Things Could Be Worse

by Lily Brett

  Lola had tried to dance. At sixteen, when her friends were jiving to Chubby Checker, Bobby Darin and Crash Craddock, Lola had tried to look like a carefree rock-and-roller. She had had the right rope petticoats, the right T-bar shoes, the right lipstick and the right hairstyle. But she had had the wrong expression. She looked anguished, embarrassed and uncomfortable. She had tried to keep smiling through ‘Only The Lonely’ and ‘Boom Boom Baby’, but her discomfort had dislodged her smile.

  Lola had tried again in her early twenties, when dancing had become more creative. You could make up the movements or follow the go-go dancers. At Ziggy’s discotheque, Lola had kept her eyes glued to the go-go dancers. Six go-go dancers danced in cages suspended from the ceiling. Lola often felt dizzy looking up at the dancers while she copied their arm and leg movements, but Lola had no talent for choreography. Her imagination didn’t extend to dance steps. If she couldn’t see the go-go dancers, she couldn’t dance.

  At twenty-three, Lola gave up dancing. She didn’t dance again until she met Garth. Garth was a fabulous dancer. Lola clung to Garth as he turned and stepped and twisted around the dance floor. Garth held Lola close to him, and clutched her tightly. From this secure position, Lola Bensky could smile while she danced.

  Lola had seen herself on the screen before. She had seen herself in old footage of the prisoners of Dachau being liberated by the American army. She knew that the young girl behind the barbed-wire fence in Dachau, in front of the ditch filled with dead bodies, was her.

  Lola saw herself in photographs, too. She saw herself in photographs of street urchins in the Lodz ghetto. She saw herself in a photograph of a small girl sitting next to her dead mother in the ghetto. She saw herself in photographs of Jewish women smiling for the camera in displaced persons camps.

  Lola also looked for relatives in these photographs. She searched through photographs, books and films for members of her family. She looked for the son that her parents had had before the war. She looked for her grandparents. She looked for her aunties and uncles and cousins.

  In her handbag she kept a notebook with the names of her parents’ parents and brothers and sisters. In this notebook, she also kept an index of the titles of the books on the Holocaust that she owned.

  Lola hated the word Holocaust. It was too neatly wrapped into a parcel. There were no loose ends and no frayed edges. The Holocaust. It was a nice, compact abstraction. But what else could she say? The alternatives were so wordy. She could say the Nazi extermination of European Jewry. She could say the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis. She could say Hitler’s murder of six million Jews.

  Lola had a library of over one thousand books on the Holocaust. She had read most of them. Lola had a good memory. She had always had a good memory. She could remember hundreds, if not thousands, of phone numbers. Conversations she had ten years ago, she could recall verbatim. Yet the facts and statistics of the Holocaust flew out of her head. She had to check and recheck the information. Was it in Bergen-Belsen that British troops had found over ten thousand unburied bodies? Was it there, in Bergen-Belsen, that five hundred inmates a day had died from typhoid and starvation in the week after liberation? Was it in Mauthausen that the Nazis had murdered thirty thousand Jews in the last four months of the war? Lola had to check and recheck.

  When she was thirty, Lola had begun to ask her parents about their experiences in the war. They had answered her questions, hesitantly at first, but they had answered. Lola had listened. She had listened quietly. She had taken notes. She had tape-recorded some of the conversations. She had videotaped a long interview with each of her parents. And still their stories blurred and wandered in her head.

  Lola had been shocked to find that other Jews her age didn’t know or couldn’t remember what had happened to their parents during the war. Solomon Seitz, with his Oxford D.Phil, didn’t know. Susan Shuster, a researcher for the Prime Minister, couldn’t remember. Boris Kronhill, the physicist, had a vague idea. He told Lola that his mother had been in hiding in a convent and his father had been in a labour camp in Russia. Lola knew that Boris had it all wrong. Renia knew the Kronhills and had told Lola that Mrs Kronhill had been in Auschwitz and Mr Kronhill had been hidden in a haystack on a farm in Poland for two years.

  Renia and Josl’s friends thought that Lola, with all her questions and all her books, was crazy. ‘What does she want to read books about concentration camps for?’ said Genia Pekelman. ‘Does she want to go crazy?’

  Lola came out of the Adelphi theatre in Mordialloc. Mordialloc was a long way from Russia and the world of Tevye and Tzeitel and Motel.

