Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  In Colombo, we were finally allowed ashore. In a small lighter that skimmed the cobalt sea, we landed in a bustling, dusty town planted with lush palms and milling with women in bright saris and men in loose white tunics. Women with fat bejewelled arms sat in rickshaws pulled by men with bare legs and gaunt cheeks. On the pavements, hawkers with glittering eyes offered ivory elephants, woodern monkeys and silver bangles for sale. An old man with a bushy white beard selling wooden figurines of Hindu deities smiled at me approvingly and offered to buy me from my astonished parents.

  The thought uppermost in everyone’s minds was food. After the privations of shipboard cuisine, we longed for a hearty meal. Our mouths watered when, in a restaurant decked out in textured crimson wallpaper, the waiter placed a whole chicken on the table. It was roasted to perfection, its skin an appetising reddish brown, its aroma a tantalising blend of unfamiliar spices. We couldn’t wait to bite into it but within seconds, we were all coughing, spluttering, gasping and choking. No-one had warned us about Ceylonese curries. The appetising colour of the chicken was due to chili and although I drank enough water to put out the fire on the Derna, the inside of my mouth felt as though it had been scalped. It was almost a relief to return to the macaroni and sour pickles on board ship.

  Shortly before we reached Melbourne, while the Derna was pitching and tossing in the Great Australian Bight, Halina Kalowski, one of the Jewish women on board, gave birth to a baby she named Jennifer Derna. The birth lifted everyone’s spirits. It seemed a good omen for starting life in a new land.

  It was drizzling when we finally docked in Melbourne on 5 November 1948. Our odyssey was over. As we stepped ashore on this unfamiliar and remote continent for the first time, we wondered what the future would bring. As for the Derna, her long career soon came to an end. Unfit to sail, she was sold for scrap metal and demolished at the shipyards of Blyth.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 32

  Coral trees blazed, banana palms rustled in the breeze, and the sun lay gently on my shoulders like a benediction. From the moment we arrived in Brisbane, I felt as though I’d stepped through a magic mirror out of a wilting world of pastel hues and apologetic skies into a fantasy land exploding with light and colour, a land that seemed innocent of hate and history. No halftones diluted the triumphant colours, no twilight deadened the dazzling day.

  In this enchanted place, fruit tasted like flowers and flowers smelled like fruit. My head whirled with the delicious scent of gardenias, frangipani and jasmine on warm summer nights. Like the flowers, the fruit also belonged to a world of make-believe. Bright orange pawpaw, with its hollow filled with black peppercorns, repelled and attracted me with its musky odour of sweat and tropical perfume. The scented, slimy pulp of passionfruit and the luscious flesh of mangoes made my tongue quiver.

  Our house, too, was strange. A box on stilts, with a dark, cool verandah running all the way around it. Every night Mrs Black, who owned the house, grilled a slab of beef under a high blue gas flame, filling the whole house with the mouth-puckering smell of steak, crisp on the outside and juicy pink inside.

  By day, my mother worked in a house for orphaned Jewish boys run by the Jewish Welfare Board. In return for a small wage, she looked after the boarding house and cooked their meals, while my father spent his days at the university, discussing the possibility of studying dentistry again.

  The button-making machine he’d brought from Krakow had been stolen from the wharf along with most of our belongings when the Derna had docked, and my father took this as an omen. He gave up the idea of becoming a businessman and decided to continue being a dentist. My mother supported his decision whole-heartedly. ‘Your father is as much a businessman as that cat is a brain surgeon,’ she used to say. ‘He’s too straightforward to succeed in business.’

  On my first day at school I feel anxious because I can’t speak English and everyone will think I’m stupid. How will I find my classroom? On my new leather satchel my father has printed my name in bold capitals. DIANA BOGUSLAWSKI. Finally I can revert to the name he always wanted me to have. But at school the teacher calls me Diane, so I hastily turn the A into an E, assuming this must be more Australian. I don’t want to be different here too. That’s why I hate my schoolbag. The kids at school carry bags resembling small suitcases which they call ports, not leather satchels which look foreign like mine.

