Vera (16 page)

A cobber is always a man. Women do not have cobbers. Women have ‘girlfriends'. Even if you are a hundred and fifty years old, your female friends are ‘girlfriends'.

The milk bar. Who runs these milk bars? People who are prepared to work sixteen hours a day without employing anyone. In Australia at that time, 1958, Greek immigrants ran milk bars. Greeks and Italians. Also a few immigrants from freezing places like Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. These immigrants wanted to make money, so they were ready to work sixteen hours each day. After ten years, they do something else – for only ten hours a day.

When the Greek guy and his wife, the Italian guy or the Estonian first buys the milk bar, he smiles like crazy at every customer.

‘Mister Smith, how nice to see you, ha ha ha! – lovely day. A loaf of bread, Mister Smith? A pint of milk? For the kids, maybe some cobbers, what do you say? Ha ha ha!'

After one year of this, the smiles have withered away. It's the most boring job on earth. The man behind the counter – he or his wife – has seen you three hundred times, and he knows exactly what you will buy and what you will not and, in all honesty, he's sick to death of you. He's sick to death of all of the Mister Smiths. Secretly, he wants to buy a gun and shoot you. Or if not you, then himself. A sandwich loaf, a pint of milk, once a week four cobbers. Never four pink musk sticks or four mint leaves – always four cobbers. Of course he wants to shoot you. Of course he wants to shoot himself.

But he doesn't. He sticks to the sixteen-hour days, he saves his pennies, and then one glorious day he sells the milk bar to a Vietnamese guy and takes a holiday with his wife and his kids in the sunshine of Queensland. Dear God!

The Jews of Melbourne say to me, ‘Don't worry about Bergman. Don't worry about Samuel Beckett. Losers! Open a business. Get some respect.'

I feel like throwing up everything in my stomach. But I say, ‘Okay, open a business. Get some respect. How do I open a business?'

‘You do what we did. You roll up your sleeves. You work like a crazy person. Sixteen hours a day. Maybe seventeen, who can remember. Ten years. You save your money. Then you start a business.'

‘But how do I save money? What are you talking about? Sixteen hours a day?'

‘Vera, listen with all your ears. You buy a milk bar. After ten years, you sell it. A milk bar. Loaves of bread. High-dome loaves, sandwich loaves. Spaghetti in tins. Baked beans. Ice-creams. Lollies. You understand? A milk bar.'

Later, I tell Jan. ‘They say, “Open a milk bar”! Can you believe it? Am I one of those women you see in such shops? Like someone who has not seen the sun for a hundred years? Am I such a woman, do they think?'

Jan laughs, maybe at me, maybe at the idea itself. ‘Calm down. It's funny.'

He amazes me. He says, ‘It's funny'? Every day for sixteen hours, that little bell ringing when someone comes into the shop? Am I supposed to sit out the back with a magazine, waiting for the stupid bell?

I have seen the sort of magazine the Australians read. It is called
Women's Weekly
. Dear God, on the cover there is a picture of Queen Elizabeth with her children and her husband at Balmoral, a tartan blanket spread on the grass; they're having a picnic. The husband is standing, looking down at the family; he's wearing a kilt with a pouch hanging over his genitals – obscene! Inside the magazine, women are making cakes, knitting cardigans. A famous woman tennis player, an Australian, is engaged to be married. Here she is smiling with her fiancé at the net on a tennis court; he has a round, pink face and an untrustworthy ginger moustache. Is that what Jan thinks is so hilarious?

In two weeks, I would burn the shop down then shoot myself.

Well, no. There is Marek to think of. He likes everything about Australia. What does he know? He's five years old. But he would still have Jan. He adores Jan; Jan adores him. I adore them both. I'm ashamed of thinking of burning down the non-existent milk bar.

About Jan. He takes a job in a car factory at Fishermans Bend. They make Holdens. In Poland, he's famous; he's a journalist of genius. In Australia, they give him a job making cars at Fishermans Bend. Okay, it's better than nothing. Off he goes to the factory five days a week, never a word of complaint. I admire his stoicism. In a way, it suits him to be surrounded all day by men of the working class; he's there in solidarity; it's the proletariat, maybe a few communists, working alongside him. On a ‘smoko', as the Australians call it, a mid-morning break, he probably sings the ‘Internationale' with them, also a verse of ‘The Red Flag'. He works on an assembly line. He uses a spanner. It would drive me insane. But it is harder to drive Jan insane than me. He has a very welcoming personality and never thinks of burning milk bars down.

