Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  It was Melbourne’s Block Arcade that gave him the courage to confront his parents and quit engineering. He had been to the arcade numerous times, but had never taken any notice of the building — with the notable exception of the Hopetoun tea rooms with its famous cakes and desserts.

  One Thursday, late in the first year of his engineering course, he was whiling away an hour in the city, wandering through the arcades and bluestone lanes. It was after six when he found himself in the Block Arcade. The shops were closed, human traffic was light, and for the first time he saw the domed ceiling, he saw the glossy wood-and-brass shop fronts, and, most particularly, he saw the floor.

  It was covered in mosaic.

  This floor, smoothed by the passage of millions of feet, yet retaining its colours and images, was not simply beautiful, he found it utterly compelling. How could all those tiny fragments come together to produce a coherent and seamless whole? All those tiny pieces — tiles? stone? — forming patterns and human figures, and of such variety: some resembled friezes from the ancient Greeks, others looked quite modern. He squatted down, ran his hand over the pieces. He had to know how this wonder had been created. He had to know more.

  He left the arcade and rushed through the lanes towards Bourke Street. At the first phone box, he stopped to ring his parents. He explained he was with friends and would not be home for dinner — they’d be happy to hear he was not alone — and bolted up the street to the Paperback Bookshop, open late every night. In the art section he found a book on the world’s most famous mosaics, an oversized volume with many coloured plates. With insufficient money to buy it, he settled himself on a bench near the window. He studied the pictures, he read the text.

  And so it happened, in a city bookshop an hour after he had seen his first mosaic, Andrew Morrow decided on his future. Page after page of mosaics from Spain and Morocco, Italy and Russia, Turkey and the Middle East; mosaics in stone, glass, pottery, enamel, gold and jewels; geometric patterns, landscapes, interiors, animals, human figures, the sacred and the secular; skin shadings, fancy hair, flowing garments, complex movements. Mosaic, this extraordinary enduring art, was the work he wanted to do.

  He decided to complete the first year of engineering before telling his parents of his new career. With a creditable pass, he hoped they would see that his choice not to be an engineer really was a choice.

  He studied, he passed with honours, and he made his announcement. His parents were not happy; his father in particular was very unhappy. Finish the engineering degree, Leonard said. Give yourself something to fall back on; after all, he added, very few artists make a living from art alone. Sylvie was worried he would become even more ‘socially isolated’ than he already was. Those were her exact words, and the first time in Andrew’s memory she had described him in such a way.

  Andrew ended up doing what he wanted, and his parents continued to worry. He found more books to read, he studied every mosaic in Melbourne, he travelled up to Canberra to surround himself in Napier Waller’s great mosaics at the Australian War Memorial. He enrolled in short courses (the major art schools ignored mosaic as pensioner craft and sheltered-workshop activity), and eventually secured an apprenticeship with one of the few established mosaicists in Australia. He had never been happier.

  He was just twenty-one when he entered the landscape competition that would change his life. With nothing to lose, he used his entry to explore the sort of mosaic-meshed-with-nature design he aspired to, in lieu of the commissions that were yet to come his way. And to his amazement he won; even the organisers were surprised that a complete unknown had walked off with the prize. He used the money to travel. He went to Spain to see traditional Moorish mosaics, before crossing into France to study some stunning modern pieces. And then he went to Ravenna. He visited church after church filled with mosaics. He examined dozens of glorious images, and discovered an astonishing array of materials. In the vestibule of the Archiepiscopal Chapel at Ravenna, he stood before a wall on which had been transcribed the words of an unknown poet. Aut lux hic nata est, aut capta hic libera regnat: ‘Either light was born here or, imprisoned here, it reigns supreme.’ This would be his future.

  Ravenna remained his mosaic apotheosis until his trip to Leningrad and the mosaics of the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood. During that exhilarating winter, he worked alongside the men and women who were restoring those marvellous artworks. And when he came back to his room at night, tired and euphoric, the girl he had knocked down in the street filled his thoughts, and she continued to do so even when he returned to Australia. She had become so much a part of his life that he had told his parents about her, implying she had been his girlfriend and the two of them still corresponded.

  On this warm November night in Melbourne, as he worked on his indoor pool, she entered his mind with the ease of a regular visitor. He imagined talking with her about this mosaic he was making for himself, discussing why it was that artists keep unfinished pieces, keep pieces that fail to sell, but rarely, if ever, create a work specifically for themselves.

  It was an issue that had been puzzling him for some time. It was not just the money, but something more personal. He was his own harshest critic — most artists are. He knew all too well that last year’s successful work can reveal shocking flaws twelve months on. Only a committed masochist could live surrounded by old and accusing mistakes. And besides, it’d feel like bragging to display your own work at home, as if you were saying you admire your art more than anyone else’s. But despite these problems he had gone ahead with his pool.

  Joni Mitchell sang on, the pool grew, the night moved forward. Immersed in his work, he was removed from himself, from this world. Work silenced his demons. He knew he ought to protest against nuclear tests in the Pacific, he knew he should rally for a better deal for nurses, but his was not a loud-hailer personality, and never would it be.

