Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  body’s absence at every given point?

  (Joseph Brodsky.)

  If life goes on does it follow that sooner or later the radius of pain starts shrinking and time will act as the disinfectant to people’s wounds, as the warm water to bathe them in, as the large cotton towel with which people may make their wounds dry?

  Amanda’s brother’s best friend shot himself one weekend. Amanda was sixteen. She says she’s learned by now no I’m over it moment’s going to come, that’s that.

  While Fiona was editing Melanie’s book her father—long since divorced from her mother, married to another woman—drove his car into a tree.

  Wendy thinks any kind of reckoning with a suicide can only happen ‘after the casseroles stop’.

  ‘We’ve had a million go on and become scientists and architects and I won’t remember most,’ Monique says. ‘Maybe I’ll remember a president. But I’ll always remember the ones we lost.’

  Mark Costello said of his close friend and one-time flatmate David Foster Wallace, ‘There was not enough velcro to keep Dave on this planet.’

  Jean Améry said the only ethical stance is ‘to revolt against the disappearance of the past in the biological dimension of time’. Améry, survivor of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen but not what he saw as the spell time casts on people and societies desperate to believe in its healing powers—for so long I was persuaded by Améry’s words.

  ‘Time,’ says Frances, ‘if anyone asks me, I tell them. It’s the only thing.’

  The part of her that is turned towards Katie and that will now be permanently shaped that way, that’s not most of Frances anymore. It’s not like she grew new skin, it’s more like she grew new parts.

  One afternoon years ago Frances is over for a cup of tea. I hear my daughter singing in the bathroom “Gloomy Sunday”. As sung by Billie Holiday. A song about suicide. Possibly the most beautiful song on the subject ever. Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless. Of all the songs my daughter sings this one goes furthest into me. I still gasp at certain moments, get taken aback by what the song can do to me, does it every time. At first when I hear my daughter’s voice I’m mortified Frances might hear. How utterly careless of us. What kind of family are we? Buffoons. Then I think ‘actually’ and then I think ‘bugger it’. Then I ask my daughter to come to the big room and sing it here. The world is big and most of it is not filled with pain and it has a Katie-shaped hole in it. Frances sits straight-backed on the couch. My daughter, Billie, closes her eyes for her namesake’s song. ‘It’s beautiful, it’s terrifying,’ Frances says when it’s finished.

  Something she wrote five years after Katie’s death

  I remember making bargains with myself. I would live life as a quadriplegic to have her back… I would choose to have my lips stitched and not speak another word… I would never have thought I would think this but I don’t wish for her to be back. I can’t imagine life with her, before I couldn’t imagine one without.

  ‘Hey, Maria,’ Frances texts me, ‘I am about to bombard you with pages from Katie’s school diary. They’ve made me sad.’

  I sit and read. What is there on these pages? Life and death and time (life being the most banal of the lot) all mixed up together like swabs and scalpels after a surgery.

  Japanese. Dentist appointment.

  We don’t live in a perfect place.

  Peace doesn’t exist.

  chemistry book

  Not in this world or

  Even within ourselves.

  Kickboxing 6:00.

  Further down

  It’s so easy to erase pencil or a tape.

  I didn’t know it could be so easy to

  Erase a life you weren’t even a

  Mistake.

  Methods (tech) 8.30—10.45

  THOSE WHO FORGET THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO RE—

  NEWSPAPER INTRO. ‘The couple who abducted their grandson and hid him in a makeshift dungeon were jailed yesterday.’

  They are in their fifties, born in Poland. Judge declares the grandmother, this woman, the LEADER IN THE AFFAIR. She is sentenced to fifteen months’ jail and has to serve a minimum five. Her husband gets twelve suspended. In court records the woman is referred to as an artist, and that she is.

  The MAKESHIFT DUNGEON is in a way-out Melbourne suburb and is the length of a single bed.

