The security officers consulted each other then nodded to Laura to go ahead. They positioned themselves against the wall, one either side of the door, and waited.
Raphe Carter was a man who needed no encouragement, his words slipped out like silk. He told Laura he was an academic, mentioned a couple of book titles she’d never heard of, then without a trace of a smile said,‘The Holocaust is my gig.And I do a side in volcanoes.’
Laura caught the expression on the female officer’s face, an unambiguous are-you-sure-you-don’t-want-me-to-get-rid-of-this-geek grimace. But Laura didn’t, or at least not yet. Raphe Carter from San Francisco, California, was providing an entertaining break in what had been a horror week. Here was a man who could have walked off the set of an American sitcom, not simply the lines so earnestly delivered, but the compact body, the clothes worn with ease, the make-up smooth skin, the dark, almost pretty face.
‘I’m Jewish,’ he said.
Seinfeld, Laura was thinking, Raphe Carter could be Seinfeld’s brother. As for Jewish, everyone on
Seinfeld
is Jewish.
‘Well actually part-Jewish,’ he said.
‘Nothing special about that around here,’ she said. ‘
Our
gig is minorities.’
Although no one within these ideologically pure walls would put it quite like that. The Human Rights and Social Justice Commission had been established in the 1980s to deal with a range of ethnicity-based human rights issues. Throughout the nineties its brief had grown to meet an ever-expanding repertoire of bigotry and intolerance. Now in the new century the extent of the commission’s purview was reflected in its scrupulously nondiscriminatory board of commissioners. There was one of everything: one Greek, one Italian, one Vietnamese, one Chinese, one indigenous Australian, one Malaysian Muslim, one Jew, one Lebanese Christian and, at the present time, two vacancies and a stampede of lobbying in high places.
Not that any of this concerned Raphe because his business had nothing to do with the commission. His mother’s family was Jewish, he explained, but had been severed from their roots in the move from Europe. He gave a you-know-what-I-mean shrug to encompass the entire Holocaust and its devastations. ‘My immediate family’s gone now. So as I was out this way I thought I might try Australia.’ Then, to ensure Laura had not missed his point,‘To see if anyone’s left.’
With the American woman of a few years ago and her own investigations since, this was not a point Laura could easily miss. Although for what he was wanting she couldn’t help.‘Wrong sort of Jew,’ she said.‘Wrong sort of clout.’
Again he mentioned she was the only identifiable Jew in the morning paper, again he mentioned he was short of time. Laura consulted her watch, so was she.‘Some traces take years and you’ve got –?’
‘Four days.’
The sweet-faced renegade from
Seinfeld
had fast become a nuisance. As Laura rummaged in her desk for the phone number of the Jewish Historical Society, she wondered what sins she had committed this past week for her Friday morning to be saddled with such a schmuck. At the same time she realised how much she must need a break that she gave him the benefit of the doubt in the first place. She found the number and wrote it down, then couldn’t resist, ‘For a four-day search,’ she said with an exquisite lack of facial expression,‘you’d have done better to arrive earlier in the week.’
Raphe Carter looked confused.
‘Friday,’ Laura explained.‘It’s Shabbat. The Jewish organisations all close early and tomorrow they’re shut.’
She watched as the frown was replaced by an utterly symmetrical smile.
He was, he said, a seasoned researcher. ‘If there’s anything to discover, I’ll know by the end of the day.’
She too smiled, very dry and very wry, as if that might highlight the irony he clearly was missing. ‘Maybe so, but a week would have clinched it.’
She watched as he slipped the information into his wallet, a satisfied expression on his face, and knew he was in for a rude awakening. The searches took years, even a lifetime, particularly if the searcher chose to interpret every failed attempt as a flaw in the search rather than there being nothing to discover. Laura had observed this among a number of her friends, on and on they went, lurching between eager anticipation and dazed disappointment as they hunted down their lost past. And just when they thought they’d exhausted all possible leads, along came the Internet with website after website bristling with promise, and conveniently linked to online loss and grief counselling when hopes took a whipping.
