The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  ‘No one listened then,’ Etti would say, ‘and no one listened when it was over. And people they still don’t want to listen. But if you talk long enough, soon they have to hear. And if people like your father won’t speak, then others have to do it for him. Me, you, even this Steven Spielberg.’

  Laura had wondered whether forgiveness played a role in all her mother’s talking, but Etti was scathing about forgiveness. ‘Forgiveness is just an easy way of making normal,’ she used to say. ‘Not my life but the ones who did the wrong. Who forgives?’ she continued. ‘The victim forgives. Always the victim. This person who has suffered so much and lost so much and now she has to say “I forgive you” as well. Why should I bend myself over to make bad people feel better?’

  With so much to say and so few reliable answers, Etti’s speech was littered with rhetorical questions. Her motivation for talking, however, was much more simple.‘You talk to make people believe,’ she said. ‘You talk to make people understand. And you talk,’ and here she would look down at her ample body, ‘because the truth you cannot hold it inside.’

  Laura would listen while her mother talked, and long sharp nails of tension would jam into her, and when she was alone she would find herself cut with a revenge so powerful she actually felt sick. Laura used to imagine her mother’s words as pellets of revenge, although at whom they were directed remained a mystery.

  The Germans weren’t hurting, the Poles weren’t hurting, the Ukrainians weren’t hurting, the Latvians weren’t hurting, none of Hitler’s willing helpers were hurting. And besides, neither Etti nor Henry ever spoke of revenge, which was, in Laura’s opinion, as extraordinary as a condemned prisoner never talking escape.

  Laura, on the other hand, had spent hours and hours pondering revenge. She would imagine German people driven from their homes and banished from their country. German people made to work as slaves for no other reason than being German. German people stripped of their dignity and herded naked to their death. German people forced to hide in holes like her mother, or put in concentration camps like her father. And instead of feeling better, she found herself feeling sorry for the poor suffering Germans of her imagination. Revenge, she decided as she wiped her mind of the false images, would simply turn the perpetrators into victims.

  So she steered her thoughts towards justice, but justice was on its knees after the most cursory of considerations. Justice was, after all, what happened at Nuremberg, and while that might have eased the world’s conscience, it did nothing for the loss and gruelling memories of those who survived. Certainly it did nothing for her mother and father. Justice, Laura decided, was simply too polite for genocide. So presentable in its staid abstractions, so authoritative in its ordered processes, justice fell well short when it came to dealing with the torture and killing of millions.

  Laura was older, a law student at university, when she realised that in the same way language had failed to come to grips with justice, so too the official language of the Holocaust. Etti’s words were heartbeats, but the public language of the Holocaust, in fact of all the horrors which pockmarked humanity, was diluted and disinfected in abstraction. Genocide. Persecution. Incarceration. Where were the perpetrators in all these words? Where the victims? Laura was studying law, she knew what to ask. But the law was silent. Only the words of her mother and other persecuted people seemed to be blooded with truth. Laura learned from them that it’s only when you tell the incomparable individuality of horror, each dreadful act recited one at a time, hundreds of horrors each with its own description, each with its own location, each with its own victims, that you break genocide into its austere, blood-curdling bits. And then, only then can the sober, indecent, heart-stabbing meanings emerge.

  Not that she had ever regretted pursuing law as a career, particularly when it had brought her parents so much joy. Neither of them had advanced beyond primary school yet both their children were university educated. And when Laura decided to specialise in human rights issues, they were thrilled. Later when she was appointed to the new Human Rights and Social Justice Commission they could not have been more proud than if she’d won the Nobel Peace Prize. The law fell short, but if her own work were any guide, it was not entirely useless.

