Things Could Be Worse Read online

  Genia felt closer to Esther than she did to Rachel, her first-born daughter. Genia felt that Esther understood her. Esther had been in the audience at the luncheon last week. As soon as the performance was over, Esther had rushed up to her. ‘You were fabulous, Mum,’ she had said. She had hugged Genia tightly. It had been a hug that had shut out all Genia’s fears and nerves. Esther didn’t have the beauty of her sister, Rachel, but Esther had the heart.

  Genia thought that Rachel was one of the most beautiful young women she had ever seen. Many other people thought the same thing about Rachel. Rachel had large, green, almond-shaped eyes, flawless olive skin and an elegant aquiline nose. Her face was framed by a head of thick auburn ringlets. At the moment Rachel was between husbands. She had divorced number three, and had just met Boris Zayer, who fulfilled all the prerequisites for husband number four.

  Each of Rachel’s husbands had been richer than the husband before him. Rachel had started by marrying a struggling young lawyer. She had left that marriage with a small house in South Yarra. Rachel’s last divorce had netted her a settlement of two and a half million dollars.

  ‘She doesn’t have an economics degree or a Diploma of Business Administration, but she could be president of the World Bank, the way that she has escalated her assets so rapidly,’ Izak used to say about his elder daughter.

  Rachel was now beautiful and rich. She believed that every man in Melbourne was in love with her. She had told Genia that Rabbi Blatt had propositioned her at her son’s barmitzvah. She had also said that the rabbi who had handled her last divorce had wanted to handle her. Genia couldn’t believe that a rabbi would behave like that. ‘Rachel darling,’ she had said to her daughter, ‘I think you must have made a mistake. Rabbis are more concerned with the Torah than a nice-looking tuches.’

  With her striking curls and smooth skin and polished nails, Rachel looked full of life, but Genia knew that there was not a lot of joy in Rachel. Rachel was made happy by the transient things in life, and she had to keep getting more and more of them. Esther, Genia thought, had more lifeforce in her, more spirituality, more balance. Yet to most people, Genia thought, Rachel appeared alive, and Esther appeared mad.

  ‘Esther is fine,’ Genia said to Renia.

  ‘It’s lucky that she’s got a good husband like Stan,’ said Renia. ‘Someone like Esther is not always appreciated. What do people appreciate?’ continued Renia. ‘They appreciate the things that are not so important. Do you remember what Rabbi Bloom said when he married Stan and Esther? He said Esther had a good heart. Usually Rabbi Bloom says that the bride is beautiful. If he can’t say that she is beautiful, he says she is clever. If he can’t say clever or beautiful, he says how rich the parents are. He doesn’t say rich, he says successful, but everyone understands what he is saying. And if he can’t say one of those things, Rabbi Bloom says that the bride has got a good heart. When Rabbi Bloom said Esther had a good heart, I did nearly cry, Genia.’

  Genia thought that this was a good time to say goodbye to Renia. She could feel herself starting to feel gloomy.

  ‘Genia darling, before you hang up,’ said Renia, ‘please let me make an appointment to the hairdressers for you. Ada Small rang me this morning to say that she heard Malka Spiel and Fela Brot in the chicken shop saying that it was shocking that a woman of your age has such long hair. Genia, I am telling you this for your own good. Do you want people to talk more about you?’

  Genia had been growing her hair for four years. It had almost reached her waist. She wore it in a single plait.

  ‘Don’t listen to them,’ Izak had said when Genia had told him about Renia and Ada nagging her to have her hair cut. ‘If it makes you happy to have long hair, then have long hair,’ Izak had said.

  ‘Renia darling,’ said Genia, ‘I know that you tell me these things for my own good, but it is me that people are talking about, and I don’t mind. At least I am giving people something to talk about. I have to go now, Renia. I will speak to you tomorrow. Goodbye.’

  Genia felt unsettled now. She should take the phone off the hook when she wanted to practise her ballet. She had tried to take the phone off the hook many times, but she was always overcome with the worry that Izak or Rachel or Esther might want to get through to her and not be able to.