My job – well. I meet a man by the name of Klotzman, who has a clothing factory in Prahran, a solid building of red brick. Skirts, dresses, blouses. Klotzman is middle-aged, middle-class, a Jew from Łódź, quite dapper, in the Hungarian way, but otherwise conventional.

Klotzman says to me, ‘Vera, tell me this, can you sew by hand? I mean sew properly, good stitches? Can you?'

‘Sure.'

I can't, but how is he to know?

‘Okay, listen to what I have to say. You can work in my factory. Good wages for hard work. Tell me this: can you do this job?'

‘Hard work, good wages? Sure.'

So I start work in the clothing factory. Four years at university, such professors as Kotarbiński and Kołakowski, and now I'm working hard for good wages, stitching skirts in Prahran. Too bad for me. Boo hoo. I roll up my sleeves, as they say.

Fortunately, I have never been afraid of hard work. Any Jew who walked out of the Lvov ghetto is never afraid of hard work. We have already had the hardest jobs on earth for zero wages, and lived to tell the tale.

There are not so many people working at Klotzman's factory. Mostly he sends out the fabric to have the garments made by women working at home, and the women send the garments back to have the difficult stitching completed by me. I am the finisher.

Here I am, a cliché, a Jew in the rag trade.

The other finishers are not Jews. They are migrants from the Mediterranean.

I have to lecture myself: ‘Werunia, do not mention political philosophy. Marx, no. Proudhon, no. You shut up, or when you have something to say, talk about the Queen, and what's-her-name, the sister with the breasts like cushions, Margaret. In fact, about the breasts, say nothing.'

It's no great ordeal, but in my daydreams I have left Australia and taken a ship to Israel and taught myself Hebrew. I am restless. It's madness. I escape the Poles who want to build a new Auschwitz, I come to this country where nobody has even heard of the Holocaust – nobody but the Jews – and where the sun shines all day, where there is fresh fruit in the Victoria Market, not expensive – and all I can think about is running away.

I despair of myself. No wonder people think I am strange. It's true. I am strange. Sometimes I am sick of myself. But what can I do? Best to be true to yourself, and wear your awkward features like medals.

Maybe not in Klotzman's factory, though.

Here is Werunia, bent over her sewing table, humming tunes from American movies –
South Pacific, Some Enchanted Evening, Dites Moi
– she's a regular gal.

South Pacific
you could speak about with anyone, even in the factory. But I went with Jan to a little cinema in the middle of Melbourne, where foreign films were shown with subtitles, and here I saw
Virgin Spring
, the Bergman film: wonderful. A more bleak film you couldn't imagine, but it made me happy.

For a week after, I don't think at all about Israel, or about London, a city I've also singled out as a place we might flee to. I want Jan to practise his craft of journalism. He is known to some in London as a fine journalist. He could work there; he could write in English. It is his passion: good writing, good reportage. A man you love, you wish to see him working with passion.

In any case, why am I yearning for Israel? I have heard from Jews who have visited that it is completely philistine. They don't say that it's philistine; they say it is wonderful. But since they themselves are philistines, it's not difficult to draw conclusions.

This is what I think: Vera, Werunia, you have come to Australia. Make your stand here. That's what you should accept, Werunia. Make a stand. Are you listening?

  
15
  

STITCHING

K
lotzman and his wife watch me at my sewing table with suspicion.

What's the big problem? I'm sewing as fast as a crazy person, I'm making good stitches, I'm humming pop songs – never the Allegro from Mozart's Symphony No. 28. Bergman, I never mention.

But I gather that my normal expression is satirical. The look on my face says, ‘May God give me the strength to kill myself if I cover my furniture in plastic.' Mama Klotzman thinks I look down my nose at her.

Of course I look down my nose at her. She's a moron.

She says, ‘My son is marrying Rachel, the daughter of a rabbi; two hundred people are invited to Temple Beth Israel.'

