Vera (29 page)

He comes down from the north for Jan's funeral, as I have said; he doesn't grieve as I do. But he comforts me. Death to Marek is not death but the commencement of a new stage of existence, yet he knows that death is pretty much death to me, and that I am in pain.

He heads back to the north, to Kuranda on the Atherton Tableland, the wet tropics, inland from Cairns. A river runs down to the sea from Kuranda, a torrent. The town – the region around it, the rainforests – is full of neo-hippies, neo-bohemians, Buddhists of a fashion, acolytes of various Hindu holy men. Why they should all be attracted to the tropics is a mystery. It's the country of the Djabugay people, and those who remain must wonder what the hell is going on, white people from everywhere sitting under trees with perspiration pouring off them as they court enlightenment.

My son is there with his wife, and later a son – my grandson – is born: Pani, fair-haired, beautiful. I visit Marek ever and anon, and that mama joy I experience at seeing my son is further enhanced by seeing Pani. He's growing up as a sort of neo-hippy: semi-feral, tanned and healthy, a complete stranger to Mars Bars and Cherry Ripes. I wouldn't have anticipated just how much I relish being a grandmother. I've said – confessed, what you will – that I was a very ordinary mother to Marek, but I'm better at it now. Better at mama love, at least. You know what it was like when Marek was a baby and then an infant? It was as if I were so intent on never becoming a conventional mother, every damned thing for the baby, that I somehow closed off the channels of good, old-fashioned mama love. Sure, I adored Marek when he was a baby, but there was always an asterisk that led you down to the bottom of the page: ‘Don't define me as a mother.' Now, it's different. Define me as a mother and grandma if you like. Up to a point.

But the relationship of Marek and Vedika falls apart, for reasons never explained to me. She'd become a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an Indian guru, later known as ‘Osho', so maybe that had something to do with it. This is about 1988, 1990.

Marek leaves Kuranda for Nimbin, which has a better climate, not so humid. Then from Nimbin he moves to Byron – or rather, New Brighton, not so far from Byron. New Brighton is a suburb of a sort of Ocean Shores, the land all around it once owned by a cabal of American investors headed by the American singer-turned-motivational-speaker Pat Boone: what the hell?

I visit Marek in New Brighton, more than once. Pani is with him if he's not with his mother. The boy is a delight, as I say. Hazel comes with me, very much in sympathy with Marek's embrace of the role of seeker. Marek has a new girlfriend, Ela: like Vedika, a German.

It's a beautiful place, New Brighton, lush vegetation, the ocean stretching out to the east. Marek and Ela buy a house there, and marry. At the wedding, I think, ‘This man, now almost forty, how extraordinary the life he leads, and he's my son.' I think of my own journey: Lvov, the Beckstein, the murders and the murderers, Warsaw, Kotarbiński, the intersection of my life and Viktor's, and then the baby who is Marek. Marek's journey takes a path that branches off from mine, leading from the snows of Warsaw to the glittering coast of eastern Australia, to a flute first invented in China, perfected by the Japanese. This is astonishing, the journeys of our lives, the poetry of those journeys, the music. And he remains my son, Marek, married this day to a girl born in Germany.

Marek and Ela sell the New Brighton house and buy another, this time in Byron, around the time that I cease to be a salaried employee of the ABC, to put it politely. I visit Marek and Ela in their new home. They suggest that I might move up to Byron, make it my home. I'm not repelled by the idea. To be close to my son would be enjoyable, and Byron itself is attractive, particularly its climate. Oh, it has its affectations, of course it does – it has a population that at times seems to be attempting to create a monoculture of dedicated languor – but it's nothing I can't tolerate.

So, maybe Byron. I could sell Loch Street, pack my suitcase, and go. I would have to accept that I am – well, what can I say? – that I am ‘retired'. I don't know how to be ‘retired'; nobody does. The word carries with it a freight of suggestion that I am repelled by. Retired from what? From life? You no longer receive a salary, so that's it? Reduced to scanning the supermarket shelves for home-brand variants of items you used to fling into the trolley without the least concern about price? All of that shit?

Okay, not retirement, but maybe Byron. I can't stay at Loch Street any longer. The neighbour on one side wants to erect a wall the height of the pyramids; all the view will be lost. I've tried to fight it but he, Tutankhamen, is going to win. And the boarders I have at the house, they're an ordeal. On the other hand, my Melbourne friends, especially Mirka, they'd be here, I'd be there: how would I cope? It's like what's-his-name says – who am I thinking of? The writer, American, bullfights and the Spanish Civil War – who the hell is he? Hemingway! Ernest Hemingway.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. Yes, him. He said, ‘Life is just one damned thing after another.' Well, it hasn't been like that for me most of the time, but it is now. One damned thing after another.

