Lola Bensky

by Lily Brett

  Lola had also recognised the feeling of not feeling entitled to live her own life. She often felt that she was an imposter. Someone pretending to be a real member of the Bensky family. The real members were of course the dead and those who had suffered with the dead. Even when she and Renia and Edek lived in one room, Lola felt like a spoiled little rich girl. Renia and Edek regularly told her how lucky she was. ‘You are so lucky to have parents,’ Renia would say. ‘You live in a free country. You have it so easy,’ Edek would add. Her life was so easy, she felt. She would spend a lot of her life trying to rectify that. She would make sure that her life wasn’t easy. If only she’d known that was what she was doing.

  Lola didn’t know that she was double-stitched to the dead. Tied to them with an invisible thread. And beginning to feel their weight.

  She didn’t know she would soon begin to have panic attacks. The panic attacks started, out of the blue, on a sunny day, when she was driving her son and his friend home from school. She was turning into Toorak Road, one of the wide, shop-lined streets that ran through several of Melbourne’s wealthier suburbs. Mothers were out shopping with their children, people were walking their dogs, sidewalk cafes were full of Melburnians talking and enjoying the spring weather, when Lola’s head started spinning and she broke out into a sweat. She gripped the steering wheel. She felt dizzy and as though she were going to faint.

  Her son, who was eight, and his school friend were in the back seat. Mrs Gorgeous, who was two, was at home with the babysitter. Lola wound down the window and tried to take deep breaths. She had no idea what was happening to her. She did know that whatever it was, was not good. The after-school traffic was heavy. Lola drove with her head half-hanging out of the car window and her heart pounding. She dropped her son’s school friend off and managed to drive home.

  She saw three neurologists and had her head measured, prodded and X-rayed. There was talk of tumours and seizures and infectious diseases, but no evidence of any of these. She went back to her analyst, Dr Silver, whom she would later refer to as her first analyst. ‘Panic attacks,’ he said. ‘A sudden and overwhelming feeling of acute and disabling anxiety.’

  Lola had first seen Dr Silver when she was twenty-five. She had thought she was going to a weight-loss doctor. She lay on Dr Silver’s couch, twice a week, for four years. She put on twenty pounds in her first year with him.

  Lola’s second analyst would suggest, when Lola was in her late thirties, that the panic attacks could have been triggered by her need to punish herself for getting what she had wanted. When Lola was pregnant with Mrs Gorgeous, she had really wanted a girl. After her birth, a C-section under general anaesthetic, Lola’s obstetrician told Lola that she had kept saying, ‘Somebody very lucky had a girl,’ and that no matter how many times he or the nurses told her that it was she herself who had had the girl, Lola had kept repeating, ‘Somebody very lucky had a girl.’ By the time Lola saw her third analyst, she knew that feeling of being lucky was not that easy to live with.

  The panic attacks always took Lola by surprise. They could happen in the supermarket, in the street, in the car. She tried to drive as little as possible, which, in a city like Melbourne, was not easy. She hired a part-time assistant so she wouldn’t be in the office on her own. And she took half of a five-milligram Valium tablet when she had to do interviews.

  She had spent years doing things on her own. Working late in the office, navigating airports, driving long distances. Now, she wanted someone with her all the time.

  Lola knew nobody who had had a panic attack. She’d never even heard of panic attacks.

  There were so many things Lola didn’t know about. She really knew very little about being Jewish. She didn’t know what most of the Jewish holidays meant. She didn’t know anything about the religion. She couldn’t understand a word of Hebrew. Although she was Jewish, Lola was not allowed to join either of the two Jewish youth organisations that most Jewish teenagers in Melbourne belonged to. She was also not allowed to go to synagogue. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, when Jews were supposed to fast and not drive or do any work, Edek would drive past the synagogue waving a ham sandwich. ‘Hypocrites,’ he would say loudly to himself. ‘Who are you praying to?’

