Things Could Be Worse (9 page)

Pola Ganz had hoped that she would be able to find Chaim Berman a new wife in Israel, but after a few days Pola decided that a Jewish woman from Melbourne might be more suitable.

‘You have to be careful with these Israelis,' she said to Ada Small. ‘We wouldn't want to find Chaim a wife who married him because he owns a nice house and a good business in Australia.'

Ada Small agreed that they had to be careful.

The group visited a kibbutz in the Negev. They all loved the kibbutz. They were very impressed by the size of the kitchen, and the laundry facilities. ‘Did you ever see such a stove in your life?' said Joseph Zelman. With all his blocks of flats, Joseph knew about kitchens.

‘Australia is paradise,' Josl Bensky said on their last night in Israel. He raised his glass and proposed a toast to Australia. ‘To Australia,' they all chorused.

In Israel, Renia Bensky had become increasingly agitated about Pola Ganz and Joseph Zelman. Several times, she thought, she had caught them looking at each other tenderly.

By the time she was back in Australia, Renia Bensky was sure there was a heat between Pola Ganz and Joseph Zelman. And Renia Bensky felt hot watching them.

‘Poor Mina Zelman,' Renia said to Josl. ‘She hasn't suffered enough? It wasn't enough what she did go through in Bergen-Belsen? Now she has to have a Romeo for a husband? And what about poor Moishe Ganz? Maybe he is not so intelligent as our dear Joseph Zelman, but he has always been a first-class husband to Pola. The trouble with Pola is that she doesn't know when she's got something good. She is always looking for something new. She says to me, “Oh Renia, I've found a new hairdresser. Oh Renia, I've found a new dressmaker. Oh Renia, this manicurist is better and cheaper.” Now, whatever Joseph Zelman has got in his trousers is something Pola Ganz thinks is better than what she's got at home.'

Renia knew that after the war there were strange and hasty alliances formed. Women married for security. Men married mothers. Strangers married strangers. People were starved of comfort, companionship and affection. Odd matches were made. There was not always time to wait for love.

Young girls married older men. Students married their teachers. Neighbours and cousins got married. Everyone was in a hurry to begin a normal life.

Dead wives, dead husbands and dead children were present at many of these marriage ceremonies.

Renia decided that something had to be done about Pola and Joseph. She hired a private detective. Two weeks later, the private detective gave Renia a photograph of Joseph Zelman sitting in his car outside Pola Ganz's house. Renia felt very pleased with herself.

It was Easter, and the company went to Olinda. Renia packed the photograph carefully at the bottom of her suitcase. She hadn't told Josl about the detective.

In Olinda, it seemed as though it was going to be another nice Easter break. The group settled into their holiday routine. They ate nice big breakfasts, they went for walks, they sat in the autumn sun. They had good lunches, a nap after lunch, another small walk and it was time for dinner. After dinner they played cards. After three days they were all in good spirits, and felt invigorated by the country air.

On Sunday night, Renia showed Ada Small the photograph. Ada didn't say much. ‘Why have you got a photograph of Joseph in his car?' she asked. Renia explained the location of the photograph, and its implication.

Ada Small went straight to Pola Ganz. Pola laughed and showed the photograph to Moishe. Moishe looked carefully at the photograph. He didn't say anything. Later, he said to Josl: ‘So what, what does that photograph prove? Nothing.' Josl had to agree.

Nobody mentioned the photograph to Mina Zelman.

‘She's got enough trouble,' said Ada Small. ‘She's so tall. At her height she would never find another husband.'

Pola refused to speak to Renia Bensky. Renia tried to explain that she had done this for Pola's own good, but Pola wouldn't even come near her.

‘If she is going to be so unintelligent about this,' Renia said to Josl, ‘she can go to hell. I am finished with Pola Ganz.'

The atmosphere became so unpleasant that the company left Olinda a day early.

What was really shocking about all of this, Ada Small said to her manicurist, was that Renia Bensky and Pola Ganz had almost been machatunim. There was no word in English for machatunim, Ada explained. Machatunim was the word for the relationship between a couple's parents-in-law. Renia and Pola were almost the mothers-in-law of each other's children. Renia's daughter Lina had almost married Pola's son, Sam.

