by Ramona Koval
But I was impatient. And you can’t be impatient while learning a language or a new musical instrument. I was stuck with sentences like, ‘Does Comrade Ivanov write English?’ Or ‘The river is on the left, the forest is on the right.’ Or ‘The air is fresh today!’ How could I be a revolutionary if I was limited to such banalities?
I daydreamed that my teacher would recognise my radical potential and make some approach to draft me into a secret plan, but she did nothing of the sort. She favoured those who did their homework although she praised my accent. This came from listening all my life to people who were translating their own languages—including Russian—into broken English, and gave me scope for mimicry. It occurs to me now that neither of my parents, who both understood Russian (at least, as it related to their own Slavic language of Polish), offered to help me.
By the middle of the year I had dropped out of the Russian classes for the same reason that I had dropped my violin lessons. After a year of violin I couldn’t play like Isaac Stern and in the Russian class we were still limited to ‘I remember all the words of the song about the motherland’ and ‘the collective farm is being built by the workers’. I told my parents I had too much school homework to fit Russian in as well.
But the truth was that my revolutionary aspirations were not being nurtured by my teacher. Although I loved the freedom of spending most of Saturday crisscrossing the city on my own on the trams, my romantic dreams were being crushed, and this was unsustainable. I kept the books, of course, hoping that I would have the time to learn Russian again in the future.
My Russian lessons were preceded by French at high school and Hebrew before that at Sunday School. I loved learning new ways people had invented for communicating with each other. My language books are joined on the shelf by a slim volume, more a word list than a dictionary, that I was given on the eve of a trip to Papua New Guinea to write some newspaper columns. I was travelling with an aid agency worker. She and I were flying to a remote part of the country to investigate the effects of Japanese forest harvesters on the local landholdings.
There is nothing like curling up with a word list like this one in Tok Pisin. The language was developed in the early 1800s, an English-based creole which is now one of the three national languages of Papua New Guinea. I had colleagues at the ABC who broadcast in Tok Pisin to the region and I enjoyed hearing them talk to each other in the corridors. You had to speak the words aloud to detect their origin and many were clever and comical.
Bras bilong teet—toothbrush (brush belong teeth)
Garas bilong het—hair (grass belong head)
Sop bilong garas—shampoo (soap belong grass)
I was idly learning the language, as we were only going for a few days and would have a translator. He was a 23-year-old Tolai warrior and he met us on a remote landing strip. Our fifteen-seater plane took off again almost immediately and we were left, two women and one warrior, sitting on benches under a rough shade shelter.
We were waiting for a truck that was to take us to our accommodation for the next few days. It was very, very hot and our lift was very, very late.
Some hours and two litres of water later I needed to find a toilet. My word book was in the bottom of my pack and, anyway, I thought, this guy is the translator so why would I need to say what turned out to be smolhaus i stap we? As far as I could see there was no small house stopping anywhere and only long grass on either side of the runway. So I turned to him and told him I needed to go for a walk into the long grass. He looked surprised. I showed him the empty water bottle and said it again. I stepped off the platform and said it once more. I had read enough anthropology books to know that there might be some kind of sacred place that I really shouldn’t use as a toilet, so I asked him if he could show me where to go.
I was puzzled when he walked with me to the appointed spot. Did he want to protect me from snakes? When he wouldn’t leave my side, I assumed he really was there to protect me. I had been bushwalking in mixed company before, and was wearing a long dress anyway, so, forced to obey my urgent bladder, I squatted down next to him. He surprised me by relieving himself in a strong stream. I put this down to cultural practices.
When I began to walk back to the platform, he seemed truly puzzled and asked me if I was ready to have enjoyments. Enjoyments? He asked if I was married.
I was not.
‘So,’ he asked, ‘we can have enjoyments?’
‘No, we can’t have enjoyments,’ I said. I was a journalist at work, there would be no enjoyments at all.
He told me that if I ever wished to have enjoyments I need only ask him.
I was confused until my friend told me that illicit sexual activity in the local villages happened away from the large common houses. Suggesting a walk into the ‘long grass’ was tantamount to asking a bloke back to your hotel for a ‘drink’ at midnight.
I am still puzzled by this, as my dictionary tells me that ‘having sex with a woman’ is hevim seks or wantaim meri, but it is easy to find cross-cultural interactions confusing, especially if, like me, you like to put your language lessons into practice before you really know how to say much.
I have even managed to generate confusion in Canada, in the English-speaking city of Toronto, at a writers festival where you might expect to find experts in communication. I had arrived in Toronto fresh from New York, and was rubbing shoulders with the organisers and guests. There were some familiar faces there, and some new ones. I had missed my daily bout in the gym, so I was pleased when a kind-faced Canadian novelist leaned over and said, ‘Have you been outside yet today, because I was thinking of going for walk.’
I sprang to my feet, agreed that it was a good idea, and told him to wait a minute while I got my coat.
