The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  There was no point explaining that using slang expressions didn’t mean you were illiterate. Halina sighed as she often did whenever she thought about her mother’s comments. ‘Vy you buy old house?’ Zosia had grumbled when Halina had brought her to see her new Paddington terrace. Wrinkling her nose, she had sniffed at the door of every room like a retriever. ‘Wilgoc. Damp,’ she said. ‘You get sick. Air not good.’

  When they had arrived in Sydney in the late 1940s, Paddington was a rundown working-class suburb generally regarded as a slum, and her mother had continued to think of it that way even though half a century later you had to be a millionnaire to buy one of those terraces. Her mother had no sense of history. Looking back on those early days, when they had rented a room in a Newtown boarding house permeated with the strong smell of lamb chops, dripping and mashed potatoes, Halina marvelled that a woman who had barely finished primary school had devoted herself to providing her daughter with the best possible education. How she had managed to scrape together enough money from scrubbing floors and washing dishes in restaurants to send her to a private school was a miracle, but one that Halina had accepted without question at the time.

  Instead of evoking gratitude, Zosia’s sacrifice had caused her embarrassment. Surrounded by girls who rode horses on country properties during the holidays and wore the latest fashions, Halina was ashamed of her frugal lifestyle, darned socks and mended sweaters. Every speech day when Halina received prizes, her mother always arrived wearing the same old faded dress and squashed felt hat stuck on her greying hair, smelling strongly of perspiration because she had rushed across town to get there. Halina squirmed whenever Zosia spoke loudly and ungrammatically in her choppy Polish accent. She could see that her mother lacked the finesse of the other women, who wore tailored suits, white gloves and had lace handkerchiefs perfumed with Helena Rubinstein’s Apple Blossom. She also noted that their pleasant smiles and Anglo politeness gave no sign that Zosia was not one of them.

  Shampooing an auburn rinse into her hair in the never-ending battle to conceal the grey, Halina thought with regret about her mother, a closed person who spoke little and avoided confrontation. She would give a brief opinion whether it was solicited or not, but if it met with an argument, as often happened in conversation with her daughter, she tightened her lips, shrugged and changed the subject. Now that it was too late, Halina wished she had found a way of breaking down that wall and reaching the woman on the other side. She didn’t even know what had prompted Zosia to leave her native land. Whenever she had asked about their life in Poland, her mother had shrugged and said, ‘Past is past. Nussing to talk about.’

  Halina dried herself energetically to erase the sound of her mother’s voice that filled her head. She needed some coffee to clear her thoughts. A few minutes later, the Gaggia espresso machine, a recent extravagance, spat and spurted as it frothed the milk for the cappucino that had become an essential part of her morning ritual.

  ‘That machine sounds like a jet about to take off,’ Rhys had said with his deep rolling laugh the first time she had made coffee for him. He had stolen up behind her and, with a rough movement, pulled her against him. ‘Leave that and come to bed,’ he’d murmured. ‘You make my balls ache with lust.’

  Rhys’s turn of phrase, so quaintly vulgar, never failed to excite her. No man she had ever known had desired her with such urgency. She had left the machine spluttering. By the time they came downstairs again, it had burnt out and the kitchen was filled with an acrid smell.

  That was months ago, and the coffee still had a bitter taste even though she’d had the machine fixed. And Rhys hadn’t phoned for two weeks and three days.

  Halina looked at her watch. Too late to go back to bed, too early to meet her friends for breakfast and too hot to jog in the park. She heard a thump in the front yard and the sound of a car speeding away as the thick rolls of the weekend newspaper struck the tiles of her verandah.

  She scooped them up and peeled off the clingy plastic wrapping on her way inside, rolled it into a ball and threw it to Puccini. He backed towards the wall, climbed up several centimetres with his hind legs, then launched himself towards the ball with the spring of an athlete about to attempt a long jump. His paws skittered on the polished floor and, instead of catching the ball, he pushed it under the settee. Repeated attempts to extricate it failed and he looked at her expectantly. As Halina reached down to dislodge the ball, she saw why it was caught.

  2

  Did she have a right to go through her mother’s papers? Perhaps the life Zosia had always kept private should be left in the scuffed cardboard box, unopened. Suspended between integrity and curiosity, Halina felt like a thief sneaking into an empty house. Parents’ lives were always a mystery to children, a mystery that deepened with age, but now that Zosia was no longer here to protect her secrets, she hesitated to raise the veil.

  How could two adults be part of each other’s lives for over fifty years, yet understand so little about each other? Sitting cross-legged in the pool of sunlight on the polished floorboards of her lounge room, Halina thought about her mother’s last days in the nursing home. An invisible screwdriver turned in her chest, tightening her ribcage so that she had to sigh deeply every few moments to suck enough air into her lungs. It was painful to remember the over-perfumed deodorant intended to mask the pervasive odour of urine, and the residents in their solitary rooms looking up eagerly at every footstep. Every Sunday afternoon it had been a guilty relief to say goodbye to her mother, slumped in the wheelchair, silent and withdrawn, and to walk out into the light and feel the sun on her face again.

