Lola Bensky Read online

  ‘Er ret far fayer un far vaser,’ Lola heard Mr Dunov say to Mr Pincus. Loosely translated, this meant ‘He is a motor mouth’.

  ‘If they had to put his brain in a chicken, it would run straight to the butcher,’ Mr Pincus replied. The saying had even more flourish in Yiddish. Lola tried not to laugh.

  Jack Weldon Worthington Sr sat down. There was silence. Edek started clapping and the rest of the guests joined in. Edek led Lola and Mr Former Rock Star into the centre of the room. All five members of the Chaim Rappaport Big Band launched into a song called ‘Chosen Kale Mazel Tov’. The lyrics ‘chosen, kale mazel tov’, ‘groom, bride, congratulations’, were repeated and repeated.

  Lola had heard ‘Chosen Kale Mazel Tov’ at so many Jewish weddings. It often made her want to cry. Probably because of the high hopes embodied in most marriages. And the plaintive tones of the flute that carried the melody. A melody that felt linked to another world.

  All the Jews knew what to do. They formed two circles, one for the men and one for the women. Holding hands, they started dancing in large circles around the bride and the groom. The guests took turns at stepping into the centre of the circle to dance with either the bride or the groom.

  The Jews beckoned to the non-Jews to join in. Some of them did. The groom’s parents sat with stiff smiles at the bridal party’s table. ‘It is a Jewish dance,’ Edek shouted as he passed Lola’s new mother- and father-in-law.

  The dance lasted a long time. Or so it seemed to Lola. She had never been good at this dance. Even though you could get away with only the ability to move sideways. She looked at her father. He knew all the correct steps. Even though he was a little tubby or, as Renia put it, ‘a fatty’, Edek was very light on his feet. He was flying around the circle.

  Luba Lipschitz and Martin Schenkel and Fay Feldman sat at their table, dumpy, slumped and silent. Their parents, who were on the dance floor, were all survivors of death camps. Some of the other guests were survivors of labour camps or had been in hiding during the war. Australia had the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors per capita outside Israel. Their children were the survivors of their parents. Quite a few of them were the product of an overly vigilant neglect. They had parents who noticed every pound they gained or when they wore their hair the wrong way, but they didn’t notice any sadness, any bewilderment, any loneliness or anxiety in their children. They didn’t notice absences at school or money stolen or most other symptoms of a child in trouble.

  The space that most parents had available for their children’s current lives was taken up by the past. Lola could see it in her mother. Her mother couldn’t hear her. On the whole, Lola had to say things three or four times, and even then it was hard to get a response. Whenever Lola was around, her mother would busy herself doing other things. Hanging out the laundry. Putting away the dishes. If Lola asked Renia a question, Renia would immediately seem to have something urgent or unnecessarily complicated to do. For example, Renia would sometimes balance one kitchen chair on top of the other and climb up, using the kitchen bench as leverage, in order to get something out of a very tall kitchen cupboard. It was such a precarious balancing exercise that Lola inevitably forgot whatever question it was that she wanted to ask. When Lola was a teenager she would demonstrate this balancing act of Renia’s to some of her school friends. All she had to do was ask Renia a question, any question, and the two chairs would be dragged out. It would take Lola many years to understand that Renia couldn’t answer questions. That Renia was terrified of questions. And terrified of the answers.

  Edek had trouble hearing Lola, too. He would come home after work, eat and settle into an armchair and bury himself in one of his detective-fiction books. He seemed to hear nothing that Lola said unless she said it in a very loud voice, and then he would look startled.

  Lola found that having parents who were unable to live in the present made living in your own present much more complicated. Lola did get the attention of both of her parents once. She was arrested for shoplifting when she was ten. Renia and Edek did not react well. Renia was hysterical and kept asking Lola how she could do that to them. And Edek was furious. Renia slammed doors and banged pots in the kitchen with even greater force than usual. And Edek stopped speaking to Lola other than to let her know, periodically, that she was lucky not to have been put in jail. It took months for things to go back to normal.

  Lola married Mr Former Rock Star because he had asked her to marry him. She also thought that she loved him. For Lola, the clincher that came with the marriage proposal was the fact that her husband-to-be said he’d never wanted to get married, as he was frightened that the person he married would leave him. Lola promised that she would always love him and never leave him. She didn’t know that she would break that promise.