We left the hotel and took the path that led around Lake Ontario, and conversed in a friendly fashion about buildings and water birds and Canada in general. After fifteen minutes I noticed with a broadcaster’s ear that his language had subtly changed. He was now using the word ‘we’ in every third sentence, such as, ‘We have a little house in the northern forests,’ or ‘When we decided to sell that car…’
We were sitting together on a park bench overlooking some Canada Geese as they swam on the lake when he asked me if I knew that his wife was arriving that night.
‘No,’ I said, somewhat puzzled. ‘How would I know that?’ I had just met him and had never met his wife.
My brain then engaged, and I realised that this man was trying to tell me something other than his wife’s travel plans. He seemed to be asking me what my intentions were towards him, and if they were honourable. Given his nervousness, I asked him why he had invited me to come for a walk at all.
‘I didn’t,’ he said.
Taken aback, I begged to differ. I explained that an Australian interpretation of what he’d said was: ‘Have you been outside yet? (If you haven’t, you might like to come now.) Because I was thinking of going for a walk. (Why don’t you come too?)’
He said that in Canada, the phrase he used had meant: ‘Have you been outside yet? (What’s the weather like? Because there could be a blizzard and I could die.) Because I was thinking of going for a walk. (By myself.)’
Feeling rather defensive now—and noting to myself that it was sunny—I explained that in Australia if a bloke was telling a woman he wanted to go for a walk by himself he could expect one of two responses: One. Why don’t you tell someone who cares, or Two. You poor bastard, hang on, I’ll come and keep you company so you don’t go and blow your brains out.
This wasn’t the only introduction I had to Canadian mores. Another guest of the festival, Argentinian-born Alberto Manguel, told me a true story about a hold-up, where a man went into a shop, with only a Canada Goose under his arm, and said that he wanted money. If the woman behind the counter didn’t cooperate, ‘The goose gets it.’ The shopkeeper gave him everything in the till, and even went down the street with him to her automatic teller machine to withdraw all of her savings
. She handed him the cash, he handed over the goose, and ran off.
Manguel delighted in the story, and described how staggered his Argentinian friends were on hearing it. And it confirmed his decision to live in Canada and become a Canadian. If you had to choose between a country that ‘disappeared’ its people and one that preferred not to ‘disappear’ its geese, you’d become Canadian too.
CHAPTER 7
Becoming a woman
As a girl, my parents’ friends admired me for my blonde hair and blue eyes, my ‘good looks’. In their circle this meant that I would not automatically be assumed to be Jewish were the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 somehow to be enacted in faraway 1960s Australia. If my mother spoke of me getting one hundred per cent for maths, my father would remind her that this would not get me a husband. In fact, he said, if I grew much taller than I was at fifteen, my education would be held against me. He thought that most good Jewish boys were short like him, and wanted women shorter still. They didn’t want to be towered over by a girl who could do algebra.
The agreed wisdom among the Friday night cardplayers who convened at our house every fourth week (playing Red Aces or Gin Rummy at four card tables with matches as the stakes) was that my mother read too many books, and that I was in danger of going the same way.
The piles of books consumed by the silent woman on the couch told another story. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, and by 1969, when I was fifteen, my mother passed it to me. It had become a bestseller and Friedan was by then the first president of America’s National Organization for Women. She described the lives of women who had been college graduates but who were now trapped into suburban lives making homes and having babies. She called this ‘the problem that has no name’. Friedan argued that the feminine mystique was a set of values that meant a woman’s life could be fulfilled by looking after her husband, her children, her home and her looks. Women were expected to be dominated by their husbands, sexually passive, and to find emotional fulfilment in love for their children. Psychologists, advertisers and politicians were all in on this. ‘Each suburban wife struggled with it alone,’ Friedan wrote. ‘As she made the beds, shopped for groceries…she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?” ’
I was unsettled by this book. My mama had told my sister and me that she had never in her life been as happy and fulfilled as when we were born. Now she was saying, silently though it may have been, that there was more to life than looking after us. Maybe being our mother was marginally better than trying to survive in Warsaw during the Holocaust, but were we really holding her back from pursuing a life outside the confines of our kitchen and laundry? Betty Friedan’s women had been educated in universities but Mama had not got past Grade 6. Was working in a factory or as an outworker at home better than making our lunches and ironing our school uniforms? What was she dreaming of as she read on our couch?
The sixties in Australia were probably like the fifties in Friedan’s United States. Mama once arranged a mortgage to build a small factory on a pocket handkerchief of land she had bought in an inner-city slum suburb (she used money from her German repatriation pension, which she received as a survivor of the Holocaust), but when Dad heard about it he started to worry that she would lose everything, and went to the bank and cancelled the loan. He could do this because he was her husband and she needed his signature. I still remember the bitter fight that ensued.
I could see she was frustrated, and remember her tears. She was much more adventurous and better read than my father; it must have seemed like she was being held captive by a lesser being.
