Choose Somebody Else

by Yvonne Fein

  And under such circumstances how will she carry out her plan of becoming a Nobel Prize-winning author, as well as—in her spare time, to keep her parents happy—a barrister of Atticus Finch’s brilliance? What if she has to take a job like Lily Schwartz, whose parents had begged her to study? But Lily had known better, Rosie’s mother never tires of pointing out. Now Lily is doomed to a life of stacking shelves at the supermarket, with her mother and father condemned to shame without end.

  ‘You want to write so much,’ Judith snorts, ‘then write a letter to your Auntie Freda in Israel once in a while. In the meantime, would it kill you to look at a school book? That’s what lawyers-to-be do. But you, you only want to go to university so you can sit around in dirty jeans with the other beatniks, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and pretending you’re sooo smart with your fancy talk. A lawyer? You never even win an argument with me! A judge, you’re going to convince?’

  Changing lanes abruptly on Kings Way, Rosie sticks a manicured middle finger out of her window at the hysterically tooting Mercedes behind her. The gesture doubles as a salute to her parents’ intransigence.

  Her parents proceed to the last court of appeal, Rosie’s sister.

  ‘For God’s sake, Eva, she listens to you. Tell her she should study the Sciences: Physics, Chemistry, Pure and Applied Mathematics. Like you.’ Judith’s Hungarian accent becomes particularly evident when she is irked.

  About to enter the kitchen behind whose closed door this conversation is in progress, Rosie hesitates. She remains on the outside, compelled to listen.

  ‘Mum, she failed basic Maths!’ Eva exclaims.

  ‘All right. Economics, languages, something she can make a living from.’

  ‘But she wants to write.’

  ‘So let her write. Am I stopping her? Gezunterheyt she should write. You see? Even I can make poetry. Letters she can write, shopping lists. But talk sense to her. She should study something practical.’

  ‘She wants to write,’ Eva repeats stubbornly, loyally, although privately she cringes inside her kind soul each time Rosie asks her to offer a critical appraisal.

  ‘It’s goo-ood.’

  ‘You don’t like it,’ Rosie asserts immediately.

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like it.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Oh Rosie, who talks like that? Who acts like that?’

  ‘I agree. Nobody we know. I’m experimenting with form and dialogue. It’s not supposed to sound familiar.’

  ‘But it sounds like Neighbours.’

  Rosie hungers to rise glittering and brilliant beyond the norm, but her parents discover radical philosophy long before she is born—Auschwitz is a great leveller—and any originality she might lay claim to, even she realises, probably has its roots in their nonconformity. The one conservative attitude they cannot relinquish is their obsession with learning and knowledge—an almost religious belief in the eternal value of education.

  ‘I came across some figures once, Mum. Did you know that it was the ones with degrees, the Jewish academics, who perished first in Germany? They were so well educated, they knew they would always be safe in das Vaterland…’

  But she never dares say it.

  To complicate matters further, when Rosie listens to myriad tales of her parents’ first years in Australia, she realises that her mother must have been one of the original, post-Holocaust suffragettes.

  ‘There was no equal opportunity then. If your father didn’t help me and I didn’t help your father, who was going to help us? And that’s how it should be. That a daughter of mine should even think of depending on a man for the clothes on her back, the food in her mouth while she writes stories…’

  In any event, Joel, Rosie’s husband, only ever manages to support her financially. It is not that he does not want to offer her all manner of succour; he does. Urgently. But by the time Rosie finds herself with her own man in her own house, contemplating having her own children, all her emotions have frozen.

  Yet far beneath the ice, an ache begins if she lets it. She realises that trying to measure up to people who have become rag-trader millionaires after surviving Hitler is a feat of death-defying magnitude. And what’s more, they have done it in a strange land, learning a strange language, at the end of the world. How could anything she writes even approximate the terror and the passion, the beauty and the obscenity, experienced by those who had survived to give her life?

