Vera (28 page)

I think, ‘This is what many people have to endure, someone they love suddenly dead. And now it's my turn.'

Jock takes me to Loch Street, where David is cleaning up in the kitchen. Jan had been preparing Atlantic salmon, a favourite of his, and at some stage must have collapsed, the salmon left on the kitchen bench.

David says, ‘Vera …' and doesn't know what more he can say.

I say, unnecessarily, ‘He was making salmon,' and I, too, don't know what more I can say.

Jock says nothing at all.

Grief is an odd mixture of the profound and the prosaic. At home over the next two days, I am in pain when I stand at the kitchen sink making tea and cannot ask Jan if he would also like a cup. If I walk into the living room, I won't see Jan with his hands in his pockets and his head raised, scanning the book shelves for a volume he needs. Five days ago, if I heard the toilet flush, that was Jan; or if I heard a door closing, or a chair squeak, or a window being raised – that was Jan. Such commonplace things. Now, the only sounds I hear are those I make myself. That phrase ‘a house in mourning', I know what it means. The comings and goings in these rooms, all that is familiar to them, welcomed by them, abruptly reduced by half, and the half remaining, my half, is altered, diminished in tone.

In fatalistic moments, I think of answered prayers, which got rid of my vile Uncle Maniek, and of the cosmic evening-up that might take decades, and cost you a person you dearly wish to keep forever.

I phone Marek and tell him the news. He is not distressed. In Marek's scheme of things, we move from existence to existence, taking on new forms. For him, Jan is not dead but enjoying a renewal of some weird sort. I'm certainly not going to debate it with him. He's coming down for Jan's funeral with his partner, Vedika, and Pani.

Morris Lurie, the writer, who was close to Jan, arranges the cremation and the service. I'm consoled by all my friends, and I am a woman rich in friendships: Hazel, more than anyone, and Mirka, and Mary Delahunty.

Hazel has what might almost be called a genius for avoiding platitudes. Often, she says nothing, but there is a universe of empathy in her eyes. And love. How many people understood this about Hazel, that if she loved you she gave you everything she had, with no economy of feeling. If she had to plunder her soul to find the solace you craved, she would do so without a second's hesitation.

I continue to talk to Jan. And as a matter of fact, he answers. I'm not crazy. It's one of the consolations that the death of someone we love cannot deny us. It's a consolation I certainly will not deny myself.

  
25
  

‘DEAR VERA …'

I
receive a telephone call from ABC management. I'm to come in (it's one of my days off) and talk to such-and-such a fellow. So I go. I talk to such-and-such a fellow, who tells me to go to another place and talk to another person altogether.

I'm anxious. Well, of course. I'm not in the first blush of my youth. Is it possible that I will be asked to go elsewhere in the ABC, where everyone is beyond the first blush of her or his youth? Oh, my prophetic soul! And yet, not quite prophetic enough, for this second such-and-such says, ‘Dear Vera, We love you, of course we do, invaluable contribution over thirty-five years, regret to say that from today onwards, we'll have to cope without you, most unfortunate, enforced retrenchments, sure you'll understand, best of luck in the glorious future that awaits you.'

There'd been rumours of the sort that make you sick to your stomach, and rumours have never been, for me, the harbingers of anything good, and damn them. In Lvov, ‘The Russians might pull out.' And the Russians do pull out, these people who admired my piano playing and wanted to send me to Moscow to become a genius. Also in Lvov, ‘The Nazis might invade.' And the Nazis do invade. ‘The Nazis might kill all of the Jews of Lvov, they're capable of it, maybe not the children.' And the Nazis do kill all of the Jews of Lvov, including the children – but they don't kill Werunia. In Warsaw, ‘The police will maybe permit the charming, romantic post-war Poles to murder Jews, that's what they're saying.' And yep, that's what happens. Then, less dramatically, rumours all over Gordon Street of retrenchments, and now, Mr Such-and-Such himself: ‘Dear Vera, We love you, of course we do …'

I am a journalist. The first thing I do is write a document, a letter of protest to the ABC. I wonder if ever in the history of the world a letter of protest such as mine has succeeded in reversing an injustice? Probably not. This one didn't.

At sixty, I'm unemployed. I sit in the living room at Loch Street and look around at the paintings, the drawings, the books. It's a beautiful interior, largely fashioned in my years at the ABC, but can I keep it? I have a spooky few minutes imagining poor Vera out on the footpath with a rack of dresses and various well-stocked bargain tables, bric-a-brac, bibelots, a few first-class objets d'art, and there I am with my little cash box, hailing passers-by, bargain day in West St Kilda, come one, come all, Werunia needs the dough. Oh God, has it come to this? The Madame Wasowski Garage Sale? No, no, no. I'd rather shoot myself.

