Vera (30 page)

  
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PARTY

I
am about to turn eighty, apparently. I am to have a gala birthday party. Kerry O'Brien and his wife, Sue, are hosting it at their place in Binna Burra. There will be maybe a hundred guests, maybe a thousand, dear God. It's in the afternoon so that people who can't stay awake after seven in the evening can still attend. I can stay awake a bit later than that, but the afternoon date serves to remind me of times when I could stay up all night drinking wine and vodka and flirting with six men in an hour. These days, if you paid me a million dollars I could maybe stay up until midnight and flirt with two men in five hours. I am proud of those times past, I am happy to confess.

Some people I know, they say, ‘Ah, me, wasted years, so much frivolity, I can't even remember who I fucked, so sad!' I remember plenty. People said back then, ‘Vera, how do you do it? It exhausts me just to think about it.' How did I do it? I had the energy to do it, and the appetite. It's a disaster for your soul if the appetites of your younger years now embarrass you. What are you saying – that it wasn't you who did those things? That you are older now, and wiser?

Wisdom, spare me. I am an enemy of wisdom. I am an enemy of learning profound lessons from life. Life has taught me nothing profound, nothing that makes me want to write an inspirational book with a title that says, ‘Now that I am old and full of years, ah me, the lessons I could impart'. Everything important I know about life, I knew when I was twenty.

Who writes these encomiums for the wisdom of age? Old men, old women. Of course they want to praise wisdom. It's what they have now in place of wine and cigarettes, a hard dick, a wet pussy. They are the Augustines of our world.

When he was twenty years old, Augustine went to Carthage and made merry hell with both the girls and the boys and with some who were a bit of both. He drinks like a fish. Whatever substances they had at that time, they go into his system. He says, ‘God, what I'm doing is frightful, please save me, but not now, a bit later maybe.' Forty years pass and he writes his
Confessions
: ‘Dear friends, all that rooting, all that wine, the substances, it's no good for you. Follow the example of Jesus, no wine, no substances, no rooting, crucified at the age of thirty-three, you bet.'

But I'm touched. A birthday party. Werunia is eighty, so they say. The whole thing is to be catered: barrels of the best wine, cartloads of fine food.

Kerry says to me, ‘Vera my love, who do you want me to invite? Write a list.'

A list? I don't like lists of any sort. I see a list and it recalls for me the Nazis and their lists in Lvov. Cold beads of sweat appear on my forehead.

Still, best not to be too neurotic. I make a list. First, those I love, then those I like, then those who love me, then those who like me, and at the end a number who have not yet divulged their commitment, one way or the other.

There will be speeches. Let them be delivered by those I adore, such as Kerry and Anna. At eighty, you don't want anyone telling the entire truth about you. Let people say, ‘When I first met Vera, I laughed and drank, borrowed a smoke from the gorgeous creature, laughed and drank some more.' Or: ‘Vera Wasowski? Unusual.' Maybe: ‘I kissed her, she kissed me; the rest is legend.' What can you say about a person's life? It has to be a summary that leaves out ninety-nine per cent of everything you ever thought, everything you ever wrote, spoke, dreamed. Someone will say, ‘Werunia survived the ghetto in Lvov, she lived like a stray dog or an alley cat, she saw things too horrible to speak about, she came to Australia with Jan and Marek and made herself happy.' That's acceptable.

But ‘she survived the ghetto in Lvov' will not convey the glee of a child finding a length of potato peel in the mud, washing it not too scrupulously and stuffing it into her mouth. The extraordinary gratitude of that child's taste buds, of that child's stomach. The potato peel was the highlight of the week, and it helped the child – one muddy strip of potato peel – to imagine a future in which she found a potato peel in the gutter every day. I hope someone says. ‘Until you can dream of a paradise in which a strip of potato peel sits on a patch of mud at the feet of God, you cannot dream as Vera has dreamed.'

Can someone mention the poor and incompetent, and those who are baffled by the society they live in, those whose wits are addled, those who are despised and spurned? Can someone say this unusual woman, this peculiar woman, felt a kinship with all those people, and hated with all her heart those who looked down their pointy noses at such as them?