  Laura had prepared for her career at the family dinner table. Etti was an appalling cook and the food easy to neglect while the family sat around the table arguing the issues of the day. Etti, broad-faced and buxom, would sit at one end of the table, her pudgy hands with the dimples at the base of the fingers striking the emphasis as she talked across the congealing food. At the other end of the table Henry, straight and strong and, if the truth be known, the sort of face and figure to delight an Aryan, sparred with his wife, sometimes agreeing sometimes not. And in between, Laura and Daniel, one each side of the table, Daniel an inexplicable conservative in the Lewin household and Laura spokesperson for the oppressed and dispossessed from the time she was three years old and defending a disabled child at her kindergarten. Night after night Daniel and Laura, Henry and Etti would mix politics, economics, business, welfare and international relations with the awful food, their conversation only easing off with dessert, one of Henry’s creations brought home from the shop because Etti believed ‘better we eat than we waste’.

  Over the years Etti had grown fat on her beliefs. Every day in the shop, with so much sugar and cream, was it any wonder, she would say, she was so fat? Henry, same shop, same sugar, same cream, same daily temptations, was built like a fortress. Even into his eighties he remained a tallish man with a strong, muscled body more suited to labour than fancy cakes. As it happened he was good at both: a legend in the kitchen and a master up a ladder. He used to joke he would live out his days with a whisk in one hand and a wrench in the other.

  Whatever he did, it wouldn’t have mattered to Etti. She thought the world of him, as he did of her. Even in the heat of an argument he would rise from the table to sit near her, stroking the huge pillows of her arms while she talked. ‘I’m so fat,’ she would say. And Henry would turn to Laura and Daniel, ‘I’d love her however she was.’

  And so he did, through the hard early years and the easier ones that followed, through the happy times as well as her depressions, and finally through Etti’s slow dying. He held her in his arms as the cancer shrank her, his love flourishing as she became smaller and smaller. Finally it was as if she had slipped inside a sack of skin. ‘All those diets,’ she would say lifting a length of loose skin. ‘Lucky I failed. Who would want to look like this?’ But as far as Henry was concerned, Grace Kelly and Sophia Loren had nothing on his wife.

  There was a toughness about Henry, but with Etti he was pure tenderness. So much love after more than forty years of marriage, of working together in the shop, of sharing a whole life together: entertainment, friends, leisure, the lot. Their friends were drawn mainly from the Polish-Jewish community and had been from the beginning. When they had arrived in Australia in 1951, Jewish Welfare had provided them with a list of local Jewish contacts both German and Polish to reflect their different backgrounds. And while Etti would have been happy to follow up some of the German ones, Henry was adamant: the Polish Jews, he said, would be quite sufficient.

  He had been shedding all things German ever since the end of the war so Etti was not surprised. And besides, Melbourne’s Polish Jews – the Polish contingent as Laura later dubbed them – seemed to suit him. He would sit quietly amid the swirl of Yiddish and Polish, content just to listen. It was not just a lack of proficiency with the language which kept him quiet, rather it was in his nature to keep to the edges of any group. Often on a Sunday when the Polish contingent met, Henry would leave the others to their chatting and spend time alone in the kitchen baking.

  ‘Such a husband she has,’ their friends would say of Etti. ‘He spends his time in the kitchen while she shmoozes.’

  When Etti died back in 1990, Henry continued with the Polish contingent much as he had always done. And all of them, together with their chil
dren and grandchildren, were there at his own funeral. It was a good turn-up: many friends, but also suppliers, other pastry-chefs, even long-time customers for whom a visit to Lewins had been a Saturday ritual. He was a good man, they said, and a great pastry-cook.

  ‘A true artist,’ one customer said at the funeral. ‘Every cake a masterpiece, and the sacher torte his Mona Lisa.’

  It was in 1958, the year Laura was born, that Henry and Etti had started the business. From the beginning Etti was chief assistant, bookkeeper and delivery hand while the artistry of the business rested with Henry. Theirs was a small shop in a busy shopping strip, the kitchen behind, the toilet out the back, the dwelling on top. A typical Victorian terrace which the Lewins rented from an Australian with a sweet tooth and a large circle of friends. A small alcove at the rear of the kitchen was set up for Laura and there she would play while her parents worked and Daniel, ten years older, was at school.

