‘Nowhere is safe.’
Dina lets go of the reins; she’s not going to ride this horse anymore. Silence is the best way to answer her mother. She turns her focus on the traffic. It might be best to find a spot nearby and walk up a little, so she ducks into a side street and parks up on the footpath between a truck and a garbage bin. It’ll only take a few minutes at the shoemaker. She gets out of the car, shoving the broken heel into her bag. Barefoot, she heads off towards Natanson Street, clasping her shoes to her chest. They are the only pair of her mother’s shoes that Dina kept, the same ones she loved to try on secretly when she was a little girl.
A van drives past, loudspeakers mounted on the roof, blaring out in Yiddish: ‘Alte zakhen, alte zakhen!’ – Old things, old things. When Eitan was a child, apparently second-hand dealers used to cruise the neighbourhoods in their trucks every day. Guys still drive around the streets collecting junk, but these days their pick-up trucks are air-conditioned and their recorded voices are amplified through megaphones. They blast those same Yiddish words into the street, alte zakhen, alte zakhen, now with Arabic accents.
‘A neyeh mayseh. Arabs speaking Yiddish. That’s news.’ Her mother walks along behind Dina. ‘I saw these guys drive past your place so fast the other day.’
It’s true. By the time Dina had rushed downstairs and run out onto the footpath to flag them down, they were already at the other end of the street – their call trailing off into the distance – fridges, chairs and broken fans piled up high on the back of their truck. Before she was able to catch their attention to come and pick up Kelev’s old kennel, they turned left into Kalaniot Street and were gone.
‘The stupid dog died years ago.’ Her mother’s voice is grating. ‘That rotting kennel has been sitting shiva in the corner of the stairwell ever since. Isn’t it time you stopped mourning? What are you waiting for, the dog to come back from the dead?’
Dina pictures the kennel in her backyard, the cosy little shelter she and Eitan had nailed together from salvaged boards. It reminds her of their happier times together. Kelev’s old blue blanket, still tucked inside, waits for his dog ghost to tread softly across the cold tiles. Its fabric holds the memory of the dog’s ritual of spinning around three times before settling down gently into its folds. A mangy, ugly brute with bandy legs and foul-smelling farts, Kelev was always around: in the car, under the kitchen table at mealtimes, sitting in Eitan’s lap as they drove to Friday night dinner at his parents’ place. He was even the centre of attention the night Eitan proposed to Dina, standing between them on the deserted beach at the end of Sea Road.
‘And could you spend your life with me, here in Haifa?’ Eitan finally got up the nerve to ask.
Kelev waited for the opportunity to start humping Dina’s leg, just as she was about to say ‘Yes.’
Dina married Eitan, but soon became a wicked bride. She pledged allegiance to this land, to the hedgehogs and porcupines in the garden; the mongooses and honeyeaters in the wadi. She sang to the bulbul bird: ‘I am here, always, forever. I adopt you as my own, renounce the song of kookaburra and cockatoo.’ Yet all the while, from the corner of her eye, she peered at the chameleon hiding in the pomegranate tree. Each of his eyes moving in opposite directions – wary and blending in – alone in his camouflage, his invisibility.
Then one day the chameleon turned green and was gone. It simply got up and left their small Garden of Eden, the same evening in 1995 that Rabin was killed. The newsflash had appeared on the screen as Dina and Eitan were watching a re-run of Crocodile Dundee. She was sure it was exactly at this moment, when the announcer said the Prime Minister had been shot during a peace rally in Tel Aviv, that the chameleon disappeared. Rabin had been hit in the chest after he joined Miri Aloni onstage, singing ‘Shir La Shalom’, a song for peace, about how you cannot bring the dead back to life. A blood-stained sheet of paper with the lyrics was found in his pocket afterwards. The news bulletin reported he had been rushed straight to the operating theatre, and as soon as the station returned to normal programming, Mick Dundee’s lady friend emerged from a waterhole half-naked.
‘Rabin’s a goner,’ Dina said, ‘He’s not going to make it.’