  Judith comes to Auschwitz at seventeen. Her father is over in the queue with the men, so Judith, her mother Shari, and baby brother Chaim, must stand without him. Judith’s eyes are deep green and for now, her hair is blond and braided into two thick, long plaits. Soon they will be shorn and for the rest of her life she will wear her hair short, as though it would be tempting the fates to wear it at the length she once did. She keeps her daughters’ hair short too, no matter how much they beg her to let it grow.

  In her queue, Judith watches as Mengele directs the Jews: this one to the right, this one to the left. She whispers to Shari that they must try to stay together and get into the right-hand column. That is where the strong, young ones are being herded. But her mother will not let go of the baby and is shunted to the left. Mengele has worked out that mothers pining for their children are useless for labour. Judith screams and grabs hold of her mother. The little boy starts crying. Mengele’s assistant wrenches Judith away and pushes her to the right. Forcing her to live.

  For the rest of her life—only a few hours left now—Shari upbraids herself. In her pre-war household the non-Jewish servant has begged her mistress to come to her farmhouse, distant from Budapest, to hide herself and her children there.

  ‘I will look after you. They won’t ever find you. I won’t let them. Please, you have always been so good to me.’

  Shari refuses the offer, afraid of the food in the servant’s house: it would not be kosher.

  In the labour camp at Goerlitz, Abraham sees Judith for the first time. He watches her from his side of the barbed wire that separates the men from the women. Her hair is growing back and he is assailed by its gleam. They strike up the first of many furtive exchanges.

  Abraham has been chosen to be a valet for the camp Commandant. A criminal in his own right, this man is notorious for having valets who never last for more than three weeks. After that he has them shot for some misdemeanour.

  Not that he needs an excuse.

  Abraham is naturally wary of this appointment, though it does give him access to the kitchen where the Commandant’s food is prepared. He steals as much as he can from the scraps meant for the German Shepherds and shares it with his brother and the people from his shtetl.

  One day, polishing the Commandant’s shoes outside the man’s sleeping quarters, Abraham hears him say to his deputy, ‘You know, I like that Weintraub bastard. Everything he does for me is perfect. He even stands to attention in the proper manner when he has served me my food; but then he watches me eat. I feel the hunger in his belly. Takes all the pleasure out of my meals. I don’t want to, but soon I will have to have him shot.’

  Next time Abraham looks everywhere but at the Commandant’s food. He is not shot.

  Ultimately, Rosie chooses the Law. She chooses international law in particular, with its potential to confront the atrocities of tyrants. Chasing the dream of writing the Great Australian Novel has been stored away: the daughters of Judith and Abraham Weintraub are nothing if not practical.

  Rosie and Joel make their way out of the cinema on a Saturday night. They have just seen The Last Emperor with a large group of friends. When Joel asks her how she liked the film, Rosie is forced to take refuge in the women’s toilets. She must control and conceal a paroxysm of tears that engulfs her with alarming suddenness. Later that night, when he tries to elicit some sort of explanation from her, she refuses to talk to him.

  ‘Why won’t you
tell me, Rosie?’ he persists. ‘I’m your husband. You don’t need to put up such walls.’

  ‘If I do tell you, will you leave me alone?’

  ‘Is that what you want? To be left alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then maybe you shouldn’t tell me,’ he says, the sadness in his voice impelling her to speech.

  ‘It was the loneliness of that little boy,’ she finally brings herself to explain, feeling her throat begin to constrict again as she speaks. ‘He must have been such an unhappy child. His every need was catered to, but who loved him? What’s the point of being looked after if nobody ever smiles at you?’

  ‘I smile at you,’ Joel says, taking an illogical leap and somehow arriving at the heart of the matter.

  ‘Yes, but you weren’t there to look after me when—–’ She stops, knowing the sentence to be absurd.

  ‘I am now,’ he says.

