Dina’s mother is half-smiling in the photo. But Dina has always recognised that look, the slightly pinched eyebrows, the almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes. What was her mother thinking while everyone else stared straight at the camera? Was she pondering where she would spend the rest of her life, now that she had lost her entire family? Maybe she was wondering how long she could last in a Displaced Persons’ camp.
‘Why did you stay in Germany after the war?’
‘It’s a complicated story, Dina. Your father had an uncle in New York, but I wanted to follow Frieda to Australia. We decided we’d go to whichever country would let us in first. It took time in those days because it wasn’t easy to get a permit. Nobody wanted to take in refugees. You had to find a sponsor who was willing to help arrange a visa.’
‘I don’t get it. If Tati was the love of your life, why didn’t you get married straightaway?’
‘Oy, you are too young to understand these things. One day I’ll tell you.’
‘Tell me now.’
‘Look, Dina. He just wasn’t ready.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me? Well, that was different. Who else did I have in the world? And you know, there are some things in life that are worth waiting for.’
‘You wanted to give him time to get over losing his family, didn’t you?’
Her mother stopped rolling out some biscuit dough and looked up at Dina, her eyebrows raised. ‘He told you?’
‘I overheard him the day he died, telling a customer at work.’
Her mother lowered her eyes. ‘You and I were replacements for what he lost in the war.’
‘What do you mean?’
Dina’s mother rested the rolling pin on the board and lit up another cigarette. Drawing in deeply, she absent-mindedly puffed a cloud of smoke into her daughter’s face. Dina couldn’t see her mother for a moment, but heard her sigh again. Then, as if she were speaking to someone else in the room, her mother said:
‘It’s far easier to love the dead.’
When the smoke cleared, her mother’s eyes were dull. She was staring into the ashtray. Dina knew she was going off to visit her ghosts again. It wouldn’t be very long before she spiralled down to hide among their shadows and ended up back in hospital.
Dina moves towards her mother to stop her fondling the baker’s eggs. Her mother quickly ducks out of the way, sending Dina hurtling forward. She drops the plastic bag she is holding. Apples and onions spill out onto the floor.
‘I’m so sorry!’ Dina bends forward to pick them up, but the baker stops her.
‘Let me do that. A lady in your condition should take care.’
Dina rubs her side. The cramping seems to be getting worse. She should have listened to Eitan and taken the morning off to rest. The baker kneels down and gathers up the wayward produce, placing it all back in a new plastic bag, together with the pretzel. Dina’s mother has disappeared.
There must have been birdsong outside the bedroom window the morning after her mother died, but all Dina remembers is the deep silence that took over the house. She tried to get out of bed. Her legs felt rigid and her heart swollen, as if her mother had jammed herself into all the crevices of Dina’s body. Maybe her mother was hiding away, watching, waiting quietly, only to walk out of the dark and tell Dina it had all been a big mistake. That morning, when she wanted so much to snuggle up to her, the room grew colder and the house turned to stone.
Eventually, Dina staggered down to the kitchen. An ashtray stood on the table, filled with cigarette butts from the night before. The stench of stale smoke from her mother’s chain-smoking still hung in the air. Dina picked a half-smoked cigarette up from the pile and brought it to her mouth. She realised this was probably the last thing to ever touch her mother’s lips. She kissed her goodbye: a stale, tarry kiss. As she sat in the chair where her mother watched daytime soaps, her own reflection stared back at Dina from the blank television screen. She watched as the image turned into her mother. The hips that bore her rested on a metal slab in the morgue that morning. The coroner’s scalpel etching the body for clues to explain why. As if she needed a motive. Her mother’s heart had died many years before.
Dina can still picture their house in Caulfield. She walks from room to room in her mind and remembers where her mother kept the matches, thimbles, hair curlers, Father’s cufflinks, Dina’s old potty; the ordinary stuff of their ordinary days. Nothing ever came of Dina’s search for adoption papers when she was small. Now she knows how carefully her mother poured her own life into her daughter’s.
The baker hands Dina her bag and goes back to polishing his eggs. She thanks him and stands there awkwardly for a moment.
‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’
Dina looks around for her mother. She gathers up her packages and starts walking away. ‘No, thank you. I can manage by myself.’
CHAPTER 10
The shoemaker’s workshop lies hidden at the edge of the shuk, down a crooked laneway that reeks of cat piss. The metal door rests slightly ajar and a bell tinkles as Dina pushes it open. She enters a dimly lit cave in the wall, its interior redolent of a tiny shtetl in Europe, pungent with leather and blacking. The shoemaker’s three-legged Labrador, blind eyes shining like mother-of-pearl, hauls himself up from a threadbare mat and limps over to greet her by shoving his snout into her crotch. Stepping forward to avoid him, she leans her pregnant belly against the counter.
‘Dreifoos,’ the shoemaker says gently. ‘Settle down.’
The dog has a quick sniff of Dina’s bags, then gives up and heads back to its corner.
Dina could stare at the shoemaker all day. With his knobbly white knuckles and brown leather apron that hugs his rotund belly, he looks like a character that stepped straight out of a fairytale. He is busy gluing the sole of an old boot. On a shelf behind him, a small fan pivots to-and-fro, blowing wafts of glue into Dina’s face. She places her broken shoe onto the workbench.
‘One shoe does not walk alone,’ he says in a quiet, steady voice, without looking up at her.
Dina stands barefoot on the cold tiles, her right foot resting on her left. She places her other shoe next to its mate.
‘Will it take long to fix?’
He stops what he is doing but turns away without answering. Shuffling over to a basin, he fills an old kettle with water and sets it carefully onto a metal ring. As he lights the small gas burner, blue flames lick at the chipped green enamel of the kettle, which sizzles and seethes. Dina looks beyond the shoemaker, at shelves running from ceiling to floor. His whole life seems to be crammed into them. Boxes of nails and shoelaces, a pair of worn-out satin ladies shoes, a blue leather baby’s boot, a blurred black-and-white photo of a young girl with curls swept back from her forehead, a twenty-year-old Haifa telephone book, a clock with hands frozen at twelve o’clock. His past is hidden in this cave and the tools of his trade seem to be holding him together.
Dina’s broken shoe lies on its side like a patient in pre-op waiting for surgery. In the background, a radio plays Mozart. The shelves that line the side walls are all piled high with sandals, shoes and boots, some split open, their gaping mouths waiting to tell their stories. Dina follows the cracks in the whitewashed ceiling, which widen into gaps just above the shoemaker’s head. Spiders hang expectantly in crevices, their spindly legs balanced on threads of silken webs.
The shoemaker turns his head, peering at her through glasses that magnify his eyes. He pushes the frames higher up onto the bridge of his nose, setting off a shrill squeal from the hearing aid wedged behind his left ear. He moves back over to the workbench and picks up the broken shoe. With the concentration of a surgeon about to embark upon a complex operation, he rubs his thumb over the black leather uppers. He pokes a finger into the broken heel. Lifting it gently with his left hand, he checks where it has sheared off, eyeing it carefully. Then, placing everything back down on the bench, he reaches into the front pocket of his apron and pulls ou
t a small docket book and pencil. He writes slowly, his trembling hand etching a thin scrawl on the yellowed paper – ten shekels – and passes it over to Dina. ‘It will be ready in half an hour.’
‘Can’t you do it straightaway?’ Searching her purse for some coins, she offers to pay double to give him a bit of a push, but he ignores her. Or maybe he simply hasn’t heard.
‘Pay on collection,’ he says calmly. ‘Half an hour.’
‘Doesn’t it just need gluing?’ she asks, suspecting his deafness, like Mrs Susskind’s, may be selective.
He looks up, his gaze suddenly piercing. ‘Repairs take time.’ A tiny wooden spike clamped firmly between his teeth moves up and down as he speaks.
His head is balding. Fine silver hairs stand out like tiny antennae. He has soft grey eyes, but Dina can see the all-too-familiar scars of a survivor staring out from behind them. If she were a superhero they’d call her Trauma Girl. She can detect a tortured soul within a two-hundred-metre radius. Her mother must have sewn some kind of microchip sensor under her skin when she was born.
