Vera (15 page)

We are closer to Israel than I have ever been in my life. If Jan and Marek and I were to get off the ship at Cairo, we could walk to Israel. I like to imagine that – jumping off, hiking to Jerusalem – except, of course, that Jan would not be part of such an expedition.

My appetite for Israel goes back to the handsome young men who came to Poland after the war, the young men who said, ‘Jump in the water. Walk up the sand to Israel. The Jews will be waiting for you. Grow your oranges.'

Jan says – of course he does – ‘Zionist propaganda. Stay in Warsaw if you want to listen to such things all your life.'

I say, ‘Are you mad? We are Jews. Israel is our homeland.'

Jan shakes his head and sighs. ‘The Israelis are insane. I'm sorry, but it's true.'

Well, I was not about to leave Jan behind for the sake of oranges. I am not sentimental, but maybe I am a little when it comes to Israel. If Jan should say, ‘I've had a change of heart. Israel is okay,' I would run down the gangplank at the city of Cairo and start the long journey over the sand to Jerusalem.

In the cabin, when the lights are out, my body is covered in the sweat of panic. It is too much like the compartments of the ghetto. My lips are parted on my gritted teeth. It would be too shameful if I showed my dread to Marek. So I sing very softly to myself. When the song comes to an end, I talk myself around. I say, ‘Werunia, time to be sensible. It's a ship. Listen, you can hear the engines. Listen, you can hear the snores of the others in the cabin. In the places of hiding, nobody snored. In such places, you did not hear the big engines of a ship.' Then I sing another song. Then this: ‘Australia is at the end of the journey. Not a murder camp. In Australia, they love the Jews. As much as the Germans and the Poles hate the Jews, the Australians love us. Calm yourself, Werunia.'

Sometimes I can read in bed without any dread. I enjoy that.

But when the lights go out, I am a child again, not much older than my own son.

Do you see what the Nazis have done? Some of them stood in the courtroom in Nuremberg and heard a judge say, ‘You must hang.' Now they are gone. Some stood on the scaffold thinking God knows what – probably that a terrible injustice was about to be enacted by the hangman, probably that they were innocent of any crime, much less a big, big one like a crime against humanity. They are gone, except for some who have changed their names and who now eat badly prepared schnitzel and sauerkraut in the cheaper restaurants of Buenos Aires and Rio and São Paulo and Santiago. Now they are gone.

But on this ship in the Indian Ocean, one who feared them is covered in the sweat of panic. They have gone to the hangman, gone to Rio and Santiago, but they have left behind enough fear to make me shake under my blankets like a woman with a fever.

In the Indian Ocean, it is hotter than anywhere I have been in my life. Ice-cream is sold on the ship. I buy ice-creams from the kiosk and offer them to Marek. He loves ice-cream more than anything in the world, more than his mama, more than his toys. But not more than Jan. If he were told to choose between ice-creams and Jan, he would say, ‘I choose Jan, because he loves me.' I love him too, but he would not choose me before ice-creams. I think to myself, ‘Werunui, one day if you try hard, you will become as important as ice-cream.' And I laugh. I say to Jan, ‘Take Marek for a walk around the ship. Show him everything. I have to read.'

When I read in the deckchair, with the sky above me and the sun burning down, the officers, in their white uniforms, come to flirt.

The ones who know where I am from say sweet things in Polish with very bad pronunciation. ‘
Cześć, kochanie,
' which means, ‘Hi, sweetheart.' And, ‘
Czy mogę całusa?
' or, ‘How about a kiss?'

I smile and say, ‘
Odpieprz się!
' which is to say, ‘Bugger off!'

They don't know what it means. They think I am flirting back at them, which is true. I am wearing a sundress and my legs are on show. The officers think I am trying to tempt them. I am not. If they want to glance at my legs, so much the better for them. I don't care. I want to read.

I want to read
Fathers and Sons
in English. Turgenev. The Russians love Turgenev more than Tolstoy, more than Dostoyevsky. Maybe not more than Chekhov. I will step off the ship in Melbourne speaking whole paragraphs from Russian literature.

Jan's mother says the Australians do not read anything. She says they go to the beach and lie in the sun. They don't care about anything but the sun. In winter, she says, they become depressed, so they have invented an insane ball game to play in the winter to stop themselves becoming depressed. She says they are harmless people. We have nothing to fear.

