The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, Page 22

  Excusing herself, my mother came over to explain the situation to my father, who was waiting with us. But he would not hear of leaving his stamps. He would get the necessary certificate. He could get it that day. The flight was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half. Let’s not take any chances. It would be all right, he assured her. He knew someone who could arrange it for him on the spot. Who cares? Forget the stamps. But he couldn’t. They had been with him all his life, and anyway, did she know how much these stamps will be worth in the West? No, she didn’t, and neither did he. He would try to get the certificate. If he wasn’t back in time to catch the plane, we were to leave without him. He would follow us as soon as he could bring the stamps. My mother pleaded. She was not leaving without him. I told him he was a fool and that I hated him. He slapped my face. The first customs officer was free now. Pavel saw him talking to his younger colleague. There was only one flight per day from Moscow to Rome. We stayed.

  It took my father just under one week to get the certificate required to take the stamps out. A week later we were back at the airport. There was no one to see us off this time. But finally we were leaving Russia and going to Rome. No one said anything except Pavel, who wanted to explore the plane. My father told him to take his seat and not to say a word until the plane had taken off.

  When the plane took off I wanted to cry. I looked at my mother and she squeezed my arm. Every day that we had been alive, every person we had ever met and all the words we had ever spoken, their purpose had been merely to fill in the time before this. None of us had ever been on a plane before. It felt as if we were being projected into heaven and that if we died on the way that would be all right too. My father had tears in his eyes. The stamp album was under his seat. It seemed remarkable that the plane could lift so heavy a cargo of yearnings and hopes off the ground.

  In Rome we were met by a man from a Russian emigrant welfare agency. He was clearly the only person around who had any idea how momentous the day was for us. He arranged for us to be given a certain sum of money and be driven to Ostia Lido, part of greater Rome, where, with three other families, we rented a pension by the beach. There we resumed our waiting. Rome was only a temporary staging place for Russian emigrants. We applied to go to New York. My father wanted to start anew, without lies, figuring he no longer had anything to hide. When he disclosed that he and my mother had been members of the Party, he was told that New York was out of contention. We applied for Canada, which was extremely popular with people in our situation.

  We were a small but shifting community. To supplement the allowance we were given by the welfare agency, my parents did what they could. My father took whatever laboring work was available. I don’t think he ever really thought he was cut out for it, but he seemed to enjoy the pain. My mother got work as a nanny and from then on we saw much less of her.

  My parents didn’t force me to go to school and I pitched in with my earnings from various jobs. Initially, I did some babysitting. Later, I started teaching English to the other waiting Russian emigrants. At its peak, I had six groups going. Men and women, some older than my parents, grappled with grammar and handed me homework to correct, some with bravado, some with trepidation, just like schoolchildren. I tried to teach them sentences I thought might be useful to them in the early days of their new lives. What is a mortgage? Why don’t I work here anymore?

  I was learning a lot despite not going to school. My parents insisted that I keep up with my subjects. It was on that condition that they let me work. Maths, physics and chemistry were just a matter of going through the textbooks. The bigger problem was getting the textbooks. If ever I had any problems that I couldn’t work out on my own, there was always a physicist or a mathematician on hand in our small transposed Russia on the Mediterranean able to help out.

  The hardest thing to teach myself was history. Of course, it was possible to buy history texts as well, even in English, but to swallow all of it, particularly anything pertaining to the Soviet Union, required almost a paradigm shift. In Moscow, under the tutelage of my parents, I had always been reluctant to accept uncritically what was in the standard history texts, but nothing could have prepared me for the gulf between what I read in Italy and what I had been fed in Moscow.

  Now I learnt just how different the world was from the one I had been taught about. There were new perspectives to be gained on such things as the treatment of the kulaks, the trials of the thirties, the efficacy of the Five-Year Plans, not to mention the Cold War we were then still in the middle of. It seemed that less than twenty years earlier, while Marilyn Monroe was singing happy birthday to the head of the free world from the middle of a cake, Khrushchev was taking off his shoe at the UN and banging it on the table. Heel trouble. I empathized. He obviously wore locally made shoes. A true patriot.

  Our new life in Italy seemed to coincide with my sexual awakening. Boys came and went in Ostia Lido, and mostly that was fine. Everyone was aware they could be resettled in different countries at any moment, and that leant an air of abandon to our liaisons. Most of the people I hung around with were slightly older than me but they treated me as their equal. Having a little money helped. In addition to the natural sciences, I was learning all about the social power of money. It made you more mature. Your jokes were funnier, your opinions more considered. Then, of course, there was the power of a woman’s sexuality, particularly over young men. This was fascinating. It was as though I were a well-connected member of the Party with every young man needing favors endlessly. There were no lies they wouldn’t tell and nothing they wouldn’t do to secure your patronage, a tremendous system.