  Zosia had never demanded anything of Halina other than that she should study hard. ‘You want to be cleaner, like me?’ she used to taunt whenever Halina pleaded to go out with her friends. After a day spent scrubbing and vacuuming other people’s homes and travelling across the city by bus and train, Zosia ironed Halina’s school blouse and uniform, darned her lisle stockings with tiny stitches, and cooked their bigos stew or rolled out pastry for the pierogi she stuffed with mashed potatoes or mushrooms. She never asked Halina to help. ‘Go and study,’ she would order, waving her large reddened hands towards the textbooks.

  Halina looked again at the box on the floor in front of her. It was covered with faded paper patterned in a paisley design and secured with string. She recognised it from her primary school days, when she had filled it with the required lengths of cesarine and headcloth. With the sewing teacher’s help she had fashioned the material into shapeless aprons and skirts, and embroidered the edges in clumsy cross-stitch. It had lain under the sofa for several weeks, since she had brought it from the nursing home along with her mother’s other belongings. She had intended to go through everything then, but the task had proved too distressing and she had pushed the box under the settee and forgotten it until now.

  The string was knotted so tightly that when she tried to undo it, her nail broke and she had to cut it with a knife.

  As she raised the lid, her heart beat with anticipation. Perhaps she would finally find out something about her father. She knew that his name was Jozef, and that he had died fighting for Poland when she was a toddler, but her mother had refused to talk about him. Through sadness, Halina assumed. She had never even seen his photograph. ‘Photographs?’ her mother had said scathingly whenever she mentioned the subject. ‘I had to leave everything when Warsaw was bombed. I carried you on my back. And you ask about photographs!’ Pressed for details, her mother had become so upset that Halina always dropped the subject. She resented being rebuffed but had always believed that one day she would catch her mother off-guard and persuade her to talk about the past. That moment never came.

  During her last visit to Wentworth House, she had wheeled her mother onto the terrace but neither the luscious perfume of the mock orange nor the warmth of the sun had brought a smile to her face. After Halina had asked about the nurses, the food and the other residents, and Zosia had replied with shrugs and monosy
llables, there was little left to say. She would have liked to talk about her work, but the nursing home was hardly the place to describe the triumphs of identifying corpses by examining their dental remains. As for Rhys, Halina had never told her mother about him. Zosia would have been appalled at her affair with a married man and, even at her age, Halina wasn’t prepared to expose herself to her mother’s disapproval.

  Usually she broke the awkward silence with gossip about her friends, problems with the taxation department, or some minor irritation caused by the council’s incompetence. On that last day, however, she had good news. Her mother would be proud that she had been elected president of the International Association of Odontologists.

  As she told her about the appointment, she had noticed the milky fog lift from her mother’s eyes. The colour of her irises had deepened to some indefinable colour beyond the earthly spectrum, and her expression was unnerving, as though she was trying to drink her daughter in. Impaled on that impenetrable gaze, Halina felt naked, all her selfishness exposed. A moment later, her mother’s eyes were dull and unfocused once more.

  The following morning, the phone had rung before she was awake. As usual her thoughts had leapt to Rhys, and then lurched from disappointment to anger with herself.

  ‘You’d better come over right away,’ the matron had said. ‘She’s failing.’

  It was Halina’s first bereavement. The end of a life was a disappointingly small moment that hung on the final exhalation of a breath. Although she had studied anatomy and examined bodies on mortuary slabs, Halina struggled to comprehend that her mother’s light had been extinguished for ever. She sat beside the bed, watching as her mother’s face stiffened like a wooden mask, and smoothed the grey strands away from her jowly cheeks, wondering what had gone through her mind in those final moments. But her mother had died as she had lived, in silence.

  Although she was accustomed to dealing with the deaths of strangers, Halina felt unequal to the task of mourning for her mother. It seemed to her that she should feel something more significant than a numb sense of unreality.

  The burial rites had posed a problem. Although she was born and raised a Catholic, Zosia had not been a church-goer and, from the few conversations they had had on the subject, Halina knew she had little time for God or his earthly representatives. ‘Does God hide in churches when there is so much suffering in the world?’ she would say. ‘If God exists, he doesn’t need priests or churches.’

  Halina had arranged for a cremation, but changed her mind at the last moment when she thought of the teeth that would be left after incineration. Instead, she had her mother buried in the Catholic section of Rookwood cemetery, where worms consumed the dead of all religions without prejudice. At the funeral, she had spoken briefly about the simple woman who had brought her small daughter to a foreign country, worked hard all her life, and lived by old-fashioned values.

  The box contained very little. An entire life reduced to a slim manila folder. At least her mother had left a daughter behind. Who would look through her own belongings and remember her after she was dead, Halina thought.

  Puccini was brushing against her, and as she stroked his mottled fur she recalled her mother’s exasperation when she took in the starving creature she had found miaowing piteously in her yard. ‘A woman needs a child, not a cat. Cats don’t cry for you when you’re dead.’

