The Prosperous Thief (25 page)

‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked him one Sunday morning when she found him kneading pastry for at least half a dozen
Pflaumenküchen
. He kept up the rolling, shook his head and gave no words. She tried again:‘What’s on your mind?’ and again there was no answer, just a glancing up from his work and looking very old.

She was unlikely ever to find out now, she thought, as she pushed the cat aside and drew the pile of work towards her. She opened the top file and began to read but a few minutes later, with her mind still on her father, she gave up. In some peculiar way, Henry’s silences during his lifetime were exaggerating his absence now. These past weeks, as she had sorted and packed at her parents’ house, she had been aware of a very particular type of absence, bulky and uneasy like when you’re left alone in a doctor’s surgery, or those chilled moments before an examination begins and the paper is turned face down on the desk. It was an absence tinged with fear.

Nell had offered to help but, despite all they shared, Henry and Etti’s house, their past, the old memories now wrenched from their moorings, and the ever-present questions about Henry were lodged in a part of Laura that not even Nell had reached. The only person who might have understood was more cruelly absent than either Etti or Henry.

Daniel’s descent into religious observance had been incomplete at the time of Etti’s death. He had mourned his mother according to religious guidelines although not absolutely according to the book. Henry’s death provided him with the opportunity he had missed. Daniel’s mourning was total, he wore it like a shroud and it blocked out his sister. He prayed at the synagogue three times every day. He loved his mourning, he seemed to love it more than he had ever loved his parents. And while daily he would share his grief with a bunch of men at the synagogue who had never met Henry, he would not with his own sister. Daniel had left the family a long time ago, but Laura had never missed him as much as she did now.

She was left to dwell on her father alone – not just the man she knew and loved, but the man he had withheld as well. She searched and searched her parents’ house for evidence from his early years. She slid her fingers along the edges of ill-fitting drawers, she rummaged in his pockets and poked in the toes of shoes, she opened every container, she checked every envelope, she read the labels on his clothes. She sifted through the life her father had left and found nothing from the time before, except for the threepence, the centrepiece of his coin collection, but she had always known about that.

Her mother, even after the years of hiding during the war, had salvaged a photograph of her family now worn to a shadow, a tiny embroidered purse which had belonged to her mother, and enough memories to fill a warehouse. But Henry had nothing. ‘I prefer to travel light,’ he would joke. And even though no one ever laughed, it was a joke repeated down the years. Whenever a bag had to be packed, even for a day trip to the country, Henry would say he preferred to travel light.

And that was how he had quit this world. Sturdy of body despite his age, and empty of hand, and no surprises in the things he had left behind. Indeed, the only surprise at the end was the American at the funeral.

Laura had been happy to respect her father’s stowing of the past while he was alive, but once he was gone she recognised a burgeoning desire to fill up his silences, which for too long had been her own. A few weeks after his death, she had telephoned her father’s friends, but no one knew anything about the small American woman at Henry’s funeral, few had even noticed her. Laura’s curiosity tightened and a sadness too. Her father’s life had been passed in two distinct channels, and when finally someone had turned up to connect the two, no one seemed to have benefited, least of all Henry himself.

Laura had been close to her father, closer than was possible with her mother. In his own quiet way he had been more of a hands-on dad than the many seemingly easier fathers of her friends. Indeed, there was little Laura had to forgive Henry in life. Despite the baggage of a survivor’s life, he had supplied her with a happy childhood, leaving Etti to take care of the shadows.

Henry’s preference had always been for the family.With other people, even friends of thirty years standing, he always seemed to be treading on foreign ground. So strong was his preference for family life, Laura was convinced his own early life had been idyllic. When she was a child it was invariably Henry who planned surprises and outings. In winter there’d be picnics in the Dandenongs, and on summery Sundays the family would go to St Kilda beach where Henry, Laura and Daniel would swim for hours and play endless games of cricket on the sand. Henry was a rare occurrence, an athletic Jew.‘Would warrant a whole chapter to himself,’ Etti joked, referring to that slim bestseller,
The Jewish Companion to Sport
.