  There was one boy whose departure, when it finally came, I was not so cavalier about. Mitya was his name. He was much quieter than I was and that always made him appear soulful, at least to me. Unlike almost everybody else in the émigré community, he was a stranger to anything practical. All the mathematicians and physicists and engineers were capable of unjamming doors, mending bike punctures or fixing radios. Not Mitya. He was a dreamer. Of course everyone there was dreaming, but Mitya did not dream of a job in Canada, making money in New York or defending the Jews in Israel. He dreamed dreams about words, not just in words, about words. At that stage they were other people’s words, but he hoped that one day they would be his words. I suspected he was writing already. I sometimes caught him scribbling in a little black book, but whenever I came near he put it away.

  Mitya would have studied literature had he stayed in the Soviet Union. He had hoped to teach it. But now he would have to take any job he could get in whichever country it was that he and his family could get into. He had the deep round eyes of Kafka, about whom he was passionate. In his wallet he carried around a small picture of Kafka. It was not an affectation. He didn’t ever show it to me. I found it one day while going through his wallet. Most boys had condoms squashed between their notes of different currencies and spare passport photos; it wasn’t so much out of their need for them as out of the Russian habit of hoarding things of good quality. Italian condoms were so much better than the Russian ones, which broke so often it was cheaper to have children. But Mitya didn’t carry condoms. He had Kafka.

  Mitya barely pursued me. He was too shy. That helped me to love him. In his weakness was his strength. We would go out together with whatever constituted the group at the time and he would hardly say a word. I couldn’t bear to watch him trying to fit in with the other boys at a disco or party. It was painful. He thought that I wanted him to fit in. In this he didn’t know me at all. I have a lot of trouble with people who fit in, even if they’re fitting in with people famous for not fitting in. I get this from my mother. Mitya was happiest showing me the books he was reading. He spent all of his meager funds on books and on me. We still wrote to each other. He went to Israel: just what they needed. His English was terrible. I don’t want to imagine his Hebrew. Like his friend Kafka, he will never have a home. I’ve seen a photo of him in uniform. He looked ridiculous. His gun seemed to
regard him curiously. He loves better than anyone I’ve ever known.

  I have every confidence that loneliness will one day be recognized for what it is, a pathology. Whether it will be psychiatrists, neuropsychologists or even philosophers who discover this I can’t say, but in the same way that it is now thought that various types of depression have something to do with the presence or absence of serotonin in the brain, so loneliness will one day be correlated with the absence of something other than people. It is possible to be lonely in a crowd at a party, in a marriage and, of course, by yourself. Clearly, other people have almost nothing to do with it. Loneliness is an illness.

  It was probably around that time that Pavel first manifested the symptoms. Or was it simply that that was the first time that anyone had noticed them? I noticed them but I didn’t do anything to try to help him. Pavel’s loneliness had been a recurring theme, a motif, dominant for him but just a subtle harmony below the surface of our own crashing melodies. Sitting there waiting for the private investigator to phone, it drowned out everything else and I was unable to hear myself think, unable to hide my anxiety. It was not easy to admit that perhaps it could have all been avoided.

  After three years of rejection, suddenly Switzerland was said to be a possibility. My father was overjoyed. During the war he’d been evacuated from Moscow and taught watchmaking as his trade. Ever since he had been in love with Switzerland. What could be better than an entire country dedicated to hygiene, temporal precision and chocolate, not to mention their stamps? And if that weren’t enough, there were the banks, those almost mythically discreet and mysterious financial institutions allegedly run by gnomes.

  But while all this was still only talk, four visas arrived, uninvited, from Australia. It seemed impossible. We didn’t want to go to Australia. Who knew anything about Australia? We had only applied because the Russian emigrant welfare agency said we had to and because we were assured we wouldn’t be allowed in. (They had promised us that Australia accepted only direct relatives, that even first cousins were too distant.) Australia was our last choice. My parents were in shock. This was not alleviated by the seminars on Australia we attended. I remember the four of us sitting motionless in a darkened room watching documentary movies about Australia. So much wildlife, nothing but wildlife. My father was speechless. He had heard stories of Russians arriving in Perth and then trying to go back to Russia. No one knew anything about the country. The Soviet government didn’t even vilify it. But our choice was simple. If we didn’t go to Melbourne we would lose our subsidy and all forms of assistance in Rome. It was going to have to be our home.

  It was autumn in Melbourne when we arrived. Autumn, I have since discovered, is Melbourne’s season. Of all the seasons, it best suits that sprawling metropolis about which all of Europe has heard virtually nothing. It is when the antipodean former outpost of England takes time out between the un-European heat of a tropical summer and the impending log fire and cocoa season. Melbourne, I have learned, has always been more English than Sydney, and the climate has a lot to do with it. The streets are long and straight. They do not meander randomly the way the streets in most European cities do. Someone planned them.

  From being a case for the Department of Immigration in Moscow, we became first a case for the Russian emigrant welfare agency in Rome and now a case in Melbourne for a Jewish welfare society. After a few weeks in a motel they found us a unit in an inner suburb. It was a 1950s-style reddy-orange brick block with terrazzo common stairs, corridors and balconies. Our unit was on the third floor and our balcony overlooked the driveway. The hallways and stairs smelled of cats, fried food and cigarettes. But there were three bedrooms. For the first time Pavel and I slept in separate rooms. When we first moved in he wasn’t so happy about this, but later, as he got older, it became his sanctuary. This was around the time he got his cassette player. For a long time he had only one cassette, a Deep Purple tape. Someone from the welfare society had donated it. He played it over and over. It drove my parents and me crazy. My father argued with him about it, and everything else, all the time.

