Lola Bensky Read online

  About the Author

  Lily Brett

  Lily Brett was born in Germany and came to Melbourne with her parents in 1948. She is one of Australia’s most prolific and successful authors. She has published six works of fiction, seven books of poetry, and three essay collections to much critical acclaim in Australia and around the world. Lily Brett is married to the Australian painter David Rankin. They have three children and live in New York.

  Also by Lily Brett

  FICTION

  Things Could Be Worse

  What God Wants

  Just Like That

  Too Many Men

  You Gotta Have Balls

  ESSAYS

  In Full View

  New York

  Between Mexico and Poland

  POETRY

  The Auschwitz Poems

  Poland and Other Poems

  After the War

  Unintended Consequences

  In Her Strapless Dresses

  Mud in My Tears

  Blistered Days

  Praise for Lily Brett

  ‘One of a rare breed … a polished stylist with brains, wit and a message.’ – Sun-Herald

  ‘Give Brett and Oscar.’ – Australian

  ‘Full of wit and earthy wisdom in the most surprising ways.’ – Vogue

  ‘A very funny writer with a feel for the vagaries of conversation and behaviour.’ – Age

  ‘One of our most witty and candid novelists and poets.’ – Australian Financial Review

  ‘At once haunting, riotously funny and deeply touching … The most delightful surprise of the year.’ – Publishers Weekly

  ‘Brett writes with great wit and a sometimes shockingly base humour, which is always very funny.’ – Sunday Age

  ‘The rewards are ample … exasperating and exhilarating.’ – Canberra Times

  ‘This is writing of a high order of accomplishment.’ – Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Mordecai Richler … add New York-based Australian Lily Brett to that list.’ – Courier Mail

  ‘Brett is both savagely and affectionately funny about her Jewish community. She demands that we own up to the past and give it life in our present.’ – Herald-Sun

  ‘As Brett’s readers we get soundscapes, mindscapes, and feelingscapes … We are drawn closer to what Brett chooses to give us as people who cluster nearer to the storyteller’s candle when all else is dark.’ – Australian Book Review

  for David,

  for decades of love,

  with love

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Reading Group Notes

  1

  Lola Bensky was sitting on an uncomfortably high stool. She could feel the nylon threads of her fishnet tights digging into her thighs.

  She had put a wad of tissues underneath the fishnet, on the inside of each of her thighs. The tissues, which were supposed to stop her thighs rubbing against each other and chafing her skin, had shredded, and now her flesh poked through the mesh in small, shiny, tightly packed pink squares.

  She tried to move into a more comfortable position. She didn’t like sitting on stools. And she didn’t like heights. She noticed a sprinkling of disintegrated tissue on the floor, below her left foot. She decided to sit very still. And to go on a diet.

  Jimi Hendrix, who was sitting on a slightly lower stool, looked at her. His face had a quietness about it. There was no sign of the Jimi Hendrix who, just thirty minutes earlier, had been humping the microphone stand on stage and fucking his guitar. There was no sign of the Jimi Hendrix whose guitar had whined and moaned and shuddered in a frenzied, carnal staccato with his body.

  Jimi Hendrix removed the brightly-coloured patterned silk scarf that was tied around his neck. ‘Are you comfortable?’ he said to Lola Bensky, in a soft, improbably polite voice. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, looking at him and trying to separate her thighs.

  She thought that Jimi Hendrix had probably never had to go on a diet. She thought he was probably naturally lean. She had never been lean. She had a photograph of herself in the displaced person’s camp, in Germany, where she was born. She was three months old in the photograph. And she was chubby. How could a baby born in a DP camp be chubby? Lola was sure that not many of the camp’s other inmates, mostly Jews who had survived Nazi death camps, were chubby.

  Lola was hot. Jimi Hendrix’s dressing-room, the room they were in, was small. And overheated. And Lola was overdressed. It was winter, in London. Lola wasn’t used to cold winters. She’d grown up in Melbourne, Australia, where winter was barely distinguishable from spring or autumn.

