The Prosperous Thief (26 page)

‘You Jews don’t do forgiveness, do you?’ Nell said when Laura finally was silent.

Laura was incredulous: Nell had clearly understood nothing. And would never understand. She stomped back to the motel, leaving Nell standing in the main street of Omeo. There she collected the car,
her
car fortunately, and stormed off. She drove for hours, drove herself through the dark country, out of her rage and into the impossibility of this new relationship, only two months old after all and the two of them knowing so little of each other: Nell from her Anglo-Saxon Protestant background and Laura a Jew right down to her linen cupboard.

‘Such precision,’ Nell had said through her laughter when first she saw the linen cupboard.‘It deserves nothing less than posterity,’ and had returned the next day with a video camera.

Laura, too, had laughed, but not any more. As she negotiated the narrow, nervy curves of this unknown region, she cursed her heritage. Other people needed to concern themselves only with a small coterie of family and friends, but Laura,
Australian
Laura, found herself defending and arguing on behalf of all those millions of European Jews who had been silenced, all of them strangers but nonetheless included in her soul’s address book. It was not a role she wanted, but she seemed to have no choice. She and the six million were affronted by Nell’s comments, and even though she knew Nell intended no malice, she had no right to speak in a way that on someone else’s lips would be nothing less than murderous.

Hours later, having driven through ski resorts preparing for the season, down steep mountainous byways, along roads flanked by a sticky darkness, around the curves of the Tambo and the startling flash of water when her headlights found the river, she sped along the low, twisting road, could not go fast enough for the boiling inside, until in the glare of her headlights she saw a mound of dead wombat. And at last she slowed down.

Once before when driving through the country at night, she had hit a big brown male, the poor thing catapulted to the side of the road but still alive, and Laura crying and quivering and hardly able to stand but knowing she had to finish the job she had so carelessly begun. She had taken the crowbar from the car’s toolkit and beaten the poor animal’s head until she was sure he was dead. Would never forget the crippling horror of it all, the awful resistance of bone, the blood catching the warm fur, the legs jerking with each strike. Still shaking and crying and sickened with herself, she had dragged the animal away from the road to bury him. Her fingers proved useless against the hard dry earth, even the crowbar failed to make an impact. She pulled the poor creature a little further into the bush, rolled him into a shallow gully and covered him with twigs and leaves, and did not travel alone in the country for more than two years.

Now she kept her speed low, slipped a cassette of Bach’s cello suites into the tape deck and made her way down to the coast. It was ten o’clock when she drove into Bairnesdale and the streets were quiet. From a public telephone she rang the motel at Omeo and asked for a message to be delivered to Nell’s room. Then she drove back, arriving after midnight.

Wrapped in the sort of calm that feeds off tidy decisions, she informed Nell they would be leaving in the morning. But Nell would have none of it. Laura might be a neurotic Jew, she said, but she was actually quite taken by her.

They were to spend the rest of that long night talking – in later years they would call it their Isabel Archer night – and by the morning had decided to stay together. It was Henry James as psychotherapist and the only therapy Laura would ever countenance for herself.

‘You’re scared what you might discover,’ Nell had said.

But Nell was wrong;Laura’s memories of childhood were acute. Rather she was afraid what therapy might do with those memories, and she wanted to keep loving her parents. She knew about their flaws, she knew about her own flaws and she knew about the flaws in their mutual love. There was pathology aplenty in her background, enough for a lifetime of therapy, but she had made a decision long ago to live her life rather than suffer it. Being a victim, as popular as it was among many of her generation, had never held any appeal for her. Her situation was simple: there were elements in her past she could not change – the Holocaust and the cost of her parents’ survival for a start – and a closer perusal would only pollute the relationships she now enjoyed.

She used to joke that her attitude must be genetic, for neither of her parents would ever contemplate therapy, although for very different reasons from Laura. Neither believed in seeking help from a stranger.

