by Yvonne Fein
She reads me,
Italian words of love
And an English word
I’d never heard
That means ‘opaque’.
She says,
‘Write me a poem.’
I flick my fingers
And comply.
Carla gave me her Parker fountain pen to write that poem. I remember loving that pen (pen envy?) and quite liking what it produced, though I was never much of a poet. All I knew was that whenever I would re-read the copy I made for myself, it would instantly transport me to the fumoir where we smoked passively at least as much as we did actively. It was a place where we laughed at nonsense because we were all so very, very, witty and chic, our cigarette-holders held with limp-wristed élan. The coffee we drank was strong enough to render us so jittery that we had trouble sleeping at bedtime.
Even though we shared some classes together, Carla and I interacted mainly in the fumoir. She was two months younger than I and whenever I wanted to tease her, I reminded her that I was the older and that she must therefore defer to me in all matters. The only session of serious academe we shared was Advanced English Literature—testament to her London schooling. For the rest, I was in beginners French and advanced German, and she was in beginners German and advanced French.
And what was I doing in Advanced German?
In the early days of my parents’ emigration to Australia, my sister and I were still very young. Like so many of their generation, our elders worked obsessively in their garment business. But that meant they were never there when we came home from school. Someone else had to look after us.
In this way a series of German nannies entered our lives. Much later my sister and I understood them to have been gentile, political refugees who had fled Hitler’s Germany. Yet, oddly enough, from this point, our ongoing love affair with the German language began. These women encouraged us to delve deeply into all manner of things Teutonic. They read and talked to us in their elegant German, rendering us so fluent that sometimes we even dreamed in their language.
Frau Bachmeier stands out in my mind for having taught us about Heinrich Heine, the tormented Jewish poet. I came to love his writing and memorised as much of it as my brain could retain.
I am hated alike by Jew and Christian, he wrote in 1826. I regret very deeply that I had myself baptised. I do not see that I have been the better for it since. On the contrary, I have known nothing but misfortunes and mischances.
On Wednesdays, I went to do M. Duchamps’s bidding, to paint a masterpiece for him. Like most of les jeunes dames, I desired to arrest his attention with my genius. Sad to say, my artistic merit was about on a par with my poetic, and my desire far outstripped my ability. Perhaps if Carla were to lend me her fountain pen again, say, for an ink sketch, I could produce something that would separate me from the multitude. But she never did, though it was not for my want of asking. And M. Duchamps? He was indeed good looking, and he knew it. The handsome ones always do. But he never saw it as a means to an ignoble end. He never touched us. And he could have. He could have, but he didn’t.
MAY 1972
So, we survived yet another Etiquette session with Mme Mirielle. It was an excruciating exercise in yawn-suppression. But now, after dinner, we settled back in the fumoir. I was happy to have Maria-Elena opposite me as I sat between Carla and Ivory. We lit up and puffed in genial silence.
‘I’ve been reading,’ Carla said.
‘Not again,’ Ivory groaned.
Carla had a habit of writing down quotable quotes from her research. As long as they had nothing to do with her schoolwork.
‘Nietzsche, Kahlil Gibran and Sylvia Plath, today,’ she said.
It was a particularly unsavoury triumvirate. I knew that Nietzsche had been no friend of the Jews; that Gibran produced a litany of triteness; and Plath a distillation of self-hate leading to suicide. I didn’t want to go there.
Maria-Elena held out her hand and quickly skimmed Carla’s quotes. She shrugged, refusing to engage, and handed it on to Ivory who shook her head, passing it to me.
Nietzsche: It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.
Gibran: Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Plath: We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.
I looked at Maria-Elena and I felt like shaking Carla. The last thing Maria-Elena needed was to contemplate death, suicide or aerial meetings, which last probably required death in order to be facilitated.
‘Bloody hell,’ I said, raising my eyes to meet Maria-Elena’s, but she shook her head, almost imperceptibly. I was not to say anything.