  She looked at the questions she had prepared. ‘You’re not going to ask me what my gimmick is?’ Jimi Hendrix said to her.

  ‘No,’ said Lola. The question threw her a bit. She didn’t know he had a gimmick. Maybe someone had suggested that playing his guitar with his teeth was a gimmick? Or flicking out his tongue? Or fondling the neck of his guitar? She didn’t know.

  She did know that he was born in 1942 to a mother who had just turned seventeen and a father who was away in the army. She knew that from the time he was a baby he was farmed out to various people until his father came back from the army, when Jimi was three. She knew that his parents, who were separated, got back together and had four more children, Jimi’s brothers, Leon and Joseph, and his sisters, Kathy and Pamela. Joseph was born with an array of disabilities, including a clubfoot, a cleft palate and one leg shorter than the other. Kathy was premature and blind and Pamela had some minor physical problems. Soon Joseph was made a ward of the state. And so were Kathy and Pamela. By the time Jimi was nine, his parents were divorced, his mother was alcoholic and his remaining brother was in and out of foster care. Lola knew that the family was so poor that Jimi was often dressed in rags.

  There was no evidence of this childhood turbulence on Jimi Hendrix’s face. He had a slow gaze and a languid half-smile. His lips made lazy, playful movements when he spoke.

  Lola liked accumulating information about people. She liked listing what she knew about their lives. She found it oddly soothing. She had her own lists, too. Lists of her mother and father’s dead relatives. Renia Bensky, Lola’s mother, had had four brothers, three sisters, a mother and father, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces. By the end of the war, everyone Renia Bensky was related to was dead. All murdered. Lola’s father’s mother and father and three brothers and a sister were also all murdered. Those lists bothered Lola.

  Lola preferred to list the various diets she was thinking about. She had just given up on a Mars Bar Diet she had tried for several days. All the Mars bars you could eat and nothing else. On her list of diets she had called it the Get Bored Diet. The basic principle was that the Mars bars would lose their appeal and she’d soon be eating very few of them, in fact she’d be eating very little. It hadn’t worked. The Egg and Cucumber Diet was on the top of her new list of diets.

  Lola didn’t have time to feel sad. She was too busy being cheerful or planning her interviews or thinking about food. Decades later, Lola Bensky would not be quite as immune to the lists of the dead. The dead would adhere themselves to her. But she didn’t yet know any of this. She was nineteen.

  She shifted around on her stool. Jimi Hendrix was watching her intently. The row of sequined beading around the neckline of her blue dress was starting to irritate her skin. All of her dresses had high necklines and were gathered above the bust in order to billow out and cover her hips and her thighs. One of her false eyelashes felt as though it were coming unstuck. She tried to press it back in plac
e. It was probably because of the heat, she thought. This was a new pair of false eyelashes. Cher had borrowed the ones Lola was wearing last week. They were lined with diamantes around the rim and were Lola’s favourites. Cher, in the middle of Lola’s interview with her, had asked where she had bought the diamante-lined eyelashes. ‘José of Melbourne, Australia,’ Lola had replied. Cher had looked blank, and then asked if she could borrow them. Lola had felt as though she couldn’t say no to Cher.

  People sometimes said that Lola looked like Cher. Lola thought that it was their dark, heavy-lidded eyes, high cheekbones and Semitic noses. ‘I’m twice her size’ was Lola’s standard answer to any remark about the similarity. Lola was sure that Cher didn’t ever have to diet. Sonny probably didn’t, either.

  Lola had been in London for two months. She had already interviewed The Small Faces, The Kinks, The Hollies, Cliff Richard, Gene Pitney, Spencer Davis, Olivia Newton-John and The Bee Gees. Olivia Newton-John and The Bee Gees were easy interviews to get as she had interviewed them before for Rock-Out, the newspaper she worked for in Australia.