  Renia and Edek were angry with God. They weren’t really angry with the Germans. They were upset about the number of Poles who seemed to be more than happy to get rid of their Jews, but they were very angry with God. They were both adamant that there was no God. And they were both furious with him. For the rest of her life Lola would feel disloyal whenever she entered a synagogue. In synagogues, she would also feel like an intruder, an outsider, a stranger. She would feel she wasn’t a real Jew.

  Over and over again, Lola was told how important it was to marry a Jewish boy. Where she was supposed to meet one was never discussed. Was she supposed to nab Harry Mendel, the son of Renia and Edek’s friends Mr and Mrs Mendel? Harry had said to Lola when she was about thirteen that he would consider going out with her if she lost weight. Lola had stared at Harry Mendel for a long time after he’d said that. Then she’d reached over and taken a large slice of Mrs Mendel’s freshly baked cheesecake.

  Lola parked her car outside the small cottage in Carlton that she rented as her office. The cottage was very small. Two rooms and a kitchen. It reminded Lola of the cottage in North Carlton that she and Renia and Edek moved into when they moved out of their single room in Brunswick. The North Carlton cottage was a few minutes’ walk from Lola’s office.

  Lola was working for a glossy monthly magazine. The magazine was considered to be both hip and high IQ. Lola wrote profiles of people. Substantial profiles of three- to five-thousand words. This month she was doing a profile of a Melbourne psychiatrist who was using meditation in an attempt to cure or arrest the growth of cancerous tumours in patients. Lola had had to sit in on several meditation sessions. Lola wasn’t the meditation type. She’d found it hard to sit in silence, for an hour, in a room full of people she didn’t know. It had made her anxious. She had decided that if she had to do the meditation again, she would take a Valium.

  Lola wasn’t good at anything that required her to be inert. Meditation, massage, facials, facemasks, mud baths. They all made her very anxious. Lola didn’t think she would have to attend another of the meditation sessions. She thought she probably had all the material she needed to write the article.

  She liked writing profiles. Putting pieces of people’s lives together. Most people had parts and components that fitted together. The snippets and scraps were connected. There weren’t large gaping holes or disturbing absences. With most people, Lola found that if she asked enough questions, she could get enough information to form a whole picture. She also liked observing the people she interviewed. Watching their gestures, listening to the tone in their voice, looking at their demeanour, noting their responses. Seeing how their habits and their histories came together to make them who they were.

  She thought that her own history was on display, although she took great care to disguise it with a calm voice and slow, thoughtful movements. But all you had to do was look more closely, look past the measured smile, and you could almost see Nazis goose-stepping like a well-rehearsed chorus line.

  To Lola, some people seemed to come from a patch of blue sky and perpetual sunshine. She envied them. Although she was slightly suspicious of people who seemed overly optimistic or overly cheerful. Lola was drawn to the more morose type. To people who had doubts. To people who had struggled. To people who had suffered. She thought that part of why she probably loved Mr Former Rock Star was that his parents were so cold. So detached. Mr Former Rock Star was their youngest child and she thought that it must have been very difficult for him growing up with his very wealthy, very disconnected parents.

  His parents had an indifference to their children that Lola found frightening. Mrs Former Rock Star Sr used to say, ‘Hello, darling,’ to her son, and proffer up her lips for a quick p
eck on his cheek. But there was nothing behind that peck. It was an empty peck.

  Mrs Former Rock Star Sr also played a lot of golf. She didn’t work. And she didn’t cook, which was just as well, Lola thought, as on the few occasions that Mrs Former Rock Star Sr did cook, the food was always the same. And always terrible. Tomatoes sliced in half with a raw onion ring on top of each half was the appetiser she almost always served. What sort of appetiser was that? Lola was used to Renia Bensky cooking for hours and preparing enough food for triple the number of people they had coming. For an appetiser she would often make a series of dishes to go with the dense black bread she would buy in Acland Street. She would make a chicken-liver pâté, a cream-cheese spread with chopped radishes and scallions and some thinly sliced, freshly boiled tongue with black peppercorns.

