In a spice market in Morocco Mum whispered to me, ‘Look at how little these people have and how much you are given. Never take that for granted, Ondine. That is a privilege, not a right.’
I looked around at the children, my age, blinded by disease, begging in rags next to crippled men with outstretched hands. ‘I won’t, Mum, I promise,’ I said, guilty for what we had. Too much. Again, I thought. Injustice. Silent suffering. I added this to my growing list of humanity’s failings. I had been reading about the Holocaust and it had marked me deeply. Six million Jews and millions of homosexuals, disabled, Romanis and many more tortured and murdered. At least one million of those were children, no different to me. The depths of depravity to which our species could fall. And this? How could we allow such disparity between wealth and poverty? The world was so unfair. And I was a part of it. Beyond privileged.
I should have been a spoilt pre-teen brat, and perhaps I was in some ways, but I was also fuelling my rage against the establishment, devouring my Animal Liberation magazines with greater intensity, ordering campaign stickers, posters and T-shirts, covering my bedroom walls and clothing myself in slogans.
After an awkward pubescence, an unfortunate fringe and some dabbling in shoulder pads (thanks, Mum), I swept into the serious no-messing-around teenage years. By fifteen I had channelled my sulky anger into full-blown rebellion. Climbing out of my bedroom window, across the roof and down a fig tree, I used my emergency Cabcharge card for midnight taxi rides to my boyfriend’s house. Or climbing out of my friend Danielle’s window, army crawling under her sleeping parents’ window, we used our fake IDs to get into nightclubs. Profuse lying, dope smoking, hitchhiking, sneaking out of school, I was a teenage cliché. My mother lay in bed after midnight, seething with anger and anxiety, awaiting my return.
‘What kind of child have we brought up? I must know where you are. You know how anxious I get,’ she said.
‘It’s time I told you,’ she said later that week, her voice cold and angry.
There had been a baby before Emile. Stillborn. She’d carried it full term but never known its sex, never seen its body. South Africa in the sixties. ‘That’s what happened in those days,’ she told me.
‘But the hardest times started before that.’ She took a strained breath. I braced myself.
She had seen her mother. In the car. In their garage. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Suicide.
‘Why she didn’t leave a note, anything, no sign, I will never understand.’ She shook her head abruptly, as if getting rid of a cobweb. Her brother Peter had also been an animal lover, she told me; he died later, could never recover from Micky’s death. There had been voices in his head. A lot of drugs. Little was known about mental health in the sixties. Had it been schizophrenia? Eric struggled to save him, taking him from doctor to doctor. But in the end, couldn’t.
I didn’t cry, didn’t talk, didn’t tell my friends. It was not a story to be told.
Episodes of hyperventilating began. Scary, not being able to breathe. My parents took me to the doctor, who recommended a brown paper bag to breathe into and said it was nothing to worry about. But I found it so hard to fall asleep, listening to the vexatious sounds of my own breath, that relaxation tapes became a nightly staple.
My magazines, coupled with an Animal Farm philosophy, ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’, and movies like Born Free and Gorillas in the Mist, pushed me into action. I got involved in my own variety of activism. Danielle, Alicia and I had become best friends. We shared a passion for rebellion. Alicia got me into The Cure; she painted the walls of her bedroom black and covered them in Robert Smith posters, wore only black T-shirts and Doc Martens. Danielle refused to participate at school, shirking homework to dream of the day when she could build herself a hut in the woods, disconnected from the grid. Danielle also loved animals. Soon after we met she became a vegetarian and together we decided to give up leather too. My father was still a vegetarian but we didn’t talk about it together, didn’t discuss the reasons why. With Danielle, I finally felt someone not only understood my pain but was as angry as I was.
With free tickets from my parents to opening nights, Danielle and I wandered the halls of Sydney’s Opera House with weapons in our hands.
I had taken small white sticky labels from my mother’s office drawer. In thin black felt-tip we had written Fur is murder on each one. At the Opera House, when we saw a fur-clad woman, champagne in hand, we would catch each other’s eye.
‘Three o’clock,’ Danielle said as she saw one woman wearing a full-length fur directly to my right. We giggled as we watched her walk through the crowd with the sticker on her back. We told no one. On another night we smudged toothpaste to graffiti fur-store windows in the city centre. We were drunk with rebellion, vindication, camaraderie. I breathed easily. This was happiness. Luckily, we never got caught.
After I got my driver’s licence, Danielle and I borrowed Gran’s car to drive seventeen hours south-west to a muddy wetland for the start of the hunting season. I waded through the water at daybreak and rescued ducks. I wrote a sad poem about blood dripping from a duck’s mouth as it lay on my lap in the inflatable canoe. My parents wrote a note for school saying that I was having an important educative experience. Although scared of the intensity of my feelings, they were proud of my dedication and passion. They had rebelled against the establishment in their own way, giving up their previously comfortable life in South Africa to make a statement against the apartheid government.
I didn’t have many animals around me and I still fantasised about the Beatrix Potter country life filled with rabbits, horses and wildlife. Dogs, however, were always a part of my daily life. Bronnie had passed away and Taurus, a beautiful, affectionate and eccentric blue-grey Doberman, arrived.
