Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  I first see Vera’s name in a soupy news feature. A sentence near the bottom jumps at me and I know I must find her. We have enough people in common to form a small human bridge to get me to her. She once lived in Melbourne, no longer, but returns a few times a year. Email, Skype—she’s on them. We meet, talk, soon it’s clear: she is taking over something like a quarter of the book I’m writing. My heroine. The book. The book…

  The book that I am writing. When I go searching for Vera I am convinced it will be done in twelve months or eighteen. Years fly: 2011-12-13-14-15-etc.. I console myself that books take as long as they take, the usual mantra, but it’s different this time. This time it is like I have to choose between this book I’m writing and my conception of life. ‘Most people,’ Vera said to me one day, ‘don’t know who I am and I am not going to start telling them who I am because I can’t be bothered. So there you are.’

  There you are is Vera’s way of ending stories.

  As well as that’s how it goes.

  As well as that was the end of the story.

  You think the wheels are beginning to turn on a story she’s telling then you hear the screeching… so there you are. It’s not obfuscation, and it’s not like those stories can squash her, can undo her, she’s able to handle them now and probably (this should give you a measure of her) always could. It’s something else: the simultaneous, brutal pull of two forces perhaps. If a narrative of our life is something we weave during the day and unravel at night, ‘loosening the woven cloth of the day in nocturnal trick’ as Ovid wrote about Homer’s Penelope, then there is in Vera—in the Vera I know—the urge towards the narrative and the urge away from it. It’s in the memoir too. In the way the Polish story is told and the way the Australian story is not quite told, which is curious. You’d think trauma would make it the other way around.

  Oh, yeah. The memoir. It comes out in 2015. Vera: My Story. A red/white/black cover with Vera on it looking like a gypsy queen. Fat cigar in her hand. It’s half smoked. I think: I was so close. Then I remember: no, I wasn’t.

  The cover says ‘with Robert Hillman’. Robert is Vera’s materialised, declared ghost. It is his decision to put in the memoir behind-the-scenes marginalia including the times Vera’s blowing hot air at him for not working faster, saying why is this taking so long, Robert, telling him she is not going to ‘live forever’, so you know, Robert.

  I read this and think: she’s addressing me not him.

  The memoir is conceived, talked into existence, written, published, released, reviewed, moved from the front of the last still-standing bookshops to their densely shelved interiors, while I sit on my book with its twenty thousand unripe Vera words like Ilya Muromets on a pechka. I want to say to Robert: dear Robert, don’t listen to her, listen to me, you are fast and good, miraculously so.

  Vera says she can’t be bothered telling people who she is except she is telling people, she is sharing her story, bothering to speak, maybe wishing she didn’t have to while also finding some kind of charge in the telling, or maybe doing it almost automatically, speaking with her throat. Or perhaps speaking so as to protect some other truth she wishes to remain unnoticed, unsaid. The pleasures of attention are not to be discounted either. Vera is used to that. She has been this—the unmissable centre of every room—all her life. But these pleasures are not uncomplicated.

  I go to the memoir’s launch at the Readings bookshop branch in St Kilda. Robert is asking questions which Vera’s answering politely though without the crackle often emitted by the riffing of a person’s best stories and insights. I observe her looking around the room. As if expecting someone to be there. Someone who isn’t. She refers, deadpan, to ‘the Holocaust diet’: eating weeds to survive. People laugh, relieved. I could listen forever to her slam the pleasure-denying-health-obsessed-first-world bullshit. Self-enforced hunger—to one starved as a child. Clean-living mania—to one whose people were supposed to be cleansed right out of their vermin-like existence. Self-mastery lite—when one’s been through a historical catastrophe. The shop’s back area is full. ‘Are we done?’ Vera says to Robert. She wants to be out of that chair.

