Anna Zilberberg and I

by Adrian D’Ambra

In the last quarter of the twentieth-century one of the most essential experiences of Australian life became expatriation from it. Hippies, dropouts and anarchists blazed an overland trail through South-East Asia, the Sub-Continent and the Middle East to Europe, getting stoned on the beaches of Kerala or having stones thrown at them in the backblocks of Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Iran. Beneficiaries of a liberal education took their chances as dish pigs, bar maids and teachers in the UK. Intellectuals took Henry Lawson’s advice from several decades earlier and decamped in droves to London from the cultural drabness and middle-class mediocrity of the world’s most isolated continent. Lawson, of course, could only recommend escape by ship but these travellers departed by air. Early examples were Charmian Clift and George Johnston, followed by Germaine Geer and Clive James. But the phenomenon took on wide popular appeal in the 1970s and ’80s when young people departed the country en masse, abandoning the homespun national archetypes of the slouch-hatted digger and the metal-headed bushranger and inventing a new one: the backpacker. Stories of survival and escape, a new kind of itinerant genteel poverty, unexpected jobs and scams abounded. The character Sebastian in Agnieszka Zilberberg’s manuscript is a typical young Australian backpacking traveller of his time. He is a restless young Australian, knocking about between Athens, Haifa and London, hungering for experiences that might enlighten his search for meaning and belonging in the world. In this sense he is just like me when I was holed-up in the south of France. If he had a return ticket for Australia, he probably cashed it in.

The story of the relationship between Agnieszka Zilberberg and myself is a very simple one, so simple in fact, that I’m not even sure if the word ‘relationship’ can really be applied to it. What can I tell you in terms of what I knew about her? What can I tell you about us, how we met and what we were to each other?

I’ll begin with her first. These things I know, essentially because she told them to me or revealed them around the table in conversations with various groups of people at the hostel where we met. Agnieszka – even though none of us were close friends and none of us had known each other for very long, the few of us who spoke to her during the last days of her life called her Anna – Agnieszka was born in the south of France to unmarried parents and she was raised in the north of the country, in Strasbourg, by her Polish-speaking grandparents on her mother’s side. About several things she was fiercely contemptuous: US hegemony and American breakfast cereal, television, bourgeois parliamentarism, second wave feminism, fashion, the family, bisexuality. About several other things she was fiercely and positively passionate: I think I can safely say, for example, that I have never met a more ardent communist in my life, neither before during my early Trotsky-sympathising student days nor in the forty years since. And then there were the things about which she was fiercely ambivalent. The first examples that come to mind are Zionism and Israel, matters about which I knew virtually nothing before I met her. Of course she was Jewish, and of course she could speak in both Polish and Yiddish with her grandparents, and of course she was tormented by the intergenerational trauma she had inherited from their survival of the Holocaust. But the Jewish state? Every fibre of her being argued against the appropriation of Palestine and yet her tormented soul sought some kind of solace in the knowledge of a Jewish homeland.

Another matter which comes to my memory most vividly on which Anna was fiercely divided, contradictory, torn, was men. She despised the male capacity to harm others, other men in times of war and violence, but especially the harm my gender inflicts on children and women. Paradoxically, a moment comes to mind when she was listening to another young traveller, an American, describing in some detail the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of her father. Anna was far from unsympathetic, of course, but she insisted on describing the young woman’s story as ‘common’. ‘But this is common stuff,’ she said, ‘it happens all the time.’ I do sometimes wonder if the most important things we think we understand are irredeemably muddled in translation and I have often wondered if Anna’s grasp of English wasn’t up to saying precisely what she meant to say. The American girl was pretty shattered, I can tell you. To give Anna the best effort that I can at some kind of benefit of the doubt, perhaps what she meant to say was that men should be despised because they are doing this and getting away with it all the time.

So, what did I mean by saying that Anna was fiercely ambivalent about men? Well, there were men whom she’d never met whom she greatly admired. Robespierre and Stalin were two that came up in conversation, and I know for a fact that she had a handful of Léo Ferré cassettes in her pack. Whilst we didn’t have the time to get to know each other well, I also suspect that she secretly admired her estranged father who, apparently, had been some courageous figure in the French Resistance, an actual antifascist murderer of Nazis as opposed to the solipsistic wordsmiths whom she also despised. Anna respected men for their intelligence if they had any and rejected them out of hand if they didn’t. She had absolutely no sexual interest in men and spoke openly about a small number of intense relationships she had shared with other women who, invariably, had to be her comrades as well.