Dina was six years old when her mother first ended up in hospital. It was a hot day and she was busy making juice with her father to take along when they went to visit. He cut the oranges into halves and Dina squeezed them. Some of the juice spilt onto the floor, but her father calmly wiped it up. Then he poured what remained into a thermos flask and added some ice cubes. A warm wind blew strands of hair into her eyes as they walked down a side street to visit her mother. Dina jumped along the footpath, careful not to step on a crack. They stopped outside a rusty gate, and her father fiddled with the latch, which creaked as it gave way to an overgrown path leading to an old brick house. A nurse showed them into a room that smelled of antiseptic. Dina clutched a bunch of daffodils in one hand and held tightly onto the edge of her father’s trouser leg with the other. Seeing her mother lying on a bed in the middle of the room, Dina took a step towards her, but her father held his arm out.
‘She is sleeping,’ he whispered. He knelt down to hug his daughter, taking the flowers from her.
Her mother was breathing slowly.
He placed the daffodils and the thermos of orange juice onto a table by the bed. Her mother didn’t stir. As he chatted quietly to the nurse, Dina stepped from white tile to black on the floor, imagining she was a pawn tiptoeing across a giant chessboard. She couldn’t make out much of what they were saying, but the words ‘shock treatment’ made her ears prick up.
‘We have to go now.’ Her father interrupted the game almost as soon as it had begun. ‘We’ll let her rest and come back tomorrow.’
‘Will she get better, Tati?’
‘It will take a little while,’ he whispered. ‘But she’ll be home soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘It’ll only be a few weeks.’
All the leaves had turned brown and fallen from the trees. Dina added the phrase ‘shock treatment’ to the list of mysterious words she had overheard and memorised throughout the years, and planned to look it up when they got back home. The list was long, filled with words that bobbed to the surface during hushed conversations her parents had when they thought she wasn’t listening: depression, concentration camp, crematorium, kapo, weidergutmachungs. She couldn’t find all of them in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. But even though she didn’t understand their meanings, they were as familiar to her ears as good morning and homework.
Looking back now, Dina can see how hard her father tried to fill the role of both parents, weaving together the gaping hole left by her mother’s absence.
As soon as they left the hospital that day, her father took Dina down to the grassy foreshore at Elwood Beach to see the elephant. Silvers Circus was in town. The elephant’s thick, squat leg was tethered to a wooden stake with a metal chain. Chocolate-dipped ice-cream from Mr Whippy’s van dripped down Dina’s chin, and no matter how fast she licked, it melted all over her puff-sleeved blue velvet dress. Her father pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and wiped her mouth.
‘How did you know the elephant would be here today, Tati?’ she asked.
He grasped Dina’s sticky hand and lifted her up, holding her in his strong arms. ‘Tati takes care of everything,’ he said, kissing her cheek.
The sun came out from behind the clouds and the elephant’s tail swung from side to side, flicking flies away from its rump. Dina watched as it pulled up great tufts of grass with its vacuum-cleaner trunk. Her father told her she could pat the elephant’s side. She felt the leathery folds of its skin. The huge creature turned its head and stared at her with its wise, black eye. For a couple of hours that afternoon, Dina left her mother behind in the darkness of the hospital room, and stepped out with her father into the world outside of Caulfield and Bergen-Belsen.
If she has to wait for the shoemaker, Dina figures she might as well duck across to the fruit stall across the lane and do some more shopping.
‘I’ll be back in ten minutes,’ she says.
The shoemaker slides Dina’s shoes over to the side of the bench where an assortment of footwear lies, seemingly abandoned at various stages of repair.
‘Can you put it under the name “Dina”, so they don’t get mixed up with the others?’
He looks up at her and she feels her face flush.
‘I don’t mean you’d lose them or anything, it’s just that they’re very special to me.’
‘I always know which pair belongs to which customer.’ His eyes look bulbous through the thickened lenses of his glasses. ‘I remember people by their shoes.’
