He’s in the kitchen cooking toasted cheese and Vegemite like it’s Chicken à la King. I sit at the table, finishing a game of patience. The cards have pictures of English hunting scenes.
“What do you think about Jews?” I ask him. He doesn’t look away from his frypan.
“I didn’t know she was one when I married her,” he says, as though he’s not to blame. “She wanted to go back to Vienna, but it wasn’t safe, the War wasn’t over.”
“She was safe here?”
“This is where she belonged,” he says.
“You belong here,” I say. I get up and go to my room, sit on the bedspread from my childhood, my twelve-year-old’s stains. I run my fingers across the familiar bobbles and knotted cotton, the patches where it’s worn quite flat. It looks like a faded relief map. Some children here are born in the Bush Nursing Hospital, others at home on kitchen tables. I was born on a boat. I was circumcised. I wonder if there was a doctor on board. Were there candles in her cabin, a small operation, a baby crying? Did she whisper Hebrew prayers while she helped him keep my body still, whiskey or gin on the cotton wool, his scissors sharp for cutting?
My mother was as fair as me. Turning my head in the wardrobe mirror, I look for the Jew in my face. My nose is prominent but there’s nothing of it in my colouring. I wonder how Jews are supposed to look.
She placed a star of sticks on top of where she put the baby, buried before it formed a bone or feature. I remember how she walked, awkward like she wished she had more clothes to cover her. The next day there was an oval stone and twigs, arranged in the dirt in the shape of a star. She’d been down at the edge of the water in the dark.