The Fighter (10 page)

Nothing is known of the crossing of the equator. Whether,
as was customary, a bearded King Neptune, trident in hand, was there to mark the occasion. Were there forays into port, or shipboard dances, the formation of friendships? With each mile, it seems, all trace of their old lives was being obliterated.

Perhaps Sonia's disturbance started on the voyage: perhaps the ocean crowded in on her and the suspension of time allowed thoughts to fester. Perhaps the interlude at sea was a blessed relief, a time when past and future could be temporarily forgotten. Certainly, Sonia would have been occupied, caring for her three infants.

The SS
Partizanka
sailed through the Sydney Heads on 11 January 1949. A summer arrival: the bay radiant, a new city appearing, the harbour lined by cliffs and beaches, and by bushland and a scattering of suburbs sloping down to the water. With the final landfall, Circular Quay—flanked by the harbour bridge, and backed by narrow streets running between the old buildings of British settlement—drawing closer.

Sonia and Simche descend to the pier, with two-year-old Solly holding his mother's hand. Simche carries the twins in the legendary basket. The Nissenbaums line up for customs procedures—yet another queue to endure, and another inspection. Their visas are checked, and the passports stamped.

Then the final leg by train from Sydney to Melbourne: Solly at the window, Leon and Henry on the carriage seat, in the basket. The train crossing the Murray, and moving past mountain ranges, past paddocks of cattle and sheep, and dams of muddy water, past ghostly eucalypts and country towns isolated in the vast space. They had come to a land of few people.

Finally, the outskirts of a city, the low-rise houses on the flatlands, becoming denser, building up to a cluster of inner-city buildings. The tracks widening into multiple lanes: the train slowing, and pulling into Spencer Street Station.

And, at the end of the journey, waited Moshe Lajsman, one of the few known surviving relatives.

15

Within months of arriving in Melbourne the family move into 212 Amess Street. Simche finds work as a machinist in a nearby clothing factory. He sets up a tailor's workshop in the front bedroom and brings home piecework to augment his income from the factory.

The double bed competes with tailors' dummies, a sewing machine, rolls of fabric, suits and frocks in various stages of completion, and a full-length mirror for fittings. Stacks of collars lie on a worktable alongside scissors, measuring tapes, spools of thread, and patterns.

Simche works late into the night: measuring, cutting, stitching, repairing. Alternately standing and sitting, feet planted
on the treadle, shoulders hunched over the sewing machine. Pay the rent, pay the bills and put food on the table. The glow of streetlights filters through the bay window. The milkman passes by in the early hours, and the bottles tinkle. The draught horse snorts and the echoing hooves retreat. The street returns to silence. And still Simche is working.

No matter how hard he works it is not enough. The mountains of collars grow, and the suits and frocks increase. The sewing machine whirs ever more insistently. The dummies watch on, fickle accomplices that change guise with each fitting. The cracks in the linoleum widen. Roof tiles fall loose. The wall plaster chips, and the blue stains on the ceilings deepen.

Sonia is pregnant. Paul is born in 1952. There are now four boys under the age of six. The pressure is mounting, and the stress compounding. Pay the rent, pay the bills, put food on the table. The landlord raises the rent and perennially threatens eviction. He refuses to repair the roof, the peeling plaster, the damp ceiling.

For Simche, there is no way out of the confines of factory and workroom, no release from the pressure. And as it mounts, Sonia paces, a caged tigress, ears pricked to every movement, each murmur.

The world is dangerous, she warns. There are bad things going on. Watch out for the wolves. They are advancing, sidling closer. Can't you hear them howling? Watch out for the men idling in back lanes and parklands. Take heed. I will look after you. Shield you. I will keep them from you.

She is a fierce guardian. She puts her arms around her infants,
and sings a lullaby. In Yiddish:
‘Shlof mein kind'.
‘Sleep my child'. It is Paul, the youngest son, who will recall this, years later.

Only when her children are adults will Sonia hint at one of the sources of her madness. But she will not name it. There are things that cannot be spoken. The horror was perpetrated during her time in Siberia. Or was it elsewhere? The territory is infinite.

