Everywhere I Look Read online

  four

  I shared a house in Melbourne, in the mid-’80s, with a recently ‘saved’ Christian who used to harangue me about Jesus at the drop of a hat. Tim came to stay a night or two. The saved one was very keen to meet Tim, and had planned a weighty theological discussion: the big black Bible was on the dining room table while we drank our tea and ate our cake. I couldn’t face it, and went for a walk round the big park. When I got home an hour later, Tim and the Bible were still at the table. ‘Where is he?’ ‘Gone upstairs for a nap, I think.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘Oh…we talked. And in the end I said to him, “Why don’t you give the book a rest? Why don’t you let your life be your witness?”’

  five

  I envied Tim his large, free-rolling, open-air-and-water imagination. I envied him when we got on a plane together and the hostess asked him for his autograph. I got cranky with him when he spurned the European writers I revered and clung to regional Americans I’d never heard of. I sent him a jubilant letter: ‘Hey! I’ve just written a 200-word sentence which is syntactically perfect!’ ‘I couldn’t care less,’ he replied, ‘about that sort of shit.’ He was cranky with me when he published Cloudstreet and I wouldn’t read it until I’d finished my try at a book about a house, Cosmo Cosmolino. I was jealous because everybody loved his book and nobody loved mine. I managed to pick a couple of squabbles. He seemed baffled by this and for a while halfheartedly played the part I gave him in my neurotic inner-city drama of ‘friendship’, until we both got bored with it and went back to our ordinary cheerful correspondence.

  six

  When my third husband and I went to stay with Tim and Denise at their fibro shack up the coast from Perth, they served meals of such oceanic munificence that we could not cope. What they thought of as a first course would have kept us going, in our etiolated Sydney existence, for days. Our stomachs were not big enough for their generosity. They looked at us, puzzled, over the mounds of fishy splendour in the centre of the table. They had the strong physical energy of a country life: three kids, a dog, a guitar, a fishing boat. We lived in our heads: self-starved, over-disciplined. And it showed.

  seven

  Tim came east on a promotion tour and asked if he could go to church with me one Sunday morning. That day we sang the eighteenth-century hymn that goes:

  Long my imprison’d spirit lay

  Fast bound in sin and nature’s night

  Thine eye diffus’d a quick’ning ray

  I woke. The dungeon flam’d with light

  My chains fell off, my heart was free

  I rose, went forth and follow’d thee.

  At the repetition of the words My chains fell off we glanced at each other and started to laugh. Later, we knelt side by side at the communion rail. Usually, when the priest offers you the chalice and says ‘The blood of Christ’, you reply ‘Amen’. I still don’t know if I dreamt this, but when Tim took the chalice and heard the formal words, he answered, ‘Thanks, mate.’

  eight

  Once, when I was staying at the Wintons’ place, Denise and I were mucking around in the kitchen, cooking the dinner. Tim rushed in with news: his agent had phoned him to say that a very handsome offer for the film rights to one of his novels had come in from a famous American company. But Tim had signed a local film contract for the same book only the day before. He lurched about the kitchen hitting cupboard doors with his flat palms, cursing and bewailing his luck. I began to commiserate. Denise worked on in silence while the two writers luxuriously whinged. Then she cut across us in a sharp, clear, level voice, matching the rhythm of her words to her physical movements: ‘Denise puts the roast in the oven. LIFE. GOES. ON.’ She slammed the oven door. We stopped talking. She opened a bottle and poured three glasses. We drank them. And life did just as she said.

  1999

  Notes from a Brief Friendship

  WHEN I was invited to write a cover line for Jacob Rosenberg’s second book of memoir, Sunrise West, I knew only that his first memoir, East of Time, had won several prizes and was highly thought of; so I promised the endorsement, sight unseen, and sat down, pencil in hand, to read both volumes.

  The narrator I found there was likeable, but his style at first was not congenial to me—a heightened rhetoric, dialogue of ornate wryness, a taste for the ringing phrase. My initial reservation about his technique must have been an unconscious attempt to shield myself from the nub of the story he had to tell, for when it came I was not prepared for the sickening jolt of his family’s arrival and immediate destruction at Birkenau. Within the blink of an eye I became bestially free…I am not trying to explain. There is nothing to elucidate.

