The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Enough, he told himself, he had to move on. He had his hair cut and bought some new clothes, he put in a proposal for a new course and made notes for a new journal article. Then Juno’s German professor accepted a position in Brussels, and without language or job prospects Juno announced she was going with him. It all happened so quickly: one week Raphe was avoiding her in the corridors, the next she was gone.

  The semester rolled on. A couple of students started to show promise, his new course looked as if it would be accredited, his article was shaping up nicely, he was going out regularly with friends, he’d even had a couple of dates. Life was looking up. But no matter how hard he tried he could not silence the voice of his grandfather, could not placate those old demands for justice. In the end Raphe decided that unless he was prepared to live like his mother, forever turned away from the wrongs, he needed to settle his dues.

  With the semester’s end in sight he started to make plans. He arranged some study leave, closed up his apartment, and almost three months to the day, Raphe Carter found himself again flying across the Pacific to Australia to meet Laura Lewin.

  Feuds and Fallout

  It had been the warmest winter in living memory and a great disappointment to Laura who preferred Melbourne’s winters to be wracked with winds off the Antarctic. Afterwards she would say the peculiarly warm weather was an omen, for those three months were shot through with disappointments, and of them all, the weather was the least malignant.

  Raphe Carter was quickly forgotten as bigotry continued its ride through the backblocks of the nation. Laura’s workload reached mammoth proportions. Passions were high, demonstrations flared, righteous supporters clashed with righteous objectors. The everyone-has-a-right-to-an-opinion-in-a-democracy justification for inaction was uttered with prim authority by the prime minister, who had seen the polls and wasn’t about to alienate further all those voters who under his administration had lost so many of their community services. Every time he appeared on the evening news Laura would rail against him. In the past there had been political leaders she had not liked, but the present prime minister, a remarkably unprepossessing man who did not know how he would act on an issue until he had seen the polls, revealed an ethical emptiness that was truly frightening.

  ‘He couldn’t possibly believe this “everyone has a right to an opinion” crap,’ Laura said to Nell during a walk along the Merri Creek trail on a rare evening both were home early. She paused a moment to watch a pair of red-rump parrots, but not even her favourite bird could calm her. ‘This man is pure politician. Blood, bone, muscle and gore. He’d do anything to stay in power.’

  Apart from a handful of courageous community leaders and a few liberal voices in the now almost universally conservative press, racism was being given a dream run.

  ‘Why can’t people see what’s happening?’ Laura continued as she and Nell turned around and headed for home.‘We’re turning into a nation of inhumane, jingoistic, selfish, mindless cretins, while desperate people die a short boat ride from our shores and our prime minister fashions himself to appeal to the lowest common denominator. What needs to happen before this man will act?’

  Laura had been asking similar questions of colleagues, friends, shopkeepers, even strangers on the tram. She could talk about little else. It was incredible to her that anyone, even reactionary leaders like the present PM, would allow the current situation much less promote it,‘And in the name of bloody democracy too.’

  She continued her diatribe back home while she prepared dinner. ‘There’s a case for political assassination, although you wouldn’t want to risk making a martyr of the man.’ She went on to suggest a chronic but not life-threatening disease instead. ‘One of those bowel conditions which cause uncontrollable wind would do quite nicely.’

  Laura was standing at the stove with a knife in one hand and a leek in the other, her indignation turned up to extreme. Hers was a passion sparking with incredulity, the sort which renders the speaker, if not blind, then largely insensitive to anything else, so the outburst which followed took her by surprise. Only later, as she travelled through the last months of her relationship with Nell, would Laura find several subtle signs.

  ‘Can’t you talk about anything else?’ Each of Nell’s words was a bullet.‘I’m fed up with the refugee situation, I’m fed up with the bloody prime minister. And,’ this said more slowly,‘I’m fed up with your raging.’