  She really had to make sure that she could practise uninterrupted, Genia thought. She would never progress if her practice was constantly interrupted. She would take the phone off the hook. She would do it today, Genia decided. She took the phone off the hook, and walked back to Rachel’s old bedroom, which was now Genia’s rehearsal room.

  Last night Josl Bensky had gently asked Genia why she drove herself so hard to dance. ‘I feel happy when I am dancing,’ she had replied. ‘When I’m dancing, Josl, I feel very happy, and it takes my mind off things.’

  Josl understood about taking your mind off things. Josl read three or four detective novels a week. They had titles like Cold Blooded Revenge and From Death To Death and Who Killed The Boss? and The Crippled Snout. When Josl read his detective novels, he was utterly immersed in them. Nothing else existed. He read after work, and he read in the evening before bed. He read all day when he was on holidays. He belonged to three libraries in different areas, and there were never fewer than half a dozen unread detective novels in the house.

  When Lola was fourteen and beginning to read serious fiction, she had asked Josl why he read such rubbish.

  ‘It keeps my mind off things,’ he had answered.

  Lola had asked her mother the same question. ‘Why does Dad read such garbage?’ she had asked.

  ‘It keeps his mind off things,’ Renia had replied.

  Lola had a very vague idea of what it was that Josl was keeping his mind off, and she was too frightened to enquire further. She was already frightened enough about her parents’ past. She had grown up with all kinds of phrases spinning around in her head, like ‘you don’t know what it means to suffer’ and ‘you don’t know the meaning of trouble’ and ‘you think this is trouble?’ and ‘you think this is a tragedy?’ Lola didn’t want to ask any more questions. She didn’t want to know what real trouble was.

  ‘If it takes your mind off things, then go and dance, and dance in good health,’ Josl had said to Genia.

  With the phone off the hook, Genia practised and practised. She was learning the part of Odile in Swan Lake. She was rehearsing the ballroom scene in the third act.

  She had mastered the mime and the movements when Odile tries to force the prince to marry her. Her arabesques were balancing nicely, but she was having trouble with her fouettes. Her teacher, Marilyn Warner, had told her that she was too old to attempt fouettes. Genia had felt depressed when Miss Warner said this. Genia told Esther, who always rang her after her classes.

  ‘Look, Mum, maybe you could learn another role, or maybe Miss Warner could choreograph the part differently for you,’ Esther had suggested.

  ‘I’m only having trouble with my spotting,’ Genia had said to her daughter. ‘When you do fouettes, you are spinning around and around on one leg, and you have to spot while you are spinning. Spotting stops you from being dizzy when you turn. Your eyes should be the last thing to leave the front of the stage, and the first part of your body to return. You have to turn your body first, then move your head quickly around so that it gets to the front again before the rest of your body,’ Genia had explained to Esther.

  Now Genia wasn’t spotting properly, and she was feeling dizzy. Her back hurt and her feet ached. She could hardly move her shoulders. She felt nauseous. She sat down.

  She closed her eyes to stem the dizziness. She saw her mother’s face. Mania Buchbinder’s face was full of pride. ‘Remember, Genia darling, when Olga Ramanova said you would be a beautiful Giselle?’

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ said Genia. ‘I remember.’

  Genia stood up and took a deep breath. She threw herself into a fouette. She spun around and around and around. She had known that she could do it.

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nbsp; Every Death

  Renia Bensky read the obituary columns of the Age and the Herald every day. The death notices were the first thing she turned to in the Jewish News when it arrived on Fridays.

  She read every death. She knew who had died and who they had left behind. She could guess the age of the deceased. She knew if the dead were good or bad people, and whether they had many friends. She knew when they were dearly loved, or when their death notice was only a formal acknowledgement.

  Renia could feel the levels of grief behind the announcements. She could detect the pain or anguish or anger behind these public notices.

  Every day there were families left without a mother, and families who had lost a father. Every day there were small children left fatherless and motherless. Every day a child died. Many times Renia would see that a husband had given up and died a few months after his wife’s death. There were also quite a few wives who didn’t want to live without their husbands.

  Fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, and even brothers and sisters, wrote poems for the dead. Such touching poems. They were bad verses, but Renia was always touched by the depth of pain and sadness, and the great effort it took to put this into a poetic form.

  Renia was scathing about the death notices that came in large boxed advertisements. She scoffed at the ads that began ‘The Managing Director and the Staff of’.

  ‘Mr Bigshot, Mr Important!’ she would say out loud.

  Renia often wondered why it was so hard for these notices to say how very much someone was loved. People tried, but always came up with the same half a dozen sentiments. The same neatly packed phrases at the end of a notice. The announcements usually ended with ‘Forever In Our Hearts’, or ‘Will Be Sadly Missed By All Who Knew Him’, or ‘Forever In Our Thoughts’. Why was it so hard to write out a scream, or an ache, or a cry of pain?

  Renia had never buried anyone she had loved. She had never written a death notice. In the ghetto, Josl had carried their stillborn son to the cemetery, but there had been too many bodies waiting to be buried, and Josl had had to leave the baby. Renia had stayed in bed. She had been too sick to walk to the cemetery. Renia wasn’t sure exactly how her mother and father and her four brothers and three sisters had died. She knew that her mother and two of her sisters had died in Auschwitz. Her last image of them was of the three of them walking towards the gas chambers. Her mother was holding Renia’s niece Hanka by the hand.

  Renia had often wondered who had knocked her on the head and pushed her out of the queue for the gas chambers. Was it a Kapo? Was it a fellow prisoner? Was it a member of the Gestapo? She never knew.

  Renia had heard several conflicting reports about the deaths of her father and brothers. After the war, she heard that Jacob had died in Bergen-Belsen, and that Felek had been shipped to Mauthausen and was shot when he tried to jump off the train. Someone said that Abramek and Shimek and Renia’s father, Israel, died in Dachau. But there was no conflict about the fact that they were all dead.

  In 1972, when the passengers on an American plane were taken hostage in Lebanon, Renia Bensky was beside herself. The news almost paralysed her. She couldn’t read. She couldn’t talk on the phone. She sat in her kitchen all day, and waited for the radio news bulletins. Nothing could distract her from the fate of the hostages. Genia Pekelman said to Ada Small, ‘I think Renia has lost her mind.’ When Renia knew that the hostages had been released, she rang Lola.

  Lola was twenty-five. She was so overweight that even her face had doubled in size. She was wearing a long, blue, voluminous, flower-patterned dress. Lumps of mashed pumpkin had dried on her cuffs. Lola was sitting in her kitchen looking at a huge bucket of nappies soaking in Milton solution. It was ten o’clock at night.

  ‘Lola, darling, I hope I didn’t wake you,’ Renia said. ‘I want to tell you what you should do if you would be one day hijacked on an airplane. First of all you must never say you are Jewish. If anyone should ask you why you are born in Germany, just say it is because you are Polish. Say that your Polish parents went for a holiday to Germany after the war. You see, Lola, Jews who survived the camps were, a lot of them, in Germany after the war.’

  Lola was used to calls like this. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I said I was German?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, maybe you are right,’ Renia agreed. ‘Yes, maybe you are right. And see, Lola, how handy it will be that you did study German at school. You can say a few words in German to the hijackers. In Auschwitz, quite a few times I was saved because I had such good German.’

  ‘You know, Mum,’ Lola said, ‘I don’t think anyone would even ask me if I was Jewish. I’ve got an Australian passport. Why would they ask me?’

  ‘Oh, Lola,’ wailed Renia Bensky, ‘You know nothing. The Jews are the first ones they will kill. Look, it happened already, I think the American soldier the hijackers did kill was a Jew. Everybody wants to kill the Jews first, Lola. But what do you know? You grew up a free child in a free country. You know, Lola, maybe it is not so bad that you didn’t marry somebody Jewish. Rodney is so blond, and the baby is blond, and they’ve both got blue eyes. The hijackers would never think the baby is Jewish. Anyway, Lola darling, I shouldn’t hold you up. Give the baby a big kiss from me. You sound a bit tired, so try and get an early night.’

