The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, Page 23

  My mother fought with Pavel and he looked to me, crying so seductively, entreating me to take his part in disputes in which he was invariably wrong. Was I any less his friend, his soul mate, for wanting him to finish school, to turn the radio down, not to smoke, at least not in the flat, or for wanting him not to grab my father by the scruff of the neck and thrust his face into our impoverishment? His unintelligible English was also a real problem for him. He said he was so sick of trying to prove he wasn’t stupid, he just wanted to smash everything. He was languishing in our tiny flat and he cursed my father for it. Take the government’s money. It is for people like you. You are no antique dealer. Don’t make us laugh. You are a disgrace to every real antique dealer. No stock? There is never any stock. There never will be because you have no money to buy it. And it went on nightly, my mother and Pavel joining in a mutual lullaby at each other or else in harmony against my father. And he sang, too, just any time, alone, in winter with the doors and windows closed so that he might be anywhere, and then in summer with the balcony door wide open to the street. I looked at him and at the railing on the balcony. In a genuine tragedy there is no hero to die finally, but the stage itself falls apart, beginning at the edges.

  I was already working at the book and music shop part-time when Pavel left home. He desperately needed some self-esteem and he wasn’t mustering any staying with us. I felt his English was the problem. He spoke well enough for shopping and for the street, but he was a long way from being able to study in English at a tertiary level, and—without ever having quite said it—my parents had brought us up to revere education above everything else.

  Pavel saw the relative ease with which I coped academically, and because he loved me so much, he couldn’t hate me for it or even be jealous. I was proof that, even in our circumstances, with our lack of money, one could still get on. So why couldn’t he and when would he ever? It ate at him. He did not even have the consolation of a special talent that might just see him through anyway—no musicianship or artistry. I could see this fine young man hollowing before me: my brother, who in some other time or place need not have looked ridiculous to the world. He loved me. And I loved him, but because of the way he saw himself, he could never believe that my love was not pity or duty.

  It was decided that he would move out, rent a one-bedroom unit in St. Kilda and, while working part-time, study a trade by night. Hadn’t my parents worked by day and studied by night? Tradition! At least it was a plan. My father drew comfort from this, and in the days before Pavel left we began saying that it was for the best. My mother had thin tears along her face as we stood in the passage near the front door on the day he left. Pavel hugged each of us, including my father, with new strength, and when he came last to my mother, she heaved for breath. He was closing the door and only I heard him: “I am not worth your tears.”

  How Russian it was of us to turn his moving to a separate unit into a scene from Doctor Zhivago. Or perhaps it was very Jewish of us. In the first couple of days my mother moped around the unit between outbreaks of tears as though he had gone off to war, rather than moved three kilometers away. But before very long he was visiting with his laundry and eating everything in sight, waiting for his washing to dry. He was visiting once or twice a week, and my parents—usually my mother—spoke to him on the telephone almost every day. There’s nothing like doing someone’s laundry to eradicate sentiment. His new lifestyle seemed to bear fruit almost immediately. Pavel was a different person: he was lighter. The autonomy had given color to his demeanor. When he came to visit he would laugh and joke with us, even with my father. After a few months he started bringing us gifts, telling us that his hours at work had been increased and that he had more money. My father cross-examined him as to what this meant for his course. Was he still working hard? Where previously this type of questioning would have been interpreted as belittling, an invasion of his privacy and a lack of trust, now Pavel remained calm. “I have it all worked out,” he told my father.

  “How so?”

  “Everything will be fine. I’m not going to go into the details. I know that you’re happy about the extra money: don’t pretend you’re not. You’re beginning to be proud of me. I can tell. Now you’re going to have to learn to trust me.”

  My mother also started bringing in a little extra money. In addition to the occasional dressmaking, she started working in a little shoe repair store a few days a week.

  “What do you know about shoes?” I asked her.

  “It’s like clothes. You just sew a little harder.”

  The shoe repair shop was a tiny leather-smelling place not far from where we lived. It was owned by another Russian Jew, a Mr. Kuznetsov, Sergei to my mother.

  “This man knows shoes,” my mother said, impressed. There was plenty of scope for people to have talked about Mr. Kuznetsov and his new assistant, spending all those hours alone together with nothing but the finer points of leather craft to keep them apart. But who would want to waste their time speculating about a relationship between two middle-aged Russian Jews?

  “I don’t trust him,” my father said when Kuznetsov asked my mother to go full-time.

  “But we need the money and he’s got the work.”

  My mother sounded Kuznetsov out about taking my father on part-time. My mother explained in a roundabout way that my father was going crazy and that she would take a reduction in pay for the period it took to train my father. Kuznetsov agreed on the condition that she accept a pay increase before my father started.

  My father was adamant. “I’m not working for him. That’s it! Do you want to discuss something else?”

  But he wasn’t working for anyone else, either, and when my mother suggested that they examine the possibility of getting a car, my father looked at her in horror. Not only could they not afford one but it had always been his role to want things first.

