Waiting Room, The

by Kaminsky, Leah

  The first time Dina sliced open a corpse as a medical student, her hand trembled as she held the scalpel. Tracing a straight line from neck to pelvis, she cut through the waxy skin. That night, she dreamt she was lying on a dissection table in front of the entire Anatomy 101 class. The professor drew a coronal–caudal line slowly and steadily with an indelible marker. He started from the crown of her head, down across the midline of her face – forehead, nose, lips, chin – over the length of her throat, her sternum, her abdomen, and crossing her mons pubis, down between her thighs. All the students were watching silently. Dina stared up at the ceiling, smiling to herself, feeling important because the professor had chosen her to demonstrate surface anatomy to the class. She was his perfect specimen. Wanting him to run his fingers over her breasts, she lay there, naked, waiting for him to dive into her mound and demonstrate the perfect female orgasm to the crowded lecture theatre. He reached into his pocket. Her nipples tingled; her vulva throbbed. He held a small, shiny scalpel over her and traced along the line he had drawn. A thin line of blood trickled out. He cut her open, slowly, gradually, delicately fingering each vessel, each nerve. Then he placed his scalpel onto the bench and gently lifted out her heart, holding it up for all to see. It was beating fast and hard and she watched with wonder at how perfectly it was formed. The professor brought it close to his mouth and took a bite from the left ventricle, the strongest chamber that pumps blood to the rest of the body. He placed it back inside her chest, leaving a gaping hole in its wall, and sewed her up again. As he left her lying there in the lecture theatre, students filed out behind him, laughing on their way down to the pub for the afternoon.

  Dina moves over to the wash basin by the window, rinsing her hands with disinfectant, like a well-programmed robot. She washes slowly, thoroughly, rubbing her palms together in a circular motion, cleaning meticulously between the fingers with the scrubbing brush. A tiny, black louse is lodged under the nail of her right index finger. She quickly flicks it out and drops it into the basin. She watches it swirl around in the opposite direction to what it would in Melbourne, and finally it disappears down the drain.

  How can she know how to help Tahirih, who is filled with forgiveness and love and understanding for everyone, even for the very people who hated and abused her? Dina asked her once where she drew her patience and strength from. Tahirih clutched at her necklace of freshwater pearls, and Dina watched her mouth as it moved.

  ‘Bahá’u’lláh says the actions of those who persecute us are born out of innocence. It’s always best,’ Tahirih said, trying to stifle a cough, ‘to kiss your killer’s hand.’

  Today, something about Tahirih’s face makes Dina think about an old wooden ventriloquist’s doll she used to have as a child. Or maybe she reminds Dina of her own mother; both women were so traumatised by their experiences. The difference, though, is that while Tahirih found God in the midst of Hell, Dina’s mother lost her faith forever.

  CHAPTER 7

  Yael isn’t at her desk when Dina escorts Tahirih down the hallway to book a follow-up appointment. The phone is off the hook. Dina looks over to the waiting room, but before she can say anything Evgeni leaps at her.

  ‘Dr Dina,’ he fawns. ‘You must see me.’

  ‘Where is my receptionist?’

  Evgeni shrugs and persists like a heat-seeking missile: ‘Doktorsha, my neck hurts and throat is dry. Give me day off to rest, please.’

  Dina knows if Evgeni doesn’t get a sick certificate to his boss by ten am he will need to work the entire shift. He’s been performing this dance with Dina for years. On any other day she would cave in and waltz along with him, but today she isn’t going to let him wear her down.

  ‘Evgeni, take a seat please. I don’t have time for this right now. If you want to wait till I’ve seen the patients who have appointments, I’ll gladly squeeze you in when I can.’ She looks across at Sousanne. ‘Does anyone know where Yael is?’

  It’s the receptionist’s job to protect Dina from demanding patients like Evgeni; she pays Yael to be the door bitch.

  ‘She went outside with that Arab,’ Evgeni answers. He slinks back over to the corner and sits himself down.

  Dina opens the front door. Yael is standing in the stairwell opposite a tall man with dark hair. He is wearing a check shirt and work pants, a large toolbox resting on the floor beside him.