And I say, ‘Two hundred? Hmm. A wonderful thing.'

Mama Klotzman says, ‘In this city, there has never been a wedding of this size for a Jew.'

I say, ‘Well, good luck.'

Mama Klotzman says, ‘What? You think we need luck? You think maybe we can't afford a wedding of two hundred? Is this what you think?'

‘I'm very happy for you. May the Rabbi of Jerusalem himself bless Rachel and David. On his wedding night, may your son burst with joy.'

Mama Klotzman has the feeling that I am not sincere. She narrows her eyes. She says, ‘Okay, back to work. This is not a charity.'

I'm in charge of skirts, and Jan is making Holden cars on the assembly line.

In university, I read all that Marx had to say about the English working class. Now Jan and I are in the Australian version. It's not so bad. But to accept that you are in the working class forever, you must be born to it. Then your eyes never seek out something new on the horizon; you don't notice that there is a horizon. Maybe you look for a better job, but still in that same class.

I am not working class, and neither is Jan. We can take a holiday here, but we can't live here.

I am a journalist. I think, ‘Werunia, you have never in your life considered the working class inferior to your own. Don't start now; don't disgust me. Sew the skirts; that's okay for a time. Make no complaints, but in some way return to journalism.'

All the same, without even knowing it, I am wearing that satirical look, that mocking look.

Mama Klotzman asks me, ‘Why so high and mighty?'

I pause over my sewing. ‘High and mighty?'

‘Always so haughty. Who knows what's in your head? Communism, maybe.'

‘Well, since you ask, yes.'

‘You admit it!'

‘Yes, I admit it.'

‘The communists in Poland are killing the Jews. A shame that you even speak of them!'

‘That's not the communists. Marx was a Jew. That's just the Poles being stupid.'

‘Aiee! Now she is saying that Marx is a Jew!'

But why am I claiming that I'm a communist? Maybe a bit. I have more sympathy with communism than most. Not with the communism of the Russians and the Poles, though: I mean nice communism. From each according to his ability, and so on. I'm an ‘each'. That's about all I can say. I'm not about to do anything about it, though. I'm not likely to seize Klotzman's factory in the name of the proletariat and issue demands. I don't have the stomach for a struggle that would require generations of raised voices, lock-outs, strikes. I'm a rubbish communist. I want to work as a journalist. I want to become a salaried employee of a good newspaper owned by a fat capitalist.

Meanwhile, will you look at this floor, the floor of the finishing room? It's covered in dust. When it was last swept, God knows.

I am a person who wants well-swept floors wherever she goes. In Pine Street, I keep a tidy house. I'm obsessive. I visit the household of Mrs Wife and scorn the vigour with which she scrubs every surface in the place. But I am as bad. I take a broom to the floor, humming tunes from
South Pacific
.

Mama Klotzman stands at the doorway, her face a mask of horror.

‘What are you doing?' she shrieks.

What I'm doing must be obvious. I say nothing.

‘Sweeping?' says Mama Klotzman. ‘Are you sweeping?'

‘Yes, I am sweeping. You see the broom?'

She runs at me and seizes the broom. ‘Are you mad, Wasowski? Don't you know? Sweeping is bad for business! What? Do you want people to think we have time to sweep the floor?'

I say, calmly, ‘Mrs Klotzman, what are you talking about?'

‘It's bad luck, idiot! You want to ruin us? Is that why you came here?'

Her face is pink. The tips of her ears are red. The expression on her face is that of a peasant who has been cursed by the evil eye.

It's the Hungarian way: on the surface, very sophisticated; underneath, seething with peasant superstitions. The Hungarian Jews, they go out at midnight and dance naked before pagan idols. They believe that witches ride through the sky on broomsticks. They have so many superstitions you'd need an encyclopedia to explain them all. You have whooping cough? Catch a fish in a stream, cough on its fish face and throw it back in the stream. Then the fish will have the whooping cough and you will be cured. Such things, the Hungarians believe. Also, so it appears: never sweep the floor of your factory, or business will suffer.

I gaze at Mama Klotzman with a mixture of pity and humour. It drives her crazy. She says again, ‘So high and mighty.'

