Choose Somebody Else Page 17

  ‘You were seen,’ she said.

  My mother cocked her head as though to say, ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Standing outside a bakery, a non-kosher bakery. Holding hands with a boy, a non-Jewish boy.’

  They put the seventeen-year-old under house arrest, from January till March 1944, when the Germans invaded. Then she was sent with the rest of her family to the ghetto in Budapest. Once she told me that she was never quite sure which incarceration was more painful, but seeing my shocked expression, she smiled and said she was having me on.

  From the Budapest Ghetto to Auschwitz; of all her family, she alone survived it. My other grandfather almost made it, and probably would have, I’m told, had it not been for his tobacco addiction. He exchanged what little food he had for cigarettes and, in the end, died of starvation.

  So that’s the long and short of it: I was sent to Lac d’Or perhaps to allow the knots of the past to be unravelled by fingers a generation removed from the original tangle.

  I was one of the lucky ones. My mother had a cousin who lived in Zürich and that cousin had three daughters. Rachel and Abigail were twins, eighteen like me, and Adina was twenty-one. Once a month the school allowed me to visit them for the weekend, having no idea of the discotheques we frequented, the boys we danced with, the bars we lounged in, the joints we toked and the alcohol we consumed.

  The cousins had a wide circle of friends. Sometimes we would all meet in restaurants or at cinemas. More often we would dance till midnight, fuelled by cocktails or wine. I loved the freewheeling spirit I found among them, so different from the demure and staid deportment required of us at school.

  On my very first outing, we went to a party. As we walked through a vast entrance Abigail said proudly, ‘This is Tommy’s house,’ as though she had a share in it. It was extremely grand, leased, she told me, by a diplomat stationed in Zürich.

  A couple of synapses connected.

  ‘It’s Tommy Benjamin, isn’t it?’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Just Tommy.’

  It was never ‘just Tommy’. But I was distracted by a young man handing me a drink and offering to share a joint. We started to dance. At a break in the music someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘I’d know that long, dark hair anywhere,’ he said as I turned around.

  ‘Tommy? No way. It really is you.’

  He held out his hands as if to say, ‘Who else?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘I live here.’

  He smiled as though he’d said something funny, so I laughed.

  ‘I live with my dad—Dad the Diplomat. You remember him. He always liked you for some reason. I throw these parties once a month.’

  ‘That’s good. I’m allowed out once a month.’

  ‘Allowed out? What are you—on parole?’

  ‘I’m at school in Montreux,’ I told him. I couldn’t bear to say finishing school. We had known each other since those early blackboard days, always in the same class. When we were sixteen we paired up for a year—intense and passionate. Then for some reason we just walked away, no rancour, no animosity. I never really understood why; I often wished we hadn’t.

  I would conjure up his snub-nosed, bright-eyed face and that half-smile he wore when his phenomenal intelligence was about to take another leap into the unknown. Back home, we all knew he came from great wealth but even as a kid, he believed in truth, justice and sharing his potato chips with kids who never had money for the tuckshop. The very notion of a finishing school would have been an anathema to him: Tommy the socialist.

  ‘So, what are you doing here?’ I asked again. ‘You can’t just be keeping your dad company.’

  ‘I’m an undergrad at the Zürich University of Applied Sciences.’

  ‘Wow! Impressive.’

  ‘Eventually I think I’ll want to try for a Masters,’ he said. ‘They have a programme in Public and Non-profit Management.’

  ‘Still the same old Tommy.’ I grinned.

  He grinned back as he scribbled down his phone number and gave it to me. ‘You never know when you might need it.’

  He held out his hand. ‘Come on, let’s dance.’

  But now the music was slow and I found myself with my chin on his shoulder and his arm around my waist.

  After breakfast the grind really began: three hours of French with The General. After one-and-a-half hours we had a twenty-minute break during which we were informed of the acceptability or otherwise of the state of tidiness in our rooms. If conditions did not pass this white-glove test, time for a quick cup of tea and a few bites of an apple were forfeited, and cleaning up took their place.

