Inside Outside (19 page)

At length they were driven, despite their disinclination, to seek the company of other expatriates, with whom they did not have to pretend, at least, that all was well in this land of milk and honey. The range of their friends and acquaintances was naturally limited, yet even within that narrow scope they exercised curious and inexplicable choices. They shunned people of similar disposition and personality, often quarrelling with them over a real or an imagined slight, remaining inflexibly vindictive and unforgiving. My mother, especially, elaborated a terrible mythology of insults and betrayals she had endured. These would constantly torment her; she would demean herself by trying to involve others in her resentments. Yet my parents tolerated and forgave others whose behaviour had violated every canon in their code of social conduct, who had exploited them and mocked them behind their backs. One married couple stands out in my memory as representing the extreme effects of this alarmingly neurotic aspect of my parents' behaviour during our Epping years, the blackest and most depressing period of our life in Australia.

The husband's family had been landowners in the district where my mother was born. According to my mother, the extent of their holding had been quite modest but, as happened so often, in his accounts it had grown to vast proportions. They had been ennobled in his grandfather's time through the old monarchy's attempts to pacify as many as possible of its potentially unruly subjects. He went around Sydney aping, in a way he would not have dared back home, what he considered to be aristocratic ways of behaviour. Totally self-centred, rude, offensive beyond endurance, he treated everyone with an exaggerated
hauteur
which would have been farcical had it not been so disgusting. He never spoke but always shouted. He affected a slurring of the ‘r's in what he thought was an aristocratic manner—except when, as frequently happened, he got carried away and entirely forgot about it. His every utterance was laced with scatological obscenities of the most revolting kind.

His wife was a meek, nervous woman, years younger than her appalling husband. She was the daughter of a Jewish banker who had managed to save most of his considerable fortune by transferring his assets to Switzerland in the thirties. Some years later, he even contrived to have his personal possessions—valuable paintings, silver, a priceless collection of Meissen figurines—consigned in a sealed railway wagon to Switzerland at a time when identical wagons were rolling in the other direction, towards Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their human cargo. She lived in awe of her frightful husband, who took every opportunity to shame and humiliate her.

They visited us on Sundays, arriving at lunchtime, but on most occasions, despite his wife's entreaties, the former
grand seigneur
decided to stay on for an evening meal which my parents, in their often difficult financial circumstances, found hard to provide. The whole day would be punctuated by his noisy demands—a glass of water; more of those pickled cucumbers; some coffee; more wine, but not the muck you've been serving. He treated us as his servants, without the least trace of politeness or consideration. Everyone was at his beck and call; he issued orders in a stream of the most distasteful obscenities. He would fart loudly at table, drawing everyone's attention to his skill. He was a dreadful parody of Hofmannstahl's Baron Ochs (himself a parody) without Hofmannstahl's wit or Strauss's captivating music to redeem him.

His performance usually reached its climax at meal-times. As his wife fiddled nervously with the food on her plate—she ate very little, and spoke less—he would mount a tirade against her stupidity, her sexual inhibitions, her pride. ‘She's so proud of herself you'd think there's a feather sticking out of her arse' was his favourite expression. He would invite us to look at her closely; didn't she have a dumb face? And her appearance—she was a mess. Everything about her drew a scathing comment. She would blush deeply, her head sinking lower and lower towards her plate. These execrations would sometimes give way to reminiscences about the world he had lost: his family's hunting lodge, their faithful retainers, golden misty mornings, sleigh-rides on moonlit winter nights—cheap images culled from equally cheap fiction. But the relief afforded by these interludes was short-lived. After a few minutes he would revert to his former theme, growing increasingly strident, constantly trying to catch sight of himself in the mirror above the fireplace of our windowless living room. He would turn his fury on his wife's parents, those filthy Jews, bloodsuckers, living in the lap of luxury in an hotel suite in Lausanne. A pigsty was too good for people who were so lazy they'd shit on the floor rather than take the trouble of going to the bathroom. He would veer off into complicated analyses of his wife's excretory habits, how she wasn't able to produce anything, not the tiniest skerrick, unless she had a box of expensive Swiss chocolates beside her. Dear God, she would end up by bankrupting him—whereas, of course, they lived on her money in a comfortable house in a pleasant suburb.

Why my parents tolerated all this is beyond my comprehension. They claimed that it was out of pity for the unfortunate wife, but that was clearly an insufficient explanation. I suspect that their decision to keep on seeing this couple, providing them with food and drink, when their restricted circle of acquaintances nevertheless contained much less outrageous, altogether more civilised people, was a result of the deep spiritual disturbance produced by their harsh and in many ways joyless life. These were people you could not envy, despite their comfortable financial circumstances. At least they did not treat my mother, who was mortally ashamed of her poverty-stricken appearance, and of the way in which her fingers were covered with evil sores and scabs, with the woundingly contemptuous civility she encountered on the few occasions that we visited our smart friends in the Eastern Suburbs. (‘What a sweet dress! Who made it for you?') My parents could even feel superior to the former landowner and his tormented wife. Perhaps they could see themselves, briefly and provisionally, as more fortunate than these emotionally stunted creatures. But the deepest reason for such an odd choice of friends, for their tolerating the intolerable when other much less serious offences were condemned with unforgiving determination, was, I am convinced, that exile, the half-life or living death they were leading, had somehow thrown their emotional and ethical responses entirely out of balance.