  The memoir’s opening line: ‘Outside, at a cafe in St Kilda, a new place at the back of the Prince of Wales, we’re talking of murder.’ Murder = Jews and WWII, we’re = Robert and Vera, and years earlier—the memoir wasn’t on the cards then—five women sat at a rectangular table in another St Kilda cafe. Vera had on a light, black dress hanging off thin-as-vermicelli straps. Green-and-black jewellery. A shawl. She looked better than good but not in a Taylorian—Gaborian way. Seventy-nine then and not an inch of her was caked-up or mumsy. ‘Where’d you get such an exquisite shawl?’ people were asking. ‘From our ALDI supermarket, it’s a great shawl for breastfeeding mothers,’ she replied. Next time I see that shawl Jane will be wearing it. Jane—Vera’s dear friend and former colleague at the ABC, where Vera worked first as a make-up artist, later as a producer.

  Come to think of it I forget what anyone else wore that day—when I close my eyes, it’s only Vera I see in colour—though I do remember coughing the place down, the prelude to a month-long pneumonia bout in the middle of a Melbourne summer, and I remember Vera with her veteran smoker’s cough saying, ‘You are really outcoughing me today,’ which almost felt like a badge of honour—coughing like this, yet still up, out and about, living—since by then I had bumped into plenty of accounts of Vera’s legendary staying powers. A friend in Byron Bay, where Vera moved after the ABC retrenched her, wrote to me: ‘Had an outrageous night with Vera on Friday. She drank and smoked me under the table and we danced the evening away to her fabulous music collection.’ This ability of Vera’s to outlast—my friend was no lightweight—pretty much everyone was confirmed that day by Sophie. It was my first time meeting Sophie. ‘Vera could always drink and smoke every day and be fine,’ Sophie said. ‘She still can. She says she is tired. These are words out of her mouth. But she can do it: drink, smoke, stay up, be OK.’ Sophie is French not Polish but she lived in Poland as a young woman and speaks Polish with Vera. They met at a party in Melbourne long, long ago. How young they were then. From afar Vera looked Latin American. They got talking. Where are you from? Poland. In which city did you live? Warsaw. Which suburb? What street? Sophie must have told the story of meeting Vera a million times but she still made sure not to deny me its pop.

  ‘Did you two live on the same street?’ I asked.

  ‘Better than that. Same building.’

  Jane, draped in the breastfeeding shawl—she wasn’t at the cafe on one of St Kilda’s corners that morning but she’ll be at Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival the year after the memoir’s release: first row, Sophie on her left, the session will be called ‘Vera Wasowski Tells It As It Is (As She Talks to Writer Maria Tumarkin)’. I’d come up with the title and blurb. I’d lobbied the festival producers to make me Vera’s interlocutor. ‘Pick me, please. I know her story. Know it back to front. I know too much.’

  At the cafe Vera’s phone kept ringing: people wanting to see her, cook her dinner, introduce her to someone. ‘Vera,’ said Sophie, ‘has a talent for bringing people together and getting them to stay connected.’ I told Sophie I was writing about Vera because something about her and her story made the by-now safe-seeming space of Holocaust testimonies dangerous again. Dangerous felt right. Sophie knew what I was saying. She blessed me with her eyes.

  Just about everyone who isn’t family in the Australian part of Vera’s memoir are Mirka Mora and Hazel Hawke types: famous. Jan was famous too: in Poland. Sophie is not famous. I don’t think she is hurt about being omitted but I can’t be sure. Theirs is a long, strong friendship. It feels tender, too. Young. At the launch, while people queue to buy the memoir Sophie and I discuss the reviewer in the Australian who three-quarters-canned it. Ridiculous review. She got Vera all wrong. Both of us like the book. The Polish part manages to do much more than replicate familiar-feeling tropes: idyllic childhood in Poland, prodigious child, yet
another family of assimilated Jews oblivious to what’s coming, the war, first Soviet soldiers, then German soldiers, marching into Lvov (Lviv, Lwów), ghetto, Aktions, childhood over, death everywhere, fear, hunger, survival, betrayal, more death, total eclipse of the world… The eclipse that will not end when the war ends. Everywhere in that part is Vera’s bubble-pricking humour and her disdain for euphemisms. A refusal to make herself into something (a role model, a sage) she is not. Her inviolable gift for life. And appetite for it.

