Foreign Correspondence (11 page)

My mother embraced the newcomers much sooner than the rest of the neighbors did. She befriended the lonely migrant women and worked on their English, and when she found they were
being ripped off doing piecework for a pittance, she helped them use Australian labor laws to get a fairer deal. She became the children’s advocate in their inevitable clashes between the ways of the adopted country and the abandoned one. When the Greek across the road lost his job at a car plant because his flight home from a family funeral had been delayed a day, my mother got on the phone and badgered the foreman into rehiring him. When the bachelor who lived over the back fence talked of returning to Turkey to find a suitable bride, my mother tried to figure ways to introduce him to “a nice Australian girl.”

I loved the new world that these people opened up for me: the decadence of being offered a tiny glass of slivovitz by the Serbs on Sunday mornings, the gothic grieving of the Greeks when a distant cousin died, sipping tea in ornate cups from the Russian spinster’s samovar, the strong tastes of black beans and chili oil brought by the Chinese and the arias that would burst unexpectedly from the Italian.

And yet the fact that they had come to Australia devalued them in my eyes. Why would anyone leave Rome or Athens or Beirut or Leningrad? Italy had scary terrorists, Greeks had military dictatorships, the Middle East had wars, the Russians had brave dissidents. To me, the banal certainty of three meals on the table, a steady job and stable politics seemed a pallid swap. My pen pals were still out there, amid the danger and the culture. So it was to them that I continued to look for my lifeline to the world.

The culture I particularly envied was French. One dull Sunday afternoon Darleen swooped down and swept me off to a Rodin exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was the first art I had ever seen up close. I gazed at Rodin’s desperately heroic
Burghers of Calais
, his towering
Balzac
, his delicately entwined
Lovers
.

From Rodin, I moved on to the Impressionists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Fauves. It was easy to love Cézanne’s landscapes because they so much resembled our own. His clear Provençal light might have been Sydney light; his rock-ribbed hillsides differed only in their extra centuries subdued to the hand of man. At the time, I didn’t realize I loved these paintings because they were showing me a way to look at my own country. I thought I loved them because they showed me a country that was better than mine.

There was a name for this syndrome: Cultural Cringe—the Australian belief that just about anybody anywhere did things better than we did. And no wonder. It was always other people and places we saw reflected in books and movies, never ourselves. I was seventeen before a major Australian novel (Patrick White’s
The Tree of Man
) elbowed its way onto one of my classroom reading lists. In history, we spent weeks studying the U.S. Civil War, but no time at all on the Australian miners’ rebellion against British troops at the Eureka Stockade. Australians still made few films. Our painters still often used misty European hues rather than the stark palette dictated by Australia’s own crisp light and air.

We didn’t even recognize the gifts of our native plants. One of my chores was sweeping up the pesky brown detritus that fell into our yard from a neighbor’s tree. I didn’t know that the Minié balls I was consigning to the compost were macadamias. These delicious nuts didn’t become famous until an American exported seedlings to Hawaii.

With materials borrowed from Darleen, I began painting. Slowly my palette, easel and pieces of primed Masonite began to take over the space on the back veranda that my science lab had occupied. Instead of copper sulfate solution, dribbles of acrylic paint began to threaten the contents of my mother’s ironing basket.

My artistic inspirations were all French. If Israel represented
my craving for risk and adventure, it was France that made me hunger for a culture that was old and arrogant, serene in its own superiority.

In 1968, I finally began to study French at high school. For someone of my temperament, it was an auspicious year to start. I had developed the bad habit of doing my homework sprawled in front of the television set. As I struggled to devise sentences using the irregular verbs “to be” and “to have” the TV news offered a brief film clip from Paris. The street seemed to be on fire. In the midst of the flames, a devastatingly handsome Parisian student ripped up a cobblestone and hurled it at the police. It was May 1968, and the
événements
were under way.

“Il est un beau étudiant,”
I wrote.
“Il est en fureur. Il a colère.” Et moi
, I thought,
j’ai colère aussi
. I wanted to hurl cobblestones, too—or I thought I did. I wanted to hurl something. I tingled all over with vague, nameless passions and urges. I wanted trouble, desperately. I wanted to kiss boys, take drugs, be hauled by the hair into a police van at an antiwar protest.