Emile and I had the responsibility of walking and feeding him every day. It was one of the activities that brought us together. Every week we would be trained by a trainer on how to train Taurus. He was large and dangerous looking, bred to be a fighter. Every second day I took him down to our local Sydney Harbour beach. As Taurus and I walked along the streets we practised heeling until, seeing the harbour in front of us, I unclipped his leash. Taurus would look at me momentarily before flying down to the grass, onto the sand and into the water to swim and chase and bark fanatically at the waterbirds.
I wanted little to do with my father’s riches; I made Dad drop me around the corner from school, I was so embarrassed by his car. Kombi vans, tattoos, The Cure . . . now they were worth pursuing. I was fiercely proud that money had no impact on me, but in retrospect that is only something you can say if you have it, in mounds. Little did I know how much I would need that money later in my life; how important money can be when things go wrong.
THREE
At eighteen I moved out of home and into a shared apartment in Bondi Beach. Dad somehow sensed my pressing need for my own space and offered to pay my rent. I started studying Communications at university, ironically perhaps since I was still quiet, shy and loath to discuss my feelings. I rarely brushed my hair and earned extra money by door-knocking for Greenpeace. I wore vinyl boots, black leggings, tie-dye singlets and a shell as a necklace. I majored in Film and Philosophy but the latter did little to help me understand the injustices I saw in the world.
‘Humanity is a mistake,’ I told my friend Denise through a smoky haze of weed. ‘God stuffed up with us. Seriously. Everything else is perfect. Humans, we are the ones who have a fault. Destroying the earth and each other. Hopefully one day we will be eradicated,’ I continued,‘so other beings on earth can prosper.’
She remained silent, watching her own arms move and turn above her head to the beat of Bob Marley.
Although I had grown up in an atheist household, I couldn’t believe nature was an accident, the product of a random series of events. The beauty in nature was too awesome. Subtle ridges where the pip of a ripe summer peach met the flesh. Frangipani flowers, gold and white and smelling like heaven. Spouts of whale
s with giant tails splashing on the horizon. The pink inner curve of the seashell I had made into a necklace. Perhaps God had created the natural world and then gone AWOL.
I wanted to be a global citizen, just like my mum. I had the travelling bug; I would go anywhere, everywhere. I wanted danger, or at least a small taste of it. After a gourmet walking tour of Tuscany with my father, I was desperate for adventure. I met up with a guy in Paris and travelled to Amsterdam with him, decided I didn’t like him or his cocaine habit, and figured that I would ditch Europe for Israel to look up a high-school friend, Dana, who was on a year’s overseas study program. I flew into Tel Aviv, barely knowing or caring where I was, high on the drug of liberation. We had rarely discussed Israel at home, and I knew nothing of the politics and little of the history.
But at nineteen, behind the ancient walls of Jerusalem, I met someone. Dror lived on the same floor in the student accommodation at Tel Aviv University as Dana. He had finished national service a year before; he had been in an elite special-forces unit, the Paratroopers. He was studying Mathematics with a view to eventually returning to the States, where his family had moved when he was nine, and getting into Medicine there.
Dana had told Dror that her friend from Australia was visiting, and he had offered to show us around the old walled city of Jerusalem with his friend Roni. We met them at the Jerusalem central bus station after they’d finished a two-day hike through the desert. Dana and I watched them walk towards us, dirty, smelly and dehydrated.
It wasn’t an obvious choice. Dror certainly didn’t look like any guys I had ever known in Sydney.
Together, we walked towards the Kotel, or the Western Wall, the holiest of Jewish sites in the world. The city was insane. Long-bearded ultra-Orthodox Jews in black hats and black suits mingled seamlessly with Arabs, Christian pilgrims and secular Israelis in miniskirts and heels. People shouted and pushed past each other roughly. I saw civilians with handguns in holsters. Sexy young Israeli men holding giant rifles checked Dana and me out. Everyone smoked and the ancient cobbled streets were paved with cigarette butts and covered in graffiti. Decrepit churches, mosques and synagogues desperately in need of fresh paint fought for space and attention. I had imagined such a holy place to be a sanctuary of peace and serenity. A quiet place for reflection. But this was the opposite.
We saw the Kotel in the distance: a twenty-metre high wall made of enormous pale boulders. Green grasses hung down from many of its cracks and white doves flew in and out of their small nesting crevices. If you looked closely, tens of thousands of tiny rolled-up pieces of paper were evident between the lower stones as well as littered on the floor beneath: all heartfelt handwritten prayers to God. It was really quite stunning. A security machine beeped as Dror entered the boundary of the Kotel. ‘Must be this,’ he said, unstrapping a large knife from his leg and handing it to the security man, who gave him the once-over, profiling him as safe, before handing back his knife and allowing him through. Later, we stopped to eat. The place was a hole in the wall. Literally.
‘This is good.’ Dror pointed to the spinning carcass. ‘Do you want to try some?’
Dror had a soft, kind voice. And an American accent. His name meant ‘freedom’ in Hebrew.
‘Umm, no, I don’t eat meat,’ I said. ‘I like falafel!’ I added brightly.
