Eating the Underworld Read online

  Three weeks later, he is back in Australia, to pack up his belongings. He is moving to New York.

  It’s strange to think of my father being so far away. It means I’ll only be able to see him every couple of years and I’m sad about that. But I’m glad that he’s found a companion. Dorka will never take Mum’s place, Dad says, but he feels comfortable with her and it’s good to be part of a couple again.

  He is a man in his late seventies, preparing to leave the country in which he’s spent the last five decades. I am struck with admiration and reminded again of what a survivor he is.

  ‘What’s Dorka like?’ I ask. I feel peculiarly like a parent whose child has eloped with a stranger.

  Dad finds her difficult to describe. Finally, he lights on a phrase, ‘She has a lot of energy.’

  Some months after Dad’s marriage, I get to meet Dorka. It is a few years ago. She and Dad have flown over for a visit. She’s short, savvy and intense. We spend the day together and end up at the Botanic Gardens for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As we walk through the gardens, Dorka is as alert as a bird—looking around her, asking questions, curious about the origins of this or that.

  She has greeted me earlier in the day with a hug. ‘You are the only person in the family I haven’t met yet,’ she says, and tells me of how she knew my mother all those years ago after the war. She has already met my sister of course. Lily lives in SoHo, a few kilometres away from Dorka’s house in Queens. At the end of the evening, Dorka takes me aside and puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘I listened to what was said about you,’ she says, ‘and I took the opposite. I was right.’

  Dad and Dorka look happy. She bosses him about, but he seems to like that. He responds to Dorka’s fussing, like an obedient child. I realise for the first time that he gravitates towards strong women; needs them, perhaps.

  Mum’s quiet, inner strength was very different to Dorka’s, but it was my father’s anchor. She was the love affair of his life. He remained devoted to her throughout their marriage. At her funeral, my most vivid memory is of sitting next to my father while his knees shake continually and uncontrollably. My father is a stoic man. I have never seen him like this and it is wrenching to witness his agony. Her death has left him directionless. It is good to see Dad blossoming again.

  A couple of days after the Botanic Gardens excursion, Martin and I meet Dad and Dorka at my childhood home in Elwood. Dad had taken a mortgage out on the house for someone who needed money. The loan wasn’t repaid in time and the bank has been insisting on payment. Dad has to sell the house. He’s asked Martin and me to finish clearing it out in preparation for the sale.

  Dad and Dorka sit in the kitchen, while Martin and I clear out the cupboards in Mum and Dad’s bedroom. I pack away her clothes to give to charities. It is sad work. After a while they come into the bedroom. Dorka is carrying one of Lily’s poetry books. She must have found it around the house. She is curious about the poems, she says. People she has met in Melbourne have been telling her about them. She sits down and begins to read out loud from Poland and Other Poems. She has selected the poems about my mother.

  Dorka starts out strongly and then her voice suddenly falters, picks up, falters again and finally stops. She has a look of horror on her face. ‘How can she write this?’ she says. ‘How can she write this about your mother?’ She has tears in her eyes.

  The poems are from the section titled ‘Kaddish For My Mother’ and are about Lily’s relationship with our mother. In them, Lily describes herself as a jealous child and talks about how, as a teenager, she envied her mother’s beauty. She describes how in her thirty-fifth year, just a few years before her mother’s death, she finally feels a new tenderness for her mother. But this feeling does not last.

  Days before her mother’s cancer diagnosis, Lily is back to feeling the old anger at her mother, an anger she attributes to the ‘jealous fat child’ she was. She talks about how she thought her anger would change when she knew her mother was dying, that she would be able to speak kindly to her mother. Instead, Lily remains her old angry self, taken over by what she describes as the ‘witch’ inside herself.

  Along with her anger, she also feels anxiety about her coming loss, fearful of being left motherless. In one poem, she describes her mother cooking a goulash for her while she is dying and the abandonment Lily feels in anticipation of her mother’s death.

