Maria Katsonis & Lee Kofman (ed)

by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)

  PRESSING THE SEAMS

  LEAH KAMINSKY

  ‘A woman who makes her own coat is able to choose a style that will express her own individuality…’ Tailoring for Women by Gertrude Mason, 1935

  Step 1: ‘The Importance of a Well-Cut Pattern’

  In 1975, I flatly refuse to wear anything my father sews for me. He is a professional tailor, but I shop only at Sportsgirl to spite him. With a spoilt teenager like me for a daughter and a wife who survived the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, my father stitches together far more than suits and frocks. He holds together the fabric of our family with his love.

  ‘Ve sacrifice evrytink for our children,’ he says, with a heavy Polish accent I laugh at.

  It isn’t until I’m much older that I find out my father was an apprentice tailor with the distinguished Getter Brothers on Haufgass back in 1937, in his tiny hometown of Zhetl. On May Day, the International Workers’ Day, he was caught setting messenger pigeons free, red ribbons tied to their legs – a teenage gesture to prove his love for a beautiful girl who belonged to the Communist party. For that, he sat in Vilna’s Lukiskes gaol for six months, urine poured into his nostrils. One day my grandfather shared a bottle of vodka with the guard and put my father on board the SS Moreton Bay, just before the storm of war began in Europe.

  In 1938, my father stepped off the boat onto Melbourne’s Station Pier. At first, he worked as a tailor for his uncle Yankel and lived in Rathdowne Street, Carlton. Later he was employed by Winik and Weiss in Little Bourke Street. He was a good tailor, sewing everything by hand. After a year he rented a flat on the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets with Sam Krycer, Harry Steinitz and Sam Helfgot, and together they made up samples of ladies’ coats for a little extra pocket money.

  In 1945, while Europe still blazed, destroying his youth, his love, his hope, my father sat sewing ladies’ suits at 126 Flinders Lane, in the heart of Melbourne’s shmatte district, looking down from the window at men loading mannequins onto trucks. He basted coat sleeves and pad-stitched lapels. ‘Is it overlocked?’ my father always asked, running his thumb over the jagged hem. It would take several years for him to find the remnants of his family who hid in makeshift dugouts in the depths of the Lypszynska forest throughout the war. He eventually saved up enough to bring them all out to Australia.

  But now it is 1975 and I am cheating in sewing class. My father has cut the pattern for my lime green skirt – put in the zip and carefully hemmed the edge. The teacher gives me A+. The truth is I do not even know how to thread a needle and I have absolutely no intention of learning. I want to wear the latest fashions bought from department stores and trendy shops. I am a modern girl. I don’t want my father’s life and the frayed remnants of an old world threaded into mine.

  Step 2: ‘Basting the Coat for the First Fitting’

  My first holiday job, at 15, was folding monogrammed handkerchiefs into boxed Christmas gift sets at Buckley and Nunn’s department store. I saved all the money I earned to buy a record player that summer, starting my collection of vinyls with the Beatles. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was by far one of my favourites. And I knew all the trippy word dervishes of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, which my best friend told me I shouldn’t be listening to because the title was an abbreviation for LSD. The track I loved most though was She’s Leaving Home. I played it over and over, barricading myself inside my bedroom by creating a fortress with the cupboard door. My room became a bunker, out of earshot from the quiet weeping of my mother who would sit chain-smoking Craven A’s in the kitchen, and from the mournful Yiddish serenades of my father as he clipped hedges outside my window while revisiting the blurry joy of his childhood in a shtetl. Every night, he would come into my hideout holding a plate of apple cake and peeled orange segments, which I barely touched, preferring to nibble on the stash of Smarties and Chocolate Freckles I kept hidden in my desk drawer.

  One evening, later that summer, my father barged into my room without knocking and proudly announced that he was taking me on a month-long holiday to Israel: ‘We are going to the Land of Milk and Honey, so you can learn about your heritage.’ A zealous smile was plastered across his round face. He was eager to introduce me to his friends from Zhetl. The few who survived went to Israel after the war and he hadn’t seen most of them since he was a teenager. My mother didn’t want to join us, preferring to stay at home and stare into her ashtray.