  Apart from the bed there’s a TV, small table, chair, an ornament or two, no windows. During what the Judge calls a FOUR MONTHS’ ORDEAL the GRANDSON who’s twelve reads, watches TV, and writes. He is only in the room, which is concealed by a moulded rock wall, when police come to his grandparents’ house. Which is to say twelve times at least from the day he disappears from a local primary school on a September afternoon. Police know the missing boy had lived in the house with his father and grandparents from when he was a few months old till his father died and his mother, estranged till then, sued for custody. Sued for custody and won. Police turn the place upside down. One time they bring a seismic sensor and fibreoptic cameras, another time they start drilling while the many dogs of the house bark loud and long.

  In charge the Detective Senior Constable, a determined man, gives the story to a female Crime Reporter, the only one at her newspaper. She describes him as someone ‘who lives and breathes his cases’. He has done all he can and now police need the story to break in the media. It’s pre-internet times, newspapers are in rude health still and they get things done. The story is frontpage material. Alleged kidnapping of a minor with possible international twist—suggestions fly that the father’s side of the family may fatten the boy up, change his hair colour, and get him out of the country. The detective and the reporter have worked together before. ‘He trusted me with reporting the cases,’ she says. ‘Trusted me not to go overdramatic.’ Crime Reporter likes it that the Detective Senior Constable gets particularly worked up over cases involving children. Right now he wants to reunite the missing boy with his mother. The newspaper coverage does the trick. Sometime in January an employee at a car rental joint in another city calls 000 with a tip-off.

  When the woman is arrested her grandson is by her side and the name she gives to police is that of her own mother. The ID she shows them belongs to her mother too. In the woman’s paintings her mother appears as an aristocrat (the palette is pastel, almost see-through) clad in elegant clothing from another era, garments too big for her small, strong body. At different times and to different people the woman will describe her mother as ‘the bravest person I know’. To me she will say, ‘My mum had that strength. All through her life. When other people were unable to bear that kind of load, she could. Watching her made me stronger still. I became a master of strength.’

  Crime Reporter meets the boy’s mother while the boy is still missing. The mother looks distraught. It’s Christmas time just about and not having her son for Christmas is, she says, hard. ‘Some mothers,’ the Crime Reporter tells me, ‘have repulsed me over the years. Not this one.’ The mother asks the reporter not to publish her fiance’s name. Unusual request—most people are fine with having their names in print—the reporter doesn’t think too much about it. ‘If I’d had the surname,’ she says now, ‘I would have done some investigations. But I didn’t know who he was.’

  Only one journalist, in another paper, with the matter in court already, publishes the man’s surname and a single sentence connecting the man to the boy’s decision to run away and seek his grandparents’ protection. The man’s name is not mentioned again.

  After that the boy is with his mother, not just the mother, with his brother and half-sister too, all the siblings living together, the half-sister’s a few years older, the brother a few years younger, and the mother’s ‘fiance’, who is the half-sister’s father, is also in the house with them after more than a decade inside Pentridge’s A Division. The mother thanks the media and the police for bringing her son home. Tears etc. The boy will need a lot of intensive counselling, the mother says. Journalists�
�not the Crime Reporter, she’s finished up on this story, but the ones at her newspaper who cover families coming together or falling apart—write of the boy speeding on a bike up and down neighbourhood streets. The bike, full speed, is the sign that all is as it should be. Child, mother, brother, sister, stepfather, house, bike.

  The woman is charged with child-stealing her grandson and spends two months on remand in Deer Park Women’s Correctional Centre. Detective Senior Constable, who likes children to be safe, opposes her bail application though not her husband’s. He gets released after ten days. He, says the Detective Senior Constable, was happy how things were with the boy’s mother keeping custody and the grandparents getting fortnightly visits; it’s the grandmother who has BRAINWASHED the grandson. ‘Everything that has gone wrong,’ the detective is quoted saying, ‘was directly because of the grandmother.’ The court hears of two years of letters written by the boy and grandmother to the Department of Human Services requesting the boy be returned to his grandparents’ care. The letters, dismissed by the DHS and the Family Court, are according to the detective evidence of the grandmother’s custody fixation. This brainwashing of the lost-now-found boy seems to be the answer to a whole lot of questions—why’d he walk out by himself from school? What made him write those letters? Why ask his grandparents for help?

