Dina is crying. Eitan holds her head in his hands, Lily cradled in the papoose, fast asleep between them. On the table, a jar filled with daisies smiles at them, while curtains hold off the rising heat of the day. She can hardly recognise the words as they form in her throat. She has to force out each syllable as she tries to say it right.
‘I want to go home.’ She feels as if an icy gust of wind has driven right through her. ‘I need to show Shlomi where I come from.’
Eitan strokes his tiny daughter’s head. ‘What about Lily?’
‘I want to take her too.’ A voice inside Dina, at odds with the words that have just shot out from her mouth, is hoping in vain he will try to stop her from leaving.
A chasm lies between them; they can both see that now. Eitan is silent, as if he senses Dina’s body already disappearing across continents and oceans. He understands his wife needs to go before she can return – if she ever does, that is. Dina can see her words burn right through him, but his voice is patient and tender.
‘What are you looking for there that you don’t have here?’
Dina hasn’t been back to Australia since they married. She tried to amputate her past to embrace her hopes for the future. After all these years, it has taken a bomb blast to stop Eitan treating her as an outsider. Maybe he can see now that Dina is as much a veteran of this country as he is. Perhaps even more so, since she has experienced an intimacy with horror he has never known. Dina looks at her husband, the father of her children, the man who was the love of her life when they met.
‘I’m not sure,’ she says.
He kisses Dina’s cheek then takes a step back, his lips moist with her tears. ‘Maybe you’ll only know after you’ve left.’
EPILOGUE
Melbourne – September 2001
It’s been so many years since Dina has visited her mother’s grave that she can’t even remember which part of the cemetery it’s in. She walks along the main path, passing by tombstones etched with familiar names, friends of her parents, parents of her friends.
‘There is Rosa Winter’s mother.’ She points out one of the tombstones to Shlomi. ‘She made a great liptauer cheese dip. And over there is Mr Fleischmann, the kosher butcher who juggled lamb’s eyes behind the counter when I was your age.’
‘Ikhss. Gross!’ Shlomi screws up his nose.
‘Then he’d lean over to pat me on the head with his huge, blood-stained hand.’
Shlomi runs ahead of her.
Searching for her mother, Dina turns off the path and wanders between the graves that seem to be watching her as she passes. Shlomi weaves in and out between the tombstones. Noticing a small group of mourners huddled together in Aisle K, Dina thinks about asking them for directions. Why did she assume she would be able to find her mother so easily now, when it was impossible to reach her while she was alive?
‘Shlomi, see if you can gather a few small stones for us to put on your Bubba and Zeide’s graves, will you?’
After he scurries off, Dina whispers. ‘Mother? Where are you? Are you here in this place?’ Dina imagines her up in Heaven somewhere, rowing around in a glass-bottom boat, looking down on them.
She feels herself being pulled ahead. Typical Melbourne weather has her shivering in the middle of spring. In its hurry to get somewhere, the cool breeze claws at her, collecting twigs, leaves, Snickers wrappers, torn Target catalogues and wearing them like fancy dress over its invisible, shifting form. It teases Dina, laughs at her with its bluster. And somewhere, wafting in its grip, is the faint smell of her mother’s favourite cashmere sweater.
Dina has only a wispy memory of her mother’s funeral. An old rabbi in a black suit stood beside the freshly dug grave, his hairy stomach bulging between the buttons of his white shirt. Someone tore Dina’s collar, a ritual in memory of Jacob who rent his own garment when he thought his son had died. The rabbi told her it symbolised the immortality of her mother’s soul, after the demise of her mortal body. While they were lowering the coffin into the ground, each of the mourners shovelling their own tiny avalanche of dirt into the grave, Dina had already started to forget the colour of her mother’s eyes, the shape of her lips.
She must be getting nearer. She feels as bare as bone.
‘We need to talk, Mother.’
Dina is ready to weave through their spidery past together. It has taken her a long time to come visit. Maybe if she could know her mother now, she might finally be able to listen carefully to all those stories, write them down, pass them on to her children as they grow. Dina turned her back on her mother years ago, but now she wants to be held again like a child, a loving hand stroking her hair, giving her sage advice on what to do about her crumbling marriage, her fractured life.