Because the world of Epping seemed to them so alien, because they were adrift in an environment to which they found it very difficult to relate, their attitudes towards their own kind—with whom there were fewer barriers of language or custom—lacked the discrimination, even perhaps finesse, they had exercised in their social relations in the past. The spiritual ills of migration and exile manifested themselves in curious and disturbing ways; the dislocation from familiar patterns of life, the absence of that network of social and family relationships which had sustained them and given substance to their existence, produced eccentricities, curious aberrations of behaviour or judgment which revealed themselves, it seems to me, as much in their odd choice of friends as in their financial miscalculations, or in the fantasies they entertained about the possibilities of life in their new land.

The spectral life led by people like my parents, who were by no means entirely cut off from Australian society yet were never quite at ease in it, received its most powerful commemoration in the awesome and alarming figure of Patrick White's Wandering Jew, the tormented Himmelfarb. Neither my parents nor any of their acquaintances approached the intellectual strength of White's extraordinary creation, nor were they capable of enduring the self-scrunity or self-abnegation with which Himmelfarb lacerates himself. His predicament, illuminated by the intense light of White's vision, nevertheless reflects the experiences of those who may have suffered less intensely, yet suffered all the same—even if their sufferings had at times the characteristics of farce rather than high tragedy.

Riders in the Chariot
was published in 1961. The date is, to my mind, crucial. This was the time when the confusing and contradictory pressures on people who had come to Australia in the immediate aftermath of the war combined to reveal to them the particular nature of their predicament. They had, by that time, lived in Australia long enough for its critical and disturbing impact to have become somewhat blunted. They had been away from Europe long enough for the irresistible need to escape brutality and horror to be replaced by a tentative nostalgia for a lost world. By that time many had lost the febrile energy that had sustained them through the war years and had allowed them to survive the trials of living in an alien environment. They no longer needed to struggle to learn the basic tools of communication or physical survival. Some had prospered. Many, like my parents, were at least making a living. They could relax their vigilance and the fierce determination to survive that had seen them through the horrors of war and the immediate confusions of migration. Many were exhausted, physically and also spiritually. Consequently, they turned their gaze inwards, restricting their engagement with life, going through the motions of their daily business, but betraying little vitality and no joy. Many held themselves aloof from the largely uncomprehending world in which they were forced to live, while, at the same time, they grew increasingly alienated from their more successful and confident co-exiles—just as Himmelfarb experiences a powerful disgust and nausea as he crosses the Red Sea of the Harbour on his way to the Rosetrees in Paradise East.

Like Himmelfarb, my parents came at this time to be haunted by the past and by an acute sense of loss. What haunted them was, nevertheless, entirely different from those images of a rich Judaeo-Germanic cultural and theological tradition that enter into a complex counterpoint with the mundane world of Sarsaparilla and Barranugli in the pages of
Riders in the Chariot
. They, like many postwar migrants, had lost a brittle, materialistic, entirely secular way of life; consequently their torment was tinged less by a metaphysical guilt of the sort Himmelfarb suffers, and more by regret, nostalgia, and a growing tendency to romanticise the good old prewar days. They searched for substitutes for that lost world, imagining that they found them in two curious institutions of migrant culture that began to emerge in the late fifties, and reached their golden age during the following decade.

Both of these institutions—espresso-bars and holidays in the mountains—proved difficult to transplant into Australian soil. The espresso-bars were a faint echo of that cafe-culture which reached its zenith in the first thirty years of the century in the fabled institutions of Vienna, Berlin, Prague and Budapest. Those vaulted, gilded, pillared and coffered palaces could not, of course, be replicated in Sydney—though that bastion of ‘native' culture, which migrant society rarely if ever patronised, the Cahill's chain of coffee houses, provided, architecturally at least, antipodean versions of such establishments. The espresso-bars of Sydney were much more functional affairs of plate-glass, laminex and plastic, generously endowed with the favoured kidney-shaped furniture of the late fifties. Nor was there any of the heady intellectual talk, the ferment of ideas—at times radical, at times alarmingly reactionary—that distinguished those hives of Central European political and cultural life. The denizens of the Sydney espresso-bars were bereft of ideas; they were beyond politics. Being generally contemptuous of the world in which they had chosen to live, Australian political life rarely engaged their interests, except on those occasions when they could voice their fears that the country would be taken over by the Communists. Like the rest of the nation, they remained generally ignorant of groups of former Nazis and other European right-wing extremists who were attempting at that time to penetrate the fabric of Australian political life.

The earliest espresso-bars were to be found in the Eastern Suburbs, but one eventually opened in North Sydney, and it was there that my parents found a milieu where they could achieve some sort of a communal life, the likes of which they lacked in their humdrum daily existence. The clientele of these establishments was solidy Austro-Hungarian with a sprinkling of other nationalities. They sat on rickety chairs at flimsy tables, drinking glutinous coffee and consuming large quantities of whipped cream, rich custard trapped between sheets of puff pastry, or strudels oozing with sour cherries. The women had a characteristic look that immediately identified them as members of this society. They wore too much jewellery—a legacy of the days when you had to put all your wealth into gold. One lady, notorious among her compatriots, kept on ‘losing' valuable rings and bracelets—in planes, on the street, at the cinema—until the insurance companies declared her to be a decidedly bad risk. Their hair, often fiercely tinted, was fashioned into hard shapes resembling crash helmets. Their clothes were made of expensive but excessively colourful stuff. They looked hard and calculating, and many of them were precisely that.