Between bites of exquisitely prepared sandwiches and gourmet vol-au-vents, between the marvellous pâtés served on gluten-free biscuits imported from Switzerland, between sips of Mumm and Penfolds Bin 87 shiraz, can someone speak up on the subject of my work at the Community Centre in Byron? There I managed to insult almost everyone, especially those with garlands of platitudes about the poor to distribute, and their lunches, their many lunches that raised money to assist all those who couldn't afford lunches. Okay, okay, they held their events, their lunches, and they did indeed raise money, and the money went to the poor and addled, but the self-congratulation always left me queasy.

And finally, and I give this task to those who have taken a close interest, let someone raise his glass and toast my pretty face, someone who knew that face when it was a little lovelier than it is at the moment. That would be nice. And since nothing reveals more about you than the people you honour, would someone also toast all those people who have delighted me in my long, awkward, unusual and peculiar life: Gough and Keating and Mandela, Samuel Lech and Kerry, Germaine maybe, Susan Ryan, Samuel Beckett, Leo Tolstoy, mad Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Okay, back to the hors d'oeuvres, the chicken kebabs, the Mumm, the Bin 87.

Morry is here in an elegant shirt of grey silk, and Anna, my friend and Morry's wife – both of them very enthusiastic about the book Robert is writing about me at a snail's pace. Morry wants to publish it. I feel I should tell him that both of us will be twenty years older before Robert has finished. But at least it will be between covers sometime.

Such a ridiculous thing to contemplate: the Book of Vera, eighty thousand words and eighteen photographs and this is supposed to represent a life of eighty years, to convey the essence of Vera to total strangers. Almost thirty thousand days, some much odder than others, some so odd that even I can barely comprehend them, seven-hundred thousand hours, forty-two million minutes, a billion impressions, a billion judgements, a billion opinions, most of them foolish, a billion words spoken, a billion thoughts of greatly varying quality permitted to occupy my brain box, buzzing incessantly like mosquitoes in a cage of wire mesh.

All of this, and yet the life you live on any particular day is not so complex. You have in your head as you walk to the shop the six, seven, eight items you intend to purchase, you revise a few of the events of the week, you recall something that you must do the next day.

It is only when associations come into play that the vast freight of your years reveals its weight and suddenly you know that you are carrying on your shoulders the minutes and hours and days of your life. A face in the street, a man turning his head a little to the right, then to the left, scanning the faces that meet him, the set of his mouth, the nose that probes forward like the beak of a bird, shoulders square – and my mind projects without my consent an officer of the SS striding along Trakt Slimiamska in Lvov, pointing at this child on the sidewalk, at that one, at this man, this woman, and behind him soldiers peel off and grasp the man, the woman, the child and force them into a dishevelled troupe of the wretched who know their fate but strain to believe that it will not happen, hope it will not happen, then accept that it will and resign their lives. But the officer, so vain in black, at his waist a black leather holster, his boots polished so conscientiously that they reflect in a blurry way the blue of the spring sky and the clouds – the officer does not see me, and does not point at me. In hiding, all of my small strength and all of my great will is squeezed into a ball of hope that I will not be made to join the troupe, will not be taken further along Trakt Slimiamska and under the bridge to the place where walls on either side of the road prevent escape into the town, and soldiers with automatic rifles prevent escape forward and behind.

Okay, the speeches are about to be made. I want to say to Kerry, to Anna, don't bother with the SS. Let Kerry say, ‘Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, all the world's a stage, and the woman we're here to honour (in a manner of speaking) is one of the players, lots of exits, lots of entrances, and of course she's played many parts, some of them ridiculous, some sublime…' And let him say, ‘She's unconventional to the point of absurdity.' Something like that. And then he can qualify it with this, ‘And yet, she was excellent at what she did, at research and producing and so on and so on, had a lovely face, a shapely figure, swore like a trooper.'

Where am I when all this unfolds? Sitting here in the midst of it on a deck chair, as if enthroned, a glass of merlot in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I smile, I laugh, and I think, ‘A nap would be nice: thirty minutes, maybe an hour.' The whole Werunia carnival passes by, Kerry at the head of it twirling a baton. There's maybe a tear in my eye. In fact, there is. I sip my wine, I smile.

Vera, Werunia, Beloved. Her story.

So let's begin.