‘You haven’t said “Jesus Christ” yet, tonight,’ said Carla. That’s my favourite. ‘But I’ve always wanted to know, Katie, which Jews say, “Jesus Christ”?’
‘Pretty much all of us, where I come from. It’s a way of blaspheming that won’t anger the Jewish God.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Carla said. She wasn’t sure whether or not to be offended.
‘Jesus isn’t holy to Jews. He’s simply not part of our story. When any of us do take the time to contemplate him, it is clear he was born out of wedlock. I went to the Britannica and even as far as Matthew is concerned, the issue of immaculate conception hangs in the air.’
Carla snatched the paper from my hands and stalked out of the room.
Maria-Elena looked at me and said, ‘I never told Carla about Isabella’s attempted suicide. She’d never have come up with all those things if she’d known.’
‘You never told me, either,’ said Ivory.
‘I’m sorry.’ She shrugged again. ‘I couldn’t at the time.’
‘You did tell Katie, though.’
‘I know. Forgive me. But Katie grew up with many strange and terrible stories. It makes her a good listener. I don’t think there’s much that any one of us could tell her that would be worse than what she knows.’
I shook my head. I could think of nothing to say.
She smiled at me, one of her melancholy smiles. ‘It’s true. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise.’
Carla was predictable. After any argument it would never take her long to come back and light up with her customary sangfroid. But this time I would not kiss her cheek and stroke her hand as I usually did. This time I did not see how it could all be made light of, even if she hadn’t known. I was angry with her. Hers was the sort of carelessness played out by the preposterously wealthy. How rarely they understood the appalling extent to which they might hurt people. True, Maria-Elena’s family wealth probably exceeded Carla’s, but the difference between them lay not in dollars but somewhere within Maria-Elena’s innate humility and her rejection of the concept of entitlement.
Carla did come back, but was still angry. I think my Jesus exegesis had really unsettled her.
Her laughter had a high-pitched inflection. Now, to prove she was still in control of matters, she wanted to discuss suicide and its appeal to genius. She said she had suicidal thoughts quite often. Ivory’s pale English skin went paler still. I wanted to halt Carla’s words but found myself speechless.
‘Would you really do it?’ Maria-Elena asked, her voice quiet.
‘I know how. My brother’s girlfriend told me and also how you make sure it works. You step into a hot bath and soak awhile. Then, with a straight razor, you make a vertical slit—not a horizontal one, as everyone thinks—along the most visible vein which—–’
‘Thank you, Carla,’ said impossible-to-rile Maria-Elena. ‘Now I am able to visualise exactly how my sister tried to meet her end. I am in your debt.’ She left the room and we knew she wouldn’t be back any time soon.
‘You’re an idiot,’ said Ivory.
‘How was I supposed to know?�
�� asked Carla.
‘If two people tell you you’re an idiot, you should definitely lie down,’ I said.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Go after her and apologise,’ Ivory said
‘Yes, go,’ I said.
Carla seemed to deflate. She went to leave but stopped, hand on door handle. I flinched in anticipation. I knew her well enough to realise she was about to attack.
‘Who appointed you to be the keeper of my conscience?’ she asked me.
I wondered why Ivory was not also on the receiving end.
‘You crowd me, Kate, do you know that? Wherever I am, you find me. Whatever I do, you have an opinion on it. It’s too much, too much. I love you but I’m not your younger sister, I’m not your wife, for God’s sake. I’m thinking that perhaps we should take turns at the fumoir. A break from each other.’
‘Go find Maria-Elena’ said Ivory. ‘The two of you don’t want to be going to sleep on all this.’
What about my going to sleep on all this with Carla? I ask, but it is an internal inquiry.
I would be humiliated voicing it.
Carla left. Ivory and I let the silence, broken only by the flick of a lighter, float over us.
‘She’s not right, is she?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘Maybe. Yeah. There’s something to it.’
‘But we’re all friends. We hang around with each other pretty much all the time. It’s not just me and Carla.’
