Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  ‘Do you think I am an outlaw, Maria?’

  Loïc Wacquant called prisons ‘outlaw institutions’. He said they violate, ‘necessarily and routinely’, the very societal laws they are presumed to uphold and enforce. It’s probably Sociology 101 or Criminology 102 but to me it’s news. ‘Actually,’ says the woman, ‘prison was more civilised than the whole system outside’—she means more civilised than the justice system—‘you know, when I was giving false testimony one time when they still hadn’t found him I looked at this judge’s eyes and he stared at me for two minutes at least and I stared at him for two minutes because what I wanted to tell him and couldn’t was that no court in the world and no judge in the world had the right to put this little boy in such a terrible unsafe situation.’ It was a different judge she was staring at that time. Not the Judge who jailed her and put the boy back in the mother’s house—‘Because I knew about another so-called civilised people somewhere else who did a lot of barbaric things,’ she says, ‘I was not surprised.’

  To be born in the worst time imaginable, what does that leave you with? And to then survive? The doctor hiding them had to go away for a few days and the woman’s mother decided the potato pit was no longer safe so they climbed up. They were caught and sent to Auschwitz but by then the war was nearly ending, the baby was a toddler, and even though people were still being gassed the mother and the daughter sneaked out. They found the lady doctor, lived with her, this time above ground. Years passed. The woman married one of the doctor’s sons (the doctor had twins). In time the woman, her husband, their young son and the woman’s mother left Poland. Too much blood was spilt in Poland, too much hatred could not be erased and the anti-Semitism was unrelenting. The in-laws were deeply anti-Semitic too: the lady doctor, the saintly rescuer, turned out to be as bad as her husband who openly and feverishly hated Jews. (That’s a little side-parable for those who think wars are over when they appear to be over. Or that people pick their sides and stay on them. Or that we become our parents. The lady doctor’s son who married the woman did not become his mum or dad.) First the four of them went to Israel then they ended up in Australia, Australia being an escape from Poland, in-laws, anti-Semitism, war.

  There are people in Australia and of Australia who help the woman. A politician, a future State Liberal Minister—the woman considered the Politician a friend and believes he looked after her while she was in jail. He was the one who forced the Judge to resign too, that’s what she thinks. In his memoirs the Politician thanks his parents for not having a single argument in front of him, for making sure their children ‘did not witness the less attractive expressions of their emotions’. He is no longer alive. She thinks of him a lot. Another good one is the Prison Director. He too goes on to become a boss man presiding over one correctional services conglomerate or another. A cousin of the man who got out of Pentridge’s A Division was in the same jail as the woman and, the way it looked to people smart to that world, her life was in danger. So the Prison Director, says the woman, ordered guards to follow her. Good people are everywhere, she’s seen and met plenty.

  It’s the system failure, the culture failure. The blindness. It is like the twentieth century didn’t quite happen here, not in the same way anyway, a century that, in its closing decades at the very least, made whole societies fearful of barbarity, violence, fanaticism within and without, because people now knew how close these things were to the surface, what little it took to unleash them, and how once they were out there they destroyed wholesale ‘the very structures of civilised life’ as Tony Judt wrote—‘regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges’—scooping up informal structures of reciprocity and trust along the way. Not that countries in Europe or Asia or Africa that remember what wars do are immune or enlightened—Yugoslavia!—and not that intergenerationally things are not lost—Cambodia!—and not that remembering wars can ever be free from the dirty politics of the present—Russia!—and not that remembering is always a self-evident good, but still.

  The woman who talks of WWII, brings it up again and again, her whole being insisting it is necessary to put it at the centre of the table seventy years after its end, especially in this country, which she says is filled with barbarians, could she be on to something? The remembering she does, which the world around her sees as her trauma taking over, her soul ulcer screaming out, could it be that this remembering is what this country needs? Not the pomp of it, brass bands and hands over heart, but the horror of it that lives under the skin of a culture and makes the culture worry sick about where it’s going and what it may miss.

