The Prosperous Thief (36 page)
Juno always knew where to stick in the knife.
Suddenly Raphe was awash with reality. Five years with a two-timing, anti-Semitic black woman who had been on his back from day one.‘There’s no malice in it,’ he used to say to his friends when she was so critical of him. But that’s where he was wrong, there was malice and plenty of it, and long before she massacred his chair and shacked up with a Kraut.
He should have been warned. From the beginning she had wanted him to be a different Raphe Carter. She had insisted on a new wardrobe, a shorter hairstyle, a change of cologne. Even before she moved in she had rearranged his kitchen cupboards and his bedroom drawers. And while both of them were aficionados of junk food, her McDonald’s always won over his Burger King, similarly her KFC over his Taco Bell. ‘You wouldn’t have the problem if you were a vegetarian,’ one of Raphe’s vegetarian friends said, but with his world already upside down Raphe wasn’t about to help it along. She had killed his collection of bonsai, they were unnatural she said, and she had tried to kill his volcano love, comparing it with a ten year old’s fascination with fire crackers.
‘Come with me and see for yourself,’ Raphe said.
So she came, and he should have called the relationship off there and then.You have to be careful whom you take to a volcano and with Juno he was not careful enough. He had chosen his favourite, Kilauea in Hawaii, but he might as well have shown her a barbecue for all her response.
‘You’re so fucking attached to your own fucking narrative,’ she said when he complained.
‘No other life interests you,’ she said as she attacked his Mies van der Rohe chair.
And then she was gone, but not before accusing him one last time of living with his head turned in the wrong direction. And possibly she was right, but someone had to watch over the past, and at least the past, unlike Juno and all the women who preceded her, hung around for the long haul.
Juno moved out and the semester dragged on. Raphe wasted hours and energy trying to avoid her at work, his students were the worst ever, his nights were long and solitary, and his dreams were haunted, not only by Juno, but by Laura Lewin whom he really blamed for Juno’s departure. It no longer helped that he had met her, nothing seemed to help any more. Every night the same turmoil, the two women shouting at him and making demands, and his ever-present grandfather, once his guardian angel, the most demanding of all.
One night on his third trip to the toilet in as many hours Raphe stood in front of the mirror and saw what was happening to him. He had lost several pounds, which he could ill afford, and deep creases had formed down both cheeks. He hadn’t had a decent shave in weeks because his razor needed replacing and he couldn’t be bothered going to the store. He couldn’t even be bothered masturbating. He was turning into a lovesick eunuch whose deepest relationships were with ghosts.
Enough, he told himself, he had to move on. He had his hair cut and bought some new clothes, he put in a proposal for a new course and made notes for a new journal article. Then Juno’s German professor accepted a position in Brussels, and without language or job prospects Juno announced she was going with him. It all happened so quickly: one week Raphe was avoiding her in the corridors, the next she was gone.
The semester rolled on. A couple of students started to show promise, his new course looked as if it would be accredited, his article was shaping up nicely, he was going out regularly with friends, he’d even had a couple of dates. Life was looking up. But no matter how hard he tried he could not silence the voice of his grandfather, could not placate those old demands for justice. In the end Raphe decided that unless he was prepared to live like his mother, forever turned away from the wrongs, he needed to settle his dues.
With the semester’s end in sight he started to make plans. He arranged some study leave, closed up his apartment, and almost three months to the day, Raphe Carter found himself again flying across the Pacific to Australia to meet Laura Lewin.
I
t had been the warmest winter in living memory and a great disappointment to Laura who preferred Melbourne’s winters to be wracked with winds off the Antarctic. Afterwards she would say the peculiarly warm weather was an omen, for those three months were shot through with disappointments, and of them all, the weather was the least malignant.
