Things Could Be Worse

by Lily Brett

  Lola hated hearing about the potato peels. It seemed too pathetic. Worse than the stories about children dying in the streets and relatives killing each other for a piece of bread and trainload after trainload of people being shipped out of the ghetto never to be heard of again.

  When Lola was twelve, she had boiled herself a pot of potato peels. She had often wondered what they tasted like. She was halfway through her first mouthful when Mrs Bensky came home unexpectedly. Mrs Bensky, who had never laid a hand on either of her daughters, took the bowl of potato peels. Then, screaming and crying, she shook Lola by the hair until Lola fainted.

  The thought of her father’s penis made Lola feel nauseous. If she thought about her father in sexual terms, she would have to think about him fucking her mother. She tried to blink that thought out of her head.

  At seventeen, Lola was having furtive sex regularly, if erratically, with her first serious boyfriend. One evening, with her puce-faced boyfriend hovering above her, Lola was suddenly seized with the thought that maybe her parents were doing the same thing in their bedroom across the hallway. Her stomach heaved, and she vomited and vomited.

  Fortunately, Lola’s boyfriend considered himself an existential eccentric. He felt that this messy, smelly, potentially humiliating episode merely added to the interesting experiences of his life.

  Melbourne is a small city. Years later, people still asked Lola if it was true that she had chucked all over Johnny Rosenberg while he was fucking her.

  Mrs Bensky rarely touched Lola or her sister. When she kissed them hello and goodbye, she planted the peck firmly in mid-air.

  Every evening when Mr Bensky came home from work, he would grab Mrs Bensky by the bum, and kiss her loudly. Mrs Bensky would try to shrug him off. ‘Look at your beautiful mummy,’ he would say to the girls. ‘My little Renia. What a beauty!’ By this time, Mrs Bensky would have wriggled out of his grip and busied herself serving dinner.

  ‘You’ll be going back to your roots if you marry me’ was one of the lines that Garth used to persuade Lola to leave her husband. He pursued her relentlessly. He phoned her several times a day, wrote poems for her, painted her portrait, bought her an eighteen-carat gold Parker pen and a leather-bound notebook. Then came the jewellery. Lola loved rings. Garth bought her garnet rings, emerald rings, ruby rings, sapphire rings and a magnificent art-deco diamond ring.

  In the end, Lola couldn’t resist the adoration. Even before her analysis, Lola knew that she loved being adored. And Garth adored her. He was always looking at her. In seven years he had painted over five hundred portraits of her. Last year he had had an exhibition of his paintings in Sydney. The exhibition was called Pictures Of Lola. One hundred and eight portraits of Lola hung from the walls of the Creighton Galleries.

  Lola got up from the breakfast table. ‘I think I’ll have a shower,’ she said to Garth.

  Lola found it difficult to wash. She found it an ordeal. Lola only showered when she had to wash her hair.

  Mrs Bensky showered every morning and every evening. And at night, if Mr and Mrs Bensky had made love, Lola used to hear the bathroom taps gushing at full throttle while Mrs Bensky furiously washed herself out.

  Mrs Bensky kept her house as clean as she kept her body. She washed the floors every day. Twice a week she stripped the stove and the fridge. Once a week, balancing a large bucket of water on top of a ladder, she cleaned the windows. Mrs Bensky vacuumed the carpet when Mr Bensky and the girls left in the mornings, and again after dinner.

  Sometimes Lola didn’t change her pantihose for a fortnight. The feet would become rigid. Lola wondered if the dirt held the pantihose together and made them last longer.

  Mr and Mrs Bensky visited Lola every Tuesday and Friday night. They usually stayed for about three-quarters of an hour.

  For years Lola felt that they only came to see the children. They were besotted by their grandchildren. Mr Bensky would look at Lola’s son, Julian, who at sixteen was already six feet tall, and say, ‘Whoever would have thought I would live to have grandchildren?’

  Mrs Bensky would go straight to Lola’s kitchen sink, in her Yves St Laurent silk blouse, her Kenzo trousers and her Maud Frizon shoes, and wash and scour and dry until everything gleamed.

  Even at home, Mrs Bensky never wore an apron or work clothes. She cleaned in her ordinary clothes, although Mrs Bensky’s clothes could hardly be described as ordinary. She had satin dresses beaded with pearls, taffeta coats dripping diamantes, lame and lurex cocktail dresses, linen and leather trousers, all from the best fashion houses in Europe.

