Lola Bensky Read online

  Lola had been shopping in Carnaby Street with Barry Gibb, the eldest of The Bee Gees brothers. Barry was exactly Lola’s age. Technically, he was four days older than her. They knew each other from Australia, where the Gibb family had migrated when Barry was twelve.

  Barry Gibb had found a cream-coloured suit he liked. He had tried it on and asked Lola what she thought. She thought he looked smashing in it. ‘Smashing’ was her new word. Everyone in London seemed to be using it. Lola had been trying to eliminate it from her vocabulary. It had an inbuilt violence that bothered her. Still, Barry Gibb did look smashing in that suit.

  ‘You look fabulous,’ she’d said to him.

  ‘What colours does this suit come in?’ Barry asked the salesgirl. She showed him the suit in three more colours, a pale blue, a pale pink and a bright white. ‘I’ll take them all,’ he said. Lola had been thrilled. She’d never seen anyone buy clothes in bulk. Lola liked Barry Gibb. He was calm and kind and easy to be with. He had a solidity about him. Not a physical solidity. A psychic solidity, as though he’d never do anything too stupid or too crazy.

  Lola knew that Barry Gibb hadn’t had an easy childhood. When he was two and a half he spilt a hot cup of tea over himself and spent more than two months in hospital with serious burns. When he came home he was very quiet, cried a lot and wouldn’t talk. He was three when the twins Robin and Maurice, the other two Bee Gees, were born. The family was very poor. A neighbour described the three boys as skinny and always hungry.

  Lola was glad that Barry Gibb could now afford to buy four suits at a time. She thought that he could probably buy four thousand suits at a time. Lola had asked Barry Gibb if he thought she should ask Cher if she could have her diamante-lined false eyelashes back.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Barry had said. ‘Why wouldn’t you ask for them back?’

  ‘I think I’d feel too embarrassed,’ Lola had said.

  Lola didn’t think she would ask Mick Jagger if she should ask Cher to return her diamante-lined false eyelashes. Mick Jagger had finished his phone call and was back in his black leather armchair. ‘You are so admired by so many young people, do you feel a responsibility to set an example for them?’ Lola asked him.

  ‘A responsibility to set an example for them?’ Mick Jagger said. He looked irritated. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. I don’t think people in the public eye have as much influence as people think they do. I believe that individuals really do make their own minds up much more than they’re given credit for. They don’t just follow blindly, like sheep, what some pop singer says or does. I don’t like it when pop stars preach about drugs, politics or religion. I don’t do it because I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough or responsible enough to lead other people or make public statements. I’m not a bishop or a minister of religion, someone who is setting themselves up as an example to the community. I’m not a great philosopher or a headmaster. I’m a pop star.’ He paused for a moment. He still looked irritated. ‘My responsibilities are only to myself. My responsibility to the public is to do my work, my records, as well as I can. My knowledge isn’t enough for me to start lecturing or pontificating on some of the subjects some pop stars try to get into. I don’t propagate religious views, such as some pop stars do. I don’t propagate drug use as some pop stars do.’

  ‘Propagate? Do you mean promote?’ Lola said. ‘I thought propagate was to do with plants, like germinating a plant from a seedling. Not that I know much about plants or seedlings,’ she added.

  ‘It can also be used to mean to widely promote knowledge or an idea,’ Mick Jagger said.

  Lola felt embarrassed. ‘English wasn’t my first language,’ she said, and then felt awkward because she had learned English by the time she was four or five.

  ‘You speak it extremely well,’ Mick Jagger said.

  Mick Jagger and her parents were in accord about that, Lola thought.

  ‘What was your first language?’ Mick Jagger asked.

  ‘German,’ she said. ‘I was born in Germany to two Polish Jews who had separately survived Auschwitz.’

  ‘That must have been terrible,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘Terrible isn’t a strong enough word for what your parents must have experienced.’

  Lola was surprised that Mick Jagger knew what Auschwitz was. So many people didn’t.

