Letter from my Father (17 page)

I started talking to it. ‘Zak...' I began. This was nonsense. I knew it was a chicken, but I also knew I could not eat it. That would make me a cannibal.

Over the next four weeks I lived in a suspended state of joyous agitation. Zak's birth stunned me. It seemed a miracle, an experience like no other. I would wake at night and see an image of that little face floating above me. Jonathan was also deeply affected. He went to a toy store and spent ages choosing a teddy bear for his nephew. The one he finally chose was fluffy and white.

Jonathan was inspired by the idea of having a baby. He announced:
I want one of them too.

XIII

Facing the Darkness

H
enry and I proceeded with our travel plans. He would go to Europe via the United States, to visit his many cousins, and then meet me in London. After my twelve-day course on Gestalt psychology run by two American psychologists in Austria, I would meet Jonathan in Moscow then link up with Henry in London.

An eight-hour train journey took me deep into Austria with its pretty little villages. I struggled with mixed feelings. There was excitement and exhilaration but also anxiety about finding myself for the first time since leaving Europe in a Germanic environment. The village where the course was to be held lay in a small valley. After the open horizons of ocean, beaches and wide plains of Australia, I found it claustrophobic. The big white house in which we were accommodated was at the very bottom of the valley. I shared a first-floor room with a German woman, Heidi, a stocky, well-built and outspoken psychologist in her forties. I liked her, though we rarely spent time together in our room.

There were thirteen of us in our workshop group, all psychologists, eight Germans, three Poles, one Scot and I, the only Australian and only Jew. Apart from Scottish Annie and me, all the others had come with a colleague and were in daily contact with their family or partners. My Henry was on a different continent, in a different time zone, and phone calls were prohibitively expensive. Although I made friends with Annie, I felt isolated.

In our first session it became evident that the dominant theme within the group would be racism and issues of inclusion. How could it have been otherwise when every day for ten days, Pole and German and Jew were faced with the dehumanisation of the Holocaust and the self-acknowledged shame of Germany tangibly alive among us? It was a frightening space in which to find ourselves, and the wise ones within the group put up their protective shields.

In one of the evening sessions, I was the protagonist and Krzys, one of the Polish psychologists, was assigned the role of my therapist. He directed me to turn to every person in the group and say:
I want you to be my friend
. I looked around and felt surrounded by enemies, all these faces staring at me, faces of people who did not know me. I wanted to run away. However, obediently, against my instincts, I stammered out my plea to each person in turn. Each one rejected my request – or was it my demand? I could not believe it. The very situation I most dreaded was actually happening. I could not explain it.

The facilitator mishandled the hostile reaction that my feelings aroused in the group and allowed the session to end without resolution. The bell summoning us for the evening meal was rung and everybody rushed out. I retreated to my room.

I wanted to hide from everyone. I sat on my bed in semidarkness and felt I was falling, falling into a deep, dark hole. There was nothing to grasp, no one within reach. Nobody knew that I existed. I felt totally alone. Sheer terror. I broke out in a sweat, my heart beating faster and faster. What could I do? I looked at the photos that I had arranged by the bed showing my sons and my grandson, Henry and me, all my loved ones. I found a piece of paper and made an attempt to start writing a letter, making a connection. But I could not finish it.

This was my reality. I could not bear it. I stayed in that state for some time. Eventually I dragged myself downstairs
to make tea in the communal kitchen. One of the others saw me and dragged me into the room where my colleagues were all talking and drinking. They immediately embraced and hugged me, telling me how angry they were at what had happened in the session. They felt that we had all been victims of an engineered situation, in which forces bigger than ourselves had taken control. Out of the abyss of my aloneness, I responded and reached out to them. And I connected. I survived. The terror of the four-year-old child subsided.