  Lola’s mother had died nine months ago. Last night, Lola had been feeling out of kilter. She had seen in the Herald that Fiddler On The Roof was playing at the Adelphi, and she had decided that she needed to see it. This morning Lola had bought a packet of Fantales and a packet of Minties, and driven for an hour to Mordialloc to catch the early matinee session at the Adelphi.

  There had been only five other people in the cavernous theatre. Lola thought that she and the four elderly women and one very old man must have been the only people in Melbourne who hadn’t yet seen Fiddler On The Roof.

  Now, outside the theatre, Lola felt a bit disconcerted. It was a bright, blue, hot day. Mordialloc looked prosperous. People were eating Chiko Rolls and pies in the pizza shop next door to the Adelphi. Poor Tevye had been so poor that he had to carry his milk deliveries himself when his horse had become too old. Here everyone had a car and could afford a milkshake.

  Lola bought a custard tart and drove back to Melbourne. On her way home she stopped at Texoform, the factory in which her father worked. Josl had been with Texoform for nine years. Josl’s clothing company, Joren Fashions, like many small businesses, had closed down in the seventies. At first Josl had felt devastated. Now, he enjoyed his job at Texoform. He had his own office, and he was in charge of ordering the fabrics. Josl felt as though Texoform was his own company. He was overjoyed when he saved the firm money, and he worked hard to create a high morale and a sense of loyalty among the workers.

  Josl was surprised to see his daughter, but then nothing that Lola did really surprised Josl. For many years, Lola had been at odds with herself. At odds with him. At odds with his beloved Renia, who had died just when everything was looking promising. Renia had died when both of her daughters were happily married and her grandchildren were turning out to be everything she had hoped for in her own children.

  Josl wiped away the tears that came when he thought about Renia. He still got up early every morning and tiptoed around the bedroom so that he wouldn’t disturb her. And every morning he was jolted out of his quiet by the realisation that Renia was no longer there. His darling Renia, the woman he had loved since he was twenty-two and she was sixteen, was dead.

  Josl kissed Lola hello. He looked at her. Lola had changed. In her thirties Lola had changed, and all the things that Josl had loved in her as a small child had returned. He had loved her curiosity and her enthusiasm. And he had loved her laugh. When Lola was little she used to laugh and laugh. If something struck her as funny she would laugh with her whole body, with her whole being. She would be completely immersed in her laughter. It used to give Josl so much joy.

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ said Lola. ‘The photo of Mum looks good on the wall. I like this new office. How are you, Dad?’

  ‘I’m all right, Lola. I’m all right,’ Josl answered.

  ‘You know what I did today?’ said Lola. ‘I drove out to Mordialloc and went to the pictures. I haven’t been able to work well lately, and I noticed that Fiddler On The Roof was playing, so I went and saw it.’

  ‘You haven’t seen Fiddler On The Roof before?’ said Josl.

  ‘No, I’d never seen it,’ said Lola.

  ‘You never saw Fiddler On The Roof? But everybody did see Fiddler On The Roof. What a picture! I loved Fiddler On The Roof. Topol was very good in the film, but that Hayes Gordon, who did play Tevye on the stage in Melbourne, he was ter
rific. He is not a Jew, yet he was one hundred per cent a Jew on the stage. Your Mum and I, we loved him. We saw him twice. I can’t believe that until now you didn’t see Fiddler On The Roof.’

  ‘I’m glad that I went to see it,’ said Lola. ‘I loved it. Dad, I know it’s not Wednesday, but will you have dinner with us tonight? I’m making a beautiful veal and beef klops with sauerkraut.’

  ‘I don’t want you to start again with the “can I eat with you” business,’ said Josl. ‘I told you, I’ll come once a week and that’s it. Klops with sauerkraut? Is it the same way that Mum made it?’ Josl asked.

  ‘It’s exactly the way that Mum made klops and sauerkraut,’ said Lola.

  ‘It is a little bit hard to say no to klops with sauerkraut. All right, all right, I will come, but don’t put me in this position again. I’m not going to be a burden on you or anybody,’ said Josl.

  ‘Dad, you know that it makes us happy to see you,’ said Lola.