  As a child, Laura would watch her father as he prepared his famous sacher tortes, the butter and sugar in the Hobart mixer, Hilde Hobart he called it, his thick hands on the great metal mixing bowl testing aeration and temperature, cupping the bowl with the same sensitivity as a mother supports her baby’s head, knowing the slap slap slap of a mixture too wet, the white whoosh of a mixture perfectly aerated. He would lift Laura up on a stool for a better view when the chocolate was added. Listen, he would say, it sounds like mud pools with its plop and splat, plop and splat. And later when everything was prepared, her father would mix with his big bare hand in the huge bowl and her mother would add the various ingredients a little at a time: the chocolate mixture, the egg whites and now some fine almond meal, and her father’s left hand on the rim of the bowl gently tipping and rolling while the right hand twisted in a deft blending of the mixture. ‘Like this,’ he would say, and show his hand with the chocolatey fingers slightly apart.‘You don’t want to crush it,’ he would always add as he scooped the mixture from the sides in a graceful arc. He had a mathematician’s precision for a yield.‘There’ll be nine cakes in this batch,’ he would say, and with the mixture aerated to perfection there would be exactly nine tins filled. Laura would watch as he scooped from the edge and dropped the batter in the tins, dollop by dollop, with a little twist, a little squeeze. And the smell of the kitchen, the smell of baking, the smell of her parents, the smell of love. Laura would watch her father for hours on end, the stiff silent man who was all texture, all poetry when at work.

  In the weeks following her father’s death, Laura kept seeing Henry’s hands cupped around the huge beaten copper bowl, her favourite of his implements. She would remember the faraway look in his eyes and how she used to wonder what was hidden behind that clouded gaze. Baking, Laura decided long ago, took her father back to his past. So it was significant that when the American woman turned up he was baking again, a frenzy of baking, baking up memories or baking to forget.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked him one Sunday morning when she found him kneading pastry for at least half a dozen Pflaumenküchen. He kept up the rolling, shook his head and gave no words. She tried again:‘What’s on your mind?’ and again there was no answer, just a glancing up from his work and looking very old.

  She was unlikely ever to find out now, she thought, as she pushed the cat aside and drew the pile of work towards her. She opened the top file and began to read but a few minutes later, with her mind still on her father, she gave up. In some peculiar way, Henry’s silences during his lifetime were exaggerating his absence now. These past weeks, as she had sorted and packed at her parents’ house, she had been aware of a very particular type of absence, bulky and uneasy like when you’re left alone in a doctor’s surgery, or those chilled moments before an examination begins and the paper is turned face down on the desk. It was an absence tinged with fear.

  Nell had offered to help but, despite all they shared, Henry and Etti’s house, their past, the old memories now wrenched from their moorings, and the ever-present questions about Henry were lodged in a part of Laura that not even Nell had reached. The only person who might have understood was more cruelly absent than either Etti or Henry.

  Daniel’s descent into religious observance had been incomplete at the time of Etti’s death. He had mourned his mother according to religious guidelines although not absolutely according to the book. Henry’s death provided him with the opportunity he had missed. Daniel’s mourning was total, he wore it like a shroud and it blocked out his sister. He prayed at the synagogue three times every day. He loved his mourning, he seemed to love it more than he had ever loved his parents. And while daily he would share his grief with a bunch of men at the synagogue who had never met Henry, he would not with his own sister. Daniel had left the family a long time ago, but Laura had never missed him as much as she did now.

  She was left to dwell on her father alone – not just the man she knew and loved, but the man he had withheld as well. She searched and searched her parents’ house for evidence from his early years. She slid her fingers along the edges of ill-fitting drawers, she rummaged in his pockets and poked in the toes of shoes, she opened every container, she checked every envelope, she read the labels on his clothes. She sifted through the life her father had left and found nothing from the time before, except for the threepence, the centrepiece of his coin collection, but she had always known about that.