Maybe Byron. Let me think about it.

  
26
  

LIGHT

T
he house is full of Byron light that floats in off the sea, very thick and creamy. In my Lvov, there was no such light as this, and sometimes no light at all. I have developed a taste for the Byron light. I like to sit in an armchair in the dining room and gaze out the glass doors at the garden glittering in the sunshine, the myrtle vines, the flowers. Bush turkeys come into the backyard at times, big clumsy birds that drop from the sky with all the grace of a winged wombat.

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen, the song I was on the verge of sending to John Howard at a time of more than usual disgust and anger, ‘Everybody Knows', a poetic dirge cataloguing injustices, hypocrisies: I thought he needed to hear it. In the end, I didn't send it to the prime minister. I was probably stoned, and really, what was I thinking: that he would undergo some radical conversion of the soul after listening to a Jewish baritone from Montreal pouring out scorn like a lava flow? No, let me keep him, Leonard, to myself. My God, there was never a voice so soaked in sex, never lyrics so witty and so moving at the one time. I'm at that age when consolations – like Leonard, like art, like books – matter more than ever, as consolations for aching joints, for diminished powers of all sorts, and for friends I can't embrace anymore.

Okay, if I'm not researching or producing anymore, what exactly am I good for? I look around in Byron. They have a writers' festival: good, I'll be a volunteer or whatever it is they want to call me. I meet the director of the festival, Jill, a wonderful woman, brimming with intelligence. How do I manage to keep meeting such people?

I say, ‘Vera Wasowski. What do you think, do you have some work for me?'

Jill says, ‘Your résumé is fabulous. You must know everything about pampering writers.'

And I say, ‘Sure. Show me one, I'll demonstrate.'

I see lots. Many of them, I've read. This impresses a writer. Some of them want to cry. A few come to the festival to meet girls, or boys, but most writers are highly conscientious creatures with a sense of obligation to their readers and are only too keen to follow instructions. ‘You talk for fifteen minutes, read something from your book, let the audience ask questions, then you go to the bookshop and sign copies of your novel. You'll have a jug of water, but best not to drink booze on stage. Or smoke.'

‘Yes, yes, of course. Fifteen minutes?'

‘Fifteen. Then you read.'

It's enjoyable. So long as I can be involved with writers, who's complaining?

But the festival doesn't take up the whole year. I have a few meetings with Jill leading up to the event, a week of being busy, a certain amount of correspondence to write – then the rest of the year.

Time to look around again. They want volunteers at the Salvos shop, at the community centre and other places. It's Vera the Fairly Good Samaritan.

I'm sympathetic to the people who come to the community centre looking for help. Some are crazy, some have no idea how to negotiate their way through life, some are a bit addled, some have a strange sense of entitlement that makes them think life is a sort of holiday, punctuated by brief periods of paid employment – which it should be, of course – and some have simply been mucked up by life. I don't judge. I do what I can without limitations; now and again, I listen to bizarre tales that focus on the malevolence of certain dark deities that float around in the air.

I answer telephones, too, not always patiently, to those who call wanting to talk to the director about something trivial. I say, ‘She's too busy. Call back after Christmas. After Easter.'

And I organise fundraising lunches, dinners, what you will, sometimes at my place.

I have to mention this now, in case you ever come to my house, reader. Do not say: ‘Goodness! So many books!' Dear God. As if shelves full of books were a strange and rare phenomenon. If you say that, I will put poison in your tea.

It's not so bad. The Byron climate suits me. Marek is close by, half an hour away. When I go down into the town, there are lots of attractive people, the women and girls in loose-fitting stuff, all perfectly tanned, attractive men everywhere. But perhaps there is not so much intellect per square metre as in other places.

There are many people in Byron with, frankly, insane ideas about the world, but the insane ideas are all to do with butterflies and flowers and trees and astonishing diets, free of fat and sugar and protein and carbohydrates that allow you to live forever (essentially, lentils and dried bananas). But that's okay – their insane ideas do not include murder.

Live and let live, says Saint Vera of Byron.

  
27
  

FAREWELLS

S
omebody could write a history of our species guided by a theme of unavailing prayers. It is 7 December 2006. Marek has died. He had just turned fifty-three. My prayer, ignored, was the same as that of countless other parents: not to outlive my child.

