by Lily Brett
“Maybe you don’t make her so comfortable?” Edek said.
“She is a snob,” said Henia. “And always in black. Like a widow.”
“An expensive widow,” Edek said. “You know how much she does pay for those black things?” As soon as Edek had said this, he had regretted it.
He knew he had unwittingly given Henia another round of ammunition to fire at Ruth.
Henia’s sons came around together one Friday afternoon. They had another series of documents for Edek to sign. More papers to safeguard Henia’s property.
“We’ve noticed that our mother’s phone bills are a hundred dollars a month more than they used to be before you arrived,” the elder son said.
“And we feel you should pay for this.”
“I feel that I should, too,” Edek said, “which is why I do. I do pay all the phone bill and all the electricity and all the food bills straight into your mother’s account.”
“Does he?” The elder son asked his mother.
“Yes,” said Henia.
“Don’t they notice how much better off Henia is with you?” Ruth asked Edek when he told her about the incident. “You do everything for her. You shop, you wash the dishes. Henia’s got a very cushy life.”
“I call them the waiters,” Edek said to Ruth. “They are waiting for their mother to die.”
When the boys came back for a third series of documents to be signed, Edek patiently signed each page. Henia never said anything during these signing sessions. As the older son was leaving, he leaned over to Edek.
“You’re not giving your daughter any of our money are you?” he said. Edek was stunned. He looked at Henia. Henia remained silent. Edek decided he had had enough. He left. He went back to Australia.
He felt bad about leaving Henia. As though he had abandoned her.
“She was a cow,” Ruth said. “She abandoned you when she didn’t speak up for you.” Ruth tried to persuade Edek to stay in New York. But he didn’t
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want to stay in New York. He didn’t want to bump into Henia or her friends. “You can live in New York and never come across Henia or any of her friends,” Ruth said. “It’s a very big city. Anyway, they all live in Queens.
You can just never go to Queens.” But Edek was adamant. He had to go.
He booked his ticket to Australia and left.
Edek had been unhappy and out of sorts for most of his first year back in Australia. But slowly he had stopped blaming himself for the breakdown of the marriage. And slowly he started playing cards again, and eating chocolate, and running errands.
Edek didn’t look eighty-one. His silver hair was thick and vigorous; his face was hardly lined. Ruth felt lucky to have a father in such good shape.
She didn’t want to lose him. She had reeled for too long after the death of her mother. When she flew anywhere, she still found herself looking out of the window of the plane, wondering if at thirty-three thousand feet up in the air she was any closer to her mother. Wondering if there could possibly be a heaven, and if there was, was this where her mother now lived. She knew it was a stupid thought. There was no heaven. And there was no life after death. There was nothing after death. “Mum’s spirit still lives on in me,” she had once said to Edek. “I think about her all the time. I cook the food that she used to cook. I use the face creams she used. I even lie in the sun like she used to, and understand why she loved it so much.”
“There is no spirit,” he said. “Mum is dead. Nothing has changed.”
The baggage collection area was crowded. The luggage from Edek’s flight was already arriving. Ruth saw Edek’s suitcase straightaway. Six inches of bright yellow masking tape was wound around the middle of the case. She lifted the suitcase off the carousel. It was very light. She hoped Edek had packed enough clothes.
She had noticed that he was wearing the navy knit top she had bought him. Her mother used to choose all of her father’s clothes. Rooshka had good taste. She bought finely woven 100 percent cotton shirts and simple well-cut trousers for Edek. Rooshka made sure that he always had one good-quality suit for everyday occasions, and one suit with a bit more panache for going out at night.
Left to his own devices, Edek would have stuck to the same items of T O O M A N Y M E N
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clothing until they disintegrated. He never noticed what he was wearing.
When Rooshka went on her annual two-week winter vacation to Surfers Paradise, Edek mixed and matched his clothes with an abandon that disturbed Ruth and drove her mother mad. “You can’t wear sandals with socks here in Australia,” was the first thing Rooshka said to him when he picked her up at the airport, after her very last vacation in the sun. “It is not Poland,” she said. “It is comfortable for my feet,” Edek said. But the minute they got home, he had changed his shoes.
