The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  At first the cows were uneasy, such lumbering shadowy beasts with their frosted breath and flicking tails, but soon they adjusted. In time it was as if her world blended with theirs: same home, same cycles of fitful sleep, same caked-on filth, same smell. How shamed her mother would have been, Etti thought as she tried to remove some of the dirt. And before the thought grew, she would shut it down, because totting up the losses made survival that much harder.

  You live in your head when the obstacles of living in the world become too great. All the time Etti was in the barn, the cold hacked into her like an ice cutter. She would gather the good thoughts and separate them into stories, each story set in America where it was always light and warm with plenty of food and her family together again. The seam between waking and sleeping blurred while she lived in one or other of her storylands for whole days at a time.

  She went to the toilet as seldom and neatly as possible, firstly in the barn, her smells mixing with those of the cows, but as she trained to hold her bowels, sometimes for more than a week, she would, under cover of night, venture out of the barn beneath a tent made of the quilt and find a place among the trees. As she shrugged off the hiss and spit of night noises, she was struck by how much she had changed: once so scared of creatures, now it was only people who frightened.

  She made friends with the cows, one in particular, a smooth caramel beast whose stall was closest to her trapdoor. The cow would watch as Etti climbed out of her hole, the glassy brown eyes glinting as they caught the light. It was the cow who made the first move, a gentle nudge in the back as Etti sat eating at the edge of her hole. The cow must be hungry, Etti decided. She had put aside a small piece of meat to eat in a day or two, closer to when she would next have to move her bowels – she’d learned which foods settled and which ones made a fuss – and now after a brief hesitation she retrieved it; after all, this was the cow’s home and she the trespasser. But the cow showed no interest in the meat, just moved closer to Etti and nuzzled into her side.

  Decades later, Etti would say she owed her life to a good Polish farmer and a lonely cow. After that initial contact, Etti would eat her food, turn fresh hay in the stall and stretch out along the cow’s flank, and there she would sleep for two maybe three hours, sucking in the warm alive smell of her cow, properly sleep, rather than the fitful time-filling she did during the day.

  Months later, when the Russians came into the countryside and Paul deemed it safe for Etti to emerge, it turned out he had hidden a whole family as well as her. Here was a man so good that Etti’s poor wracked brain could not quite assimilate it. The cow, however, was easy to understand. Etti wrenched herself from that cow as her family had been wrenched from her. And never again would she eat meat. It’s not beef, she would say to Laura and Daniel, it’s a cow. It’s not a chop, she would say, it’s a lamb. Chicken, in contrast, presented her with no such problems. No chicken, she told her children, ever saved a girl’s life.

  ‘Just take a look at all this,’ Laura said to Nell.

  It was four months after Henry’s death. Etti and Henry’s home was up for sale and all the contents had been dispersed, with a good proportion ending up at Laura and Nell’s place. Laura was standing at the kitchen bench. Set out in front of her were a bit of blanket, a dozen old letters from Paul the Polish farmer and some more recent ones from one of his daughters. There were nine plastic cows each individually wrapped in tissue paper, a flap of old shoe, a pair of tattered mittens, the faded photo of Etti’s family in Lodz, a purse, a scrap of shawl, two stones, a copy of the tape Etti had made for the Holocaust Museum and a transcript of the tape.

  Nell and Laura took them in.

  ‘They’re remarkably volatile,’ Nell said at last.

  Laura did not answer, could not answer, just wanted the things out of sight. She bundled them up and returned them to their box, wondering when it would all stop. Her mother had been dead five, nearly six years, and still her horrors kept coming. In all Etti’s telling of her past, she had never paraded this collection, or rather not as a collection. Laura had seen a couple of single items, but the cows, the stones, the scraps of clothes were new to her.And while she knew about the tape, she had never wanted to listen to it when her mother was alive, and after Etti died, was terrified of what new horrors it might contain.

  She closed the box and moved it to the end of the bench, then a minute or two later picked it up and took it into her study. To deal with later, she told herself. Of course Daniel would need to know about these things, although she doubted he would be interested. He’d had so little involvement with the clearing of the house, had left it to his wife to lend a hand; neither had he wanted much in the way of Henry and Etti’s possessions.