In the period following her father’s death when she’d been desperate to uncover the truth about him, Laura had been caught in the on-line search maze. Almost every night while Nell slept, she would cruise the survivor sites, perusing names, dallying in chat rooms, following leads, searching always searching. While she was at the computer, while she was scanning lists, while she was searching for her father’s lost past, the immediate reality of Henry’s death with all its accompanying pain was somehow pushed aside. On and on she would go, often ending up at sites with only the faintest connection with the known facts about Henry. But it didn’t matter. She had hope and it pulled her onwards, away from her mourning, away from the gaping hole of the present, towards the answers her father had so strenuously concealed.
It was some months before she realised how very seductive hope can be and how great its stamina to withstand disappointment. So much time wasted: for she discovered nothing. In the end she forced herself to give up her on-line excursions, to turn away from the alluring echo of her father’s silence. But it was hard, very hard, both the knowing and the not knowing, the searching and the not searching. And here was this cocky American bitzer wanting to uncover his European roots in Australia this weekend. He was, Laura decided, either very naïve, very arrogant, or very crazy.
And fortunately he was leaving. He thanked her and shook her hand. But at the door, dwarfed by the two burly officers, he twisted around,‘I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t be as difficult as you think. Lewin, for example, your name. My mother was born a Lewin. I could start with you.’
And with that he was gone.
Months later, after her own life had collapsed, Laura would recall those words:
I could start with you
, and wonder whether that was exactly what he had done. He was neither so arrogant nor so naïve that his Jew-with-clout-in-the-newspaper story should be believed.Although on the day of their first meeting it was not that she believed him, she simply did not have time to doubt.
It was in the heat of yet another multiculturalism backlash, spearheaded this time not by ratbags from the far right but the country’s own elected political leaders. Every month saw another boatload of desperate asylum seekers risking their lives to travel to Australia because their lives were under far greater threat in their own countries. And instead of welcoming these people, instead of recognising the shocking brutality they’d suffered under some of the most repressive regimes on earth, many of the nation’s leaders were accusing them of queue-jumping and turning them away. But what queue was this when the oppressors in their own countries had no queues? What astonishing twists of reason had supposedly humane citizens talking of queues when people were being maimed and slaughtered at random?
Laura was witnessing slurs and slogans which could have graced the pages of
Der Stürmer
, and violence too, this spilling onto any Australian who looked and sounded different from those of a white European background. ‘Australia for Australians’ was the catch-cry. But what sort of Australia was this? And how limited the definition of Australian. Some of the flag-wavers were extremists such as the neo-Nazis outside the commission at the time of Raphe Carter’s visit, but most were just ordinary citizens who had been doing it tough.
People had been quietly seething throughout the nineties as their jobs disappeared and social services were cut. They stood by powerless as their local hospital was shut down, together with kindergartens, schools and neighbourhood banks. As their standard of living plummeted, it was with bitterness they heard how the nation had never been so prosperous, that the budget was in surplus for the first time in years, and a financial institution far away in the United States had rewarded Australia with a triple A credit rating. Immigration levels and multiculturalism were easy targets in such a climate and, with an election in the offing, were being used as political cards by the nation’s leaders.‘Australians will decide who lives in Australia,’ the prime minister had said recently as yet another boat of desperate people was turned away from Australian shores. And riding the waves of his thinly disguised racism, a level of violence to keep plenty of people locked in their homes.