And there were his odd endearing rituals, like the ritual of the orange which Laura assumed had been transposed from his own childhood. Oranges, Henry used to say, were family food, already divided into those tidy segments so no one would miss out. He would peel with such care with his large gruff hands, the trick, he said, to remove the bitter pith without breaking the delicate film. And then the dividing: one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for me. And everyone ends up with three or four pieces according to Henry’s nimble fingers and, if necessary, a sleight of hand.

‘What happens if there are lots of children,’ Laura once asked.

An orange was family food, her father said, there had to be a piece for all.

‘Did you learn about oranges from your father?’ Laura continued. When Henry ignored the question, she asked again, louder this time. But before he could answer, Etti stepped in as she so often did,‘Don’t bother your father,’ she said.

When people you love have suffered greatly, you don’t want to add to their sorrows. Even as a young child Laura did what she was told and tried to avoid trouble. She trussed her days with caution, subjecting all her actions and utterances to close scrutiny before releasing them into the world; she tried, in short, to be a good and undemanding child.

Guilt, gratitude and grief, the three Gs of children of survivors – and love of course, but compared with the three Gs, the love was easy. Laura tiptoed through her childhood, not wanting to compound her parents’ suffering – Etti’s more than Henry’s, for in the hierarchy of suffering her mother was on top.‘We were cheap children,’ Etti used to say.‘We managed without food, we wore rags and were grateful, our shelter was a hole in the ground, our schooling was basic: you passed if you were alive at the end of the year.’This she would say to the daughter who once foolishly said she would die if she didn’t have her own stereo, and the son who at eighteen accused his parents of a
shtetl
mentality when they told him he didn’t need his own car. Unlike Daniel who had always resented his Holocaust heritage and refused to accommodate for it, Laura made a deliberate decision to keep her needs and desires private if there was any possibility of their upsetting her parents.

Which was why she married Alan Schwarz despite having been aware of her preference for girls practically since kindergarten. To present her parents with a female partner would have been beyond the pale. Not that she had used Alan: neither of them was particularly good marriage material, she had her lesbian tendencies and he had his drugs. And they had truly loved each other in their grossly imperfect ways, understood each other too, coming as they did from similar backgrounds. Then there were his looks: Alan had the face of an angel; on appearance alone butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but as Laura would soon discover, anything with a kick in it would. Alan loved her and he loved drugs, and with parents so indulgent of their only child, he had plenty of money for the top quality stuff even while still a student.

By the time he and Laura started dating he had finished university and was working in his father’s bias-binding business, with neither commitment nor reliability it should be said. As for drugs, they were a central feature of his life, although Laura thought he confined himself to grass and an occasional trip with the safer hallucinogens. And while there were plenty of warning signs even in those early days, so intent was she on keeping her parents happy, she failed to notice.

On one of their early dates Alan took her to a party. She remembered entering a basement flat (later she would wonder where on earth it could have been, given that basement flats were not common in Melbourne), a dark place with an odour of dope and sweat and people who had not moved for a long time. Ashtrays were overflowing and burgundy-coloured candles were burning, and she remembered dirty hands with black-rimmed nails and assumed that the dirty hands resulted from playing with the dark candle wax. Everyone was slow and vague and laughed a lot, and even though she felt out of place, she decided it was her fault for not being cool enough. Lou Reed waiting for the man played interminably, but so naïve was she in those early days, she had no idea why he was waiting. She smoked a little dope and thought that was all Alan did too, although when he disappeared into the bathroom with another guy she did wonder what they were doing in there together.

She and Alan were married before she recognised his heroin look: the pallid, clammy skin, the eyes that looked straight through her, his manner so disengaged. Heroin provided a shortcut to his soul, rendering her own determined attempts pathetic in comparison.