  It was late when he went to bed, tired yet relaxed, the trials of the day entirely subdued. With Goddy curled up next to him, he fell asleep. He slept through to the morning and woke refreshed, happy with the prospect of an uninterrupted day of work.

  4

  PROSPECTING FOR HOME

  Not far from Andrew’s studio, on this warm November morning in 1987, Galina Kogan was marking her first anniversary in Australia. She didn’t feel it warranted a full-blown celebration, she was still too unsettled for that, but she did have steady work and sufficient money, and she was now living in her very own Australian home.

  Perhaps it was this, she was thinking, that deserved a celebration: that after a mere four months, her odd, unconventional dwelling did feel like home — not home as in Leningrad, but a secure and welcome comfort after the extended bivouac of her first months in Australia.

  Her home was a former saddlery shop, located in a lane opposite the Melbourne Cemetery. She was inclined to believe that the very unorthodoxy of the place had been its primary attraction: that in the same way she was an oddball among the Australian people, so too was this dwelling among Australian houses and flats. Decades earlier, the saddlery shop had been converted to a bedsitter, with a shower and toilet closeted off in a back corner. She had placed her bed down one end of the rectangular space. A kitchen was pressed into one of the side walls, and she had put a small table and two chairs nearby; a glass sliding door along the other side led to a courtyard garden, described as tiny by her visitors, though many times larger than the balcony of the Leningrad flat. The northern end of the room doubled as a work and living area. With a mere half-dozen steps from bed to desk, the saddlery, Galina decided, must have specialised in gear for miniature horses. She bought a two-seater couch upholstered in a splashy green-and-fawn floral; it was not a pattern she would have chosen — hard to imagine what sort of person would choose such a pattern — but the couch was in good condition, it was cheap, and it was comfortable. She added a side-table and a well-worn leather pouffe from the same second-hand
goods shop.

  Her desk was constructed from a door suspended between two banks of shelves, and it was here she was working, just after eight in the morning, drawing slender female figures. These illustrations would be used on packets of sewing patterns sold to the home seamstress. It amused her that a Soviet girl was bringing fashion to Westerners, a Soviet girl moreover, who was a hopeless seamstress. The current crop of patterns depicted the new season’s fashions, the ‘new season’ referring not to the summer about to begin, which if today’s weather was any guide had already begun, but rather summer 1988, more than a year away.

  She had the whole morning to finish the current batch of sewing patterns before leaving for her other job, her real estate job — in the middle of a day, she suddenly realised, when the temperature was expected to be in the mid-thirties.

  ‘Today will be a stinker,’ she said aloud, indulging in the earthy Australian vernacular that both confused and delighted her. She regarded Australian English as an outlaw form: much like the saddlery, much like herself.

  This would be her second summer in Australia. Last year had been so stupendously hot, she’d viewed the heat with the same fascination as a scientist might the atmosphere on Mars. The saddlery, a low-pitched dwelling shaded by taller two-storey buildings, fortunately remained quite cool, and despite today’s heat she was wrapped in her mother’s shawl, and her feet were snug in Lidiya’s old tapochki.

  Her place was located in Carlton, the area she had chosen during her time in Rome for her Australian home. Carlton was on the opposite side of Melbourne from where most other Russian émigrés lived, and where she herself had stayed for the first several months in Australia. She had been tempted to remain there, with people she knew and among streets that had grown familiar, but the decision to live in Carlton had been made, and she was determined not to change her mind.

  Being decisive made her feel as if she were in control. She had decided to emigrate despite her mother’s death, so she had emigrated. She had decided on Australia because of a chance meeting with an Australian, so here she was in Australia. While in Italy, a film of the Carlton area of Melbourne had appealed, so now she was living in Carlton. The decisions acted as stakes in her new life, holding it in place; decisions, she would admit, that were often made impetuously. Indeed, with each major decision various adults, both in Leningrad and here in Australia, had cautioned her to wait and consider. But she believed that to waver even for a moment would cause her to stumble. Two factors pushed her forward: she was young, and her mother was gone. She could do nothing about her mother’s death, but if she had waited for maturity to shape wiser decisions, she probably would never have left Leningrad.

  For her first eight months in Australia she had lived with a Jewish couple whose ancestors had migrated from Russia after the revolution. Although both Zara and Arnold managed a halting formal Russian, to Galina they seemed entirely Australian. Their house, the first Australian home she had entered, struck her as very grand. Their ‘living room’ was just for sitting in, and their three bedrooms were just for sleeping; they had a special room with a dining table that could seat ten people; their kitchen was fitted with every conceivable appliance, and there were two bathrooms, two toilets and a whole laundry room just for themselves. It came as a shock to discover that their house was considered a typical suburban dwelling. Zara and Arnold slept in one room; the other two bedrooms had belonged to their daughters, both of whom had moved to different houses when they married. One of these rooms was now used as a nursery for the visiting grandchildren, the other was given to Galina.

