Vera (23 page)

And as a matter of fact, there
are
occasions when Canberra is Sophocles. I'm indifferent to the mystique of politics, sure, but when events become particularly torrid I get swept along by the drama like everyone else.

The Dismissal is like that. Even in Gordon Street, a long way from the main stage in Canberra, the presenters and staff look as if they've started the day with a big snort of cocaine. For a month there's only been the one story: the Coalition senators have blocked supply in the Senate; Gough and Malcolm, the two central characters, are locked in a struggle to the death. This is the sort of maximum stakes combat that gives media people an orgasm-of-the-century feeling. And nobody's getting a bigger high out of the drama than Gough and Malcolm. They love it. They have the undivided attention of everyone in the country.

And whenever Gough and Malcolm cross paths in the studio at this time (the bloodletting brings them to Melbourne a couple of times a week), I notice that a bond is being forged between them. In their lives, they will never know intimacy of this intensity again: not with anyone, not their wives, not their children. They pause for a second to acknowledge each other, nod, pass on, and even though they can't admit it, don't even realise it, they love each other in a way that will take a further decade, even more, to come to the surface. What they are sharing is more potent than high-proof Polish vodka. The whole nation is now an arena, the seats are packed, and there in a shaft of sunlight stand Gough and Malcolm.

Then comes the Dismissal itself. Nobody at Gordon Street predicted it. The news comes through from the Canberra studio that the Governor-General, assuming the role of
deus ex machina
, has dismissed the Whitlam government and installed Malcolm as caretaker PM. There are shocked expressions, yes, headshaking, even a certain amount of partisan outrage, but also a type of wonder that this fabulous drama, in which all of us in the media have taken the role of chorus, should have reached this sensational denouement.

Reporters are despatched in all directions; whatever plans anyone may have had for the rest of the day and night are disregarded. I'm furiously ringing all of the Great and Good I have numbers for, arranging for them to express their outrage or satisfaction to our reporters. Malcolm, meanwhile, is getting to every studio he can to promote his cause, which is to say a majority in the House of Representatives at the upcoming election. Gough is doing the same thing. Difficult to say which of the two is the more exultant. Malcolm now has an election he expects to win; Gough is strutting up and down the high moral ground like a Homeric hero. Couldn't be happier, either of them.

But politics is only that thrilling now and again. Mostly, it's tedious. To start with, there's the whole business of language. Politicians spend so much time expressing themselves in the clichés of their trade that almost every utterance can be predicted. It is as if they're following a script prepared years in advance, at a time when they were striving for preselection in the drafty halls of their electorates. They learnt then never to stray from the phrases they had practised, not if they were serious about a career in parliament, in government. Your predictability is a test of your reliability; this is what they absorbed. And, it strikes me – on
TDT
as I stand off-camera with my clipboard and my scepticism – that politicians find it impossible to escape those clichés. For the life of them, they can't fashion an original sentence. If you were God or Satan, and you promised them the presidency of the world if they would say something original, something made of words that would remain memorable for a hundred years, they couldn't do it. They see a camera, they see a microphone, and a cataract of clichés pours into their brains. It exhausts me.

Even those who imagine that they have a gift for rhetoric, like Menzies – no, I don't think so. Whenever I watched Menzies doing his schtick – he was mostly in retirement by that time, I admit – I thought of those English actors, like John Gielgud, stretching out the vowels of a speech by King Lear or Prospero, like brandy toffee. They think it's art, but it isn't; it's just John Gielgud crazy in love with his voice, or it's Laurence Olivier. And with Menzies, it was Menzies.

‘Look at me,' he begs, in his suite at the Rio Tinto building, giving an interview to Peter Couchman about the book he's just published:
Afternoon Light
, a memoir with an atmospheric title.

Afterwards, I glance around at the suite, trying to avoid eye contact, because I won't be able to look as if I enjoyed the performance. And this gives Menzies the impression I'm puzzling out where the toilet is.

He asks, ‘Do you require the facilities?' and I burst out laughing.

I want to say, ‘Thank you, no, if I need a piss I'll squat in the corner.'

He probably has a fairly good mind, but he's trapped by his act as a masterful statesman and can never escape.