  It’s hot and steamy, and sometimes we have lessons in the schoolyard, in the shade of the wattle trees whose yellow flowers resemble fluffy balls of cotton wool. I can’t understand what anyone is saying. It’s like trying to find your way around blind-folded, but more embarrassing. Everyone smiles at me but the days seem endless. In class the teacher points to a little boy and says, ‘Next.’ I deduce that this must be his name, but a moment later she says it again and points to another boy. What a peculiar country, so many boys with the same name. Then she says ‘Next’ once again, but this time a girl stands up to answer. I’ve learnt my first English word.

  Every day I walk to school and back with Beverley, the girl next door, and on the way home we stop at the corner shop which is plastered with signs for Kinkara Tea and Mother’s Choice Flour and sells emerald-green ice blocks for one penny. Before I reach home, I’ve sucked all the lime colour out of it, and all that’s left is a tasteless cylinder of marbled ice that numbs my tongue.

  One day Beverley is sick, and I walk home alone. Suddenly the sky darkens, thunder crashes above my head, rain lashes my shoulders, and I can’t remember the way home. In the thunder and blinding rain, I run into a side street looking for the movie poster with the woman with red hair cascading onto her bare shoulders whose name seems to be Tap Roots. I run on, panicking now because I’m all alone, don’t know where I am, and have no idea how to ask. I try not to cry when suddenly I heave a huge sigh of relief. There’s Miss Tap Roots and I’m in Upper Moray Street where we live.

  Sometimes we visit Aunty Mania in her small room which smells of perfume and cigarettes. She shows me her jars of creams and bottles of make-up, dabs perfume on my wrist and chats to me as if I was grown up. We’ve come to Brisbane because Aunty Mania was alone after Uncle Misko died. They migrated here because of his relatives, one of whom has a little daughter called Maxine. She’s always chattering, jumping and running, and even giggles when she gets into trouble. For her, life seems so light and easy, while to me it feels so complicated.

  Even the grown-ups in Brisbane seem light-hearted. My favourite is Uncle Misko’s cousin, Bernard Rapaport whom I’ve nicknamed Uncle Furry because his short simian arms are covered in thick black hair. This short, balding man is the most charismatic person I’ve ever met. The moment he strides into a room, the air is charged with electricity. He talks rapidly, has an opinion about everything, a joke for every occasion, and everyone regards him as their best friend.

  Bernard, his wife Tosia, and Maxine’s parents Gina and Bert all treat us like close family. During school holidays Maxine’s parents invite me to their weekender at Palm Beach. Standing on an Australian beach for the first time, feeling the sun-warmed sand squishing between my toes, I let the Pacific Ocean lick my toes, and listen to the waves as they slap, suck and whoosh endlessly against the shore. Unbroken waves crest to a peak as crisp as the crease on my father’s trousers, curve over, and tumble down in a joyous eruption of spray and foam. Uncle Bert, who has the kindest blue eyes and the softest voice I’ve ever heard, teaches me to jump the waves. ‘One, two, three, jump!’ he calls as he lifts me over the crest or shows me how to dive underneath. He’s whooping, laughing and having fun like us. I never realised that adults could play.

  While I’m discovering the joys of the beach, my father is falling in love with Australia and its friendly, tolerant people who smile at strangers in the street for no reason and say, ‘How are you?’ which is a greeting and not a question. After the stiff hierarchical relationships of Poland, where age, education and occupation created an unbridgeable gap between people, and where you c
ould know someone all your life and still address them in the third person, he likes the informality of Australians who call him Henry as soon as they are introduced.

  Soon after we arrived in Brisbane, my father wrote to Father Soszynski, describing life in our new country. This was a land of opportunity where even labourers owned their own cottages, where bank loans were accessible to everyone, food was plentiful, and no-one seemed hungry or homeless. The Prime Minister, Mr Chifley, was a genuine working man, and journalists were free to criticise the government without fear of censorship or reprisal.

  My parents often wondered why the priest never replied.