  Poem after poem in this sequence describes, in excruciating and repetitive detail, her once beautiful mother’s physical deterioration—her emaciated body and jaundiced skin. In another poem, Lily describes herself sitting by her mother’s hospital bed, having emptied herself of her mother’s tenderness. As her mother calls her ‘Sweety’, Lily gazes back ‘dry-eyed and hard-hearted’.

  Dorka is looking stricken. ‘How can she write these things?’

  My father shrugs. He is looking ashen. It becomes the first and only time I have seen him react like this to what Lily writes.

  The theme continues in Lily’s next book of poems, After The War. In ‘I Slip’, Lily again talks about the envy and jealousy she felt towards her mother. At last, Lily says, she has caught her mother, ‘consumed’ her, and in doing so Lily has freed herself of the envy that contorted her. The poem concludes with Lily saying that she has no further need for her mother now that she has become her.

  The years go by. Lily has described her poetry as being autobiographical; the ‘truth’ about her life. Many reviewers and readers have also assumed this of her fiction. These, along with her autobiographical essays and interviews, are what have come to delineate the public image of my mother.

  It is late 1993, a couple of months before my diagnosis, when a friend draws my attention to the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature.

  ‘I think you should look at what it says about your mother,’ she says.

  ‘Why would my mother be in the Oxford Companion?’ I ask, startled.

  ‘Look under the section on Lily Brett,’ she replies.

  I find the volume in my daughter’s school library. And there to my horror, under the section on my sister’s fiction and poetry, is the sentence, ‘Many of the stories record Brett’s own personal adventures …’ Followed by the statement that, ‘Lily’s mother (Renia Bensky) is the dominating figure of the stories as she was of the poems.’ The writer then goes on to describe my mother as vain, irritating, ordinary and venial. There’s not a positive adjective in sight.

  My mother’s real name is Rose (or Rooshka) Brett, née Spindler. Renia Bensky is the character in Lily’s fiction. The writer has clearly assumed that they are one and the same and on that basis has passed judgement on my mother. This judgement is enshrined in a textbook, standard in libraries, schools and universities and read by thousands of people. I am appalled. I have to write to Oxford University Press and point out what they’ve done. But I keep putting it off—I know it’s going to be an upsetting task and my energy is so low. I’ll do it tomorrow, I keep telling myself. And the weeks roll by.

  I ring Dad in New York to tell him that I’ll be going into hospital for what is probably going to be cancer surgery. He is shocked, but I have the sense that he doesn’t quite believe me. Although on the surface we have been our usual selves, I am aware once again of the odd distance that has grown between us.

  I am saddened as I put down the phone. But there is also something freeing. Whatever is growing inside me has made it clear that I have to attend to my own life now. My father is making his choices and will have to live with them. It is no longer my battle to fight.

  As it turns out, within the next two years, my father’s marriage to Dorka will have broken up and he will be back living in Australia. Because of his decisions, his circumstances will be substantially reduced. He deserves better, but he is sanguine about it, never complaining or voicing regrets.

  Right now, it’s extraordinarily relieving to let go of the family issues. I’m surprised at how easy it is, after all the worrying I had been doing.
One of the benefits of cancer must be this ability to spring clean your life. It not only concentrates your mind, but also your energies. Your focus is stripped down, pared away—there’s none of it to waste. Too bad it can’t be marketed as a new form of therapy.

  Spring cleaning is an issue with me. My cupboards resemble the Black Hole of Calcutta; it takes the muscular strength of Superman to fit just one more garment into each of them. Oddly enough, just two weeks before my diagnosis, I am gripped by the urge to clean out my cupboards. Although puzzled by this urge—the equivalent of the salmon deciding to jog rather than do the swimming thing—I give in to it. My clothes haven’t had an overhaul since I moved house eighteen years before. The Augean Stables would have been a snap compared to this. Eventually, I emerge triumphant only to stumble straight onto the cancer fast-track a few days later.