As soon as there was a stain or a smudge on anything Edek was wearing, Rooshka would whip the garment off Edek and put it in the laundry. There, it would soak in bleach or salt or whatever Rooshka thought would best remove the offending mark. Edek was resigned to this. He would take off the socks Rooshka thought he had worn for too long, or the trousers with the cuff that contained a spot of mud. He understood that Rooshka had had too many smudges and stains in her life. Edek would change whatever he had on, as many times a day as Rooshka wanted him to, if it made Rooshka happy. He loved her dearly. He saw her, until the day she died, as the beautiful young girl he had pursued, and won, in Lódz. Ruth walked back to where she had arranged to meet Edek. A couple with two teenage children were sitting on the bench. Ruth put down the suitcase and stood next to them. The son, a sallow-skinned, sullen-looking youth, stared fixedly out into the distance, as though by removing his gaze he had removed himself from this family picture. The girl looked down at her lap.
Nothing Ruth had seen, in her forty-three years, had persuaded her that having children was a good idea. All that effort to enable someone to voice complaints, bitterness, resentment, and hostility toward you. It didn’t feel like the right return on an investment.
She looked at her watch. Where was Edek? She should have asked him exactly which office he was going to. What if he had forgotten where he said he would meet her? She hated casual, open-ended arrangements like this. She liked to pin things down to a time and a place.
She walked around the airport to see if she could see Edek. She stopped at a cake shop. Even at the airport, the cakes and pastries looked wonderful. She looked at a round, well-filled piece of apple strudel. She wondered what percentage of the apple strudel was composed of just apple. All the apple was probably bathed in butter and sugar, she decided. Maybe on her
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last day in Poland, she would have a slice. If she started eating strudel now, she’d be sunk.
Edek was nowhere to be seen. Ruth went back to their meeting place.
The mother and father and their two hapless teenagers were still sitting there. Ruth was agitated. Where could Edek be? How could he arrive, and then disappear like this? Maybe she should have him paged?
Just then Edek appeared. He was flushed and excited. “Where were you?” Ruth said. “I was worried.”
“What could happen to me?” Edek said. “I am in an airport. Nothing could happen to me in an airport. I had to speak with the manager, then another manager, and a supervisor, but I got it done. Another ten minutes and the whole thing will be finished with.” He rushed off again.
Ruth stood next to the family on the bench. They were all looking forlorn now. Maybe the parents had realized that travel would be wasted on these children. Ruth looked at them. Why would anyone want to have children?
Ruth knew that, after the war, her mother didn’t particularly want to have children. She knew that her mother hadn’t been overjoyed to find herself pregnant with Ruth. Rooshka and Edek had not been in Australia for very long when Rooshka discovered that she was pregnant. They we
re both working in factories. They had no money and they spoke no English.
“What right did we have to bring a child into this world?” her mother had said to her. Ruth thought that the world her mother was referring to was a larger world than the world of poverty and lack of language. It was a world where everything was erratic, and nothing would ever make sense again.
This world was full of mourning and full of dead people. Dead people who hadn’t just died. Dead people who had been murdered.
The murderers of these dead people were rarely referred to, and Ruth, as a child, often wondered who they were, and if she would recognize them if she passed them on the street. For years she used to examine the faces of passing strangers to see if they contained evidence of murderousness.
Ruth had had a German school friend, Elfriede. Elfriede had long blond plaits and three brothers, a mother and father, and four grandparents. When Ruth was ten, she had stayed at Elfriede’s place overnight. Ruth had eaten bratwurst and Kartoffelklösse for dinner and listened to the German words and phrases flying around the dinner table. In the middle of the T O O M A N Y M E N
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night, she had woken up with a stomachache. Was she in a house full of murderers? She had asked her mother, the next day, if Elfriede and her family were the murderers. “Who knows?” Rooshka had replied. It was a worrying answer.