  Her voice was low and threatening and hardly recognisable as Nell’s. Laura was immediately silenced. She turned from her cooking and for an embarrassingly brief moment their eyes met.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ Nell continued. And as Laura went to speak,‘No, don’t offer to join me. I suggest you stay here and think of some new topics of conversation.’

  Before she left, however, there were a few other issues she wanted to get off her chest, and through them all her voice remained quiet and controlled and frighteningly fluent; clearly her sights had been loaded and on target for quite some time. As for Laura’s sights, they’d been directed elsewhere and not monitoring her own behaviour as one who experienced personal criticism as a catastrophe always should.

  She had no desire to defend herself, not with the fear rising faster than the PM’s approval rating. She’d hurt Nell, that much was clear, annoyed her too, and was prepared to accept the blame. In fact, she would agree to anything as long as Nell stopped attacking her. She interrupted Nell’s tirade: she was sorry, terribly sorry, she said.

  But Nell didn’t want her apologies.‘Apologies roll so easily off your tongue, Laura. You’d apologise for murder and mayhem if you thought it’d stop someone yelling at you.’

  Nell opened the door, then paused for a parting shot.‘No one’s as affronted as you are over this refugee business, Laura. And do you know why? It’s the whole Jewish thing. But as bad as he is, the prime minister is not Hitler, and today’s Australia is not thirties Germany, and the sooner you get that into your bloody child-of-survivors head the better.’And the knock-out blow just before the door slammed: ‘If you’re not careful, Laura Lewin, you’ll end up raging alone.’

  Laura stood at the stove stunned. The threat of those last words. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t step back into a life which had turned so hostile. Minutes passed before the crackle and smoke of burning oil broke through. And then came the tears: over Nell and her attack, over the gutless prime minister, over the fact that no one had learned a bloody thing during the past brutal century. But most of all she cried over Nell. She cried as she finished slicing the leeks, she cried as she wiped the mushrooms, she cried as she cooked the linguini. By the time she was adding black olives and salted capers and tossing the lot in a pasta dish she and Nell had bought in Florence, her tears were finished and a decision made.

  For a month or so things settled. Laura monitored her outbursts and kept her criticisms of the prime minister away from home. Not that Nell was often there. The old days of a leisurely drink together after work, sitting on the deck with the lorikeets squawking overhead, were a distant memory. So, too, the pleasurable evenings which used to follow, with Laura whipping up a meal from the jangle of food in the fridge and cupboards, the two of them lingering over dinner to talk, and then to the couch together and a spot of TV.

  Laura would do anything to have that life back again.

  ‘If I didn’t know you better,’ Laura said one Friday evening as they were driving to her brother and sister-in-law’s for Shabbat dinner,‘I might suspect you were having an affair.’

  They both laughed, but there was no hilarity, and Nell drifted off almost immediately into her own thoughts.

  Was an affair so improbable? Laura wondered, then quickly brushed the thought aside. While there was little certainty in this life, Laura was sure about Nell. And while neither was so naïve to think they wouldn’t have their ups and downs, the relationship was rock-solid. And rock-solid meant no affairs.

  ‘I’m so bored.’ Nell’s voice burst out loud
and accusing.‘I’m so bloody bored.’

  It was a bull’s-eye hit. Laura slammed on the brakes in the middle of impatient end-of-week traffic and brought the car to a standstill – a brief breathless moment sidelined from the rest of her life, before she regained her senses, shuffled behind the wheel as if that would dislodge the knife, and moved back into the traffic. Immediately she riffled her mind for possible explanations, had to understand, had to stop the panic. And of all the possibilities, she decided the most likely culprit was work.

  Nell had made several comments recently about how she wished she had never left film production, that if she hadn’t she would now be one of the foremost filmmakers in the country. And while this had been a regular lament in the past, with the cutbacks at universities it had gained momentum in recent times. She had started picking at some old unfinished scripts, had actually spent a couple of days revising one of them, but while she always had good ideas and good twists on ideas, follow-through had never been Nell’s strong point. The whole filmmaking issue always tended towards a slow frustrating collapse and, as far as Laura was aware, it was proceeding no differently this time.