But I realised that my mother had given me The Feminine Mystique not so much to paint a picture of her own life as to allow me to plot the trajectory of mine. This was purely theoretical plotting at this stage—she was still buying my clothes and restricting my social life and would do so until, in the summer of the year I turned sixteen, I found a holiday job selling ladies swimwear in Myer’s department store. After that she gave me a translation of French philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, a more complex book. Its most memorable phrase was, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’
De Beauvoir meant that we learned to be women, learned what was expected of us, how to walk and talk and be. This was a mystifying idea so soon after the changes that ‘becoming a woman’ (as my mother put it) had made to my body and to my concept of myself—I could have children now. If I wasn’t a woman, what was I? And had I become a woman through simple biology or had society made me one?
Philosophy aside, I enjoyed reading de Beauvoir because she lived in Paris, the city where my parents had spent four years after the end of World War Two. The rare times that we could get Mama to talk about the past were when she baked. Between the dough being made and the yeast rising, I had a whiff of Paris after the war, when de Beauvoir and Sartre might lunch at Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. My mama, on the other hand, had a job as an outworker in a fourth-floor one-room apartment in another part of the city, but I fitted her story into my impressions as best I could.
Of course there was the other scandalous part of the life of Simone de Beauvoir—she was not married to Jean-Paul Sartre and they both took lovers. She had no children. But for many of my generation they were the couple who served as a model for the kind of life that might be possible—he the founder of existentialism and she one of the pioneers of feminism. They lived as equals and they travelled together and helped each other develop ideas for their books. They valued freedom and honesty and dismissed jealousies.
Anyway, that was the theory—one that has taken a beating in the years since my friend, the late Hazel Rowley, published her book Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre in 2005. Rowley describes the lies and jealousies and unhappiness that the couple never publicly admitted. She reveals that Sartre used to promise to marry the ‘drowning women’ he took as mistresses—‘these rather neurotic little women, often actresses, very beautiful always, whom he took under his wing and made financially dependent on him and he wrote plays for them, which they weren’t always up to’. Meantime Simone de Beauvoir, the one who could swim, kept insisting that marriage was not what they wanted, and that she was the most important woman in his life.
But all this was beyond me when I was a teenager. I did notice that, much to my irritation, my father was right about boys and me and mathematics, but I didn’t care very much as I loved school and I loved having my head in books too. And who cared about the boys in my class? I had no way of meeting those more interesting-looking older boys anyway, as Mama was still very strict.
But that didn’t stop her from casually leaving Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group on the bookshelf. Where of course I found it. The book, first published in the United States a few months after The Feminine Mystique, while not officially banned, had been the subject of a threat to prosecute booksellers and a subsequent campaign in Victoria by the ‘Freedom to Read’ group. It explores the lives of eight women who graduate from Vassar College in 1933. They embark on sex, love, marriage and motherhood and one of them takes a lesbian lover. I remember being intrigued by the pen-portraits of the women on the back cover.
Lakey—Mona Lisa of the smoking room—for women only!
Libby—a big red scar in her face called a mouth.
Dottie—Thin women are more sensual. The nerve ends are closer to the surface.
Really? Was that true about thin women? Whatever kind of woman I was going to be, it wasn’t thin. Was I destined not to be sensual? What was sensual anyway? It was hard to read the book in snatches when Mama was in the kitchen or out shopping.
The only really vivid part I remember was when Dottie, the thin one, goes to get a pessary from the doctor after her rather unsatisfactory defloration with Dick, who didn’t kiss her at all. Armed with her pessary she waits in Washington Square Park for him to meet her for their next assignation, but he doesn’t turn up so she lea
ves the contraceptive device under the bench and walks away. As if she has had a narrow escape from Dick as well as the pessary.
I wonder if reading this led to my own shyness about contraception when I went to university in 1972. The pill had been available for years by then, and even my best friend’s mother was on it. I was confused by this. All of the talk in the press was about the pill and how racy single girls were being prescribed it, but as my parents had separate rooms I had no occasion to ask my Mama about contraception. And we both knew I didn’t need contraception to read, and that was all I was allowed to do, so what was there to talk about?
I fear that I thought that the Vassar class of ’33 rules applied to my first year of university. I would have saved myself a lot of heartache if I had marched up to the Student Health Clinic and got myself sorted as soon as I enrolled. I blame Mary McCarthy and a fundamental misreading of her novel.
For despite my wide reading, I was completely sheltered. I caught the bus to university each day, attended my classes, borrowed books from the library and made my way home. This was my pattern until I started ‘going out’ in first year with a medical student who was a few years older and who knew everything there was to know about life on campus. And life in general. Or so I thought.
How silly I was. In 1973, in my second year of university, when I was eighteen, I told my mother I had a university excursion and got up early, met my boyfriend on our street corner, and we hitchhiked to a private hospital in the suburbs, where I had an abortion. The doctor was kind, and wore black-and-white platform shoes. My boyfriend left me there and went off to buy me flowers. Later we took a taxi back to university where we sat in the cafeteria for the afternoon. He walked me to the bus stop and I went home. My mother was none the wiser.