Things Could Be Worse

by Lily Brett

  ‘I was lucky to see this sign. My friend Felix had died in the train that brought us to Sachsenhausen, and my cousin Moishe was beaten when he got off the train, and was shot when he fell down.’

  At four o’clock, Lola decided to pack her work away for the day. The poem was working well, and she felt happy. She decided to prepare dinner early; she liked the feeling of being ahead of schedule. Maybe tonight she would make a nice potato and onion soup, and a light pasta.

  Lola was chopping up her fourth large onion when the front door bell rang. It was Renia and Genia and Izak.

  ‘Hello, hello, hello,’ they chorused. Genia and Renia looked flushed and elated. The shopping had obviously been a success.

  Renia looked beautiful. Her skin was golden and smooth. She was wearing a double-breasted, black Chanel suit. She looked stunning. Renia had looked much happier lately, thought Lola. It had happened slowly, over the last few years. Her happiness suited her, thought Lola.

  ‘It was a very good sale, darling,’ said Renia. ‘I bought you six Lily of France bras, and three petticoats. Genia bought herself the most beautiful Swiss cotton underpants with a matching camisole singlet, and I did buy myself Christian Dior silk stockings for a quarter of their normal price.’

  ‘We also went to Myers,’ said Renia. ‘I bought you a challah, some brisket and some gefilte fish. Everything from Myers. You can buy a very good challah in Myers. The fish is very good too. Friday is a very good day for fish. It is always fresh on Friday.’

  Izak took Lola aside. He had a new joke. He knew Renia didn’t approve of his jokes.

  ‘Did you hear about Mrs Rosenberg?’ Izak asked Lola. ‘The phone rang in Mrs Rosenberg’s flat. She answered the phone. “Hello,” she said. It was a man on the phone. “I know what you want,” he says. “You want me to come over and tear your clothes off. You want me to shtoop you stupid. You want me to tie you to the bed and shtoop you silly,” he says. “From one hello you can tell all this?” said Mrs Rosenberg.’

  Lola laughed.

  ‘We should leave now, otherwise we will catch all the traffic,’ said Renia. ‘Goodbye, darling, enjoy the fish.’

  Lola kissed Renia, Genia and Izak goodbye. ‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,’ they called.

  Five minutes later the trio were back.

  ‘I forgot to give you the horseradish to eat with the fish. Garth loves this horseradish,’ said Renia.

  ‘Thanks, Mum. Goodbye,’ said Lola.

  ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ called Genia and Izak. Lola didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She could see the goodness, the kindness and the love in this frenzy, this intensity. So why did it still give her a headache? Maybe after another couple of years of analysis she would know the answer.

  Lola and Garth ate alone that night. The children were in Sydney visiting Garth’s parents.

  ‘This is fabulous gefilte fish,’ said Garth.

  ‘It’s from Myers,’ said Lola. ‘My mother has always said that the gefilte fish in Myers is very good. She’s said so many things that I haven’t listened to. I wonder what else I’ve missed out on.’

  After dinner, Lola and Garth went to the opening of Stephen Newsome’s exhibition of paintings at the Smithson Galleries. Newsome was an old friend of Garth’s.

  Lola disliked openings. The harsh lighting in galleries often heightened her anxiety. Standing up and talking to people also made her anxious. Tonight she would made an effort not to focus on herself. She wouldn’t examine herself minutely for symptoms of anxiety. She wouldn’t concentrate all her energy on the question of whether she was feeling anxious. She wondered if other people had to make such a conscious effort not to think about themselves all the time.

  Lola and Garth told Stephen Newsome how much they liked his paintings, but Newsome was so drunk he could hardly recognise them. He was so drunk he could hardly stand.

  ‘Newsome and I have both, over the years, had a lot of trouble standing up,’ Lola said to Garth. ‘He’s been pissed, and I’ve been dizzy.’ Lola and Garth said hello and goodbye to half a dozen people, and left the gallery.

  At home, Lola prepared herself for bed. She cleansed and scrubbed and creamed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked so Jewish. Jewish eyes, Jewish curls, Jewish expression. She had a Jewish face. A face that looked semi-anxious when she was happy, and distressed when she was sad.

  Lola turned her face away from the mirror. If she was going to work at making this analysis successful she would have to place less emphasis on what she looked like. She used to think that if her curls were at the right angle, everything else would be all right.

