Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  CHAPTER 37

  Summer had ended and the autumn sun shone weakly through my parents’ dining room window, casting long shadows on the wall. At one end of the table Justine was deep in conversation with my father. Their heads were close together as they bent over a sketch pad, and her long thick hair, the colour of polished teak, fell across her eager face as she showed her grandfather her latest drawing. If it had been sketched by a famous artist, he couldn’t have given it more attention. He admired a flowing line here and suggested more shading there, while she nodded, glowing with pleasure. From time to time, his comments were interrupted by a short, dry cough.

  Jonathan, a ten-year-old whose motor rarely ceased revving, was growing restless so Michael took him outside to play catchings. As usual my father brought out his camera to capture the occasion, fiddling with the settings until we moaned at having to hold the pose until the smiles froze on our faces. ‘Hurry up, Henek, I have to make the coffee!’ my mother protested. Now in her sixties, she still had that flawless ivory complexion. With her fair hair, sparkling smile and ramrod straight back, she reminded me of a daffodil.

  Before we sat down to Aunty Mania’s chocolate roll, my father stood the children against the doorway to the dining room, told them not to stand on tiptoe, and pencilled a mark to record their height as he did every year so we could see how much they’d grown. Years after he’d died, this remembrance of the passing years remained on the architrave like a memorial.

  On every wall of my parents’ flat hung the landscapes, abstracts and portraits which my father had recently painted. Late in life he’d begun attending art classes and discovered a new talent. ‘Maybe I’ll become a Grandpa Moses,’ he used to joke. The first portrait he ever painted was of his father.

  At the other end of the table my mother was arguing with her sister. ‘You’re talking just so your saliva doesn’t dry up!’ she scoffed. It was a safe bet that if my aunt said that the sky was blue, my mother would immediately find ten reasons why it wasn’t. If Mania bought something, it was never the right thing, she’d paid too much, and she shouldn’t have bought it anyway. Her smoking was a constant irritant too, because Mania had rheumatic heart disease and had been told to quit.

  Aunty Mania usually dismissed her sister’s criticisms with a shrug and a lopsided smile to prevent minor skirmishes escalating into major battles. War meant that my mother would refuse to speak to her for weeks and these prolonged hostilities took too much out of my aunt. Mania lived downstairs, and whenever I visited her during these feuds, I could always hear my mother’s assertive footsteps stomping in the room above. This meant that she’d already seen my car and knew I was consorting with the enemy.

  My mother and her sister were enmeshed in a relationship that puzzled me all my life. I couldn’t understand my mother’s generosity to my aunt on the one hand, and her criticism on the other. When my mother had suggested that Mania could live in her building at a very low rent, my aunt had accepted, but close proximity only made things worse. Indebtedness neither engenders gratitude nor improves relationships.

  Whenever I questioned my mother about their arguments, her mouth became a minus sign and her eyes became flamethrowers. ‘You always take her side! You don’t know her like I do!’ she would rage. ‘She’s an arch-manipulator. You have no idea what misunderstandings she’s caused all my life!’

  It sometimes seemed as if my mother envied her sister, although I couldn’t see what she could possibly be envious about. She was much better looking than Mania, who had become more round-shouldered with age and whose complexion had become more blotchy. Financially, too, my mother was far better off. Mania and Bronek had started off selling underwear at the markets and gone on to make plastic raincoats, but their cottage industry had come to an end when plastic raincoats started being mass-produced. For a time Bronek worked as a travelling salesman, but for the past few years they’d lived on my aunt’s war pension.

  Aunty Mania received a pension from Germany because she’d been interned at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My parents were also entitled to some compensation on account of their experiences and losses during the Holocaust, but my father had refused to lodge a claim. ‘I don’t want to accept blood money,’ he insisted. ‘They can’t compensate me for what I went through or for the relatives they’ve murdered. I don’t want the Germans to think that because they’ve paid me a few marks, their conscience is clear.’ My father was always rather quixotic but I admired his high principles.

