The Fig Tree (6 page)

Hadassah looked like a gypsy at such moments. Her hair was her great pride. It matched her black eyes and her dark complexion. It radiated vigour. Even when she was sixty it still retained much of its colour. Her voice and hair shared one thing in common: they both retained a youthful quality well into old

‘Play Gypsy' was written by the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger. Born in 1901, Manger was raised in the Romanian city of Czernowitz, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. It was in this city, in 1908, at a congress of writers, that Yiddish, once held in disdain as a jargon, a common vernacular, was declared an official language.

Manger saw himself as the heir of the Yiddish minstrels and bards of the nineteenth century. His mentors were Berl Broder, the folk singer and composer, who moved through the hamlets of Russia and Galicia singing ballads of the common man; and Velvl Zbarzher, the ‘folk nightingale', a prolific songwriter who performed throughout the Ukraine, so legend has it. Manger revered Eliakhum Zunser, the wedding jester, whose spontaneous verse and social commentaries poured forth at village celebrations in an effortless flow; and Yisroel Grodner, an entertainer who performed humorous monologues in the wine cellars of Odessa, dressed in stylish jackets and capes.

The troubadours moved throughout Eastern Europe. Their domain extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea. They sang in bars and wayside inns, in makeshift halls and village homes. They composed ballads and popular verse, and collected folksongs and traditional lore. They were both entertainers and social commentators who challenged the authorities of their time.

Manger reinvented himself in their image. He journeyed in their well-worn tracks. His vision expanded. He was inspired by other mentors, Rilke and Goethe. Manger was at home both in music halls and literary forums. He composed sonnets about ancient sages, and re-created biblical figures in the guise of his own townsfolk. He experimented with many forms, but his first love remained Yiddish song.

Manger was impulsive and unpredictable. He rarely said no to a drink. Hadassah once saw him perform his poetry drunk in Bialystok. He was an unrepentant romantic, intoxicated by his love of verse. But Manger's romantic self-image was shattered by the Shoah. He spent the war years in London, and emerged a bitter man. He raged at the fate of his people. He saw the Shoah as a betrayal of his faith in universal brotherhood. His people had been abandoned. His treasured legacy was in flames. His work now seemed meaningless.

‘Play Gypsy' captures the essence of a dispersed people; and Manger, the wandering poet, personified their longing for a better life. This is why his work touched a deep chord in his audience. And this is why his songs reached out to an ageing woman seated at her kitchen table in a Melbourne suburb, far distant from the world of her past.

As she hummed Manger's songs, she threaded her comb through her unbraided hair. This is my most abiding image of Hadassah, singing in the fading light, as she tamed her gypsy-black hair.

Even in her final days, in Royal Melbourne Hospital, she continued to tend to her hair, with the help of a new friend. A week before she died I made my way down the corridors to the ward in which she lay, and stopped, abruptly, in the doorway, arrested by the sight of her seated in a wheelchair. Behind her stood a trainee nurse, combing her hair.

Hadassah and the nurse were silhouetted by the rays of the mid-morning sun radiating through the windows. A cleaner was swabbing the floors, the morning teas were being delivered and Hadassah, eighty-five years old, was in a reverie as the teenage nurse continued her combing. Strangers just days earlier, in this moment they seemed as one.

And Hadassah was humming, inaudibly almost. Beside her, on the dressing table, lay the amber combs and a jar of Restoria Cream. While in the chair sat a tough old gypsy, still haunted by ghosts. And still singing.

The Fig Tree

A cancer ward in St Vincent's Hospital. The lights have been turned down. It is at night that I prefer to visit Lily Varvarigos, my mother-in-law, now lying terminally ill. It is at night, as the city meanders towards sleep, that a special kind of energy can be felt. It simmers beneath the surface calm, among sixteen patients in a public ward. Some doze, some cough, others moan. Within their dreams, and their ebbing thoughts, there is a wafting of memories, a raging against the dying light and, perhaps, in others, the beginnings of an acceptance, a reconciliation.