Looking back on it now, she wonders if it was then she started falling apart. She saw biblical celebrities fly up out of a hole which had opened in her heart. The young shepherd, David, stepping out of the pages of an ancient book, led Goliath by the hand. Stupid Adam followed, arm in arm with calculating Eve. They were leaving this Holy Land, and even Lot’s wife did not turn back to see the empty pages of the Torah, flapping in the breeze. They walked along a ribbon of smoke that curled upwards to the sky, unwinding from somewhere inside Dina. A misty yellow brick road made of hopes and dreams and a naive longing for peace wound its way far across the wadi and out over the oceans, towards the land of Oz. Moses led the Israelites to Caulfield. Abraham brought the ram to Fleischmann Brothers, the kosher butchers on Glenhuntly Road, and Isaac walked along silently behind. Dina followed them all back home. She could not let the sacrifice begin.
And when Crocodile Dundee was over, Dina gazed at the screen, at the bulletins, the political analysts, the tense reporters; feeling hollow inside, knowing then her life had been, up until that moment, a spectator sport. She realised she could not barrack for either team, or listen to the applause of war. She wanted to gather their newborn baby in her arms and fly back home to the Grand Final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Monarch’s plum cake on Acland Street and the black swans paddling around Albert Park Lake.
Dina hobbles past a fruit-and-vegetable stand.
‘Ah! Doctor!’ shouts a man sporting a toothless grin and ample gut.
Itzik, the owner of the duchan, a stall the size of a closet, has been a patient of Dina’s for years. He migrated from Morocco in 1956. Setting aside the fruit he has been rubbing vigorously with his apron, he rushes forward to serve her.
‘How are you today?’ he asks.
‘I’m fine, Itzik. Just fine.’
He glances down at her bare feet, raising his eyebrows.
‘The heel just came off my shoe. I’m on my way to fix it right now,’ she says.
Three giant pumpkins lie huddled together in a locked cage under the trestle table. They look as if they are being held back so they won’t attack customers.
‘I see you have tight security here today,’ she says, pointing at the vicious vegies.
Her joke is answered by a blank face, so she tries a more conventional approach: ‘How are the grandchildren?’
‘They are all well, thank God. Everyone is healthy.’ His face beams. ‘We don’t want to give you too much business you know, giveret Doctor!’
‘Remember you wanted apples,’ her mother says, puffing on a cigarette.
Dina asks Itzik for a kilo of Granny Smiths. He weighs them on his rusty scales, places them in a pink plastic bag and shoves in a handful of onions to boot.
‘Take it,’ Itzik says, staring at Dina as he holds it out to her. ‘I insist. And send my regards to that nice husband of yours.’
‘Thank you, Itzik.’
‘Such a lovely man. How is he?’
‘Yes, Dina. How is your husband?’ her mother barks. ‘Why haven’t you spoken to him yet? You were so awful to him this morning. You should call and apologise.’
Dina raises an eyebrow at her mother.
‘Yes. You heard me. Eitan is a good man. You don’t appreciate him enough. I’ll admit I had my doubts about him at first; I wasn’t all that sure he’d amount to much. But he studied hard, cut his hair and made something of himself. He’s become a real mentsch; proved himself a good catch and such a wonderful father.’
The fruit vendor is standing there, poking at his hairy ear as he stares at Dina.
Realising Itzik is waiting for her to answer his question, she mumbles, ‘Oh, Eitan. Yes, he’s fine.’ She takes a twenty-shekel note from her purse and holds it out to him.
‘Please! Don’t insult me,’
he says, flicking the money away with the back of his hand. ‘May you be rich, giveret Doctor. But not from sick people!’
Dina limps along, her toe now swollen, belly sticking out, bags balanced in one hand, shoes in the other. She is careful to avoid the clumps of dog shit on the pavement. Drivers honk their horns and shout at her as she weaves in and out between crowded cars and heaving vans. A policewoman stands in the middle of an intersection, waving her hands about wildly as she tries to redirect traffic.
The smell of cheese bourekas, fresh out of the oven, wafts over from a bakery up ahead. Tables jutting out are piled high with challah rolls, fresh doughnuts and pita bread sprinkled with zatar. Dina feels her stomach growling and stops to buy a warm pretzel. The baker is standing at the entrance to his stall, polishing an egg with a white cloth. She tries to hand him a five-shekel coin.