  “What has got into you? What do you need a car for?”

  “Well, it would make things much easier but perhaps you’re right, Sergei can give me a lift.”

  At about the time they were talking of cars, Mitya wrote to tell me he had taken a job in Israel driving buses. It wasn’t what either of us ever had in mind for him, but there was no bitterness in his letter. I assumed he must have been so disappointed with his life that this was a positive thing. If anything, he seemed to quite like the idea of driving a bus up and down Israel. He had been a driver in the army, after all. I wondered if Kafka was going with him.

  Pavel visited us in different clothes each week, clothes we had never seen before. My mother scoffed at his taste or lack of it. My father questioned his priorities.

  “Do you have so much money you can squander it with equanimity, or does your vanity lobby with more conviction than your future?”

  But Pavel told him the future was always there. “The future can take care of itself.”

  “Maybe it can, but who will take care of you? All of a sudden you know everything,” my father said.

  “Just like you do, only you got to know it gradually. I am spending money I earn, like everybody else. Perhaps it has been so long that you have forgotten what people do. You earn, you spend.”

  “I should slap you down. You fool, what about saving something?”

  I tried to intervene; I could see it escalating. “Let him spend all his pay for a little while. He’s just excited to have some money for a change. You’ll start to put a bit away soon, won’t you?”

  But he didn’t, and to my father, who had always been besotted with contingencies, Pavel was a cowboy. He stopped coming as often as he had and he was more frequently out when my mother or I phoned him. She worried about him, and my attempts to attribute his increasing absence to some youthful phase of muscle-flexing machismo did little to pacify her. When he did visit he was usually sullen and disaffected. If he wasn’t actually volleying barbs at my father, they barely spoke at all. But it was not due to my father that he was coming less, nor was it due to my mother’s incre
asingly emotional expressions of concern for him. There was nothing at all at our place that made him feel better about himself. Everything there reminded him of the time before he had moved out, and I could see that whatever it was he had experienced after that had not made him look at us differently. His despair at the smallness of the place, at the wretchedness of our lives, the shabbiness of the furniture, the fetidness of the cooking odors that never went away and the irritating tap of our shoes on the linoleum floor, was still there, even if tempered by a kind of pity.

  But worse for me than any of this was that Pavel was not coming to see me. He has never realized how much I need him. We are each other’s personal historians. Without him my past is uncertain and my future is forlorn. We are each other’s children, having spent our childhoods sitting together on so many different floors, laughing wildly at nothing when there was nothing to laugh at or crying about something when there was something to cry about, which was often. We have hidden together behind couches pretending to be other people or sometimes animals come alive from something we had read. Were my disapproving glances too strong or not strong enough? Did they come too early or too late? In the face of his rage, his burning desire to get on, to rid himself of his feeling of inadequacy, my love had been a too-faint breeze. No wonder he turned his back on me.

  When my father refused to work in Sergei Kuznetsov’s shoe repair store, my mother began working there full-time. By this time I had finished the Diploma of Education I had been advised to do after my first degree and was waiting for a teaching position to become available. I didn’t want to teach but I was getting restless in the bookshop where I was now working full-time, and moreover teaching was better paid. The one benefit I would miss would be the discount on books.

  My father had taken on the purchasing of a car as a personal project even though my mother had stopped talking about it. In the morning she walked to work and at night Sergei Kuznetsov drove her home. It seemed to my father that the shoe repair store was close enough for her to walk to and too far for her to be driven home from. Kuznetsov had a car and all day, six days a week now, he was with my mother while my father was at home or out trying to get work. Eventually Kuznetsov offered to drive my mother to the supermarket to help her with the shopping. At first she declined. Her husband could do the shopping. He has time. Yes, but he doesn’t have a car.

  One afternoon my mother called me at work from the shoe repair store. Her voice was interrupted by the syncopation of Kuznetsov hammering away at somebody’s sole. It had been over a week since we had seen Pavel and days since any one of us had spoken to him. She was worried about him and asked if I would stop by his flat on the way home. Kuznetsov would have driven her there but she didn’t feel right dropping in on Pavel with him unexpectedly. I was not to mention any of this to my father.

  I knocked on the door and waited. There was no sound from inside. I went around looking through all of the windows. Fortunately his unit was on the ground floor. The place was emptier than it had ever been, emptier than it should have been. I stood on my toes and peered in, face flat against the glass, looking for something I hadn’t yet articulated to myself, something I didn’t want to see. There was nothing. A few boxes and some rags my mother had given him for cleaning lay on the floor. He had gone.

  Where was he? What was I going to say? I needed time to think, so I just walked around the streets of St. Kilda near Pavel’s unit. I called the real estate agent responsible for managing the block. It was late and I got his answering machine. In desperation I went to the agent’s office hoping to find an after-hours number somewhere on the building. I did and called from a café, but another answering machine announced in a Groucho Marx imitation voice that no one was home. I told my mother that Pavel was out when I had got there and that the place was a mess as usual.