  Two years on, I will again experience the same puzzling urge to spring clean. I will have just risen from the chaos, with clothes neatly packed for Salvation Army bins, when news of a possible recurrence arrives. I know that shortly before labour begins, the expectant mother often finds herself drawn to a frenzied round of spring cleaning. It’s explained as an instinct—clearing the nest for the coming event. Is this in the same class—some intuitive recognition that life is about to be swept out of shape? At any rate, it’s given me even more reason to avoid clearing out cupboards in the future.

  It’s the day before hospital and I have everything ready. A neat little suitcase is packed with everything I imagine I may need. Everything I imagine I may need includes the full make-up collection—foundation, lipstick, lip-liner. I have visions of myself sitting up in bed, reading the latest novel, flawlessly made-up with the ‘natural’ look as I greet friends and visitors.

  In the disappointing way of real life, it turns out that my concentration span barely extends to women’s magazines. Anything more taxing has my neurons swooning and fanning themselves at the thought that they are expected to absorb sentences that actually contain thoughts. Hefty doses of morphine running through the bloodstream also encourage this laissez-faire attitude to intellectual stimulation.

  With regard to personal adornment, it’s all I can do to lift pencil and paper to jot down thoughts and phrases for poems. Lip-lining and make-up belong in the far-off hazy days when I actually had energy, as well as the kind of fine hand–eye co-ordination necessary to avoid being besieged by talent-scouts for the local clown school.

  The drive into the hospital is quiet; the roads aren’t crowded, the sun is shining. To all appearances, it’s a perfectly ordinary Wednesday afternoon. And yet every molecule of it hums with an exquisite intensity. I feel as if I am seeing things, feeling things with the acuteness of a Martian suddenly planted on Earth.

  Afterwards, when I am asked what this first experience of having been diagnosed with cancer was like, there are many ways I want to describe it, but one of the first phrases that always springs to mind is ‘deeply interesting’. I am fascinated, absorbingly so, with the process, the people, the surroundings, the feelings, the sensations. I imagine it must be akin to the old explorers who fell in love with exploration, while intensely in the presence of danger, illness, pain and threat.

  The hospital is a familiar building. I have driven past it countless times, but never been inside. A woman, pleasant but impersonal, leads Martin and me into an office where I fill out various pieces of paper. Consent forms are handed out and I sign them in a business-like manner. This room has no emotion in it; the transactions undergone here might just as well be for the sale of real estate or a minor bank loan. I imagine what must be carried into this room as person after person enters, bracing themselves for whatever their stay in hospital means; but there is no trace of it here. Afterwards, Martin and I sit in the foyer, waiting for my room to be readied, feeling absurdly like tourists in a three-star hotel.

  At last, my name is called; someone has come to show me to my room. We walk through to the lifts, making polite conversation. My guide takes us to the nurses’ station on the eighth floor and introduces me to the nurse who will be taking care of me initially. I am startled to find that the nurse is a male. I recoil at the idea of a strange man giving me sponge baths and helping me to the toilet. I suddenly realise that this is what male patients have to go through all the time. As it turns out, this male nurse will be the gentlest and most considerate nurse I encounter in this hospital. When his stint with me finishes after a day, I’ll yearn for him in the face of a succession of bristly, gruff and tough female nurses.

  My room is a private one with a window out of which I can just see a single large tree. I feel encouraged by this and bond immediately with the tree. I bond less enthusiastically with the bed and its thin, cotton hospital blankets. The mound of pillows is good though, reminding me of lazy mornings spent lounging in bed in the ‘peel me a grape’ pose.

  I unpack my bag on that first afternoon and get into bed. It feels odd and a little silly to be sitting up in bed in a hospital room when I’m perfectly functional. I feel like someone impersonating a patient. Martin leaves and the hospital takes over. I’m weighed, measured and tagged. My operation is not scheduled till four o’clock the next afternoon. Why do I have to be in here so early?