  Her mother, even after the years of hiding during the war, had salvaged a photograph of her family now worn to a shadow, a tiny embroidered purse which had belonged to her mother, and enough memories to fill a warehouse. But Henry had nothing. ‘I prefer to travel light,’ he would joke. And even though no one ever laughed, it was a joke repeated down the years. Whenever a bag had to be packed, even for a day trip to the country, Henry would say he preferred to travel light.

  And that was how he had quit this world. Sturdy of body despite his age, and empty of hand, and no surprises in the things he had left behind. Indeed, the only surprise at the end was the American at the funeral.

  Laura had been happy to respect her father’s stowing of the past while he was alive, but once he was gone she recognised a burgeoning desire to fill up his silences, which for too long had been her own. A few weeks after his death, she had telephoned her father’s friends, but no one knew anything about the small American woman at Henry’s funeral, few had even noticed her. Laura’s curiosity tightened and a sadness too. Her father’s life had been passed in two distinct channels, and when finally someone had turned up to connect the two, no one seemed to have benefited, least of all Henry himself.

  Laura had been close to her father, closer than was possible with her mother. In his own quiet way he had been more of a hands-on dad than the many seemingly easier fathers of her friends. Indeed, there was little Laura had to forgive Henry in life. Despite the baggage of a survivor’s life, he had supplied her with a happy childhood, leaving Etti to take care of the shadows.

  Henry’s preference had always been for the family.With other people, even friends of thirty years standing, he always seemed to be treading on foreign ground. So strong was his preference for family life, Laura was convinced his own early life had been idyllic. When she was a child it was invariably Henry who planned surprises and outings. In winter there’d be picnics in the Dandenongs, and on summery Sundays the family would go to St Kilda beach where Henry, Laura and Daniel would swim for hours and play endless games of cricket on the sand. Henry was a rare occurrence, an athletic Jew.‘Would warrant a whole chapter to himself,’ Etti joked, referring to that slim bestseller, The Jewish Companion to Sport.

  And there were his odd endearing rituals, like the ritual of the orange which Laura assumed had been transposed from his own childhood. Oranges, Henry used to say, were family food, already divided into those tidy segments so no one would miss out. He would peel with such care with his large gruff hands, the trick, he said, to remove the bitter pith without breaking the delicate film. And then the dividing: one for you, one for you,
one for you, and one for me. And everyone ends up with three or four pieces according to Henry’s nimble fingers and, if necessary, a sleight of hand.

  ‘What happens if there are lots of children,’ Laura once asked.

  An orange was family food, her father said, there had to be a piece for all.

  ‘Did you learn about oranges from your father?’ Laura continued. When Henry ignored the question, she asked again, louder this time. But before he could answer, Etti stepped in as she so often did,‘Don’t bother your father,’ she said.

  When people you love have suffered greatly, you don’t want to add to their sorrows. Even as a young child Laura did what she was told and tried to avoid trouble. She trussed her days with caution, subjecting all her actions and utterances to close scrutiny before releasing them into the world; she tried, in short, to be a good and undemanding child.

  Guilt, gratitude and grief, the three Gs of children of survivors – and love of course, but compared with the three Gs, the love was easy. Laura tiptoed through her childhood, not wanting to compound her parents’ suffering – Etti’s more than Henry’s, for in the hierarchy of suffering her mother was on top.‘We were cheap children,’ Etti used to say.‘We managed without food, we wore rags and were grateful, our shelter was a hole in the ground, our schooling was basic: you passed if you were alive at the end of the year.’This she would say to the daughter who once foolishly said she would die if she didn’t have her own stereo, and the son who at eighteen accused his parents of a shtetl mentality when they told him he didn’t need his own car. Unlike Daniel who had always resented his Holocaust heritage and refused to accommodate for it, Laura made a deliberate decision to keep her needs and desires private if there was any possibility of their upsetting her parents.