The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  It used to be that given all his girlfriends left him sooner or later, he was very careful how attached he became in the first place. Juno had identified this quality early in their relationship. She accused him of living, and loving too, with his gaze pointed in the wrong direction. She said he reminded her of those drivers who spent their time looking in the rear-vision mirror rather than through the front windscreen.

  ‘They wouldn’t see disaster coming in sequins and tiara,’ she said to him.‘And neither would you.’

  ‘Someone has to watch over the past,’ he said in his own defence.

  Although since learning the truth of his grandfather’s death, Raphe has done considerably more than watch. It’s as if he and his grandfather are connected by a tight leash and Raphe not quite sure who is leading whom. With his gandfather no longer the benign protective presence of his younger years, Raphe has wondered what would happen if he were able to untie the old man and let him go. Would Martin run off, dragging Raphe behind? Or released from his bonds, would the Raphe who remained blossom and flourish? There are times when the force of his grandfather is so intense that all Raphe wants is to step out of the old man’s skin into his own reduced but contemporary life. And is ashamed at the thought.

  For whatever resentment Raphe feels, none of it belongs with his innocent grandfather. It is all too clear where the blame lies. Martin Lewin’s life was so brief, cut short by Henry Lewin. Raphe’s own mother was orphaned by Henry Lewin, and Raphe was deprived of the grandfather he always wanted. So much loss and all because of Henry Lewin. It doesn’t matter the man is now dead; the wrong he committed still requires restitution, and it is now up to his descendants to pick up the tab.

  As the volcano hisses and steams in front of him, Raphe imagines two people at the edge of a fuming crater. And then only one. Laura Lewin and Raphe Carter go to a volcano and only Raphe returns. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and no evidence to condemn. He is unnerved by his thoughts, but feels no shame.

  Over and over he has envisioned it, and again now as the warring couple continue to throttle each other at the edge of the volcano. When the man raises his arm, Raphe finds himself dashing forward to save the wife. But the man’s arm comes to rest across his wife’s shoulders, then he is kissing her and the two of them, all quiet and loving, start back to the boat together. An hour of yelling and screaming in front of one of the natural wonders of the world and now it’s all peace and harmony.

  Raphe follows at a distance. His anger has subsided too; he’s beginning to understand what must be done. He moves across the ashen landscape, treading carefully around the steaming cracks. The air quivers, the gases lighten, he breathes more deeply. He has a week before he has to return to work. Juno won’t miss him if he stays away a few days longer. In fact, she’s all spark and wire at the moment, firing off at him at the slightest provocation. And while she’s quick to blame him and his fixations, a book which is dragging its feet as is hers at the moment, does nothing for the mood.

  He stops near a craggy slope encrusted with sulphur deposits and picks up a bright lemony lump dusted in a layer of dove-grey ash. He wraps it carefully in a tissue and puts it in the pocket of his jacket. It’s toxic and he registers an odd sort of comfort. As he walks onwards to the rickety jetty, the crushing responsibility he feels for his grandfather becomes more and more manageable.

  On the way back to the mainland he keeps to himself, sitting at the back of the boat where he can watch the volcano shrinking on the horizon. He feels calm, he feels inspired, he feels his grandfather’s plaint as a clear and gentle urging, like the press of a lover’s hand between his shoulders. As the volcano grows smaller and smaller, Raphe vows to make amends.

  As soon as he arrives back at the hotel, he telephones Juno to let her know he will be staying away an extra week. Then he calls Qantas and arranges a return flight to Melbourne. At last he is ready to meet Laura Lewin.

  A Seinfeld Lookalike with a Side in Volcanoes

  At the Human Rights and Social Justice Commission no one entered the building without a serious encounter with security. But Raphe Carter did. He skirted around the posse of neo-Nazis protesting outside, slipped into the building, sweet-talked the man on the information desk, took the lift to the inner sanctum of offices, and within two minutes of entering the building was standing in the open doorway of Laura Lewin’s office.

  It was just after nine. Laura had been at the office since seven trying to finish a report before the day began in earnest. She was in that glazed space of prolonged gazing at her computer when she glanced up and saw a strange man standing in her doorway. He was smiling and uttering her name. She stared at him as if through clouds, then a fraction of a second later her years of training kicked in and she hit the emergency switch.

  In the time it took for security to respond, the man with dazzling American fluency explained his business with her. He was in Melbourne for only four days, he said, and needed to speak with a Jew. He had seen her name mentioned in the newspaper that morning, so she seemed an obvious place to start.

  ‘What about the telephone directory, under Jewish,’ she said.

  He was reading the newspaper not the telephone directory, he said. And besides, not any Jew would do. He needed a Jew with clout.

  ‘A synagogue then. And an authoritative rabbi,’ Laura said, intrigued in spite of herself.

  The man shook his head, he wanted results not religion, and would have continued but for the arrival of two security officers. The male officer frisked him, while the female officer checked his passport and other documents. Then each grabbed an arm and were about to escort him from the room and the building when Laura asked them to wait. Not that she needed any more work, but she admired chutzpah, something Raphe Carter from San Francisco, California, had in abundance.And she was curious to know what a well-dressed, thirty-something maybe forty, sweet-looking, sweet-talking man wanted from her – or not specifically her, but a ‘Jew with clout’.