  Lola walked out of the bathroom, through the lounge-room and into Garth’s studio. Garth was painting. Luciano Pavarotti was singing ‘Nessun Dorma’. Garth’s hips and legs moved in time to the music. He was immersed in his canvas, and didn’t hear her come in.

  She stood and watched him. She thought about how lucky she was. She was lucky to have Garth. Lucky to have the children. She was lucky. The thought took her by surprise. She felt temporarily disconcerted. It wasn’t an aberrant thought, just a new one.

  She kissed Garth goodnight. Still feeling lucky, Lola walked back to the bedroom. She knew that Garth was going to paint until late, so she had made herself a hot-water bottle. She got into bed. The new sheets she had bought felt nice. She hugged the hot-water bottle. Still feeling lucky, she fell asleep.

  I Heard You Got Another Husband

  For ten years Lola had not been able to mix with Jews. For ten years, even to walk along Acland Street, past the Scheherezade Restaurant, past the Benedykt Brothers Delicatessen, caused Lola anxiety.

  She knew most of the people who stood in small clusters on the footpath, talking. ‘Lolala, hello, what’s happened to you? Last time I saw you, you were thin, now look.’ Lola didn’t have to say much in these encounters. ‘Good morning, Lola, I heard you got divorced and now I heard you got another husband.’

  Garth loved Acland Street. He always greeted Tivele, who had Parkinson’s disease and shook dangerously as he drank his lemon tea, with a pat on the back and a handshake. He asked Abe how the hosiery business was going. He smiled like a benign parent while Adek, Edek and Isaac talked. They talked and talked. Over the top of each other. At the same time. What energy they had, this gang of elderly men! thought Lola. Everything mattered. Everything was important.

  Lola went into the Scheherezade. She sat at a table near the counter. She ordered a glass of borscht and a plate of boiled potatoes. She watched Mr Krongold, who was at the back of the restaurant, eating his latkes in his parka and his peaked cap. He had already had schnitzel and boiled potatoes. Mr Krongold was a slightly built, fine-boned man. He ate vigorously.

  Lola often ate bent over the rubbish bin. She tore clumps of bread from a loaf. One piece of bread into her mouth, one piece into the bin, some more for her, and a few crusty pieces for the rubbish bin. Lola had to finish the loaf. It would have been damaging evidence. Another couple of bites, and the last piece could go into the bin.

  Lola could evacuate any thoughts that disturbed her. She blinked them out of her head. Three blinks and all bothering thoughts vanished. The only problem was that most of anything else that was in Lola’s head was also blinked out.

  Lola had difficulty feeling the life in her. She often breathed herself dead. Her breathing would become slow and shallow. She could sit in one spot for hours. She could be with her children, she could be in the middle of a group of people and appear enchanted by the conversation, but she was somewhere else, and she was dead. If she was not as dead as all the dead, then she was almost as dead.

  Mr Lipnowski, who often ate at the Scheherezade, came up to Lola. ‘I did see the wonderful drawing Garth did do in the newspaper. Such a beautiful drawing. You can see the suffering of the whole world in the eyes. The way he drawed those eyes. Beautiful.’

  ‘What about my article?’ said Lola.

  ‘Too short,’ said Mr Lipnowski. ‘Too short
, and I didn’t learn anything from it.’

  Lola was in a good mood. Her analyst had told her that unless she worked at this analysis she would have to leave. The news had shocked her. She felt more alive than she had for weeks. She smiled at Mr Lipnowski.

  She remembered a conversation she had had with Mr Lipnowski last summer. Her book of poetry about life in a concentration camp had just come out. Mrs Frydman from the bookshop around the corner didn’t want to order any copies until she saw whether there was a demand for the book.

  ‘I was in Auschwitz,’ she said, ‘so, do I write poems?’

  Mr Lipnowski had said to Lola, ‘I told Mrs Frydman she should be selling gutkes, not books.’

  Gutkes, Lola had explained to Garth, were underpants.

  Halfway through her analysis, Lola saw that this apparent harshness, this callousness, this bluntness, was an endearing directness, a brisk and efficient communication. They all spoke like that. Mr Lipnowski, Mrs Frydman, Mr and Mrs Bensky. ‘This is right. This is wrong. This is bad. This is terrible. This is no good. This is how I see things. This is this.’ They all knew.