  Something else the Wasowski/Hillman book does, or rather doesn’t: it doesn’t let readers walk away thinking they know what Vera lived through now that they have read the story and paid attention all the way through, now that they’ve agonised themselves an ulcer the size of a child’s fist. Charlotte Delbo dealt with the question of knowing in ‘O you who know’. Dealt with, i.e. made it impossible, as long as her poem is read, for anyone not possessed of first-hand experience of this kind of survival to tell themselves they are able to know what it was like:

  O you who know / did you know that you can see your mother dead / and not shed a tear / …O you who know / did you know that a day is longer than a year / a minute longer than a lifetime / …Did you know this / you who know.

  ‘Oh well,’ I say to Sophie, ‘as for that hypothetical book of mine with the hypothetical Vera chapter it’s by now a non-hypothetical total fuck-up. Fair enough too.’

  ‘It is not over, Maria,’ Sophie says. ‘Maybe what you have to say is even more important now.’

  We hug. What is it I have to say?

  She is not angry with you, Sophie says when we meet again and sit in her parked car. Don’t hide. She’ll be in Melbourne for the Jewish writers festival to talk about the memoir. Get them to put her on with you.

  I don’t see what Sophie sees but can’t figure out what to do with the Vera stuff inside of me. Thought I needed to just walk away. Am learning I can’t. So I write an email. So I get a reply: ‘Dear Maria—hello again! This is a wonderful idea. I need to discuss it with the rest of the committee to see how we fit this in… I will get back to you ASAP.’

  In a few days the committee finds a way to fit us in.

  My blurb, an excerpt:

  Wasowski’s memoir … unlike any other book you’re likely to read … sardonic, impolitic black humour … refusal to abide by the conventions of living and writing about one’s life.

  My parents—they have read the memoir and want to hear Vera speak—are in the audience, and my daughter is there and my partner and my friend Tali who is on the festival’s committee. Sophie, Jane. I consider mentioning my non-book, that hilarious failure, to be less like a stiff interlocutor and more a messy human in the spirit of Vera’s low tolerance for polite society, but I don’t. It’s beside the point. Vera tells me before the session she’s beginning to feel her age. Tired, she says. Can only take so much. Instead of a ‘look at our hero Vera Wasowski’ intro I describe a comedy routine the memoir starts with—Vera ranting to Robert about lycra-clad Melbourne bicycling bourgeoisie. Then moving swiftly to ranting about Melburnians’ collective horror at the sight of a lit cigarette. Damn good start for a survivor memoir. I leave it up to Vera to see where she takes the war story. I see tears in Sophie’s eyes. I spill water on my chair. Jane gets up and applauds Vera. The air in the room is just a little electric. You were right, Sophie. Once the session is over, I introduce Vera to my family, and I can see she will instantly forget their names and faces although she does notice my handsome partner.

  Look at me—practically relishing my inability to tell Vera’s story. We can tour together if Robert is too busy.

  Herodotus tells a story of Histiaeus, who ruled Miletus in late sixth century BC and who, needing to communicate with Aristagoras, shaved a trusted slave’s head, tattooed the message on the slave’s scalp, and waited for the hair to grow back before sending him to Aristagoras. Aristagoras, in turn, shaved the slave’s head to reveal Histiaeus’s message encouraging him to revolt against the Persians, which, apparently, Aristagoras did. Steganography is the Greek word for the art of hiding messages—as opposed to, for instance, encrypting them. In Greek the word means ‘concealed writing’. Most messages are hidden within other, larger, benign-seeming chunks of text. The existence of the secret message is a secret. We don’t know to go looking. Perhaps telling and not-telling are not what we think they are. Perhaps experience could be placed in narrative for safekeeping, hidden in it, not to be buried, or rendered unknown, but to be preserved so as to be revealed in a different kind of story.

  I go again through the memoir; it is on my bedside table seemingly permanently, durable yellow stickers a shortcut to particular bits—the nightclub story is there, wrapped up in a few lines, so’s what her mother did to keep herself and Vera alive, so’s what her father asked seven-year-old Vera to do… They’ve put it on the bloody back cover. I had to cancel myself as a writer, writing of that time. Couldn’t bear my inadvertent embellishments—couldn’t handle so much as my breathing—getting in there and re-punctuating her memory. Had to be Vera’s words only. This next chunk she said to me, I kept till the near-end of my twenty thousand words on Vera:

  My mother was being looked after by my uncle, who was fucking her. The hiding place was available to us on condition that my uncle would get sexual comfort from my mother. Her condition was that she would bring me along. When it was safe I slept outside. During that time I developed my love of cockroaches because cockroaches were walking over me all night as my mother was having intercourse with my uncle.