  ‘In some countries, like America, a lot of children grow up with no real understanding of World War II,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying that people in America didn’t have terrible experiences then. They had rations and shortages and they had people killed but, unlike people in Europe and Russia, they didn’t have the experience of the block opposite you being destroyed when you woke up in the morning. All of his irritation at her question about his responsibility as a public figure had vanished. He looked pensive and moved.

  Lola hadn’t really thought about what people in America were doing when her mother and father’s families were being murdered. In general, she had understood that not many people anywhere in the world had seemed to care.

  ‘You’ve been called rebellious,’ Lola said. ‘Do you think you are rebellious?’ It was a ridiculous question to ask someone who was sitting in an armchair looking sensitive and concerned. Mick Jagger laughed. ‘Do I look rebellious to you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure what rebellious looks like,’ Lola said, feeling a little stupid.

  ‘Look, I question things about society,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘But my generation isn’t the first generation that’s questioned the values of the previous generation. That doesn’t mean I am a rebel. My generation is one of the first generations that hasn’t had to worry about material things like food and shelter. We’re questioning things, like fighting wars, in a way that other generations couldn’t. They couldn’t question the morals of their society, because you don’t have enough time to worry about morals if your stomach is empty and you’re hungry.’

  Lola knew you could be very hungry and be concerned about morality. ‘My mother weighed seventy pounds when she was liberated from Stutthof, the death camp she was sent to after Auschwitz,’ Lola said. ‘She had severe malnutrition, typhus and all her teeth were loose. She had been hungry for six years. But she said over and over again, “It wasn’t enough to survive, you had to survive as a human being.” When I was small, I didn’t know what she meant. I used to wonder if human beings could suddenly turn into elephants or rats, and I thought if they could it would be important to try and avoid that. When I was older, I understood that she was talking about not turning into an animal, in quite a different sense. She tortured herself and still does, wondering if she did anything at all at anyone else’s expense in order to survive. She was always talking to herself about that in Yiddish.’

  ‘Do you know much about what your parents experienced?’ Mick Jagger said.

  Lola knew that she didn’t know much. She knew miniscule, barely visible molecular scraps of a crushing calamity. A calamity neither of her parents seemed to want to talk about, and neither of them seemed able to avoid talking about.

  ‘When the Germans did first come into Lodz, it wasn’t too bad,’ Edek had said. He came from a very wealthy family that owned apartment blocks, knitting mills and a timber yard. ‘We was used to pogroms. My mother did say, “This will pass.” The Germans did come and take our jewellery and fur coats, but my mother said, “Let them take what they want, we don’t need it.” Me and my two brothers were seized for forced labour. We did have to clean toilets with our hands and we did have to scratch the dirt off with our nails. They did make the women take off their underwear and wash the floor with it.’

  Lola used to hate that detail. Even when she was eight or nine, she understood that that was just to impose extra humiliation. ‘We was allowed to go home at night,’ Edek said. ‘Things did still seem a little bit normal.’ A few months later, they were forced to leave their homes and their possessions and were imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto.

  Nothing was going to be normal for Renia and Ed
ek for a long time. Nothing was going to be normal, and nothing was going to be ordinary.

  ‘Nobody did have a cat in the ghetto,’ Edek had said to her out of the blue one day. Lola hadn’t asked for a cat. She didn’t want a cat. She didn’t think she’d even talked about cats to Edek. ‘The only people what was allowed to have a cat was the people what did run the food-distribution centres,’ Edek said. ‘The cats did have to work for their rations like the prisoners did. But for their work, which was to catch mice, they did get one kilogram of fresh meat a week. I did work in the food-distribution centre for a few months, and me and the other workers were so jealous of the cats. We didn’t get any meat. We did get turnips and radishes and a terrible, thin soup. I did decide, one day, to steal the meat from the cat. And you wouldn’t believe that that was the week the meat for the cats did run out. Not even the poor cats did get meat.’ Edek had laughed and laughed at the end of this story. Lola hadn’t thought it was funny.

