, Lola used to wear lumpy, frilly bathers. They had a gathered yoke and a full skirt, which Mrs Bensky said disguised Lola’s hips and thighs.
Now, Lola would soon be able to wear her first pair of bikinis. The weight was dropping off her. Every day she was thinner. Garth satisfied all her appetites and she no longer felt hungry.
At five o’clock, Lola started getting ready to go home. Garth phoned for a taxi and then came and sat down next to her. ‘Lola, I love you. I’ll always love you. There’ll never be anything in my life more important than loving you. I feel as though I was born to be with you.’
The next day, Lola told Rodney that she was moving out with the children. All he said was: ‘Have you slept with him?’
‘No,’ she lied.
Garth, with his dark hair and large, heavy-lidded eyes, looked Jewish. Lola hoped that the Benskys would see this as progress.
You Will Be Going Back To Your Roots
Garth’s new trousers had three pleats on either side of the zip. Until now he had worn skin-tight, peg-legged Levis. Lola looked at Garth. She found the loose space between his legs alluring. She started to think about what lay behind those parallel pleats.
Not since Lola was seventeen had she felt lustful just looking at a man’s crotch.
Out of bed, Lola rarely felt sexually aroused. She had enough trouble feeling that way in bed. Where were the children? Could they hear? Was she ovulating? Should she use Ultrasure With Spermicidal Creme or Nuda Natural Feeling condoms? What was the time? Did she have to get up early in the morning? These were the questions that occupied Lola when sex seemed imminent.
A distant memory flickered in Lola’s head. She quickly tried to calculate how old she would have been in the 1950s, when all men wore pleats in their pants. She had been just young enough still to sit on her father’s lap and crush him with hugs when he came home from work.
Lola had always adored her father. She still did. She couldn’t resist his generosity and his sense of humour. She loved the way that he turned beetroot red and cried when he laughed. If he laughed at the dinner table, pieces of fish or chicken would fly from his mouth and land on the other side of the kitchen.
Lola’s girlfriends also adored her father. ‘Mr Bensky, Mr Bensky, can you drive us to Luna Park?’ they would beseech him. On Saturdays and Sundays Mr Bensky could be seen driving through the streets of Melbourne, his pink Pontiac Parisienne full of chattering, gum-chewing fourteen-year-olds.
If they passed Leo’s Spaghetti Bar in Fitzroy Street, the girls knew that they could rely on Mr Bensky to shout them a round of chocolate gelati.
Mr Bensky loved gelati. Before the war, in Lodz, Mr Bensky used to spend more money on ice-cream than most people earned in a week.
Mr Bensky came from one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Lodz. They owned apartment blocks and a timber yard. At sixteen, Mr Bensky was in charge of the ti
mber yard. He doubled the turnover, fiddled the books and pocketed the profit. Nobody noticed.
Even as a schoolboy, Mr Bensky never used public transport. He went everywhere by droshky. He single-handedly supported two droshkies and their drivers. At eighteen he bought himself a dark red Skoda sports car.
Mr Bensky met Mrs Bensky when she was the very quiet, studious, extraordinarily beautiful Renia Kindler.
Mr and Mrs Kindler lived in two small rooms with their seven children. Mrs Kindler paid the caretaker of their block a couple of zlotys extra a week to keep one of the external toilets solely for the use of the Kindler family.
Renia’s ambition was to study medicine. She was not easily deterred from her studies.
Mr Bensky wooed this slim-hipped, serious sixteen-year-old fervently. He bought her an eighteen-carat solid gold Rolex watch. He bought her French perfumes and Swiss chocolates. He bought her peaches and strawberries, and the first pineapple that she had ever seen.
* * *
Just as Renia was preparing to leave for the University of Vienna, Germany invaded Poland. All the Jews living in Lodz were ordered to move to a slum area of the city, where they were completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Mr and Mrs Kindler urged Renia to marry Mr Bensky. They thought that she would be better off with his family.
In their haste and confusion, the Benskys had only been able to pack a few valuables. At the end of that first year in the ghetto, they were as poor and as hungry as everyone else. They had sold their last diamond, a blue-white, 2.4-carat stone in a heavy eighteen-carat gold setting, for a sack of potato peels.
Potato peels were a luxury in the ghetto. You had to have good connections in the public kitchens to buy this delicacy. You also had to know whether the kitchens used knives to peel their potatoes. Peels from the kitchens that used potato peelers were mostly just films of dirt.
