Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  Later I asked Michael, ‘Why did he call you back yesterday when we were leaving?’

  ‘To remind me that he wanted to be cremated,’ he replied. Although the Jewish religion forbids cremation, my father had a horror of burial ever since the Holocaust, because the Germans used to dig up Jewish graves and wrench gold out of the mouths of the dead.

  My father had discussed his funeral arrangements with Michael. Although he felt profoundly Jewish, read Jewish authors and studied Jewish history, he hadn’t said anything about Kaddish. He was strong enough to need neither tradition, ritual nor organised religion. His faith was a private matter between him and his maker and he didn’t need intermediaries to pray for him. ‘It doesn’t make any sense for someone who doesn’t know me to talk about me. But if the family would like a few words said, then I’d like it to be you,’ he told Michael.

  Among the mourners inside the crowded chapel of the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium, one close friend is absent. My mother’s cousin Aron, who loved my father and often visited him, couldn’t bring himself to attend the cremation which our religion doesn’t permit. Bodies must be returned to the maker in their original shape so that they can be resurrected when the Messiah comes. Although he was clearly distressed at the pain his decision was causing, Aron wasn’t prepared to compromise his principles. ‘I cared too much for your father to participate in something I believe to be wrong. But I’m going to say Kaddish for him every day for a year.’

  Inside the crematorium chapel, I try not to look at the coffin, try not to think about my father lying inside it, or about the flames that will soon reduce his body to a handful of ashes. I try to think how lucky I am to have had a wonderful father for thirty-nine years. Michael stands in front of the assembled mourners and clears his throat. Several times he has to stop speaking while he weeps aloud. I admire his courage in making this tribute and exposing his grief. ‘In death as in life, Henry knew what he wanted. He was an independent thinker who didn’t like ceremony or hypocrisy, what mattered to him was genuine feeling. “I feel at peace,” Henry told me. “I’ve done nothing I regret, and I don’t regret leaving anything undone.”’

  I don’t know whether my father believed in a creator as taught by the Torah, but he never forgot what his father had taught him—to marvel at the beauty of the world and all its creatures and to be grateful for the faculties that enabled him to enjoy it. My father died on his own terms like his own father had done almost exactly thirty years before. He didn’t suffer, didn’t linger, but died with dignity, all his faculties intact. And he’d died on the Sabbath, when souls go straight to heaven. The best gift that parents can give their children is their own life fully lived, and that’s the gift my father gave me. There was a feeling of completeness about his death. I didn’t understand until much later, during my mother’s last years, that my father’s death was perfect, just as he had planned it.

  CHAPTER 38

  Standing in front of the Ark at Sydney’s Temple Emanuel, Jonathan was chanting the Hebrew words of his parsha, the section of the Torah which Bar-Mitzvah boys and Bat-Mitzvah girls read during their coming-of-age ceremony. As our son’s uneven boyish voice rose and fell with the traditional cadences, Michael squeezed my hand and I felt tears pricking my eyes. Jonathan had become part of that spiritual river which has so often changed its course, been obstructed, and sometimes reduced to a trickle, but which has continued flowing for thousands of years.

  While Justine and Jonathan were growing up, Michael and I faced a dilemma. How do parents who are not religious, and do not keep a kosher home, impart a sense of Jewish identity to their children? My identity had been forged in the flames of the Holocaust. I didn’t need to learn Hebrew, observe kosher laws or light candles on Friday nights to know that I was Jewish. Michael, too, had a strong sense of Jewish identity, even though his parents hadn’t been religious, but we realised that our children were growing up in a country where assimilation was a greater threat to Jewish continuity than anti-Semitism.

  Although we didn’t want our children to lose their heritage, we hadn’t done much to nurture it. Going to synagogue twice a year, attending Sunday school reluctantly once a week, and gathering for festive dinners on Pesach and Rosh Hashana wasn’t enough to imbue them with a strong sense of Judaism.