  From the safety of our gate, I watch children crowding around the bonfire, their faces glowing from the flames. Every few minutes they jump back shrieking as something sputters and rockets towards the sky with a flash of light. ‘Give us a sparkler, Dad!’ a small boy lisps through the gap in his front teeth, and soon there are shrieks of glee as loops of light circle against the night sky. One of the men letting off the fireworks comes over to me and holds out a sparkler which crackles with points of light. ‘Would you like one, love?’ he asks. Mr Knight has a kind face and a soft English burr in his voice, but I shake my head and shyly edge away.

  It’s Cracker Night, Empire Day 1949, and we’ve just arrived in Sydney because here my father will only have to study for three years instead of four. In deference to his twenty-five years’ experience as a dentist and university lecturer in Poland, the dental faculty has agreed to credit him with the first year of the course. We’re renting a small semidetached cottage in Bondi Junction. Like all the others in the street, it has a curved roof over a narrow verandah whose floor is covered in a mosaic of maroon, blue and beige tiles, and is hidden by a privacy hedge in front.

  My parents have never lived in a cottage before and are ignorant of the finer points of house maintenance, like trimming hedges and mowing lawns. Occasionally my father borrows Mr Knight’s clippers to trim the unruly bushes in the front, but no matter how hard he tries, the hedge always ends up bulging out at one end and nipped in at the other like a lopsided bird’s nest.

  But gardening isn’t very high on my father’s list of priorities. Every night he sits hunched in the front bedroom, a blanket draped over his shoulders for warmth, poring over notes and textbooks while my mother brews cups of coffee to keep him awake. Becoming a student again at the age of forty-eight is hard enough, but studying in a language you don’t understand is like trying to decipher a secret code. Every evening when he returns home from university, he takes out his lecture notes and looks up all the unfamiliar words in the dictionary, but that’s not as simple as it sounds. During lectures he jots down what he hears, but English isn’t a phonetic language so he can’t find many of the words in the dictionary.

  In spite of his difficulties, my father never complained or criticised the system which obliged him to study all over again after so many years of dental practice. Henry, as he came to be called in Australia, had most in common with the matureage students, ex-servicemen who were admitted to the course after the war. One of them was John Levitt, a sandy-haired Aussie with a whisper-soft voice and dry sense of humour who became our friend, along with his large warm-hearted family.

  As dentistry was a full-time course, my mother had to find a job to support us. For a woman who could hardly speak English and had no employment skills, the choice was limited. Bronia became a finisher at a dress factory, and at the end of each day she would lug piles of skirts and toppers to hem at home to earn extra money. Long after I’d gone to bed, she was still sitting under the single-bulb lamp, thimble on her finger, stitching and hemming until the small hours of the morning.

  In the late afternoons I used to hear the sound of her heels clicking on the pavement long before she turned the corner into our street. Footsteps are as unique as fingerprints, and as revealing as hands and voices. Her short, rapid steps crackled with energy and tapped out a message of optimism for the future.

  When I think about my parents at that time, I marvel at their strength and resilience. They appreciated the kindness of their neighbours, work-mates and fellow students, and liked being called New Australians. It made them feel accepted. But although they never complained, I became an emotional antenna, acutely aware of all their difficulties. I didn’t realise how much of their anxiety I’d absorbed until many years later when their friend, Max Brenner, was reminiscing about our first few years in Sydney. ‘You hadn’t been in Australia very long when I asked you what you’d like for your ninth birthday. I never forgot your answer. You said that the only thing you wanted was for Daddy to pass his exams.’

  Dr Brenner, a Jew from Lwow who’d arrived in Sydney before the war, was our first contact with Sydney’s Jewish community. An energetic man with a shiny bald head and probing dark eyes in a round face, he became our advisor, doctor and friend. My parents never forgot his kindness. Soon after we moved in, he arrived lugging a sack of coal over his back so that we could heat our chilly cottage.