Raphe Carter was quickly forgotten as bigotry continued its ride through the backblocks of the nation. Laura’s workload reached mammoth proportions. Passions were high, demonstrations flared, righteous supporters clashed with righteous objectors. The everyone-has-a-right-to-an-opinion-in-a-democracy justification for inaction was uttered with prim authority by the prime minister, who had seen the polls and wasn’t about to alienate further all those voters who under his administration had lost so many of their community services. Every time he appeared on the evening news Laura would rail against him. In the past there had been political leaders she had not liked, but the present prime minister, a remarkably unprepossessing man who did not know how he would act on an issue until he had seen the polls, revealed an ethical emptiness that was truly frightening.
‘He couldn’t possibly believe this “everyone has a right to an opinion” crap,’ Laura said to Nell during a walk along the Merri Creek trail on a rare evening both were home early. She paused a moment to watch a pair of red-rump parrots, but not even her favourite bird could calm her. ‘This man is pure politician. Blood, bone, muscle and gore. He’d do anything to stay in power.’
Apart from a handful of courageous community leaders and a few liberal voices in the now almost universally conservative press, racism was being given a dream run.
‘Why can’t people see what’s happening?’ Laura continued as she and Nell turned around and headed for home.‘We’re turning into a nation of inhumane, jingoistic, selfish, mindless cretins, while desperate people die a short boat ride from our shores and our prime minister fashions himself to appeal to the lowest common denominator. What needs to happen before this man will act?’
Laura had been asking similar questions of colleagues, friends, shopkeepers, even strangers on the tram. She could talk about little else. It was incredible to her that anyone, even reactionary leaders like the present PM, would allow the current situation much less promote it,‘And in the name of bloody democracy too.’
She continued her diatribe back home while she prepared dinner. ‘There’s a case for political assassination, although you wouldn’t want to risk making a martyr of the man.’ She went on to suggest a chronic but not life-threatening disease instead. ‘One of those bowel conditions which cause uncontrollable wind would do quite nicely.’
Laura was standing at the stove with a knife in one hand and a leek in the other, her indignation turned up to extreme. Hers was a passion sparking with incredulity, the sort which renders the speaker, if not blind, then largely insensitive to anything else, so the outburst which followed took her by surprise. Only later, as she travelled through the last months of her relationship with Nell, would Laura find several subtle signs.
‘Can’t you talk about anything else?’ Each of Nell’s words was a bullet.‘I’m fed up with the refugee situation, I’m fed up with the bloody prime minister. And,’ this said more slowly,‘I’m fed up with your raging.’
Her voice was low and threatening and hardly recognisable as Nell’s. Laura was immediately silenced. She turned from her cooking and for an embarrassingly brief moment their eyes met.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ Nell continued. And as Laura went to speak,‘No, don’t offer to join me. I suggest you stay here and think of some new topics of conversation.’
Before she left, however, there were a few other issues she wanted to get off her chest, and through them all her voice remained quiet and controlled and frighteningly fluent; clearly her sights had been loaded and on target for quite some time. As for Laura’s sights, they’d been directed elsewhere and not monitoring her own behaviour as one who experienced personal criticism as a catastrophe always should.
She had no desire to defend herself, not with the fear rising faster than the PM’s approval rating. She’d hurt Nell, that much was clear, annoyed her too, and was prepared to accept the blame. In fact, she would agree to anything as long as Nell stopped attacking her. She interrupted Nell’s tirade: she was sorry, terribly sorry, she said.
But Nell didn’t want her apologies.‘Apologies roll so easily off your tongue, Laura. You’d apologise for murder and mayhem if you thought it’d stop someone yelling at you.’
Nell opened the door, then paused for a parting shot.‘No one’s as affronted as you are over this refugee business, Laura. And do you know why? It’s the whole Jewish thing. But as bad as he is, the prime minister is not Hitler, and today’s Australia is not thirties Germany, and the sooner you get that into your bloody child-of-survivors head the better.’And the knock-out blow just before the door slammed: ‘If you’re not careful, Laura Lewin, you’ll end up raging alone.’