  Their children had trouble knowing whether this was this, or this was not this. Lola’s friend Ben, whose father had fought with the partisans in Poland and now owned Sunsoaked Swimwear Industries, belonged to the Shiva Yoga Centre. Every morning, between 5 and 6, Ben danced to Indian chants. From 6 to 7 he meditated. For the rest of the day he worked on his idea for a contemporary theatre production of the Ramayana Ballet.

  Ben smiled at everything. In recent years, as he had climbed the executive rungs of the ashram, he had become more interested in his Jewishness. He now interspersed his ‘oms’ with ‘oys’.

  And then there was Morris Lubofsky. Lola found it hard to believe that Morris was the offspring of Rivka Lubofsky. Orphaned at thirteen by the Nazis, Rivka had spent the war hiding in the forests of Poland. Lola was mesmerised by Rivka’s beauty. Rivka had fiery, dark-red hair and enormous, seductive and inviting eyes. She spoke six languages. And she laughed. She laughed with her whole body.

  Rivka completed her Master of Laws degree in the same year that Morris dropped out of dentistry to edit the Teenybopper.

  One hour after he had arrived at his parents’ place, and twenty minutes after he had finished his regular Sunday lunch with them, Morris Lubofsky, forty years old and thrice divorced, lay on the couch in his parents’ lounge-room. His stomach heaved gently and he slept.

  Last Sunday at lunch Mr Lubofsky had given Morris the brochure for a new Jaguar Sovereign.

  ‘Delivery will be in December. Happy birthday.’

  ‘Oh. Great. Thank you,’ said Morris, and he went to the couch and slept.

  Lola had observed this impossible-to-stay-awake-in-front-of-your-parents disease. She had discussed it with Morris’s Catholic first wife, who was infuriated and bewildered by it. Lola had seen it in herself.

  Lola never looked excited or enthusiastic in front of Mr or Mrs Bensky. She rarely expressed surprise, and never showed any joy, light-heartedness or happiness in their presence. She appeared to have no sense of humour. She never laughed when she was with them.

  Occasionally they had caught her laughing with a friend. Lola once saw Mr Bensky look at her with great surprise when she exploded with laughter while telling her friend Margaret-Anne the story of how she had met Dean Robertson, who was a top political journalist and a former colleague of Lola’s. Lola’s son was five at the time, and going through a stage of adding ‘1’ to every word. He said bookl, smokel, dogl, catl. Dean Robertson had asked Lola what she was doing now. ‘I’m just a housewifel,’ she had answered. Dean Robertson had fled with a nauseous grimace of farewell.

  Lola looked at a photograph of Garth that she carried around in her wallet. He didn’t look Jewish. He looked too happy.

  Even the language tapes that Lola and Garth were learning Yiddish from were not too cheerful. Each phrase was stated slowly and then repeated. The conversation on the subject of ‘How Are You?’ went like this:

  How are you?

  Fine, thank you.

  Not bad.

  So so.

  I don’t feel well.

  What’s wrong with him?

  He has a headache.

  She doesn’t feel well.

  What’s the matter with her?

  She has a toothache.

  We are ill.

  What’s wrong with you?

  We have stomach aches.

  I don’t feel well.

  What’s wrong with you?

  My feet hurt.

  My parents aren’t well.

  What’s wrong with them?

  They have heartaches from their children.

  My head hurts.

  Her back hurts.

  His hands hurt.

  Your bones hurt.

  Our feet hurt.

  Their feet hurt.

  By the time she was twenty, Lola knew no Jews. She worked as a rock journalist. Her three close girlfriends were pale, tall and angular, and, she realised on reflection, all prone to constipation.

  She fell in love with blond, blue-eyed men whose fathers were president of the golf club and whose mothers had been the school hockey captain. Jewish boys looked awful to Lola. They looked spoilt and soft and unmanly. They looked frightened of their mothers, frightened of their fathers. ‘Jewish boys have still got their mother’s breastmilk on their faces,’ said Margaret-Anne.

  When Lola and Johnny Rosenberg were eighteen, he had driven his father’s Vauxhall into the back of another car. Lola had had several stitches in her knees and Johnny Rosenberg had broken his nose. He sat in the Royal Melbourne Hospital and wept. ‘How can I ring up my parents? The shock will kill them.’