  ‘Dr Dina, this is Hassan,’ Yael says, smiling. ‘He finally made it.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Hassan says. ‘I’m here to fix the tile.’ He takes a final drag on his cigarette before tossing it into Evgeni’s bin, which is parked outside the entrance. ‘It’s lucky I got here at all. The roads are so crazy this morning; I almost turned the car around and headed back home. But I’m not one to give up.’ He is staring straight at Yael’s cleavage. ‘It took me ages to get to Checkpost from Tamra and then a whole hour just to make it across town.’

  Hassan reaches into the pocket of his shirt, offering Dina a cigarette. Yael puffs on hers.

  ‘She’s pregnant, for God’s sake,’ Yael says, laughing.

  He gives a wave of his hand, lighting up another one as he leans back against the wall. ‘You only live once.’

  Dina takes a step backward to avoid the smoke wafting in her direction. Hassan doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to start work. He winks at Yael and blows a smoke ring into her face. Stubbing out her cigarette, Yael grinds the butt with the toe of her shoe.

  ‘Tahirih is waiting to make another appointment, Yael.’

  ‘Sorry, Dina. I was dying for a smoke,’ she says, preening her hair as she brushes past Hassan on her way back inside. She looks as though she could fuck him right here on the doorstep, probably imagining him ripping off her clothes and tying her to the banister. In many of the wild fantasies Yael has ever confided to Dina, sex and violence are intimate bedfellows. In reality, her love life is a total drought.

  As if Dina’s is any better. She can’t remember the last time Eitan touched her. He doesn’t seem to find her pregnancy much of a turn-on this time around. When she was carrying Shlomi he couldn’t keep his hands off her, right up until the delivery. She wonders if you ever get used to not making love to your husband. Her swampy vulva is swollen. She’s been as horny as a teenager lately. Although, when she was a teen, sex wasn’t really driven by arousal; it was more like revenge fucking, to spite her mother.

  She remembers the first time. She was seventeen. One night, she let Danny Horowitz slide into her like an eel. He lay on top of her, his face wild and his eyes filled with elsewhere. Maddened by the temptation, she gave in to Danny’s trombone, as he referred to his cock.

  ‘Your skin, your skin,’ he kept repeating, but Dina knew he was moaning to someone else, somewhere else, his wet doggy tongue searching for her in the dark.

  And when he left, after a perfunctory peck on the cheek, a ‘See ya later’ thrown in for good measure, Dina ran to the bathroom and stood under the shower, scrubbing her skin red raw with a brush, trying to cleanse her shame.

  Silence seemed to linger in the streets where Dina grew up. Melbourne was a city that absorbed the highest number of Holocaust survivors per capita after the war, outside of Israel. It didn’t matter if Dina walked to school, or to the shops to buy cigarettes for her mother, or even over to her friend’s house to hang out for the afternoon, for her Caulfield felt like a place hope went to die.

  ‘Save it for someone special,’ her mother had said when Dina was thirteen, handing her a Modess sanitary pad and belt and sending her off to the bathroom clueless. Four years later, Dina made a point of dating two boys at once, each with cocks perfectly circumcised. Neither one knew she was fucking them both. She resisted telling her mother about it, even though she would have loved to see her face if she were to find out that two good little Jewish boys, from good Jewish homes, the firstborn boychiks of her mother’s friends in fact, were screwing her daughter brainless on Sandringham pier, in the back seat of their cars at the bottom end of N
orth Road, or in the lounge room at home, on the leather couch. All this, while her mother snored chloral hydrate nightmares into a feather pillow.

  ‘You never told me,’ Dina’s mother says, standing in the stairwell beside the tile guy.

  He stubs out his cigarette, picks up his toolbox and heads back into the clinic.

  Her mother hovers as Dina stares out at the garden. Evgeni’s dog is lying under the shade of a loquat tree, scratching its stomach.

  ‘Truths are brutal, mother.’

  ‘How could you do this to me, Dina? Why didn’t you say anything all these years?’

  ‘Would you like me to explain what it was like to need to fuck over and over again, just to escape from your madness?’ Dina glares at her.

  ‘It’s rude to swear, young lady.’

  That first time, hours after Danny Horowitz went home, slithering out of her life, Dina lay awake, loathing and wanting him at the same time. She had not been wronged or deceived. She let this choose itself.