  At the wedding, Lola looked at her new husband. He was all blond hair and flushed skin. She felt proud to be marrying him. They were getting married despite a few hiccups in the relationship. Lola didn’t know why she called these incidents hiccups. The incidents should have been harder to tolerate than the hiccups. But for Lola, they weren’t.

  The incidents or hiccups involved other girls. In his bed. Once, just minutes after she had left that very bed. She had returned unexpectedly just twenty minutes after she had left for the newspaper office where she worked, to find him in the middle of his final heaves and grunts. Very firmly she had asked the girl, a blonde with straight hair and very narrow hips, to leave. And with great disdain, she had asked Mr Former Rock Star to put fresh sheets on the bed.

  She had been rattled, but not as rattled as she should have been. Mr Former Rock Star had come around to her office later that day, looking both sheepish and apologetic. And a little distraught. Lola couldn’t tell what aspect of the incident was causing his distress. He promised that it would never happen again. Lola wasn’t sure that it would never happen again. But for some reason, apart from wondering how he could have gone from heaving and grunting inside her to pumping away at Miss Slim Hips in twenty minutes, it was not a subject she dwelt on.

  Lola wasn’t going to think about that, now, on her wedding day. It was late in the evening and she was dancing with her parents’ friend Herschel Ryza, to the music of the Chaim Rappaport Big Band, whose music was now more subdued. Herschel Ryza was a sweet, short man. He and his wife Topcha were childless. On weekends, Topcha baked small, horseshoe-shaped almond cookies and honey cakes. She always kept some for Lola.

  Next to Lola, Mr Grynbaum was dancing with Mrs Mendel. Mrs Slotkowski was dancing with Mr Mendel and Mrs Grynbaum was dancing with Edek. She could see Renia at the far side of the dance floor, moving gracefully in unison with Mr Slotkowski. Lola suspected that her mother was having an affair with Mr Slotkowski. She’d found them in the house one afternoon, years ago, looking blotched and dishevelled, when she’d come home from school early. Her mother had said that Mr Slotkowski was helping her with a surprise birthday present for her father, so Lola mustn’t mention his visit. Edek’s birthday had come and gone with no surprises that Lola could see. Still, she kept quiet about Mr Slotkowski’s visits and the number of phone calls he seemed to make to Renia.

  Lola knew that Mr Grynbaum was having an affair with Mrs Zucker. Mrs Zucker was wearing a pearl-encrusted, aqua silk, one-shouldered dress and a smouldering expression. Lola could see her leaning over and saying something in Mr Grynbaum’s ear. Renia had told her about the affair. ‘Regina Zucker thinks that Josef Grynbaum loves her,’ Renia had said. ‘But Josef Grynbaum has already had a big affair with Mrs Slotkowski’s sister.’ Lola wondered what constituted a big affair as opposed to a little affair. Was it the length of time, the frequency or heat of the sex? She had no idea. She didn’t think she would ask Renia. Judging from what Lola had seen of Renia’s blotched skin and the way Renia would dart out of the room, holding the telephone, each time Mr Slotkowski called, Lola thought that their affair probably fell into the big affair category.

  Lola looked at Mr and Mrs Former Rock
Star Sr. They were talking to their friends Annabelle and Alistair Pilkington and the Honourable Judge Wilkinson-Powell. Lola wondered if the Church of England guests also had affairs with their friends’ spouses. They all looked a bit too uncomfortable to have affairs. They looked uncomfortable standing up chatting to their close friends. Lola couldn’t imagine them crushing their clothes as they grappled with each other, or how they would deal with the aftermath of that grapple. The mess that had to be wiped up and washed away. Or the unplanned and unpredictable nature of the noises and sounds that might accompany a less than orchestrated encounter. Maybe they just had more polite, controlled, well-mannered affairs. Happy together, in their shared discomfort.

  Lola’s parents, who were now dancing together, had decided to skip the part of the wedding where the bride and the groom are each lifted up in the air, on a chair, and carried around the room, often to another chorus of ‘Chosen Kale Mazel Tov’.

  Lola had heard Edek and Renia discussing the subject. ‘She is too fat for anyone to lift her up on a chair,’ Renia Bensky had said.