  Since I was a teenager I have read many books about the Nazis’ attempts to destroy the Jews, but no matter how often or with what close attention I contemplate accounts of these horrible crimes and sufferings, I have never been able to hold steady their details in my head. Again, with Jacob Rosenberg’s books, I read with heart in mouth, but a protective amnesia blotted out what my eyes had just travelled across. To fix the murdered Jewish children’s ages in my mind I would stand them beside a mental picture of my grandchildren, then shrink in panic from that manoeuvre. Whenever Rosenberg put a date to some unspeakable barbarity of the early 1940s, I would be stopped in my tracks by the fact that in the same year my young mother was wheeling me in my pram along the clean new streets of suburban Geelong, unmolested, ignorant of terror, naively privileged to have been born in the very land to which Jacob and his wife, Esther, exhausted, bereft and brutalised, would stagger in 1948—which he describes in his book as ‘an amazingly peaceful world soaked in sun’. How was it possible that these wild extremes were taking place at the same moment? Would I ever be able to understand or grasp this phenomenon?

  Yet I found that Jacob Rosenberg wrote with a kind of mercy for the reader. He drew with fierce strokes a scene of the most savage brutality, and then relaxed into a vignette of human interaction tinged with unexpected sweetness and even humour.

  He was a deft sketcher of physical appearance, with a knowing eye for what people’s clothes, and the way they wear them, could reveal: a smallish condescending man who always wore a white shirt with a black tattered bow tie. Sometimes he took a fleeting pleasure in an item of clothing: a silky white shirt, perhaps, trimmed with an emerald tie. His attitudes towards religious faith and the idea of God were undogmatic, and beautifully complex: when he wrote about soup, for example, he made clear not only its preciousness to the physically starving, but also its sacramental meaning and value. In fact, I found that he was impressively in command of something I have heard a Christian call the sacrament of whatever’s necessary.

  I wrote a humbled sentence for the book cover and sent it to the publisher.

  Soon Jacob Rosenberg himself phoned to thank me. He was a man in his eighties, twenty years my senior, with delicate manners and a voice with a smile in it, tremulous, a little bit reedy. He would like to take me to lunch. Would I suggest a restaurant? I proposed the European in Spring Street, opposite the Parliament.

  He turned out to be a small, slight man, in glasses, with eyes that peeped brightly over their frames. His hair grew in white puffs above his ears. His English was very fluent, with a strong accent.

  The food at the European that day was delicious and Jacob seemed pleased by it; but our table was tiny and ill-placed, and the noise level close to unbearable: we sat there for an hour yelling at each other. This was not what I had envisaged. Still, we communicated. He told me that writing was the only way he could make sense of the world. His granddaughter, he said, was a fan of my work. I suspected that he had not read any of it himself, and that if he had, it would not have appealed to him. This made me feel relaxed and free: relieved that I would not be obliged to account for myself. He had brought me, as a gift, one of his earlier books, Lives and Embers. The stories in it, he said, were ‘parables, stripped of detail, but rather sentimental’. He asked me to launch Sunrise West. I said I would be honoured. Rain began
to fall while we were inside the restaurant, so heavily that we ordered another glass of mineral water, another pot of tea, rather than leave the building and get drenched. A man of my father’s generation, Jacob picked up the tab with a confident swoop.

  On the tram home I opened Lives and Embers, with its brown-tinged, almost comically beautiful Modigliani double portrait on the cover. I riffled the pages at random and my eye fell on this: It was in the early days of September 1944 that I saw my sister Pola for the last time. Her head had been shaved. She wore a loose white shift that clung to her swollen legs. She was stretched out on the electric fence at Auschwitz, finally at rest. Breathless, I turned back to the title page and found that he had written there, in a neat, foreign hand, To dear Helen.

