Maria Tumarkin, journal
Melbourne, 2006.
I was in a take-away coffee queue as usual, just behind the woman, who had sold me fruit and veg ever since my 10 year old was the size of a Lebanese cucumber. Up close I saw her white moustache (mine is black like Frida Kahlo’s), her hair ravaged by bleach, a flock of crowns framing her mouth. We talked about stuff, the coffee was not coming, we gritted our teeth and talked some more. And then in this mud of general ‘slowly, slowly’ conversation, there was a little splash, an intimation of a story. By then we already had coffee in our hands but I made her tell me. I really asked for it, and put my feet on the ground firmly, all toes evenly spread, like I was there for the long haul, letting the coffee go cold, putting my hip out for balance. Please tell me. She told me.
A group of her relatives and friends, including young kids (her grandchildren), went to a Chinese restaurant to mark some kind of occasion. At the restaurant, there was one table of Indians and their table - all Russian Jews. Otherwise the restaurant was filled with Australians. Not long into the evening, with the kids playing on the other side of the restaurant and adults easing their way into a meal, men in balaclavas came in wielding knives and demanded for everyone to get under the tables. Australians obliged. My compatriots, on the other hand, did not. Their children were on the other side of the restaurant playing by the door, cut off from adults. So it was all primal instincts from there. The entire table went into the counter-assault mode. The woman’s son-in-law and husband ran across the restaurant tables and threw themselves onto the men in balaclavas. Russian Jews first. Indians second. The burglars were overwhelmed and had to flee. TV crews were not far away. Happy ending on all counts.
I asked who ran towards the intruders, she said everyone. Did someone lead the charge? No. Did you exchange glances, did you communicate, did you agree tacitly on the course of action. No, there was no time. There was no need. We all just went. Spontaneously. Effortlessly. Only an old woman, someone’s grandma, the memories of pogroms etched into her ageing mind, screamed in Yiddish, ‘Leave them, don’t touch them, they’ll kill you.’ Or something like that.
I was struck by just how good Australian patrons were at self-organising. They gave themselves orders, they shouted to themselves ‘Quickly, everyone, under the table’. They folded and made themselves scarce in no time at all.
My woman, on the contrary, had this to say, ‘I worked all week, I am exhausted, there is no way I am getting under the table. It’s my day off.’ And, most enjoyably, ‘What haven’t I seen under the table? What great attraction is there for me?’ She was not thin either, so getting down would surely have been a task and a half. And in a vegetable shop, you stand all day, and Saturday is a day-off, and you just want some peace and quiet especially when you are finally sitting down and getting ready to eat.
I thanked her, you should have seen me, I kissed her on the cheek and said ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ And she said ‘Promise me, you’ll never get under the table.’ I promised like the girl-scout of the year, all blush and puffy chest.
I am sure there are millions of situations in our lives when we need to get under the tables, where not getting under the tables is no great virtue, quite on the contrary - an expression of vanity or stupidity or disregard for the lives of others.
But I meant what I said. That I wanted to live my life on the other side of the table.
My coffee was cold, but I kept sipping on it, while I called my friends. I needed to tell them. ‘Not everything is lost’, I shouted in my mobile, ‘There are still people out there’, which was, if you think about it, implicitly disrespectful to Australian patrons, who probably did the right thing on some kind of level. But to me it was like Christmas. Normal life was suspended and I was floating.
Ultimately, this was a story about courage (amongst other things), but it was not squeaky clean. Neither was it overtly or covertly moral or moralistic. The arena for the battle between good guys and bad guys was a restaurant, not a Parliament or a battlefield. And the good guys did not struggle to uphold morals or ideals, to stand up for what was good and right. And they, the good guys, were not even attractive. Most of them, I imagine, probably had greasy spring-roll fingers and food stuck in their teeth. Their reaction was not a display of thoughtful excellence and fortitude in the face of grave threat, but a kind of reflex. Besides if the brave boys in balaclavas had guns, and, say, the brain of the operation would have lost his cool, the story could have ended very differently.