  Lola’s tape recorder was on her lap. She looked down to make sure it was working. Jimi Hendrix licked his lips. His mouth didn’t look anything like the mobile, worryingly lascivious mouth she’d had to avert her eyes from during his performance.

  ‘Are you religious?’ Lola asked Jimi Hendrix. Lola envied people who were religious. She felt that being religious would be like being in a very large club and always having someone to talk to. Not God, just another member of the club.

  Lola’s mother, who had been brought up in a very religious home, wouldn’t tolerate any notion of religion. When Lola now and then asked if she could go to synagogue, mostly on high holy days, Renia used to say, ‘If you did see what I did see, you would not even talk about religion.’

  ‘You only want to go to synagogue to meet boys,’ Renia would add, in the tone of voice that suggested that meeting boys was akin to meeting your drug dealer or hanging out with a serial killer.

  Religion was a subject that couldn’t be discussed in the Bensky household. ‘There is no God,’ Renia Bensky would say, over and over again. ‘There is no God.’ She would say this in the middle of washing the dishes, or in the backyard hanging out the clothes or just sitting at the kitchen table by herself.

  ‘Am I religious?’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘I don’t believe in religion. I went to church a few times when I was a kid, but I got driven out because my clothes were too poor.’

  ‘That wasn’t very charitable or pious of the church or the congregants, was it?’ Lola said.

  ‘Charitable or pious,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘They’re interesting words. No, it wasn’t charitable or pious. I loved listening to the choir. But I never went back.’

  ‘What do you believe in?’ said Lola.

  ‘I don’t believe in heaven or hell,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if there is a God.’

  Renia Bensky could have told him the answer to that, Lola thought.

  ‘We all have our beliefs,’ Jimi Hendrix said slowly, as though he could hear Lola’s thoughts. ‘I try to believe in myself. If there is a God and God made us, then believing in myself means that I believe in God.’

  ‘I don’t believe in God,’ Lola said. ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘I hear you, man,’ Jimi Hendrix said. Lola thought he probably did.

  ‘Music is my religion,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘I play to go inside the soul of people.’

  Lola knew what it felt like to want to go inside people’s souls. She used to wish she could press herself right into people she liked so that she could be as close to them as it was possible to be. She wished she could get past the barriers of clothes and showers and clean hair and good manners.

  ‘Are you comfortable?’ Jimi Hendrix asked her, taking a packet of gum out of his pocket.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m very comfortable.’ Lola said.

  ‘You haven’t moved at all,’ he said.

  She was surprised, she hadn’t realised that he had been observing her that carefully. Most rock stars were so absorbed in themselves that you could have had a nervous breakdown or been dancing a jig and they wouldn’t have noticed.

  Lola moved her head and her shoulders in an effort to appear more mobile. She looked at the floor. She didn’t think any more shredded tissue had dropped from between her thighs. ‘I like sitting still,’ she said.

  Jimi Hendrix smiled. It was the sweetest smile. The sort of smile you’d expect to see on the face of a choirboy. The smile was so far removed from the expression on his face when he was playing to go inside the souls of people. You wouldn’t think that the same face, the peaceful, almost sinless face that she was looking at now, could accommodate such diverse and possibly conflicting expressions.

  Jimi Hendrix offered Lola a piece of gum. ‘No thanks,’ she said. She shifted slightly on the stool and tried to clamp her thighs even closer together.

  ‘Were you a happy child?’ she asked him. Lola felt that there were a lot of people who were happy children. She wasn’t one of them. It made her sad to think that she mostly remembered being unhappy. There must have been happy days. She could think of happy moments. Moments when someone, particularly a man, told Renia how beautiful she was and Renia glowed from the compliment. Or moments when Renia, flushed with excitement, in a dress she’d bought at a bargain sale, looked at herself in the mirror and looked happy. Lola thought there were probably a lot of people who thought of their childhoods as happy. As a series of one happy day after another. Maybe they were taken on picnics with picnic hampers and woollen rugs to sit on. Maybe their mothers held their hands and allowed them to eat as many ice-creams as they wanted.