  Then one day my father arrived. The transport failed; the ghetto was closed; he had nowhere to go. We were the only people he had contact with. And my uncle was throwing him out. They had this big conversation in German. I could hear, ‘Heraus! Heraus! Get out!’ But my father, who looked very Jewish, couldn’t leave the hiding place because he would have been killed. By then we all wore bags of poison: my father wanted to make sure we had that ‘little out’. I wore that bag always. We didn’t have quick poison anymore, you couldn’t get cyanide, so we had heaps and heaps of sleeping powder. My father gave me instructions—if someone gets hold of me and there is no way out, ask for a glass of water.

  There was a lot of that powder. He obviously had taken half of it with a glass of water and was in a coma for three days in that hiding hole where we all were. Then he woke up and I was going to see how he was going. You could smell his urine. He asked me for a glass of water. I knew exactly what I was doing. I went and got him a glass of water from the kitchen, crawled back into the hiding place, gave him the glass of water.

  He said that I was not going to have him anymore, just the mother. And that he was not going to take me to the Sorbonne anymore when I grow up because he wasn’t going to be there. And then he died. He died and my uncle who I absolutely hate till this day, although I know you shouldn’t hate anyone, and this other Polish fellow who was hiding us, wrapped his body in a blanket, dug a hole in the cellar, and buried my father. When the Russians started bombing Lvov we had to go into the cellar to hide and I was very aware I was standing on my father.

  When my father killed himself, not a word was spoken. It happened and that’s how it was. For the rest of my mother’s life, both of us were pretending that none of it happened, pretending that everything was normal, when absolutely nothing was normal. That was the end of the story.

  I kept this till the near-end of my twenty thousand words because I wanted to dissolve into black, into white. I wanted to kick floorboards out from under my readers’ feet, make them rethink everything I told them about Vera, all that they had come to imagine and to believe—now that they knew what happened to her at age seven. That was then. And now? Now I am the one who has to rethink everything because Vera’s life is not a story I can tell, and yet it is its non-storyness that feels increasingly essential somehow, in need of being noticed.

  We, soft-fleshed denizens of the West, have come to rely on a certain image of a Holocaust sur
vivor (and other kinds of survivor too) taken over by their moral and emotional compulsion to testify lest the world forgets, sometimes like Levi, Borowski, Frankl or the non-Jewish Delbo (although Delbo held off publishing) immediately after the war, more often later, once the world’s plucked the cherry stones out of its ears and begun listening. But a just-as-powerful compulsion inside survivors steers towards silence. Survival leaves you knowing both testimony and silence as tainted choices, each riddled equally with despair.

  You MUST speak because how else will what happened to you and your people be known as the monstrosity it was, as the end of the world that it is, how else to turn it to anathema, make it an impossibility in the future? You see how unthinkably fast the world’s memory is fading, hear more and more ‘no, it didn’t happen that way’. You must speak because the act of speaking, the narrative you make and remake with each telling, is what will keep you alive, what you’ll hang on to, because this narrative covers, incompletely, too bad, the hole inside you. You must speak because if you don’t, they win. If you don’t, you have stopped fighting, given up.

  You must NOT speak because it’s with only a few fellow survivors that these conversations are properly possible—the telling and the listening do not feel so piercingly unreal. As if it is about someone else. You must not speak because what you know is impossible to bring into language, it’s beyond transmitting, and whatever you can say is only a tiny bit of it and by saying it and letting them think it’s the whole thing you are betraying the memory of those who cannot speak, or be silent, for themselves. You must not speak because this speaking exhausts you, empties you out, the burden of remembering and testifying is too much, the tyranny of narrative—too much—you do not wish to go back there again and again, and for what? You must not speak because your life is much bigger than this, you’ve made it so, beaten the odds. You must not speak because you have done more than enough speaking.