And I guess this is as good a time as any to bring me into the picture. Probably the first thing I should do is to borrow the line from Leonard Cohen, that for me she ‘would make an exception’. Lou Reed is possibly closer to the mark: ‘I guess I’m just dumb, ’cause I know I’m not smart.’ If I didn’t know it when I met her, I certainly learned it from the manuscript, that I was the second Australian man she had met in fairly rapid succession. Or was I? Who Sebastian was or where he went I had no idea then and I have no idea now. Indeed, did he even really exist or was he a fictional construct through which Anna was simply teasing out a couple of hypothetical propositions: what would it be like for a woman like her to fall in love with a man and to want to make a child with him? And, of course, Anna uses him as a fairly obvious diversionary device by casting him as the author of her novel, rather than herself. Naturally, the same sorts of questions can be asked about the character of Raymonde: to what extent is she a self-portrait of Anna? The insignificant externalities match as far as I can tell but what about the all-important interior life? To what extent is Bel-Exil an autobiographical text? Again, quite possibly Anna’s work needs to be read entirely as fiction without concern for the likelihood or possibility of an autobiographical element. I wouldn’t even know if there is anyone alive today, forty years after the event, who could answer these questions. Anna certainly isn’t and, therefore, she certainly can’t.

Anna warmed noticeably to my Australian accent when she asked me what I was reading and I showed her the volume of Apollinaire I had picked up somewhere on my travels. Of course it was an English translation. Like most of my fellow Australian-born compatriots I am hopelessly monolingual. But she asked me to read Le Pont Mirabeau in English which I did with pleasure and then she recited it back to me in French. I was more than a little awestruck – remember, please, I was only twenty-two or twenty-three years of age for goodness’ sake – and I was probably more than a little attracted to her. After all, what more is there to admire or despise about human beings beyond their intelligence and their cultural and political sensitivities? Beauty? The damned, dark poets of the French nineteenth-century knew the truth about that whore. Is that a dimly remembered quotation from Anna? Maybe. If anything, though, it sounds more like the character Jeanne about whom all of us know even less. Whether or not she represents one of Anna’s actual lovers or she acts as a compound character made up from several of them, I cannot tell you because I do not know. And we will never know if the events in Israel that are more alluded to than described in the manuscript really transpired or not. They exist today as nothing more than a literary fiction.

Anyway, the exception Anna made for me was neither romantic nor sexual. It was strictly platonic and intellectual. Anna was also a decade older than me and this, alongside her sexuality, put her even further out of reach. We were holed up in a fleapit of a hostel in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, deep in the middle of the pantheistic medieval south of France, and it was the middle of winter, miserable with rain. Anna had just come down to the coast for a day’s ride and found herself stranded because her motorbike had broken down and I had hitch-hiked in from Carrara in Italy where I’d narrowly avoided being raped by a truck driver. As you can tell, we talked about politics, society and culture and we were joined on and off by fellow travellers. She carried two top-quality pipes – one a briar and the other a meerschaum – and a tooled leather pouch of tobacco in the inside breast pocket of her leather jacket so that both of us could smoke to our hearts’ content. Like her character, Raymonde, Anna’s dress code was strictly proletarian – she was wearing a faded deep indigo boiler suit beneath her leathers – and her short hair looked distinctly like she had cut it herself, either with or without the aid of a mirror. The conversation was equally edgy and engaging, one of those rare meetings in a lifetime with someone remarkably memorable and memorably remarkable. I think she would have hated that kind of turn of phrase.

I told her that I was planning to become a school teacher back in Australia once I’d exhausted the travel bug and she was singularly unimpressed by my lack of ambition. What she did for a living, I had no idea. We know from the novel that the character Raymonde worked in an Institut de Rééducation (a harrowing term when one thinks of it historically) but whether or not this was the case for Anna, I have not been able to establish. The last time we chatted – it would have been, I think, the third morning and the motorbike was ready so she could go home – she confided in me that she had been trying to write a novel which she had in typescript in her satchel and she wanted to know if I’d be interested in having a look at it. She knew I couldn’t read French but she insisted that I start struggling at the beginning, that she would pick up the bike from the mechanic and come back and we could spend the day talking about it. The one thing I understood above all others was that she was shocked at what she had written, that it seemed so far from her own sensibilities and values and beliefs. It felt, she said, as though someone else had written it through her. For her – an out-and-out Marxist materialist – this was absurd.