There was an unspoken, unanimous decision among the company not to tell the children why they were no longer friends. The children had to be protected.

One of Lina's colleagues at the law firm where she worked told her that she'd heard a rumour that the rift between Renia and Pola was caused by Renia's accusations that Pola had committed adultery with Joseph Zelman.

Sam Ganz laughed when Lina told him. ‘My mother, having an affair? You're joking. She goes to bed in flannel nightgowns and wears face cream, throat cream, neck cream, arm and leg cream. As a kid, I used to watch her hop into bed and wonder why she didn't slip straight out again. There must be another reason Renia and Pola aren't speaking.'

Mrs Zelman also wondered why Renia and Pola weren't speaking. Maybe Mrs Ganz had done something she shouldn't have been doing with Mrs Bensky's Josl. She wouldn't put it past that Pola Ganz to meddle with someone else's husband.

Mr Zelman and Mrs Ganz also stopped speaking to each other. ‘He was a rotten lover,' Mrs Ganz said to her sister. ‘He wore his socks to bed.'

The company collapsed. Mr Small and Mr Pekelman and Mr Berman met Mr Zelman and Mr Ganz to try and patch things up. They agreed that it was important to forgive and to forget. To make a fresh start. But the women wouldn't budge.

Moishe Ganz believed his wife, and wouldn't hear a word against her. Josl, although he thought that Renia shouldn't have interfered, knew that she didn't do it out of malice.

People took sides. Mr and Mrs Small sided with the Ganzes, and Mr and Mrs Pekelman stayed loyal to the Benskys. Chaim Berman remained friendly with everyone.

For thirty-two years the company hadn't missed a Saturday night at the pictures. Now they stopped going to the pictures. They stopped playing cards. They stopped going out for supper. They stayed at home.

Mr and Mrs Small and Mr Berman took short walks around Caulfield, but their hearts weren't in it. The Zelmans tried to learn bridge, but everyone else at the Herzl Club could play well, and they gave up. Izak Pekelman took up golf. He dropped it a week later.

At weddings, barmitzvahs, engagements and anniversaries and birthdays, people knew to put the Benskys and the Ganzes at different tables.

Genia Pekelman talked separately to Renia and Pola. She begged them to make up. She said to each of them, ‘Couldn't you just put this behind you and make a new start?' That approach hadn't worked with Genia's daughter Rachel, and it didn't work with Renia and Pola.

Genia tried again. ‘If you can't be friends, at least don't be enemies. Let us all go out together again, and maybe things will get slowly better. And we will be a group again. And people will stop talking about us. And if things are not as good as they look, at least it will look as though they are good.' Genia's mother used to quote this old saying to her. It had a melodic lilt in Yiddish that got lost in the translation. Nothing that Genia Pekelman said moved Renia or Pola.

This was the price of success, thought Genia. This is what happens when you can afford to hire a private detective. Life used to be so straightforward in the old days in Melbourne, thought Genia.

When they first came to Australia, some of them had lived two families to one room. Even the most comfortably off of the group, the Smalls, lived in a room at the back of their factory.

On weekends all their children played together. Now, when Genia reminded Rachel that Jack Zelman was unattached, Rachel replied, ‘I hate Jack Zelman.' Rachel and Jack had played together so nicely when they were small.

Genia had thought that she had created cousins for her Rachel and her Esther in Australia. A new family. She thought that the company and their children would regard each other as family. As cousins, aunties, uncles, nephews, nieces. As it turned out, none of their children were friends, except for Lina and Sam. And now the company themselves were no longer friends.

They had all ended up, Genia thought, in the same position that they had been in in Germany after the war. No family. No close friends. At least they had their children. But the children were another story. Even the children had brought them troubles.

Soon, Genia thought, they would all start dying. And they would die alone. One of Genia's most comforting thoughts had been that she would never have to die alone. Not like the hundreds and hundreds of dead in the streets in the ghetto.