I don't have
Fathers and Sons
with me, but I do have
Anna Karenina
. I read, ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; I will repay.' I know this in Polish: ‘
Zemsta jest moja, mówi Bóg; ponszczę
.'

I will have no use for a statement like this in Australia, where they do not believe in vengeance, so I hope. They have the sun and the beach and the game they play in winter when they are depressed. But I firmly believe they do not have vengeance. Good. I can do without vengeance.

Or is that true? My uncle who wanted to rape me in Lvov, if he had not died, would I have murdered him? Possibly. But who needs to dirty her hands in that way when God is ready to repay? May He go to Rio and São Paulo and Buenos Aires and repay with great fervour. Or not.

What do you want, Werunia, here in the blazing sun in the middle of the Indian Ocean? A world in which evil is always punished? Yes, how lovely. But it only happens sometimes.

Read your book, your
Anna Karenina
. ‘Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky household. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an affair with their former French governess, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living with him.'

It is difficult to work out which word is which. Polish grammar and syntax is different.

I look up from
Anna
and from my notebook to see the horizon tilting and straightening with the motion of the ship.

And dear God, look! I drop my
Anna
and hurry to the rail. A huge bird is riding the currents of the air. At this distance it looks black, like a silhouette, but when it tilts its body I see that its wings are white while the body is grey. As I watch, it comes closer, in a huge circle, its wings stretched wide, wide … three metres, more. Its neck is bent so that it stares down at the ocean; I think it is looking for fish.

This is an albatross, surely, with wings that wide!

My heart is up there with this superb creature of the air. Tears stand in my eyes.

I know Baudelaire's poem about the albatross. In Polish, it begins: ‘
“Często znudzeni marynarze łapią albatorsa, ktory szybuje nad rozległym oceanem, pełnym morskich ptaków …
' And in English (the English that I could not speak on this day of the albatross):

This is a different way of looking at those who can fly – those whom my friend in Warsaw praises. It is only when they are airborne that they come fully to life, and show their majesty.

In the Australia that I will come to know, how Baudelaire's view of the poet will be mocked, or if not the poet, then all those winged ones who stumble when they alight on a deck with their broad wings dragging.

Look now at the creature. It is a god.

The albatross changes direction after a time and soars away towards the sun. When he is no more than a black speck, I return to Anna.

‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Is this true? We are a happy family, Marek and Jan and I, but we are not like any other happy family I have ever known. There is no sex; the mother is an acknowledged failure at motherhood; the child prefers an alcoholic journalist to his own
Mamele
. But we are happy enough.

Australia is over the horizon. In four more days, we will stop at a city by the name of Fremantle, before we go under the bottom of the continent and dock at Melbourne.

Australia, may I introduce my happy family. I bring you gifts: my clever brain, Jan's writing, Marek's sunny disposition. Also some less-welcome cargo stored in a dark cellar of my memory. Germans in black uniforms and polished boots that come up almost to their knees. A line of small children stands before the Germans. The officer in black points with his finger at one child, then another, another, and many more. He says, ‘
Dieser Mann … das Mädchen … Dieser Junge …
' He does not point at me. I am not in the line of children. I am hidden away.

But I am watching.

It is the watching that I bring with me.

  
14
  

AUSTRALIA

W
hat if you sailed on and sailed on, heading for a land that might be anything, you just don't know, but your hope is that you will walk down the gangplank with a huge smile on your face, gazing out at a city that exceeds everything you had attempted to imagine?

Perhaps I allowed optimism to take the place of sense. I thought:
People will embrace me. The Australians will say: ‘Werunia, all this way from Poland? We welcome you.'

I hold the hand of my son. He, too, is smiling. And Jan is laughing. ‘My darling,' he says, ‘like cats we leapt from a window, turned in the air and landed on our feet.'

Well, the place that the gangplank leads to is not paradise, but it's okay. The architecture is dull, but who lives her life, or his, for the chance to study interesting buildings? Not such a problem. But, you know, better if the architecture was a little more engaging.

The Australians themselves are cheerful, very cheerful, very friendly, maybe a bit too much, as if they were gloriously unaware of anything in life that needed to be hated, scorned. I like the Australians. Men wear their shirt sleeves rolled up. They say, ‘How you going, love?' They think football is more important than food and shelter, than anything. Who cannot love people like this?