  The house was surrounded on all sides by a private garden, with trees and bushes and flowers and not a square metre used for growing food. The beach was a five-minute walk away. This was Galina’s favourite place in those early months. She came to believe that the sea, or rather this Melbourne sea, had a mysterious power. She knew that if she were to travel across the water, sweep over the horizon and stay her course, the first land she would see would be Australia’s southern island of Tasmania; a few thousand kilometres further on and she would reach Antarctica. But, as she stood on the sand staring out at the horizon, the landmass she felt to be in front of her, although hidden by the curve of the earth, was Russia. There on the beach she would sit, in the burn of her first Australian January and the bluster of her first Australian July, and be transported over the sea to home.

  Her hosts were kind, welcoming people and, to Galina’s secular gaze, very Jewish. Arnold wore a yarmulke and Zara’s kitchen was kosher; they attended synagogue every Saturday and they encouraged Galina to join them. They observed a staggering number of special Jewish laws — laws previously unknown to Galina, whose favourite food at home had been salo, pork fat, and whose major key to Jewishness was Leon Uris’s Exodus. She never told Zara and Arnold about salo, but she did explain about Ishkod, the Russian version of Exodus, which her mother, like so many Soviet Jews, had read in samizdat.

  Ishkod came to Lidiya in the late nineteen-sixties after the Six-Day War in Israel, and following a new batch of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist measures in the Soviet Union. It was a faded carbon copy on tissue-thin paper; the print was so pale that Lidiya said hers must have been the last of the four sheets when the typing was done. Ishkod provided Soviet Jews both then and later with a model of Jewishness, replete with strength and hope and a country, too, although Israel’s struggles with her neighbours meant that as a homeland it never appealed to Lidiya, who longed for a life of freedom and peace.

  Pork fat, Leon Uris’s Ishkod, and entrenched Russian anti-Semitism had contributed to Galina’s Jewishness, so it was not surprising she found Zara and Arnold’s Judaism so foreign. After attending a few Shabbat services, she’d had enough. ‘Perhaps later,’ she said to Zara, ‘when life here is no longer so strange.’ But even as she spoke, she knew she would never embrace their kind of Jewishness. It was too late for her — she suspected it was too late for most Soviet Jews. It wasn’t just the revolution’s official removal of religion from their lives, Orthodox Christians had experienced that too. There was something else, something specific to Russian Jews that she only realised once she moved to Australia: when you’ve been the target of anti-Semitism all your life, this actually contributes to the sort of Jew you are. And it doesn’t change: despite your having crossed the world, despite witnessing other forms of Jewishness, despite your wishing it were not so.

  Living with Zara and Arnold, she acquired the basics of being Jewish; it was not so difficult. Becoming Australian, however, presented a far greater challenge. She walked Australian streets, she shopped at Australian stores, she ate at Australian cafés, she worked alongside Australian workers. And all the while, trespassing on her emerging Australianness was a residual suspicion of other people (would she ever become trusting like the Australians?), a continuing tendency to hoard food and clothes (would she ever develop their easy materialism?), and a fear of authority coupled with the compulsion to determine the power hierarchy wherever she found herself (would she ever acquire their casual anti-authoritarianism?). Even her habit of overdressing intruded on her Australianisation program. Soviet ways, she was realising, were her blood and marrow, her heart thumped to a Soviet tune; permanently removed from the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union had travelled with her. In Melbourne, Australia, despite all her efforts, she was still in large part a Soviet Jew.

  She grappled with the arcana of Australian customs and the mysteries of Australian Jewishness, and if Zara and Arnold ever found her behaviour odd or incomprehensible, they never revealed it. They welcomed her into their home, they treated her like family, she owed both her jobs to them. She had no doubt that Arnold and Zara liked her, even loved her; she suspected they would have been happy if she had stayed on with them permanently. But she had decided on Carlton as the place to live, so despite many good reasons to remain exactly where she was, Carlton it was going to be. Although it would not be easy, she realised, when s
he came to explore the area. There were plenty of Italians and students, as the film she’d seen in Rome had shown, but the students were vying for the same cheap accommodation as was she. The irony did not escape her: half her week was spent working in real estate, but when it came to her own housing, after two months she was no closer to moving from Zara and Arnold’s than when she first started her search.

  And then luck intervened. Luck: such a delightful concept to one far more accustomed to sistema, that Soviet staple of knowing who to contact and how much to pay when there was something you needed. She had been studying the advertisements for vacant rooms posted on the noticeboard of Readings, a big bookstore in Carlton. These were rooms in shared houses, kommunalki Australian-style, and while not her preference, it was all she could afford. She was noting down possibilities when she became aware of a man also perusing the advertisements. She stepped aside to allow him a better view.

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  It was the man who had spoken, and with no one else nearby, he was clearly addressing her.

  She swung around, immediately on her guard.

  ‘I’ve a place to rent,’ he quickly explained. ‘A great place.’

  It was a former saddlery, he said. He’d lived there for the past four years, but now needed to break his lease. ‘I’m moving to Tasmania.’ And after a brief pause, he added, ‘To follow my heart.’

  By the end of the day the saddlery was hers. It came with a higher rent than she had wanted to pay, but she was already employed four days a week, and had been led to believe the sewing-pattern work would increase, so she should manage, and managing was, after all, ingrained in all Soviet citizens.