‘Only yourself can you rely on,’ her mother used to say. ‘And your family too – although even they can die.’

Despite her family’s emotional self-sufficiency, privately Laura had thought her mother might actually benefit from a little professional help. Depressions, sleeplessness, a gastrointestinal tract which helped keep the medical profession afloat, and a story of personal loss and torment too great for a multitude of people seemed sufficient to justify the services of a specialist. But Etti was of the opinion that you don’t wash your dirty linen in public – or Etti’s version: better the dirty clothes they stay at home – and besides, what sort of world would it be if every time you have a little problem you run off to the doctor?

Over and over she would insist: you can do anything you set your mind to if it’s a matter of survival. Even when her cancer was diagnosed Etti was quite matter-of-fact: she’d survived worse.

Etti was just seventeen years old at the end of the war and entirely alone. Both parents had perished, together with her two sisters and brother, her aunts and uncles, most of her cousins, and her two grandmothers who would have died happier if, like their spouses, they had died before Hitler had marched into Poland. All alone at seventeen, minimal formal education yet a doctorate in survival. Human beings can live in a hole if that’s their only option, she used to say, and feed on paper if nothing else is available. You can train your body to shut down, not to feel hungry, not to feel the squeezing of your bowels, not to smell your own filth. You can train your eyes not to see, your poor heart to go numb, your brain to go quiet.

Throughout her life she continued to believe that a person can do anything if there’s a chance of survival. Although it clearly didn’t work with her cancer, as the once-buxom woman with the smooth rounded face faded, too busy fighting the disease to have time for depression, too busy fighting the disease to realise she had lost this one. And still telling her past.

‘I remember everything,’ she said.

Etti remembered in Polish, Yiddish and English.Three languages to try and puncture the silence.Three languages better to tell the world.Three times the ammunition with which to fight evil.

With each new revisionist she despaired. ‘No one else has to prove their own suffering. No one but the Jews.’

As a child, Laura used to shut herself in her wardrobe because her mother had spent half a year in a space the size of a cupboard. She would push the shoes to one side and crouch in the dark and remain absolutely still, scarcely breathing according to her mother’s account.

‘My feet they were always going to sleep,’ Etti had said. ‘My fingers I thought they would break from the cold.’

Laura’s feet did go to sleep, but Melbourne was never cold enough for her fingers to freeze.

‘And to know you are still alive, you have to keep thinking.’

So Laura would think: I am thinking so I must still be alive. And rolling word sequences silently over and over: days of the week, months of the year, forwards then backwards. I am still alive, she would think as she crouched in the wardrobe, counting by twos, and when she was older by threes, and older still, by sevens and nines. I am still alive, she would think as the darkness droned on.

There were times when she fell asleep in the wardrobe and knew if this were for real she might have died.

‘Never a proper sleep,’ Etti said.‘Always on the alert.’

And decades later, right up to the time of her death, Etti still slept poised for flight. Even the sleeping pills worked only for a couple of hours. Sleeping, Etti believed, was a state of mind which her own mind could not afford.

Laura, too, was not a good sleeper, although like so many aspects of her life, better since she’d been with Nell. In the early days of their relationship Nell would wake in the middle of the night to find Laura on the couch hitched to her walkman and the all-night broadcast from the BBC World Service. Nell would take Laura back to bed and stroke her while she concentrated on falling asleep.

‘Stop concentrating,’ Nell would say. ‘And forget cupboards, forget darkness. Think colour, glorious colour. Think Jackson Pollock in gorgeous rivulets. Feel it slither down your spine.’And would stroke her gently to sleep.

Everyone said it wouldn’t last, Nell and Laura were simply too different.

‘Why on earth would you want a partner a carbon copy of yourself?’ Nell said.

Over the years Laura had come to the same opinion as friend after friend introduced their latest love, a version of themselves right down to their mother problems, or, in a recent case of two adopted women getting together, their absent mother problems.