  Killing their parents was something that most Jewish children felt they had the power to do. Common fragments of conversation among the children were: ‘This is going to kill my mother.’ ‘I can’t tell my mother, it would kill her.’ ‘I couldn’t do that, my father might die.’ ‘I can’t leave my wife, it would kill my parents.’

  Lola was no exception. Rather than kill her parents, Lola lied about everything. She lied about her non-Jewish boyfriend. The Benskys were perfectly happy to see Lola going steady with Angus Nankin, a ‘Scottish Jew’. Mr and Mrs Nankin played along. Mr Nankin wore a yarmulka at dinner, and on Yom Kippur they all went to synagogue together. Mrs Bensky explained to her friends that these Anglo-Jews could never speak Yiddish. The Benskys thought it was a shame when Lola and Angus broke up.

  Lola lied about being a virgin, she lied about what she ate, she lied about studying at the Sorbonne. After she finished high school, Lola had begged the Benskys to send her to Paris to do a Diploma of Languages at the Sorbonne. Lola spent two days at the Sorbonne. She felt lonely, lost, and unable to be understood. She flew to London, bought an old London taxi cab and drove around Europe for six months. She drove through Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland. She put the car on a ferry in Naples and went to Israel, where she visited her cousin on a kibbutz in the Negev. A Parisian student rerouted Lola’s mail, and everybody was happy. Mr and Mrs Bensky still boasted about Lola’s gift for languages, and how she topped her class at the Sorbonne. Lola knew that people didn’t die of lies.

  She did fear her parents’ deaths though, and did feel that whenever and however they died, it would be her fault.

  She sympathised with Morris Lubofsky. When people talked about what a rich man he would be one day, Morris always said, ‘I hope I die before my parents.’ Lola knew exactly what he meant.

  ‘You will cry on my grave but it will be too late,’ Mrs Bensky said to Lola over and over again. What if she didn’t even cry then? Lola used to wonder.

  Now she wondered how she could have been so cruel. So indifferent. How could she have been so unsympathetic, so uninterested in what Mrs Bensky had been through?

  When Lola began to think about Mrs Bensky’s life, she couldn’t understand why, after the war, Mrs Bensky
had still wanted to live, or why she had wanted to have children. Lola felt that she herself would have given up. She had given up many times. She had felt that nothing was worthwhile. This feeling, Lola now recognised, was a sad luxury. That nothing-really-interests-me, everything-is-so-tedious syndrome. It was usually accompanied by the my-parents-have-ruined-my-life philosophy and had, as a postscript, and-they-can-pay-for-it.

  Lola folded her copy of the Jewish News. She had had a slice of apple cake, even though this was the first day of her new diet. She paid for her coffee and cake. She waved goodbye to Tivele. She smiled at Mr Rosenberg and Mr Schwarz, who were sitting at the front table, and she went home.

  If You Live Long Enough

  ‘Mmm, Elizabeth is so beautiful.’ Morris Lubofsky was talking about his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend. ‘She’s got such strong limbs. You should see her close up. I mean really close up. People look very different really close up.’

  Lola Bensky and Morris Lubofsky were walking along Lygon Street. Morris continued his conversation enthusiastically. ‘You know, she’s a really fabulous singer. There’s no-one in the country who can sing like her.’ Lola said nothing.

  Sometimes Lola had to remind herself that she was very fond of Morris. She liked his sense of humour, and his dogged loyalty. When Morris held these conversations about his girlfriend, Lola didn’t have to look interested. Morris was entertaining himself. He didn’t notice Lola’s lack of response.

  Morris usually rang Lola several times a week. He rang to say how beautiful Elizabeth was, or how brilliantly her photography was progressing. Sometimes he wanted to relate what he had bought for his house, or what he intended to buy. Morris lived in a 20,000-square-foot converted dairy in Williamstown.

  ‘She says I’m a fabulous lover,’ Morris said. Lola didn’t know what to say. They went on walking. ‘We spent all yesterday in bed, and I’m meeting her for a production conference at home this afternoon.’

  Morris was emerging. He was re-entering the world. He had been a dilettante. An editor of unsaleable newspapers. Morris had founded the Teenybopper and the underground 1970s weekly The Joint. His last venture had been the Vegetarian Monthly.