‘I do not want to die just yet,' Lily tells me. She resumes her defiant silence. Her eyes remain shut. ‘Look after the baby,' she says. ‘He shouldn't be allowed out into the cold.' She remains a carer to the last. Her mind sways between fear for herself and concern for the welfare of Alexander, her one-year-old grandson. Lily is Alexander's last living grandparent.

October 1994. It is four years since my mother's death, two years since my father's. And many years since Lily's husband Athanassios passed away. Alexander's last link to a generation is moving on.

‘Why is this happening to me?' Lily asks after another prolonged silence. Over and again these words float into hearing. ‘Why is this happening to me?' These are not cliches but battle cries—attempts to come to terms with impending death, with life's greatest mystery.

‘I want to go out into the garden,' she tells her youngest daughter, Dora, and me, the next night.

It is a demand.

‘Which garden?' we ask.

‘My garden,' she says, with a hint of annoyance. ‘The garden in Parkdale,' she adds, in order to make sure that we know she still knows her own mind—the garden with the apple and citrus trees, grape vines and ferns, infant gums, pots of basil and scented mint; the garden with the duck waddling about, the cats dozing in the sun, the bantams laying eggs; the garden with the all-embracing fig tree.

But it is midnight, and Lily is dying. She lies in a hospital bed, far removed from the garden she has presided over this past quarter-century of her sixty-nine years of life.

‘Perhaps wait until morning,' we suggest.

‘I know it is night-time,' she replies, with annoyance. ‘Still, I want to go out into the garden.'

And the thought occurs to us, why not? Why shouldn't she return to the place where she feels most at ease? Why shouldn't she return to the familiarity of home? Why shouldn't she be set free of the drips and tubes, the catheters and masks that are keeping her afloat? Why shouldn't she be granted just this one simple request?

A Sunday morning in St Vincent's. In the city, a festival is taking place. In the cancer ward, dramas unfold, a constant ebbing and flowing of life. On a bed, diagonally opposite Lily's, lies little Roza, wrapped in a blanket, asleep. She is one week old. Her mother hovers nearby. On a reclining chair, beside the bed, lies Roza's forty-seven-year-old grandmother, after whom she has been named. The grandmother is gasping for breath, and the doctors say this may well be her last day. By her side sits Yiayia, the great-grandmother, clad in black, distraught. She holds her dying daughter's hand.

‘Why doesn't the cancer attack rocks? Why does it attack people?' Yiayia asks. Hers is the wisdom of the village woman. Not far from Thessaloniki she raised her children who were to make their way to new worlds. Yet those who remained in the village, those who have watched the rise and fall of countless suns, they seem to sense that through rocks and people the same life-force, the same atoms, the same energy flows. So why not the rocks? And the attention of Yiayia's grand-daughter, the young mother, is torn first one way, then the other: from the baby, the miracle of new life, and the joy of her being, to the woman who bore her, now slipping away from life.

A Sunday morning in St Vincent's. Birth and death cross paths. Four generations of women sit in one room and at least, in this one moment in time, they find solace in each other's company. At least, in this moment of time, they are together.

A cancer ward in St Vincent's. Lily is fading away. She is uncomfortable, despite a steady dosage of morphine. Nurses rearrange her frequently. For the past year she has been in and out of hospitals and rehabilitation centres, due to broken bones brought on by osteoporosis. It is as if her body, after years of service, is crumbling. And now this final blow: inoperable ovarian cancer, which has spread into her vital organs.

Born in Melbourne in 1925, into a family from the legendary island of Ithaca, she married an Ithacan immigrant, and spent her life rearing three children whilst working in a series of shops and factories. Yet she also moved on to become active in the Union of Australian Women; and, for a time, in her later years, she visited factories to advise Greek immigrant women about contraception and their basic rights.

Beyond all this, however, was a quality for which she will long be remembered—her hospitality. Hers was an open house. Lily's refrigerator was always stocked with food and drink in readiness for the unexpected visitors who dropped by for an impromptu meal, a cup of tea, a coffee, a chat around the kitchen table.

They came from everywhere, Lily's many guests, among them her neighbours, and friends from across the road, from around the corner and surrounding streets. And from further afield, the friends, lovers, and in-laws that her children brought home in their restless wake. Her companions from the women's movement, they too knew that this was an open house.