So this is how things had turned out, thought Genia Pekelman. This is how things had turned out in the goldeneh medina, the new world.

The Children

Sam Ganz was the Managing Director of Champs Elysees Blouses. Sam was on the phone negotiating the purchase of a turn-of-the-century musical sideboard. When you opened its glass doors, this sideboard played ‘Fur Elise'. Sam was on the verge of agreeing to pay the asking price when his father walked into the office. ‘I'll call you back, and we'll discuss it this afternoon,' Sam said to the antique dealer. ‘Just talking to the mechanic about the Volvo. It needs its front brake pads replaced,' he explained to his father.

Moishe Ganz was the Chairman of Eiffel Tower Fashions, which owned Champs Elysees Blouses. Pola and Moishe had set up the business in 1950.

Pola and Moishe had met in Paris, in the Hotel Lutetia, in 1946. They had both just survived the war in Poland – she in hiding, and he in a labour camp. Now they were being looked after at the Hotel Lutetia.

During the war the Hotel Lutetia had been the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Now it was a welcoming centre for the few Jews who had survived Nazi Europe.

Pola and Moishe had rooms on the same floor at the Lutetia. They began talking to each other. Soon they began to meet in the foyer of the hotel in the mornings. Then they spent their days together.

After two weeks, Moishe proposed to Pola. Pola said: ‘No, never! I don't want to get married. I want to live a bit, to grow up. I am twenty-one, and I haven't had any boyfriends. I haven't done many things a normal girl does. I don't know who I am, where I am. I only know I don't want to get married. Not now, never.' ‘Never say never,' said Moishe. Three weeks later, Pola and Moishe were married.

They moved out of the Lutetia and into a small bed-sitting room in the Rue de Rennes. Pola and Moishe shared their sixth-floor flat in the Rue de Rennes with a family of dark-brown rats. Pola and Moishe kept their bread, coffee, tea, sugar and even butter wrapped in newspaper, and hung these parcels in pillowcases from a hook on the wall.

One day Pola reached for one of her shoes from the bottom of the cupboard. She surprised a sleeping rat. The rat ran up Pola's arm. Pola wept. The rat had shat on her skirt. ‘I knew I shouldn't have got married,' she said to Moishe.

Pola and Moishe did have good times in Paris. They went for long walks along the river. They went to the zoo. Even then, straight after the war, Paris was a city of lovers. Pola and Moishe got to know each other slowly. It was a time of rest and recuperation. A honeymoon of sorts.

They were waiting for their immigration papers to be finalised. Moishe taught Pola to ice-skate. They fed pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens. They walked arm-in-arm alongside other lovers in the Tuileries and on the Boulevard St Germain.

Years later, when people talked about the beauty of Paris, Pola could only remember the rats.

Baby Sam was born three months before Pola and Moishe were due to leave for Australia. Pola wept with happiness at the birth of her son. The night after Pola had been freed from the cellar in which she had spent the last year of the war, she had had a dream. Her father, who had died in the cellar, had come to her in her dream. ‘Pola, my daughter,' he had said, ‘you will one day give birth to a son. And this son will have in him all the fathers and all the sons from our family. I will be there in him. Your grandfather will be there. And your grandfather's grandfather. We will all be there. As soon as you see your son, you will see us.'

Sam was a beautiful baby. He had a wise face and a quiet disposition. Pola saw that her father had been right. Sam looked just like him.

Moishe was also in love with Sam. He kissed him hundreds of times a day. When Sam was two months old, Moishe took him to the Punch and Judy show at the Bois de Boulogne. He pointed out dogs and cats and birds in the street. He repeated the Yiddish, French and English words for these animals to Sam. As soon as he had set eyes on Sam, Moishe had seen that Sam was the image of Moishe's mother. Moishe also recognised Sam's eyes: they belonged to his youngest sister, Chana. Chana and her mother had died of tuberculosis in the ghetto.

Moishe had hoped that Sam would be born in Australia. He had gone to the Australian Embassy every day to ask if the visa had been approved. ‘I want my child to be born in Australia. I want that he should be very Australian,' Moishe had pleaded. But the process couldn't be hurried.