  If it wasn’t envy that soured my mother’s attitude towards her sister, perhaps it was jealousy because I loved spending time with my aunt who was a sympathetic listener and had a good sense of humour. Because she couldn’t afford to buy the clothes she loved, she taught herself to make them. Soon she was sewing for me as well, so we spent a lot of time together, discussing styles, chosing fabrics and having fittings.

  Family relationships are harder to untangle than skeins of wool. One day when I dropped in to see Aunty Mania during one of their feuds, her face looked drawn and sad, and her back was very bent. She must have been thinking about her early life because she suddenly said, ‘I know it isn’t nice to say this, but my parents didn’t love me. That’s what I always felt.’

  Now, as we all sat around my parents’ table drinking coffee and chatting, Aunty Mania was looking out of the window where a jacaranda tree brushed against the pane, but by the bitter twist of her mouth and the cloudy expression in her olive-green eyes, I knew that she was looking at some bleak landscape of the heart. Finally she murmured, as if to herself, ‘Sometimes a person goes through life just looking for some sign of love from her brother—or sister.’

  It was 1978, three years after my father had sold his dental practice. When he’d retired, his devoted patients had felt that they hadn’t only lost an extraordinarily talented dentist, but also a caring friend who was never too busy to listen to their troubles or to share a joke. He had begun going to art classes, had taught himself carpentry, and had been reading history books. After one of our Saturday lunches, he handed me a sheaf of typewritten notes stacked in a folder. ‘I’ve written my memoirs,’ he said. ‘One day you and the children may want to know what happened.’ There were one hundred neatly typed pages written in Polish and divided into periods. Thrilled to have his memoirs, I hadn’t asked him for more details. The questions only occurred to me when it was too late.

  As we sat together that day, I noticed that my father looked paler than usual. When he coughed again, Michael repeated his earlier comment, ‘You really should get that seen to.’ As usual my father shrugged it off. ‘It’s nothing. Just a cough.’ At seventy-seven he was fit, trim and energetic. He ate moderately, just as Daniel had taught him, and went for a stroll every day. When he had started developing a paunch, he’d dieted until he lost it; when his teeth had yellowed, he’d had them capped.

  Finally he agreed to have a chest X-ray. When it didn’t reveal anything, Michael urged him to have further tests. Like most strong-minded, determined individuals, they sometimes clashed, but they understood and respected each other. Henek had a high regard for Michael’s diagnostic skills and his compassionate nature, but was sceptical about the medical profession in general. ‘Once specialists get their clutches into you, you never get away from them,’ he argued. I think that deep down my father already knew what the tests would reveal.

  Several weeks later, when the pain in his hip was so severe that he couldn’t go for his daily walk, he agreed to go into hospital for tests. ‘Since I asked for a medical opinion, I have to follow the doctor’s advice,’ he said to me. ‘If you say A, you have to say B.’ Winter light was slanting through the bare branches of the jacaranda tree, highlighting the whiteness of his hair and the pallor of his face. Then he made a deprecating gesture with his hand and said in an angry voice, ‘This is the beginning of the end.’

  I was shocked. I don’t know whether it was his negative attitude that shocked me so much or the possibility that
he was seriously ill. ‘Why are you so pessimistic?’ I asked, angry in turn. ‘You’re just going for some tests, that’s all.’ He shot me a look that said I didn’t know what I was talking about, but didn’t say any more. I glanced at my mother. She was looking away and every muscle in her face seemed clenched.

  When she left the room to brew coffee, he turned to me, calmer now. ‘You know, Diane, I’m not afraid to die,’ he said. ‘I’ve made my peace with God. I just don’t want to suffer.’ A jumble of frightened, confused feelings stumbled about in my head, but over them all one short clear word kept repeating itself. No. No. No.