Laura stood at the stove stunned. The threat of those last words. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t step back into a life which had turned so hostile. Minutes passed before the crackle and smoke of burning oil broke through. And then came the tears: over Nell and her attack, over the gutless prime minister, over the fact that no one had learned a bloody thing during the past brutal century. But most of all she cried over Nell. She cried as she finished slicing the leeks, she cried as she wiped the mushrooms, she cried as she cooked the linguini. By the time she was adding black olives and salted capers and tossing the lot in a pasta dish she and Nell had bought in Florence, her tears were finished and a decision made.
For a month or so things settled. Laura monitored her outbursts and kept her criticisms of the prime minister away from home. Not that Nell was often there. The old days of a leisurely drink together after work, sitting on the deck with the lorikeets squawking overhead, were a distant memory. So, too, the pleasurable evenings which used to follow, with Laura whipping up a meal from the jangle of food in the fridge and cupboards, the two of them lingering over dinner to talk, and then to the couch together and a spot of TV.
Laura would do anything to have that life back again.
‘If I didn’t know you better,’ Laura said one Friday evening as they were driving to her brother and sister-in-law’s for Shabbat dinner,‘I might suspect you were having an affair.’
They both laughed, but there was no hilarity, and Nell drifted off almost immediately into her own thoughts.
Was an affair so improbable? Laura wondered, then quickly brushed the thought aside. While there was little certainty in this life, Laura was sure about Nell. And while neither was so naïve to think they wouldn’t have their ups and downs, the relationship was rock-solid. And rock-solid meant no affairs.
‘I’m so bored.’ Nell’s voice burst out loud and accusing.‘I’m so bloody bored.’
It was a bull’s-eye hit. Laura slammed on the brakes in the middle of impatient end-of-week traffic and brought the car to a standstill – a brief breathless moment sidelined from the rest of her life, before she regained her senses, shuffled behind the wheel as if that would dislodge the knife, and moved back into the traffic. Immediately she riffled her mind for possible explanations, had to understand, had to stop the panic. And of all the possibilities, she decided the most likely culprit was work.
Nell had made several comments recently about how she wished she had never left film production, that if she hadn’t she would now be one of the foremost filmmakers in the country. And while this had been a regular lament in the past, with the cutbacks at universities it had gained momentum in recent times. She had started picking at some old unfinished scripts, had actually spent a couple of days revising one of them, but while she always had good ideas and good twists on ideas, follow-through had never been Nell’s strong point. The whole filmmaking issue always tended towards a slow frustrating collapse and, as far as Laura was aware, it was proceeding no differently this time.
Perhaps work was not the problem, perhaps given they were on their way to Melissa and Daniel’s place, Daniel’s new prohibition against non-Jews was to blame.
‘I don’t have non-Jews in my house,’ he had said recently.‘And I’m no longer prepared to make an exception of Nell.’ He held nothing against her personally, he said, in fact he had always liked her, but it was inappropriate for her to enter his home.
‘
Our
home,’ Melissa had corrected. And proceeded to remind him of all the changes she had made because of his Judaism, which was not, she stressed, her Judaism.‘In my home I’ll have the friends and family I want. I’ll have llamas if it suits me.’
Melissa had reported the conversation to Nell and Laura earlier in the week, and Nell had been furious. Daniel could stuff his religion up his kosher arse for all she cared, she wouldn’t want to enter his home now even if he were to beg. ‘
My
home,’ Melissa reminded her, and added that as far as she was concerned, her increasingly absentee husband had no rights in this matter. The three women had ended up laughing together over women power, chicken soup performance-enhancers and potential uprisings in the
mikvah
, and this had been the flavour of the two or three comments Nell had made to Laura since. So perhaps Daniel’s appalling attitude was no more likely to explain her outburst than her dissatisfaction with work. Laura wracked her brains for a few moments longer, then decided to forgo the guesswork. As loathe as she was to have this conversation, she realised she had no choice.