At last, Dina sees her mother’s grave, huddled beside her father’s.
‘Shlomi! I’ve found it. It’s over here.’
‘Okay!’ he calls from somewhere over near the fence. ‘I’m coming!’
‘Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.’ She recites the ‘Kaddish’, the mourner’s prayer, standing in front of the grey tombstone. The Aramaic words have become so familiar to Dina, even though they are meaningless to her ears. She has been to so many funerals since her mother died – a hazard of her trade as a doctor – that she knows the ancient prayer by heart.
Dina is not one for ritual, nor for visiting the dead. She doesn’t like cemeteries. As a child she used to play a game with her friends where they held their breath every time they passed a graveyard. The rule was, whoever breathed first was going to be the first to die.
‘Well, would you look at this?’
Dina hears her mother’s voice coming out of the grave.
‘Over my dead body, what do you know? It’s my own daughter, finally come to visit me here, instead of me having to chase her around the world all the time.’
Baby Lily is fast asleep in her papoose.
‘Would you like a slice of apple cake, darling?’ her mother asks. ‘It’s freshly baked.’
Dina pulls a tissue out from inside her sleeve. It was her mother who taught her always to tuck a clean handkerchief under her cuff, just in case.
‘How about some whipped cream with it?’
Dina dabs at a tear. She cried so much when her mother died; at first tears of disbelief, then relief and afterwards guilt. Dina cannot believe she still has any tears left. She thinks Jews ought to have more words for tears, like Eskimos have for types of snow. How stupid she feels standing here in front of a bag of bones, long gone, talking to her mother. A gust of wind slices through her. A kookaburra cackles from a nearby tree.
As she faces her mother’s grave, Dina can almost feel her own flesh starting to rot. Each one of us carries time in our bodies, death in our bones, she thinks.
‘We are all betrothed to death, darling. From the moment we are born,’ her mother interrupts Dina’s thoughts. ‘Now sit down. Have some apple cake. Tell me all your news.’
‘You haven’t been around lately, Mother. I’m actually surprised you are still talking to me. I thought you were finally dead.’
‘Dead, shmead. You think that would keep a Jewish mother quiet when her daughter finally comes to visit her grave after so long?’
‘I would have come sooner, Mother.’
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. What’s the rush? I’ve been dead for over twenty years, and I’m going to be dead for many more, so what are a few years of waiting here and there?’
Dina tugs at a nail with her teeth.
‘Look at your nails! You’re biting them again. I thought you’d stopped, Dina. My father used to tell me our nails are sacred; small pieces of our soul. I wish there was a good manicurist around here. Mine are a mess.’
She takes a puff of her eternal cigarette and flicks the ash out of the coffin.
‘Careful, Mother, you’ll burn down the cemetery.’
‘So, what do I care? God is my witness your father and I paid enough for these plots, and the shnorrer
s, those misers, cheated us and stuck us all the way over here in a row with no view. So let them all go to hell, I say. And anyway, you know what – smoking is not going to give me lung cancer now!’ She is growing louder by the minute. ‘Have you come after all these years just so you can kill me again with your nagging?’
‘But, Mother –’ Dina tries to interrupt.
‘But, shmutt. Don’t you “but” me, young lady. How could I ever expect you to understand? You might as well take a knife and stab me right in the heart. Go on, do it already. What are you waiting for?’
‘How can I kill you? You’re dead already, Mother, remember?’
‘Ach,’ she says, calming down a little, ‘Jewish mothers never really die.’ After an emphatic pause, she continues. ‘So. How’s things with Eitan?’
Dina doesn’t answer. Lily stirs in her sleep, squeezing out a tiny whimper. Dina’s mother hasn’t noticed her yet.
