Читать книгу Helena Rubinstein - Michele Fitoussi - Страница 14

Helena snapped her parasol shut before entering the store on 107 Whyte Street, next to the brick house with the wide porch that was now her home.1 It was a general store, somewhat more modern than her father’s in Kazimierz, with high counters, shelves and wooden crates. Her uncle Bernhard, who was also a sheep farmer and boasted that he was an optician to boot (a rather fancy word for the four pairs of spectacles he had on sale), sold a bit of everything in his store. Castor oil, shovels, sieves, dried biscuits, sugar, potatoes, poultices, ointment for horses’ joints, halters, ropes, flour, nails, tools, black soap, spectacles, even clothing – twill trousers, raw linen shirts and wide-brimmed hats.

Helena couldn’t stand the way the farmers’ wives dressed, in their rough calico frocks and frumpy lace-up shoes. Even if it wasn’t practical, every morning she put on one of her pleated silk dresses that constantly needed mending and her high-heeled boots that were worn down from riding horseback. Just the sight of a horse made her tremble. What an idea, to climb on its back! She wasn’t cut out to be a horsewoman. Her only concession to country life was the apron she put on over her dress in order not to spoil it when she was working in the store.

It was the first thing she did on arrival every morning, just before she went behind the counter. There weren’t any customers around, but she didn’t know how to sit still. She opened the ledger and took up the inkstand. Very soon she was busy at her bookkeeping.

‘Is that you now?’ asked a gruff voice from the room in the back. ‘Sure took long enough. What were you up to this time?’

‘My English lessons,’ she replied curtly. ‘I’ve been going to school every day since I arrived, you ought to know.’

And as soon as I know enough English to manage on my own, I’ll get away from here, she thought to herself, before immersing herself again in her figures.

Bernhard’s Yiddish accent exasperated her. As did his loud, coarse voice, not to mention his bad manners. He chewed tobacco, burped and picked his nose without the least compunction. Rebecca Silberfeld, Helena’s grandmother, would be furious if she could see her son’s rough ways. He had become a real yokel, with his muddy boots, sleeve covers, and a pencil behind his ear. He didn’t look out of place among all the colonists, gold prospectors and stockmen, or the ex-convicts deported from Europe. Things were different in the city: people were educated, well dressed, refined. She had noticed it at once when she got off the ship in Melbourne. The little she managed to see during the half-day she spent there, because Bernhard had some shopping to do, had immediately enchanted her. But in Coleraine there was nothing to do. The human species hardly mattered at all; in these parts, the sheep was king. Farmers raised sheep, the women who married the farmers looked after the sheep and had lots of children who would follow in their parents’ footsteps. Their sole topics of conversation were childhood illnesses and complaints about the weather, their Aboriginal servants, the drought, the floods, and, of course, the sheep.

Helena hurried along with her calculations. It was getting hotter and hotter, and she wiped her damp forehead on her sleeve. She couldn’t stand the climate – sweltering in summer, freezing, damp cold in winter. In fact, she couldn’t stand anything about the place. She’d spent nearly two years in this little pioneer town of two thousand souls that had sprouted up in the middle of nowhere in the southwest corner of Victoria, and she still hadn’t got used to it.

Coleraine was surrounded by vast, monotonous plains, swept by the violent wind that churned clouds of yellow dust in its wake and gave her headaches. Roughly six miles to the south was the Wannon River, which had given its name to the district, and which often flooded during the rainy season, isolating Coleraine and its surroundings.

Coleraine had a post office, three general stores including Bernhard’s, a saddler, a smithy, a local newspaper, a jeweller, a tailor, three hotels, one presbytery and a private school run by two old maids, Miss Crouch and her niece Miss Arrovoye, where Helena was learning English with students who were fifteen years younger than her. And there were two or three pubs where the farmers got drunk after the horse races, the only entertainment in the region.

Helena felt lonely and abandoned. She had no friends in Coleraine, nor did she try to make any.

People were kind, obliging and supportive – but Helena had little to say to them other than neighbourly pleasantries and the usual customer dealings. If only Eva had stayed with her. But after a year in Coleraine, her cousin, who didn’t get along with her father, had decided to go back to Melbourne with her three children.

Helena would have followed her if she’d known what she could do in the city. But with no money, where could she go? Now she had to prepare the meals all by herself. And she was also in charge of the housekeeping. Bernhard’s house had all the modern comforts, with a real bathroom – a claw-footed bathtub and a shower – four bedrooms, a kitchen, living room and dining room.2 But cleaning it all took a huge amount of time.

