Waiting Room, The Read online

  ‘I could have come straight to Israel from Europe after the war, but I wanted my children to grow up in a peaceful country.’ Her mother is speaking to Dina’s reflection.

  ‘That may be true, but even in Australia, I was born in the shadow of Europe’s smokestacks.’

  ‘I’ll have you know we did our best to shelter you from everything we went through, young lady.’ She moves closer, standing right behind her daughter.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Breastfeeding me the belief that home and family are something I can lose in an instant was pretty helpful stuff.’

  ‘It’s not true. I never said anything like that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to, Mother. You kept that old suitcase permanently packed, stashed away in your cupboard, always ready for us to leave. Father used to joke about it being your just-in-case case.’

  Dina has been to wartime Poland hundreds of times in her imaginings, the country where her mother was born. It is a cursed land where people, buildings and landscapes only appear in varying tints of black and grey, often tinged with a wash of red taken from the bloody palette of her mother’s stories. Dina keeps returning there, even though she’s never set foot near the place. She pictures women who wore black hats and gloves, as they clung to their elegant purses and carried suitcases stuffed with clothes, as if they were off on some holiday. Instead, they found themselves trapped inside cattle cars, only one small, barred window for air. A notice was pasted on a wall inside the Lodz Ghetto one evening, and by the following morning, torn away from all they knew, the well-to-do women were crammed in together with everyone else.

  Dina tries to bring herself back from there, to see her face in the hall mirror as she applies another layer of gloss to her lips, but it only makes her mind travel faster, backwards through the years. She hides behind a fence at Radegast station in Lodz, waiting to steal a glimpse of her mother. Maybe she can catch her eye in time to warn her about where they are all going. Her hands grasp the steel bars. She is hoping her mother will pass right in front of her, when suddenly she sees her, carrying a metal canister in one hand, arm in arm with a middle-aged woman.

  Dina’s grandmother clutching a bag, holds onto her daughter’s arm. Dina strains to see more, but something is tugging at her, trying to rip her away, back to where she belongs. She will not let go. She needs to stay. She must see them board the train together. Soon the guards, carrying bayonets, will be sliding the iron doors across, locking the cattle cars that are already filled with people. The train will start to move, slowly at first, pulling away from the platform, taking her mother and grandmother away. Now is the time to act. It is this moment that will change their lives forever. Dina could jump out and halt the cars with her bare hands. Stop them from moving forward.

  She calls out to her mother, trying to shout across time, as if Dina has the power to pierce history with one scream. Suddenly, her mother turns her head, searching among the crowd of people behind the barbed wire fence. As her eyes meet Dina’s, everything around them stops. Her mother’s calm voice reaches out to her.

  ‘I know you are standing there, my daughter. You are hidden between the years that lie ahead, waiting for me to come, yet warning me not to leave. If I don’t journey forward along these tracks, you will never be born. Then who will there be to tell my story?’

  Her mother smoothes loose strands of hair away from her forehead and tucks them into a scarf. A large Alsatian, fangs bared, front paws raised as it strains on a leash, suddenly starts to growl and snap again. The guard lets it lunge towards Dina’s mother and grandmother, forcing them to step forward onto a wooden ramp, pushing the women ahead of them as they try to board the train. Once they are on, the door is slammed shut and bolted tight. Dina watches as the death car rattles off into the distance, knowing she can’t change history.

  She waits until the guards and their dogs have gone and the platform is empty again. The distant, rhythmic chugging of the train gradually fades. Silence drapes the air.

  Shlomi dashes past Dina, wearing one shoe. He holds the other in his hand. He bumps into her in his hurry and Dina is jolted forward, accidentally smudging lipstick onto her front teeth. She carefully wipes it off with the edge of a towel, checking her face in the mirror again. Her mother is nowhere to be seen.

  ‘We have to leave, darling.’

  ‘Sorry I took so long, Mummy. I had to do caca.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Dina ruffles his curls. She has often wondered if there wasn’t some Cossack rape hidden in the burnt branches of her mother’s family tree, the genes showing up in the blonde hair and blue eyes she shares with her son. ‘Come on. Let’s get going. Old Evgeni’s probably already at the clinic by now.’