  The first time I visit him at St Vincent’s Hospital, his face seems carved out of tallow, and the whites of his eyes are as yellow as if an egg yolk had burst. But although he is jaundiced, he is in good spirits and entertains us with anecdotes from Poland, about the conmen of Warsaw who used to accost gullible peasants, and ‘sell’ them the city’s trams. While Jonathan giggles I can’t stop looking at my father’s waxlike feet poking out of dead-white sheets.

  Back home we watch television together and talk about trivia to avoid the topic that is on all our minds. Justine suddenly goes over to kiss Michael who gives her a hug. It strikes me that I never did that with my father. We were very close, had similar ideas, and shared a love of music, literature and ideas, yet we were never demonstrative. My father was reserved and now I realise that I was too.

  Next day, he is drowsy and listless. His eyes are a stranger’s eyes, and their dullness alarms me. I reach forward to pat his hand. Touching has never been our way of showing emotion so it feels awkward. When I look down, I’m shocked by the contrast between my pink hand and his yellow one. On top of the building across the road, a huge plaster Christ with outstretched arms seems to be looking right into this room. For the first time I know that my father is going to die.

  That night Jonathan looks searchingly into my face. ‘Is Grandpic going to die?’ There’s a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit as he says, ‘I’m sure Grandpic’s going to be all right. But if it was you, I don’t know what I’d do.’ This boisterous ten-year-old with dancing eyes and front teeth that cross over, who is always running, jumping, shouting or bragging, squeezes my heart.

  Later, Justine puts her arms around me. ‘It’s natural that you’re upset, but Grandpa has had a good life,’ she says. The sensitivity of my children touches me. Sometimes it seems that they are far wiser and more mature than I am.

  At the hospital my mother sits miserably at the foot of my father’s bed, drowning inside her bulky winter coat which she refuses to take off even though the hospital is overheated. Her optimism has deserted her and she seems to have shrunk, swallowed up by her own unhappiness. She can’t bring herself to talk openly about his illness, and I can’t face the thought of his death or her grief.

  To relieve her pent-up anger, she wages war with one of the nurses, the one my father jocularly calls ‘The Duchess’ because she has such regal bearing. It irritates my mother that this woman has long conversations with my father and walks past her as if she wasn’t there, as she does right now. ‘She’s got a nerve. Now she’ll disturb him,’ my mother bristles. Later, when we go into his room, his eyes have a dreamy look. ‘The Duchess sat beside me, held my hand and kept saying, “You’ll be all right, my dear, you’ll be all right.” It was so comforting.’ It’s touching and painful that this stranger understands what he needs better than we do.

  Next morning, the tall specialist with wavy hair carefully combed across his bald scalp asks me to step outside. Everything about him, from the concern in his eyes, the breathless voice and the way he stoops towards me, tells me what his message will be. Not taking his eyes off my face, he gives me scientific information about sedimention rates, liver function tests and white cells. He says something about a blocked bile duct and a tumour. ‘We can operate to relieve the blockage,’ he says.

  Later Michael explains it to me gently, several times, because there’s a humming in my head and I keep tuning out. My father has cancer of the head of the pancreas which has spread. It’s not curable. Surgery can relieve the blockage but it won’t alter the outcome. I feel numb. Death is the down payment we make on life, but it’s always too soon to discharge that debt.

  Michael told me that when they were alone, my father had said, ‘I’m not afraid of dying. My conscience is quite clear. I’ve never knowingly hurt anyone. But I don’t want to suffer, linger or become dependent. What do you think about surgery?’

  In a voice he tried to keep steady, Michael replied, ‘I don’t think that it will solve the problem. You don’t have any pain. If it was me, I wouldn’t have it. I’d go home.’ My father nodded. He’d made his decision.

  When he returned home, he looked so serene and was in such good spirits that I wondered whether the doctors were mistaken after all. Perhaps he’d get well, I thought, ignoring the fact that he spent most of the day in bed and that even shaving exhausted him. We never talked about dying. I lacked the courage to bring it up, and he probably didn’t want to upset me, so we spent the precious last days of his life talking about things that didn’t matter, to avoid the only thing that did. He didn’t discuss his approaching death with my mother either. The only person he talked to openly was Michael.