Raphe Carter was quickly forgotten as Laura dealt with the latest attacks. The Jewish targets had been fewer than the Asian and Muslim ones, but sufficient to place her usual work on hold. Anti-Semitic obscenities had been daubed on the walls of the Yeshiva as well as on a number of houses in the main Jewish area of the city. One of these was occupied by a terrified Indian family from Fiji who had not expected to experience in Australia the same racial hatred which had forced them from their own country. Midmorning Laura met with her colleagues and together they devised a plan to meet the most pressing of the current problems. The rest of the day Laura spent lobbying parliamentarians and bureaucrats for a special one-off grant to pay for increased security. With the impending election and many politicians not wanting to be strongly identified with either side of the refugee issue, it was a day spent talking in euphemisms. But home-grown violence on the front pages was not conducive to a conservative government running for re-election on a platform of security and stability, so by the end of the day Laura had the funds she needed.
It was after seven when she rang home to say she was running late. The answering machine was on and Nell clearly running later. With Nell not at home pouring the drinks and preparing the dinner, Laura decided to walk herself out of the hectic day into a calmer evening. Her brain was a tangle of hot acid circuits and she fairly bolted out of the building into the Friday-night bustle. The traffic was heavy, the air cluttered, and the footpaths thick with impatient shoppers and weary workers. With a graceful swerving to avoid other pedestrians, Laura swept past shops and bars and cafés with bright lights and blaring music, heading towards the park. From there it was just a short tram ride home.
Laura Lewin had changed little in the five years since her father’s death.With her tall elegance, the full proportioned body, the black tailored suit setting off the pale hair and pale skin, she was still a woman not easily overlooked. She, on the other hand, took an increasingly pragmatic approach to her appearance, a no-frills person except for the hair which she categorised as a non optional extra.
It was this blonde Polish fuzz, as light and wild as one of Turner’s skies, that had saved her mother in the war.‘You and me,’ Etti would say to Laura,‘we look like Poles not Jews.’
That life could depend on the colour and texture of hair was an obscenity, Laura had said.
‘I can tell you worse obscenities but you wouldn’t want to hear.’ And then without any encouragement Etti would go ahead and relate the obscenities in all their gory details.
It was now more than ten years since her mother’s death, but Etti’s voice was as clear as it had always been, the familiar utterances framing old memories and keeping them vivid. How different it was with her father, more recently dead, but fading, less as a result of his own reticence during life than the shadows which had crept over him since his death.
How Laura wished she had left well alone after the Internet fiasco, but she simply could not stop herself when she heard about a group seeking restitution for those forced into slave labour for German firms during the war. Another possibility, she thought, another chance for the truth. She contacted the group, she waited for news, and when the news came through she castigated herself yet again for not leaving the past in peace. For the fact of the matter was her father had not been at Westerbork despite what he had said, nor at Belsen. There was no record of him among the survivors of either place.
It had been a madness after that. Laura returned to her searches with the force of a runaway train, and with about as much thought. Camp after camp, list after list, documents, books, survivor groups, she plunged ahead, looking for something, anything, and would have continued if not for an incident involving some friends of her parents, a couple who had been part of the Polish contingent. Both of them had been survivors of Auschwitz. They had made a good life in Australia, had raised two children, one a lawyer, the other an architect, and were settling into a healthy and active old age when they were dragged back to Poland by their children, back to where they had lost everything, back to Auschwitz, back to deliberately buried memories, all because their adult children had wanted ‘to connect with their roots’, had wanted first-hand experience of ‘their tragic history’, which is to say their parents’ tragic experience, and insisted their parents act as guides. The mother, always prone to depression, did not recover from her children’s pilgrimage and was now in a nursing home; the father, poor man, could not re-forget the same unimaginable horrors twice, and his children wouldn’t forgive him for what they had learned he needed to do to survive.
Suddenly Laura was shredding notes and erasing computer files, destroying all the leads and dead ends she had collected in the years since her father’s death. Suddenly it was all very clear: only something truly awful, truly shameful would have necessitated Henry’s lies. She had loved her father, and in order to keep loving him she carefully corralled her thinking about him. As for the Seinfeld lookalike who had appeared in her office that morning, she would have done him a favour if she’d shared some of her hard-won lessons. Even presumptuous Americans did not deserve the disappointments she had suffered.