He died from a particularly pure batch at a time when he was supposed to be clean. He had left the house to do the shopping and two hours later he was dead. Laura still loved him – she was always loyal in love – and he had loved her too, although not as much as he loved heroin. Living with Alan had been shot through with problems, not the least being Laura’s determination to conceal the truth from her parents. However, when Alan died, it turned out they already knew, but loving her as they did and believing she was ignorant of his problem, had chosen to speak privately with him while assuming a protective silence with their own daughter.

Love, protection, silence, it’s a dangerous brew, yet Laura was never in any doubt her parents loved her, and never did she waver in her love for them. And if at times it became a little murky, that was simply a side-effect of so much love. Over the years she had watched with amusement as many of her friends had gone into therapy, each of them spending thousands of dollars trying to understand why they hated their mother or resented their father or felt betrayed by both. They would complain about not being loved enough, or being loved too much but the wrong sort of love – like the wrong sort of cholesterol, Laura once joked to Nell – and as damaging as if they had experienced no love at all. Her friends would compete for the prize of unhappiest childhood. Each would toss their childhood into the circle, then rummage through the pile, prodding, pushing, running the quality through their fingers, and in the end would retrieve their own damaged rag: it was best for being the worst. These were women and men in their twenties and thirties and forties who, with tears running down their face, would describe how at the age of four or five or eight or ten, this brother or that sister was given the book, the bedroom, the beach holiday, the bike they had coveted; or the best clothes, the front seat in the car, the mother’s attention, the father’s approval. ‘How can you still be upset about such things?’ Laura would ask. ‘None of it matters any more.’ But it did, it did. They were as fiercely possessive of their miserable childhoods as a miser of his bank account.

Then there were the friends who were children of survivors, all in their own way lugging around their parents’ horrors whether these had been revealed or not. Laura would not condemn as she watched them negotiate a crooked path into the future, often with a great gaping chasm behind. Certainly she had never condemned Alan, although she wished he had chosen a different way. And she tried not to condemn her brother with his religion, even though Daniel’s opiate was just as effective in separating him from her as Alan’s had been.

How different it was for Nell who, with her gratifyingly ordinary background, could not have predicted what trouble she had brought herself in choosing a Jew.

‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground?’ she had remarked in the early days of their relationship.

Just a handful of words but a mighty insult, not only to Laura but to survivors like her parents. It was indecent what her parents had paid for their survival and no one had the right to trespass. Her relationship with Alan had been far from perfect, but clearly, she realised, a non-Jewish partner was out of the question.

It was their very first holiday together and sparking with the usual excitement and fragility common to all new relationships. She and Nell had driven for hours from Melbourne to the high country of Victoria, had booked into a motel at Omeo and were taking a stroll through the main street of the historic town. It was late in the day, and although there were people about, there was that sense of space and emptiness so typical of country towns in Australia, and an odd spongy silence against which voices, birdsong, even the grating of an old ute sounded newly polished. They were passing by a stately old bank building when Nell spoke.

‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground? Complete with an electric fence around it for all eternity?’

Laura stopped, a partly exposed landmine could not have produced a sharper response, and grabbed Nell’s arm tight enough to hurt. And there in front of the red-brick bank, the sky blooding with the closing day and an icy chill oozing down, she took Nell on, not shouting but talking with venomous intensity. Two tall women in a country town, one startlingly fair with a mass of long blonde curls and the other equally tall, but angular and boyish with closely cropped dark hair, women who would have occasioned notice in a bustling city mall, but in this location were as obvious as performers on a brightly lit stage.

Laura, a fine arguer at the best of times, gained eloquence under pressure. It was as if a sluice gate were opened and a stream of sparklingly fluent, finely honed arguments released. With cutthroat logic and perfect delivery she ranged from trespass and betrayal, to appropriation and moral boundaries, on to ancient scapegoats and Christians with blood on their hands.