The Ganzes arrived in Australia in May 1949. They spent the first month at the migrant hostel at Bonegilla. Pola and Sam slept in the women's quarters. Moishe was in the men's dormitory. Pola's bed was in the middle of rows and rows of beds. The toilets were outside. There were no lights at night. Sam wasn't well. He had diarrhoea. At night, Pola changed his nappies in the dark. As soon as she had a clean nappy on him, he had another bout of diarrhoea. Pola had been nervous about coming to Australia. Australia was proving to be worse than her worst fears.

Moishe found a nice room in Brunswick. The Jewish Welfare Agency furnished the room, and the Ganzes moved in. Moishe was happy. Things were looking up.

Pola put on her best dress and went to Georges, the most exclusive department store in Melbourne. She took a pencil and a notepad. In the dressing room of the Ladies Daywear department, Pola sketched half a dozen of the blouses that they had in the store.

Moishe bought some fabric. Together, in their room in Brunswick, Pola and Moishe made copies of the blouses. Moishe got orders for these blouses from several small retailers around Melbourne. Champs Elysees Blouses was in business.

‘Mum,' said Sam, ‘I've put a deposit on a sideboard. It's antique and it's very beautiful. It will be a good investment. In another few years it will be worth twice what I am paying for it.' ‘Good, darling,' said Pola. She liked Sam to be happy.

‘It was very expensive,' said Sam. ‘But this sideboard is one of a kind. You'd never find another one like it, and it's going to look fabulous in my den. I took Ruth to see it, and she adores it.'

Mrs Ganz, unfortunately, didn't adore Ruth. She thought that Ruth had married Sam to better herself. Ruth came from a poor family. She had adapted herself very well to a moneyed lifestyle. Too well, thought Pola.

‘Well, darling, enjoy this sideboard,' said Pola. ‘How much did you pay for it?'

‘Fifty thousand,' said Sam.

‘What, are you crazy? Fifty thousand? Does it have eighteen-carat gold cutlery in the drawers? Are you a meshugana? You are, you are mad.'

Eventually Pola calmed down. It was only money, she thought. Sam was their only son. What did it matter? Nobody was hurt by the purchase. Pola did feel, though, that it would be unwise for Moishe to know that Sam had paid fifty thousand for a sideboard.

When Moishe was angry with Sam, he would call him a ‘little prince'. ‘He doesn't know what it is to work hard, to earn your own money,' Moishe would say.

Moishe was disappointed in Sam. Not that he voiced this disappointment. Moishe believed that to air a problem only made the problem seem worse. Sam had been a mediocre student at school, and had failed his matriculation year. The Ganzes had no alternative. They had taken Sam into the business.

Pola and Sam worked out a scheme whereby Sam would pay for the sideboard with three separate cheques. He would tell his father that he was buying three pieces of furniture, not one. Fifty thousand for three pieces would seem reasonable.

Moishe didn't notice Sam's purchases. He had other things on his mind. His two daughters both wanted to leave their husbands. Moishe didn't know what to do.

Last week Debbi, the elder daughter, had told him that she was leaving her husband, Oscar. She was in love, she said, with Adrian Gartener. Moishe didn't see that there was much difference between Oscar and Adrian Gartener. Why Debbi was transferring her love from one to another bewildered Moishe.

‘Love, love,' he raged to Pola. ‘They all talk about this big word love. It is not “love”, but “LOVE”. Tell me Pola, can you see that that Adrian Gartener is any more of a mensch than Oscar Kreutzer? They are both pishers.'

Helen, the Ganzes' other daughter, was also looking for fulfilment. She had said to her father, ‘Issy is a nice enough person. He's good-hearted and kind to the children, but I can't bear him to touch me. It's not that he wants to touch me so often. Luckily, he is not all that interested. But when he moves towards me in bed I feel sick.'

Pola Ganz knew that Helen had been having an affair with one of her colleagues at the University of Melbourne. She had told Helen to be sure to be absolutely discreet. ‘Darling, for a few hot minutes in someone else's bed, you don't throw away a good husband,' she had said to her daughter.