  ‘I was a very shy child,’ Jimi Hendrix said. Lola believed him. He still looked shy. At least here, in this dressing-room, away from the stage, he looked shy. ‘My father was very strict. I didn’t speak unless I was spoken to. My mother drank a lot. She didn’t take care of herself. Still, she was a groovy mother.’

  Lola didn’t think a mother who drank and didn’t take care of herself sounded at all groovy. Jimi Hendrix looked pensive. ‘My mother and father used to fight a lot. Things would be quiet for a couple of months and then there’d be another fallout and I knew I’d have to be getting ready to be sent off somewhere. To my grandmother’s place or to a friend of the family’s place. My parents weren’t around that much. They got divorced when I was nine.’

  Lola felt sad. She felt sorry for Jimi Hendrix. She knew what it felt like, as a child, to feel that there was too much that was unpredictable. And too much that was incomprehensible. ‘My parents didn’t get divorced and never argued,’ she said. ‘But they weren’t around. They seemed to be there. But they weren’t. They were on another planet.’

  Decades later, Lola would learn that she had been right. That Renia Bensky, who was in the kitchen, banging the saucepans as she lifted them out of the cupboard or grinding meat in the old, loud meat grinder, was not there. Renia Bensky was somewhere else. She was with her dead.

  In the death camps, it was impossible to mourn the dead. There were no farewells, no burials, no memorials. Without the goodbyes, Renia Bensky, like many others, remained locked in a frozen dialogue with her dead. For Renia Bensky, her dead were still alive. They took up most of the space in her heart.

  ‘Oh, man,’ said Jimi Hendrix, ‘having your parents around but not around, that must have been tough.’

  ‘I don’t remember it being tough,’ said Lola. ‘And I don’t remember ever crying as a child.’

  ‘I cried when my mother died,’ Jimi Hendrix said.

  An awkward silence descended on them. As though they had both been taken by surprise and were a little embarrassed at the unexpected turn the conversation had taken. Lola realised she had moved to one side when she was talking. She straightened herself up. She noticed some miniscule pieces of tissue float to the floor. Maybe Jimi Hendrix would think it was dandruff, she thought.

  ‘Were you upset by
the fighting in your house?’ she said to him.

  ‘Sure I was,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘Man, I hated it. I used to hide in a closet. Children know what’s going on without being told. The fights were mostly over money. I knew and I hated it. I spent a lot of time in the closet. I slept there, too. It was my bedroom.’

  Lola was impressed by the thought of having a closet as a bedroom. When Lola was small she would invent stories about her and her parents only having one blanket between them. The truth was that Lola and her parents, who lived in one room of an eight-room terrace in Australia that they shared with seven other families, had several blankets. The eight families shared one small bathroom and one small kitchen, but Renia, Edek and Lola had plenty of blankets.

  People seemed spellbound when Lola described how they took turns at using the one blanket, which meant that each of them, Lola, her mother and her father, had a blanket for two-and-a-half days a week. Seriously poor kids, kids who wore no shoes and whose clothes were in tatters, would cry when Lola told that story. And Lola found that curiously satisfying.

  Jimi Hendrix was right, Lola thought. Without being told, children always knew what was going on. Lola herself felt steeped in her parent’s past. She’d felt this way since she was a small child. She didn’t know how she knew so much.

  No one ever sat down and talked to her. Renia Bensky’s mouth was mostly clamped firmly shut and her head was bent over a sewing machine or a saucepan. Six nights a week Renia did piecework, sewing sleeves into dresses, for a factory in Fitzroy. Edek didn’t say much when he was home. He would sit on the bed at night in a singlet, too tired to speak after his double shift at the factory.

  ‘My parents separately survived Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp,’ Lola said. ‘But although they got out alive, parts of them stayed there. Parts of them got left behind.’

  Jimi Hendrix nodded.