  The security officers consulted each other then nodded to Laura to go ahead. They positioned themselves against the wall, one either side of the door, and waited.

  Raphe Carter was a man who needed no encouragement, his words slipped out like silk. He told Laura he was an academic, mentioned a couple of book titles she’d never heard of, then without a trace of a smile said,‘The Holocaust is my gig.And I do a side in volcanoes.’

  Laura caught the expression on the female officer’s face, an unambiguous are-you-sure-you-don’t-want-me-to-get-rid-of-this-geek grimace. But Laura didn’t, or at least not yet. Raphe Carter from San Francisco, California, was providing an entertaining break in what had been a horror week. Here was a man who could have walked off the set of an American sitcom, not simply the lines so earnestly delivered, but the compact body, the clothes worn with ease, the make-up smooth skin, the dark, almost pretty face.

  ‘I’m Jewish,’ he said.

  Seinfeld, Laura was thinking, Raphe Carter could be Seinfeld’s brother. As for Jewish, everyone on Seinfeld is Jewish.

  ‘Well actually part-Jewish,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing special about that around here,’ she said. ‘Our gig is minorities.’

  Although no one within these ideologically pure walls would put it quite like that. The Human Rights and Social Justice Commission had been established in the 1980s to deal with a range of ethnicity-based human rights issues. Throughout the nineties its brief had grown to meet an ever-expanding repertoire of bigotry and intolerance. Now in the new century the extent of the commission’s purview was reflected in its scrupulously nondiscriminatory board of commissioners. There was one of everything: one Greek, one Italian, one Vietnamese, one Chinese, one indigenous Australian, one Malaysian Muslim, one Jew, one Lebanese Christian and, at the present time, two vacancies and a stampede of lobbying in high places.

  Not that any of this concerned Raphe because his business had nothing to do with the commission. His mother’s family was Jewish, he explained, but
had been severed from their roots in the move from Europe. He gave a you-know-what-I-mean shrug to encompass the entire Holocaust and its devastations. ‘My immediate family’s gone now. So as I was out this way I thought I might try Australia.’ Then, to ensure Laura had not missed his point,‘To see if anyone’s left.’

  With the American woman of a few years ago and her own investigations since, this was not a point Laura could easily miss. Although for what he was wanting she couldn’t help.‘Wrong sort of Jew,’ she said.‘Wrong sort of clout.’

  Again he mentioned she was the only identifiable Jew in the morning paper, again he mentioned he was short of time. Laura consulted her watch, so was she.‘Some traces take years and you’ve got –?’

  ‘Four days.’

  The sweet-faced renegade from Seinfeld had fast become a nuisance. As Laura rummaged in her desk for the phone number of the Jewish Historical Society, she wondered what sins she had committed this past week for her Friday morning to be saddled with such a schmuck. At the same time she realised how much she must need a break that she gave him the benefit of the doubt in the first place. She found the number and wrote it down, then couldn’t resist, ‘For a four-day search,’ she said with an exquisite lack of facial expression,‘you’d have done better to arrive earlier in the week.’

  Raphe Carter looked confused.

  ‘Friday,’ Laura explained.‘It’s Shabbat. The Jewish organisations all close early and tomorrow they’re shut.’

  She watched as the frown was replaced by an utterly symmetrical smile.

  He was, he said, a seasoned researcher. ‘If there’s anything to discover, I’ll know by the end of the day.’

  She too smiled, very dry and very wry, as if that might highlight the irony he clearly was missing. ‘Maybe so, but a week would have clinched it.’

  She watched as he slipped the information into his wallet, a satisfied expression on his face, and knew he was in for a rude awakening. The searches took years, even a lifetime, particularly if the searcher chose to interpret every failed attempt as a flaw in the search rather than there being nothing to discover. Laura had observed this among a number of her friends, on and on they went, lurching between eager anticipation and dazed disappointment as they hunted down their lost past. And just when they thought they’d exhausted all possible leads, along came the Internet with website after website bristling with promise, and conveniently linked to online loss and grief counselling when hopes took a whipping.

  In the period following her father’s death when she’d been desperate to uncover the truth about him, Laura had been caught in the on-line search maze. Almost every night while Nell slept, she would cruise the survivor sites, perusing names, dallying in chat rooms, following leads, searching always searching. While she was at the computer, while she was scanning lists, while she was searching for her father’s lost past, the immediate reality of Henry’s death with all its accompanying pain was somehow pushed aside. On and on she would go, often ending up at sites with only the faintest connection with the known facts about Henry. But it didn’t matter. She had hope and it pulled her onwards, away from her mourning, away from the gaping hole of the present, towards the answers her father had so strenuously concealed.