I have to wait for Keating before I meet a politician who's capable of talking with a vernacular elegance. It's not just the candour and force of what he has to say that makes him so attractive. He's a truly charming man. When women meet him, they adore him. I read in a magazine once a survey of what things in a man attract women, and a dozen or so anonymous women gave their opinions. One said that she enjoyed more than anything a man with a good, strong body dressed in a cashmere jumper; soft and yielding on the outside, but the exciting hint of something hard underneath. That's part of Keating's charm for women. They know his reputation – he's a battleaxe in parliament – but his voice elsewhere has an intimacy that's full of suggestion, without a single suggestion being made. You want to be invited out to dinner, want to listen to him for an hour, then, in private, undress in a languorous way and kiss him till your mouth is jelly.

How bloody annoying the Australian media can be – still! – when it comes to high culture. The first thing that occurs to so many journalists when a political figure reveals an attraction to art, to music, is affectation. Isn't it possible that the fellow (it's always a man) is simply standing up in the sincerity of his enjoyment? I mean Paul Keating and his French clocks and his Mahler. Can you imagine the French president or the British prime minister sneered at for passions of the same sort?

The Israeli Symphony is in Australia for a series of performances, in Canberra this particular evening. I'm at the concert hall with my dear friend Hazel Hawke. It's Mahler, and beside us two seats are still vacant just before the commencement. Paul arrives with his wife, Anita, making his way with apologies past the knees of audience members already seated and takes the vacant place next to me.

I whisper to him, ‘What the hell are you doing here? You've got the budget tomorrow.'

He says, ‘I know, I know. I've got papers all over my desk. But it's Mahler, Vera, it's Mahler.'

His political ambitions depend on making a fine budget, not on what Zubin Mehta does with Mahler, yet he comes to the performance. Can't he be admired for that?

Okay, politics is one thing and it's another, but I don't want to have anything to do with that lazy sort of disgust with politicians that you hear so often. Politics is what we have in place of murder. Let it prevail. If you're disgusted with politicians in Australia, what would you suggest? That we burn down the Reichstag? Relax.

I was saying, before I rudely interrupted myself, that other stories meant much more to me than anything happening in parliament.

One
TDT
story that I love has a very local origin. On Fitzroy Street, not so far from the Banff, there's an old bluestone church with a Canary Island Palm out the front. The church is running a school for homeless children, without any publicity, not just schooling but food and accommodation.

I go down there with my notepad and get details from the minister whose name may have been anything – see if you can dig it up, Robert, I don't know – the Reverend Tom, or the Reverend Phil, a decent human being, and the volunteers, good human beings, although just a little overexposed to the teachings of Jesus, but nothing fatal. The kids, all homeless in the middle of this big, juicy country, it wounds you to see them like that, some of them quite young, living feral until the Reverend Tom or the Reverend Phil came across them.

I don't want to make a bore of myself with constant backward glances to my own ordeal in Lvov, but the experience of these kids cries out for cross-reference. Not that anyone is trying to hunt them to extinction, but I hate to see their famished faces when most people are swimming in excess: it's immoral.

And so I am more than usually conscientious in gathering the data for this story, in arguing at
TDT
meetings for the story's priority. It's not that I seek out stories – this one, or any other – that relate themselves to my past; it's that Lvov has left me – and countless other Jews, from their own Lvovs – especially sensitive to privation, injustice, what you will. You can't have a life that disregards the marginalised, even those who lack the competence to make their way in our society.

  
19
  

LEITH RATTEN

I
n my email today, there is a list of questions from Robert. In two days he's flying up to Byron to interrogate me again, and he wants me to prepare some answers for him. I read through the list and groan: he asks me about Marek, about Jan, about things I'm not ready to talk about yet. It's exhausting. We will sit at the table in my dining room, Robert always courteous but at the same time a pain in the arse. I wish this book could be written in a stream-of-consciousness way, a glass of wine in my hand, slumped in an armchair, eyes closed, babbling away without any need for thought or reflection. Each question of Robert's is meant to stimulate certain specific memories, but the questions also stimulate the memories close by, and some of those are awkward for me, some of them are unpleasant, some are vile. I wish I could quarantine things I am happy to recall, or at least willing to recall, from those that unsettle me. I embrace my life, but some of it I embrace much more warmly than other parts.

But okay. I'll look at the questions. Let me first roll a cigarette. Also, pour a glass of wine.