  Perhaps work was not the problem, perhaps given they were on their way to Melissa and Daniel’s place, Daniel’s new prohibition against non-Jews was to blame.

  ‘I don’t have non-Jews in my house,’ he had said recently.‘And I’m no longer prepared to make an exception of Nell.’ He held nothing against her personally, he said, in fact he had always liked her, but it was inappropriate for her to enter his home.

  ‘Our home,’ Melissa had corrected. And proceeded to remind him of all the changes she had made because of his Judaism, which was not, she stressed, her Judaism.‘In my home I’ll have the friends and family I want. I’ll have llamas if it suits me.’

  Melissa had reported the conversation to Nell and Laura earlier in the week, and Nell had been furious. Daniel could stuff his religion up his kosher arse for all she cared, she wouldn’t want to enter his home now even if he were to beg. ‘My home,’ Melissa reminded her, and added that as far as she was concerned, her increasingly absentee husband had no rights in this matter. The three women had ended up laughing together over women power, chicken soup performance-enhancers and potential uprisings in the mikvah, and this had been the flavour of the two or three comments Nell had made to Laura since. So perhaps Daniel’s appalling attitude was no more likely to explain her outburst than her dissatisfaction with work. Laura wracked her brains for a few moments longer, then decided to forgo the guesswork. As loathe as she was to have this conversation, she realised she had no choice.

  ‘What do you mean “you’re bored”?’

  ‘I don’t know how to be any clearer,’ Nell said, making no attempt to disguise her irritation. ‘I’m bored, Laura, I am, quite simply, bored. Look at our life, look at our friends. Every day, every week, every bloody year, the same people, the same places, the same conversations.’ Nell spoke with a fluency which suggested her thoughts had benefited from considerable rehearsal.‘I look at us and rather than the lively, cutting-edge, we’re-going-to-change-the-world sort of people we always planned to be, or rather I planned to be, I see two women slouching towards middle age, drab and dismal and dragging their best years behind them.’

  Clearly she and Nell had very different perspectives, indeed Nell would be hard-pressed to find any support for her view. As for the whole middle-age caper, Laura had made a conscious decision before she turned forty to jettison middle age forever. Middle age was a figure in a sensible skirt with twinset and pearls, a figure which had passed away along with earlier generations, a figure which had nothing in common with Laura.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ she now said. And as she turned into her brother’s street,‘Can we postpone this talk until after dinner?’

  ‘Of course,’ Nell replied.‘Who am I to upset the Jewish family?’

  If the feeling in the car had been bad, worse was lodged within the timber and glass interior of Daniel and Melissa’s home. The atmosphere was crisp and careful, with Daniel and Melissa skirting round each other like athletes before a race. Their twenty-three-year-old son Nicholas was the immediate source of tension. During his schooldays Nick, like his father before him, had been drawn to a greater observance of Judaism – although more of a hobby than his father’s energetic calling. But in the past few years the hobby had become an all-embracing commitment. Not only had Nick overtaken his father, he had decided to study for the rabbinate; worse still, he’d chosen a college in America. Daniel was elated, but Melissa together with Sophie, a cool, slender twenty year old studying at the Film and Television School, were not impressed. ‘Daniel’s defection was one thing, and took some adjusting,’ Melissa said to Laura and Nell as she prepared the dinner. ‘But it’s far worse when it happens to your son. God knows we have little in common now, but when he’s finished with this rabbinical nonsense we’ll have nothing.And he’ll find himself one of those wives with a wig and the clothes sense of a nun, who’ll have baby after baby and she and I will have as much to talk about as I now have with Daniel’s meshuggeneh pals.’ Melissa took a hefty swig of non-kosher vodka and tonic.‘My son tells me nothing. Nothing. If I ask, he says there’s no point talking to me because either I won’t understand or I’ll ridicule. And when I mention I’ve stayed with his father all these years and have provided a home in which both of them have lived as observant Jews, he looks at me as if he despises me.’