  Not long after he came home, as we sat talking, he suddenly said, ‘Jews should never become complacent, even in a tolerant society like Australia. All Jewish children should know that anti-Semitism can occur anywhere at any time so that they’re prepared.’ He must have been reviewing his life. Several years later, when Sydney synagogues and Jewish day schools were fire-bombed, and more recently, when a Queensland politician with a racist platform started whipping up hatred against ethnic groups, his words came back to me.

  After saying goodbye to my father one afternoon and promising to return the following day, I was on my way home when something made me decide to go back and see him again. On the way, I did something I’d never done before. Stopping at a florist’s, I selected one perfect crimson rose for my father. When I handed it to him, his face lit up as if his dearest wish had just been granted.

  A few minutes later Justine arrived, as she did every afternoon after school. I didn’t expect Jonathan to come that day as he had soccer practice, but to my surprise the doorbell shrilled and there he was. Like me, he’d come on impulse. ‘I was already on the bus to go straight home, but suddenly I got off and caught the other bus to see Grandpic,’ he explained.

  ‘Am I very yellow today, Jonathan?’ my father asked.

  Jonathan scrutinised his face. ‘A bit,’ he replied.

  ‘Oh well, green or yellow, what’s the difference, as long as you feel all right,’ my father quipped. ‘Because apart from this illness, I’m really perfectly well!’ he smiled, and asked whether he’d like to watch television.

  Jonathan, who usually jumped at the chance, because at home we rationed the viewing, shook his head. ‘I’ve come to keep you company, not to keep the television company,’ he said.

  Glancing at my mother, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, her knuckles as white as her face, my father turned to Justine, ‘Look at Nana, she’s so upset, she takes everything too seriously.’ My mother hadn’t even told their closest friends how ill he was. My father hadn’t wanted anyone to see him weak and ill, dreading the pity in their faces. And she, always accustomed to bearing her burdens silently and alone, didn’t know how to accept compassion or share her pain.

  ‘Don’t come in to check on me tonight,’ he told my mother when she came to say goodnight after we’d gone. Ever since his illness, she had slept in the spare bedroom so that he wouldn’t be disturbed, and had placed a little bell on the bedside table in case he needed anything. ‘The floorboards creak and wake me up when you come in. Just go to bed. Don’t come in till I ring the bell,’ he said.

  Next morning, after Michael had left to see my father, I was washing my hair when the telephone rang. Michael’s voice sounded strange.
‘Leave everything and come,’ he said. I didn’t ask any questions. Twisting a towel around my sopping hair, I gathered the children and we sped towards my parents’ place, cursing every red light. One thought kept drumming through my mind. I hope I’m in time to say goodbye, to hold his hand and see a spark of recognition in his eyes. I didn’t realise that I’d already said goodbye with my rose.

  We ran up the two flights of stairs. The door was open, and I heard the jerky, heart-breaking sound of Michael sobbing, the loudest, most heart-wrenching sobs I’ve ever heard. The five of us stood with our arms wrapped around each other. My mother had tears in her eyes but she didn’t cry then, or later. Aunty Mania put her arm around her while she sat on the lounge suite, crushed and white, like a piece of crumpled paper, her chin trembling with the effort not to weep, staring at my father’s books on the walnut table beside his armchair. Many years later, my mother surprised me by admitting that she used to cry for him, alone at night. She had perfected the art of invisible grief during the Holocaust and it had become a habit.

  I rose and walked slowly towards the bedroom. The demarcation line between life and death is clear and shocking. The person who lay in my father’s bed was a wooden statue of my father, stiff and set. His jaw had dropped open and the light had gone from his eyes. When I stroked his cold head, even his hair felt dead. Michael moved forward and with a movement as gentle as a butterfly’s wing, closed his eyes.