Vera (17 page)

Secretive, my arse. The Klotzman Jews can't wait to show how conventional they are, how supportive of any society that abstains from murdering them. Always, when something happens, some event, they ask, ‘Is this good for the Jews? Is this bad for the Jews? It makes them accept us? Best if it makes them accept us!' Mama Klotzman, Papa Klotzman, do you think they want to tear the society in which they have found a haven into little pieces? They love it! The warmer the embrace of the new neighbours, the more they return the hug. Mama Klotzman adores the Australians. ‘Lovely people. Completely mindless, but lovely. Suits me,' says Mama Klotzman, and she settles with great relief into the happy culture of the sun-loving Australians. Sure, she is still a Klotzman Jew – she goes to
shule
, she buys her bagels at Glicks in Carlisle Street, at Chanukkah she buys
latkes
and doughnuts, maybe a cheese dish to honour Judith who cut off the head of Holofernes – but of Australia she has nothing bad to say. If she had to, she would put on a pullover of black and white stripes and big boots and white shorts and kick a football to Papa Klotzman.

The dispossessed of Armenia? Same thing. Pomegranates and apricots and
dolmi
three times a day; in front of the church, a fire for the bride and groom to jump over; nothing nasty to say about Australia.

Me, no.

No niches, no nooks, no layers. Not the home that Werunia was hoping for. Let me go back to Poland. Or it could be Israel. Or London. Why not?

One fine day, Mama Klotzman bites me on the leg.

Well, I expected it. I could see her around the corner, with her aggrieved and resentful look, judging the right time to strike.

She says, ‘Wasowski, I want you to clean my house. You want to sweep floors and destroy Klotzman's business? Better you should sweep my house.'

She is standing in front of me with her chin raised defiantly; I'm sitting at my work table, with a skirt to sew.

‘What?'

‘I want you to clean my house. Extra pay.'

‘Clean your house?'

‘Too high and mighty, Wasowski? Too high and mighty to get your hands dirty?'

‘Mrs Klotzman, I am not going to clean your house.'

‘So what are you telling? Communists don't clean houses? You see a Swedish movie, now you can't do some ordinary work with a vacuum cleaner?'

‘How did you know I saw a Swedish movie?'

‘Someone told me. In black and white, Technicolor is not for communists, is that what you're saying from Stalin? Clean my house, Wasowski. Extra money.'

‘No,' I say, on the brink of laughing out loud, and it would be genuine mirth if I did, not satire. ‘Are you mad?'

Off she stalks, the cheeks of her arse swaying like giant watermelons. I settle down to work once more, chuckling happily. ‘Communists don't clean houses' – that's wonderful.

I think back to Kołakowski's lectures on ‘a humanist communism'. I wish I could raise my hand in that lecture hall and say, ‘Professor, a question: are communists permitted to clean the houses of the bourgeois and the rentiers?'

A few minutes later, Mama Klotzman returns, her face flushed with triumph. She stands before me with her arms folded under her bosom. At first she says nothing – she wants me to feel menaced by her happiness.

I say, ‘Mrs Klotzman?'

‘I have been speaking to my husband. You can take off your apron. You're dismissed.'

‘Dismissed? For what reason?'

‘For the reason very well you know it, Wasowski! For the reason you are not taking orders!'

‘You mean for refusing to clean your house?'

‘For the reason always you are so high and mighty! The communists, you love? Okay, Wasowski, go and work for the communists!' And she stalks off for a second time. The watermelons.

I remain where I am, in a shaft of sunlight that angles down from a dusty window. I am amused. I stand and take off my apron, saunter to the locker room, fetch my handbag.

I stop at the accountant's office to inform him of my finishing time.

‘Vera, you are leaving us?'

He's a nice guy, Harold something-or-other; he has colourless hair, wears thick-lensed glasses and, in an attempt at adding some much-needed flair, a polka-dot bow tie.

‘I am leaving, Harold. I was sacked.'

‘This I don't believe!'

‘It's true. It appears I am a communist infiltrator. Maybe I am.'

I blow him a kiss, and depart.

I am unemployed. No work, no pay. At times like this, I see more vividly than ever the virtues of communism.

All the same, it's true that at this time in Australia, 1958, any man who wants a job can find one. But women? Not so much is expected of them. If women want to work, okay, so the thinking goes, that's perfectly acceptable. But a woman should never take a job away from a man. Women are homemakers before anything else. A second job in the one family is a luxury.

But here's the funny thing: most employed women are working class. They make sandwiches in cafés, clean motel rooms, attach Part A to Part B in certain factories. There are only a few women in the professions: teachers, nurses, a couple of doctors. There is still an old-fashioned attitude to female employment in Australia, an old-fashioned way of dealing with women altogether.

In Poland, much less so. It is capitalism that preserves this vision of women as homemakers and weaklings; under communism, we put a rivet gun in the hands of a woman and say, ‘Get to work.' Not so sentimental. In Poland, women still wish to be distinguished from men, but the differences do not have to be enforced by laws and limitations. After all, the idea of what a woman might be is much older in Poland than in Australia – the white part, at least – though not always in a good way.

In Australia, women and children are placed in the one category: the weaklings. ‘Be careful of the weaklings; show some consideration for the women and children.'

In Poland, historically, people have not been so fussy. The women and children can be murdered along with the men; there is no discrimination.