But I am enthralled, I am uplifted. I repeat to myself, ‘What haven’t I seen under the table?’. I love it, I love it. People who cannot be turned into cattle, because they generally do not take orders very well, because they are hard-ass skeptics, because they see the ridiculous before they see the frightening. I am sure this is what she thought - me, get under the table, right now, you must be joking. In other words, the way she told the whole story to me was not an afterthought designed to dignify what happened, but a kind of second nature.
Where does this kind of second nature come from? Do you have to have centuries of humiliation or ostracism to arrive at the sorry realization that if you get under the table once, you’ll spend the rest of your life there? Or that the world is like a giant schoolyard and that bullies are themselves always a moment away from wetting their pants, no matter how determined and capable they are of effecting death and destruction.
But is this really true? Modern-day terrorists, for instance, are surely not like that. Quite a few of them probably get erections, not wet pants, when they set the explosives off. And most of the grave dangers we face will not disappear if we run over the restaurant tables towards them, waving forks in our hands.
Yet I desperately need this story as the blueprint. … and, to no lesser degree, as the provocation. I am not Gandhi, I am not Martin Luther King, I am not Mother Theresa, I am not Anna Frank. And no matter how inspired I feel by their and other lofty examples, I am unlikely to turn my other cheek, to love my enemy or people as a whole, to lead a cavalry charge or a revolutionary movement. I will fall apart if shot at or tortured. I will not respond with love to hatred. And I am most likely to be useless to those who are drowning (I cannot swim) or to those who are in pain (I invariably forget all my first aid in emergency). But as far as getting under the table, that is more or less up to me. And not just that, but what my daughter does in a situation like this, is not entirely outside of my influence. This story, in other words, is within my reach – intellectually, morally, emotionally, spiritually. It is my kind of story.
Townsville, North Queensland 2001 – 2002
Ladies and gentlemens, are you sitting down? So says my daughter, a grand MC to all occasions, hiding in a lukewarm bath from her first tropical winter, on the occasion of a Monday evening, and there is a show on offer, if only I can sit myself down on our toilet seat for long enough, but I run, I am not in a sitting-down mood, I run hopping to drop, but the drop never comes. It never comes soon enough.
This is I, at my most squashed, right smack bang in my daughter’s formative years, in a huge house in the middle of a small town, writing and un-writing because doing, all of a sudden, is out of reach. I can’t even get to the car – our white and weary Magna station wagon parked outside of the house in our first tropical garden, where a man killed himself not so long ago, leaving behind a wife and a daughter, where the birds sound like they know what they’re doing, louder than a tap dripping, quieter than a nana next door chucking her guts out.
Life is so short. And it feels even shorter in the smallest, hottest, loneliest, honestest town we’ve ever known. Here she comes with sparkling wrinkles around her mouth, freckles faded from smiling too much, my regional Mary Poppins, complete with five kids and a goat, the best white trash the world had ever seen – hands moist from stuffing fairy bread into gaping mouths of other people’s kids she loves to spoil. Fuck the curriculum, half a kingdom for these moments of bliss when the kids and teachers all gorge themselves together, and boys and girls, anxious, unsure, uptight, begin melting. Oh, how they melt with you, but then again I would melt with you too, you would wear me out with your paradise-on-earth – white bread, dark roots, feely-touchy freckled arms.
Now it’s all about fear. Everything is scary – rats, swimming, beautiful (because I am riddled with envy). I am riddled with envy, take this out of the brackets please. Black family next door used to be scary too - with twenty kids, heavy slow women, a few transit skinny perpetually pissed men. They throw over the chairs, for god’s sake, into my garden, and all around is litter, lice and waves of yelling as if everyone is dying or getting lucky at the same time. The pitch of that yelling, that used to be scary, so my coming out around midnight in the middle of some god-awful fight to grab the kids and women and to take them to my place, that took even me by surprise. There was one woman a bit older than me by the looks, she got hit and was crying. I thought I’d give her my bed, didn’t want to bundle her up with the rest of the kids. Privacy, I thought. Space. Respect. She turned out to be eleven.