  I had never been overseas, but a huge chunk of my childhood was spent dreaming of visiting all the exotic places in my stamp collection – floating in the pretty lagoons of Cocos and Keeling Islands, climbing icy peaks in Greenland. Yet I wasn’t in the least bit excited about the prospects of travelling to the Holy Land that summer – I wanted to spend it with my friends (my popularity was on the rise then, having recently joined the Beatles Club at school). Besides, going away would totally ruin my decision to finally act on a three-month-long crush I had on Mark Rabinovitz; I dreamed about him being the first boy I’d kiss and planned my attack for New Year’s Eve. I’d spent ages carefully preparing for the occasion: perfecting the technique of wrapping my hair to straighten my frizzy curls so I’d look like Marcia from the Brady Bunch; saving up extra pocket money to buy a blue and silver check Miller shirt and some brown treads (popular shoes with soles made out of Dunlop tyres), so I’d be considered ‘spunky’, the ‘70s equivalent of hot; and practicing ‘pashing on’ with my pillow. The attraction of a pimply-faced adolescent boy who read Herman Hesse and quoted John Lennon was far higher up the ladder of my desirable bucket list than an organised tour around a dust bowl over the other side of the planet with a bunch of decrepit old Jews.

  My father won against my feeble protests and I bid farewell to my friends, looking down sorrowfully on Melbourne fading away from view as the plane took off. After what seemed like endless hours of travelling, my excitement over opening tiny packets of salt and sugar and downing endless cans of free Coca Cola began to wear thin. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the WC to escape my father’s embarrassingly loud snores. How on earth was I going to survive a month of sharing a room with him? And it certainly wasn’t great for a girl’s image to be seen walking around with a short, bald man with a limp, who always wore a suit and tie no matter where he went.

  Twenty-four gruelling hours later I found myself on a Mercedes bus that had been bought with German guilt-money. Over the next four weeks, deserts merged into spindly forests as our tour guide, Shlomo, dragged our group across the country, hauling us out from the air-conditioned comfort of our bus to stand in front of memorials for the dead dotted everywhere. After the obligatory lowering of heads for one minute’s silence, I’d retreat to my seat at the back of the bus, as far away from my father as I could get.

  I was still furious at him for dragging me away from my friends. Sulking, I stared out the window at my reflection super-imposed on rocky hills pock-marked with stunted trees, or the yellow sands of the Arava desert. I daydreamed of home, wondering if, in my absence, Rachel Mayer had muscled in on my territory and pashed with Mark Rabinovitz. Meanwhile, back on the bus, Mr Waldman’s toupee kept falling off into my lap from the seat in front of me every time he yelled at the observant Dr Honigman who demanded the bus stop each day at dusk, no matter where we were, so he could pull out his ritual shawl and phylacteries and rock to and fro in evening prayer. I was stuck with these fellow travellers – an odd collection of the proud, the crass and the wounded.

  One afternoon, our bus crawled into a shabby gas station in the middle of the Negev desert on our way to an overnight stay on a kibbutz in the south, where we were promised ‘a meeting with real Israelis, as well as experience in milking cows’. I wasn’t excited about either prospect. On my way to the bathroom around the back, I saw fields of date palms stretching across the horizon and imagined myself running away in slow motion, hand in hand with Mark Rabinovitz. There was only one toilet and it reeked of stale urine and cigarettes. The door rested ajar and,
as I pushed it open, I found our bus driver, his smile as greasy as his hair, standing there, his fly wide open. Suddenly, he grabbed me and pulled me in, rubbing against me as he made weird grunting sounds. He asked me in broken English if I wanted to play with his handbrake. My cheeks burned and I felt a rush of nausea as I shrugged him off and ran back to the safety of the bus. For the first time since arriving in Israel, I sat down next to my father, my heart beating like the wings of a fledgling fallen out of its nest.