  Next time we met, we tried the Windsor Hotel, where the floor was carpeted and diners could converse; I used to meet my father there after my mother died. Jacob and I ate grills with salad. His eyes were very bright and warm behind the spectacles. He tilted his head while he listened and thought. He told me a thrilling story about the time when his daughter Marcia, working for Doubleday in New York, needed a special outfit for an occasion she was to attend in the company of Jackie Onassis, who had been very supportive of her; he had designed and made, in record time, a beautiful velvet suit ‘with a jabot. Do you know jabot?’ He made an eloquent one-handed gesture at his throat and I got the picture.

  Although Jacob appeared to enjoy the Windsor, I felt again that we had not found the right venue. A few months later he took the matter of the restaurant into his own hands. We would meet at an Italian place on Toorak Road in South Yarra. This was off my patch. I took the train. He had told me the address, but tramp up and down as I might, I couldn’t find it. At last I spotted a figure in a raincoat on the other side of the street, waving patiently. He had given me an odd number instead of an even. When I hurried across the tramline and teased him about his error, he seemed annoyed with me for a moment, frowned, and looked away. This too reminded me fondly of my father.

  The owner of the Italian bistro greeted Jacob with a respectful affection that made him relax and glow: he was known here, a beloved patron. I too was at ease in this old-style restaurant, with its dark timbers and enormous menu and middle-aged waiters in long aprons. We ventured a glass of wine.

  He brought out of his briefcase a copy of Sunrise West, the new book I was to launch, and passed it across the table. It was a paperback from Brandl & Schlesinger, like all their books elegantly and powerfully designed. On the cover was a black-and-white shot of a young couple in heavy overcoats, striding towards the camera, both with thick dark wavy hair swept back handsomely from their foreheads. Their expressions were the unposed ones of people caught unawares on a pavement by a 1940s street photographer.

  ‘It’s you! With your wife?’

  ‘Yes, with Esther, in Marseilles,’ he said, ‘in 1948, just before we left for Australia.’

  ‘I thought Marseilles was a warm place. Why those big leather gloves? Look—the man behind you is only wearing a light suit.’

  ‘It was the iceblocks I had to carry,’ he said with a shrug. ‘After that my hands never got warm.’

  He was happy today, he said, because he had spent the morning working on his new book, a novel, and had written a sentence that he was pleased with: Youth is like a diamond, unaware of its own brilliance. We raised a glass to youth and its innocent shine.

  Jacob was very friendly. I liked him and I think he liked me. And yet we were always slightly awkward with each other. Our social styles did not easily mesh. When our conversation moved in a direction he was not comfortable with—if I indulged in idle psychologising, or made a crack aimed at provoking light laughter—he gently drew me back on to his turf by offering a philosophical generalisation, a piece of wisdom about life or literature. I had known other male writers, particularly ones who worshipped at European cultural shrines, who had this habit. I was aware that Jacob was friendly with certain Australian novelists, poets and philosophers who were men: that this was the milieu in which he most liked to move. He was an old man, no doubt an autodidact—he wrote that Auschwitz was his university—and his style was to express himself in well-considered, hard-won nuggets of thought. He would lay them down on the cloth between us, peering up at me on an angle with his bright eyes; and I, the beneficiary of a university education that I had been too lazy to take advantage of, would sit there gazing at them helplessly. I have never been any good at generalising, or at responding to other people’s philosophical insights. Jacob was seeking literary companionship, but I was not able to provide it, or not as he conceived it. The gulf that separated us, I think, was the one that lies between those who love chess and those who grasp neither its rules nor its purpose.

  Some of his men friends had repeated to me the statements of deep, stoical bleakness that he had made to them. He never spoke that way to me. Perhaps he felt that I was naïve, that he ought to spare me the worst of what his experiences had taught him.

  Re-reading a random page of Sunrise West on my way home from the South Yarra restaurant that day, I came upon this lovely three-sentence account of exhausted prisoners crossing at last into Italy: We moved out by moonlight, after being transferred to a goods train once again. The night was warm and the shutters of our carriage were left wide open. We rushed through a pastoral world unknown to me.

  Yes—when the chips were down, when his storytelling voice breathed freely and I heard it without defence, my respect and affection for him were unconstrained.