When Robert arrives, we sit at the kitchen table and go through his list of questions. I'm being especially patient. I don't lose my temper when he fails to understand a point I'm making. I want to, but I don't. It's all nice Vera today. Good Vera. Forebearing Vera. I even make him a cup of tea. But, you know, it is only when he gets to the questions about Leith Ratten that I become properly engaged. Robert's questions about politics bore me a little. But Leith – that was life and death. I tell him the whole story. Please God, let Robert do it justice.

Leith Ratten killed his wife with a shotgun. That much is agreed. He says it was an accident; the cops say it was murder. He comes from Echuca on the Murray River, and that's where the shotgun went off, in the kitchen of his house in Mitchell Street. She was about eight months pregnant, Beverley Ratten, and the police investigation revealed that Leith had been having an affair with a woman by the name of Jenifer Kemp, a married woman. Leith had spoken with her not long before the gun went off. A few hours before: not so long. He calls the emergency number; he's hysterical. The police arrive; Beverley is dead; Leith is a babbling wreck. They take him away and he is eventually able to tell them that he was cleaning the gun in the kitchen when it went off. The police: ‘Yeah, sure.' Leith is charged with murder; the jury finds him guilty; he's sentenced to hang. In Pentridge, waiting for the hangman, Leith's lawyers appeal the verdict, but the appeal is dismissed.

I hear about the case – the guilty verdict, the dismissal of the appeal, and become interested. A number of people in the legal profession are convinced that there has been a miscarriage of justice and that Leith is innocent. It could be a story for
TDT
. I have some acquaintance with a law professor in Melbourne, Peter Brett, a lovely man, and I ask him to take a look at the trial transcript and the appeal verdict.

He says, ‘Vera, the man's innocent.'

And one way or another, I'm able to interest the Melbourne producer of
TDT
in the story.

I am on my way to Pentridge to talk to Leith. He has a second appeal in the works. Of course he does – they want to hang him.

I have seen men, women and children hanging from lampposts and trees, and I have a special horror of it happening here, in the city I have come to in order to escape such horrors. The death penalty means that if the state decides to hang someone, you, the citizen, know the exact minute of the hanging. You go to sleep the night before, thinking, ‘They're hanging Mister X in the morning.' And when you wake up, you might think, ‘They're hanging Mister X in an hour's time.' And at five minutes to eight that morning, you think, ‘In five minutes, they hang Mister X.' Then: ‘He is standing on the trapdoor. He has said his prayers.' And at eight o'clock in the morning, exactly: ‘He is now falling through space.' This, to me, is an abomination: that the death of Mister X, his hanging, is enacted in the consciousness of all the state's citizens in real time. That it is an item in a schedule.

I hope to discover in my audience with Leith Ratten that he is innocent, but if I look into his eyes and say to myself, ‘Uh-oh – he did it,' I will tell him that I won't be watching the clock on the morning of his execution. I will be listening to loud music; I will be drinking vodka; my awareness will be obliterated; I will think of anything but his feet on the trapdoor – and that will be my protest.

I know the governor of Pentridge Prison. I spoke to him in regards to another
TDT
story a couple of years back.

When I ring him, he says, ‘Vera. Of course. Vera Wasowski. What can I do for you? You want to talk to Leith, before we hang him? Okay, why not?'

I make my journey out to Coburg, a dreary suburb of weatherboard houses either side of Sydney Road, many of then constructed in what is known as the Californian bungalow style, with red brick pillars supporting a broad, overhanging verandah roof. Around the houses, in homely garden beds, are a few geraniums, beach daisies, small acacia bushes.

Immigrant Greek families, and the first of many Turks, inhabit these houses. But they will be owned one day by couples who have put off making babies until Mrs Mum and Mr Dad are in their early forties and can afford a stroller bigger than a ride-on mower, also a huge monster of a vehicle with a name that evokes adventure and glory – a Toyota Indomitable; a Holden Saga. And in those days to come, when Robert is flying up from Melbourne to Byron and plaguing me for information, the grounds and buildings of Her Majesty's Prison Pentridge will have been given over to new housing, apartments for the owners of those behemoth strollers.

But today in 1972, under grey skies with light rain floating down, Pentridge Prison, itself built in part by convicts, is home to a thousand men – the wretched, the unlucky, the brutal, the untrustworthy, and a few innocent fellows conspired against by circumstance.

On the wall next to the desk at which you surrender your bag is a notice advising you that no guns or knives or weapons of any sort can be carried beyond this point. The sign makes you wonder what sort of person would require such a warning.

