Choose Somebody Else

by Yvonne Fein

  At this, Ruthie, who had just started to close her books, could not stop herself. She laughed loudly but at least had the sense to flush the cistern at the same time.

  The next day Ruthie had an evening seminar at the university, after which she went for a snack with some girlfriends. By the time she arrived home, the lights in her own house and her neighbours’ were out. She went to bed wondering if Genya had found a girl for her baby.

  That weekend Ruthie sat down—at her desk—to catch up on some serious reading. She had not realised how very far behind she was slipping. The Horowitzes were too much of a distraction. She would have to learn either to like the bathroom at the other end of the hallway or to read at her desk. During the semester the WC opposite their kitchen would have to be strictly out of bounds.

  But like a magnet, the flickering on of that fluorescent kitchen light of theirs drew her back to her hideaway where she could listen in peace to other people’s problems and maybe forget a few of her own for a while.

  ‘Well Benny,’ Genya Horowitz started in on her favourite subject one Tuesday night. ‘What do you think of her? She’s a nice girl, isn’t she, sweetheart? Wouldn’t you like to take her out or bring her home for dinner, maybe?’

  ‘Why does he have to bring her home for dinner, for heaven’s sake?’ Bolek sounded irritable. ‘They should have time alone. He should take her to the pictures and then—–’

  ‘In the pictures they’ll be alone? Bolek, do me a favour and don’t mix in. Now Bennyle darling, why don’t you give her a ring and see if she’s free for Saturday night.’

  Ruthie hugged herself in glee. Perhaps now she would hear Benny say something more interesting than asking for the different sorts of food he wanted his mother to serve or prepare for him.

  Benny remained silent.

  ‘Nu?’ said his father. ‘What are you waiting for? A raving beauty I admit she’s not. But let’s face it, none of us Horowitzes ever won a beauty prize.’

  ‘Mind you,’ said Genya, ‘none of us ever entered a competition, either’.

  ‘So? You need an explanation for that? Look son, why don’t you ring her?’

  ‘She’s intelligent,’ said Genya. ‘You can’t deny that, can you? It’s all right to go out with good-looking girls (Ruthie wondered what good-looking girl would go out with Benny), but the looks go in a few years. Brains don’t.’

  ‘Well,’ ventured Benny, ‘I don’t—–’

  ‘Look at it this way.’ His mother’s voice was like a steamroller. Benny’s protests were flattened. ‘You’re twenty-nine. She’s a bit younger. If you marry soon, you’ll be able to have children not long after you’re thirty.’

  ‘Don’t nag him all the time with the children, Genya. He’s a big boy now. He knows what to do, don’t you Benny? All you have to do is ring her up and say you’ve seen her around a few times—don’t mention that it’s always at a restaurant when she’s been eating like a horse—and that you would very much like to take her out. Look, knocking down her door the boys aren’t. She’ll be very grateful if you ring her up for a Saturday night.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Genya, for once supporting her husband. ‘How many times do you think her parents have waited up wondering where she is? Never, I can assure you. It would be a mitzvah, a holy commandment, to take her out. Trust me.’

  ‘But I wonder–—’

  ‘Listen, don’t wonder so much. Have your father or I ever told you to do something that was bad for you?’

  Either way, as Ruthie saw it, his answer to that particular question was going to get him into trouble. If he agreed with his mother, he would have to ring this girl. If he disagreed, it would be the same as farewelling the comforts of home: sandwiches on call, cups of tea with just the right amount of lemon, apple cake wrapped in the lightest pastry. To say nothing of a laundry service second to none.

  Ruthie understood his predicament. Which child of Jewish parents—especially Holocaust survivor parents; they were crazier than most—would not? And her mood was slowly changing as, what amounted to separate monologues by Benny’s parents, wore him down. She had been through similar battles with her own people. Endlessly they would lecture her about her lack of boyfriends. And they didn’t care when they did it. Most often, and mostly her mother, would come uninvited to her room when she was trying to study. It was this that had finally driven her to the one little room in the house where she could lock the door.