  In an effort to create more Jewish feeling at home, we introduced Friday night dinners. Not having learned Hebrew or attended Sunday school, I had to learn the blessings from a book. Justine and I lit the Shabbat candles together and thanked God for the gift of the Sabbath; Jonathan said the blessing for bread over the plaited challah; and Michael, who remembered the prayers from his Sunday school days, said the blessing over the wine.

  It wasn’t belief in God, but belief in tradition, heritage and continuity that motivated me. Within my lifetime, six million Jews had died because of their religion and I too had been destined for death. It was a sacred trust to carry the flame forward to the next generation.

  Together with my mother, Aunty Mania and Bronek, and sometimes with Michael’s sister Carole, her then husband Ron, and their three high-spirited sons, we gathered around the Sabbath table. My mother loved Carole and her family. ‘There’s never a dull moment with Paul, Jeffery and Antony around!’ she used to say as she laughed at their jokes and riddles and marvelled how caring and considerate the boys were. My mother’s stories made them laugh too. Although she’d been widowed for three years, and found life desolate without my father, she hadn’t lost her spirit and always had an amusing anecdote for every occasion.

  One of the highlights of our Shabbat dinner was my mother’s potato pie and sugar cake. Ever since my father had died, she had been eating with us several times a week, and always brought delicacies that she’d prepared. Whenever she arrived early, she always felt bad for holding me up. ‘You probably want to write your articles, and I’m a bloody nuisance, taking up your time,’ she used to say. Fiercely independent, she was determined not to become a burden. ‘I have to get used to living alone,’ she used to sigh. It brought tears to my eyes whenever she told me that she’d dreamed about my father again. ‘He was standing right beside me, telling me that everything was all right, and patting me. His hand felt so warm and firm and I could still feel it on my shoulder when I woke up. I know he was there, she used to say.’

  I thought that, with time, she’d adjust and start a new life, but time only made her more acutely aware of her loss. Her friends bored her and Aunty Mania irritated her more than ever. The only activity she enjoyed was bridge which she played three times a week. ‘I love bridge because while I’m playing, I can’t think about anything else,’ she often said.

  Not long after Jonathan’s Bar-Mitzvah, Aunty Mania was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital with a massive heart attack. She’d often been in hospital with heart problems but had always bounced back and we didn’t suspect that this would be any different. She was connected to a cardiac monitor, had an IV drip attached to her vein, huge bruises on her arms like ink stains, and was breathing with an oxygen mask. Like an injured butterfly, her exhausted heart fluttered between this world and the next, her eyes flickering occasionally as Bronek sat by her bed from morning till night trying to get some response out of her. ‘Come on, kitten, Danusia has come to see you, what are you going to tell her?’ he would coax.

  At the end of that week the specialist told Bronek that Mania would not come home again. He wept, and his thin shoulders shook as he shuffled along the hospital corridor in his beige raincoat, a frail old man whose heart was breaking. ‘Doctors don’t know everything,’ I said. ‘They often make mistakes.’

  And that’s how it turned out. Two days later, when the specialist came to see her, accompanied by students and residents, Mania was sitting up looking at them. The doctor gazed at her as if she were Lazarus back from the dead. ‘So you are better today, Mrs Ganc!’ he exclaimed.

  The woman who had been at death’s door the day before gave him a lopsided smile and quipped, ‘Well
, would you believe it!’ The entire entourage burst out laughing.

  One day when I was alone with her, she was gazing at me with a loving expression. ‘People don’t get to choose their children,’ she whispered. ‘But I did. You are my chosen child.’ I picked up her slim hand with its tapered fingers and almond-shaped nails, and for the first time in my life told my aunt that I loved her.

  My mother came to the hospital every day and sat at the foot of her sister’s bed with a worried face, saying little. One day, after my mother had left, Aunty Mania seemed to be staring into the distance, but she was really examining the past. ‘You know, the wrong sister died during the war,’ she whispered and there was a wistful look on her thin face. She meant my mother’s favourite sister Hania. ‘I know what I’m talking about. Your mother never forgave me that I was the one who survived. She would have been able to love me much better if I had died.’