  So much for the sentimental Jew, thought Laura, again experiencing a longing for the brother she once had. As for Etti’s box of memories, even before he became religious Daniel had been critical of what he termed ‘Holocaust fixations’. He believed that dwelling on a single tragic moment in Jewish history to the exclusion of millennia of Jewish learning and discovery was a greater threat to the future of Judaism than the Holocaust itself. The Holocaust, he said, had taken over Judaism. And even when Laura and Melissa insisted that sorting through Henry and Etti’s possessions was about his parents not the Holocaust, he still refused to be involved.

  As it happened, it had been a comfort doing the job with Melissa. Revealing considerably more foresight than her husband, Melissa had selected a number of Etti’s things to keep for the children and quite a few items for herself. She had not been particularly close to Henry, she used to joke that with her Australian background she was the wrong sort of Jew for him, but she and Etti had enjoyed a special connection.

  ‘There’s a safety zone between a woman and her daughter-in-law,’ Melissa said one day when she and Laura were working together at the house.‘The relationship begins somewhere beyond that often very fraught space which is the sole domain of your own children.’ She paused a moment to wrap one of Etti’s pieces of fake Venetian glass. ‘Your mother had nothing to lose with me. I was never dangerous ground for her so she could let herself go. And for me it was all pleasure: no guilt, no resentment, no debts.’

  Melissa had wanted some of Etti’s crockery, also a selection of her tchutchkas, that vast collection of ornaments and objects which reflected Etti’s sense of the aesthetic but no one else’s. Laura was amazed: Melissa and style were welded together.

  ‘I know your mother had appalling taste,’ Melissa said. ‘But without her appalling taste she wouldn’t have been Etti.’

  Melissa had selected a coral-coloured fake Venetian glass serviette holder – ‘I’ll use it for envelopes’ – a set of fruit knives with mother-of-pearl handles housed within a huge mother-of-pearl shell – ‘It’s a conversation piece’ – a mother-of-pearl butter knife – ‘Etti could have gone into the mother-of-pearl business’ – and a trio of amber-coloured glass pigeons grazing on amber-coloured glass grass which doubled as a hall lamp.

  As for the rest, Laura’s reluctance to get rid of anything which had been important to her mother had left her with several cartons of kitchen goods she and Nell did not need, her mother’s jewellery – most of it clunk and paste – and the remainder of Etti’s tchutchkas.

  ‘We’ll have to move house to accommodate your mother’s hoarding,’ Nell said when Laura brought everything home.

  It was easier with Henry’s things, there being so few. And the personal items, even the everyday ones like his watch and cufflinks somehow less attached to the person he was. His baking implements, however, were in quite a different category and Laura had wanted to keep these, not that she ever baked but they had revealed a side to her father that rarely surfaced in the rest of his life.

  ‘Here are my words,’ he used to say, indicating his cakes.‘Here are my words.’

  ‘Don’t you find it odd,’ Nell now said as she cleared a shelf for Henry’s baking implements,‘that your father should so assiduously
remove every element of his Germanness?’

  Laura shook her head. It was obvious to her that extreme circumstances demanded extreme responses. But with Etti’s cache of Holocaust horrors so fresh, she would prefer a change of topic, so decided not to elaborate.

  ‘To jettison an entire language,’ Nell persisted. And then a moment later:‘I wonder what language he dreamed in.’

  Laura felt herself bristle: she didn’t want to talk about this.And besides, Nell’s comment showed that even after all these years there were things she would never understand.

  ‘So teach me,’ Nell said, responding to the exasperation on Laura’s face.‘I want to understand.’

  Laura sighed. All she wanted was a few hours in the sunny present. And besides, there was nothing more to say; Nell already knew about Henry’s escape into Holland, his incarceration at Westerbork, the move to Belsen in 1944 where only pure luck had saved him from typhus. Peace, she found herself thinking, just give me a few hours peace. But Nell was waiting.

  ‘I can’t answer for his dreams,’ Laura said at last.‘As for the rest, you know all there is to know about him.’