‘Just a moment,’ he says, gently placing the egg back in its carton. He slowly folds the cloth in half and shoves it deep into the pocket of his trousers.
‘I’m in a bit of a hurry,’ Dina says.
‘These eggs are my future.’ He places his fingers and thumb together like the petals of a tulip, in an Israeli salute meaning wait. ‘And you can’t rush your future.’
That’s not true, Dina wants to tell the baker. Her future certainly unfolded abruptly when she collided with Eitan all those years ago in the pool.
‘You got lucky. Most girls have to kiss a lot of frogs before they find their prince,’ her mother says, poking her finger into a doughnut. ‘Then, when they finally catch Mr Right, get married and have children, he usually turns back into a frog.’ She licks some jam off her nail. Dina reaches across to stop her mother.
‘Savlanut,’ the baker says, pulling some tongs from his apron. ‘Patience, please. I’ll get that for you.’
‘He’s right,’ her mother says. ‘You have never known what it is to wait for anything. You grew up a little princess. That’s your father’s fault.’
If her mother were ever to make it to Heaven, finally leaving Dina to deal with things by herself, she would probably leap onto a clump of cumulus, choosing a particularly bulbous, grey cloud. Cigarette in one hand, fishing rod in the other, she would sit there and continue to lecture her daughter. ‘I wanted a pretzel, not a doughnut,’ Dina tells the baker.
‘It’s no good for you to be alone, Dina. It makes you crazy,’ her mother nags.
‘That’s not a problem, Mother. I’m hardly ever on my own. You’re never far away.’
‘I don’t mean me, silly. I’m talking about your husband. He is good to you, and you don’t realise what you have – you’re too busy carrying some fantasy version of him around inside your head. If a bride can’t dance, she always finds fault with the musicians.’
‘Surely a little bit of sugar won’t hurt you, Doctor?’ the baker says. ‘These are still hot.’
‘Tell him you prefer salt in your wounds.’
‘Why do you always have to kibitz?’ Dina says. Her mother was always a bit of an armchair general.
The baker stares at Dina quizzically.
‘Sorry, I was just talking to myself.’
‘Ha! That reminds me of a story,’ her mother continues, oblivious to Dina’s embarrassment.
‘You know we had an old man called Bulchik, living in Lodz. He had a kroomeh foos, a twisted foot, and he never found a wife.’
‘What does this have to do with anything?’ Dina asks. The baker stands there poised with the doughtnut in his hand, waiting for Dina to take it.
‘We were talking about getting married. Well, as he grew older he began to feel very lonely. So, one day he went to the doctor.
‘“Doctor. I need help,” he complained. “Lately, I talk to myself all the time and people are mocking me.”
‘“Do you suffer pain?” the doctor asked.
‘“No. No pain.”
‘“Well then, go home. There’s no need to worry. Millions of people talk to themselves.”
‘“But Doctor,” cried Bulchik, “you don’t know the half of it. There is another person living inside my head.”’
The baker coughs politely, but Dina doesn’t acknowledge him. On the end of the line her mother has secured some bait, a half-told tale to tempt her daughter, jiggling it up and down, a story worm alive and bleeding as it wriggles on the hook. Dina takes the bait and her mother reels her in. It wrenches Dina out of the moment. Her mother continues.
‘“Do you know who it is?” the doctor asked.
‘“Yes, of course. Her name is Shayndel-Yaffa and she’s very beautiful. In fact, I think I am in love with her. Oy, Doctor, what am I to do?”
‘The doctor scratched his beard and thought for a moment. “Why don’t you ask her to marry you?”
‘A huge grin appeared on Bulchik’s face.
‘That very evening Bulchik asked the sweetheart living in his head to marry him. She agreed and the townsfolk stopped laughing because suddenly old Bulchik stopped speaking to himself. Once he married his imaginary wife he never got a word in edgewise again.’
‘All I wanted was a pretzel.’
‘That’s fine.’ The baker puts the doughnut back and picks up a pretzel instead. ‘Would you like a glass of water, Doctor? You look a little pale.’
‘I’m fine. Sorry, just a bit distracted today.’