  Although Aunty Mania was very weak and couldn’t walk unaided, she insisted on coming home. I was waiting for her when two ambulance officers carried upstairs a gaunt woman with hollow cheeks, dishevelled white hair and bloodless lips. My heart ached for my aunt, who hadn’t looked like that since the day she staggered out of Bergen-Belsen. Bronek looked ashen and his hands shook. He sank into an armchair under the window, unable to get out a single word.

  When Mania had settled down at home, we took the children to the South Coast for a week’s holiday, but after a few days my mother rang. She sounded frantic. ‘Mania is very ill, she’s back in hospital, she can’t breathe properly. I don’t understand how you could have gone away. Can’t you do something?’ Michael called the hospital, prescribed something to ease my aunt’s suffering and we threw our belongings into a suitcase and rushed back to Sydney.

  Without waiting for Michael to park the car, I ran into the hospital. In Aunty’s room Bronek sat slumped in a chair, alone, staring into space. ‘Aunty isn’t here any more,’ he said. ‘She passed away.’ I stared at him. It couldn’t be true. She must have been so ill, so frightened. I was her chosen child, I should have been with her when she died. Why do we let people we love just slip away from us? We look away and they’re gone, taking so much love with them.

  After Mania died, Bronek resembled a sad shadow flitting on the edge of life. From the moment she died, the sun ceased to shine for him. For hours he sat on the settee, holding a cigarette with trembling fingers, his cup rattling on its saucer as he stared blankly into the distance. One day he turned his big vacant pale eyes on me, his mouth turned down with a shiny snail-like trail of saliva in the creases, and said in a barely audible voice, ‘She was a great woman.’ Then he sobbed. ‘What for should I keep living now? How will I ever survive this?’

  My mother’s reaction was terse. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll survive.’ But he didn’t. Three weeks later he died. The doctors said that his kidneys and his heart had packed up, but they were wrong. Bronek died of a broken heart.

  It took me several years to summon up enough courage to ask my mother about the day that Mania died. I knew that she was with her at the end, and wondered whether there had been any reconciliation between them. My mother shunned sentimentality and found it difficult to express emotion, especially where Mania was concerned. I asked whether she’d made peace with her sister at the end. ‘I held her hand,’ she replied.

  ‘Did you love Mania?’ I asked.

  She looked at me as if I was talking nonsense and, with a finality that made further conversation impossible, said, ‘Of course I did!’

  CHAPTER 39

  The moment I walk into the room, her face lights up. I’m in time to see the exercise class, and as I watch her wiggling her fingers and shaking her toes in response to the teacher’s instructions, I feel as proud as any parent at a school open day.

  But this time I’m not the parent. She is. Six months ago, when I left my mother at the day centre for the first time, she looked so forlorn that I spent the whole day in turmoil, just as I did when I took my children to kindergarten on their first day. This, however, has been far more painful. At kindergarten children begin to gain independence, but attending this centre means that my mother is losing hers.

  It’s hard to watch someone you love grow frail, lose confidence and become frightened of life; hard to see a strong mother become a clinging child. With each day her past recedes, and eighty years of courage are blurred by one year of confusion. It’s hard to realise that this is the woman who sparkled like a mountain stream in sunlight, who defied Ukrainian militia, Nazi soldiers and Russian border guards. These days when we cross the street, my mother grips my hand and tells me with the same sense of wonderment that my hand feels just like her mother’s, that she feels as if she is holding her mother’s hand again. And in a sense she is, because we’ve now switched roles in this bitter-sweet reversal.

  After exercises at the senior citizens’ centre, there’s a discussion about immigration. Evie, the group leader, asks whether my mother felt alienated when she first arrived in Australia and couldn’t speak English. My mother shakes her head vehemently. ‘Never! I always made friends at work, and we had wonderful neighbours. I think Australian people are tops!’ she says in her Polish accent.

  Evie turns to me. ‘How are you two related?’ she asks.

  Too late, I hear myself saying, ‘I’m Bronia’s mother.’

