Things Could Be Worse (17 page)

Two months after they were married, Mina and Joseph arrived in Australia. They spent their first month in Australia at Bonegilla.

The air at Bonegilla was thick with the smell of boiling mutton. The smell lingered in people's clothes and in their hair. Mina felt as though her skin had absorbed the stench of the mutton. Mina avoided going to the huge pit that was used as a toilet as much as she could. She would wait until her bladder ached or she felt ill before she went to the toilet at Bonegilla.

Jack had been conceived at Bonegilla. The barracks at Bonegilla were segregated. Mina slept in the middle of a large, crowded women's dormitory. One afternoon, Joseph had wound two sheets around four chairs to create an area of privacy around the camp stretcher that was Mina's bed. He had then made love to Mina. Mina had wept with humiliation. When they had both emerged, Mrs Lovic and Mrs Platt and Mrs Antman, who slept in adjoining beds, were grinning.

One morning in Bonegilla, Mina thought that she could hardly remember what it was like to live in a normal home. For almost ten years she had gone from one set of barracks to another. From labour camp to concentration camp to displaced persons camp, and now to this ‘Reception and Training Centre'.

Mina tried to remember the small apartment in Warsaw where she and Tadek had lived. Just as the memory was beginning to warm her, Mrs Lovic called her to come to what was called an English class. Very few people in Bonegilla spoke English. It was unnecessary. Living in the camp you could have picked up German, Polish, Italian, Latvian, Russian or Yiddish, but not English. The English class, that day in Bonegilla, was learning to sing ‘Roaming In The Gloaming'. Mina still knew the words.

Joseph Zelman had had a good head for business. He had worked very hard, and now the Zelmans were very wealthy. Joseph had built large blocks of apartments all over Melbourne.

Joseph liked to live well. He went to the theatre, to the opera, to the cinema. Twice a year he flew to Switzerland to the Brechen-Bilt Clinic for a rest. He went to Germany for Alpine Air Inhalations at the Baden Rejuvenation Centre, and he went to Austria to have mud baths for his arthritis.

Joseph ate at the best restaurants and drank the best wines. Joseph dined at these restaurants with business colleagues, with friends, or with his son Jack.

Mina wouldn't eat in restaurants. She was suspicious of them. The few times she had eaten out, she had been ill afterwards.

When Joseph and Mina travelled, Mina ate raw vegetables, which she bought herself. Restaurant food was never clean enough for her. She had tried several times to explain this to Joseph. ‘I don't want to eat food that has been touched by other people,' she used to say. ‘I don't know who has touched the food, and if the cook has washed his hands, or if he has got a running nose or a bad cough.' Joseph was aggravated by Mina's attitude, but he never said anything.

Joseph felt that his own experiences during the war were so mild compared to Mina's that he could never criticise her. Joseph had been lucky. In 1939 he had been sent to a Russian labour camp. It may not have been a picnic, Joseph often thought, but when he compared it to Mina's wartime experiences he knew he had nothing to complain about.

In the centre of the sideboard in the Zelmans' dining room, in a large silver frame, was a small, yellowing, sepia photograph of a small boy. He had large, hooded eyes, chubby cheeks, and a sweet, bow-shaped mouth. The small boy looked just like Jack Zelman. He was Henryk Fischer, Mina's first son. The photograph was all Mina had from her life before the war.

When Jack was sixteen, he had told Lola that he didn't think he was Mina's real son. He thought that the boy in the photograph was Mina's real son. The boy in the photograph was never mentioned in the Zelman house. Jack didn't even know his name.

Jack had asked her if her parents had had any children before her. She had said no, even though she knew that her parents had had a stillborn son in the Lodz ghetto.

Lola didn't know why she had lied to Jack Zelman. Lola had woven so many of her own fantasies into the fabric of her parents' past that she could no longer remember what was true and what wasn't.

She had concocted a whole story about how her parents had been separated in Auschwitz, and had searched for each other after the war for six months. The story up to this point was true. From here, Lola added a scenario worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. Lola's story was that her mother and father had separately criss-crossed Europe by train looking for each other. They had often missed each other by seconds, and often passed each other on parallel train tracks going in opposite directions. After six months, neither had yet found out whether the other was alive. Finally, in Lola's story, her mother was asking a British soldier at a railway station in Germany if he had seen her husband.

‘Yes I have, madam, and he's on that train,' the soldier had replied, pointing to a train that was just pulling out of the station. But all was not lost. The British soldier drove Lola's mother to the next station and she boarded the train. She walked through the carriages looking for her husband. Then she saw him, and fainted.

The Master of Ceremonies, Nathan Spatt, tapped the side of the lectern with a teacup.

‘Ladies and gentlemen! Ladies and gentlemen! Quiet, please. I am going to call on Mr Sol Spigal, our president, who shall say a vote of thanks to the many people who have helped to make today a memorable day.'

‘Jesus, look at all that saccharin,' said Jack Zelman. Lola looked around at the tables. There were two bottles of saccharin for every four place settings. An avalanche of saccharin was about to be dropped into five hundred cups of coffee.

‘It's always puzzled me why Jews are so fixated by saccharin,' said Jack. ‘They've just eaten apple strudel and ice-cream, and chocolates, and now they're making up for that by not putting sugar into their coffee. It's madness.'

‘Yes, it's madness,' agreed Lola.

Mr Sol Spigal had twenty-five minutes of thank-yous. Everybody from Melbourne had to be thanked. Everybody from Sydney had to be thanked. And, of course, the local committee from Canberra had to be thanked. Each individual was thanked, and the audience applauded each thank-you.

The Master of Ceremonies returned.

‘And now we have something very special to end our very special day. We have the honour to have with us tonight the wonderful poet Lola Bensky, and she is going to read her wonderful poem again for us.'

Lola stepped onto the platform. She was not so nervous now. She quietened herself for a minute. She took a deep breath, and began to read. There was an uproar in the hall. ‘We can't hear. We can't hear,' echoed around the room. ‘I think the microphone is not working,' said Nathan Spatt.

‘I'll shout,' said Lola.

Acknowledgements

Some of these stories have appeared in different forms in the following publications:
Overland
,
The Canberra Times
,
Meanjin
,
Island
,
Australian Short Stories
,
The Australian Short Story
, 2nd ed. (UQP, 1992), and
Neighbours: Multicultural Writing of the 1980s
(UQP, 1991).

First published 1990 by Meanjin/Melbourne University Press
Published in paperback 1992 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
This edition published 2016

www.uqp.com.au
[email protected]

© Lily Brett 1990, 1992
Illustrations © David Rankin 1990, 1992

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

Author photograph by Frida Sterenberg
Typeset in 10.5/13.5 pt Minion Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available
from the National Library of Australia
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

ISBN 9780702259500 (pbk)
ISBN 9780702258626 (epdf)
ISBN 9780702258633 (epub)
ISBN 9780702258640 (kindle)