My parents were just as desperate to ensure that I did none of the above. For the next four years the tiny word “No” loomed large in Concord. No, I couldn’t go on a date. No, I couldn’t go to the beach with my girlfriends. No, I most certainly could not go and scream “Baby killer” at LBJ when he visited Australia.

Of course, I obeyed. Adolescent rebellion is a problem when your parents are your friends. But I ranted, I cried. I would have locked myself in the bathroom except that, since we only had one bathroom, locking oneself in it for any length of time seemed thoughtless. So I flounced through the house, singing loud, tuneless renditions of every song I knew with the word “free” in it: “Born Free,” “I Want to Be Free,” “set me free, why don’t you, babe?” I blasted the “come mothers and fathers”
verse from “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” at maximum volume, knowing that Bob Dylan’s spectacular lack of vocal ability drove my father to distraction. I sulked in my bedroom over copies of
Rules for Radicals
and
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. My parents ignored it all, and in between outbursts we continued to get on famously.

Darleen, who could have been my advocate, was suddenly gone. Lured to Melbourne by a job as an advertising copy writer, she was now earning the phenomenal salary of a hundred dollars a week—almost twice what my father made. I moved into her room and hoped that the vibrations emanating from her décor—hessian drapes appliquéd with hippie-esque daisies, interesting junkyard-salvage bookshelves, rice-paper lanterns—would work some kind of transformation on my style-impaired psyche.

From Melbourne, Darleen became another pen pal. Her first letter arrived doodled all over like an illuminated manuscript with inks she’d purloined from the ad agency’s art department. She had nicknamed me Face, gently mocking my discovery of heavy black eyeliner. “Heard you moved swiftly—up with the posters, on with the records—the dragon is dead—long live the face. How do you like the bed—bet you’re getting good sleeps—well that’s good—no lines for the face—right?”

From a distance, we drew closer. The letters got longer and more intimate. She sent me poems (Exley, Eliot), book recommendations (Tolkien, Vonnegut) and advice about boys: “With no brothers I found it hard to be natural at the beginning of my courting days.” One day a letter arrived sharing sisterly confidences about work and romance. In it, she predicted our future: “We’ll have little houses in Glebe and/or a dome house in the country, and we’ll wizz around, drink lots of tea with mum, pick dad up from the races and cricket. And I’ll either have a dog and lots of babies or a briefcase in the back seat and you’ll
have lots of impressionable young owl-eyed boy students five years your junior from your English classes at uni.” She ended this letter with the words I’d longed for all my life: “And do you realise what an incredibly wonderful amazing thing it is to me to find I have a sister who has all the qualities, and more, that I look for in a friend. Much happiness, thank you face.”

Worried that my curiosity about drugs would lead me into the company of creeps, she sent me a Glad sandwich bag containing a tiny amount of pot, also scored from her agency’s art department. (No doubt from the “bad types” from whom the nuns of Concord had hoped to shield her.) I waited till Mum went down the street on a grocery errand, rolled a flaccid, emaciated joint, stood at the door of the back veranda and smoked it, fast. The spasm of coughing that followed was so intense that the dog started barking in sympathy. The back fence didn’t melt. The magpies didn’t start singing in harmonics. I didn’t see God. Disappointed, yet ever the optimist, I fished a couple of seeds out of the crease in the bag and shoved them into the loamy soil among the begonias.

I decided that if I was to be imprisoned by the bourgeois values of my backwater country, at least I could write to some brave French soul out there on the ramparts. I had visions of her, my French alter ego. She wore tiny black mini-skirts and lashings of eyeliner. She chose her lovers with discernment. I visualized her hurling cobblestones by day and retreating to an intimate Left Bank brasserie where she argued about Simone and Sartre as the blended smoke of Gauloises and marijuana thickened in the candlelight. I decided to ask my French teacher to help me find her.