  She was sobbing now and, when the tears would not stop, excused herself. A few minutes later she returned to the kitchen red-nosed and dry-eyed, refreshed her drink and applied herself to some California rolls and some bite-sized fishy things – ‘For we girls,’ she said indicating the platter. ‘To have with drinks. Our drinks. My husband and son won’t go near this stuff.’ She added a clump of chives, a couple of curls of lemon peel, a small dollop of something dippable and stood back to appraise. The platter was, as with all Melissa’s platters, a work of art. She slid it along the bench, then pulled a couple of bowls from a cupboard, slammed them on the bench, filled one with olives, including two olives which had fallen to the floor – ‘A dollop of non-kosher botulism would be good for them’ – and the other with sliced dill cucumbers reeking of garlic. If the expression on her face could have translated to action, she would have spat in each bowl.

  Melissa was clearly out of patience.

  ‘You know Daniel’s planning an extended trip to Israel?’

  Laura did know because Melissa had mentioned it several times.

  ‘And now that Nick’s going to America, Daniel will probably spend some time there too. I may as well not have a husband.’ She looked from Laura to Nell.‘I envy you, I really do.’

  As she finished arranging the hors d’oeuvres she talked about what it was like to have a husband who put so many things ahead of her, who would prefer to spend his leisure with a crop of men smelling of chicken fat, men who not only didn’t know her but wouldn’t want to know her.

  ‘Daniel and I used to have so much fun. Films, picnics, jazz concerts.We used to mesh so well together, but now –’ Suddenly she stopped, her gaze directed to the door. Daniel had entered the kitchen.

  ‘And we could have a life together again,’ he said.‘Even better than before.’

  He spoke softly, but each word was clear and resonant, eerily so. And then he turned away. He left the kitchen, he left the house and walked down the path to a sheltered alcove at the end of the garden. To be alone, to collect himself, to try and find his balance in a life which was crumbling. It had come to this, he was thinking, the wife who had once been his saviour was now ridiculing him and demeaning his choices, and making no attempt whatsoever to bridge the gap between them.

  ‘Share this with me,’ he had begged when he first became interested in Judaism. ‘Come to shule. Join one of the women’s study groups.’

  But she had never been interested, not then nor now. She knew she was Jewish, she said, she didn’t
need to eat it and wear it, and she certainly didn’t need to make a lifetime’s study of it.

  He brushed some leaves off a garden bench and sat in the shadows watching the house. In the early years he had persisted, hoping she would change her mind. And then one day it dawned on him he liked having his religion to himself. Indeed, if she were to change her mind now, and the arrival of the Messiah was far more likely, Daniel would be at pains to talk her out of it. His religion was his only comfort and she would spoil it for him, not through deliberate malice, he had never believed she wished him harm, but through a certain shallowness. It was an awful observation to make about your own wife, but there was no avoiding it: Melissa seemed without passions, without longings, or at least none he could discern. As for his own yearnings, as obvious as a face without a nose, she had always been blind to them.

  His parents hadn’t noticed them either. Yet from his earliest years he had been aware of an emptiness cutting deep within him, an abrasive hollow which filled so much space and yet demanded itself to be filled. He remembered as a young boy drawing a picture of his family: mother, father and himself – Laura was yet to be born; the parental figures had bodies shaped and clothed, but his own torso was an empty circle.

  It was how he had always been, a person with a hollowness hard within him, and spawning a yearning so amorphous yet so voracious, and little notion how to satisfy it. Yearning not wanting. Wanting knows its target, yearning is far less specific – although he had known since boyhood that lining his emptiness was the Holocaust. It was a reluctant knowing and one he preferred to avoid, yet he was convinced if he could somehow fill the gaping hole inside him he would submerge, quieten, his Holocaust heritage. He saw an analogy with the Eildon Weir, a vast manmade catchment not far from Melbourne which had drowned out an unwanted landscape. What worked so well in geography and metaphor he hoped would work for him.