In the past, Australia, so I am told, was a much more progressive place. Here, social reforms happened before anywhere else. Australia was out in front, leading the world. Now, it seems like the Australians won't do a damned thing unless it has been tried out and adopted somewhere else. At a certain time, the Australians became scared, timid. This is a terrible shame.

But let me say this. It is 1958, 1959, 1960. Most of what I know about the Australians is what is easy to see. Lots of things, I don't see, don't understand. And this I say now is true, I think: what we don't know is much greater than what we do. In what we don't know, the poetry lives.

Robert tells me, ‘So critical of Australia, Vera! So critical of Australia when you first came here!'

What I did not know was this: that in 1958, 1959, 1960, a thousand people – more, a hundred thousand, and more still, a million people – were about to open their mouths and say things that had never been heard before in Australia. And they would not be polite in what they said. Many would be women and there would be none of the weakling in what they demanded.

What I am grumbling about in 1960 will barely exist in 1970, and will be extinct in 1980. I came here a few years before Australia became the most interesting place on earth. I could not see that it would ever happen. Robert, I confess my ignorance, and my egotism. You want me to avoid alienating readers by complaining ‘endlessly' (your word) about the terylene dresses, by patronising the poor, cheerful, childlike Australians. Okay. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I've become a Catholic in my repentance. Can that be an end of it?

I meet a Jewish businessman somewhere, at a gathering of Jews, let's say. Jan and I are always invited to these gatherings (what the gathering was about, God knows – supporting Israel, maybe) so that the men can enjoy my legs and study my figure. Better if they were attracted to my polemic, but let's be honest – when a man has a choice between studying a woman's legs and figure or listening to her talk politics, he will always choose the flesh. He's chatting with me, this fellow, and he mentions that he has a business making jewellery.

What was his name? It started with ‘Y'. Maybe Yulker, Yelkan, something like that. The first letter was ‘Y'.

Yeitsman, was that it?

No, Vulcan! – it was Vulcan. The name erupts now in my memory. Vulcan, and his business was Vulcan Jewellery.

I say, ‘You make jewellery? I know how to do that. Give me a job.'

It happens to be true that I know how to make jewellery. When I was studying journalism in Warsaw, they took us to the state television station and taught us everything to do with performance – painting sets, applying make-up, fashioning costume jewellery. It was as if they thought that theatre and journalism were the same thing. And in Poland, news broadcasting and theatre
were
more or less the same thing: everything scripted to reflect credit on the government, and also to glorify the Soviet Union.

‘I know how to make jewellery. Give me a job.'

And Vulcan tells me, ‘Wasowski, here's what we do. I provide the materials. I provide the finished piece of jewellery for you to imitate. Maybe you add a little bit of yourself, that's okay. You start tomorrow.'

Making jewellery at home in our apartment becomes my next job.

Jan, by this time, is no longer working at General Motors; he's found another job, in the credit department of the Myer Emporium in the middle of Melbourne, a huge department store built by a Jewish immigrant decades ago. Jan has gone from hammering away in a big happy gang of working-class men to facilitating the survival of capitalism by dispensing credit for whitegoods and television sets. He sees the irony.

Me, I've turned my training as a journalist to the manufacture of costume jewellery. I see the irony, too. It's a very ironical time. I sit at a table in the apartment with my tools and materials arranged before me: three pairs of pliers, one with a very fine nose; tweezers; silver wire; glass; glue. I think, ‘It's come to this, Werunia – you're a cottage industry.' I could be in medieval Europe, with the same equipment, the same materials.

But there's no need to sing songs from
South Pacific
to pacify the workforce. I can play Bach, Rachmaninov or Mozart on the record player. The December sun comes through the windows. This is a type of happiness. I can be a communist here. I might hum the ‘Internationale' if I wish to – but I don't. Or I might reflect on the federal election the Australians have just transacted, an election in which I had the opportunity to vote for the CPA, the Communist Party of Australia – but didn't.

It was the first truly democratic election I have ever witnessed. The Australians support two political parties, mostly. One calls itself the Liberal Party and is led by a big, white-haired individual by the name of Menzies, who worships the Queen of England and is also a devotee of the insane sport of cricket. His life is divided entirely between the Queen and cricket. He has no other interests in the world, does not keep a mistress, has, in fact, no interest in sex (so I am informed) but can be roused to passion now and again by the communists of Australia, who barely exist. His party is made up of hidebound reactionaries who have bad sex lives, keep small, yapping dogs and experience difficulty going to the toilet – constipation, the abiding health issue of conservative politicians, poor digestion. The Australians like him, many of them. They vote for him, so it seems. In the best newspaper of Melbourne, the
Age
, they say he has been prime minister for five hundred years. He has a friend in another reactionary party that supports him: McEwen – I can't pronounce his name – a crook if ever I saw one, the sort we see a lot of in Poland with an appetite for pulling the fingernails from the hands of enemies.

The other big party is for workers, the Labor Party, socialist in its way, led by a man by the name of Calwell, who wears mismatched socks and the broad neckties you see on party apparatchiks in Warsaw. It is difficult to feel inspired by him. He looks like the sort of folksy fellow who mixes his peas with his mashed potato when he sits down to dinner and takes a fried egg sandwich to work smothered in tomato sauce.