  ‘It is not one person who does lift the chair, it is four people who do lift the chair,’ Edek had replied.

  ‘She is too fat for four people,’ Renia had said.

  After a couple of minutes, Lola had heard Edek say, ‘Mr Kirschbaum’s son was very fat and they did lift him up in a chair.’

  ‘She is too fat,’ Renia had replied, and left the room. Lola didn’t mind. She didn’t like heights. Heights made her feel nauseated.

  Lola finished making her tuna salad. The house was quiet. Not even her one-year-old was awake yet. Lola didn’t feel thirty. But then how did she know what thirty felt like? She did know that she still had two parents. And that thought was strangely uplifting.

  She had a small portion of the salad. It really wasn’t a great breakfast dish. But it certainly was fibrous. She went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. Lola loved sitting on the toilet in peace. She thought that she had inherited this from Edek, who always checked before he used the toilet that no one else wanted to use it. ‘I do like to sit there in peace,’ he would always say. Edek would also sometimes add, ‘Even the Queen of England does have peace on the toilet.’ It was the only reference to the Queen of England that he ever made. Lola had no idea that either of her parents were aware of the Queen of England’s existence, let alone know about the peace that she felt when she went to the toilet.

  It was not easy to get peace on the toilet when you had children, Lola had discovered. Her six-year-old liked to keep her company when she went to the toilet. He would use the time to ask her endless questions, like where did the tampons she inserted go when she had a period? It was hard to sit and concentrate when a six-year-old was asking you to show him where the tampons went.

  Lola, like Edek and possibly the Queen of England, loved sitting on the toilet in peace. The peace enabled things to work like they should work. She imagined her sphincter muscles giving her anal canal instructions to relax and open her anus. She thought about the muscles of the colon contracting and relaxing while they rolled the food that had been eaten, in Lola’s case a lot of cabbage, carrots, radishes and zucchinis, around and around, like clothes in a washing machine, all the time breaking the food down and extracting the water. She knew that several times a day, mostly after meals, the colon made large, muscular contractions that dumped the newly made faeces into the rectum. When the faeces arrived in the rectum, it sent a message to the nerve centres in the spinal chord and they sent a message to the sphincter muscles of the anal canal telling them to relax and open the anus. If it wasn’t a convenient time to have your anus open, the brain delivered a message to the spinal chord to prevent the ‘open anus’ message being sent.

  Lola was staggered at this system of communication. All the parts of the body spoke the same language. Unlike her own family. Renia, Edek and Lola had never spoken the same language. Renia and Edek spoke Polish and Yiddish. Their German was also quite good. Their English was, for years, non-existent, and even after that it was fractured and broken and battered.

  When they lived in Germany, where Lola was born, they all spoke German. But once they got to Australia, Renia and Edek insisted that Lola speak only English. And they would only speak English to Lola. This meant that Renia and Edek didn’t understand three-quarters of what Lola said. And Lola had no idea of most of what Edek and Renia were trying to say.

  Edek and Renia spoke to each other in Polish and Yiddish. Luckily, Lola understood Yiddish, but she could never join in. As soon as Lola uttered one Yiddish word, Renia would snap, ‘English, please.’

  Renia and Edek’s English was full of patched-together and completely made-up words. Edek called faeces ‘bikpeeses’. Lola had thought that ‘bikpeeses’ must have been Polish for faeces until she was about twenty and realised that what Edek was saying was ‘big pieces’. Lola felt sad. If only the three of them could have spoken the same language, there would have been less room for confusion, distraction, dismay and uncertainty.

  Renia and Edek had never really stood a chance of learning English. Three days after they arrived in Australia, they were both working in factories. The only person who spoke English in those factories was the owner, who never spoke to workers like Renia and Edek. In the factories, Renia and Edek had learnt smatterings of Italian, Greek, Maltese and Chinese.

  It was seven a.m. Lola knew that her son, who was about to turn seven, would soon get out of bed. He never slept in. He was a bit like her. Always alert. Lola could hear her one-year-old babbling in her cot. She went into her daughter’s bedroom. A small girl with a mass of strawberry-blond curls beamed up at her. ‘Good morning, Mrs Gorgeous,’ Lola said to her daughter.