  She loops a lock of Shlomi’s hair around her finger, but he pulls away from her and heads towards the front door, calling out to his father:

  ‘Bye, Abba.’

  Eitan emerges from the kitchen chewing on a piece of toast. He flicks a dishcloth playfully at his son and tucks the drink bottle into the side pocket of Shlomi’s schoolbag.

  ‘Have a good day.’ He plants a kiss on Shlomi’s cheek and turns to Dina, wringing the rag with his fingers. ‘I’ll see you tonight then.’

  She grabs Shlomi’s bag and slings it over her shoulder. Shlomi picks up his mother’s briefcase and holds her hand tightly.

  ‘See you.’ She forces herself to be civil to her husband for the sake of their son.

  She hears Eitan head back towards the kitchen, his slippers scuffing the tiles as he kicks the wreckage of a toy out of the way.

  ‘To infinity, and beyond!’ Buzz Lightyear lets out a tinny squeal as it hits the wall.

  Shlomi squeezes Dina’s hand. Just as they are about to walk out the front door, she trips over a pile of old newspapers stacked for recycling. She grabs onto Shlomi to steady herself, then opens the door. They rush downstairs to the car park. It is only when she is seated behind the wheel that she notices one of her heels coming loose. There’s no time to go back and change now; she’ll just have to make it through the day.

  She has already backed out of their driveway when she looks across at her son.

  ‘Fasten your seatbelt, Shlomi.’

  After she drops him off at school she may have just enough time to pop into the supermarket to pick up some apples for the dessert she promised to make him tonight. Dina sees herself standing in front of the stove this evening, calmly stirring a pot of compote in the midst of a bomb scare. She would finally become a vision of the perfect Israeli mother and wife. Ha! Wouldn’t that make Eitan happy?

  CHAPTER 3

  Shlomi high-fives the security guard at the entrance. In her rear-view mirror, Dina follows the Power Rangers logo on the back of her son’s schoolbag as he disappears downstairs towards the school’s main building, which slopes along the edge of the Siach Valley. She glances at the guard again, who waves through a small group of Arab workers waiting to enter the grounds.

  Dina turns her attention back to her reflection. She licks her finger and wipes some smudged mascara from under her eye. Grabbing her cosmetics purse, she reapplies her lipstick. She looks straight ahead, slowly lowering the handbrake. Just before she taps her foot on the accelerator, she notices a single strand of hair resting on the outside of the windshield. It looks like Shlomi’s, curly and blond.

  She heads off down Moriah Street, past a billboard with a picture of a puppy squashed between two hens, all of them sitting in a nest, keeping some eggs warm. The caption under the image asks: Are you in the right job? Never mind the job, Dina thinks, is she in her right mind? Or for that matter, the right country, the right marriage? Her suitcases have been stacked on top of the wardrobe at the end of their bed for years. Often, they call to Dina at midnight. She wakes up in a sweat, throws off the covers and sits up. In the half-light seeping in through the shutters, fluoro stickers on the hand luggage glare at her, screaming MLB, MLB –Melbourne! Melbourne! Leather melting into night air like a Dali painting, the suitcases are alw
ays watching, wrapping cords around the back of Dina’s eyes, lassoing her dreams and leading her back to Australia.

  Dina lives her life surrounded by cardboard boxes, filled with objects she cannot give away. Her cream satin wedding shoes, a dried bouquet of roses she carried down the aisle, her copy of Now We Are Six, its purple cover faded and torn. She hoards. She keeps stuff, collects stuff, is unable to let go of stuff. Boxes she shipped from Melbourne, filled with her parents’ junk that she could never bring herself to throw out, now sit in the boydem, a recess above the bathroom ceiling.

  She has never really unpacked; she lives neither here, nor there. The boxes float above her bed as she sleeps, ready to be filled with dreams and instantly locked away. Every morning she waits for the jug to boil and toast to pop up from the toaster. She stares out at carob and pine trees in the garden, cheeky bulbul birds fighting with woodpeckers, flecks of yellow and red feathers peeking out between the leaves, and part of her is looking out onto magpies and lorikeets sitting high up in the old wattle tree back home. You can compromise on many things in a marriage, but how can you live in two places at once?