  Dina heads back inside the clinic. She storms past Yael’s desk, making a beeline for her room. Her mother rushes after her, slipping through the open door a moment before Dina slams it.

  ‘But you were such a sweet child.’

  ‘I was too damn sweet. Always your darling daughter, the hope of your life, the good little girl who used to dance the twist at parties.’ She kept twirling her skirt, showing off to all the broken people seated around the room in armchairs that held them upright; too polite to roll their eyes at such a spoilt child. She thought of her mother’s friends, the frustrated Mr-and-Mrs-I-Could-Have-Beens-But-The-War-Broke-Out, with their dried-up poets’ souls, the elegant European women turned neurotic suburban housewives, wearing aprons and sprinkling Bex powders onto the back of their tongues, downing them with a swig of sherry; all beautifully manicured and utterly mad.

  ‘Those people were like family to me, Dina. I had no one else.’

  None of them were blood relations, but they were bonded by trauma and loss, each one naming their children after loved ones they had lost in the war. As a teenager, Dina tried to avoid these people she called aunts and uncles, as they sat crowded around the kitchen table on Saturday nights, eating herring, smoking Craven As, downing shots of vodka and playing Polish rummy. What was it with that lot and their herring? Those greasy, salty, naked pieces of fish, swimming alone on a sea of oil, surrounded by strips of onion and wrinkled capers, like shrivelled-up baby foreskins.

  She fucked such nice Jewish boys, all of them, like her, unborn at Auschwitz station, but forever standing on that platform, in line, waiting to be chosen, to be sent right or left. But after a while, faceless fucking seemed a sweeter revenge. So, after she grew bored with Jewish boys, Dina embraced men who might never know perpetual fear, and she gave thanks for the uncircumcised cocks of true-blue Aussie blokes, the fellas who laughed clean, hearty laughs and made her feel alive. Sex with them felt weirdly like a bath, cleansing her from all her mother’s stories. But of course, it couldn’t last.

  It’s already nine-thirty and Dina’s head feels tight. Borborygmi, those rumbling gurgles in her stomach, keep reminding her she’s hungry. She grazes like a cow when she’s pregnant, but at least she hasn’t put on so much weight this time. Just before she had Shlomi her blood pressure shot up and she looked like a bloated whale with all the swelling. She’s been trying to watch what she eats this time. Remembering she still has an apple in her bag from yesterday, she pulls it out and takes a bite, juice dripping down her chin and onto her lap. How good it would be to roll it slowly between her legs. She is tempted to lock the door to her room, pull off her maternity trousers and lie down on the examination couch, parting her clam-like labia with fingers that always harbour the faint smell of disinfectant. She would ignore the phone and the patients waiting for her, rubbing the apple up and down, the pressure building up slowly, deliciously, until she comes. Then she would pull up her pants, shift gears back from animal to stone and call in Sousanne and her girls, not even bothering to wash her hands. Let her patients smell who she really is.

  She rests the half-eaten apple on the pile of papers next to her and buzzes Yael.

  ‘Tell Sousanne I’ll be out in a minute.’

  She searches for the fax Yael handed to her when she walked into the clinic. She remembers it had Sousanne’s name on it. It has to be here somewhere in among all the mess on her desk. She promises herself Dina-of-the-Future will sort out the mountains of paperwork and file everything alphabetically in a four-drawer filing cabinet. She will also clean out the cupboard under the sink and throw out old bottles of disinfectant and expired samples left by relentless pharmaceutical reps. And at home, her pantry will be filled with a line of labelled containers for flour, sugar, cereal and nuts, her spice rack organised and catalogued. But meanwhile, Dina-of-Today surrounds herself with clutter, likes to think she knows where everything is within the chaos. She lives with books piled up beside her bed, waiting to be read. She hoards herself, knowing one day she will run out of time to read, speak, love. Most of all, she hoards Dina-of-the-Past, who wraps memories around her body, keeps them superglued to her skin.