‘What’s wrong, darling?’ her mother asks. ‘Here, come sit on the edge of my tombstone. It’s quite a nice one, really. But you know what a ganef that Mr Pollack was, the thief? He overcharged us. Your father, may-his-dear-soul-rest-in-peace, was so gullible in those days; he should have pre-booked the plots and got a discount. But no, he insisted on waiting and look now, no room left to bury you next to us, which is maybe not such a bad thing in the end. A woman should be buried next to her husband, after all. Although, Mr and Mrs Triggendorf are buried at opposite ends of the cemetery. She tells me anyway she doesn’t know if her nerves could have stood being next to him for eternity; says he’d drive her crazy with his complaints – the dirt’s too hard, the worms aren’t good quality. She says she spent half her lifetime with the man, so doesn’t she deserve a break?’
‘So, Mother, how have you been?’ Dina says, trying to change the subject.
‘What a question, darling. How can a dead woman be?’ She drags on her cigarette.
Lily lets out a little groan.
‘This is my daughter, Mother.’
‘My granddaughter? Oy, a shayneh maydeleh. She’s so beautiful. What’s her name?’
‘Lily.’
‘You named her after your father’s Lily?’
‘Yes.’
‘He would have liked that.’
‘I brought her to meet you. We’re visiting Melbourne for a while.’
‘And Eitan? Is he with you?’
‘No, Mother. We’re having a bit of a break at the moment. It’s just me and the kids. Shlomi’s here too.’ Dina looks around but can’t see him anywhere. He must be searching for more stones. She’s not too worried – a graveyard’s as safe a place as any for a kid to wander around. ‘Shlomi! Come visit your grandmother.’
‘What do you mean? You took the children away from their father?’ her mother says, her voice sounding gravelly.
‘Just for a while, till I sort myself out.’
‘Sort yourself out? What’s to sort? Listen, Dina. I waited a long time for you, but now I’m dead tired. You need to let me be where I belong. Go on, be a good girl and listen to your old mother for once. You’re going to have to work this one out by yourself.’ A cigarette butt comes flying out from the grave, landing on the ground beside a pile of dead matches.
Shlomi rushes up to Dina and dumps blossom and pebbles he has gathered onto his grandparents’ graves. He reaches out to grab his mother’s hand, his fingernails lined with dirt.
‘It’s a pity they never got to meet you, Shlomi,’ Dina says. ‘But I think somehow, even though they are gone, they still love you very much.’
Lily wriggles in her papoose, stretching out her arms as she wakes. She lets out a tiny cry.
‘Mummy, I miss Abba,’ Shlomi says, picking a dandelion that is growing out from a crack in the marble of his grandmother’s grave and blowing the seeds into the air. ‘Can we go now?’
‘Mother,’ Dina whispers. ‘What would you do if you were in my shoes?’
‘Dina,’ her mother answers. ‘Love is more ferocious than terror. What on earth are you waiting for?’
Dina understands every choice has its own sacrifice.
She leans over to give Shlomi a kiss. Holding his hand, she guides him away from her mother’s grave and back onto the path.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have been fortunate to have a global village of people who have generously supported the development of The Waiting Room in so many ways over the years. My deepest thanks go to Johanan Loeffler and our children, Alon, Ella and Maia, who grew up with this book – they have been my greatest fans and have helped me with ideas, constructive edits and love. My extended family have also cheered me on along the way. I first spoke at length about the idea for this novel with my dear mentor and friend, Yosl Bergner. I am so deeply indebted to the graciousness and generosity of trusted early readers who provided me with invaluable feedback and encouragement – Peter Balakian, Lisa Berryman, Peter Bishop, Geraldine Brooks, Leslie Cannold, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Davidoff, Evan Fallenberg, Joanne Fedler, Abby Frucht, Jerome Groopman, Jacinta Halloran, Diana Hanaor, Antoni Jach, Joshilyn Jackson, Liz Kemp, Lee Kofman, Sandra Levin, Andrea Rothman, Graeme Simsion, Catherine Therese, Aviva Tuffield, Fiona Wood, Lane Zachary and Paul Zakrzewski.
Both Jacinta di Mase and Todd Shuster have been dream agents. At Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary, Jacob Moore helped hone the manuscript. Lexy Bloom and Danny Yanez have been champions of my work, urging me all along that this story needed to be told. I am forever indebted to the lovely Meredith Curnow and her colleague Nikki Christer at Random House Australia, for believing so strongly in this book. Their extraordinary team of book designer Nada Backovic, managing editor Brandon Van Over, editor Elena Gomez and publicists Emma Lawrence and Judy Jamieson-Green have been a joy to work with.