Miss Fitzpatrick probably wasn’t the right person to ask. Sixty-something, her steel-gray hair wrenched into a prim bun,
Miss Fitzpatrick was a caricature of the spinster schoolmarm, living with her elderly sisters and puttering to school in an ancient, pea-green Morris Minor that never went above thirty miles per hour. She always wore homemade, long-skirted Liberty-print dresses with a starched lace handkerchief attached to her lapel by a large safety pin. For thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds reveling in the rebellious atmosphere of the late 1960s, watching our elders scream, “Fuck the pigs!” at anti-Vietnam rallies, she should have been a gift from the gods: the ultimate fossil to satirize and send up.

Yet no one ever uttered a disrespectful word in her classroom. Other teachers had to bellow to get our attention. Miss Fitzpatrick could silence a class of rowdy adolescents with the raise of an eyebrow. When she read us the poetry of Verlaine and Ronsard, the room became so quiet that the only sound was the rhythmic pop of tennis balls from the courts outside. She transfixed us with French novels. When she read Antoine de St. Exupéry’s memoir of his desert plane crash, I held my breath as she reached the passage where the downed pilot sees the nomad coming to his aid. In French, she read St. Exupéry’s mellifluous paean to universal humanity and, looking up over the wire spectacles perched on her nose, translated it in her sweet, soft voice: “You are the well-loved brother.…” In the pause that followed, I wasn’t the only one snuffling into my Kleenex.

Miss Fitzpatrick spoke French with an impeccable Parisian accent, and spun tales of regional life in Normandy and Provence as if she had supped on
soupe de poisson
in every portside café and cheered the boule players in every sycamore-shaded square. In fact, she had never left Australia.

Every afternoon, in French class, she drew us a little bit further into her illusory world. As the cicadas drummed in the eucalyptus trees outside the classroom window, I filled exercise books with essays on French culture so detailed that in one, on
cuisine, I noted that a satisfactory accompaniment for
saumon au beurre blanc
would be a Puligny Montrachet 1961. The only salmon I had ever tasted had come out of a can, and wine, in our house, meant sweet sherry.

Unfortunately, when it came to the language itself, I didn’t turn out to be the prodigy I’d hoped. I could read and write well enough, memorizing great swaths of obscure vocabulary. But when the words left the page and floated out into the air, they might as well have been Swahili. Because I learned words by writing them down, my brain stubbornly clung to the way their spelling was supposed to sound in English. And because I had trouble understanding correct pronunciations, I had trouble reproducing them. My spoken French was a raspy collection of diphthongs in which I habitually swallowed the consonants that should have been stressed and barked out the ones that were meant to remain silent.

When I told Miss Fitzpatrick that I wanted a French pen friend, she said she’d be delighted to help.

I forgot to mention Paris.

I had imagined fiery dispatches from the Paris barricades, scrawled in haste on table napkins. Instead, Janine wrote to me on delicate azure stationery, her letter folded as carefully as a piece of origami, her penmanship impeccable. Her address was a placid village in Vaucluse, Provence, a village so tiny I searched in vain for it on all the school library’s maps of France. St. Martin de la Brasque, population 516, didn’t even have a high school. Janine boarded during the week in a town called Manosque, near Marseilles, where the disciplinary regime sounded tougher, if possible, than the tyranny being exacted upon me in Concord.

In some ways her letters were a great advertisement for the French education system. Written half in French, half in English,
they rarely contained a grammatical slip. Janine had started studying English two years earlier than we had begun French. After receiving my first letter, she kindly wrote that my French wasn’t
très mauvais
. But then, she hadn’t heard me try to speak it.

Her proletarian credentials, at least, seemed impeccable. Her father was a farmhand who made his living pruning and cultivating the vines of the Lubéron. The farmer’s daughter in her showed an avid interest in Australian sheep populations and wheat-growing acreage. To my mortification, and in confirmation of my own worst fears, the only Australian culture she’d heard of was agriculture.

But when I probed her for working-class consciousness, all I got was a dissertation on the aggravating behavior of the
minets
, or
beaucoup snob
, who peopled her school. Instead of being feted for her peasant origins, as I imagined she would be among the Maoist student radicals of Paris, it seemed she was enduring a quiet torment from the bourgeois pupils at her boarding school.