But I am not in the mood for irony. I am in the mood for breaking down in tears. I do not like prisons. I think of camps. I think of gates that close behind you forever. I think of people shuffling in a long line to a building in which they undress themselves and accept a rough grey garment with black stripes running down its length.

I am terrified of this place, like a child. I obey instructions from people in uniform without the slightest objection. If I am told I must undress, I will do so. If any of these coolly indifferent guards says to me, ‘So, a Jew, is that right?' I would say, ‘Am I to die?'

Not now, but later – tonight maybe – when I think back on today, I will resent these fantasies of victimhood that so stubbornly play themselves out in my imagination. I have a right to dread, I know that, but often these dramas seem so blatant. I did not die in Belżec, in Janowska, in Auschwitz. I was not shot in Peltewna Street. Can I not, without fear, enter a prison as a visitor in a country where Jews have never been rounded up, never murdered? Is it necessary for me to tremble in this way, like a character in a second-rate horror movie? The stink of the compartments in Lvov is in my nostrils, like shit stuck to my shoe.

At a third stop, a prison officer asks me a question. He says, in a friendly way, ‘You're here to see Prisoner Ratten?'

I say, ‘Yes, Leith Ratten.'

And the officer, without any change of expression, says, ‘Right you are.'

I am led down a long corridor, in places painted the pale green colour you take on when you are kneeling at a toilet bowl, about to vomit up five hours' consumption of alcohol; in other places not painted at all, bluestone blocks left exposed. We reach a door in which a flap of metal that can be opened and closed has been installed at eye level. I am shown inside, asked if I'd like to take a seat at a bare, wooden table.

The prison officer says, ‘Leith'll be here in a mo. Just hold your horses.'

And Leith is indeed with me in a very short time. He is a man in his early thirties, quite strongly built in his upper body, but without any sense of masculine menace. He is dressed in the greyish-blue denim of the prison's inmates. Responding to an order from the guard, he takes the second chair at the table. He is not manacled. The prison guard is content to leave us together unsupervised.

I say, ‘Leith, I am Vera Wasowski, from the ABC. We want to do a story about your conviction and appeal. It's for
This Day Tonight
. Do you know the show?'

Leith says, ‘What's it called?'

‘
This Day Tonight
.'

‘No.'

‘Do you watch the ABC?'

‘Sometimes.'

The instant I see him, I know he is terrified. Of course he is terrified – they intend to hang him in this very prison.

The quality of terror in his face is very familiar to me, although I haven't seen it since Lvov. No, later than Lvov: Warsaw, in 1957. I saw it then when I looked in the mirror on a day when the news was full of stories of Jews being murdered in Poland in one city and another, one town and another, and hearing these stories brought a surge of fear rushing up from the pit of my stomach. It was in
my
face that I saw that dread, and I wanted to run and never stop.

I pause in my questioning and stare at Prisoner Ratten's face, which is drained of blood, as pale as bone. He was once a handsome man: I can see that. A strong jaw; thick dark eyebrows; a smooth forehead, quite high; short, dark hair. His upper lip is a little too thin to benefit him when a jury studies him over a period of weeks. They might think his thin upper lip is exactly the upper lip you would see on a man who made a plan to murder his wife, and carried it out.

I do not believe that this man, this Prisoner Ratten, murdered his wife. But maybe he did. There's a puppy softness in his eyes still, but what he's facing (the scaffold, supporting hands helping him up the steps, a brief glimpse of the sombre witnesses …) has marred his good looks.

I say, ‘We will be telling the story of your wife's death again, and we will have a barrister looking at your case, and your appeal. He is our expert. He believes you are innocent.'

Leith says, ‘I am.'

For the sake of hearing him answer while I'm watching, I ask, ‘You are innocent? You did not murder Beverley Ratten?'

‘I didn't murder Beverley. No.' He speaks at a low pitch, but not a mumble.

‘It was an accident?'

‘It was an accident.'

Even if he is guilty, I hope with all my heart he doesn't hang. I do not wish to see anyone hang. Okay, maybe Eichmann. Otherwise, no-one.

I have come here late in the afternoon. One of the things about Pentridge is this: no visitors are permitted to exit the prison after five. Once the doors close, you are there for the night. By the time I have asked twenty more questions, the hands on my wristwatch approach 4.45 and my heart is beating as fast as a cat's.