  ‘You will be an old maid,’ Freda would groan in desperation. ‘You’re nearly thirty and the most exciting thing you do is go to poetry readings at the university.’

  She was stubborn. ‘I like poetry.’

  ‘I like poetry too, but you can’t marry a poem. You can’t have children with a poem.’

  ‘Leave me alone, Mum. You want me to fail my exams?’

  ‘I want you to pass—pass under the chuppah, under the wedding canopy, my daughter.’ And Freda would leave the room blowing her nose, using three Kleenexes.

  I want to get married, too, Ruthie would whisper at the closed door. I want to have children to care for, a man to cook for. I want to read him poetry and listen to him reading to me from…from…I don’t care—the sports page. If only you knew how badly I wanted those things. But no one comes for me. Perhaps that’s how it’s meant to be. Can I change my fate?

  Was it so surprising, then, that she found herself muttering at the open window, ‘Stand up for yourself, Benny. Tell them to leave you alone.’

  But he didn’t, and they didn’t, and the most decisive sound Ruthie heard from him all evening was a sneeze.

  Wednesday evening and each was at his post: Bolek, Genya and Benny seated around their kitchen table, and Ruthie seated as well. She strained to catch every word but all she heard was a variation on the previous night’s theme.

  ‘Come on, Benny, you don’t have to take that.’ She felt her anger rising. ‘Tell them you’ll find your own girls when you’re ready, not when they are.’

  ‘Nu? Are you going to make your parents happy?’ Genya’s voice started to crack. ‘Is it so hard to do this one little thing? Ask her. What’s the worst that can happen? She can say yes, or she can say no. That’s all. Ask her!’

  Ruthie was seething on Benny’s behalf. ‘Tell them to get lost,’ she breathed. ‘Tell them.’

  She heard the sound of a chair being pushed back. Five…ten…tension-filled seconds elapsed. Then silence. Broken by Genya.

  ‘Go on, Benny. Dial the last number.’

  That was the moment Ruthie exploded.

  ‘Lay off him,’ she yelled, regardless that they could hear her, wanting them to. ‘If you’d leave him alone for only a minute he might do something for himself.’

  Just then, the telephone near her bedroom started to ring, and in a moment, her mother was knocking on the bathroom door.

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘A boy. And who are you shouting at in there, anyway? There’s a boy on the phone and he wants to speak to you.’

  Well, that’s the story. I never pretended to be Sholem Aleichem and you maybe guessed the ending before I got there. Romeo and Juliet, I agree with you, it’s not. Nobody’s family was very distinguished. Nobody took poison, heaven forbid, and died. But in Caulfield, when another couple is finally pushed into marriage to the delight of their parents and the joy of the rabbi, we do not look for Shakespearean romance, never mind tragedy. Just that they should have many children and grow fat and old. Happily. Or at least together.

  THE ENDORPHIN SOLUTION

  Irun; you run; he, she, it runs. We run; you run; they run. Where is the movement, the magic in such a conjugation?

  Ikh loyf; du loyfst; zi loyft. Mir loyfn, ir loyft, zey loyfn. In Yiddish it sings, it dances, the words leap off the page in the rhythm of history. Mir zenen shoyn yorn lanf gelofn: oh, how we have run down s
ix millennia with the speed, the skill, the panic of survivors.

  I run—ikh loyf—in circles around Caulfield Park. When the urge takes me; when there is nothing that can dissipate the adrenalin build-up born of frustration, of guilt. Ikh loyf, carrying the torch of my people in the unlikely Antipodes. And even there, the voices of my never-met grandparents haunt me, and the past will not surrender its hold.

  Pounding the sandy gravel in my anti-clockwise quest for peace, I am confronted daily by an old man jammed into woollen layers against the Melbourne winter mornings. Everybody runs or walks anti-clockwise except this grey-haired embodiment of bitterness. Against the current he strides, locked in sombre reflection; and although he has seen me every day for over a year, never once has he indicated that he recognises me. I make up stories about him and the reasons for his misanthropy, but I know they are fantasies. Only one tale can be true: ghetto, concentration camps, loss of his entire family, then onto the D.P. camps. And after all of it, lonely and alone, Australia. That story flickers in his watery eyes as he passes me. Does he see my sweating face? Does it register? Maybe he survived only because he always kept his eyes lowered, always chose clockwise when others chose anti.