Since Dina was a child, her mother breastfed her stories she’d rather not have heard. Dina still remembers her mother slumped in a vinyl chair in the kitchen as she stared at the ashtray Frieda, her best friend, had brought back from one of her trips. She picked at dead matches with her nicotine-stained finger, then carved out Dina’s initials with her nail, right into the ashes. Pushing the cigarette butts around, she lined them up in two rows and stared at them unblinkingly, as if searching for the traces of something she lost.
Her mother’s ghosts, who lived with them the whole time Dina was growing up, were kept muted in the background by bottles of pills: blue ones for nerves, red ones for sleep, white ones to stop the tears. Dina never liked sharing her mother with the dead; she wanted to keep her all to herself. She was different from the other kids’ mothers. They all played tennis, joined the Parents’ Association, went camping or hiking with their families. But Dina was happy sharing smaller adventures with her mother. Sometimes, as a special treat, when her mother stood kneading dough for an apple cake, punching and rolling it out, she would let Dina mix the cinnamon and sugar together and sprinkle it on top. It was these sweet moments that hung like grace notes in the dirge of Dina’s childhood.
The ghosts would often follow them down the aisles of the supermarket on Glenhuntly Road as they shopped. They stood and watched as Dina helped her mother take tins of Ardmona pears and Sirena tuna, jars of Povidl jam and Polski Ogorki pickles down off the shelf and pile them up in the trolley. Back home, they unpacked, while the ghosts pressed in on them, peering at Dina as she handed the groceries to her mother, who stacked them in the pantry with the rest of the stockpile.
In her early teens, Dina’s eyes were already scanning the rooftops, searching for escape. She cast the line of her heart over their garden, beyond the weatherboard houses of little ladies who smelt like tea-cosies, tossing the hook out across the ocean in search of something – anything – that would drag her away from Caulfield. She willed herself to be as transparent as tracing paper, the see-through outline of an unhappy girl, always the dutiful daughter who made a cup of tea, buttering two slices of toast cut into triangles and placing the plate in front of her mother.
As she grew older, Dina began to understand the best thing her mother could do for her was die. She imagined standing over her mother’s grave, dry-eyed and relieved. It wouldn’t really matter that much if she was dead – Dina had actually lost her to the ghosts years earlier. The dead had swathed themselves around her mother so heavily, they squeezed out any life left inside her.
Dina wasn’t there to see the ashes when the war ended, but she was born into the smoky after-
haze. She had never known war, but its tendrils gripped her from a young age, as she tried to make up for everyone her mother had lost. She had to be a good girl; fill her mother’s sadness with love. But with the body of a young teenage girl waking to desire, she turned her back on a life of mourning. And even now, so many years later, she is still never far enough away from the weight of her mother’s world; the memory of her flesh spilling out of the girdle she wrestled to take off every night, as exhaustion washed her from the day’s swell onto the none-too-safe shore of sleep.
What a contrast to the beauty her mother used to be. A framed black-and-white photo of her, taken in Germany after the war, stood for years on a shelf in the kitchen, next to a vase of dusty plastic flowers. So elegant in a black, chiffon dress with a sculpted neckline, she wears a velvet choker and stands behind a table, among a group of other beautiful young friends, all smiling at the camera.
‘Your father was the love of my life,’ her mother said, one grey Melbourne afternoon, the wireless tuned to 3AW in the background, Philip Brady softly gossiping with listeners on his talkback show. Dina, just home from her first driving lesson, freshly baked apple cake in her belly, sat opposite her.
In the photo, Dina’s mother has her head turned slightly to the right, looking at a woman seated in the centre of the room.
‘That was taken at Frieda’s wedding, just before she left the Displaced Persons’ camp to come to Australia. Did I tell you how we slept in the same wooden bunk all those nights in Bergen-Belsen? Her hand was my pillow.’
Even though Frieda was her mother’s closest friend, they used to fight like cat and dog. With her manicured nails, beehive hairdos and Lurex sweaters that hugged her ample bosom, Frieda was the polar opposite of Dina’s mother, whose apron was permanently tied around her waist. The story goes that she saved Dina’s mother’s life. She had smiled sweetly at the guard who asked for two women to work in the kitchen and prepare food for the SS men. She was the first to raise her hand, pushing her best friend’s arm up at the same time.
Waiting Room, The Page 12