  She glances up at a glass eyewash cup perched on one of the shelves, wedged between the spines of textbooks. It stands alone like a tiny wineglass. When Dina was a child, her father used it every morning, after finishing his fifty push-ups. She remembers one day in particular, when she was around six years old, waking up earlier than usual. Standing in the doorway of the bathroom, she watched her father’s rituals. First, he brushed his teeth, then soaped up a shaving brush, painting suds onto his face. She’d seen him do this many times before, so she knew the order of his ablutions; a few careful sweeps of a razor across his cheeks, a comb dragged through his hair, which he smoothed down with Brylcreem. Only then did he take the eyewash cup down from the bathroom cabinet, filling it with cold water from the tap. Catching sight of Dina in the mirror that particular morning, he raised his hand and made a toast, l’chaim, to life, as he splashed icy cold water onto his eyeball. He repeated this on the other side, using a handtowel embroidered with her mother’s initials to wipe his face. That day, Dina noticed a tear still hanging in the corner of one eye as he left the bathroom, heading off to dress before they visited her mother in hospital.

  Dina isn’t sure when her father abandoned the eyewash glass. It stood at the back of the bathroom cabinet for years, hidden behind bottles of her mother’s pills. Dina forgot about it after he died. Her mother shoved it away in the wardrobe, together with his ties, gold cufflinks and horn-rimmed spectacles. Then one day, not long after Dina moved to Haifa, while she was unpacking one of the boxes she shipped halfway across the world, her father’s eyewash glass emerged from the folds of crumpled newspaper. She held it in her hands and stared through the opaque glass, into blurred memories of childhood. Dina always had to second-guess between fiction and fact with her parents, creating her own history, her own truth.

  She can still picture that huge, oak wardrobe, remembering how much she used to love exploring it as a child, running her hands over her mother’s Crimplene suits and cashmere twin-sets, opening the drawers and rummaging through stockings, corsets, handkerchiefs, gloves and costume jewellery. But most of all, she loved trying on her mother’s shoes; stilettos that had been taken en masse to the cobbler’s in the late 1960s to round off the pointy toes and make them more fashionable. Dina would slip them onto her ten-year-old feet, clomping around in front of the mirror, imagining how elegant she would be when she grew up.

  On one of those days, not long after her father’s death, her mother headed out to do some shopping in St Kilda’s Village Belle, leaving her young daughter at home on her own. Dina waited until she heard the front door slam shut and the fading of her mother’s jingling car keys as she walked down the drive. The minute her mother was safely outside the gate, Dina bolted for the master bedroom, hurriedly opening the closet to try on her shoes. As always, she started by carefully liftin
g her favourites from the rack, a pointy, leather pair, with a kitten heel, the only pair that had escaped the cobbler’s amputation. That day, as Dina took them out of the wardrobe, she noticed an uneven floorboard jutting up from underneath the shoe rack. She lifted up the wooden slat, climbing into the wardrobe to look inside.

  Something shiny was hidden there. She reached in and pulled out a rusty tin. Sitting down on top of all the shoes, she tugged at the lid. As it came loose, a bundle of old papers spilled out. Dina searched among them for the adoption forms she was sure her mother must be hiding from her. She was determined to find the document that would reveal she was someone else’s child, desperate to prove she had been born unstoried, rather than carry the dark pages of her parents’ life in her veins.

  Dina fingered some foreign banknotes; they were blue and a little creased, the long words written on them in a foreign language. She tried to memorise one of them, Littmanstadt, so she could ask Mrs Grant about it at school the next day. Dina peered back inside the secret trapdoor and saw the worn spine of a book sticking up. She lifted it out carefully, fingering the cover: Our Destruction in Pictures, Bergen-Belsen, 1946. A sick feeling rose from her chest as she pored over photos of piled-up naked bodies being shovelled into a large pit by a bulldozer, burdening her with memories she would rather not hold, shadows of reality emerging from her mother’s stories.

  A brown envelope fell out from between the book’s pages. It was crammed full of photographs and letters. As Dina flicked through them an image of her father caught her eye, his face shining with laughter and youth as he cuddled a woman and a little girl Dina had never seen before. Not wanting to waste any time before her mother came home, she shuffled through the pile, searching for more untold truths. The letters were addressed to her father, handwritten in blue ink, from a Mr Wolf Schuster somewhere in New York. She inhaled the musty smell of her father’s past.