  Rosie blasts her horn at the driver ahead who is slowing down as he approaches the still-green traffic lights. They turn red just in time to condemn her to a long period of idling on the cusp of Flemington Road and the Tullamarine Freeway, while the idiot in front of her, accelerating at the last moment, manages to dodge nimbly through the amber.

  ‘When you and Dad make love,’ Rosie asks one morning in her thirteenth year. Her mother is grimly applying a Wettex to the table top after breakfast; Rosie sweeps the floor.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Does he lie on top of you?’

  The Wettex never misses a beat.

  ‘Yes. Sweep by your sister’s chair.’

  Subsequent to their exchanging promises of fidelity and eternity, Joel lies on top of Rosie a few times. Afterwards, she sees how a monosyllabic response to her adolescent inquiry is possible. Next, Rosie imagines that she and her daughter (as yet unborn) are cleaning the kitchen. With the same breathless apprehension, the daughter asks Rosie the very same question. Now Rosie understands that a ‘yes’ would definitely suffice, if not slightly overstate the case. The shadow of the past always hovers over some fraction of Rosie’s consciousness: the Holocaust is as much a part of her daily existence as eating breakfast or quarrelling with her sister.

  ‘Tell about the time the kapo caught you stealing water for your cousin,’ Rosie prompts her mother. It is Friday night. They are at Sabbath dinner where the memories flow tough and thick like the beef top rib from which the soup has been boiled.

  Or her father offers: ‘To stay alive in those days you had to become invisible. You think that’s impossible? Every survivor of the camps knows how it’s done.’

  At eight years old, Rosie finds this irresistible and goes to bed ruminating, only to wake in terror.

  ‘What is it?’ her sister groans.

  ‘Eva, please. Can you see me?’

  The room is dark.

  ‘No,’ says Eva.

  So it’s true, Rosie thinks, and sleeps through the night.

  Nonetheless, through the depressive period and at report time, her parents do not cut off her pocket money and her head for the good of her soul. They are away, travelling to the fashion capitals of the world in search of new machines, new styles, fabrics and prints for their garment business. With clear consciences they leave their daughters in the care of their closest friends, an older, childless couple who act like the grandparents the two girls have lost long before they were born. Bozsi and Hugo love Rosie and Eva enormously, blindly, indulgently, but their English is appalling. To communicate with one another, they all have to resort to an admixture of German, Hungarian and Pidgin English.

  ‘What does it mean, “Incomplete Assig…Assig…?”’

  ‘Never mind Aunt B. Just sign it, please.’

  ‘But I must know, no?’

  ‘It means that they’re very happy with me and they want you to know, too.’

  ‘Ah, my good Rosie.’ Aunt B. smiled beatifically. ‘Why do your parents complain?’

  ‘I wish they looked after us all the time, Jude,’ Rosie says. ‘Aunt B. is so uncomplicated.’

  ‘Don’t you miss Mum and Dad?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But Jude?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Promise it’s true that Qantas has never crashed?’

  Do parents really return just because they say they will? How many children, now grey-haired and arthritic, are still waiting, blocking out the screams, the smell of smoke, the diminishing numbers, with the words of the promise. We’ll be back soon. Don’t worry. Be good. Rosie becomes so good in their absence that she stops functioning altogether.

  On the Tullamarine Freeway you are allowed to do 100 kilometres per hour. Rosie is on schedule to pick up her professor so there is no need to speed. With considerable effort she lightens the pressure she realises she is exerting upon the accelerator. For a long time it has become increasingly difficult to curb the desire to push her car well beyond the various city or country speed limits

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Joel demands as he opens the mail one evening. ‘This is your third speeding fine in as many months. You’ll lose your licence.’

  ‘I thought you were going to say life. You’ll lose your life.’

  ‘That, too.’

  ‘But my licence would be more serious, right?’

  ‘Why are you always such a shit, Rosie? What did I ever do except—–’

  ‘Don’t stop. Except what?’

  ‘Love you.’