Very well, I have to accept that I will stitch skirts with a carpet of dust under my feet. Also, cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, cobwebs forming roads and tracks and highways for spiders on the window panes. I am like Cinderella, sitting among the ashes on the hearth. I laugh to myself.

When Mama Klotzman walks through the finishing room, I raise my face from the sewing and smile.

At home, it's okay.

It makes me happy to see Marek so cheerful in his school in Elwood, so pleased with this new life. In his school uniform, his face aglow, he goes off to school, with never a word of complaint about this Australia we've crossed half the world to embrace.

But I miss the life I led in Warsaw; I miss being a European. The Poles are attracted to the idea of their unique status as a nation. They say, ‘Sure, we're Europeans, but the poetry in our bones is older than Europe, older than the Russians, stupid, clumsy bears with blocks for heads that they are. We are the heirs of the Lusatians, the bards of olden days, and of a better class of Slavs, more nimble, not so arse-about.' This is a fairy story the Poles tell themselves. They're Europeans, a little less ridiculous than some, more ridiculous than others. And I am European.

You know, when Europeans come face to face with the new world in English novels, in American novels of the nineteenth century, those I have read translated into Polish – come face to face with an American businessman, an American heiress – they experience a certain degree of alarm, or disgust, or pity, also some fascination, but by and by they settle into a fairly tranquil sense of their European superiority. They are often wicked, these Europeans, but in a calm way, wicked without much outward malice. Well and good. When the Europeans meet the Australians? Not so many novels. But this is what happens. We are at first baffled. Such good-natured people, such friendly people, what is the cause of all this geniality? And we think, as I've said, ‘Like children, how wonderful.'

This is patronising, I suppose. But it's true that there's not much sophistication. So what? No great loss. Let the world be like the Australians; that would be a big improvement. The Australians have put aside so much that is false in favour of being cheerful. Then you begin to realise that a bit too much has been set aside. Nobody has fashioned the subcultures that I knew in Warsaw; there are no niches, no nooks, no layers. What the Australians welcome is a man or a woman willing to embrace the ethos of Australians: don't put on any airs, don't get fancy, don't show off, don't pretend you know something that nobody else knows; we're all easy-breezy here; you might be a Pole or a whatnot, but here you're the equal of the Prime Bloody Minister, so relax. Maybe the Australians think this sounds like heaven, and it is, in its way, except that something's hiding underneath the big, warm welcome: a fear, a timidity. It's mostly bluster on the surface and a horrible, ashamed fear underneath. Fear and resentment, like a friendly dog that jumps all over you and wags its tail but at the first hint of complaint lurches off and watches you from round the corner of the house with a scheme in its brain: it intends to bite you on the leg. There is, in Australia – I have noticed this – a limitation of sources of delight, and of the things that might be honoured, the people who might be honoured. Don't get fancy, don't put on any airs, don't get arty-farty.

I had not heard that term, arty-farty, before I came to Australia: not even in a Polish equivalent. Really, this is wonderful, this Australia in which you must not put on any airs, in which you must not come over all arty-farty. It is wonderful, except for that thing underneath, that fear and shame. And that sneering. That dog that intends to bite you on the leg.

In Warsaw, when we gathered in the nightclub or at a bar – often the Journalists' Club – we thought our tastes and appetites and frenzies and phobias were different from those of other people, but we didn't think we belonged to some higher group. And the people, the ‘other people' might have thought we were peculiar, or weird, or stupid, but they did not think we were affected. They shrugged, that's all. And that's what I miss – that shrug.

Mama Klotzman – all the Mama Klotzmans, all the Papa Klotzmans – they come to Australia and do what the oppressed and dispossessed always do on their great journey over the face of the globe. It is this. They take on the complexion of the culture and society in which they have settled. They disrobe and stand under the waterfall of the local culture and let the colour of the torrent dye them blue or green or red or crimson. It might take a couple of generations, but in the end the dispossessed are happy to jump into the waterfall. The Armenians jump in, as do the Assyrian Christians, the Kurds, the Black Irish, the White Russians. The Jews have had more experience of jumping into waterfalls than anyone else, and that's why it's such a crazy thing when the Jew-haters write in their pamphlets, ‘A disgrace! The Jews keep to themselves! The Jews are secretive!'