‘What do you mean?’ He looked at me as though he had never heard such a crazy-arse idea. ‘Why?’
‘Well,’ I said carefully, ‘because I care about animals and I don’t like to contribute to their suffering. I am in the privileged position,’ I said, thinking of those who are poverty-stricken and must eat what they can, ‘of having a choice.’
‘Oh, wow, that’s really interesting,’ he said genuinely while wolfing down his lamb shawarma. We talked about it for a few more minutes. I liked his open mind and had noticed he patted the street dog on the corner too.
That evening we found a youth hostel. It was in the Jewish Quarter and therefore religious and segregated by sex, so Dror and Roni stayed in a different hostel. We arranged to meet up after a shower and a change of clothes. Dror scrubbed up well. He was dangerously close to the perfect trifecta: handsome, adventurous, smart. What else did he offer?
After dancing at a club until 2 am, Dror, Roni, Dana and I lay down on the street, realising we had missed curfew and been locked out of our youth hostels.
Dror’s head was next to mine on the dirty cobbles. I could feel the heat of his body.
‘This is cool,’ I whispered.
‘Who knows where the night will take us,’ he said, echoing my thoughts.
Where would my life take me? I wondered. I certainly didn’t see myself living a routine, boring, suburban life. Oh no. Not me. Africa beckoned. The African wildlife of my National Geographic magazines. I had seen the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, but not Mozambique and Botswana, where the world’s most beautiful animals could be found. I had to go. In the back of my mind I knew farm animals also needed a saviour. That seemed harder. But I had made a vow to Bronnie that afternoon years ago on my bedroom floor. Could Dror be a partner in the plan? Adventure. Freedom. Nature.
After our twenty-four-hour interlude in Jerusalem, Dror and I kept in touch through the ancient custom of letter-writing until we met six months later in the US. He had flunked university in Israel; his Hebrew reading and writing were not up to scratch, not surprising given he had done his schooling in the States; despite being fluent in spoken Hebrew, he knew he could succeed more easily with his studies in English. He wrote that he was buying a motorbike.
‘So, did you get the bike yet?’ I asked hopefully when I called him from the health retreat where I was holidaying with my parents.
I had decided to take up their offer to come with them to the States, but I was regretting it now, bored and stuck at the Arizona health ranch they stayed at every year, a welcome rest after Dad’s US board meetings. I imagined Dror would roar down the dining-room path on a Harley, past the cacti and calorie-counting Americans, and whisk me away to a new world. I rolled my eyes at the regimen of massages and stretch classes and the wealthy New York A-type lawyers, doctors and bankers who needed scheduled relaxation.
‘It’s a bit far, about a three-day drive . . . and I’m driving the night shift this week,’ he said apologetically. He was studying full-time at a cheap LA college, heavily in student-loan debt and barely surviving on his income as a taxi driver. ‘But how about you come to LA? I’ll take time off and we’ll go cruising up the coast.’
Four days later my parents and I flew into LA and arrived at our five-star hotel. Dror appeared the next day in tattered jeans and an old T-shirt. Not the kind you bought already ripped and crushed.The cheap and daggy type, two for ten dollars at Kmart. He was unsophisticated, unshaven and had no knowledge of table manners. My parents smiled and made small talk, thinking our union was just another stage in my rebellion.
Wind in my hair, arms wrapped around his strong back, we weaved his sky-blue 750 Kawasaki up the windy winter California coast. And so I fell in love. His skin was blackened by a passion for long-distance running and his hair was like black lamb’s wool, with a tendency to puff into an afro. Perhaps it was his hands that did it, so different to mine. They exuded heat. When we held hands, it was yin with yang. His dark muscled palm, thick strong fingers sprouting with black hair, interwoven with mine, long, pink and freckled.
We discussed travelling and the liberation of carrying all your earthly possessions on your back. He was raw adventure: earthbound and real. Perhaps, most importantly, I never tired of his company, never felt the need to escape him as I did with others. We were opposites in some ways: he liked an open house, with people popping in unannounced for coffee, while I fantasised about a dark mossy cave devoid of other human life. Although he was social, curious about people, loved to chat and hear their stories, he was also comfortable in his own company, in his own skin. We could talk for hours and we could be silent together.
Despite having
many girlfriends from high school and university, I was in essence a loner. Around friends, I became the person they wanted me to be and that was draining. I could muster the effort if I felt good, but if I was tired or sad it was all too much to deal with. Then, rather than seeking solace with others, I craved time alone. I didn’t have the kinds of friendships I saw in movies: girlfriends calling each other every day, analysing the details of every experience, sharing all their thoughts and feelings. I hated the phone; it made me feel exposed as I couldn’t read the other person’s expression for signs of disinterest. The smallest sign and I would shut off. Move on. Change the subject. ‘Oversensitive,’ my brother had teased me as a child. Later, I was referred to as ‘aloof ’. One friend described me as an onion: hard to get to know, layers upon layers.
I could be fully myself with Dror.
A month later he called me at home.
‘So, I’m thinking of deferring school and coming to Australia for a while . . . What do you think?’
I thought he was my soulmate. It turns out I was right.
The Miracle of Love Page 3