  When Tony Judt wrote that in the 21st century the United States was exceptional in the way it had forgotten ‘the meaning of war’—surely the most important historical lesson of the century before it—he was forgetting Australia where the forgetting of war is double. The first thing forgotten is the war fought in this country, which has not had a war fought on its soil: a hundred and forty years’ worth of ubiquitous and continuous frontier conflict glimmering for so long in the space between remembering and forgetting, recalled in stops and starts now, still not recognised publicly as a WAR. The other forgetting is more the kind Judt was talking about, things witnessed on other shores, what wars do to people and to everything they love and build.

  The woman doesn’t wish any suffering on this country and its people, doesn’t begrudge it being spared. In Australia people did not have to learn that ‘a human being becomes an animal in three weeks—with the hard work, cold, hunger and beatings’ (Varlam Shalamov, writer, Gulag survivor). Of course it is a blessing not to have this twentieth-century lesson home delivered. Of course the only adequate response to this blessing is infinite gratitude. But it can’t be a cover for ignorance. Or indifference. Being spared means you have to work twice as hard at remembering. Only when does that ever happen? Two words: ‘human nature’. She knows.

  Two decades later the woman and her husband will do the paperwork, leave the house to the young man and his younger brother, and move out of Melbourne. No one will tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Forgive us for we got you so wrong. You were not criminals after all but righteous people. You were not criminals but loyal, loving grandparents. You acted the only way you could. You acted the way civilised people must act.’ No one will apologise to the young man either for not letting him save himself (he did what he could and where did it get him?). No one, not even god.

  (g)

  ‘I now know what I didn’t know when we last spoke,’ the woman says. ‘Judge got bribed.

  ‘Detective Senior Constable was involved in cover-ups and crime.

  ‘My son was killed.

  ‘A trap was set for me.

  ‘They knew I would do anything for my grandson.’

  The woman is wearing a white blouse and grey pants. I’ve only ever seen her in white tops. Her husband is mowing the lawn. He’ll go slowly, take his breaks, but he’ll get it done. Shall we have a cup of tea while we talk? No. Yes. No. Too much to say.

  Her eyes.

  ‘I can read between the lines,’ the woman says. ‘I know who my grandson would choose even though he knows I am his best friend.’

  Even when filled with tears, they are scooping the world from inside out, peering into the far-out corners of it. Even when they are crying, they are smiling at the bottomlessness of human endurance.

  Outside of Melbourne the woman and her husband have two rooms and a little verandah. The yard, and the care for it, is shared between three families. She is painting and feels maybe it’s a whole new period she’s entering. ‘Painting is about the illusion of depth, you do it through perspective. About bringing people into it. But what I am working on is bringing the painting out.’

  The woman always thought what happened to her family in Australia was criminal—not only isn’t-it-outrageous criminal, not yet-another-failure-of-criminal-justice-system criminal, but criminal-criminal—and now she’s sure beyond doubt. Judge. Detective Senior Constable. Bought. Blood
ied. All that for a house. Worth millions now, true, even so. Greed: who could have foretold that out of seven sins (still seven?) it’d be the one to do her family in? Such a toothless little badness compared to what else is out there. Australia… Australia…

  I want to say to her I can’t believe she’ll have to live with never knowing for certain what happened. So much of her new information cannot be verified without a full-scale cold case investigation that’ll potentially implicate police and judiciary and the likelihood of that ever kickstarting? Negligible. I say nothing. The woman is convinced the people who found her recently and confirmed her son’s murder and her own entrapment are to be trusted. Her gut knew it all along and her heart is now moving away from the grandson—that same love for him inside her, but no more saving him. Someone else will need to keep him safe from the house. From the temptation of robbing her. Or maybe he won’t be saved. The Drowned and the Saved as Primo Levi put it back when. ‘The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate…

  ‘The room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero.’