  The General was Mlle Sedrille, who had earned that soubriquet long before I arrived. It was meant to deride her almost military insistence on discipline and order, but I fear her nom de guerre understated the case. She wielded her measure of power in and out of les heures Francaises with small-minded glee and petty sadism. She confiscated eye makeup if she considered it too boldly applied and revoked recreation for unpunctuality and untidiness. Undone Homework was a felony not worth risking. Her swift ability to identify every possible infraction of the law made it seem to us all that the Swiss precision of her inner workings had been created by a master craftsman. Externally, however, the mastery had deteriorated.

  Her hair, pulled back into a school marm’s bun, was dry and thin, debating whether or not to remain loyal to her scalp. Her nose, at an incalculable angle to her chin, dominated her face, rendering the pale line of humourlessness—her mouth—almost invisible. Hanging from her sad, virgin’s body were clothes which appeared to have been purchased from a fin de siecle Oppe Shoppe. Oh, and she walked with a slight limp, as if God thought he had not tormented her enough.

  We used to turn the other way in the corridors whenever we saw her approach, just to avoid even the possibility of an encounter. She must have known, and her feelings can’t have been immune, but I never could feel any empathy for her. I suppose I have always abhorred the bully and the abuser of power. Something to do with my upbringing by parents who emerged from the war wounded but alive.

  For all their practice of the lying-down philosophy, it didn’t stop them from understanding—and teaching us to understand—the evil of being violated by those who did so simply because they could. Thus, there were times when you had to lie down and actually, times when it was vital that you didn’t.

  But the truth is that Mlle Sedrille was no Nazi, though we all feared her, and she did persecute us. And obviously Lac d’Or was no killing centre. So, I didn’t have to lie down here and I wouldn’t, whatever my father had advised.

  ‘Katie, I have to tell you, I don’t like Carla,’ said Iris, my compatriot. She hailed from the upscale Sydney suburb of Pyrmont, no less. ‘She’s a bitch and I’ve been here longer than you, so you can take my word for it. Anybody’s word for it. She’s a bitch and a user. Thinks enough of herself, too, because of her father, I’ll bet.’

  Iris stopped talking and sailed out of the room. I was not surprised by what she had said; she found something nasty to say about most people. She seemed to have taken a strange liking to me, though, probably because we were both Australians. Whatever the reason, I tried, and mostly managed, to keep my distance.

  Carla had been in Italy since the Christmas break and her return had been expected two days ago, but she was late. The buzz was enormous and even I, who had never met her, knew why.

  In the months to come, I would learn that she—my Italian friend to be—understood far better than I the art of lying down. She had spent long years growing up under her father’s gaze. It was scrutiny a great deal more austere than any I had ever suffered. It made her wise to that adage’s meaning, even though I was sure she’d never heard it. She knew how to protect herself. Some of the pupils at the school were jealous of her family
name and the standing that being a Biancardi conferred upon her. They would sneer at what they called her expedience, because when it suited her, she would affect deafness to their jibes, refusing to be drawn—her version of lying down. But sometimes she would stand and then it was wiser to avoid her.

  Once, out of nowhere, she likened my presence at Lac d’Or to that of a valuable stone sequestered in a vault. The vault of course was the school.

  ‘Diamond is a Jewish name,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t mean I am one.’

  Which was as far as the disagreement went. No one really argued with her.

  But all that was to come later.

  It was in the fumoir that I first met her; the room where girls who had reached eighteen were allowed to smoke. To do so anywhere else on the premises was considered a heinous crime by the authorities—plus strictement interdite, proibito, am strengsten verboten. Nevertheless, many of the younger girls who did not qualify for entry withdrew to the dubious privacy of the bathrooms where it was often possible to find their smoke wafting over locked toilet doors.