  For the rest of the trip I sat beside my father on the bus, feeling safer there. As time passed on our long drives, my eyes began reading the contours of the land, searching for some kind of connection to my ancestry, culture and faith, maybe as a way to cross the bridge into my father’s world. In the seat next to me, he would nod off to sleep, his wrinkled forearms bearing the scars of war. Looking at him, it felt as if exile was embedded in his epidermis like the ridges of limestone and clay outside my window, hiding layers of stories I’d never really wanted to hear.

  While we were in Israel, each Shabbat my father would shave carefully, slick down his hair, don a suit and tie and drag me along to meet the Zhetlers, those fabled friends I had always heard of who survived the war. They would crowd together inside Fayvel Kalbstein’s tiny apartment around a table that groaned under cheesecake, babke, blintzes, pickled herring, cottage cheese, slices of rye, gefilte fish, all draped with the heavy memory of the dead. There the Zhetler men poured shots of whisky, clinking their glasses together in unison as they shouted ‘L’chaim!’ To life! They spoke in hushed tones – of Moteleh Iglak the dwarf who warned them German soldiers were on their way, of Noah Zalcstein (‘such a lovely man’) who had to choke my great-grand-mother when she had a coughing fit just as Gestapo soldiers walked across the boards above the family’s hideout under the house. And at some time through the afternoon, bellies full, collective tears almost spent, Ethel Kovanski would burst into song, with a mournful rendition of My Yiddishe Mama or Mein Shtetele Belz, the longing hanging silently in the air well after the last of her slightly off-key operatic notes. And I sat there cocooned inside the reluctance of youth, picking at my metallic blue nail polish and refusing the constant offers of greasy food and cups of lemon tea. I was bored – tired of hearing about babies frozen in the forest, or men hanging themselves with their prayer shawls rather than be herded off to death camps.

  My father and I kept travelling around the country, strolling along the ramparts of medieval fortresses and wandering amongst ruins of Byzantine cities. Despite all my resistance, the trumpets, harps and mountains I’d heard of during all those tedious Bible readings at school gradually came to life. I saw my father cry for the first time ever at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as he searched in vain for the names of relatives and friends from his shtetl, so many murdered during the war. I couldn’t find any words that might comfort him. I kept silent, tentatively reaching out to hold his old, pale hand, feeling empty and full at the same time.

  From then on, most days, coming back to our hotel in Tel Aviv after our day’s journeying, we would swim together at dusk in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. My father had never worn bathers before and, for the first time, I saw his withered right leg, a remnant of childhood polio. Holding my tears back, I helped him as he limped back towards the boardwalk, past peddlers with wagons harnessed to exhausted donkeys trying to sell us their wares under the shadow of new shiny towers. ‘How much?’ my father would ask the wiry men. But the answer never mattered; whatever the price was, he bought me their wooden camels and hamsas embedded with blue stones to ward off the evil eye.

  Towards the end of our trip I was growing weary of touring and kept myself amused by making origami birds out of shiny candy wrappers, waiting for evening when our tour group would go to a restaurant, and after that the theatre or a discotheque. I was still grieving that lost opportunity for my first kiss back home. But there was always the hope I might meet some Israeli boys my own age and get the summer love locally (although, where we were, over the other side of earth, it was winter).

  On New Year’s Eve, our tour guide took us to the Khan, a popular nightclub in Jerusalem carved into an ancient cave. I leant against a limestone wall, praying that my father wouldn’t embarrass me by dragging me out onto the dance floor. My fate, as it turned out, was far worse. The greasy bus driver grabbed me and pulled me away from where I was seated, his hands pawing at me. It was then, while looking over the shoulder of this jerk for an escape plan, that my eyes met with a young boy’s stare homing in on me from under his mop of sandy blond hair. He sauntered across the dance floor and, hovering for a moment, cut in and stole me away.

  ‘I’m not letting you go,’ said my young rescuer and, as we danced the steps of The Bump, my teenage heart filled with the thrill of anticipation of my first kiss.