  The answer is, I discover, to clean out my bowels. I am about to encounter the delights of an enema. As we chat over this procedure, my nurse tells me that I’ll also have to drink something to put the final seal on my bowels’ sparkling freshness. I’ve heard about this: stories about having to drink gallon after gallon of foul-tasting liquid. Luckily, what I have to drink has been condensed down to one glass. The foul-tasting part still holds though.

  I down it as quickly as I can, on the theory that the less time it spends in my mouth, the less time I have to taste it. Unfortunately, my taste-buds turn out to have excellent memories. I swallow the last drop and sit back in anticipation. I’ve been told that the effects will have the urgency of the last quarter of the last lap of the Grand Prix. Nothing happens.

  After a while, I get bored and go back to reading my novel. Still nothing happens. Some time has passed now. I have a dilemma: do I go to sleep, taking the risk that the nuclear-fission-type effects I have been led to expect from this concoction will impact on a mind too groggy to get out of bed in time? Or do I hang around awake all night? I decide to play my hypnotic tape instead. All is going smoothly until I come to the part where I’ve suggested that my bowels will recover from surgery rapidly and easily … boom! There’s no mistaking this signal. Back in bed again, I rewind the tape. Same thing happens. The instant I mention bowels, they leap into action.

  The next day as I sit up negotiating my way through the hours of ‘nil orally’ with an indignant stomach, the anaesthetist comes to visit. He is alarmingly young and launches into a discussion of the kind of post-operative pain control I would prefer. He sounds disconcertingly like the dietician discussing my menu plans for the day. I have a choice of epidural and intravenous analgesia. With the intravenous option, there is further choice—the standard model or a relatively new gadget that allows the patient a say in how much morphine is administered. You simply press a button to give you an extra spurt of pain relief. The machine has built-in controls to ensure you don’t overdose. I go for that one. Anything that gives the patient more say has my vote.

  With the decision-making over, I have something to ask of him. It’s becoming increasingly well-documented that patients, even under deep anaesthesia, can hear what is said in the operating theatre. They can’t usually remember it consciously, but under hypnosis can often repeat word for word what was said. I know it is likely that my cancer will be advanced; not the kind of situation that prompts the surgeon to say, ‘Oh good. This looks excellent.’ I don’t want anyone saying negative things or making gloomy prognoses while I am unconscious and possibly soaking it up. I explain this to him and ask that whatever he sees, he will not say anything negative out loud. He readily agrees and I think to myself that this is the be
nefit of young minds—they’re more open to new ideas. Of course, as I am to find out, there’s a difference between what people say they will do and what they actually do.

  Another highlight of the day is the shave. All my pubic area has to be shaved. For someone initially concerned about sponge baths with the male nurse, I’ve really been given the grand tour with enemas at the top of the list.

  There’s now nothing much to do but wait for the nurse’s arrival with the pre-op injection. Martin arrives an hour before I’m due in the operating theatre. He’ll wait in my room while I’m in surgery, so that he’s there for the surgeon’s report afterwards. I don’t envy him the wait. I’ll be asleep through all the suspense.

  Surgery

  I have his name tags,

  like large wedding rings

  around my wrist and delicately

  round my ankle. Hareem girl,

  dancer with the lucky charms

  to be delivered to him,

  a singing parcel, late in

  the afternoon. A special suite

  has been hired, sealed off,

  separate from the intrusive

  world. That’s how honeymoons

  are, just the two of us

  and a few others. Blood

  on the sheets, some witnesses

  and it’s done. After

  the consummation, I will be

  returned, back to the back parlour.

  I will wake slowly.

  I won’t remember a word.

  On the Way to the Operating Theatre

  How strange it is

  to see the ceiling go

  by like a river.

  It smiles at me, sorrowfully

  I think. It has been there

  for years, silent,

  unappreciated—only we

  upside-down fliers

  on hospital linen

  are privileged to see it.

  It is white as the moon

  and even more secret.