  ‘OK, Lola, OK. I will come but I won’t stay long. I want to have an early night. I didn’t sleep so well last night. I started thinking, and I couldn’t fall asleep. It’s no good to think too much. It can get you so mixed up. I started to feel crazy. First I was thinking about Mum. She did everything right. She was slim, she didn’t smoke, she did do exercise, and still she died. She was young. Sixty-three is not old today. Then I started to think about the past, and that maybe what happened to Mum in Auschwitz was what did give her the cancer. After a few hours thinking like this you can think you are crazy. It’s better not to think too much,’ said Josl.

  ‘It’s better not to think too much’ was something Josl had said repeatedly since Lola was small. Lola had stopped thinking altogether when she was sixteen. Until then she had topped all her classes, played the piano well and won prizes for her French and German poetry recitations. At sixteen she failed two of her five final year high-school subjects. The following year she had passed the two subjects that she had failed and failed the three that she had passed. The third time, to everyone’s relief, she passed all five subjects.

  Lola had drifted through the next ten years. She became a journalist. She became a wife. She became a mother. She seemed like a good journalist, a good wife and a good mother. But Lola was crooked. She was skew-whiff. She was at an odd angle. And no-one noticed.

  Arrows of anger and shafts of self-pity pitted her thoughts. Fear ruptured her nights. Fantasies and dreams were intertwined with her daily life. She thought she was Renia and Josl. She thought she had been in the ghetto. She thought she had been in Auschwitz too.

  Lola had always been plump. But from the age of sixteen, she grew, slowly and steadily, until she was huge. She grew a cocoon around herself. And in this unoccupied territory, this haven, this no man’s land, Lola, a bit breathless and tired, spent her youth.

  Lola didn’t start thinking again until she was twenty-six and went to see a psychoanalyst about her weight problem.

  ‘What sort of answer is that to a weight problem?’ Renia had said when Lola asked her to look after Julian while she went to the analyst. ‘Is this a solution to being fat? To go to a psychiatrist? What sort of a solution is that?’ said Renia.

  ‘Lola is going to see an analyst about losing weight?’ said Ada Small. ‘Why doesn’t she go to Weight Watchers? Whoever heard of somebody going to see a doctor for mad people, for meshuganas, when she just wants to lose some weight? It’s crazy.’

  ‘What about a hypnotist?’ suggested Genia.

  ‘What about Limmits biscuits, or the egg-and-grapefruit diet?’ said Renia to Lola. ‘I have heard some very good reports about that egg-and-grapefruit diet. You can have as many boiled eggs as you like, as long as you eat half a grapefruit first. Lola, what did we do to deserve the shame of a daughter who goes to see a psychiatrist?’

  ‘You think too much and you don’t do enough dieting,’ Josl had said. ‘Anyway,’ he had continued, ‘I have heard some not very good things about this Herr Professor, this expensive doctor psychiatrist. I heard he got divorced from a very nice woman. I heard that he is the meshugana, not the patients that he treats. The worry about this is making your mother sick. Her daughter is going to see a lunatic doctor. She needs this like a hole in the head.’

  Lola had decided that it hadn’t been a good idea to ask Renia to babysit Julian. She came to an arrangement with her friend Margaret-Anne. Margaret-Anne would look after Julian twice a week while Lola went to her analyst, and Lola would babysit Margaret-Anne’s Jonathan while Margaret-Anne was at meditation classes.

  Lola had always had close women friends. She spoke to them every day. She had cooked food for their husbands when her friends were in hospital having children. She had scoured the real-estate pages of the newspapers and visited properties with them when they were buying houses. Her friends were her substitutes for sisters.

  Although she had tried to see little Jonathan as family, his shit stank and she couldn’t understand him. After six months Lola had hired a babysitter for Julian.

  Lola had tried other ways of creating a large family. She had arranged book clubs, film clubs and card nights. She had tried to organise a communal housing project. Lola had wanted her friends to sell their houses and build new houses on a large block of land that had come up for sale in Melbourne. This land was fifteen minutes from the city, and had a thousand feet of river frontage. Lola had envisaged a beautiful environment where they could all still have their privacy, but they would be able to develop deeper friendships with each other. They would be able to share some of the domestic drudgeries of having young children, and they would also be able to afford luxuries such as a swimming pool and a tennis court.

  Lola had cajoled, arranged, organised, pressed and begged her friends. The proposed project had divided the group. The book and film clubs and the card nights came to an end.

  Charlie Goldstein, Lola’s old school friend, had asked Lola why this large group of friends no longer spoke to each other.