  Margaret-Anne and Ivana, Lola’s best friends, kept spotless houses. Ivana felt compelled to clean up whenever she visited Lola. Margaret-Anne said that she found Lola’s mess relaxing.

  Margaret-Anne and Ivana were both tall and thin. Mrs Bensky was very slim too. Lola wondered whether ectomorphs had a mania for cleanliness.

  Lola never used to wash the dishes. She owned enough crockery to keep going between the cleaning woman’s twice-weekly visits. After her first year in analysis, Lola began to wash her own dishes. Late in life, Lola discovered the joy of well-scrubbed saucepans and shiny surfaces.

  Lola had always had trouble with the concept of moderation. For a while she became a bit obsessive. She washed every teaspoon or fork or coffee mug as soon as it was used. She cleaned out the pantry and bathroom cupboards and put everything in labelled jars. She rearranged the cutlery drawers and the crockery cabinets. She vacuumed the front veranda and polished the letterbox. She drove everyone crazy, and the kids begged her to go back to being a slob.

  Garth stood next to Lola. He wound his leg around her leg and stroked her face. The children were at school. They lay down and had a noisy fuck.

  After she came, Lola wept and wept. She often cried after a strong orgasm. She knew that it usually meant that she had been shutting herself off from any intense emotions, been out of touch with her sadness.

  Lola used to say that she felt that she was born with a backlog of sadness. She didn’t really know what she meant. Was it all those dead relatives – uncles, aunts, cousins, grandmothers and grandfathers – all fed to the sky? The ashes of the victims of Auschwitz almost choked the Vistula river.

  Mr and Mrs Bensky shared a past that Lola could never belong to. Lola longed to drive a wedge into their togetherness. She had one such moment of triumph when she was ten. She had been begging and pleading to have her ears pierced. Mrs Bensky said that ear-piercing was a barbaric custom and they were a civilised family. Not while Lola lived in her house could she have pierced ears.

  Lola stopped practising the piano. She no longer took the dog for a walk. She sat in her room for hours looking miserable. Mr Bensky relented. Behind Mrs Bensky’s back, he took Lola into the city and held her hand while a nursing sister pierced Lola’s ears.

  For the next week, Mrs Bensky made twice as much noise as she washed up while the rest of the family ate their dinner.

  Lola still wore the gold sleeper earrings that Mr Bensky had bought. Now a gold, heart-shaped Victorian locket carrying a lock of Garth’s hair hung from the sleeper in Lola’s right ear.

  ‘Lola, my love, my beautiful wife, my delicious chicken, shall we go out for coffee?’ Garth called from the bedroom.

  ‘OK, I’ll be out of the shower in a second,’ she answered.

  Lola loved going out for coffee. Going out for a coffee meant going out for a walk, going out for a cake, going out for a talk. She had seen some new earrings up the street. They were small ruby studs. Maybe she would have another look at them.

  Chopin’s Piano

  Lola Bensky was about to arrive in Warsaw. She tried to decide whether she was nervous or anxious. Nervous was all right. Being anxious made her dizzy. She wondered if she should take a Valium. She didn’t want to take a Valium if what she was feeling was a normal kind of tension. If it was anxiety, she needed the Valium.

  The plane landed. An indecipherable blast of blurred Polish came from the loudsp
eaker system. Lola began to feel breathless. She hated not being able to understand or to make herself understood. In the bleak immigration and customs hall, long queues of people stood waiting. Lola was dismayed. She always tried to avoid standing in queues. It was one of the things that made her very anxious. Her analyst had explained to her that she felt this anxiety because she could not bear to have to wait for the breast. That she was angry about the fact that she was dependent on her mother. That she was outraged that her mother had something that she didn’t. That she was jealous and envious of her mother, but couldn’t face the pain of these bad feelings, and so denied her need for her mother. This insight hadn’t helped Lola with her queue problem.

  The yellow-haired, sallow-faced young man behind the immigration desk tapped his blue biro violently as he asked Lola questions.

  ‘Your nationality?’ he snapped.

  Lola tried not to panic. He was holding her passport. Why would he ask her her nationality?

  ‘Australian,’ she said meekly.

  ‘Purpose of visit?’ he barked.

  ‘To see Poland,’ Lola whispered. She could see that he thought that this was a reasonable answer. With a brusque gesture, he motioned her to move on.