  A visitor, the Chaplain, goes to see the woman at Deer Park and notes that the woman spends most of her time painting. ‘Nobody likes being locked up,’ the Chaplain tells me, ‘it’s a real shock. Still, she was the most privileged prisoner I’d met. They gave her canvases, they gave her paints, they gave her a room.’ The woman paints a series of works that get exhibited at Old Melbourne Gaol when bail finally comes through. Her paintings, says the Chaplain—only Jewish chaplain in Victoria—are ‘expansive, and alternative, and abstract, and beautiful. And really colourful. And very sensual.’ The woman has a gift for lifting what’s harrowing towards vitality writes the critic who writes the exhibition catalogue essay. Colour is the other gift. It is a force.

  ‘In jail,’ the woman says to me years later, ‘I was all eyes and ears. I was afraid I would run out of time. Why should you want to get out of a place with so much material? It’s crazy to say this. I shouldn’t be saying it. But this is what I feel.’

  Nine months after bail comes sentencing. The woman and her husband plead guilty—on the advice of an experienced Criminal Barrister they hire. The reasons for their actions will come out in court—says the Criminal Barrister.

  Only it doesn’t happen that way. The promised surge of attention away from the grandparents towards the grandson’s welfare never materialises.

  ‘If I were a lawyer,’ the woman says, ‘and maybe I am wrong because I am only a painter, I would probably shout the reasons to the court.’

  Criminal Barrister has since passed away from cancer so she can’t explain why she couldn’t stop things going so wrong.

  Court Psychologist asked to assess the woman tells the court of the woman’s grief flowing from the sudden death of her only child, the boy’s father. Killed in a motorcycle accident two and a half years earlier but the grief is still acute. Court Psychologist says the woman is not psychotic, obsessive, schizophrenic or suicidal. Court Psychologist has been doing this court thing forever: Magistrate’s, County, Supreme, Family, Children’s. He spends two hours with the woman. ‘I wasn’t myself,’ the woman tells me. ‘If you slap a dog, a dog is not himself.’ The grief the Court Psychologist seems to fasten on to is there, that’s a given, it’ll always be there, but meanwhile the woman’s belief that her grandson is in danger in his mother’s house is mentioned only in passing.

  No one who is aware, however dimly, of a man with an armed robbery and an aggravated burglary to his name, other priors too, plus a history of drug dealing inside and outside, seems to have any interest in following up on what the woman is saying about him. More than a decade inside Pentridge and now he’s inside a house with three young kids and it’s like the man is invisible, a ghost, and the woman about to head back to jail cannot make anyone see him. Instead everyone sees her: weird, unhinged, smothering, duplicitous, foreign. The media is for the most part peddling dungeons and airless basements, brainwashing and outrageous abductions, with, by way of an overarching framework, angry climaxes to festering hostilities. It’s a good story, a great story, and they got it from the police, horse’s mouth, besides there is never enough time to dig and why would you when everything fits so nicely together as is? ‘We write and publish one-tenth of what’s out there,’ the Crime Reporter says to me. ‘One time I had seventeen minutes to write a frontpage story.’

  Crime Reporter does not think the woman is a criminal. What she did was an ‘extreme reaction to what a lot of families go through’. Extreme? The woman would say hers was the only possible reaction to the phone call her grandson made after walking out of schoolgrounds—I am not going back to that house no matter what, he’d said. ‘I used to be such a law-abiding citizen before this,’ the woman says to me. ‘Would never break a single traffic rule.’ Crime Reporter will give up the crime beat once she has her own kids: too dangerous this work if you have a family. Six years later the Judge will retire, become a Reserve Judge. The woman believes he was made to retire and that her case had a lot to do with it.