Something about his way of staring draws Dina to stay; it’s that look from somewhere else.
‘They were my mother’s,’ she says. ‘She brought them with her from Germany after the war.’
‘She was in camp?’
‘Bergen-Belsen.’ Dina utters it like a password that unlocks the door to a secret world.
‘I learnt my trade in Auschwitz,’ he says.
Dina is tempted to ask more, but won’t let the questions form in her throat. The shoemaker keeps staring at her, as though he has heard her thoughts. Dina lowers her eyes quickly, slamming the lid tight on a box filled with writhing snakes of memory.
The dog starts making guttural noises, eagerly attending to fleas in its groin. Examining Dina’s broken heel again, the shoemaker clicks his tongue. He points to a large shelf filled with more musty-smelling shoes. ‘These are all waiting to be picked up.’ He turns to look at her again. ‘Some have been here for over fifteen years.’
They both know no one is coming to collect these shoes, the abandoned, orphan footwear of the dead. The shoemaker keeps them anyway, as if to preserve the memory of people who are long gone. Or perhaps he is waiting for a miracle, for one of the lost souls to return one day and claim their shoes.
The shoemaker looks like he is trapped in another time, hemmed in on all sides by ageing tools of his trade.
‘A woman with child should not rush. Why don’t you have a cup of tea with me while you wait?’
Dina rubs at the small of her back and reluctantly eases her bottom down onto a stool. She may as well stay put. She has nothing much better to do while she waits, and running around barefoot will probably only make her toe throb more, or her headache worse. The old man pulls a rusty tray out of a shabby cardboard box and places it beside him. While he waits for the water to boil, he takes out three glasses and spoons some sugar into each one. He opens a packet of Wissotzky tea and heaps a pile of leaves into a blue teapot.
‘Today is really quite a warm day for May, don’t you think?’ Without waiting for an answer, he turns his attention back to the workbench, tugging at the sole of Dina’s broken shoe.
‘What a lovely man,’ her mother says, appearing at the entrance to the shop, a fist planted on her hip.
‘You know, these are the best nails I ever owned. They’re made of wood, not steel,’ the shoemaker says, suddenly becoming talkative. Dina has an odd
feeling he is speaking directly to her mother. ‘They came from a factory on Hechalutz Street,’ he continues. ‘It used to be owned by old Eichenbaum. What a character he was, that man. He would dip the wood in almond essence back in those days. But I told him we’d all be better off if he used whisky instead. Ha!’ He starts hammering steadily. ‘I don’t have many of those old nails left now. I bought them up in bulk when he closed down a couple of years ago. Poor fellow.’ He sighs heavily, looking straight at where Dina’s mother is standing. ‘You know, his kids threw him straight into a nursing home.’
The kettle starts to whistle, quickly building up to a screaming crescendo as steam blasts from its nozzle. The shoemaker puts down his hammer again, removes the wooden spike from his mouth and shuffles back over to the gas burner, turning off the flame. He fills the teapot with boiling water and lets it brew a little before he pours the tea through a metal strainer. With a tarnished silver spoon he stirs in the undissolved sugar and carefully slides one of the glasses across the workbench in front of Dina. She tries to pick it up but it’s far too hot to hold. He brings his own glass up to his mouth and empties half of it with a few quick sips. The third glass stands on the bench, steaming and untouched. She wonders who else he is expecting.
‘You’d be surprised at all the little tricks a shoemaker knows. We are like magicians.’ He sips the rest of his tea slowly now. ‘But nobody wants to repair shoes anymore; most things have become disposable. People are in such a hurry nowadays. They all say it’s quicker to buy new ones.’ He sighs. ‘But I tell my customers, an old pair of shoes is like an old friend. Comfortable.’
The shoemaker notices Dina looking at his ancient hearing aid. She hasn’t seen one of those in years.
‘I am almost deaf,’ he says, half-smiling. He reaches up to fiddle with the device. It squeals in protest. ‘And this old thing doesn’t help much, Dr Ronen.’
Waiting Room, The Page 13