  As a 15-year-old, I had a vastly different take to my father on what constituted longing when it came to the Promised Land. Swept up in my new romance, I refused to go along with him to see his long lost friends, feigning excuses that I was too tired after our daily bus tours and wanted to stay in the hotel room to rest. He said he understood, reluctantly leaving me behind, but I noticed his eyes were teary as he kissed me on the forehead and said goodbye. Ten minutes after he left, I would sneak away and meet up for some heavy petting with my new crush. For the rest of the trip, I barely spent any time with my father. One evening, when he finally ventured to ask why I didn’t want to be together anymore, I put on my best Daddy’s Girl voice:

  ‘Don’t you want me to have some fun with kids my own age?’

  He slipped on some cufflinks, straightened his tie and kissed me goodbye. From the balcony of our hotel room, I watched him limp down the road and disappear.

  Step 3: ‘Preparation of the Material for Cutting’

  I watched the stranger dive into the deep end, his arms spread out like wings as he arched his body, plunging down below the surface of the water. Coming up for air, he rolled over, facing the mottled clouds. He floated slowly over towards me. A row of ants paraded along the edge of the tiles, their line detouring around where I sat with my legs dangling in the coolness of the water. It was my first day off after a long week of night duty as an intern in the casualty department, my mind occupying that foggy space between moonlight and sunshine. I had just come from breakfast with my father, who’d recently sold the family house. My mother had died a couple of years earlier and he now lived alone. I’d moved into a share house by then, but visited him several times a week. I brought him gefilte fish, read him the ‘Hatched, Matched and Dispatched’ section of the Jewish newspaper and watered his pot plants. We would watch Jeopardy together, until eventually he fell asleep and I snuck out the door.

  ‘What’s a tumour?’ The young man floated on his back as his voice drifted towards me.

  ‘Pardon?’

  We’d just met that afternoon, lounging around a mutual friend’s pool, sipping lemonade and laughing at each other’s lame jokes. Young. Intoxicated by the scent of possibility.

  ‘I fell off the roof yesterday,’ he said, smiling. ‘Tried to fix the aerial just after I ran the City-to-Surf.’

  He told me how he ended up visiting the emergency ward just to rule out a fractured rib. There were no broken bones but they found a shadow on the X-ray and made an appointment for him to come back on Monday for more tests. So, instead of dwelling on this all weekend, he decided to fly to Melbourne and have some fun with friends.

  Swimming over to the stairs, he gripped the metal rails, hoisting himself up over three steps at once. I felt myself sinking into the depths of a sea where there is no up or down, no landmarks of fish or weed. I loved how tanned and strong he looked, filled with the calm certainty of being alive. I ignored the ominous possibilities of what might lie beneath his ribs. I was in my early twenties then, wanting to escape, at least temporarily, from the suffocation of my relationship with my father, who had become much needier since my mother’s death. Here was this man,
with his taut abdomen and broad shoulders, who appeared to me a harbour of strength.

  I didn’t realise it then, but I was falling in love with a dying man. I moved to Sydney several weeks later to be with my new lover, leaving my father alone in his apartment, his hours filled with watching daytime quiz shows.

  ‘I am human too, you know,’ he said during one of my guilt calls home.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I knew exactly what he was telling me. My father was fading away, his body and mind shrivelling gradually into the world of dementia.

  ‘Come back.’ His voice was trembling. ‘I need you.’

  But I stayed in Sydney, leaving behind a dying man in his seventies, only to find myself with another, much younger, dying man.

  That lover has lately been haunting my dreams, drifting up from amongst the dead. Happy memories of him surface with the buoyancy of ghosts, unlocking the door of forgetting. The waves we surfed at Bondi Beach, our spontaneous road trips to ‘Hay, Hell and Booligal’, and drawn-out midnight Scrabble games, emerge suddenly through the fog of time. He is back, but I do not hang a welcome sign on the door; I still feel guilty even though so many years have passed, because eventually I left him, too.

  This is what happened: two years later, while my father was still living through his small days of visits from the chemist and the district nurse, my lover began his own process of slowly disappearing, loosening his grip on life. I saw him vomiting incessantly after chemotherapy as he shed skin, hair and flesh, grimacing in pain after surgeons carved his chest up like a roast chicken. We grew apart as he began to die; I struggled to watch him journey down those tracks.