  ‘And a wife?’ Nell said. ‘What about another wife? He was so much older than your mother. Was he married before? Were there any children?’

  Nell, following her own interests in true Nell fashion, seemed totally oblivious to Laura’s mood. And now it was too late. A wife? Another family? How painfully incriminating were the questions Laura never thought to ask. Her father had never suggested another family, so the possibility had never occurred to her. He had been twenty-nine when war broke out, old enough to be married and certainly old enough for children. But how completely can one block out the past, even a person as thorough as her father? Surely not to the extent of another family?

  There was a chorus in her brain pleading against a first family and in its wake an echoing doubt. With her guilt gathering strength, she assured Nell there had been neither wife nor children, not simply because the habit of protecting her parents was so deeply ingrained, but because it seemed such a mark of failure that this most basic of considerations had never figured in her own map of Henry. What else, Laura wondered, had she not asked him? And had he been aware of her omissions? Had he been hurt by them?

  ‘Are you sure?’ Nell said. ‘No wife? No children? Nothing stashed away behind that strong silent facade.’

  Laura laughed although she really wanted to stifle. ‘I’m sure there was plenty, but not another a family.’

  Nell finished stacking the baking implements.‘The last of their brilliant career,’ she said. And, Laura hoped, the last of Nell’s curiosity.

  But it was not to be. Everything was packed away and a free afternoon stretched before them when Nell brought Etti’s special cache of memories back into the kitchen. Laura waved them away.

  ‘You can’t just ignore them,’ Nell said. And when Laura failed to make a move, Nell took out the items and again displayed them on the bench.

  Laura stood back and watched.‘Mother’s memories,’ she said at last,‘and now my pellets of uranium.’

  She forced herself to survey the things. Precious enough to keep close, yet profoundly uncomfortable, they posed a danger to the smooth conduct of her life. She wanted to preserve them, no question of that, but she didn’t want to be stumbling over them all the time. She recalled a cardboard gift box someone had given her, printed in a riot of flowers and sparkle which Etti would have loved. It would be perfect. She rummaged around until she found it, tossed aside the old bills it contained, packed up all Etti’s bits of a saved life, searched for some tape, sealed the box and put it at the back of the cupboard under the stairs to glow like uranium, with a half-life that given the modern memory was not long enough. The whole exercise took less than ten minutes. She felt much more her old self when she returned to the kitchen.

  She walked over to the windows and looked out.‘How about a stroll along Merri Creek while the weather’s still fine.’

  Then she saw the transcript in Nell’s hand.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’

  ‘I took it out of the box.’

  Laura could not believe it. She had herself paused a moment over both the tape and transcript, but the possibility her mother had held something back from the family, perhaps the worst atrocity of all, had settled the issue, and she had quickly added both to the box. Then Nell had taken the transcript out. Laura simply couldn’t believe it.

  Nell was now at her side, an arm around her shoulders. Laura tried to shake her off. But Nell was firm. ‘By all means store the tape,’ she said. ‘You’ll know when it’s time to hear your mother’s voice again. But the transcript is different. All these years since your mother’s death, and how many times have you said that silence never suited her? So here’s a fresh crop of her words, and nicely cushioned by print.’

  Fresh or not, these were not the words Laura was wanting from her mother. She was furious with Nell. She had no right.

  Nell insisted she was only thinking of Laura. ‘You can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist,’ she said.

  She made a pot of coffee, talking gently and persuasively all the while. And continued to talk while they drank it.

  ‘If you’re unable to read it,’ she said at last, ‘let me.’ She leafed through the pages. ‘There’s quite a lot here about your father. Perhaps there’s something about the American woman.’

  Laura didn’t know what to do. Such fear of what might happen, how sentences lead to corners, and around every corner unexpected dangers. Or, it suddenly occurred to her, perhaps unexpected surprises, not-unpleasant surprises. Perhaps even the knowledge there was in fact nothing to fear.

  ‘All right then,’ she said at last.‘And yes, you read it to me.’