  Lola had replied, ‘We were split up by my proposal that we become closer.’

  This was a liberated era. Charlie Goldstein, still wide-eyed, had told his partner Hyram that, although Lola Bensky didn’t look the type, she had told him, and he had heard it with his own ears, that she had tried to organise a wife-swapping commune.

  The news had spread through Melbourne. Mrs Goldstein, Charlie’s mother, had rung Renia Bensky.

  ‘Renia darling,’ she had said, ‘I hear you are having a bit of trouble with Lola. Just be strong, Renia. Like my dear departed mother used to say, “Small children small worries, big children big worries.” ’

  ‘That idiot Mrs Goldstein rang me today,’ Renia had said to Josl that evening. ‘She rang to let me know that she knows how fat Lola is. “Be strong, Renia,” she said. With friends like Mrs Goldstein, who needs enemies?’

  ‘Renia darling,’ said Josl, after he had agreed that Mrs Goldstein was a philistine, a peasant and an idiot, ‘Renia darling, I think that Lola is losing a bit of weight. Do you think there is a chance that that lunatic doctor is doing her some good?’

  ‘Who knows what would do Lola good?’ said Renia. ‘I think I will make her a dish of zucchinis and tomatoes. I got the recipe from Nusia who got it from Mrs Braunstein who is going to Weight Watchers.’

  Lola was just leaving Josl’s office when he called her back. ‘Lola, I nearly forgot. I bought some dog food for you. Pal dog food. The brand Mum always bought. It was on special, so I bought two boxes. I’ll put them in the boot for you.’

  Lola had inherited her mother’s dogs. Lola, who had no interest in dogs or cats, was now the owner of Cleo, Benny and Blacky.

  Lola was sure that Renia had been the only Jew in Melbourne to own three dogs. Cleo, Benny and Blacky had all been strays. They had attached themselves to Renia, who couldn’t bear to see homeless or hungry animals.

  Josl put the boxes of dog food in the car. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ said Lola. ‘I’ll see you tonight.’

  Lola drove
towards St Kilda. She felt better. Seeing Fiddler On The Roof had cheered her up, and she was happy that Josl was coming for dinner. She wished that her mother wasn’t dead. Why did her mother have to die? In the last few years she and her mother had been getting on so well. Lola’s throat constricted with choked tears. She hadn’t been able to cry for her mother since the funeral.

  On St Kilda Road, Lola started to think about how good her life was. She loved Garth, and he loved her. The kids had turned out well. Julian was a medical student.

  ‘My son is two-thirds of a doctor,’ Lola boasted. When Renia was in hospital dying, Renia had told every nurse, every intern, every orderly and every specialist that her grandson was a medical student. It had made Lola weep. It had also consoled her. At least she had given Renia a grandson who had given her a lot of pleasure.

  Even when he had been a small boy, Julian had been able to make Renia happy. When Renia was with Julian all her anger evaporated and all her anguish vanished. Renia had played with Julian, fed him, walked with him, talked with him. Lola had felt that little Julian had healed and soothed Renia in a way that her own children had never been able to.

  When Julian was older, Renia collected his prizes and certificates. The two of them went for long walks along the beach together. Sometimes, on these walks, people had complimented Renia on her handsome son, and she had glowed. ‘Julian is as good at maths as I was,’ Renia used to say to Lola. Lola had always been hopeless at maths.

  Lola arrived at Polonsky’s kosher butcher shop. Though her parents had never been Orthodox, Lola bought kosher meat. Josl used to laugh at her. ‘The kosher meat is twice the price and it doesn’t taste any different,’ he would say. Lola knew it was irrational, but she felt that the veal and beef were better for having been blessed.

  Mrs Kopper was inside Polonsky’s.

  ‘Hello, Lola,’ she said, ‘and how’s things? How are you keeping? Are you and your sister still broygis with each other? It’s a shocking thing that two sisters should not speak to each other. Thank God your poor dear mother, God rest her soul, didn’t see this. It is shocking. I saw your father the other day and he told me how upset he was about you two girls. I tell you, Lola, there was a tear in his eyes. I told him, I said to him, “Josl, things could be worse.” And it is true. To make your father feel better I reminded him about the old Sholem Aleichem story. You know, the story about the bags of worries. You don’t know this story? You didn’t hear about it? Well, I will tell you, Lola.