  Walter Street was a tightly-knit but open-hearted community where the children called the neighbours aunty and uncle. Whenever we were asked to run down to the corner shop to buy a few slices of devon or a jar of Kraft cheese spread, we were always given threepence to spend. The corner shop was plastered with advertisements for Craven A cigarettes, Bushells, the Tea of Flavour, and Peters Ice Cream which was touted as The Original and Best. The term original as applied to ice cream always made my father chuckle. ‘I suppose Moses brought the recipe down from Mount Sinai,’ he would joke.

  The food we ate at home made me acutely aware of how different I was from the other children. Every afternoon when our neighbour’s daughter Anne came home from school, her mother, a kind, grey-haired woman we all called Aunty Tessie, took out a loaf of bread which resembled two white breasts billowing on either side of a deep cleavage. On each soft, spongy slice she smeared a thick layer of amber-coloured spread called Golden Syrup whose malty odour made my mouth water, so much more enticing than the dry rye bread speckled with caraway seeds which my mother always bought. In the evening, while my mother braised beef goulash in her pressure cooker, Aunty Tessie fried lamb chops with their crisp collar of fat, and their tantalising smell wafted over the fence into our kitchen.

  On rare occasions I was allowed to have dinner with the Knights, a cause for great jubilation, as lamb chops, peas and mashed potatoes followed by jelly and ice cream seemed the epitome of gastronomical indulgence. Before we started eating, Uncle Reg always said grace. Everyone closed their eyes while he thanked the Lord for the food and blessed everyone, saying: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ I knew that he was praying to Jesus, but I closed my eyes out of respect to my hosts. My father had put Jesus into a historical and social context for me, as a Jewish rebel with a social conscience, an early socialist whose disciples formed a new religion.

  The Knights were kind-hearted, tolerant people who included me in most of their activities, even church outings. Although Uncle Reg sometimes discussed theology with my father, our religion caused him no problems, while my parents saw nothing wrong with me attending Baptist church picnics at Bronte Beach or physical culture in the local church hall.

  Ever since moving to Sydney to be with us, Aunty Mania put her love of hats to good use by becoming a milliner. Every Friday evening she handed me two shillings pocket money which she used to call my ‘wages’. ‘Fri-die is pie die!’ she’d say, exaggerating Australian vowel sounds. ‘I’m becoming a real Aussie,’ she would laugh, ‘Even if I was on my last legs, I’d crawl to work on Friday to be paid!’ On Monday afternoons, clutching my precious two shillings, I used to go with my best friend Mary Zantis to buy our favourite girls’ magazines, The Schoolfriend and Girls’ Crystal.

  Occasionally Aunty Mania took me with her on a date with one of her boyfriends, none of whom ever met with my mother’s approval. ‘Mania should be more discriminating,’ I sometimes overheard h
er say to my father. She disapproved of the current boyfriend who went to the pub on Fridays and to the races on Saturdays. Les was a slow-talking, laid-back fellow with a brown hat pushed back from his forehead. Horrified that I’d never been to the Easter Show, he took me and bought kewpie dolls, fairy floss and sample bags filled with treasures like Captain Marvel comics, colouring books, Jaffas and Violet Crumble bars.

  Before long, Mania met Bronek Ganc, a Polish Jew from Lodz who had survived the war in Romania. Bronek had large pale blue eyes, a ready smile, and traces of moisture in the corners of his mouth. He didn’t drink or gamble, but he worked in a factory and didn’t have a penny to his name. What he did have, however, was a devoted, loving nature. A bachelor in his early forties, he idolised Mania and lavished love on me for the rest of his life.

  Although they hadn’t been in Australia very long themselves, and my father was still studying, my parents were always ready to help and advise newly arrived migrants. On Sunday afternoons, my mother would run to and from her tiny kitchen where she baked cakes in a small stove with a kookaburra on the door, and kept drinks cool in an ice chest, serving coffee, yeast cake and encouragement to the guests.

  Among our regular visitors were my mother’s second cousins, Srulek and Aron Kestecher. She was delighted that the sons of her mother’s favourite niece Balcia had survived the Holocaust and had migrated to Sydney.