  The sentencing:

  Judge acknowledges the grandparents’ clean record and concern for the boy’s safety. States he has no choice but to jail them. The offence is too severe, one count of taking away a child under sixteen, one count of false testimony, BAREFACED LIES rules the Judge, who describes what the grandparents did as outrageous, manipulative, extensive, elaborate, sophisticated. He calls it a SCHEME. The boy is victim of an UNFORTUNATE TUG OF WAR leaving him confused and troubled. Judge has no comment on whether the grandparents’ fears for the child’s wellbeing are justified. He talks rousingly about the boy’s mother’s suffering, her not knowing for months where her son was, her being scared out of her mind. He doesn’t mention—does he not know?—that the mother did not see her son for close to ten years. He doesn’t mention—this he certainly doesn’t know—that the man back from Pentridge now walks around the house with a knife. One day the Judge’s daughter will be walking around with a knife too, stopping women with children, pregnant bellies, old faces and making them give her whatever they have in their wallets to feed her heroin habit. It’s far away, this stuff, unimaginable to the Judge. Right now in this courtroom he’s on a roll.

  The woman about to be jailed has several theories on why the Judge is so burned up by her case, one theory being he is scandalised at the suggestion, which in his head has become a fact, that she is trying to replace her dead son with the grandson. The court hears from the mother that the woman, this grandmother, offered to adopt the boy. This is true. Mention is made of the woman’s own son’s ashes. How they’re on her mantelpiece. ‘I never wanted to replace my son, my son is not replaceable,’ the woman says to me. Whatever else is going on for the Judge, he is clearly reacting to how the woman in front of him loves her twelve-year-old grandson. In the Judge’s head this love, mixed up with loss, has crossed lines not to be crossed. It has become dangerous, immoral.

  The stone:

  The woman, grandmother, artist, mastermind, whatever you want to call her, says nothing, just sits emotionlessly as the Judge speaks. Her silence is noted by journalists present. One describes her as stone-faced. Another, given to psychological insights, mentions her history as a child Holocaust survivor from Warsaw who stayed alive by hiding. She is still hiding, he writes, and makes it his last sentence. It is not apparent to anyone in that courtroom, least of all the Judge, that the woman’s silence is an expression of disgust not shock. ‘In media reports,’ she will say to me years later, ‘you might have noticed them talking about me not saying anything, not showing any emotions. If they had asked me why I said nothing—nobody asked me, but if they did—I would have said I had nobody to talk to. And when people say to me why didn’
t you bring this or that up I say there was no one to bring it up to. When I was in the court-room, what can I tell you… I felt above it. Above it all. I talked to myself. I looked at the judge and thought you little piglet. I had nothing to say.’

  The woman was born in Warsaw in April 1943. Nothing Jewish was being born in Warsaw at this time. The ghetto was burning. Everyone like her was dead or dying. Her grandparents, her brother four years older, her father: killed. But there she was hiding with her mother in a deep pit where potatoes get stored for winter so they won’t be ruined by frost. The pit was covered with straw and sand. A Polish woman, a doctor, a Catholic, who was hiding them, dropped supplies down the hole and picked up the waste. The mother’s body heat kept the baby from freezing. In the pit the mother had no moment of peace, convinced they could be discovered, killed anytime. That was the first year of the woman’s life. Then Auschwitz.

  Inside the Australian jail the woman does not put herself down as Jewish. Jewish in a place of no freedom is the last thing she wants to be. In twenty-four years as a chaplain the Chaplain has seen no anti-Semitism in jail, it’s pretty multicultural in there, but the woman is not to know that. She makes contact with the Chaplain through another Jewish prisoner who she sees reading Tehillim, the book of psalms, in Hebrew. The woman and the Chaplain talk for a long time about religion, her family, justice. A jail is a jail though, not a spiritual retreat, prisoners are chucked together. ‘You can be a murderer or you could have not paid,’ the Chaplain says, ‘your parking fines.’ Or something drug-related: that accounts for half the women or more. While the woman serves out her sentence another woman, at forty-three, dies from natural causes. Another is found hanging. Some women in jail, particularly newbies, get so scared their legs shake uncontrollably and the Chaplain has to hold their legs down. Not the woman—she seems OK. She is surrounded by other people’s suffering and wants to observe, absorb. What do humans do with their pain? What if the pain becomes intolerable? When is there no choice? Where can you go inside yourself from behind the wires?