You know what I’m going to write next, don’t you? That she never came back. That she picked up the bike and that she slid under a truck on the grimy, slimy, salty road surface just down from the hostel. I didn’t see it happen but I sure as hell heard it and when I looked out the window, even though I’d never seen her bike before, I had that disgusting gutted feeling that I knew exactly who had been riding it and what had happened to them. And I was right. The green fuel tank of the BMW R65 belonged to her. There was very little blood. A broken back, massive head trauma and one dead rider on the road. We – the staff and the guests at the hostel – helped the police as best we could. She had signed the register and given an accurate account of her address in Lodève and the hostel manager had correctly recorded the details of her carte d’identité which she had with her in any case in the same breast pocket where she kept her tobacco.

And the manuscript? Please believe me, it was never my intention to be a thief. There was simply nothing I could do with it other than keep it. It was obvious from our few days of conversation that she was not close with any family member and that there was no one – friend or lover – currently residing with her. I also knew instinctively that the last thing Anna would have wanted me to do was hand it over to the police. So, I kept it. And I’ve had it with me, tucked away in a desk drawer for the last forty years.

Now that I am coming to the end of my anything but illustrious career as an English teacher in Melbourne – during which I have exhorted both the keen and the unwilling to say precisely what they mean to say – I have also had to accept that I am most unlikely to see any of my own writing being published in Australia or anywhere else for that matter. It’s something I’ve come to call ‘the D’Ambra curse’ in front of my few closest friends and my family. At the tender age of 62 it’s time to admit that I’m either just not good enough or just not lucky enough to have witnessed the publication of my novels and poetry. But, over a very long period of time, I have been able to render Anna’s manuscript into English. What you have before you is the product of what I would describe as two pretty rough jobs. To be honest, Anna was not the literary writer she might have wanted to be. The manuscript was very fragmentary, very first draft, with very limited characterisation. Same passages were barely sketches, others read like hastily tossed off entries in a diary. And then there’s also the fact that I am no linguist and that rather than relying on my own poetic sensitivities I’ve had to rely, phrase by laborious phrase, on a bilingual dictionary. Over the last decade or so, I have also become increasingly reliant on the internet to help me render Anna’s original French into an English approximation which I have then been able to embellish.

Naturally, I’ve imbued Sebastian with some of my own characteristics and experiences to flesh him out a bit, but there are bits of other people in there as well, including my own wife and children. He is, after all, an Australian male of around about my age with a similar level of education, so he wasn’t too difficult to do. Any writer will understand that exactly the same thing goes for the character of Raymonde. She was given to me by Anna as a fairly flat, one-dimensional self-portrait, lacking in depth and definitely an overly harsh rendition of herself. As an ongoing act of kindness through the years, I have tried to iron out the self-loathing of the original Raymonde and to leaven it with some of the sardonic humour and sharp, dark wit I observed in Anna. This new Raymonde, the product of both our lives and both our imaginations, also wears the parts of other people from my world rather than Anna’s, including myself and my family. Indeed, I realised just the other day that our youngest daughter is there – in embryo, so to speak – in one or two passages belonging to Raymonde.

So, here it is, my last shot at the stars, and it’s based on a book that wasn’t originally written by me. I’ve never been very comfortable with the postmodern predisposition and Anna would have absolutely despised the quasi-fascist capitalism that the so-called Left’s perpetual theorising and cultural cringing has facilitated on the Right, but this novel may very well be happy here in this miserable world that we’ve made for ourselves, happier than the rest of us in any case.

Going back to the beginning of this essay, I find myself in a clearer space, more able to say more clearly who and what we were to each other, Anna Zilberberg and I. We were complete strangers brought together by the vicissitudes of the road. Over the period of a couple of days we became good friends, confidants even – that’s right, I told her about my hopeless love affair with a married woman immediately preceding my departure from Australia – and we gave each other just that, the sacred gift of friendship, friendship that should know no boundaries of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion or language. (Thank heavens in terms of politics we leaned roughly the same way, my Trotsky to her Stalin, so to speak!) And in this friendship she gave me a gift, a manuscript called Bel-Exil, a gift-giving which I have taken a very long time to reciprocate.

Adrian D’Ambra, Melbourne 2020