  Her grandson will discover, doesn’t realise it yet, that the house where he and his brother are living is actually not hers so cannot be made his. Theirs. And then it’ll be the rest of his life. And he’ll hate it and what he’ll make of it will be his life’s work. She and her husband did their bit. She wants to grow old and paint. She’ll never be safe in Australia but can’t go anywhere either. She doesn’t even like travelling outside Australia. Her son is buried here. Her mother.

  She has been re-reading the Torah and the Talmud. Her son was religious (‘you didn’t know? oh yes, very’) and she is trying to get as close as she can to the way he’d be looking at things. Reading Torah means thinking a lot about Eve. Isn’t Eve head and shoulders above Adam? A cosmic being. Do you agree, Maria?

  Modern Mona Lisa is the name of one of the recent works. She’ll show it to me next time. She may have done something there, had a breakthrough. ‘I said to Leonardo: you couldn’t do this but I can.’

  We hug like two people on a train platform—strangers who love each other with the love that belongs not to them but to the world around them that has gone off its axis.

  His eyes.

  His eyes when my car backs out of the driveway.

  HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

  THIS MORNING, that morning rather, two men in my carriage lift their heads—two men in their fifties in silky understated ties—then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they’re leaning into each other laughing how long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What’s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one mid-chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don’t tell me it’s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriage picks, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on city loop trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?

  My phone vibrates: one time only for texts. ‘Make sure you don’t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.’ It’s Vanda. Thank you Vanda.

  Shhh.

  In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who’ll never ride the same train again.

  I don’t remember getting off or walking. Somehow I reached the courthouse doors on William Street where my bag was screened, nothing sharp in it, and the structure that looked dull and huge on the outside, a building without qualities, was alive and brown inside with wrappers pulled off chocolate bars, doors slamming, others opening, kids in school uniforms who were not, as I’d guessed, witnesses to inexplicable suburban crimes but legal studies students bored on a field trip. Several of the magistrates looked like Karl Heinrich Marx. In a lift I stood next to a lawyer with the face of someone who sometimes forgets he has not, yet, seen it all. I looked at him. He looked at the crease in his hardworking pants.

  What is the Court 8 clerk wearing today? Orange jacket, there you go, bold choice for the setting. And what is Court 8’s loudest sound right now? My fineliner pen making notes about courtroom silence. Big silence in a roomful of busy-looking people is jarring. Then the magistrate appears—once he’s seated, that silence is gone—and to a man on the stand whose second drink-driving offence is the day’s first matter he says, ‘I cannot take your past away,’ and it is like some subterranean conversation underneath the one everybody can hear is flowing about how to be alive is to be caught in one web or another. ‘I know your first offence was twenty years ago but your past doesn’t disappear. If police stop you, they’ll test you.’ The magistrate means it’s your last chance, your cufflinks can’t save you, the taxes you pay won’t save you. He also means: nothing is more human than the experience of feeling trapped. And everything’s a trap, your past, family, genes, addictions, loneliness, that feeling that pretty much everyone else is galloping gaily ahead while you are crawling backwards like a lobster or lopsided baby.

  All morning I wait for something but nothing much happens. After the man on drink-driving offence #2 comes a retail manager from Elwood who’s drinking because her IVF is failing. Next is a well-dressed Somali man charged with not wearing a seatbelt and accompanied by a well-dressed Somali interpreter. After that it’s a Turkish taxi driver caught going 105 in an 80 zone. I move courts. Sit in on an aggravated burglary hearing. Go to the room where a meth syndicate (most lawyers I’ve seen all day) is being sentenced. ‘There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.’ So said Goethe. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. That—‘I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me’—is what the Roman playwright Terence said. ‘There are no fairytale endings.’

  Vanda says that. How come, I ask her.

  ‘Because people are people.’

  People wear ugg boots to court. You may find yourself one day staring down at a court floor and seeing ugg boots next to high-heeled, calf-extending leather numbers worn by female lawyers, and this image might lead you to believe that lines have been drawn and you will always be able to tell who is who. Don’t believe it. Sometimes it is like that and other times—not at all.