  Carla was inhaling deeply on a cigarette and saying something to Ivory Lawrence, the English girl. Ivory nodded and left, as though she had been dismissed, but she would become one of the four.

  She and I went for long walks around the grounds of Lac d’Or. It seemed to be an Anglo thing, this need for exercise. We both had it, though with my European heredity I was less Anglo than many but very much of my country where sport was considered a priority. Most of the other girls huddled around the heaters, limp and languorous. To bring colour to their cheeks they simply allowed hot air to blow over them.

  There was a time when Ivory and I managed to lose ourselves on one of our rambles. The grounds were certainly large enough for that. For me, losing my bearings was part of my life. Unlike my sister, I did not have a compass secreted within my central nervous system, so I was never quite sure where I was going. To get back to where I had been was no easier. It became my habit simply to follow my companions, always trusting that they would be able to lead me wherever I needed to go. But it made me fearful, this disturbance in my brain.

  ‘I’ve always been scared I’ll get lost,’ I said to Ivory that day. ‘At home the city streets are laid out on a grid. Even so, I can get disoriented in a minute.’

  ‘That’s a bit weird,’ she said, as we wandered deeper into the foliage. In parts it was almost impassable.

  ‘It’s very weird,’ I said. ‘Any time I go out I worry I might never find my way home.’

  I didn’t know why I had offered her that. It was something I’d always managed to conceal before. And I certainly had no intention of explaining how so many of my people had been forced from their homes by German soldiers. Even after the war was supposedly over, most of those who had managed to endure had never been able to make their way home again. During the whirlwind of blood and slaughter their property had been seized by their erstwhile neighbours. Now, even if they were able to find their way back to recover their land and their belongings, those same neighbours were waiting there to kill them if they tried. Many survivors still knew their own addresses but equally, many had forgotten them in the ordeal. It didn’t matter. They were all lost.

  While I had been pondering, we had wandered well into snowy terrain that was partially branch-blocked. Ivory, uncharacteristically, looked perplexed. She eyed the pale, yellow embers that passed for sun in that hemisphere’s winter, trying to work out which direction was north. We stumbled—or I stumbled; Ivory never lost her footing, concentration or courage—and after a while I simply sat down on a log and began to cry. Ivory looked at me, confounded.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t do anything else.’

  She took my hand then, the warm vitality of her pulsing through her fingers into mine.

  As she hauled me to my feet, she made me believe that somehow, we would find our way.

  ‘I know where we should be going,’ she said after a while, but by then I could tell she was lying. ‘Besides, if we sit down now, we’re as good as dead. And in case it hasn’t occurred to you, people would laugh like crazy once they discovered we’d died in the gardens of a finishing school. We’d never hear the end of it.’

  ‘If we’re dead we won’t hear anything.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. After which I allowed her to lead me in what turned out to be circles. At length she put her arm around me and I leaned on her. For all that our predicament was dire, her vigour and her energy never flagged. From then on, in some curious way, whenever I thought of her it was as mon Sauveur.

  They sent staff out to look for us and eventually, one of the groundsmen, accompanied by the General, found us. The General looked relieved, even pleased, to see us. It was an astonishment, as my Turkish roommate would have said. We were hustled into hot baths and then our pyjamas. We were given soup and hot chocolate and forbidden henceforth from walking in the gardens without an adult present, which was as good as grounding us forever.

  Later that night, I shivered in my bed. Even after the shower, the soup, and the hot drinks I could not rid myself of the chill. I wandered the corridors until I found the room Ivory shared with American, Lucille. Ivory sat up in her bed as soon as I turned the door handle.

  ‘Katie, is that you?’

  ‘I can’t get warm,’ I whispered.

  She threw back her covers. ‘Hop in.’

  I looked dubious.

  ‘Hop in,’ she said again. ‘I’ll set my alarm. Don’t worry.’

