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?’
NOTES
1 The Age, Melbourne, 25 August 1979.
2 ibid.
Uncle