Her uncle wasn’t even grateful to her for it. When he wasn’t making fun of her lady-like clothing, the ridiculously high heels that she insisted on wearing even on the dirt roads, her parasols to protect her face, her fear of lizards, spiders and night noises, her urban mannerisms, her hopeless inability to ride horseback, or the charred legs of lamb, he said nothing. He could go for days without saying a thing, expressing himself solely through grunts and other unappealing noises. It was not surprising that he had never managed to remarry after the death of his wife, poor Aunt Chana. No sensible woman would want anything to do with such a man.

In the beginning, pressured by his insistent siblings writing all the way from Kraków, Bernhard was resolved to marry off his niece. During the first few months she was there, he introduced her to suitors chosen from among the handful of Polish, Romanian, and German Jews who lived in Coleraine and the surrounding villages of the Wannon district. All were charmed: Helena was a rare find in those parts. A shayna maidel, a pretty girl, judging by the appreciative gazes that followed her hourglass figure. And she had real character on top of it, which could come in very useful in this harsh terrain. They could already imagine her running their household, warming their bed, and keeping a strict watch over the many children they would be sure to give her.

But these men were farmers, blacksmiths, cobblers, gold washers: proster mensh, vulgar individuals who she could never imagine knowing in Kraków. So the mere thought of marrying one of them …

And because she rejected them out of hand, without even so much as a smile – no, I don’t want that Yankel, I couldn’t care less that his pub is the most popular one in Digby, nor do I want Moishe with his limp, or Nathan, he may be a rich farmer, but he’s still no better than an ongentrinken, a drunkard – Bernhard then resorted to introducing her to the remaining bachelors – goyim – in the area.

Helena wouldn’t get married. Over and over she had to explain – politely to begin with, then raising her voice in what turned into shouting matches after each of her rejections – she had no intention of shutting herself off in Coleraine. And so Bernhard gave up on the idea. From that point on he kept an eye on everything she ate as if calculating the cost of each mouthful. And yet Helena ate like a bird. When he had been drinking, he predicted she would dry up like an old sheepskin tanned by the brickfielder – the desert wind – since she didn’t want a man by her side.

But there was worse than Bernhard.

Louis, his younger brother, raised sheep in Merino, a little town twelve miles south of Coleraine. Louis was a lecherous bushman who slept with his boots on and spoke with a thick sheepherder’s accent. When Helena walked by he would run his tongue over his lips, as if she were a bowl full of cream. Whenever she came to visit, he insisted on teaching her how to ride a horse. After only a few minutes, Helena would complain of a backache and ask to go home. She couldn’t have said which was more frightening: the horse or her uncle.

Louis did not give up easily. His niece’s rejections even seemed to excite him. The last time he had got too close to her, in the stable, touching her breasts, she had clouted him with her parasol. Not wanting to see Gitel’s daughter disfigured – it would create havoc in the family – Bernhard had managed to calm his brother down, but only just. Louis had chased her, hurling insults.

Helena had run as fast as she could and sought refuge in the school where the pupils stared at her, their mouths agape.

‘What’s a “bugger”?’ she had asked the teachers, Miss Crouch and Miss Arrovoye, when she had caught her breath.

The two old maids turned as crimson as the worn plush curtains in Helena’s bedroom.

‘Well, I suppose it’s a lowlife person or some such thing,’ murmured Miss Crouch, while Miss Arrovoye lowered her eyes.

Nothing was going to plan. Not that she had any real plans. Every night she went to bed in tears, exhausted, after working harder than any beast, except for the few hours when she went to the school.

She was overwhelmed by homesickness. She hated everything here: the climate, the people, the sheep, her uncles. It was too hard. God knows, life in Poland was anything but easy, but Australia … She would never get used to it. Gitel would have cried for a whole week if she had even the faintest idea how her eldest daughter was living.

‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ Helena would say over and over, looking at herself in the little mirror above the toilet. ‘I cleanse my skin when I get up in the morning, I moisturise it with your cream, and I brush my hair for one hundred strokes before I go to bed, just the way you taught me.’

Gitel’s ritual was one of the few memories that still tied Helena to the past. She had forgotten how often she used to rail against the confinement of her life back there, and how she had prayed to the heavens to help her find a way out.

Helena could almost feel the warmth of her family nest. The few letters she got from Kraków, which she read over and over until she knew them by heart, plunged her into a nostalgia that left her devastated long after she had read them. She was suffering from an oppressive, unshakeable despondency.