  Mr Former Rock Star loved Renia’s food. And they ate at Lola’s parents’ place at least once a week. Mr Former Rock Star couldn’t cook, but he liked to bake. He particularly liked to bake shortbread cookies. He zealously practised making the perfect shortbread. Whenever Lola worked late, she would come home to racks and racks of hot shortbread coming out of the oven. Apparently the secret to perfect shortbread was the quality of the butter. It was necessary to use very, very good butter. Lola’s fridge seemed to be constantly full of local and imported butters. Shortbread contained one cup of butter for every half a cup of sugar and two cups of flour. It was not good for Lola’s diet. It was a catastrophe.

  When Lola decided to leave Mr Former Rock Star, she told Renia and Edek not long after she had told Mr Former Rock Star. Lola hadn’t expected Renia and Edek to take the news well. She had dreaded telling them. But the hysteria that had ensued after she had told them was far worse than she had expected. It had been worse than telling Mr Former Rock Star himself.

  Mr Former Rock Star, after he’d got over the initial shock of someone else falling in love with Lola, or maybe it was the shock of Lola falling in love with someone else, had seemed almost pleased. After not eating for a week and losing twelve pounds, Mr Former Rock Star asked Lola if they could always remain good friends. ‘Of course,’ Lola had said. She felt she loved Mr Former Rock Star, in a sisterly sort of way.

  ‘You were always a bit too intense for me,’ Mr Former Rock Star had said.

  ‘Really?’ said Lola. Her guilt at leaving started to evaporate. A cheerfulness that she hadn’t seen in years appeared on Mr Former Rock Star’s face. She could tell that he was wondering whether, although he was now an accountant, he could resume his former rock-star ways.

  Edek had not taken the news as calmly. ‘Oy, Gott,’ he had said, several times. He seemed stunned.

  Renia cut straight to the chase. ‘Hitler didn’t kill me,’ she shouted, ‘so you want to finish me off.’ Before Lola had had time to say anything, if she had thought of anything to say after being partnered with Hitler, Renia wailed, ‘I should have died in Auschwitz rather than live to hear this news.’

  ‘Liebala, Liebala,’ Edek said, using her pet name, ‘do not do this to us.’

  ‘I’m not doing it to you,’ Lola said. ‘I’m doing it to myself. I’m the one who is leaving my marriage.’

  ‘She wants to kill us,’ Renia said.

  ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ said Lola.

  ‘I should have died in Auschwitz,’ Renia said, again, sobbing.

  Lola was alarmed. She had only ever seen Renia crying quietly. Crying quietly for her dead. For her father or her mother or one of her brothers or sisters. Once, when Lola was about five or six, she had watched Renia crying silently. Renia’s body had been heaving with sobs, yet not making a sound. Lola had put her arms around her mother, but Renia hadn’t appeared to notice.

  Edek had come home and seen the two of them, sitting side by side, in silence. Edek said something to Renia in Polish. ‘Your mother is crying about a small baby boy who did die in the ghetto,’ Edek had turned and said to Lola. Lola had known that her mother was crying about something very sad. What it would take her years to know was that the small baby boy was her brother. Renia and Edek’s baby boy.

  Lola wished she had waited a while before she told Edek and Renia about the fact that she was leaving Mr Former Rock Star. Lola had never seen Renia crying with rage. It frightened her. She tried to calm herself down. She didn’t think that Renia really wished she had died in Auschwitz.

  Lola thought that ‘Auschwitz’ was probably one of the first words she had learnt. She was a precocious baby, and already talking when she was ten months old, Renia always said. Auschwitz was probably a common subject in the DP camp where Lola was born. People had to talk about it. It was part of the biographical information that was being collected from survivors of Nazi death camps.

  A few years later, most survivors would stop talking about Auschwitz. They would never stop thinking about it. And from time to time, the small explosive shards and fragments that belonged to that twisted, misshapen universe would erupt from them.

  ‘Poor Ida, she wanted so much to have a child,’ Renia would say every time their friends Ida and Yitzhak Stein left, after a visit. When Lola had once asked why, in that case, did Ida not have any children, Renia had said, in an almost inaudible voice, ‘Because they did try to glue her womb shut.’