  That morning, this morning, I walk back to the station past the cafe where a week ago a deputy chief magistrate, Jelena Popovic, was telling me how it took her years as a magistrate before belatedly understanding that the people appearing in front of her were, in the main, neither offenders nor victims of their own circumstances but rather people at the point of crisis. The crisis was the hopeful thing. ‘It started crystallising for me during a late 1990s heroin scourge. It seemed to me we were doing nothing to help people when we should have been capitalising on this point of crisis.’ The word, when she said it, had a nobility, a scale, and seeing myself so struck by it I thought about how this word, crisis, can recast a human life’s brokenness. No laughter spilled out of my half-empty afternoon train home, nobody was falling into an old friend’s lap. Each one of us was alone. With our bags, jackets, leaking umbrellas, wandering eyes, with the big unringing phones we were kneading in our hands.

  I have always dreaded movie sequences in which a human life—a normal, long life, unshortened by illness or war—gets condensed into a few emblematic scenes. A child, carefree and pure, becomes a young adult with shining eyes, then in no time is a parent of someone whose eyes are soon-to-be shining, and when next they’re beaming out of your screen they are the same only their hair’s greying, eyes woolly, and their frame is thicker or perhaps slighter, it’s as if their form and content are pulling away from each other, and you know where it is headed, where else, and despite these characters being fictional and this life-to-death-in-three-minutes business being just some hillbilly director’s device t
here is something intolerable about seeing life with time sucked out of it like the air from an air mattress. A few occasions, bumping across a movie sequence like that, I’d put both hands over my chest.

  For a long while I could not work out why it hurt. Until I understood: time. Time is what makes everything OK. How it flows forward and circles round itself, both; how life, suspended, zero gravity, in time consists of so many things repeating. Getting up, the brushing of hair, toasting of bread, sun shooting up in the sky, taking keys out of your pocket to open doors. Seasons. In the benign repetition of daily acts an invisible net is cast, holding people up, protecting them. Because the things being repeated—‘non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities’ so said Deleuze—are never the same. That imperceptible difference, same damn thing, same blessed thing, is what rescues it. So yes those movie sequences hurt. Time as a straight line is a monstrosity. Sometimes though what’s being repeated is hope’s absence. A child comes into a world that is like a tar pit, a tar pit of prehistoric ferocity, the kind that could suck a Columbian mammoth in. In this world a little creature still sorting its hind legs from its front legs does not stand a chance. Cannot stand. Time is not a river pushing people forward as they lunge at floating branches—inelegantly, so what?—but an oily, seeping substance. Black and sticky.

  Most of Vanda’s clients come from a tar pit. The term regularly used, ‘entrenched disadvantage’, is ugly like much of the language to do with people who don’t get to do much choosing in their lives, and whose every creep forward—in a good year every couple of creeps—gets followed by a bone-splintering triple tumble backwards. Poverty, abuse, addiction, mental health stuff, they are what’s in the tar, the sticky parts.

  We met by accident in North Melbourne Town Hall’s corridors the spring that I was pregnant with my second child and Vanda was volunteering at a fringe festival. She was checking tickets at the door, helping out with shows. The shows (as you’d expect) were of varying quality. I wondered what she was doing here, this woman whose big polymath mind was straightaway apparent even to me who was sick with a round-the-clock morning sickness and not noticing much. I remember thinking I don’t get the whole community volunteering thing. Thinking also that in another time/place this woman could have led armies to battle. I did not know then that she loved theatre, directing, actors—actors especially—and years before had started a theatre company for young people which had a policy of turning away no one at auditions. The result was large, happy casts and full houses. I wasn’t aware then that after a disheartening year doing articles at a suburban law firm she needed to feel surrounded by theatre to feel OK. And I was there why? Involved in one of the festival shows if you must know. In a non-performing capacity and due any minute to alight on the discovery of how lucky writers are compared to the men and women of theatre. Writers are not required to be present at their trials.