They are children. The sun shines on them all day long, for the whole of their lives. Australia is like a playground for them. Who among them has seen a man in a suit and tie hanging from a lamppost outside his shop? Here, soldiers have never been permitted to grab children in the streets, throw them to the ground and put a boot heel on their throats. Hell is in other lands, as far away as the planets.

I love these Australians who cannot imagine hell. May all the world be like this sunny place of men with their sleeves rolled up, men who lean against anything close by – a wall, a doorway, a telephone post – lean and smile and say as you pass, ‘How you going, love?' Men who slouch so beautifully.

Even the women, I love. They wear terylene dresses, they perm their hair, their skin is sunburnt. They don't care. Like the men, the women say, ‘How you going, love?' And if you have a troubled look about you, they say, ‘Cheer up, dearie – might never happen.'

Is it true that I saw all this in ten minutes? Maybe not. Maybe I am thinking more of the first hour than the first ten minutes. More likely, the first week, the first six months.

My mother does not live with us in the Chapel Street apartment. She wants her own place. Good. She is not my friend; I am not hers. There is an unspoken agreement between us that we will see little of each other. She is in a number of ways an extraordinary woman, but not in my life.

The love and admiration many women have for their mothers – I will never know that. I don't yearn for it. If ever I yearn, it is for my father to return to life, walk through the door of our apartment and say, ‘Werunia, sit at the piano, beloved; play me some Chopin.' We don't have a piano, and my father will never walk through the door.

The Jews of Melbourne – we meet them, many of them, Jews that Jan's aunt and cousin and his mother know – they are a different matter. Dear God, so bourgeois that they define the word! We are invited into houses where Mrs Wife has covered the sofa and armchairs with plastic sheeting to avoid any wear. The path across the carpet from the front door to the sofa and armchairs is itself covered in plastic matting. All the ornaments in the house are polished insanely. Everything glitters. If you can't make it shine, Mrs Wife doesn't want it in the house.

In one home, I ask where the toilet is to be found. Mrs Wife wears an expression of censure. I'm speaking Polish. I say, ‘
Chcę siusiu
, I want to pee.' Mrs Wife says in English, ‘You want the WC.' I raise my eyebrows. Mrs Wife frowns. ‘Down the corridor, on the left.' In the toilet, it's a hospital, on the top of the cistern a bottle of something left open that spreads the scent of the carbolic they use to scrub operating theatres. Who could shit in here? It would be a sacrilege. I feel guilty for urinating, guilty for creating the sound of piss striking the water below. When I return from the prized WC, Mrs Wife studies me as if I were a refugee from some cesspit in the pagan backwoods of Poland.

Okay, plastic on the floor, on the sofa – who cares? It's not a good sign, but who cares? What about the conversation? It doesn't exist.

After that hour or week or six months, I am in shock. This is a big land, huge, I had expected vigour, crazy appetites, madness possibly, but everyone is sleeping or else drifting, drifting. It won't be long before the first of a thousand Australian Jews will tell me that I'm an intellectual snob. They will say, ‘Vera, Vera, you complain too much. Okay, maybe we're self-satisfied and uninspired, and we've never heard of Bergman and don't care, but what about you? Do you think Bergman and Fellini matter so much? Please. Take the time to admire my sofa under the plastic covering. Take the time to praise my world-class toilet in which you are forbidden to shit. Bergman? A depressive. You want to make films, something happy is better.'

And in these houses, no books. Maybe something about Moses leading the Jews out of captivity. Nothing else.

I say to Jan, ‘How can people live without books? Do these people ever read? Nobody has even heard of Samuel Beckett. I want to kill myself.'

Okay, I'm exaggerating. Not all the Jews of Melbourne were philistines. Some were clever, even brilliant. Quite a few. And I admit that I sound extravagant when I talk about the need I have for books in my life, for art of every variety, literary art and every other sort, and of my need to see something exciting in the architecture around me. I can't help it. It is important. Listen, do you think that our talent for murdering each other in very great numbers is what we should proclaim as a great hallmark of our species? Do you think that kicking a football up and down a big patch of greenery makes us special? Okay, football makes us special in a certain way, I admit, but can you see the point I'm making? God, Adonei, Abraham, Moses, Jesus the gentle hippy of Galilee, Mohammed, even Buddha – imagining them makes us a bit special, sure, but it is art that really lifts us up higher than the angels (also, why do we never hear of books being published in Heaven? Why the hell not?) and justifies this whole insane business of being human. If you walk past a theatre where
Waiting for Godot
is playing and you think, ‘Too busy for that,' what hope is there for you on earth?