  It was some months before she realised how very seductive hope can be and how great its stamina to withstand disappointment. So much time wasted: for she discovered nothing. In the end she forced herself to give up her on-line excursions, to turn away from the alluring echo of her father’s silence. But it was hard, very hard, both the knowing and the not knowing, the searching and the not searching. And here was this cocky American bitzer wanting to uncover his European roots in Australia this weekend. He was, Laura decided, either very naïve, very arrogant, or very crazy.

  And fortunately he was leaving. He thanked her and shook her hand. But at the door, dwarfed by the two burly officers, he twisted around,‘I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t be as difficult as you think. Lewin, for example, your name. My mother was born a Lewin. I could start with you.’

  And with that he was gone.

  Months later, after her own life had collapsed, Laura would recall those words: I could start with you, and wonder whether that was exactly what he had done. He was neither so arrogant nor so naïve that his Jew-with-clout-in-the-newspaper story should be believed.Although on the day of their first meeting it was not that she believed him, she simply did not have time to doubt.

  It was in the heat of yet another multiculturalism backlash, spearheaded this time not by ratbags from the far right but the country’s own elected political leaders. Every month saw another boatload of desperate asylum seekers risking their lives to travel to Australia because their lives were under far greater threat in their own countries. And instead of welcoming these people, instead of recognising the shocking brutality they’d suffered under some of the most repressive regimes on earth, many of the nation’s leaders were accusing them of queue-jumping and turning them away. But what queue was this when the oppressors in their own countries had no queues? What astonishing twists of reason had supposedly humane citizens talking of queues when people were being maimed and slaughtered at random?

  Laura was witnessing slurs and slogans which could have graced the pages of Der Stürmer, and violence too, this spilling onto any Australian who looked and sounded different from those of a white European background. ‘Australia for Australians’ was the catch-cry. But what sort of Australia was this? And how limited the definition of Australian. Some of the flag-wavers were extremists such as the neo-Nazis outside the commission at the time of Raphe Carter’s visit, but most were just ordinary citizens who had been doing it tough.

  People had been quietly seething throughout the nineties as their jobs disappeared and social services were cut. They stood by powerless as their local hospital was shut down, together with kindergartens, schools and neighbourhood banks. As their standard of living plummeted, it was with bitterness they heard how the nation had never been so prosperous, that the budget was in surplus for the first time in years, and a financial institution far away in the United States had rewarded Australia with a triple A credit rating. Immigration levels and multiculturalism were easy targets in such a climate and, with an election in the offing, were being used as political cards by the nation’s leaders.‘Australians will decide who lives in Australia,’ the prime minister had said recently as yet another boat of desperate people was turned away from Australian shores. And riding the waves of his thinly disguised racism, a level of violence to keep plenty of people locked in their homes.

  Raphe Carter was quickly forgotten as Laura dealt with the latest attacks. The Jewish targets had been fewer than the Asian and Muslim ones, but sufficient to place her usual work on hold. Anti-Semitic obscenities had been daubed on the walls of the Yeshiva as well as on a number of houses in the main Jewish area of the city. One of these was occupied by a terrified Indian family from Fiji who had not expected to experience in Australia the same racial hatred which had forced them from their own country. Midmorning Laura met with her colleagues and together they devised a plan to meet the most pressing of the current problems. The rest of the day Laura spent lobbying parliamentarians and bureaucrats for a special one-off grant to pay for increased security. With the impending election and many politicians not wanting to be strongly identified with either side of the refugee issue, it was a day spent talking in euphemisms. But home-grown violence on the front pages was not conducive to a conservative government running for re-election on a platform of security and stability, so by the end of the day Laura had the funds she needed.

  It was after seven when she rang home to say she was running late. The answering machine was on and Nell clearly running later. With Nell not at home pouring the drinks and preparing the dinner, Laura decided to walk herself out of the hectic day into a calmer evening. Her brain was a tangle of hot acid circuits and she fairly bolted out of the building into the Friday-night bustle. The traffic
was heavy, the air cluttered, and the footpaths thick with impatient shoppers and weary workers. With a graceful swerving to avoid other pedestrians, Laura swept past shops and bars and cafés with bright lights and blaring music, heading towards the park. From there it was just a short tram ride home.

  Laura Lewin had changed little in the five years since her father’s death.With her tall elegance, the full proportioned body, the black tailored suit setting off the pale hair and pale skin, she was still a woman not easily overlooked. She, on the other hand, took an increasingly pragmatic approach to her appearance, a no-frills person except for the hair which she categorised as a non optional extra.

  It was this blonde Polish fuzz, as light and wild as one of Turner’s skies, that had saved her mother in the war.‘You and me,’ Etti would say to Laura,‘we look like Poles not Jews.’

  That life could depend on the colour and texture of hair was an obscenity, Laura had said.

  ‘I can tell you worse obscenities but you wouldn’t want to hear.’ And then without any encouragement Etti would go ahead and relate the obscenities in all their gory details.

  It was now more than ten years since her mother’s death, but Etti’s voice was as clear as it had always been, the familiar utterances framing old memories and keeping them vivid. How different it was with her father, more recently dead, but fading, less as a result of his own reticence during life than the shadows which had crept over him since his death.