  Bronia has become a frail little woman in a neat suit who shuffles with a slow, unsteady gait and beseeches me to take her to the toilet in restaurants because she’s afraid she’ll lose her way. She riffles endlessly in her handbag to make sure that she has her wallet and her key, because she no longer trusts her once legendary memory. All my life I’ve thought that my mother was indestructible, just as she did, and the first intimations of her mortality have shocked us all.

  It happened while I was overseas, travelling to the United States, Israel, Poland and France to gather information about the family, a project I’d been thinking about for a long time. Although I’d felt uneasy at being away for six weeks, Michael, Justine and Jonathan had reassured me that they could manage without me.

  When I stepped off the plane in Sydney with a suitcase full of cassettes and a mind buzzing with reminiscences, a pale, thin woman I hardly recognised stumbled towards me. During my absence, my mother had gone into acute heart failure, and if Michael hadn’t rushed over immediately and resuscitated her with oxygen and intravenous drugs, she wouldn’t have survived. Although she had been taking medication for high blood pressure for several years, there was no doubt in my mind that anxiety about my prolonged absence had pushed her heart over the edge. I had become her anchor in an increasingly insecure world. ‘You have no idea what Nana’s like when you’re away,’ Justine used to tell me, and I don’t suppose I ever understood the depth of my mother’s despair. Perhaps I didn’t really want to know. It seemed to me that my entire life had belonged to others, and now that I had finally carved out a career for myself and gained some independence, I didn’t want to be restricted by my mother’s insecurity.

  I had become a freelance journalist, and my articles about personal experiences, social, medical, ethnic and women’s issues, were frequently published in leading newspapers and magazines. Working freelance gave me the freedom to research whatever interested me, but after I’d received the Pluma de Plata, a prize awarded by the Government of Mexico for an article about that country, I became increasingly channelled into travel writing. As trips to exotic destinations kept being offered, I embarked on an enviable lifestyle which enabled me to combine the two things I loved doing: writing and travelling. By then Michael had developed his own creative talent, in photography, and had held several one-man exhibitions in top Sydney galleries, so we were often invited to travel as a team. For my mother this was a mixed blessing. Although she was proud of my success and showed my articles to all her friends, she felt insecure when I was away and dreaded my absences, especially when Michael and I travelled together. Whenever I told her that I was going away, sh
e’d sigh and exclaim, ‘Again!’

  She became ill after I’d been away for four weeks. Although Michael and the children had told me that she was unwell whenever I telephoned, they had concealed the serious nature of her illness so that I wouldn’t cut short my trip. Michael’s care of my mother had been heroic. Not wanting to admit her into hospital where she’d be among strangers, he had brought her to our place and taken care of her with Justine and Jonathan’s help. He came home during the day to check on her, cooked schnitzel to tempt her to eat, and kept finetuning her medication, while the three of them stayed with her as much as they could and made chicken soup to build her up.

  Bronia trusted Michael’s medical judgment implicitly. She had diabetes and adhered religiously to her diet; the only time she broke it was on Friday nights, when Michael looked at her over his glasses with the expression that made her call him The Professor, and said that she could have a small helping of ice cream, her favourite dessert. It was as though with his permission, and under his watchful eye, nothing could happen to her. ‘The Professor said I could have some!’ she would laugh, relishing every mouthful.

  After she’d recovered from that episode of heart failure, I noticed that she held her right hand with her left so that no-one would see that it had begun to tremble with the onset of Parkinson’s disease. ‘I always imagined I’d take after my grandmother who lived to ninety-five and never even had to wear glasses,’ she sighed one day. After her illness she lost weight and lines appeared on her lovely, smooth face. ‘I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror any more,’ she often said.

  My mother always said that once a branch snaps off the tree, goats jump up and down on it until it breaks, and that described her own decline. When she’d recovered sufficiently to resume her bridge game, she found that her partners had replaced her with someone else. She was devastated. Those games were the highlight of her week, they provided her with structure and social life. My heart broke for her, but I realised that her cronies had used her absence as an excuse because my mother’s powers of concentration had begun to fail.