After I and my family arrived in Australia with no English and no right to state welfare, there was nothing for me to do but go and enrich the army of unemployed wandering about Melbourne in search of work.
After a protracted period of failure, I finally had some luck. A fellow countryman from Tashkent, Boris Khvan, who I had never met before coming here, but who I became friends with here, came to my aid.
I can say that in Australia my ‘proletarian epic’ played out under Boris’ wing. He found me work in factories on more than one occasion. He found me work this time too. Once again in a Korean factory, but a different one. In the first factory I had chopped up shark tails – in this one it was ox tails. A move up the ladder, as they say.
At the last factory Boris’s namesake, also named Khvan, went to see the bosses. Just prior to this my Khvan had gone there and spoken on my behalf. When I asked him whether he was related to this Australian Khvan, Boris answered, ‘All Khvans are related’.
Of all my local ‘universities’ (in Australia Maxim Gorky started to make more sense to me), this turned out to be my longest period of study. After working several months there, I was sure. Although I had to work my guts out – in the mornings I would force my stiff and sore body out of bed – in my heart I was comfortable enough.
I was one of the boys in an international collective and on good terms with the bosses. The director, a man my age called Jacob, would give me a friendly slap on the back, and the factory Khvan, a person who was never too proud of a protege, often showed me off to the beginners. It seems you learn how you need to work.
We were making beef soup for export. I was especially successful at the skilled art of cutting tails with a special machine. The school of Boris, who I’d been lucky enough to work side-by-side with at the previous factory, had not been a waste of time. My fame grew day by day; they would have hung my portrait on an honour board with the inscription ‘Glorious Tailcutter’, if they had had one in the factory.
There are many interesting things to tell from that glorious time and, God willing, I’ll do so in the future. But now I want to begin at the end. They say, ‘the end crowns the work’ (or all’s well that end’s well), which is just how things worked out for me. Okay, this crown didn’t exactly turn out to made of thorns, but it was hardly made of laurels either.
Everything had gone pretty well up until the moment when a young married Korean couple appeared at the factory: he was an intelligent type in glasses, she a pretty brunette with unusual ringlets (uncharacteristic for a Korean). She was expecting. I could work out just by looking that her pregnancy was in the third trimester; I thought that the factory, with its noise, steam and smelliness was not the best place to be heavily pregnant. And the work there was hardly a stroll in the park. But the poor woman tried to keep up with her husband, who, despite his ‘non-proletarian’ appearance, turned out to be a workaholic.
At the end of the working day, when we were busy cleaning up, I saw the pregnant woman dragging a heavy bucket full of filthy waste. The gentleman in me jumped up and I rushed over to take the bucket from her, pointed at her bulging stomach and said, ‘not good’. It all began with that ill-fated ‘not good’. Back then I had no idea that my factory idyll had just come to an end and the zero hour had arrived.
The next day I kept catching her grateful glance. Whenever we met eyes, she would break out in a happy smile. It seemed that I had come to her in a dream the previous night as a fairytale prince.
In the half-hour break when we all ate lunch in a special room, I usually went out into the fresh air to reunite with my aged, though still physically independent, Datsun where, after a modest lunch, I would doze off like an old man or lose myself in meditation on the vicissitudes of life.
But this time I had no time to doze off. The woman, having left her husband in the stuffy confines of the factory, had followed me. She sat down on the footpath near my car and asked me to leave the car door open. Obviously she wanted to see her prince, complete in his ripped up overalls and oversized rubber boots. Instead of a crown this prince’s head wore an idiotic little beret made of artificial gauze (we were given these berets at the factory so our soup buyers wouldn’t be paying for our hair as well).
I was eating a banana, and she observed this act with admiring eyes. It’s difficult to say what aesthetic beauty she found in this. I smiled at her; she shone. She was obviously missing attention. Clearly her husband was not spoiling her, and my gentlemanly behaviour had made a strong impression on her. Too strong, I felt at that moment.