  After the launch of Sunrise West, at which he spoke with a gracious simplicity and with an impressive mastery of the pause, and after the pleasant celebration later at the Rosenbergs’ house, where he and his family welcomed me with warm friendliness, I hardly saw Jacob again. We lived on opposite sides of the city, and the city seemed to have become dispiritingly wide. Once or twice we spoke cheerfully on the phone. Work was his chief preoccupation and joy. He was close to finishing his novel. He sounded somewhat breathless. The word angina was mentioned.

  In a little more than a year, Alex Miller called one morning to tell me that Jacob had died of a heart attack, on the eve of the day a big publisher had intended to call him with an offer for his just-finished novel The Hollow Tree.

  I drove out to Springvale for his funeral. The service was conducted in the style at which Jews excel: deeply satisfying in its formality, tender in the beauty of its readings and tributes.

  Two days later, after timidly attending the minyan, I stepped out his front gate and headed for my car. It was almost dusk and the sky was full of dramatic, dark clouds. It struck me that Jacob would never again walk along his own street, or see with gladness the calm leafy trees of his suburb. The brevity and shyness of our friendship made me feel suddenly weak with sadness.

  Soon after Jacob’s death, Radio National’s Book Show replayed an old interview with him. ‘Suffering is so singular an art,’ he said, in his reedy, softly humorous voice; and ‘I believe that nothing is lost in the universe, somehow.’

  Reading his memoirs again, now, I am flooded by the memory of a dream I had, many years before I met Jacob. On the lip of an abyss roaring with dark wind stood a tiny bush that bore an intensely red flower. The bush grew right on the very edge of nothingness, and yet somehow its roots were holding. It had a grip that no wind could disturb; it thrived there, all on its own, this modest little plant, and while the abyss yawned beside it, it went on bravely, doggedly flowering.

  2011

  From Frogmore, Victoria

  LAST winter on a plane to the Mildura Writers’ Festival I happened to sit next to Raimond Gaita. Like many people who have read his memoir Romulus, My Father, I felt I knew him better than I actually do. I asked him if it was true that Eric Bana was going to play Romulus in the movie adaptation that I’d heard Richard Roxburgh was directing. He opened his laptop and showed me some stills: the replica of Frogmore, the crumbling weatherboard shack of his childhood; Bana riding a mot
orbike with a plaster cast on his leg; a rangy boy running and laughing in a dusty yard. The movie-Raimond looked about nine. He had a face so open that it hurt to look at it.

  ‘His name,’ said Gaita, ‘is Kodi Smit-McPhee.’

  ‘Did you go to the shoot?’

  ‘I kept away,’ he said. ‘I thought my presence might throw him off. He might think, Is this what’s ahead for me?’ He gave a small laugh. ‘But near the end I went. Richard introduced us. We stood and looked at each other. We both cried. He said, “I’ve lived your life for the last three months.” And then for an hour he wouldn’t leave my side.’

  There’s a brief scene, quite early in the movie, in which Raimond is mooching along a street and sees a teenage girl dancing wildly to a record on her front porch. He calls out and asks her the name of the singer. She tells him it’s Jerry Lee Lewis, from Ferriday, Louisiana. ‘And who are you, when you’re at home?’ she asks coldly. The screen fills with the boy’s eager, unbearably smiling and undefended face. ‘I’m Raimond Gaita,’ he says, ‘from Frogmore, Victoria!’

  At that moment a faint sound rustled through the first preview audience: part laughter, part sigh. Gaita was in the cinema that evening. I wondered how he would sit through this new telling of his childhood, a version over which he’d had little or no control.

  It’s a story of suffering: obsessive love, sexual betrayal and jealousy; abandonment of small children; violence, madness and despair; two suicides; repeated acts of forgiveness and loyalty that are nothing short of heroic. Yet threaded through all this is the miraculous blossoming of a child’s intellect.

  The book changed the quality of the literary air in this country. People often take an unusually emotional tone when they speak about it, as if it had performed for them the function that Franz Kafka demanded: ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ Reading it, with its stiff, passionate dignity and its moral demands, can smash open a reader’s own blocked-off sorrows. Out they rush to meet those that the book relates.