Rooshka had told Ruth that she had tried to abort the pregnancy that had turned into Ruth. Rooshka said she had jumped up and down. She had sat in hot baths, she had swallowed castor oil. But nothing had helped. The pregnancy had proceeded. “I was ashamed to be pregnant,” her mother had said. Ruth hadn’t really understood why her mother was ashamed to be pregnant. She didn’t think it had anything to do with Ruth herself. She knew that her mother had vomited, on the train, every morning after leaving Ruth in day care. She thought that that was pretty good evidence of her mother’s attachment to her.
Ruth knew that her mother had lost two babies. One baby boy in the ghetto and another baby, also a boy, after the war. Being pregnant hadn’t resulted in a great deal of happiness for Rooshka Rothwax. Her mother must have loved babies, at one time, Ruth thought. Rooshka used to tell Ruth a story about her amazement at finding a baby in the toilet block, in Stuthof, the concentration camp Rooshka was sent to from Auschwitz. “I couldn’t believe I had found a baby,” Rooshka used to say. “It was like a miracle. It was a newborn baby. It was on the floor, in the toilet block. I ran like crazy to the hospital in Stuthof. ‘Look, I found a newborn baby,’ I said to the nurse. ‘I think it is perfectly healthy.’ They took the baby from me and threw it into the rubbish bin. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid to run to the hospital with the baby.” “It wasn’t your fault,” Ruth would say. “I am not talking about fault,” Rooshka would answer.
The hospital in Stuthof was the reason that Ruth had been in Gdansk, a year ago. She wanted to see where it was that her mother had run to, in such hope, all those years ago. Stuthof was a forty-minute drive from Gdansk. Ruth had imagined that hospital many times. She imagined a small hospital with gleaming white tiles and polished chrome and stainless steel equipment. It had taken Ruth half an hour, in Stuthof, to find the hospital.
She had wandered around Stuthof with a map, trying to match what was left of the camp with the details on an old plan of the former death camp.
Ruth had finally found the hospital. The hospital in Stuthof, like the rest of the buildings in the death camp, was preserved exactly as it was found.
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There were no tiles or stainless steel in this hospital. The hospital was built with the same cheap wooden boards as the barracks. Two broken operating tables were in the middle of one room. Some empty shelves stood in a corner. A few old implements were scattered around. Several broken lights were on the wooden floor. There had clearly been no need for hygiene in this hospital. It was so bare and so barbaric. There was no pretense that anyone was going to be cared for in this hospital. Ruth had wept and wept.
How could she have imagined white tiles and stainless steel? She had read enough to know that that was absurd.
She had read hundreds of books on the Holocaust. Books by survivors.
Books by historians. Despite all the books Ruth bought and read, part of her could still not imagine the truth. Part of her still wanted to believe that it couldn’t have been that bad. That her beautiful mother hadn’t really slept in the middle of corpses, and been left for dead, many times. Part of her wanted to believe it was all a bad dream.
When Ruth had got back to the Marta Hotel, after Stuthof, she had showered for over an hour. She hadn’t been able to get out of the shower.
She hadn’t been able to wash off whatever it was that she was trying to wash away. She had showered until all of her skin had wrinkled.
Ruth was exhausted. Warsaw airport was nearly deserted. It was almost ten o’clock. Where was Edek? How could he do this to her? Just run off. What was he doing? A priest walked up to Ruth and asked her if she would donate some money to a children’s charity. Ruth said no. She didn’t want to give anything to a Polish priest. She didn’t like priests and she didn’t like Poles. Her father didn’t express much resentment toward Poles. He knew, firsthand, what the Poles had done to the Jews, he knew from his own experience how Polish people hadn’t been able to wait to get rid of the Jews. But he didn’t dwell on it. He didn’t express much anger at the Germans either. Ruth couldn’t understand why he didn’t hate Germans. She realized that neither Rooshka nor Edek expressed a lot of anger at what had happened to them.