Being awarded the Eleanor Dark Foundation Flag-ship Fellowship at Varuna, the Writers’ House, in 2007 was a turning point in my career. I am grateful in particular to Peter Bishop and to all the staff and the talented and generous community of writers I met there. I was also fortunate to be selected for the inaugural Grace Marion Wilson Trust Masterclass, led by Antoni Jach, who together with my fellow participants, Alison Goodman, Matt Hooper, Simmone Howell, Toni Jordan, Angelina Mirabito and Jane Sullivan kept me going when I was ready to give up on the manuscript. So too, Lan Samantha Chang and Ethan Canin from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and my fellow workshop colleagues, especially Bev Magennis. I am grateful to the Copyright Agency for their support through the Creative Industries Career Fund, as well as for being short-listed for the CAL/Scribe Fiction Prize. Thanks to Writers Victoria for both the Grace Marion Wilson Trust Fellowship at Glenfern Writers’ Studios and a Writing@ Rosebank residential fellowship. I am indebted to Mary Delahunty, Joel Becker, Kate Larsen and Iola Mathews.
I was honoured to be given time and space to work on this book as Writer-in-Residence, in turn, at the Jewish Holocaust Research Centre, the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate School of Writing, as well as Billilla/Bayside Studios. Vermont College of Fine Arts faculty, staff and students were the most passionate supporters an author could ever have – they have become my writing family. I am indebted to Creative Victoria for an early development grant. The Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts provided me with both a Project Development Grant and a New Work Grant, which allowed me to spend dedicated writing time to work on the manuscript. Being chosen as a finalist in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition was a dream come true. Earlier versions of parts of this book have been published in The Pen & the Stethoscope (Scribe), Writer, M.D. (Knopf US), Transnational Literature and Jewish Fiction.net. An earlier excerpt of the novel was runner-up in the FAW Angelo B. Natoli Short Story Award.
So many others have helped with both writing and researching The Waiting Room. Special thanks go to Karin Altmann, Richard Bausch, Dr Steven Corder, Trinie Dalton, Connie May Fowler, Jennie Fraine, Donna-Lee Frieze, Deborah Harris, Robin Hemley, Carolyn Hessel, Brendon Higgins, Daryl Karp,
Tom Keneally, Michael Kramer, Moshe Lang, Deborah Leiser-Moore, Robert Jay Lifton, Julie Lustig, Richard McCann, Alice Nelson, Rosemary Nissen, David Rose, Oliver Sacks, Majid Shokor, Domenic Stansberry, Xu Xi, Michal Zafir and Ghil’ad Zuckermann.
Without Clint McCown, my MFA advisor at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I would never have had the courage and determination to finish this book. He taught me to honour the memory of my haints and embrace their haunting. The word haunt is derived from the Old Norse heimt, to lead home. So, finally, I would like to acknowledge those in my family who perished before I ever had the privilege of knowing them, but whose stories have helped me find my way.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leah Kaminsky is an award-winning writer and physician. She is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia and Online Editor at Hunger Mountain. She conceived and edited Writer, M.D., an anthology of contemporary doctor-writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was shortlisted in the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Writing Competition. Leah is the author of Cracking the Code. This is her first novel.
‘Dina, the child of Holocaust survivors, struggles herself to survive the burden of memory and misery that has infused her Melbourne childhood. Far from home, working as a doctor in Haifa and married to a stoic Israeli, she must find a way to quiet her ghosts before their dark voices further dim her own chance at happiness. At a time when the survivors’ generation is rapidly diminishing, this novel reminds us that suffering on such a scale has a potent half-life. The Waiting Room is both haunted, and haunting.’
– Geraldine Brooks
‘The Waiting Room deftly draws together and personalises the legacy of the Holocaust and the present-day threat to Israel. It is an assured debut with a complex, believable and engaging protagonist. Finely observed characters and vignettes give us a human perspective on a culture that is too often portrayed only in political terms. Compelling, moving and memorable.’
Waiting Room, The Page 19
