All That I Am Read Free Page A

1933, the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended—’
    And then I break off. Clara thinks I am paralysed by grief, but it is not so. I simply do not know how to describe that ending. In the park the wind toys with the trees, shifting leaves and branches a fraction every which way–as if the music has stopped but they cannot, for the sheer life of them, keep absolutely still. Clara risks a glance in my direction. She is relieved to see I am not weeping. (I have form in that department.)
    ‘Sorry.’ I turn back to her. ‘Where was I?’
    ‘“Dora Fabian,”’ she reads back, ‘“whose life has ended.”’
    ‘Thank you.’ I look out again and find my word. ‘Sorrowfully,’ I say, which is the plainest truth there is. ‘Whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my flat and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts.’
    Clara doesn’t look up. Her hand moves steadily across the page, coming to rest only moments after I stop speaking.
    ‘The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she fled from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi. Full stop.’
    Clara puts down her pencil.
    That is all? I close my eyes.
    Dora’s editorial trace is all over my book: the sharp focus, the humour. At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.
    And when the stake is gone?
    ‘All right, then?’ Clara asks softly after a few minutes. She thinks I’ve drifted off, taken advantage of her sweet presence and gone to sleep. She touches the edges of the pad in front of her.
    ‘Yes, yes.’ I sit up properly again.
    I will tell it all. I will bring Dora back, and I will make her live in this room.

RUTH
    The doorbell is ringing.
    I ignore it. Without opening my eyes, I can tell it’s morning.
    Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring …
    Verdammtes bell. Fuh-ken bell, as they say here. The thing has aged along with me and it sticks. I move my bad leg with the other one over the side of the bed, and slide my feet, gnarled as mallee roots, into the sheepskin shoes–one built up, the other plastic-soled. I leave my wig on the dresser.
    Ring ring …
    I open the door. The van speeds off–I can just make out, in purple writing on its side, ‘The World on Time’. It’s seven o’clock in the morning! A tad early , if you ask me.
    A FedEx package on the mat. I stoop to get it with my stiff leg sticking out–I am a bald giraffe in an unreliable dressing gown and I feel sorry for any passers-by who might see me, mangy-minged and inglorious. This gives me a wicked thrill, till I imagine they might include children, whom I have, in general, no desire to horrify.
    I move into the front room, my favourite room. It smells of furniture wax–Bev must have done it while I was out yesterday. She uses the wax–along with her Vicks VapoRub and her copper bracelets–as part of an arsenal against decay and time, suffocating the world with a layer of polyvinyls to make it shiny and preserve it forever like the plastic food in Japanese restaurant windows. She sprays the glass-fronted bookcases, the wooden arms of the chairs, even–I have witnessed this–the leaves of the rubber plant. One day I will sit too long and she will spray me as well, preserving me for all time as an exhibit: ‘European Refugee from Mid-Twentieth Century’. Not that I need preserving. Unkraut vergeht nicht , my mother used to say: you can’t kill a weed.
    The other side of the package reads ‘Columbia University New York, Department of Germanic Languages’. Here in Sydney, the events of the world wash up later as story, smoothed and blurred as fragments of glass on the sand. And now?
Dear Dr Becker,
We refer to