  She first met Eitan back in 1989, during an unplanned visit to Israel. She took the first direct flight she could find from Vienna to Tel Aviv, after a skiing tryst in Austria with a charming Viennese doctor from the Lehrkrankenhaus at Garmisch-Partenkirchen turned sour. Leaving her ski pants behind on a drying rack, she dumped Dr Karl Jaeger right in the middle of ein aktiver Winter in Zugspitzland.

  As soon as she set foot in Ben Gurion airport for the first time, she felt oddly enfolded in familiarity, surrounded by people she recognised instantly, even though she had never set eyes on them before. The line inside passport control reminded her of a crowd of Melbourne Jews waiting for bagels at Glicks Bakery on Carlisle Street every Sunday morning; not really a line, more a schmear of generic impatience. The returning travellers at Israel’s major international airport ignored the sign telling them not to step over the red line until called. Instead, leaning on the counter, they crowded around the passport officials, talking over one another. Dina wished she had plastic strap-on elbows to push her way through the strangely endearing organised chaos.

  She took the train straight to Haifa, not because she was particularly interested in seeing the city, but to register at a medical conference for a few days so she could claim part of the trip as a tax deduction. Her hotel was right on Hanassi Avenue in Central Carmel. She dumped her bag in her room and went for an afternoon stroll, passing cafes filled with people drinking coffee, eating cake, reading newspapers and having heated discussions to the accompaniment of the excited screams of soccer commentators blaring out from TV screens. She knew these people well. It felt as though she had slipped back in time and place, listening to her parents’ friends yelling at each other as they sat around the kitchen table on Saturdays, filling their plates with heart-attack food. Of course, Israel looked nothing like the clean, manicured suburbs of Melbourne – too dirty, too cramped, too Levantine – yet it seemed to hold everything Dina had grown up with, only pluckier. In Melbourne, polite, silent smiles kept a tight grasp on any outburst, whereas here noise was plastered in layers over everything. Women sat outside hairdressing salons, perched on low stools as they chatted, waiting for their henna-streaked hair to dry around pink curlers. Drivers stood in a circle beside a taxi rank, smoking cigarettes and sipping cans of Coke, their fat bellies spilling out over too-tight belts. Every few minutes they would take it in turns to break rank and accost a passer-by, a potential customer, with a piercing ‘Allo! Allo!’, trying to attract a fare. A withered man wearing a crocheted rainbow-coloured yarmulke stood outside his shop selling Baha’i souvenirs, olive wood nativity scenes, Druze pottery and silver tchotchkes. Each time Dina stopped to browse or even to ask someone for directions, the answer inevitably came embellished with a snippet from each person’s life story – an overnight escape from Yemen, a KGB interrogation in Siberia or an attack of tarantulas in Moldova.

  After winter in Europe, Israel was so warm. On her second morning there, staring out of a conference room window on the top floor of the Dan Panorama hotel, Dina decided to ditch the dullness of Professor David Zarfati and his colleagues and their Observations of the Limitations of Quantitative Sensory Testing when Patients are Biased toward a Bad Outcome, for a swim at the local pool.

  She was doing laps on the left side of the lane and didn’t see the man coming from the other end power straight towards her like a battleship. They collided head-on, right in the middle of the pool. As they both treaded water, he pointed to a sign hanging from a rope suspended above them and said something she didn’t understand. She read out loud, slowly sounding each letter in turn, remembering her rudimentary Sunday-school Hebrew.

  ‘I-t-t-i,’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Slow!’ he said in English, with a thick Israeli accent. ‘You need to slow down.’ He lifted his goggles, resting them on his forehead.

  She stared at his sea-green eyes.

  ‘You were swimming too fast,’ he said. ‘And on the wrong side as well.’

  His face started to blur as tiny flickering lights buzzed around her field of vision.

  ‘Are you okay?’ the swimmer asked. It sounded like he was calling to her from somewhere far away.

  ‘Just a bit light-headed.’