  Mrs Gorgeous really was very gorgeous. She had very fair skin and large, cornflower-blue eyes. Lola loved the colour of Mrs Gorgeous’s eyes. The blue held a hint of the sea and the sky. Hints that suggested happiness. It wasn’t just Lola who loved the colour of Mrs Gorgeous’s eyes. All Jews seemed to be crazy about blue eyes. ‘Look what blue eyes she has,’ passers-by would say when Lola had Mrs Gorgeous in a stroller in Acland Street, St Kilda.

  When Renia had first seen Mrs Gorgeous in the hospital, hours after Lola had given birth to her, she suddenly paled. All the colour drained from her face. ‘She looks just like Hanka,’ Renia had said, before rushing out of the room. Hanka was the daughter of Bluma, Renia’s favourite sister. When Renia and Edek no longer had work papers in the ghetto and were in hiding, nine-year-old Hanka, who was still working, brought them her soup every day.

  Hanka and Bluma were on the last transport out of the Lodz Ghetto to Auschwitz with Renia and Edek. Renia, who on the arrival platform in Auschwitz had been pushed into the line for life, tried to grab Hanka. But Bluma, who was headed to the gas chambers, although she didn’t know it, clutched Hanka tightly.

  Mrs Gorgeous was a cheerful child. She smiled easily. Lola hoped that Mrs Gorgeous would retain that cheerfulness. Lola knew that cheerfulness could easily get lost. The few people who’d known Lola in the DP camp and when she first came to Australia, when she was three, were always telling her what a lovable, agreeable, cheerful child she was.

  Lola didn’t think that anyone who knew her now would rush to describe her as cheerful. How had she lost her cheerfulness, Lola wondered. Where did it go? Was there a finite amount of cheerfulness in the world? Maybe unless you kept a close eye on your cheerfulness it could disappear, in a flash.

  It wasn’t that Lola was dour. She wasn’t. She laughed a lot and thought many things were very funny. It was just that she had a sadness about her. A sadness that was hard to shake off. Even with Mrs Gorgeous beaming at her.

  After breakfast Lola drove her son to school, despite his protestations that he had done enough school, was bored and didn’t want to go any more. Then she dropped Mrs Gorgeous off at the day-care centre and drove to her office. Lola often daydreamed while she was driving.

  Car accidents were what she was daydre
aming about. She would picture a scene, just after a terrible collision. She never envisaged the collision itself. Her daydreams started half a minute after the collision with a scene of chaos. Blood, shattered windscreens, mangled car doors and bonnets, crushed roofs and glass everywhere.

  Inevitably, the injured person was someone Lola knew. In these fantasies, Lola would pull up at the side of the road, grab the first-aid kit she kept in the glove box, and rush over to help. She would clear away glass, stem bleeding, bandage wounds, gingerly lift the victim out of the wreckage and reassure them that everything was going to be all right.

  Afterwards, the victim’s close relatives would be overwhelmed with gratitude to Lola. They would cry, and say, ‘Thank God that Lola was there.’ Wealthy people often offered Lola money to show their gratitude. Even though Lola could have done with the money – Mr Former Rock Star was now a public servant, working for the government as an accountant – she always said no.

  Many years later, Lola would read a book about children of survivors of death camps not feeling entitled to live their own lives until the child went back to the psychotic, chaotic world of the concentration camp, and rescued her parents. Lola had immediately linked this to her car-accident rescue fantasies. Fantasies that took up thousands of hours of her life.

  In the book, No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost by the psychoanalyst Louise J. Kaplan, Lola learned that a major issue for children of death-camp survivors was the need to re-enact or live in their parents’ past. By doing that, they were turning their parents’ humiliation, disgrace and guilt into a victory over their oppressors. Lola was astonished when she read that. It fitted her car-crash daydreams perfectly.

  Lola entered her car-crash daydreams and fantasies with the same sense of anticipation and excitement that other people experienced when they went to the movies. Movies bored Lola. She’d sat through endless Ingmar Bergman melodramas wondering when the movie was going to end. She was bored by Jules et Jim and was almost in a coma by the end of Mary Poppins. But Lola emerged from her car-crash daydreams invigorated, satisfied and victorious. Not once in any of her tragic fantasies was she unable to triumph.