When the Jews tell me that I am an intellectual snob, will you hear what I want to say – did, in fact, say every so often? ‘Good for me. There's only one sort of snobbery you should be proud of and that's intellectual snobbery. May there be more of it.' I can forgive people almost anything so long as they will take the time to sit and read
Anna Karenina
from start to finish, and then walk up and down shaking their heads in wonder and saying, ‘Dear God! Dear God!'

Listen to me. I am Jewish, I should be happy if people don't form mobs and beat me with clubs. If they just leave me in peace. But I'm not. I need more. I need books and plays and paintings. Everyone does. Why do I even have to insist in this way? Isn't it obvious?

The Australian Jews of Melbourne, some of them – they want to get by without art. They haven't got the time. It bores them. I hold my tongue, sometimes. But here I am in this stupid, big land, and it makes me want to buy a gun and shoot all the people who won't read Beckett, then shoot myself.

Not a good idea. When things like this come into my brain, I wonder if I might be mad. I have said that in the ghetto I pictured in my mind a box of coloured pencils and stayed sane. But maybe I actually went mad in the ghetto and have been mad ever since? People look at me as if I'm mad, often. I always think, ‘What's the matter with them – are they retarded?' It might be me.

Well, what of it? I have enjoyed myself. Who do I know who has enjoyed herself as I have? A few, not many.

Craving the reader's patience (just a little bit of it, why not? – is there somewhere else you have to be?), I want to go forward for a minute from the late 1950s to the 1990s. By then, Australia had been transformed from a musty parlour smelling of lamb chops and cabbage into what we have now – many, many people with ideas that thrill me, people with brains like my box of pencils. I was asked by Cheryl Healzewood, a friend who was once in the theatre, to pose as Carmen for a poster advertising the show.

I said, ‘Any day you like.'

Cheryl dressed me up as a type of gypsy slut (I use that term with the greatest affection): a lot of cleavage, jewellery around my neck, a cigar in my gorgeous mouth. I felt at home.

I identify with this firecracker from Seville who pours out her philosophy of life in the ‘Habanera'. Carmen is mad, of course she is; nobody can live the life she has chosen without driving some bourgeois moron like Don José beserk with jealousy. And we have to remember that what enrages Don José is not Carmen's promiscuity but her freedom – he can't imagine freedom, it is beyond him, it is beyond every bourgeois, and so he kills her. I have pleased myself in life, with more kindness than Carmen, certainly, but we are kin.

So if I am mad, I'm mad in the Carmen way.

Please don't think of her as a trollop, pure and simple. Liberty always courts its own destruction, and never more so than when the one who is free is a woman.

You're free; you hate boundaries. You go further and further in your freedom. Finally, someone comes after you with a knife.

Don José should have thought, ‘This astonishing woman opened her arms to me. It's enough.'

We went to live in Pine Avenue in Elwood, next to St Kilda. All the Jews lived in St Kilda – Jews who had been here for years, some of them. And Jan and Marek and Werunia, a little further east. Elwood was quiet, tame, full of houses from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Also apartment blocks, from the same era. Along the streets, London Planes grow, with their patchwork bark and heavy, whispering foliage. Gardens, small parks. To the south, the beach, brown sands, a pier. Bathing boxes, too, such as you find on the Lido in Venice. Here and there all over the suburb, shops are arranged on each side of the street.

Among each group of shops, there is what is known in Australia as a ‘milk bar'. When you open the door to one of these milk bars, a bell tinkles and a man or a woman looking weary and bored appears from a parlour or something at the back of the shop.

Sure enough, you can buy milk in the milk bar, in one-pint bottles, and milkshakes, lollies, ice-creams. And bread: loaves with a high dome, or square ones called ‘sandwich loaves'. On the shelves, there are cans of baked beans or spaghetti for sale. On the counter and behind it sit open boxes of lollies: little shapes like mint leaves, small chocolate-coated somethings known as ‘bullets', other chocolates called ‘cobbers' – which I will come to learn is a slang term in Australia for ‘friends'.