  So, I hopped in and almost immediately she activated a series of gentle snores. She was a still, if not quiet, sleeper and with my back against hers she kept me warm all night.

  At six she woke me and shooed me from her bed.

  So…

  With Ivory dismissed, now only Carla and I remained in the fumoir, a silence between us as uncomfortable as wet wool against skin. She rose to stand in front the vanilla-foiled French windows. Facing me, she was backlit by their glow, catching the setting sun.

  ‘I suppose you’re Carla,’ I said.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘Katie, Katie Diamond.’

  ‘Have the gossips pointed me out already?’ Her tone was that of one used to but not yet bored by clumsy introductions

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did they remember to mention I was late returning because my brother was being questioned by the Milan police about a suspected drug-pushing connection? And that they had to make sure I wasn’t in any way involved?’

  ‘Were you?’

  She tensed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. They wouldn’t have let me come if I had been.’

  I felt stupid and she looked at me curiously, as though trying to evaluate my I.Q.

  ‘It was all over the papers,’ I said, hoping to distract her: ‘Milan Bust! Scion and sister held.’

  ‘Of course. It’s the price you pay for being a Biancardi.’

  ‘Like the rum that goes with Coke?’

  Again, the look that called my intelligence into question.

  ‘That’s Bacardi. And you’re only about the seven-millionth person to make that crack.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘So, what’s Biancardi?’

  ‘It means white or pure and hardy. It’s a good name. I like it.’

  ‘I like it, too,’ I said.

  ‘My father is the brains and most of the money behind the La Scala label,’ she said. ‘Perfume, evening wear, table linen, designer shoes and handbags.’ She sounded like one of those elevator ladies they used to have at Myers who, in a single breath, could delineate everything available on each floor. ‘And it’s all ruinously, ridiculously expensive,’ she continued, ‘but that doesn’t seem to bother people. Business is always brisk.’

  ‘The gossips mentioned that, too.’

  ‘What does your father do?’
she asked.

  ‘He and my mother are the brains and all of the money behind the Finetex label. Dressing gowns, tracksuits, ladies’ lingerie…’

  If she registered my response as a parody of hers, she gave no indication. She had never needed to compete and the daughter of Jewish rag traders from the Antipodes would hardly give her reason to begin now. After our shaky start we began to talk in earnest. Her English was flawless and almost unaccented.

  ‘I went to school in London. My father wanted all the Biancardi children to have nothing but the best in education.’ She grimaced. ‘And in everything else. God, the pressure to live up to that man. Still, he must love us a lot.’

  She smiled, but there was a melancholy cast to her lips, as though they might open to utter a reality very different from that which she was offering me here tonight. I didn’t try to tease it out of her. I suspected it might be work for another day.

  Carla Biancardi—her identity defined by the shadow of England, but also eddying within the umber tones of her Mediterranean homeland. Her eyes were short-sighted, pale bronze, flecked with gold. A shock of fair curls framed a freckled face, soft-complexioned and childish. That was Carla.

  Then there was Maria-Elena Garcia, Mexican, with blue-black hair that reached her waist and sad, sad eyes—some inconsolable loss which, at the time, I was not sure she would ever reveal. Her body was lithe and fluid in its movements, a garnet pendant at her throat and garnet drops flickering around her ear lobes. She was quiet mostly, her moods gentle.

  But there was something perplexing about her. After my first couple of weeks at the school I couldn’t help noticing that she never went outdoors, let alone out of the gates. Observing her cloistered existence, I wondered whether her malaise was similar to mine. Was she, too, afraid of losing her way?

  As the weeks passed, the four of us came to do our homework together, eat at the same table, listen to records and, of course, smoke together. And then the stars aligned for us to be allowed to attend some of our non-academic classes together. This could never have happened with our other subjects because our standards were so diverse. So, sessions in embroidery, painting and drama, with their easy requirements and tranquil teachers, became havens for us all as we tried to navigate our otherwise disturbed and disturbing journeys.