  When Halina had married at the age of twenty-three, she had assumed they would have children, but it hadn’t taken long to realise that she had made a bad choice. Gary had felt threatened by her ambitious nature and had resisted everything she aspired to. To stay married to him she would have had to work part-time in a suburban practice, filling and scaling teeth all day, so that his status and income would surpass hers. She had left him after four years of compromises that satisfied neither of them and arguments that grew increasingly rancorous. In the years that followed, Halina discovered that she despised weak, insecure men who needed her too much, and resented strong ones who didn’t need her enough.

  Lying on top of the papers in the folder was her mother’s document of naturalisation, signed by Harold Holt, who later disappeared mysteriously while swimming at Portsea. She wondered how his relatives had coped with the fact that his body had never been found. Lack of closure was endless torture for families. The next document referred to their change of name. Halina had almost forgotten that as soon as they had become Australian citizens, her mother had changed their name by deed poll. Mortified every time she had to spell out the long consonant-heavy Polish name that usually provoked stares and giggles from her classmates, she had been relieved when Szczecinska became Shore. But when the teacher said she would call her Helen, she had jumped to her feet and retorted with a flaming face, ‘My name is not Helen, it is Halina!’ There was a shocked intake of breath around the classroom but Halina hadn’t cared. She must have been angry even then.

  Each document took her back in time. A sheet of paper dated December 1947 was covered in copybook copperplate. It was her report from the convent school in Warsaw, the year before they had left Poland. She remembered the day she had been forced to kneel on dried lentils as a punishment for talking in class. The lentils had dug into her knees but it was the humiliation rather than the pain that had made her stand up and face the teacher. ‘You shouldn’t hurt children,’ she had shouted. When Sister Czeslawa struck her legs with a ruler for insolence, Zosia had hurried to the convent the following day, so angry that she could hardly speak. ‘You all pretend to be saints but you’re sadists,’ she told the astonished nun, and took Halina out of the school.

  As she opened the double page of the report, a cardboard cutout of a heart fell out. Clumsily embroidered in large stitches were the words Na dzien matek zyczenia od Haliny. Mother’s Day wishes from Halina. Her mother was not a sentimental woman and Halina was surprised that she’d kept this all her life. Her eyes skimmed over the report card. Bright but inattentive. Halina is an intelligent child but needs to gain control over her temper and her tongue.

  At the bottom of the box lay a black and white photograph with serrated edges. Her heart thumped in anticipation but the photo had been taken in Australia, shortly after they arrived. Zosia had been stout and grey for so long that Halina had forgotten how she had looked when she was young. Studying the photograph, she saw a buxom young woman with an open face and sturdy arms and legs. And there was Halina, standing beside her mother but not touching her. Already nearly as tall as Zosia at the age of nine, she had her hair braided in that embarrassing Polish way, each plait doubled under and tied with a bow, with a bigger bow on top of her head. And there were those prominent central incisors, the left crossed over the right, clearly visible in the photograph even though she was smiling so carefully to conceal the defect.

  Beside her stood a couple with a small boy in baggy trousers and a sleeveless vest, grimacing into the camera. The woman had a protective arm around her husband, a thick-set man with a brooding expression. Halina had no idea who they were.

  She returned the papers to the folder and replaced the lid on the box with a twinge of regret. No secrets there.

  P.S.

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  About the Author

  Meet the author

  ‘I WAS BORN UNDER the astrological sign of Cancer,’ says Diane Armstrong, ‘but it should have been Mars, because shortly after my birth in Krakow on a sweltering summer night in July 1939, German tanks rolled into Poland and World War II began.’ As Jews, Diane and her parents were in constant danger during the Nazi occupation. By 1942, most of the Jews in Poland, including members of their close family, had been deported to concentration camps or killed, and their only chance of surviving was to obtain false papers and pose as Catholics in a remote village where no one knew them.

  Little Diana Baldinger became Danusia Boguslawska, and at the age of three she already knew that she must never tell anyone her real name. But from the moment the f
amily arrived, rumours spread that they were Jewish. For the next three years Diane’s family lived on the edge of an abyss because the villagers threatened to denounce them to the Gestapo. If it hadn’t been for the support of the village priest, they wouldn’t have survived. ‘When I found out many years later that over a million Jewish children had been murdered during the Holocaust, I realised it was a sheer miracle I survived,’ Diane says. ‘It made me feel I had to make my life count.’

  In 1948 she and her parents sailed to Australia on the clapped out SS Derna and, after a disaster-filled voyage, arrived in the ‘blessed haven’ of Australia almost ten weeks later. Although neighbours and teachers were kind, Diane couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. ‘At school I felt as though I had become deaf and mute,’ she recalls. ‘It was like listening to a secret code without having the cypher to break it.’

  Despite these early difficulties, Diane was elected school captain within two years of arriving in Australia. She received a Commonwealth scholarship to Sydney University, where she studied Arts. Soon after graduating she married Michael Armstrong, and they spent several years in London where she taught in schools.

  But ever since she was seven years old, Diane knew that she would become a writer, and just before the birth of her daughter, Justine, she wrote her first article, about teaching at a ‘Blackboard Jungle’ school in London. Since then, over three thousand of her articles—including investigative pieces, personal experience stories, profiles and travel articles—have been published in newspapers and magazines in Australia and overseas.