  ‘I know weird things about my parents’ past,’ Lola said to Mick Jagger. ‘I know that at one stage, the ghetto got a huge shipment of cabbage. Vegetables were scarce and prohibitively expensive. But suddenly the ghetto was flooded with white cabbage. About two hundred kilos of it. The price of cabbage dropped. The prisoners, who had to work for six months to buy one loaf of bread on the black market, were suddenly having cabbage three times a day. My father said the whole ghetto smelled of cabbage and everyone was walking around with their stomachs distended. Then, everyone started feeling nauseous. The nausea was soon followed by widespread diarrhoea.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ said Mick Jagger.

  ‘That’s not one of the sad stories,’ Lola said. Mick Jagger looked disturbed.

  ‘What were some of the other stories?’ he said.

  ‘They weren’t stories,’ Lola said. ‘I shouldn’t have called them stories. They were just things my parents said.’

  She hesitated. She had come to interview Mick Jagger, not to talk about the Lodz Ghetto or Auschwitz. She started to feel uncomfortable. She was sure Mick Jagger didn’t want to hear more about distended stomachs or death camps.

  ‘What sort of things did your parents say?’ he said.

  ‘Odd things,’ she said. ‘My mother used to talk, almost to herself, about the fact that in Auschwitz, they used human meat, rather than animal meat, as a medium to grow culture in. She didn’t explain much about it to me, except to say that it was done in the Hygiene Institute in Block 10 and that a culture medium was material that you could grow bacteria or other microbes in. A bit like a flowerbed in which you grow flowers.’

  Why was she talking about flowers and flowerbeds? She’d already mentioned plants and seedlings. Mick Jagger would start thinking she was a keen gardener. She knew nothing about gardening. She knew that if you wanted to grow bacteria, you needed to supply it with nutrients and a good environment to keep it alive. Scientists usually used a nutrient broth, made out of meat extract, Lola had heard Renia say. In Auschwitz, human flesh was more expendable than animal meat. Renia said members of the SS inevitably stole the animal meat that was put aside for so-called scientific use. Lola knew all of this from hearing snippets of Renia’s conversation with herself.

  ‘My mother talked about four women from her barracks being shot and half an hour later seeing their discarded bodies with large, very deep pieces of flesh cut out of them. One of them was a girl she’d gone to high school with,’ Lola said.

  Mick Jagger looked disconcerted. Lola thought she should change the subject.

  ‘Is this something a lot of people know about?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lola said. ‘My mother said that some of the prisoners who worked in the laboratory talked about the slabs of meat that had no hair or fur that was being used. My mother was interested in medicine. She wanted to be a paediatrician. She was about to start medical school when she was imprisoned.’

  ‘Did she get to be a paediatrician?’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘No. She ended up working in a garment factory,’ Lola said.

  ‘What were they growing in the culture medium?’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘They were growing pneumonia, typhus, cholera and other diseases to inject into prisoners for various experiments,’ Lola said. ‘They experimented with abandon in Block 10. Experiments were going on everywhere. Organs and limbs were being removed. People were injected with poisons. People were frozen and then reheated.’

  ‘They did do it for fun,’ Renia used to say. ‘Like children who throw their food on the floor, because it is fun and the floor is there.’ Lola felt awkward. Her family’s past was so messy. It was all one big mess. She wished she came from a family who had library shelves full of books, a piano and spent their holidays by the seaside.

  She had no idea that this was exactly what she had come from. She had no idea that her father’s family had had hundreds and hundreds of books in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, or that they had vacationed by the sea, or that the piano had been an ornate Bösendorfer baby grand.

  Lola looked down at her questions. She had reams and reams of questions. She had talked about bodies with flesh gorged out of them and Nazis stealing meat intended for experiments. But she hadn’t asked Mick Jagger about his relationship with Brian Jones or Keith Richards. What was she doing? She hardly ever talked about this sort of stuff. She didn’t talk about it at home. She never mentioned it to her colleagues at Rock-Out. At the highly acclaimed high school she went to in Melbourne, no one suggested that Lola and several others in the classrooms had a direct link to a very recent piece of history. It was a subject that wasn’t talked about by anyone, other than the few solitary survivors talking to themselves. Now here she was chatting to Mick Jagger about cabbage in the Lodz Ghetto.