  Outside it was dark and bitterly cold. Lola was flushed and hot. She could feel drops of sweat trickling down between her breasts. She was wearing a woollen spencer and long woollen underpants, a three-piece woollen suit, Angora socks, boots, an astrakhan hat, elbow-length gloves and a voluminous, thick coat. A cashmere scarf was wound around her neck. She caught a taxi to the Victoria Hotel. Driving in, she was astonished to see that Warsaw looked like an ordinary city. The streets were lined with graceful neoclassical four- and five-storey apartment buildings. A soft, yellow light that suggested happy family life seeped out from the sides of the curtained windows. There was no sign of menace in the air.

  The Victoria Hotel was a 1960s late-modern building. Lola recognised the style. Caulfield was full of fine examples of this sort of building.

  Lola was unnerved when she walked inside the hotel. The interior was a large replica of the lounge-rooms of Caulfield and Bellevue Hill. The same granite and marble surfaces, the same rich, rounded woodwork, the same heavy raw silk drapes, the same large leather lounge suites, and the same 1950s expressionist ashtrays and vases. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling.

  The short, stocky woman who was to be her guide was waiting in the foyer. Lola explained to Mrs Potoki-Okolska that she had come to Poland to see her parents’ past, the small piece of their past that was left.

  She wanted to go to Lodz, she told Mrs Potoki-Okolska, to see where her parents had lived before the war. Where they had studied, where they had played, where they had walked. She would also like to see what was left of the Lodz ghetto. She explained that her parents had spent four and a half years in the Lodz ghetto before they were shipped to Auschwitz.

  ‘My mother was the sole survivor of her family. Her brothers Shimek, Abramek, Jacob and Felek, and her sisters Fela, Bluma and Marilla, and her mother and father were gassed and then burnt. My father lost his parents, three brothers and a sister.’

  ‘It was a terrible, terrible tragedy, yes,’ said Mrs Potoki-Okolska. ‘But Polish people lost people too. It was not just the Jews who were killed by the Nazis. We suffered. Oh, how we suffered! My mother’s cousin lost her mother, an innocent woman who never hurt anybody.’ Here, Mrs Potoki-Okolska had to pause. Tears were streaming down her face.

  Mrs Potoki-Okolska showed Lola to her hotel room. A sign on the back of the door asked that no guests remain in the room after 10 p.m. Lola assumed that that meant guests other than those who were paying.

  The fridge in the room was full of bottles of blackcurrant juice, blackcurrant juice with vodka, and Coca-Cola. Mrs Potoki-Okolska drank four bottles of Coca-Cola. She thanked Lola profusely for the Coca-Cola, said goodnight and left.

  Lola looked out of the window. Warsaw was asleep. The city was covered in a fine layer of snow. Everything looked peaceful.

  ‘It will be the end of you. They will put you in jail,’ Mrs Bensky had warned Lola. ‘They won’t let you leave Poland. The Poles were worse than the Germans. They used to laugh at us in our concentration-camp rags. Small children would kick us when we were walking to work in the towns near the camp. Oh, those nice Poles, those good people, they couldn’t wait to point Jews out to the Germans. They couldn’t wait to take over our apartments when we had to move to the ghetto. They took our clothes, our china, our furniture. They took over the Jewish businesses. They just helped themselves. The caretaker of my parents’ building, who my mother had looked after like she was one of the family, went running to the Gestapo to report on us.

  ‘And after the war, there was a miracle. Not one single Polish person did know anything about what happened to us. You could smell the flesh burning for kilometres from Auschwitz. Those chimneys were blowing smoke twenty-four hours a day. The sky was red day and night, but the Poles didn’t notice.

  ‘And when my cousin Adek went back after the war, what did he see? He saw that they were surprised that he was still alive. Mrs Boleswaf, the caretaker, said to him: “Oh, I thought all of you were dead.” Her son was wearing my father’s suit, Adek said. My brother’s grand piano was in the middle of their living room. And Mrs Boleswaf offered him a cup of tea from the beautiful white-and-silver china that was part of my mother’s dowry. What do you want to go to Poland for? Something terrible will happen to you.’

  In the morning light, the city looked less vibrant. Lola was shocked at how depressed and oppressed the people looked. They walked with their heads down. Even the children were quiet and expressionless. Men and women wore grey clothes and grey faces. Their hair was lank and dull. No shampoo, Lola remembered.