  Lola always knew who ‘they’ referred to. The Gestapo, the SS Obersturmbannführers and SS Sturmbannführers and Obersturmführers and kapos who pulled Jews out of the barracks and rollcalls and work details to be killed or used for useless pseudo-medical experiments. Later she would read about the many German doctors who experimented with abandon at Auschwitz, including a Professor Dr Carl Clauberg who, under the guise of researching sterilisation devices, injected chemicals into the uteruses of many women in an attempt to glue the uteruses shut.

  Lola felt bad. She couldn’t believe Renia’s response to the news that she was leaving the man who, Lola thought, Renia had possibly, initially, hoped she would not marry. She really hoped that her mother wasn’t wishing she had died in Auschwitz.

  Edek left the room. Lola thought that he was probably going off to read one of his detective-fiction books called The Blood Soaked Barrel or Five Dead Wives or Terror Takes a Turn. Or maybe Edek was looking for a piece of chocolate.

  ‘It is an infatuation,’ Renia said, as though the thought had suddenly occurred to her that Lola might be having an affair. ‘It is not love. I was in love with somebody and I didn’t leave your father.’ Lola didn’t want to hear any of that. She didn’t want to hear how Renia had sacrificed her own happiness for Lola. Edek adored Renia. Why did Renia have to muddy the picture? The picture was already murky enough as it was.

  ‘You was an example for us that a mixed marriage can work,’ said Edek, who had returned with a trace of chocolate still on his lips.

  ‘I’ll try harder next time,’ said Lola. There would be a next time. Lola knew that. She was leaving Mr Former Rock Star because she was in love with someone else. Really in love, she thought.

  5

  ‘You’ve got everything,’ Patrice Pritchard said to Lola Bensky. Lola Bensky’s chest constricted. Her ribs felt as though they’d clenched themselves, like fists, and were gripping her lungs. ‘You’ve got everything,’ Patrice Pritchard said, again. ‘You look gorgeous, you’ve got a man who adores you, you’ve got great kids and you live in SoHo.’

  Patrice, a senior editor at Oliver and Joseph, an international publishing conglomerate, was very thin, very blond and very earnest. And she was Lola’s editor. ‘Nobody has everything,’ Lola said, in what she hoped was a more plaintive than terse tone. She tried to take a deep breath, but her chest wouldn’t budge.

  ‘And you’re thin, too,’ Patrice said, looking semi-pained. ‘I work out every day for two hours so I can eat. I’m forty-three and I’m still waiting to meet the right man and have a family.’

  ‘I’m not thin,’ Lola said, in a reedy squeak. ‘I’m not thin,’ she tried to repeat as she attempted to clear her throat. Lola was fifty-one, almost fifty-
two. She shouldn’t be squeaking when she tried to speak.

  The reason Lola now had a book editor was that she had written a book. She had written a book called The Ultra-Private Detective Agency. Lola didn’t know why she had written the book. She didn’t know anything about private detectives or private-detective agencies.

  She had had a longing to write something other than a long magazine article. She had wanted to write without having to stop at three thousand or five thousand words. But why she chose to write this book bewildered her. She knew very little about detective fiction apart from having watched Edek absorbed in one detective-fiction book after another. The Ultra-Private Detective Agency had surprised Lola as much as it had surprised anyone who knew her.

  Patrice Pritchard had acquired the book for a relatively small advance. It had already sold more than one hundred thousand copies. Lola had no idea who was buying it. Possibly people who didn’t know much about detective fiction either.

  Edek didn’t like The Ultra-Private Detective Agency. ‘Nothing happens in this book,’ he said. Lola thought he was right. There were no murders and there was no blackmail. Edek liked a lot of murder and blackmail. The more murderers and blackmailers per chapter, the more Edek liked the book.

  The Ultra-Private Detective Agency was focused on the more mundane problems of everyday life. The 52-year-old wife who kept disappearing on Wednesday mornings. The business partner who started dying his hair and rollerskating to work, decades after anyone else was on rollerskates. Or the husband who came home late three nights a week, puffy and puffing with allergies, yet was perfectly fine and on time for the other four nights.