The enemy was man: man on the hunt; soldiers on the rampage, let loose on the spoils of war. It is an ancient story. In times of chaos, women are there for the taking.

Henry has made it explicit: ‘Mum was raped. She told me.' But at other times he has shaken his head: ‘I don't really know, perhaps it's true. I can't say for certain.' Then, unexpectedly, one day in the Port Diner, he brings it up again.

Workers at neighbouring tables are bent over meals, absorbed in private reveries. Road trains are pulling up and departing, brakes yawning. From the inner room, afternoon soapies are blaring. Henry is hunched over a milkshake, strawberry and chocolate. ‘A great combination,' he says as he drinks the full measure.

A grey haze of dust clouds the parking lot. Late afternoon shadows lengthen from the thick columns supporting freeway overpasses. Crows land on the gravel; seagulls scavenge for crumbs beside the diner. The sun is low in the heavens.

All is movement and traffic, and Henry is telling me, again. Matter-of-fact. Insistent. ‘Yes. Mum was raped. I don't know where, or when, but I am sure of it.'

*

The post-war years are a time to forget dreams and dark remembrances. There are no clinics specialising in trauma, no services for survivors of torture. No sisterhood to combat her growing sense of isolation. Nothing on offer except medication to dull the rage, and electric shock to convulse her back to reality.

It is sink or get on with it, bury the past or be buried by it. Yet it must be articulated. Sonia was raped.

16

In later years, the adult Sandra, the only daughter, becomes Sonia's main carer. She is the witness to her final rages, always alert to the sounds coming from the bedroom. She is quick to call the ambulance, and she sits by her mother on the way to hospital.

She stands close as Sonia is lifted out and placed on a gurney. She follows her as she is wheeled through the entrance. Sonia's gaze is fixed on ceilings as she is rushed to emergency. She barely registers the urgent chatter of those who tend her.

‘If I survive, I will try again,' she says.

This is no idle warning. Sandra has long known how to read the signs. She has known her entire life. As a child she once woke to a feeling that her mother was unwell, and decided not to go to
school. Sandra knew what was happening. Hours later, she heard Sonia gurgle and found her lying in bed, comatose.

The episodes come and go like winds gusting and returning to silence. Now, years later, mother and daughter are alighting from a bus and stepping onto the footpath. The telltale symptoms are clear in the daylight. Sonia's muscles are twitching. Her skin is paling, and her pupils are shrinking. Her eyes are wild. Sandra holds her arm. She keeps her steady as she guides her homeward.

Familiar houses are a passing blur. The outside world is in retreat. The day is mild, but Sonia is trembling. She is an ageing woman being led along the streets like a blind mendicant by her dutiful daughter.

Sandra takes her into the house, and helps her to the bedroom. Sonia lies down. She gives in to the softness, and sinks her head into the pillows. Sandra covers her with a blanket. The daughter has become the mother, and when Sandra is done, she too is exhausted. She falls asleep and is woken by the sound of choking. In the bathroom she finds her mother on the tiles, and the emptied pill bottle beside her. Again she is rushed to hospital.

It is impossible to know what will trigger an episode, other than the effects of waning medication. There are times when it appears Sonia will not pull through.

Sandra comes to know the routes to the city's asylums and psychiatric units. The car seems to know the way of its own volition.

In her final months, Sonia starves herself. She pushes away food, and shuts her mouth tight in defiance. She becomes
emaciated. The district nurse is called. Sonia wards her off. The ambulance is called. She resists, and backs herself into a corner. She is teetering on the edge of violence. The police are called. She lashes out at them, throws punches. The force in that frail body is extraordinary.

The police have no option but to restrain her. They put her into the divvy van. Sandra sits beside her. The back of the van is cold and metallic. There are no seatbelts to secure them; seatbelts have been used in attempted suicides. Sandra steadies her mother as they round the corners. Sonia clings to her daughter, and Sandra wonders, not for the first time, why do I persist in making her relive shit? Why not let her take leave of those infernal voices?