  Or maybe he was just lucky.

  All survivors will tell you, Brains—yes; strength—sure; but mazel, luck—nothing can trump mazel.

  I block the old man out. Today I don’t want to think about his suffering.

  I pass a group of Hungarian and Polish women on their daily amble. They are all members of the Herzl bridge club down the road. Some know my parents and call out greetings, send regards. For a few metres I jog backwards, replying to questions, wishing them well. Most of them are widows, relying on each other’s company to hold back the loneliness. They seem happy enough with their morning constitutionals, their midday lectures, their nightly card games, but I shudder nevertheless. I would not care to be condemned to the sentence of their lives.

  I accelerate as I run away from the park. Not today, please, to bump into those briskly striding contemporaries of mine who daily strive to appeal the implacable judgement of age. Arms flailing, legs straining, they talk as fast as they walk: overseas trips, new houses, dinner parties, the last bar mitzvah they attended, designer labels. It’s another fate I run to escape. There are no books there, no poems that can wound.

  As I trot down Balaclava Road next to the park, I head for the hum of Hawthorn Road. For some reason I have not yet broken the pain barrier this morning. It hurts when I breathe; I have stitches in both sides. Those intrepid endorphins which give me the high I crave have not yet flooded my bloodstream.

  To cross at the junction, I jog impatiently on the spot, waiting for the lights to change. Retrieving a letter from my track-pants pocket, I head towards the Caulfield post office. Breathlessly, I wait in line behind two blue-rinsed septuagenarians. My heartbeat, heightened from the run, pounds loudly in my ears but I can still hear a fragment of their conversation with the sour-faced post mistress.

  ‘Well, yes,’ the twinsetted, pearl-earringed one is saying. Her voice crumbles in her throat like a dry Arrowroot biscuit taken with tea but not dunked. ‘Yes, we all know who to blame for that around here, don’t we?’

  ‘Never used to be like that when we were growing up. It was a different neighbourhood,’ agrees her companion.

  The post mistress nods. ‘Started in the late forties or early fifties,’ she says, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘After The War, you know.’

  ‘So true,’ says the one with the earrings. ‘But they’ve already gone as far as State government. Soon, you’ll see, we’ll have a prime minister that’s one of theirs.’

  I decide I do not want to be served in this particular ecosystem. Maybe pop into Silberstein’s Real Estate across the road. Miriam always has a stamp to spare and a minute to chat. Will I tell her what I heard? What I think I heard? She would tell me not to be paranoid. Then she would laugh that sonorous laugh of hers that carries to the back of the office. It usually brings the boss, her husband Harry, out to share the joke. Everyone stops at Silberstein’s to catch up on what’s happening. If you time it right on a Friday afternoon, you can even join them for the generous lunch they’ve ordered from the local Lebanese or from Gao Feng, from Porto Fino or possibly from the fish and chips shop a few doors down.

  In the end I resist the lure and pass with only a wave. I feel the stitches subsiding, the pain lifting. Soon my mind will float away from my body in free-wheeling flight. Thoughts, ideas, clarifications, will stream into my consciousness and stay there to be collected in quieter moments. To stop now, merely for some light-hearted chatter, would be to lose them. But perhaps it would not be so light-hearted if I recounted the post office tale to Harry. He might laugh and wave it away, but the pain in his eyes, his parents’ pain, would give him away.

  Eyes are traitors, betrayers of secrets. Eichmann used to say he could tell a Jew by his eyes: they were different, somehow, from other people’s—craven, base.

  I wish I could find the off-switch to these Holocaust thoughts. Poetry, I mutter, as I speed past Northcote Avenue, think of poetry.

  But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

  It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

  Seriously? Besides, I have slowed down to keep time with the metre. Some sort of Iambic Pentameter thing happening. No, I need something else, freer, wilder…

  If you had turned away

  For just a six-year moment

  You might not have seen

  That lightless whirlwind—

  It caught us unrehearsed.