Sometimes I see the light. I saw it last Saturday. I was running across the tracks at the year’s biggest horse racing event in front of about twelve thousand richly dressed, thickly smelling people, just before the biggest race of the day. I needed to get some batteries across from the Big Screen we have set up for the day. As I jumped one of the fences, the best pair of pants I’ve ever owned went rip, not at the seams, but right across the entire surface of the left buttock. There was no point really in pulling my shirt to cover my ass, so I didn’t. I just kept running. There was clapping. Cheering. I imagined running back, facing thousands of people who saw me loose my pants. As my knees dribbled and drooled, I saw the light. They say – love as if you’ve never been hurt, dance as if no one is watching. That was my pagan dance of love, the beginning of my great innocence. So I ran as if the whole world was watching. With all of my pride. Slow, smiling. Making sure my breathing is even and deep, as if bearing an Olympic torch for my country.
The truth is I can’t do a good twosome with my daughter, can’t fill our home with what she calls – sweetness, warmness and deepness. In the evening, we drag our feet through the warmness of houses on wide streets nearby. Invite us in, I’d even eat your grave (I hate gravy). But then when everything fails, there’s still ice-cream, piercing choral renditions, taking turns to fall over till we are laughing so hard our pee bounces off the pavement underneath.
‘Mum, because we can’t see God, you are my God and I am your God!’ What’s the problem, mum? Don’t you want to be omnipresent and omnipotent? Teach me, teach me how you make the world yours, how you make a lazy cozy bedroom out of a shitty room with five suitcases, a lavish breakfast out of three biscuits, three hours of pure action out of a palmful of rarified mud. We drive sticking our heads out of the window. What we see is ours to keep – a man and a dog, a dog and a cigarette butt, a tail of a full moon caught on an aeroplane’s wing.
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Who is white girl crying over blackfella stuff? Trapped in a white woman’s body, black joints in white thighs, black diaphragm in flaky white breasts. We drive around hoping for the battery to recharge, me looking ahead to the road, you checking out my tears. Are they real? Do they last? They last. The battery is dead. We are stuck with each other. When I stop crying, I will turn to you and say, ‘A real woman, black or white, should have legs like a good horse – pulsating with energy, relentless, ready for anything’. Meaning – get out of the damn car, you’ve heard me, out you go. When I stop crying, we will start walking.
How do we walk together? What sort of a flock are we, in the end? Two in front, three at the back, our bodies not yet aching but merely sweaty and limp, our feet massaged by a timid arch of a bridge. It is getting dark. Here come the symptoms – tight stomach, dry throat, cold hands. How do you keep the fear at bay? When we run out of songs, gags, collective bouts of swaying and zigzagging, I will turn to you and say, ‘What are you talking about? We eat ghosts like these for breakfast.’ Everything is against us – broken streetlights, gangs of sandflies, abdominal rumbling. When we run out of full-body laughter, loud, lurid, complete with snorting and sobbing, promise to make us feel blessed, protected, sheltered by the dark.
Between our homes, along the punctured fence, in the no-child’s land of rotting palm fonds and lost thongs, the border separating our lives withers away. In my dreams, dressed in matriarchal gowns, I preside over dinners and disputes. I choose colour schemes for our houses. I wield, delegate and pull back in line. On other nights I dream of self-sufficiency, of eating lipgloss for breakfast, of being stripped to the bare bones.
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I am a bad cop. A bad cop to you. Monosyllabic, grim, emotionally detached. I am a walking, talking dispenser of tough love. And now we are leaving. Running back to the Big Smoke, two lightly packed rats abandoning regional Australia on a discounted Qantas flight.