So many visitors sat in her kitchen, surrounded by a growing forest of utensils: the mortars and pestles that would transform our annual crop of basil into pesto sauce; the oven-pans of various sizes which once shaped the spinach pies that were Lily's specialty; and the tins of extra virgin olive oil, labelled with enticing scenes of the Mediterranean, always on hand, in bulk, the most essential ingredient in Lily's Ithacan recipes.

It was in the kitchen that I often saw them, Lily and her daughter, Dora, cooking together. Lily led the way, passing on recipes which had, in turn, been passed on by her mother, Poulimia, who came to Australia from Ithaca as a proxy bride, to marry a stranger called Constandinou Kecatos, who had left his village, on the same island, years earlier, in 1908, as a sixteen-year-old boy.

Lily and Dora. Mother and daughter. At such moments the bond between them was palpable; two women working in the shadow of generations before them, in concert, fully focused on the task, the stillness broken just occasionally by a comment: ‘A bit more salt, Doramou.' Yes, Lily did have the Ithacan taste for salt. ‘Not enough salt,' she would say with a disapproving frown, when we went out to a restaurant and tasted another's cooking.

These are the images that return, late at night, as we sit by Lily's bed. This is what we whisper about, her loved ones. Or muse upon. Or dream about when we doze during our final vigil. These are the images that dance in the fading light. These are the moments when we contemplate the things that matter most: the garden, the kitchen, odd memories, family tales, or the proverbs Lily passed on.

She had one for every occasion. ‘Now that you have entered the dance hall you have to dance,' she would say when her children took on daring ventures. ‘It's hanging from my ear,' she said when we asked if she'd seen something we'd carelessly misplaced. When she indulged her love of gossip, she would sometimes pause, as if catching herself, and say, ‘The camel does not see its own hump.' If we were going through a personal crisis, she would remind us, ‘The night's doings were seen by the dawn and laughed at.' And if we persisted she would add, with an edge of steel, ‘Everyone cries for his own pain.'

These are the memories that come to us now, and this is why it hurts to see her in so much pain. And this is why we are full of gratitude for the attention she receives from the nurses. It is an aspect of medical care so often unnoticed, and yet so obvious to those who are forced to spend time in a hospital ward.

Doctors come and go. Surgeons perform their operations and move on to the next patient. They do what they have to do. But it is the nurse who remains to care for the patient; and it is the nurse who, at times, in the absence of loved ones, becomes a companion, a last friend of the dying, responding to whispers; listening to confessions. These are the unsung heroes of the city, those who stay put whilst the city enjoys its festival days.

A cancer ward in St Vincent's. Private griefs and battles are on open display. There is camaraderie among strangers united by a common fate. Emma is eighty-seven years old. In the mornings the nurses wash and dress her. For the rest of the day she sits in a chair by her bed. She seems ethereal. Her slender body is wrapped in a white gown. She plays with Alexander whenever he is in the ward. On the eve of her departure, she surveys the room with a mischievous grin and announces, to anyone who cares to listen, ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.'

There is Tom, a tall man who has lost several kilograms in weight during the past month. I can imagine him as he would have been not so long ago—a muscular road-worker from the country. Like the other patients, he has followed Lily's progress with concern. There is Cheryl in the corner bed, on the far side. Every day, without fail, her husband and daughter arrive in the early morning after an hour's drive from an outer suburb. They tend her from morning till night in the wake of her chemotherapy treatment. Throughout it all Cheryl seems to maintain her composure and warmth.

Eighty-nine-year-old Anna, Polish-born, oscillates between hours of gloom and moments of elation, as if she has just realised anew that she is still alive and cared for by the two daughters who sit by her bed. As Lily deteriorates, Anna is drawn out of herself, and she begins to inquire after her health. This concern for another appears to soften her, to ease her own discomfort. Then there is Theo, the ward joker, a middle-aged man who shuffles about with his drips in tow to chat with fellow patients, to dispense an amusing anecdote here, a joke there, offering words of comfort even on the eve of his own perilous operation.