  Long queues of people waited outside the sparsely stocked shops. There was no movement in the queues. No-one spoke. Lola found this collective depression frightening. She had always thought of depression as an individual and isolating experience.

  At the bus stop, people stood in silence. The bus arrived. The crowd clambered aboard, elbowing each other and Lola out of the way. Lola was left behind. From the bus, Mrs Potoki-Okolska screamed at Lola that she would get off at the next stop and walk back.

  By midday Lola had seen the Radziwill palace, the Potoki palace, the Tyszkiewicz palace, the Uruski palace, the Czapski palace, the Staszic palace, a dozen churches and several cathedrals. Mrs Potoki-Okolska left money in each church, and wept as she dedicated the gift to her mother. In the Church of St Cross there was an urn that contained Chopin’s heart. The Old Town Market Square, like most of the city of Warsaw, had been destroyed by the Nazis. Mrs Potoki-Okolska pointed to one quaint seventeenth-century building after another and announced: ‘Built in 1953,’ or ‘Built in 1956,’ or ‘This building is still being finished.’

  Lola was exhausted. Her feet hurt. She was suffering from the anxiety that she experienced when she was ignored. Mrs Potoki-Okolska had refused to listen to her when she had expressed her lack of interest in churches, palaces or monuments to famous generals.

  Lola had arranged to have lunch with Mr Konrad Serbin, the father of a friend of a friend. She felt that it could do her no harm to have a connection with Mr Serbin, who was one of Poland’s leading barristers, and his wife, a highly acclaimed surgeon.

  Lola wanted to buy some flowers for Mrs Serbin. Mrs Potoki-Okolska took Lola to a small, dimly lit, shabby shop. The back wall of the shop was lined with shelves. Each shelf held three vases, and each vase contained two flowers. A carnation and a freesia. A round, red-faced man was meticulously wrapping a pink carnation in a small square of butcher’s paper.

  Lola asked Mrs Potoki-Okolska to ask for a dozen carnations. Mrs Potoki-Okolska looked horrified.

  ‘It is very rude to buy so many flowers,’ she said. ‘Your friend’s father will think that you want to show him how much money you have. It is not good manners, no, not good manners.’

  Mrs Potoki-Oko
lska was very concerned with good manners. This morning at breakfast she had wrenched a toothpick from Lola’s hands. ‘This is not good manners in Poland,’ she had shouted.

  The carnations were thin and stringy. Lola thought that twelve of them would at least produce some volume.

  ‘What to do? What to do? What to do?’ sighed Mrs Potoki-Okolska.

  Mrs Potoki-Okolska ordered a dozen carnations. A rumble of hostility went through the waiting queue. The florist glared at Lola and wrapped the carnations carelessly. Twelve carnations cost as much as most people earned in a week. Flower-growers were the new rich in Poland.

  Mrs Potoki-Okolska was right. Mrs Serbin looked furious when Lola gave her the flowers.

  Mr and Mrs Serbin were wealthy Poles. Their two-room apartment was filled with nineteenth-century romantic and historical paintings, oriental rugs, leather-bound books, silver and crystal.

  The Serbins were very pleased with the parcel of pencils, biros, soaps, toothpaste, pantihose, silver foil and kitchen cloths that Lola had brought from their daughter. Mr Serbin’s brother and sister-in-law joined them for lunch. Mrs Serbin served an entree of smoked trout with horseradish sauce. In the middle of a mouthful of trout, it occurred to Lola that all five Poles at the table were in their mid-sixties. The same age as Mr and Mrs Bensky. Where were they when the Jews were being rounded up for the ghetto? Where were they when the Warsaw ghetto was burning? Were they part of the heated, cheering crowd on the Aryan side? Were they watching Jews explode into the night?

  Lola felt nauseous. She excused herself, and ran to the toilet. The toilet was in a tiny room, ten feet away from the dining table. The door wouldn’t close properly. Lola tried to hold the door shut with her foot while she sat on the toilet. She felt bilious and giddy. Sweat ran down her face. She could hear every word of the lunch-table conversation. She coughed loudly to disguise her own violent eruptions. Half an hour later, she emerged. Mrs Potoki-Okolska rushed to greet her. ‘You look terrible. Was it your liver or your kidneys?’ she asked.