Following my time at the course, I spent a few days recuperating in a resort with thermal baths in the Austrian Alps. I wallowed in the hot springs and walked among the alpine meadows. I scribbled notes and drew diagrams as I tried to understand what had happened in the workshop and to pinpoint my vulnerability. I concluded that I never ever wanted to expose myself to such emotional violence. I also speculated on why and how it was that I continued to find myself in the marginal, odd-person-out position, the first of my cohort to marry and to divorce, the first to have children and grandchildren, the first to experience living without a male protector. Why was my life so full of drama? Why couldn't I be content like most of my girlfriends, in stable marriages with their first husbands?

The next stop on this encountering-the-past odyssey was Moscow, where I met up with Jonathan. We spent eight enthralling days there and then moved on to shabby, neglected yet captivating Leningrad. I remembered a little Russian and could read the Cyrillic alphabet, so that helped us to navigate the city on our own. The summer circus in Gorky Park was a delight. The band played the Russian folk tunes I remembered and people started dancing. I pointed out to my son the little girls dressed up with big bows in their hair, looking just like my eight-old-year self in a photo taken on the balcony of our flat in Bytom.

In Leningrad, we immersed ourselves in the riches of the Hermitage, especially the treasures of its Gold Room. With his usual enthusiasm and curiosity, Jonathan was taking in everything. We watched Gorbachev making speech after speech on television. In the streets, we observed the long queues to buy bread and cakes and sugar (for brewing one's own vodka), the poor quality of vegetables and fruit in the street markets, the empty shelves in the GUM department store and the tired faces on the subway.

When we arrived in London, Jonathan took off for a photographic trip to Winchester and Wales, while I awaited Henry's arrival. It was wonderful to see him open the door to our room in Overseas House, relaxed and thrilled to be with me. Over the next few days we walked around London arm in arm, with Henry showing me his old haunts. We went to museums, ate in pubs and restaurants, strolled through Chelsea and, of course, visited Hamleys to buy toys for grandson Zak. Then we went on to Paris, where we had arranged to reconnect with Jonathan.

On our first evening in our little Left Bank hotel, Henry and I decided to dine at Raspoutine, the Russian cabaret restaurant. Since it was getting late and Jonathan had not yet arrived, we decided to set out on our own, leaving a note for him. Raspoutine was the epitome of old world seduction. The Kremlin onion dome-shaped red lamps; the plump upholstered chairs; the Cossack-costumed waiters moving swiftly around the room waving flaming shashlik sticks; the caviar and vodka; and the elegant French women in their little black dresses created a sensuous experience. But it was the music that penetrated one's very soul. Group after group of fiddlers and balalaika players, male singers with their formidable deep voices and women with imposing chests performed Gypsy tunes and familiar Russian songs.

I was in my element, primed by my inroads into the ¾-litre bottle of vodka that was the price of entry. By 10pm
Jonathan had still not arrived. I had foolishly offered ‘an evening on me' and was now vaguely aware that this was going to be a very expensive night. In a moment of clarity, I turned to Henry, and said:
I'm glad Jonathan hasn't come. This is for us oldies. He'll have his fun in his own way
. At that very moment he turned up. He was wearing khaki pants and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and carrying a backpack filled with camera equipment and a tripod. He was literally glowing with pleasure at his exploits, the very picture of a young Aussie at his casual best. He explained that his late arrival was due to having spent several hours photographing Sacre Coeur in the changing light from dusk to dark.

We quickly sat him down and I proceeded to teach him how to drink vodka the proper way: neat and straight down the hatch. It took him a while to catch on to this part of our Polish-Russian heritage, but he finally succeeded. A couple of hours later, after paying the astronomic bill, we staggered back to the hotel and spent the night feeling very much the worse for wear. Next morning, I was delighted to step out with Henry and Jonathan into the Paris streets, and although all three of us were suffering bad hangovers, we agreed it had been a great night together.

Jonathan left us to return to Sydney, while Henry and I continued our grand tour. We took a train to Madrid. At the Prado I learned to look at the work of Velasquez with greater understanding while Henry gazed at every Murillo as if he had fallen into it. This was so different from me, who looked, appreciated and moved on, always feeling that there were so many other things that needed to be done, seen, and accomplished.