  They settled themselves into armchairs, one either side of the room. Laura curled her legs beneath her, and at the first words she closed her eyes. Nell read through the late afternoon. There were intermittent storms of a hard pelting rain followed by an almost blinding sun, and in that brief brightness steam would swirl off the wooden deck. And the clouds would roll in again and more rain. As Nell continued, Laura felt herself pulled back through the years to the desolation of postwar Europe, to hordes of bedraggled people hauling themselves over rough terrain, and among them her mother, no bigger than a child and pathetically alone.

  June 1945 and a burning sun and Etti is still walking. After Paul’s farm, after the hideous return to Lodz, after the first of the assembly points, Etti is moving westwards. As absurd as it may seem, Germany is safer than Poland for a Jew.

  She knows yet cannot believe that everyone she loves is dead. It makes no sense that she, an ordinary girl after all, would be the only one spared. Although that sentiment sparks of God and she’s jettisoned him; cows are more reliable, more useful too.

  As she walks through the dusty heat and insect haze, she is entirely alone. In the mornings the sun blazes hot against her back, in the afternoons it glares whitely in her eyes. Her feet burn no matter what the time of day. Members of the Bricha, the Jewish underground, are hard at work gathering up Jews and escorting them to safety. Or if she’s to believe the rumours, the Bricha, comprised of hardline Zionists, will only pretend to guide you to one of the DP camps and spirit you to Palestine instead. Etti, so vague about what she wants, knows she does not want Palestine. It is, as far as she is concerned, just another Jewish ghetto despite its orchards and olive groves. She doesn’t want the Bricha’s help, she doesn’t want anyone to tell her where to go or what to do, so she makes up an American relative, an aunt in New York, and if the Bricha, or anyone else for that matter, questions her destination, she will say she is heading towards the Americans in Germany and from there she hopes to join her aunt in America.

  Etti wouldn’t know where to find America on a map.

  Death is everywhere, death has been a constant ever since she and her family moved into the ghetto. At first there was a stream of deaths, then with the dise
ase and starvation and the decay of too many people in far too small a space, a torrent. And a distinctive smell, a putrid, throat-stopping, sweet-and-sour smell. And now on the move at the end of the war the death smell is everywhere, a stinking rot that clings like a damp blanket. Her own skin becomes death-wrapped; where she goes, goes death.

  Etti gathers the shell of herself and for the next month, on foot, by lorry, by train, she crosses Poland down into Czechoslovakia and on to Germany. Advice is thick in the air, facts are thin on the ground. Some say go here, others say go there, and Etti decides she’ll go wherever people dispense soup and care and ask no questions. As she approaches the German border she hears that Germany has been occupied not just by the Americans and British but by the Russians and French as well. Each country has set up its own camps. To choose between the four is like being presented with four different types of potato.

  As it happens there is no choice. She and her group are shepherded off a train not far from Munich and taken to a nearby camp. It is July and hot and Etti and her fellow travellers hesitant with heat and exhaustion. The camp is large without trees or grass and rimmed with barbed wire – just like the concentration camps, someone says, but as far as Etti is concerned it’s just another blatantly temporary place for people who are prey to the temporary. The camp is run by Americans, and a proud lot they are. They won the war and they want gratitude. Their memories are not so much short as poorly sourced, for they seem not to know what the Jews have suffered.

  In this camp Jews are not only outnumbered ten to one, they are the dregs. The Americans far prefer the Poles and Balts, so much neater, cleaner and tidier than the Jews, and more obliging and courteous as well. But even more desirable and certainly more helpful are the Germans. Etti is horrified. Germans have been given positions of responsibility in this camp. So despite all that’s happened, Germans are still ordering Jews around. The Americans don’t seem to understand. One day a crust of bread separates you from death, one day herded into showers and killed, one day hounded by Germans and Poles and Ukrainians, and the next day the war is over, there’s food for all, the showers don’t kill and you’re expected to live among your murderers. Etti is not surprised to find Jews pushing themselves forward for food, or reluctant to enter the showers, or failing to obey orders given by their recent persecutors. Even with her limited education and guardedly shut off from the world, Etti has no trouble understanding the situation. But not so her keepers.