Replete with edifying figures of speech, I tell myself to cut my coat according to the cloth. I take in boarders at Loch Street, not with a full heart. This house that has seen such merriment, that has known the high spirits of a hundred friends, a house saturated with memory – this house is now divided up among myself and various strangers who know nothing of its history. I am now an ageing Jewish landlady, like a character in a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Counting my pennies when I was a kid at university in Warsaw was one thing – anybody young and gorgeous can make a holiday out of impecuniosity – but it's another thing when I'm at the age I am now, capable of attracting the courteous sympathy of young people on trams and offered a seat. I buy the cheaper cuts of meat and cook them slowly, for hours. I mostly avoid glancing too much further down this road I'm on, but when I do, I find myself muttering: ‘Old and cold, oh wonderful, what a future to look forward to.' What was it I told Hazel? ‘Don't sit at home, go out'? It's as if I've been jilted by fortune, and need to show that I still have the wherewithal to rouse myself to happiness. But who can afford concerts?

I take on interviewing for Spielberg's Shoah Project. Robert, you know about it; you've seen my Shoah interview. The mission of Spielberg is to hear the full stories of all living survivors of the Holocaust, to record them for the Shoah archive. Those who conduct the interviews – it was Max Wald who interviewed me – complete training sessions that make you familiar with the techniques of questioning. Believe me, Robert, you would not agree to do this if you merely wanted to fill in time or make yourself seem useful. It upsets me badly to hear these stories of murder and torment, of families torn to pieces. Even if I had not myself experienced what is detailed in the stories, it would be a nightmare, but I know what all these people endured and it is revived in my memory, just as this book of yours, Robert, sets dancing the phantoms of Lvov. The worst thing is to be reminded of what is possible when people get their teeth into an idea, such as the idea of a Final Solution. Who wants this knowledge? But all these survivors must be heard.

When Max was interviewing me, I was in pain, but I didn't weep, not on camera. I was in a room full of beauty, my living room in Loch Street; everywhere I looked I could find consolation in the things I had treasured for decades. But the Jews of Lvov, before the Nazis came, they also had rooms full of things they loved, and memories of love and friendship. All that they loved did not save them.

Mirka is among those I interview. She is a lion, but the stories she tells wrench her about.

I say, ‘So, my love, shall we start?'

Mirka says, ‘Okay. Sure.'

And I hear everything, some of which I have heard before: the Rue Nélaton, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, which became an echoing hell, the camp at Loiret, the years as a fugitive in the forests. The intimacy between us is such that Mirka's story, drawn out of her with one question and then another and a hundred more, rouses a pity in me so strong that I have to overcome an urge to spare her the next hundred questions. We are sharing a tale of man's inhumanity to man; there are none worse. Surely this will become more than Jews talking to Jews, with indifferent billions who are not Jews filling the air with the clatter of their more important business? Because that I could not bear. All through Mirka's story, and nine others, I yearn for some ultimate victory of sweetness and light. This anger that has to express itself in murder: for the love of God, enough.

Marek, from a fairly young age – eighteen, nineteen, twenty – had a sense of destination very different from my own. Out of the ghetto, I wanted everything in life that rebuked the Nazis, which is to say everything that wasn't vicious, cruel, disdainful; I craved light and love. The Nazis detested life, if you think of life as teeming, endlessly various and gloriously polluted.

I want the life I can see, taste, embrace; Marek sees something beyond that, something spiritually essential that you more honour by abstinence and contemplation than by flinging yourself about, as I do, drinking myself into a stupor, smothering the faces of gorgeous men with kisses. Temperament and demeanour are hard to predict; it would have been more in keeping with the life that was being lived around Marek if he'd become a student radical at university and spent his nights off his face on liquor and dope. But no. He remains loyal to this gentle, Eastern vision of a life lived with an ear tuned to the low, sweet, enigmatic music of the cosmos.

At university, he studies mathematics, and does well. In those days, your children did not continue to live at home into their early thirties; they moved out into a house they shared with other boys and girls, other students. And this is what Marek does.

He had taken up guitar at the age of fourteen, but in the years after university, he becomes attracted to the shakuhachi flute, a Japanese instrument, and through diligence becomes a master of it. He goes north to find a home that suits him, making a living by busking with the flute and later by teaching the shakuhachi to earnest young students, and some older ones.

He is a devotee of the Eckankar philosophy of life, something you might get involved in if you were seeking out higher states of being, a Hindu flavour to the whole thing. Marek visits me and Jan in Melbourne, often with Vedika, his partner, who is German but has taken the name we know her by to better complement her spiritual attachments. Vedika is – what will I say here? – not devoted to sexual exclusivity in marriage, but who am I to be critical? I'm not critical. Am I? Not so much; a little. It seems not to concern my son. He hasn't taken the path he is on as a fad; he's profoundly committed to a life, in its way, far more unconventional than mine, but at the same time deeply conventional in a different way: the non-materialist, family-of-man way. If you look at photographs of Marek from the age of eighteen onwards, the expression on his face evolves from an alert cheerfulness to a transcendental calm. But they are all the expressions of a single journey, as if he has grasped from an early age that his life would be a quest of a certain sort along a single path.

I can't say that I ever feel attracted to travelling with him towards whatever distant star draws him along, but I certainly don't attempt to point him in another direction. He interests me. I love him – well, of course – but over and above the love of a mother for her son, he interests me. I am glad forever that I can say that.

This is Marek's life in the north: seeking; making music with his bamboo flute; meditating; eating fruit and berries, lettuce leaves, tofu, maybe a few bananas; doing no harm; communing with his friends and his partner; cultivating an inner tranquility; fulfilling himself in ways that seem esoteric to me.