  ‘Come,’ he said, putting a strong arm around her waist, guiding her over to the side of the pool. He hoisted his tanned body up over the edge in a flash. Droplets of water clung to dark hairs on his forearms as he reached down and lifted her out with ease. Her head pounded, the loud music blaring from speakers positioned around the pool sounding distorted.

  ‘Lie down,’ he said, kneeling beside her.

  Time seemed to slow to a crawl as she listened to the lifeguard yelling through his megaphone from the other side of the pool. His voice echoed like a simple song, an uncomplicated hymn asking her to reach up and touch this man she had crashed into.

  ‘Eitan,’ he introduced himself, holding out his hand. He had long fingers and trimmed nails.

  ‘Dina,’ she said, looking away, the floor tilting under her.

  ‘Shalom, Dina. Where are you from?’

  ‘Melbourne.’

  ‘You know something, Dina from Melbourne?’ he said, smiling broadly, ‘I have been swimming a hundred laps of this pool every morning for years and I’ve never had the pleasure before of crashing headfirst into anyone, let alone a beautiful woman from the ends of the earth.’

  They began to swim together every day. Most afternoons they drove down to Dado Beach, diving into the dappled light under the waves. Dina heard the gurgling of bubbles, the rhythmic in-out of her breath as she came up for air. They lay beside each other on the sand.

  ‘People have always found love in this ancient sea,’ he said as he traced his finger over her belly.

  And war, she wanted to say, but bit her tongue. She looked down at her feet, her toes covered in globs of tar, detritus from boats on the horizon.

  They surfaced like two lost shipwrecks, creaking back to life, hauling in rusty anchors, casting off forests of tangled seaweed. And in his eyes she sensed the memory of exile, of stones and cities and prophets she had scorned. She smelt the scent of fruit ripening, remembered desert winds and spilled blood.

  Loving each other began with longing, weaving her loneliness with his. Pain drove her down into him. Not a gradual descent, but plummeting, not knowing when she would stop.

  Some nights, bathing naked in the dark, Dina drifted in and out of the sea, with the current of Eitan’s warm breath on her skin. He was the first man who didn’t seem frightened by a past she carried along with her everywhere she went; a heavy sack filled with the dead, permanently hoisted over her shoulder. In fact, he helped her carry it, lightening the load of her history. And soon he was grafted onto her, knowing full well that she was bound intricately to her mother’s roots.

  When he asked her to marry him, D
ina heard the word yes tumble out from somewhere inside her, not sure if she was speaking to him or to a place she finally felt was her home, where the dead were never out of place. She saw her own reflection in Eitan’s eyes, even though the Ronen family came from such a different world.

  His mother, a fierce, upright woman who rejected the shtetl culture of so many European Jews, instilled in her child the rigours of intellectual tradition, adding her personal embellishment to the kibbutz ideal of collective education and child rearing. She dedicated what little time she did have with her young son to reading him everything from Erich Kästner’s Emile and the Detectives, to Goethe’s Faust. His father, on the other hand, preferred to remain silent, his stories untold.

  Brought directly from the hospital to the communal babies’ house from birth, Eitan grew up eating and sleeping together with all the other kibbutz children, spending at most an hour or two a day with his parents. He became fiercely independent, one of the ‘children of the dream’; the hope of a new society. And he moved through kindergarten, school and scouts with the same close-knit group of friends, only to see many of them grow no older than eighteen, their youth bled out of them on the battlefields of southern Lebanon. Luck saw him outlive them.

  Dina had let both Eitan and his wounded country in, like a shaft of light flooding a darkened room. She felt freed from the suburban shackles of Caulfield, where Holocaust survivors built new, brick-veneer houses, seeking sanctuary inside their walls from the fires of Europe. She ran from the memory of her mother, who used to shop at the supermarket on Glenhuntly Road by day and trudge through heavy snows of Bergen-Belsen at night.

  Shlomi’s hair catches the sunlight, distracting Dina as she drives. Her left hand reaches to turn on the windshield wiper and in an instant the strand is gone, flying up towards Mother’s Park. She feels a stabbing pain in her chest, as if she has betrayed her son, casting away the magic he holds for her in an instant.