  The next day I telephoned the agent again and spoke to a woman in their rental section. She said Pavel Gamarkin had been late with his rent for a few months and had not paid it at all that month. He had said he would make up the arrears but it seemed he had shot through, forfeiting his bond. Would I like to see the unit?

  It was morning and I had a full day at work to think of something before I had to go home. I couldn’t tell my parents that he had just gone. My mother would have panicked and my father would have blamed himself, neither of which would have been much help. I was fairly frantic myself but I had customers, colleagues and employers from whom to hide it. We were busy, I was out of ideas and kept imagining horrible squalid scenes with my brother at the center of them. It may sound comical but it was while restocking the Crime/Mystery section that I came up with an idea. I would hire a private investigator to find him.

  How do you do that? How do you choose a private investigator? Do you interview them, find a competitive price? Who can advise you on something you don’t want to tell anybody about? I looked in the Yellow Pages and chose one with a Jewish-sounding surname: Leibowitz, Bernard Leibowitz. It didn’t sound much like Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade maybe but I wasn’t Lauren Bacall, either, and it was an emergency. A woman’s voice on the answering machine told me I had reached the Leibowitz Investigation Agency and to please leave a message after the tone. Then there was the tone. I waited for me to say something but nothing happened. How much time was there before the machine would cut me off? There was so much to tell him, I didn’t know what to leave out. How much does Bernard Leibowitz need to know? I called back. This time I left my name and work number and asked him to use discretion, whatever that means, when he called me back.

  He phoned me back the next day. I briefed him to find my brother. Bernard Leibowitz requested a photo of him and undertook to call me in a few days. Those few days were hell. I was no longer as good at waiting as I had been. The nights were worst. I lay there wondering how I had not seen it coming, my throat tense in remembrance of all that I had not said to keep him with me. What kind of mother would I be? What kind of friend was I? I had not been my brother’s keeper and so he had not been kept. In the torpor of the sun’s absence I scrambled the bedclothes till they lay heavily on me in complete disarray. I was so frightened for him.

  My mother was in the process of rejecting sanity. She had no time for it, notwithstanding that I had managed to keep Pavel’s disappearance from her. A few days after calling Leibowitz, I had the emotional equivalent of the experience of a newly toilet-trained child who is struggling to hold on but who trips and falls while running on his way to relief. In a sleep-deprived state I lost control of myself. But I hadn’t tripped. I was pushed over, and the realization of my family’s eternal vulnerability and of my inability to do anything about it spilled out of me all over the street.

  I was walking home down Acland Street after work. It was a fairly crowded early evening. The restaurants were already busy. The middle class, the offspring of an earlier wave of migrants, was hungry. I think I heard him first. Yes, that would be right. I would have heard him before I saw him and, had he not been singing, I might not have seen him at all. But the baritone was unmistakable. It was rich. Outside the travel agency my father was singing in the street. Some people had thrown money at his feet. I wanted to turn back, as if to un-see what I’d seen, to make it not him there. But it was him. The songs were Russian. The tears were his. I recognized them. They were like the fat rain-drops of summer. He was wearing a checked shirt of Pavel’s, one he had criticized him for buying. Under one arm he held his stamp album tightly to his side. I came up to him but he kept singing. People stared at us as I took him in my arms, but he didn’t stop singing. His tears mixed with mine and he let go of the stamp album. It fell open at his feet. I remember that one of our tears must have hit an exposed stamp and the print ran a little. Stalin lay smudged in Acland Street.

  My father told me he would sing there each day until he had the money for a car. I picked the stamp album up from the ground and as we walked he told me about his day. He had taken a tram into the city to the General Post Office in Bourke Street. H
e had stood in a number of queues; all of them, it had turned out, were the wrong ones. The people serving at the end of each queue had difficulty understanding him. Finally he was given the advice he was seeking, the name and address of the most expert philatelist in Melbourne. With his stamp album he took another tram and from the end of the line he walked to the address he had been given and showed a man the stamps he had been collecting all his life. The man offered him a cup of tea and said that he found them very interesting, nicely preserved. He did not want to buy them but knew of some people who might. The philatelist advised my father not to part with them for anything under one hundred and forty dollars.

  I still hadn’t told my parents about Bernard Leibowitz, the private investigator. This was partly to save them waiting for news in the event that he didn’t come up with any and partly to save them from whatever news he did come up with. Perhaps a few days was a figure of speech to him meaning more than one week and less than two. What if something else came up? He couldn’t be expected to drop a lead in another case to return my call punctually. How many cases did he work on at one time? Every time the phone rang I jumped. But when it wasn’t him I was relieved. At times I didn’t want him ever to call.

  We were busy. Sometimes there was no one in the shop and we just stood around waiting. But not then. It was late afternoon and I was supposed to be emptying cartons and stacking shelves, but I kept getting interrupted when they needed help at the front counter. No one else sold an art diary quite like me. Would that be cash? I was sorry, there were no books specifically on the indigenous trees of South Australia. It didn’t seem he would call.