The Ganzes had supported their sons-in-law through university. Afterwards, they had set them up in business. They had bought Issy a law practice, and Oscar a dental surgery.

Moishe felt tired thinking about his daughters. Moishe had thought that the days of having trouble with his children were over. What was wrong with young people today? They had no stamina. They had to be gratified immediately. Their love life had to be perfect. Their sex had to be the latest up-to-date manoeuvres. If they were not having simultaneous orgasms they looked for another partner.

What about love? And tenderness? And patience? And loyalty? Life, for his children, was too transient to allow for love, thought Moishe.

Pola and Moishe had given their children everything. The children had been spoilt and coddled. Moishe had set up Champs Elysees Blouses one block from Elwood Primary School so that Pola could take hot soup to school at lunchtime for Sam and the girls.

Still, his girls were better than other people's girls, thought Moishe. Look at poor Renia Bensky. Her Lola, who was so clever at school, had refused to go to university. And then she had married a goy. At least, through marriage, thought Moishe, Lola had become a wife and a mother. Before that she had been a hippie. She had walked everywhere, even in Collins Street, barefooted, with bells around her neck and long dirty dresses. Moishe had felt so sorry for Renia Bensky.

And, Moishe thought, his Debbi and Helen were better than Genia Pekelman's Esther. Esther was always pre-occupied and distracted. She couldn't finish her sentences. Her anxiety blinded her. Last year she had driven through an amber light and killed an elderly man. She hadn't seen him. Izak and Genia Pekelman had visited the man's family to see if there was anything they could do to help. The family had said that there was nothing that the Pekelmans could do for them. There were no witnesses, and the death was recorded as an accident. Izak made a large donation to the Royal Children's Hospital in the dead man's name.

Sam Ganz had a problem. The price he had agreed to pay for the sideboard was seventy thousand, not fifty thousand. He knew his parents would never understand. They really weren't very educated, thought Sam. They knew nothing about antiques. He had to find twenty thousand dollars.

All Sam's and Ruth's expenditures went through the company's books. That was how Pola knew exactly how much Ruth spent at Figgins and Georges and David Jones every week.

Sam frowned. He would have to find a way to pay the extra twenty thousand dollars. Maybe he could give his friend Solly Rosenberg a cheque for twenty thousand. Sam could tell Moishe that he was buying Solly's computer for a very good price, to use at home. Solly could then write out a cheque for twenty thousand, which Sam could give directly to the antique dealer.

At Champs Elysees Blouses, Sam earned a hundred thousand dollars a year. He also received one-fifth of the company's profits. Sam was a wealthy man, but he felt like a small boy who was not allowed to be in charge of his own pocket money. Sam tolerated this discomfort. Now and then he thought of doing something that interested him more, but he couldn't think of anything.

Every winter Pola and Moishe went to Surfers Paradise for three weeks. Pola went at the beginning of June, and when she came back, three weeks later, Moishe went. They both felt that they couldn't be away from Champs Elysees Blouses at the same time.

‘If Sam is the Managing Director, he should be able to manage the factory,' Ada Small often said to the Ganzes. ‘Moishe, Sam is thirty-two. He is not a baby. He can look after the business.' But Pola and Moishe both agreed that it would be unwise for them to be away from the factory together.

Every Sunday the Ganz family had lunch together. Sam, Debbi and Helen, their spouses and their children came to Pola and Moishe's house. Pola's housekeeper, Mrs Staub, prepared the food. Pola was one of the few women in their group who had a full-time housekeeper. ‘I work all day. Why should I work more when I come home?' Pola would say. She always felt a need to defend her use of a housekeeper. The food that Mrs Staub made was delicious. Pola's friends and Pola's children regarded Mrs Staub's meals as inferior because they were not cooked by Pola.

Today Mrs Staub had prepared gefilte fish, chopped liver, a grated egg and onion salad, a potato salad, roast chicken, and chicken schnitzels for the children, and a salmon patty for Issy.