What Ruth did see, in her mother and father, was anguish and shock.
They were still shocked. As though neither of them could quite believe what they had lived through. Ruth saw her mother’s and father’s guilt, too.
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A guilt at their own survival. The guilt of still being alive when everyone else in their world was dead. Maybe Edek and Rooshka had seen too much base behavior to want to be overtaken by a lesser emotion like anger, she thought. Getting through each day seemed to take all the emotional energy her mother had anyway. There was not a lot of room left for anger.
Edek got through his days by working and reading detective fiction when he came home from work. Edek loved working. In the four years since he’d been back in Australia, he’d applied for over twenty jobs. Jobs as a cutter in a clothing factory, a pattern maker for a shirt manufacturer, a shop assistant in a pharmacy, and a job as the manager of the shipping department of a sporting goods store. Edek knew nothing about sports and even less about sporting equipment. The only products he could identify were the exercise bikes. He was a quick learner, he told the baffled owner who interviewed him. He didn’t get the job.
He didn’t get most of the jobs he interviewed for. He couldn’t understand why. “I think you’re over the age that most people are looking for in an employee,” Ruth had said. “I didn’t tell them I was eighty-one,” Edek said, “I told everyone I was sixty-six.” He didn’t seem to realize that sixty-six was already way too old to be applying for jobs.
He did get one of the jobs. It was a temporary position itemizing stock in the back room of a health food store. Edek had to unpack new ship-ments, note what was running low and clean the store, after it closed every night. “It is very important for those places what sell this healthy food to look very clean,” Edek had said to Ruth. “They have to look more clean than shops what sell normal food. People who eat this sort of stuff like to have a very clean shop.”
Edek came to work two hours before the shop opened and he stayed longer than any other employee. “The manager does trust me,” he said proudly to Ruth. “He did give me the key to the business after just one week.” Edek was so happy. He did extra jobs without being asked, and brought chocolate biscuits for everyone for morning tea. When the job came to an end, the manager took Edek out for a cup of coffee and told h
im how sorry he was that the man he had replaced was coming back. Edek had resumed his search for employment.
Ruth felt agitated. Where was her father? She had only seen him for a minute before he had disappeared. She tried to calm down. She was not
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going to feel irritated by Edek, she told herself; not on their first day together. She was grinding her teeth and blinking her right eye five times by the time Edek returned. He was triumphant. He was holding his ticket in the air.
“I did fix it,” he said. “They did give me a first-class ticket for the way back. I am in seat 2B. The manager didn’t want to do it, but the supervisor, in the end, did agree with me. I did pay for a business class and my seat was not such a business class seat.”
“Dad, I’ve been waiting for over an hour,” Ruth said.
“I am not such a young man,” Edek said. “I did want to make sure I could have one of those things for the feet. It is not so easy to travel at my age.”
“I would have done it for you, tomorrow,” Ruth said.
“Why should I bother you?” Edek said.
Ruth calmed down. “You must be tired, Dad,” she said. “Did you manage to get any sleep when you stopped in Bangkok?”
“To tell you the truth,” Edek said, “I did not have such a good night in that Bangkok.”
“Oh no,” Ruth said. “What went wrong? I thought your hotel was just near the airport.”
“The hotel was near to the airport,” Edek said. “I did find it. I got a bus as a matter of fact. I didn’t want to take a taxi. Who knows where a taxi driver would take me?”
“So what was wrong?” Ruth said.
“Everything,” said Edek. “I was the only guest in the whole hotel.
Nobody did speak English. I was frightened to leave the room. I didn’t see one person who was not Chinee. Everybody was Chinee. You never know what they can do to you.” Edek always pronounced Chinese “Chinee.”
“They’re not Chinese, Dad, they’re Thai,” Ruth said. “And just because they don’t look exactly like you doesn’t mean that they’re not exactly like you. They’re not going to do anything to you.”