Their differences were mostly useful and often entertaining, although Laura’s lack of interest in cultural theory (‘Postmodernism, poststructuralism. When does post become passé?’) created tensions when it came to entertaining Nell’s friends. And Nell, much to Laura’s exasperation, would never learn how to stack the food in the pantry, or file the towels and sheets in the linen press. But these irritations aside, Laura liked finding what she lacked in a lover.

Coming from the the sort of background that could look after itself, Nell had always pursued a range of more creative futures. As soon as she had finished school she swapped Nell for Gaia and headed north to a commune on the central coast. But after three of the worst asthma attacks she had ever experienced, she was forced to concede that collective living close to nature fortified by love, meditation and organically grown dope was poison to sensitive lungs. Nell headed home and to university, an arts course of the English–history variety, pleasant enough but providing no future whatsoever. In her third year she enrolled in a film unit and enjoyed it sufficiently to stay for an honours year, completing a thesis on cartoons and social subversion.

Around this time she began collecting old movie posters. Her earliest acquisitions included
Some Like It Hot, South Pacific
and
Rear
Window,
and over the years she had maintained the high standard. These days her poster collection was considered one of the finest in the country. Currently it was filed in fireproof trays in her study, but one day, she said, she would purchase some space and have her collection on permanent display. Nell was full of such plans.

On leaving university she bought herself some smart clothes and for a short time worked as producer–fundraiser for a number of worthy film projects. She soon discovered that hustling was not her forté, so discarded the suits for black on black and the more artistic side of filmmaking. After two years of too much wine, too much teamwork and abject poverty she did as many had before her and opted for the halls of academe.

In choice of career, it seemed Nell’s blatantly ordinary past had eventually triumphed, but not so when it came to lovers. Here, too, her experience could not have been more different from Laura’s. The boyfriends who had passed through Nell’s adolescent heart were a motley assortment, and while none of them was out-and-out bad, she could claim more than a sprinkling of no-hopers. They prepared her well for Husband Number 1, a mistake by anyone’s reckoning, although a charming mistake by Nell’s. When he absconded with their joint savings and her electrical appliances, Nell said it was worth it: the savings were meagre, the appliances replaceable and she’d had a great deal of fun.

Husband Number 2 was her PhD supervisor. They started sleeping together in the same week Nell began the final draft of her doctoral thesis. The end was in sight, she said as she pulled Edouardo to the floor. The last draft was accompanied by abundant sex of the quick, illicit kind, much of it occurring on university property and in university time. The thesis was finished well before the sex wore out, and by the time Nell was appointed to her first teaching job at another of the city’s universities, she and Edouardo were married.

Cinema studies is not a large field. When two of the local luminaries share the same bed even if not the same university, it can become very crowded at home. Nell rose quickly through the ranks. Those who wished her harm, and within the sleazy underworld of university departments they numbered quite a few, passed prim remarks about pretty beginners with shallow charms needing neither brains nor books to facilitate their advancement. And while it was true Nell had slept with exactly the right person at the right time, and equally true she was very attractive, she was no intellectual slouch. Within six months of completing her doctorate she had converted her thesis and had it accepted by a mainstream publisher; another two years saw her celebrating the release of her second book.

Meanwhile Edouardo had slowed down. No one it seemed was interested in his latest manuscript described by Edouardo as groundbreaking, but considered inaccessible by the rejecting publishers. Edouardo believed it was too much to expect that the backwater which was Australian publishing would recognise a work of genius so he decided to go offshore. While waiting for offers to arrive in the mail, he lounged around the house expecting Nell to show her gratitude for his seminal role in her success. Nell was happy to ladle out gratitude for Edouardo’s carpentry skills, his home-distilled vodka, his nasi goreng; indeed, she was grateful to him for a multitude of things, but not her publications. Even as her supervisor his input had been minimal: he had refused to read her thesis until it was finished. As for her books, his first and only scholarly comments were reserved for what he called the ‘commodified vulgarity’ of the covers.