She was nearly twenty-seven, and her life was a complete and utter failure. She hadn’t studied or got married, she worked like a brute and didn’t earn a shilling. Her life was going nowhere in this hostile land, with her equally hostile uncles. And yet it was out of the question to return. To what? The same difficult life with no chance of escape? To see her family’s pitying gazes? She could hear them from here: still not a penny to her name, our poor Chaja, and completely unmarriable. They would call her a shlimazel, an unlucky woman. Or worse yet, a lebish, a loser.

She had come this far, and had managed to avoid the pitfalls in her path. But one day she might fall off one of those damned horses and find herself with a broken back. Or she’d get bitten by one of those vicious little bush snakes that sneak into your sheets or your shoes and she would die after terrible suffering. Or that brute Louis would get what he wanted. He’d rape her in a dark alley and she’d damage her eyesight with weeping. If by chance she managed to survive, they were bound to force her to marry one of those yokels. And she wouldn’t be able to get out of it.

Then she’d be stuck between the herds of children and sheep, her face ravaged by sun and wind; she’d grow old before her time, she’d be sun-wizened and wrinkled like the customers at the store or like those English ladies she had seen in Melbourne with their skin like parchment. Fortunately her mother had given her those jars of cream. Gitel’s caring gesture along with Helena’s fear of the sun’s rays had kept her complexion like porcelain, earning her the appreciative gazes of men and the envious remarks of women.

‘My dear, how do you manage to keep your skin so white?’

Helena replied in her bad English, compounded by the impossible Polish accent that she would never manage to lose: ‘A family secret.’

And then, as if she were sharing a mysterious, precious treasure, she would reach under the counter for a little jar of cream, and rub some of it into her customer’s skin. The women loved being looked after. Helena gave them advice, too: don’t go out in the sun, it’s a disaster for your skin; use a parasol and wear a hat. The women would leave Bernhard’s general store enchanted.

Even though Helena had been parsimonious with her creams since her arrival, she was beginning to run out. No matter how often she told the farmers’ wives that the cream was very expensive because it came from so far away, they still asked for more. Perhaps she could sell a few jars in the general store: Bernhard wouldn’t say no. But to do that she would have to order some from Gitel.

One night when she couldn’t get to sleep – in Coleraine, the night time was even more terrifying than the day – Helena went over her calculations for the hundredth time. If all went well, it would take two months for her mother to receive her letter, and two months for the parcel to travel from Kraków to Melbourne, then another two weeks to get the goods through customs and delivered.

It was far too long and far too complicated as well. It would be quicker for Helena to make the cream herself. It couldn’t be that difficult. All she had to do was ask Jacob Lykusky for the formula. Uncle Jacob. The memory suddenly became very vivid: she felt homesick thinking about her mother’s smile when she opened the large jars of cream the chemist had brought. He could not refuse her this favour.

Helena sat up in bed, her mind racing. Why hadn’t she thought of this earlier? The Australian women were envious of her perfect complexion: she could offer them the means to obtain it. Or rather, sell it to them. She would make the cream and put it on sale in pretty little jars. If she knew how to go about it, before long she would be able to earn a living. But to invest in her research, she would need a little bit of money and, unfortunately, her savings had vanished long ago.

Bernhard was so tight with his money that Helena was sure he wouldn’t even lend her a shilling. No one in Coleraine would lend her anything. She would have to find a way on her own. As the night progressed, Helena began to outline a plan that she would perfect as the weeks went by. She would leave Coleraine and go to Melbourne where she would open a beauty salon in a smart neighbourhood. She could picture it down to the last detail, imagining the colour on the walls and the shape of the furniture. Women would feel at home in her salon, and they would be able to leave their domestic worries and unruly children behind for a few hours.

Helena would teach them to look after their skin and to protect it with Gitel’s cream. They might also need massages. Helena recalled how good it felt when her mother, in a rare moment of tenderness, would knead her back.

It did her good to dream, it helped her forget her wretched life. But every time she came up against the same problem: she had no money. How could she pay for the move to Melbourne? And to make her cream? These nagging questions wouldn’t go away.

Then she remembered the old pharmacist who had a small dispensary in Sandford, the next town over. On her weekly trips to the market in her uncle’s cart she always stopped in to see him. His tiny shop was dusty and old-fashioned, cluttered with jars of herbs, bark, oils, potions, salves, and ointments. Helena loved their medicinal smell.

Why hadn’t she thought of this before? He would be her salvation. When the next market day came around, she left Bernhard with his cattle breeders and headed towards the pharmacy with a pounding heart.

At first she pretended to be nosing around the shop, removing stoppers from flasks, rearranging the jars of cream. Then she took a deep breath for courage and walked straight over to the old pharmacist.

‘Say, Mr Henderson. Would you hire me to give you a hand?’