  In his eyes is a bewilderment so acute that Rosie thinks he might spontaneously combust from the heat of his incomprehension. Two weeks later he leaves her for good. Working to an intense schedule, she does not even register the fact until twenty-four hours later when she is catching up on a backlog of recorded phone messages. His voice seems fragmented: I left you a note but I threw it out. You’ll find it in the garbage. Sorry. I didn’t mean to say goodbye like this.

  She extracts it from the detritus of some chicken bones and potato salad she has been unable to finish.

  Rosie,

  I’m sorry my grandparents are still alive. I’m sorry my parents grew up here and didn’t see barbed wire from the inside. You haven’t just built walls between us, you’ve erected an entire temple to ashes, and you’re the only one allowed to enter. I’m tired of banging on the door. You don’t know how to love anyone, and I don’t know how to love you anymore. I thought I did. I was wrong. And we’re better off not passing on to the next generation whatever it is that ails you.

  Tullamarine Airport teems. Light-headed and exhausted as he emerges from Customs and Immigration, her American colleague seems to wear an air of bemusement: he has actually found landfall at the end of so many cloud-swirling hours. Now he wants only a bath and a long night’s sleep after having dared venture as far as the Antipodes. He is staying at the Regent. Grateful that she does not have to linger over a drink and small-talk in the hotel’s too-elegant bar—disturbingly redolent as it is of the possibility of entanglements—Rosie politely sees him to Reception and leaves.

  Eventually, with the return of her parents, the depression lifts, a cause-and-effect scenario which must be played out countless times before she finally understands its significance. But being out from under the cloud makes life at fifteen very much sweeter. All her senses seem sharper, more alert. She actually becomes intrigued by what has happened, analysing the phenomenon down to its last characteristic. Or so she thinks. Then she puts it away with a certain amount of relief, not daring to speculate on its possible recurrence. She is not sufficiently familiar with the malady’s constituent parts to know that depression rarely visits just once.

  In her well-appointed, high-security apartment, Rosie pours herself a vodka. After the third glass, she is tempted to ring her psychiatrist and tell him she has identified a condition that might legitimately be called Weintraub’s Disorder or, if the name has already been taken for some other a
ffliction, what does he think of The Jewish Down Syndrome? After the fourth glass, she begins hunting for her novel-ideas notebook, the one she kept as a teenager for those times between depressions. But, downing the fifth, she gives up the search. Why record such nonsense? Syndrome, Shmyndrome, Up or Down, her life has not been permanently blighted by any disorder.

  Hiccupping gently, she switches off the light in her own elegant bar, redolent of nothing, and makes her way unsteadily to the bedroom she shares with no one. Which, had Yossl been there to tell her, was precisely the point.

  BOTH SIDES

  WEDNESDAY 18TH AUGUST

  BREAKFAST

  ½ grapefruit

  whole-wheat toast, vegemite, no butter

  coffee, skim milk, no sugar

  LUNCH

  90g tin tuna in spring water

  Lebanese cucumber

  crisp bread, no butter

  SNACK

  apple

  black coffee

  SNACK

  clear broth

  crispbread

  200g steamed Whiting

  cup broccoli

  BEDTIME

  mandarin

  chamomile tea

  FRIDAY 20TH AUGUST

  No time, no time. 15 for Sabbath dinner tonight. Still lots to do. Will write soon.

  SUNDAY 22ND AUGUST

  Dinner Fri nite triumph—fortunately—because Rafe’s business partner, anorexic wife and feral offspring all part of the deal. Along with the usual suspects: us four, (Rafe and the kids behaving beautifully, serving food, stacking dishwasher) plus my parents, plus the outlaws. Mother-in-law kept saying, ‘Who would have thought such young children could be so helpful, so polite?’ As though she’s never met them before, these strange, enchanted beings. Alzheimer’s? So I don’t ask if she remembers their names, more for Rafe’s sake, than anything. And it would’ve embarrassed Amy and Joseph too. I bite my tongue. Again.