Ivory avoided my gaze. ‘You do hang around with her more than most,’ she said.
Her words were like Chèf Béranger’s hot chilli powder drifting too close to my face.
My eyes began to water.
‘Oh please, you’re not really going to cry now, are you?’ said Ivory.
I shook my head and wiped my eyes. There was little to be gained by pretending this whole thing was a figment of everyone’s imagination but mine.
‘Maybe she is right,’ I said at last. ‘Maybe I do hang around her too much. I don’t know why. It’s weird. I’ve never felt like this before. I just want to be with her all the time. What is that? Even Kristjana has had a word with me about it, her roommate. How obvious must I be? Just the other day, she told me to back off. Quietly, of course. You know how she is.’
Ivory wasn’t perturbed by my fervour.
‘So back off awhile,’ she said. ‘Carla is Carla. She always forgets to be angry. You’re in the throes of what the Yanks call a “girl crush”. Don’t fight it, just try and calm down when you think you absolutely must see her. Go outside. Run around the front garden. It’s the sort of thing you’ll have to do when you finally decide to give up smoking.’
‘Are you saying I’m an addict?’
‘C’est bien ça, oui?’
C’est bien ça, indeed! My internal idiot-meter clucked loudly, somewhere in the region of my cerebellum. I ignored it; the message was always the same: ‘Lie down; lie down’.
So, I went to bed with a very thick novel but did not fall asleep before 4.00 a.m. even though I was most definitely lying down.
I remember those fraught sessions when for three or four days Carla and I stalked past each other as we occupied our designated times in the fumoir. I was miserable. Maria-Elena told me Carla was miserable, too. That helped. And Ivory was right. It didn’t take much time for normality to resume, but I was careful around Carla in a way I had not been before. There was more to her than I had initially thought, or less. I wasn’t sure.
And as far as her baiting me with those quotations of hers, I wish I’d had the presence of mind then to retaliate with my armoury of Heinrich Heine quotes, those beautiful things locked in my brain, surely, for just such a situation. Not that he also did not have suicidal thoughts, but his work was a celebration of life rather than a repudiation of it.
The days I hated most were when Carla received letters from her beau.
‘Aristide has written,’ she would declare and take herself off to a corner of the fumoir to savour his communication. I understood that they were childhood sweethearts, a circumstance of which her parents approved now that they were both grown. It was taken as a matter of course that they would wed and eventually inherit the dual family fortunes. Aristide’s family was in banking, whatever that meant.
She knew I was jealous and laughed at me. ‘You can’t marry me. We can’t live forever on the shores of this golden lake. At the end of the year, you’ll forget all about me when you go off to study so you can pretend to be a lawyer, and I will marry my beautiful Aristide and pretend to be a wife.’
‘What does that mean? Pretend?’
‘Will you really make a life of defending thieves and murderers?’ she asked. ‘And can you see me having 2.5 children and preparing Aristide’s pipe and slippers for when he comes home after banking all day? Serving him food? Mixing him drinks?’
‘You don’t know that that’s what he’ll expect.’
She laughed, a silvery sound. For some reason, I hated it.
‘I do know that I have not and certainly will not—ever—promise him anything like that,’ she said. For a moment she looked serious. ‘I won’t be defined by the other women in his life. I won’t vow to love, honour and obey.’
‘What other women?’
‘His mother, his sisters, cousins.’
‘So why all the sighing and the pleasure when his letters arrive?’
‘That’s how I’m supposed to react. And in spite of everything, I do love the way he writes. I think he is a true romantic’
‘Aren’t you worried you’ll hurt him?’
Again, the silvery laugh. ‘Does it matter?’
I was dismayed. That interminable carelessness. ‘I would think it mattered a great deal. To Aristide.’
For a few days I could not meet her eye, could not even talk to her, but she came to me, contrition and apology in her eyes. She stroked my hand and kissed my cheek, as was our wont when it was time for an argument to be over.