  ‘I’ve never met anyone whose parents survived Auschwitz,’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘I guess there aren’t a lot of us,’ Lola said. ‘Most of the Jews in death camps were murdered.’

  ‘Did your parents have siblings?’ Mick Jagger asked.

  ‘Yes, they both did,’ she said. ‘My mother had three sisters and four brothers.’

  ‘What happened to them?’ he said.

  ‘They were all murdered,’ she said.

  She felt bad. That was such a bleak answer. Maybe she should have made up a story and said that Aunty Bluma and Aunty Malka and Aunty Hinda were all doing well. And that Uncles Abramek, Felek, Jacob and Shimek lived in Melbourne, Australia, and that they all often went on outings together.

  ‘It must have been hard to grow up in a family like that,’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘Oh no, it wasn’t too bad,’ Lola said. ‘I thought everyone’s mother woke up at night screaming in Yiddish for their mother.’ She wished she hadn’t added that. She wished she could have mentioned something that she and Renia did together. Like cook together. But cooking the Jewish dishes of Renia’s childhood was not something Renia could share with Lola. Renia cooked her latkes and chicken livers and chicken soup in an impenetrable cocoon of saucepans and frying pans and ladles and wooden spoons. She really must ask Mick Jagger about his relationship with Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Mick Jagger said.

  ‘I’d love one,’ she said. She followed him to the kitchen. Mick Jagger had obviously thought a lot about the decor of his apartment. The kitchen was the swishest kitchen Lola had ever seen. Not that she’d seen that many kitchens. Mick Jagger’s kitchen had a series of bright-red enamel cast-iron pots hanging from one wall, and the biggest fridge Lola had ever seen. She thought you could probably fit three grown men in that fridge.

  ‘You wouldn’t ever run out of food with that fridge, would you?’ Lola said.

  Mick Jagger laughed, and said, ‘You would run out, eventually.’

  Lola thought that it would take Mick Jagger a long time to run out of food. He didn’t look as though he was a very big eater.

  The kitchen stove and oven had more clocks and knobs and handles than
any stove Lola had ever seen. It looked fabulous. More like an interplanetary laboratory than a cooking appliance, to Lola.

  Mick Jagger poured the tea and carried the cups back to the sofa. Lola hoped that she hadn’t exhausted him. Other people’s misfortune or misery or tragedy could be exhausting. Mick Jagger didn’t even look tired.

  He didn’t seem to want to talk about Brian Jones or Keith Richards, although he did say that he and Keith had gone to school together. ‘We became friends at Wentworth Primary School in Dartford, Kent, when I was about seven or eight,’ he said. ‘But I’ve known him almost all my life. We lived one street away from each other and my mother knew his mother.’

  ‘So you were close friends,’ Lola said

  ‘We weren’t close friends, but we were close,’ Mick Jagger said.

  That was a subtle differentiation, Lola thought.

  ‘Were your parents pleased by your choice of career?’ Lola said.

  ‘No, they weren’t. My father was furious with me. He couldn’t have been angrier if I’d said I was going to join the army. And I don’t blame him. Who knows how long this will last.’

  ‘You’re very successful,’ Lola said. ‘Are they still not pleased?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘But you are very successful,’ she said.

  ‘Success means different things to different people,’ Mick Jagger said. ‘I don’t know what success means to my parents. To a lot of people, success means marriage and the monotony of suburban life and planning for your old age. I’ve always had the feeling that I won’t live to an old age.’

  ‘Why?’ said Lola. ‘You’re not eating potatoes and not drinking milk.’

  ‘I am trying to take care of myself,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t want to be old anyway. There are not many old people who are happy.’

  Lola didn’t know if he was right or not about old people being happy. She didn’t know anyone older than her parents.

  She was bothered by the fact that Mick Jagger’s parents might still not be pleased. ‘Your parents must be pleased,’ she said. ‘You’ve got this beautiful apartment, you’re world famous.’