It is a human right, Sandra will say, years later, to choose whether to live or die. Why did we prolong her life? Why the need to keep her alive at all costs? To live is to hear, and my mother heard too much. To live is to see, and mother saw too deeply. And what she heard and saw terrified her. So why did we force her to live? The questions still plague her long after her mother is gone.

Yet even as she ponders it, Sandra knows she would do it again. She knows she would try to keep her alive, and would do whatever she could to lift her spirits. Despite it all, she longed to put it right.

After Sonia died, Sandra obtained and read her birth files, and discovered that Sonia had aborted several pregnancies in the nine years between the birth of Paul, the fourth child, and her own birth. The reports do not reveal how she did it, but they do
say that when Sonia was pregnant with Sandra she was confined to hospital for months and carefully monitored for fear that she would try again to miscarry.

‘Mum,' says Sandra, all these years later, ‘we loved you. And we tried. We tried so hard. But we could not save you.'

The bouts of madness, interspersed by periods of medicated calmness, continue till the end of Sonia's life. On her deathbed she says to her daughter, ‘It's good you did not have children. I never got to do what I wanted. You have a chance. You have time to find out what you want in life. You can make something of yourself.'

Amid the madness there were, says Sandra, flashes of an inquiring mind and a fierce independence. A sense of rebellion, and an alertness to the treacheries of life—an intelligence that endured despite the years of medication, and the erosion of hope and memory.

Sandra wonders what might have been had Sonia not been imprisoned by demons. And if that which was caged within her had been released. Brought to light. Exorcised.

Sandra was there at the very end, in the Alfred Hospital. Sonia's mental illness was compounded by cancer. Simche, Solly, Paul and Leon had been with her during the morning. Henry and Sandra took up the vigil in the afternoon, taking turns sitting closest to her.

In the last moment, Sandra said, ‘Henry, I need to hold her hand.'

‘I knew what was going to happen,' Sandra says. ‘I haven't
got the words for it, but I knew.'

Sonia died as soon as Sandra touched her. ‘Just like that,' she says. ‘It was a light touch. So light, and her spirit left her body.'

The final exchange between a mother and daughter. And the final witness, Henry, seated behind her, in silent prayer.

On the way to Sonia's funeral Simche breaks down. ‘I could have done more,' he says. He is distraught. Weeping. ‘I could have been a better man,' he adds. ‘I should have been a better husband.' After Sonia gave birth to the twins he had wanted to get away, to Russia, for a holiday, he confesses, and leave her in Belsen to take care of the children. How could he have been so irresponsible?

Simche's declaration shattered his stoic silence. He is a man of few words, but now he cannot stop talking. He is disoriented, anguished by his youthful transgressions.

Henry and his brothers and sister are unnerved by the power of his grief. They are overcome by his confessions. They have long been accustomed to his self-possession. They console him, and assure him he is a good man, and a much-loved father.

The family walks with the draped coffin as it is wheeled from the chapel into the daylight. The contrast is sharp, the sun abrasive. They lead the cortege to the assigned plot, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, and stand by the graveside. They take turns shovelling the dirt over the lowered casket, as is the custom.

When they are done they step back. Each child is lost in private thoughts and images, while, one by one, their friends and acquaintances step up to the shovels. All is quiet, except for the dull thud of dirt on the coffin.

When the burial is over, Leon recites the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. The words evaporate into the sky, leaving behind a blessed silence.

Within two years Simche is dead. Again the journey from the chapel into the light of day: the casket is wheeled along the route they had followed just twenty-two months earlier. Simche is lowered in the reserved plot next to Sonia. Husband and wife now buried at the ends of the Earth. Together.

He was a good man, say Henry and Leon, says Paul, says Sandra. He was straightforward in his dealings. He kept his counsel. He drew a curtain on the past and did not dare lift it. He spent his spare time watching the soccer and attended meetings of the Communist party. He marched in anti-war protests. Politics and sport were his passions, and tailoring his duty.

The children insist: our father was a good man. And Mum was a good woman. Do not reduce her to madness. Do not over simplify it. In her periods of calm she raised us. She got us off to school. She clothed and fed us. She survived the miscarriages, and she withstood the years of impoverishment.