  My parents were not happy. After my mother had learnt in Italy that we were coming to Australia, she had applied for a position with a Russian newspaper in Melbourne. The pay, she knew, would not be much but it would be better than nothing and could lead to other things. (Always they looked for the possibility of other things.) But by the time we were set up in Melbourne she learned that the paper had recently moved to Sydney. She told us this matter-of-factly, as though she had just discovered that we had run out of milk.

  My father was also having trouble getting work. There just wasn’t much call for Soviet-trained economists. But he refused to apply for unemployment benefits, claiming that it would “look bad.” Things were different here. The State was not expected to look after you, he insisted, and we haven’t been here all that long that we should feel so comfortable putting our hands out. My mother called him a fool. Did he feel so comfortable with two children growing out of their clothes? My father told her that we would be all right, we always were. He said he had been thinking about investigating the antique market here. He would even investigate the value of his stamps. It was a mistake for him to mention the stamps. I knew he wouldn’t do anything about it and it only made her angrier. Pavel said he didn’t really need new clothes. But he thought his Deep Purple tape might be about to break. The unit was becoming so small, none of us could move. The Soviet Union had seeped into every spare inch. We had never been all right.

  If I was to go to university, I had to finish school. I argued that I should be permitted to take an entrance exam and only if I didn’t perform well enough should I have to go back to school. I was almost eighteen and, after Rome, felt about thirty. I really didn’t care what I studied as long as I didn’t have to go back to school. But no one was terribly interested in my European sophistication or what I wanted. Wherever you are in the world, authorities are still authorities. I was told I would have to sit an exam just to get into final year in secondary school. It was demeaning. They gave me a week to study for it.

  I passed easily and got into a government high school for girls. Although it was a good school, I was very unhappy there. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that alone. Not one person said hello to me for the whole of the first term. I cried every day when I came home. Pavel, who got home from his school earlier than me, was already crying by the time I got there. My mother didn’t know what to do with us. My father looked at us incredulously. We had moved halfway around the world to escape the misery of Russia, and yet, we were more miserable than ever. I slowly shrank into myself. If it weren’t for letters from Mitya, I think I might well have forgotten who I was. I thought of moving to Israel. Mitya had just gone into the army and I wanted to be with him and his photo of Kafka.

  Pavel was often getting beaten up at school for being a wog. We had all been taught that a wog was a Greek or Italian Australian but not a Russian or a Jew. My father thought about this. As deplorable as it was for any child to be the victim of intimidation and violence from his peers, in his son’s case surely it was all the result of a misunderstanding. Pavel had to have the courage to explain to his tormentors that he was neither Greek or Italian. When, in his tortured accent, he did explain his origins, they called him a spy and subjected him to a pogrom. Being a spy was a charge levelled at me, too, first at school and then at university in various inane undergraduate attempts at some kind of geopolitical humor. Nevertheless university signalled a marked improvement in my personal circumstances. There was the end of the daily humiliation suffered by an adult forced to wear a school uniform. But more than that, a university is intrinsically a more tolerant world. The very institution itself is a testament to pluralism, at least it is in theory.

  I think it was Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited who wrote that we spend much of the second year at university trying to lose the friends we made in the first year. But I have always been advanced for my age, so already by the
end of first semester I had begun to discard people with the callous disregard of a veteran socialite.

  Of course, there were boys now and again, but most of them were lobotomized haircuts in gray windcheaters. I don’t know what it was about the men at that university, but their cultural aspirations and social graces tended to gravitate to the lowest common denominator: namely, to those of the engineering students. Naturally, I made the mistake of attempting a relationship, however briefly, with an engineer.

  He was the only boy at university I ever brought home. In an attempt to be hospitable and friendly to him, my mother went on at great length about how much she loved living in Australia. And, in a way, she had. Depending on what this private investigator told me, perhaps she would again. There and then she held it responsible.

  Throughout my time at university, I had a series of jobs to help pay the rent and whatever else needed paying. Often that was everything. My father refused to apply for unemployment benefits and everyone else refused to employ him. Trained in Marxist economics two or three decades before and with broken English, he did not give the impression of a man going places. He was getting older and heavier, in bulk and in manner. But the truth was, there was almost nothing he couldn’t do. No one would give him the opportunity, however, and gradually he was breaking. My mother, still trying to get some kind of language-based job with anything local and Russian, got a little dressmaking work from time to time to help out. Pavel worked after school as a janitor. He had started smoking and missing school, both with increasing frequency. My father sang Russian songs, initially when he was alone in the shower, but then in the lounge room when we were trying to watch television, or in the middle of the night, if he couldn’t sleep. We were at each other’s throats, shouting in anger at something or at nothing. The walls moved in closer to each other, and every shout set off in each of us an unscheduled train of thought to the edge of some or other precipice.