  Who’d ever heard of Jew-proof walls

  Of tattooed arms,

  Of poisoned air,

  Who’d ever thought

  God’s chosen would be cursed.

  Oh, for God’s sake, Avremele, the Auschwitz poet. His words are exactly what I do not need. Behind them, always, lie his unfathomable black eyes. They retain their vividness even in those old sepia-toned photographs, the ones in the poetry books we studied at school. They are the saddest, most Jewish eyes I have ever known.

  My daughter reads a biography of the Polish-born Marie Curie. It looks old enough to be the self-same volume I borrowed from the Mount Scopus College library two decades ago.

  ‘I feel so sorry for the Poles,’ she tells me one morning at breakfast, holding up the book as if it will help bring home her point. ‘Do you know how many times their country was overrun by foreign armies? It must have been terrible.’

  I think of Avremele.

  ‘Terrible for them, terrible for us,’ I say. I don’t explain. I don’t say ‘pogroms’ or ‘death camps’. My daughter is too young for such words. So she gives me a puzzled glance before rushing off to the bus stop.

  Over Glenhuntly Road now, heading towards North Road. Where am I going? I’ve run too far. Ordinarily I stop at Glenhuntly, turning left at Bambra Road and home. But today I have passed it, for some reason needing to flee the familiar route.

  Still, I am low-flying now. Like a hovercraft, I seem to have created an air cushion between the pavement and my feet. They are weightless. My breath is controlled, regular and I perspire freely.

  Ah, here he is again. He has not visited the cerebral corridors for a long time but I, too, have not achieved such running euphoria for quite some time, either. He is dressed in shorts and a singlet and keeps pace with me. He jogs at my left side and in his right hand he holds a cordless microphone.

  ‘Tell me, Madame, why do you run?’

  ‘You know why. Don’t you have any fresh questions?’

  ‘I don’t think you’ve ever given me a reasonable explanation. Come on now, for the viewers at home, why do you run?’

  ‘Like my parents before me, I have to.’

  ‘Because they were athletes and you wanted to follow in their footsteps?’

 
‘You know that’s not the reason. I run to get away from them. Enough with their stories.’

  But I see he still doesn’t understand. Can goyim ever really understand?

  ‘Look,’ I say, ‘they were the first generation to run for fitness. They run around Como Park with many other Jews who also don’t seem to know how to stop running. But they all have an excuse. What’s mine? Why have I become the one who keeps waking up from dreams of running? Not jogging, fleeing.’

  So, Como Park.

  At six o’clock these meshugoyim, these crazies, run there, clocking up four miles every morning. The youngest is probably fifty and they run, challenging the wind to slow them or to take their breath away. They talk as they run; they are never quiet, never at peace. Some mornings I join them. I don’t really know why. Something to do with their triumphal energy perhaps? Rising at five-thirty, I drive to Toorak to meet them. Running at Como is a much more stylish affair than running in Caulfield. The tracksuits are Fila, the running shoes are high-end Brooks and every item of clothing is colour-coordinated. I feel a bit shabby in my black T-shirt emblazoned with bright yellow embroidery. ‘Free Tibet’, it shouts, but no one is listening. They have their own freedom to consider.

  Like his father, Olympic coach, Franz Stampfl, before him, Anton takes everyone’s pulse before we start. We begin our laps with the regular, measured gait of those who know to conserve their energy for the final third of a mile.

  Then it starts: stocks, shares; gold; politics of Australia, of Israel. Is Blainey right? Or would he as soon throw the Jews out of Oz as the Asians? Among the ranks of these joggers run the Pantihose King, the Jewellery giant, the Hotel Magnate, the Chain-store Success Story and high-flying Property Developers. There is no matter too insignificant to be discussed: home renovations, business mergers, grandchildren and the latest gossip to come out of the JCCV, the ever-inept Jewish Community Council of Victoria. One of their number even has access to the prime minister’s ear, and the great man’s name is dropped with elaborate carelessness into the conversation. Now the speaker, confident of having impressed even these hardened moguls, can jog at a faster clip, setting the pace, forcing the others to keep up.