Nobody needs the summer heat of Byron to be hotter, but Marek was in a sauna on his property at Kyogle, north of Byron, on the Richmond River, when he died. I'd given him a big bag of money to buy the property – God knows where I found the money, but I did – which he and Ela were fashioning into a spiritual retreat. In addition to playing the shakuhachi, he had become a spiritual teacher, and a writer. I paid for the sauna in which his life ended. I don't mention it bitterly, only to record the grotesque sensibility of the forces that intervene in our lives.

I was out shopping in Byron and when I returned home a police car was waiting. A policeman approached me with an expression on his face that seemed – what? – wounded. He had removed his cap. ‘You'd better come inside,' he said.

And so we went inside. By this time, I was numb in mind and body. The policeman said, ‘You may want to sit down.' I sat down, and the policeman explained that Marek had died while in the sauna at Kyogle; the cause of death had not been determined, but heart failure seemed most likely.

The policeman said he was terribly sorry, and asked if there was someone who could be with me: a friend, a relative, perhaps my husband.

There were people who could be with me. And they came, as they had after Jan died. I am rich in friendships, as I have said, but the grief is awful. Hands hold mine, hands circle my shoulders, phrases of love are whispered into my ear. For the time being, all the vigour has left my body. I allow tea to be made for me, and again my shoulders are circled, again those words are whispered.

If Marek is gone, and he is, then I am being asked to accept what cannot be accepted.

Hazel is also gone.

My last sight of her was at the nursing home near Liverpool, or in that direction, a place, dear God, very lowering to the spirits. She had Alzheimer's, had been resisting it for years – fifteen years maybe – a fight she was always going to lose. Each time I saw her over that time, the disease had made gains. At the nursing home, on this final visit, the matron said, ‘Hazel is not in her bed.' Very well, then where is she? She had lost her way, so it was discovered, and had settled into another bed. She was returned to her own room. I sat at her side.

She said, ‘What have you done to your hair?' What had I done? Nothing. Then she sang a song, the first verse, ‘My bonny lies over the ocean…' It was like Hal, in Kubrick's
2001
, as functions are turned off one after another until everything is shut down, and the computer, once a technological masterpiece, sings its swan song: ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true …'

Do you know what I want? Some sort of international court, like the one in The Hague, where they try war criminals, except this one would be a court in which you prosecute Nature for releasing such vile things as Alzheimer's, which is like an atrocity. If I were a lawyer at this International Court of Nature's Crimes Against Humanity, I'd say, ‘You can take away life, sure. But like this? For God's sake!'

Yes, yes, it's impossible, I know that, but it would give people something to do with their grief, like mine for Hazel, Jan and Marek. Jan, okay, he courted what happened to him, but not Marek, not Hazel. Not a dozen others, close friends.

You know, Robert, because I told you, that I have developed an interest in Buddhism. Years ago, I went to a symposium in Melbourne, held by Namkhai Norbu, a Dzogchen teacher from Tibet, a most extraordinary man. I didn't respond very much to the notion of reincarnation, but what he had to say about suffering moved me. And I try to accept that suffering is an inevitable part of human experience, and that one (well, me) can only free oneself of the burden of suffering by recognising the four noble truths.

I can only ever remember three of the four noble truths at a time. Don't ask me about them, Robert. They are all to do with non-attachment. Okay, well and good, I try to go about in a non-attached way. It is not so easy. Suffering – not only mine, but that of others – is powerful; it gets into your DNA and becomes part of who you are. But I try, as I say. I try.

But maybe the truth about me is something that has never been heard of in Tibet. Maybe it's something Barrie Kosky told me a couple of year ago, when we were in Berlin together for productions he was directing for the Komische Oper. We went out to dinner one evening, the conversation turned to this and that, and I wondered aloud what would become of me, of all of us. It's a question that comes to mind frequently enough. I should have mentioned somewhere or the other in this ramshackle account of my ramshackle life that I once asked dear Les Tanner, the great political cartoonist, the same question. It was at a party, maybe at my place. Les, who'd had an operation on his throat for cancer, and who communicated mostly with notes, wrote this: ‘Short answer: we're all going to die.' Barrie said something different, ‘My dear, whatever comes along, you will survive. You're a cockroach.'

No matter what the fuck happens in the world, the cockroach goes about its cockroach business.

Okay, I'll take it. Vera, fabulous figure, lips to die for (all of this in my heyday), is under the surface a cockroach.

God bless the cockroaches.