One of Henry's numerous cousins, Francis, the son of an uncle who had moved to France before World War I, was the French Ambassador to Spain. Francis and his charming wife, Chantal de Gaulle, a niece of Charles de Gaulle, invited us for supper at the French Embassy, an impressive baronial mansion
in a leafy garden. The walls of the room in which we were received were covered with Gobelin tapestries depicting the life of Louis XIV. Although initially overwhelmed at finding myself in this setting, my awe was overcome by Henry's sense of ease and our hosts' relaxed and modest manner.

We moved on to Zurich, hired a car and set out on a journey into Henry's childhood in the city of his birth, Munich. He talked of how his governess would wheel him in a pram along the paths of the English Gardens; how, as a twelve-year-old, he would go and look at the Rembrandts in the museum; and how, after Hitler came to power, he was relentlessly bullied and then expelled from his high school. We struggled to relate the happiness and normality of a stable childhood within a well-to-do family in this sophisticated, art-filled city with the bestial behaviour of its inhabitants a few years later. Henry also talked of his father, a German Jew, steeped in German culture and with only a vague awareness of his Jewishness. I was acutely aware of the gulf between Henry's and my relationship to Judaism. While it was built into my very fibre, for Henry it was something for which he had sympathy, but which he could choose to ignore.

Henry and I returned home at the end of October to our half-together, half-apart married life, which I had actually come to appreciate. Our arrangement allowed me to concentrate on my academic life and, most importantly allowed time to maintain my female friendships. Though the arrangement suited us, it had inherent tensions. The first few hours of transition from single woman making her own decisions – even the most trivial, such as when and what to have for dinner – to being part of a couple, led to arguments. We often found it hard to slip from one mode to the other. Each of us sometimes thought the other bossy and inconsiderate. But when we parted, I felt lonely. I was encouraged when my full-time married women friends assured me that I had achieved an enviable balance with my Canberra-Sydney life.

XIV

A Birth and a Wedding

T
wo momentous family events happened in the second year of Henry's and my marriage. On 22nd May 1990 Ruth gave birth to grandson number two, Nathan. He was a most beautiful baby, the image of Simon. I fell in love again. Every Monday I would go over to Simon and Ruth's home in Wollstonecraft, to help with feeding and bathing and putting to bed my little grandsons Zak and now Nathan, a habit that continued for years. My role developed over the years from bathing babies and changing nappies to reading favourite stories, helping with Lego and running behind tricycles, to being homework assistant and resource person for projects on Gold, Early Explorers and Reptiles. Those Monday evenings, though at times physically quite demanding, were a time for bonding and loving and educating. They were deeply nourishing.

Early that year, following his attendance at a cardiology conference in New Orleans, Jonathan took time out for a trip to the Galapagos Islands. He came back refreshed and ready to move on. After all the years of study, he was ready to find a marriage partner and have babies, just like big brother Simon. One of his criteria for a partner was that she must be prepared to accompany him for at least three years to the United States, where he had been invited to be a Research Fellow at a leading cardiac treatment and research institution. He was also keen to have American-born babies, giving his future children the opportunities of American citizenship.

That August, a few months after meeting her, Jonathan became engaged to Paula, an intelligent, well-spoken woman from an English Jewish family from Brisbane. Jonathan was attracted to her sophistication and sparkle. She was four years older than my son, which had its advantages. Here was a woman who, unlike others he had dated, had finished her studies and travelled the world. She was now prepared to venture with Jonathan to the United States.

In the months leading up to the wedding, I was sensitive to signs that would give me the confidence that my deepest need for family togetherness, my dream of a healthy tree with many individual interconnected branches, would be realised. My friends told me that this anxiety was normal for a parent whose son or daughter, especially the youngest, was about to marry. I understood that Paula and I came from vastly different family backgrounds. Her parents had been comfortably established in England during the Holocaust and had no direct experience of it. For them, the hunger for family cohesiveness, so characteristic of those of us who survived the Nazi slaughter, was much less intense.