‘You mustn’t take me so seriously,’ she said. ‘You know I don’t mean half the things I say.’
‘Which half?’
‘I don’t know…just half. Don’t look so grim, Katie.’ She kissed my cheek again. ‘Have you stopped loving me?’
‘Never,’ I sighed.
She smiled one of her brightest smiles, and as always, I was beguiled.
Wednesday afternoons were definitely the best times of the week. In English it’s called ‘sport’, or, if you prefer French, ‘sport’. Then there’s always the Italian version, ‘sport’. And finally, the German rendition with an uppercase ‘S’ because ‘Sport’ is a noun and all German nouns are capitalised.
So, sport on Wednesdays. Yes.
In the winter we were given a choice between horse-riding or skiing up in Leysin; and in the summer, tennis or swimming.
No contest. I put up my hand for skiing and swimming, respectively.
Most of the girls were amazed that an Australian could ski at all.
‘Isn’t it all deserts and kangaroos down there?’ asked Delyth, the girl from Wales.
‘Don’t be so proud of your ignorance,’ snapped Iris from Pyrmont. ‘Australia is vast and has all manner of climates.’
‘Ignore her,’ I told Delyth who had turned a dull shade of tomato. ‘Of course, there are deserts and kangaroos. But we have lovely cities, lakes and mountains, too.’
Ivory and Maria-Elena chose horse riding. Carla and I took to the snow, Carla rendered a fine and daring skier from wintering in the Dolomites most of her life. I learned to ski in Victoria, firstly at Mt Buffalo on a gentle slope called Dingo Dell, and later on, in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales. Thredbo was a marvellous destination, with the longest ski runs in the country. My sister and I, together with our best friend Annie, learnt to pilot the Crackenback
and Ramshead runs with solid technique. We were confident, if not graceful, skiers; and, of course, we were all in love with our instructor, Gernot. He was originally from Austria and achingly handsome. When I was sixteen he broke his spine in a freak skiing accident that would render him a quadriplegic…
What amazed me was how anaemic the sun’s rays were here in the northern hemisphere. Back home if you didn’t slather on enough sunscreen against its relentless blue-gold fire, you risked ending up with second-degree burns after a day on the slopes. Here the girls laughed at my painstaking application on the first day, so that by the end of proceedings, I was exposing my face, unprotected to the elements with the best of them. Melanoma was a rare, strange word in Europe at the time.
Sometimes, when we wedeled our way down towards Lac Aï, I allowed Carla to whistle past me, stopping to watch as her slender silhouette darkened before the pale gleam cast by the sun. On occasion, she would catch me watching and lift a stock as if to say, ‘Come on, what are you waiting for?’ I moved off immediately. How to explain to her the beauty of her shadow against the light?
I was introduced to the strenuous delights of cross-country skiing. Carla and I competed shamelessly for the gold medal that was to be awarded to the best and fastest skier on the last day of our sessions. In the end, Kristjana from Iceland took the prize. Something to do with having skied to school every day of her life, and to the local grocery shop for her mother at least four days out of every seven and even to parties on Saturday nights when she was older. To hear her tell it, the only time she took off her skis was when she went to bed or the toilet, and even then, not always.
That was her story anyway. And who was there to gainsay her? She was a modest girl and I think she was made uncomfortable by the prize. Perhaps she thought that explaining it away in such a fashion would protect her from arousing too much envy. But where there were so many girls, there was also an ample amount of malice. Kristjana’s strategy for survival in our little hotpot of bitchiness was to zoom low under the radar, in the hope that this would cause her to be invisible to the high fliers. They could be brutal if they sensed weakness. Thus, she was always near the back of any queue, no matter its objective; she never complained when it was her turn to clear the tables and she certainly did not volunteer any answers in the classroom, which must have caused her untold frustration. I saw how bright she was when she would occasionally seek refuge in our quartet, her fine intelligence showering us with enough sparks to light up a roomful of cigarettes. She was not even a smoker, but she had made a career of lying down.