  Lola put the phone down. The bits of shit had come off the nappies and floated to the top of the bucket. She thought her mother was getting confused. Wasn’t it another group of terrorists who had shot the Jew first? She would ask Rodney. She put the nappies in the washing machine.

  The next day Renia rang the Immigration Department to ask if they could remove the entry on Lola’s passport listing Germany as her place of birth. Renia was switched from one clerk to another. Nobody seemed to understand why this was so important, and nobody could give her an answer.

  Renia wrote to the department. Her neighbour, Mr Spratt, checked her letter for her and told her that it was an excellent letter. The Immigration Department replied that if Renia came in to discuss the matter, it would be considered. Renia thought that she would go in with Lola. After all, Lola could talk anybody into anything.

  ‘Mum,’ said Lola, ‘I’m having enough trouble staying alive in one place. I feel in such a mess. I can’t even think about the danger of having Germany as my place of birth in my passport when I travel.’

  Renia felt angry. Lola had always disappointed her. It was as if Lola was going out of her way to make sure that she never gave her mother any pleasure. The only thing that Renia had ever asked of Lola was that she be slim. She had been putting Lola on diets for over twenty years. But somehow, despite all the diets, despite all the lettuce and tomatoes, despite the Ryvita biscuits, the thin-trim wafers, the Metrecal drink, the sugarless chewing gum and the calorie-less lollies, Lola had always been fat.

  Lola had completed slimming courses at Silhouette, the Elsternwick Weight Loss Clinic, the YWCA gymnasium and Weight Watchers. And she had remained fat.

  Renia rang up her local Member of Parliament, Mr Charles. Mr Charles lived around the corner from the Benskys. Renia made a point of always saying hello to him. She also let him know that she voted for him. Mr Charles would help her with the Immigration Department.

  Renia was elated the day that Josl picked up Lola’s new passport. Next to ‘place of birth’ was a nice, cream-coloured space.

  ‘Couldn’t this make the hijackers suspicious?’ asked Topcha Rosen. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘everyone has a place of birth on a passport. Maybe they will wonder why this girl has nothing next to her place of birth? Anyway, don’t worry, Renia. The main thing is not to worry about it. You’ll worry Lola, and then she’ll be worried, and the hijackers will see a worried person, and they will wonder why the person should be so worried.’

  Renia knew that Topcha knew what it was to be worried. And what it was to be in danger. Topcha had been hidden in a bunker in Poland for five years. Topcha’s family had shared the bunker with another family. Fifteen people living in
a bunker for five years. The bunker was twelve feet by eight feet. They couldn’t all lie down at once. They had to roster sleeping hours.

  After the war, Topcha’s parents couldn’t walk. Their muscles had atrophied. Topcha’s father never learnt to walk again. Every day, Topcha’s brother had gone out to the forests to buy and scavenge food. Topcha’s father had built the bunker in 1933. All his friends had laughed at him. When Poland was invaded, he had taken the family’s jewels and furs to the bunker. By the end of the war, the family had nothing left to sell. Another few weeks and they would have perished.

  * * *

  Renia also read reports of car accidents in the Age. If there was an extra large crash, she also bought the Sun, which always had more details. Renia wept for the car-accident victims. She scoured the articles for information. She learnt which streets and which intersections in Melbourne were the most dangerous. She learnt which times of day car accidents were likely to happen. Twilight was a bad time. She learnt that Volvos and Mercedes stood up well in accidents and that, on the whole, the bigger the car, the less damage was likely to be caused to its occupants.

  ‘Drive carefully,’ Renia said to Josl every morning. ‘Drive carefully,’ Renia, Lola and Lina Bensky chorused when they farewelled friends. ‘Drive carefully,’ the two Bensky daughters said to their husbands whenever the husbands drove anywhere. ‘Drive carefully. Drive carefully,’ they repeated several times. ‘Drive carefully. Drive carefully.’ The Bensky women sang it like a mantra.

  When Lola was sixteen, she had a boyfriend who was a tow-truck driver. For the Benskys, this young man’s other defects paled into insignificance next to the fact that he was a tow-truck driver. The Benskys didn’t complain about his long hair, they ignored his tattoos, and they overlooked the fact that he wasn’t Jewish.