Turning around, I saw that her husband the intellect was spying on us timidly from the factory doorway, shining his glasses. But he couldn’t bring himself to approach. These intellectual types! I started to fidget, realising the ambiguity of the situation, but didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t very well send a pregnant woman away.
To be the object of the attentions of the opposite gender is always flattering, and men are much the same as women in this. At another time I might possibly have broken out in a self-satisfied smile, but for some reason no particularly pleasant emotions emerged in the current situation. Despite the hard and monotonous work, I still retained enough sense to understand that my personality itself contained, along with everything else, a very indirect relationship to the feelings of this woman.
That the woman was seized by amorous feelings was obvious. Experience had taught me to differentiate true love from common flirting: a flirting woman’s eyes play, but a woman in love’s eyes shine gently with a particular light inside. This open trust… No, no. It was hard to believe I was wrong here.
But what was this woman in love with: a long-unrealised dream, or an unexpected illusion of happiness after she had come across what for her was unusual compassion, or something else? I could only guess. More has been written about love than anything else on earth, but you won’t find an intelligible answer to the question of why it occurs in the most inappropriate circumstances.
The next day her eyes followed me wherever I went. This had happened in my youth, women had fallen in unrequited love with me…but a pregnant woman? I was embarrassed and didn’t know how to act. I just avoided contact with her. But where can you hide in the brick-bordered space of a factory?
She wouldn’t take her eyes off me, and it was surprising how, even when she was manipulating a huge sharp knife, she managed not to cut herself. She was not looking at all at what she was cutting, cleaning the fat from the meat with a remote look. I was obviously more attractive than a piece of cooked meat. Though not by much, I think. In this steamy room we all had a slightly ‘boiled’ look, as though we had just been pulled
out of a fresh broth.
During the lunch break I slipped unnoticed (or so I thought) through the back gates onto the street to where I had parked my car especially behind the factory building in a secluded place. Which was actually far from it. My love slave appeared literally within a minute and, emboldened, asked if she could get in my car. Her request caught me unawares. My face creased with an indeterminate grimace, which the woman took as a sign of consent. She nimbly (far too nimbly for her condition) darted into the cabin – I had no time to work out what was what – and began to look at me with devoted eyes, which flickered, it seemed to me, with expectation.
What was she hoping for? That her freshly-cooked prince would start up the car and take her off to a magical land without the fuss and stench of factories, without the need to do exhausting work, and without her seemingly already bored husband? Incidentally, I didn’t dare make any assertions about the latter – a woman’s soul is a mystery.
I don’t know what she expected. But I didn’t feel right. What’s more, a group of young Korean factory workers was crowding around the back gates and glancing over in our direction with far from idle curiosity. The whole thing began to smell of kerosene.
I was lucky that time. We managed to work peacefully through the day. True, now I caught not only her loving eyes, but also the various glances of my co-workers, including the curious ones, the threatening and hostile ones… We found ourselves the focus of public attention.
By chance, or perhaps intentionally, Paul the shop supervisor assigned me to work at the preparation table next to the woman’s husband. The women workers standing opposite exchanged glances and started giggling. Four-eyes was concentrating on his work and looked like he didn’t notice me. I wasn’t burning with desire to engage in a heartfelt conversation with him either.
Suddenly, out of the blue, he pointed at my ear and in a shy voice said, ‘You have hair growing from your ears’. This sounded so funny I could barely stop myself from laughing, but my laugh could have been taken wrongly in the already tense atmosphere. So I just replied, ‘What can I do about it?’
In the evening when we were heading home, the woman looked over at me with such a sad face, as though farewelling me as I left for the front. They had gone out to their car ahead of me and I loitered about deliberately in the hope they would leave. But when I came outside, she was standing there near her car, while her husband waited patiently behind the wheel. What was he waiting for? I rushed off.
A new day brought new surprises. We had just started work when I was approached by one of the workers who the bosses had put in charge of supervising the others. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like this guy. He had started at the factory after me, wasn’t very experienced, and he wasn’t much of a worker either. The only thing I suppose he was any good at was bowing to those above him.
Some sort of commission from Seoul had arrived (the factory belonged to a South Korean company) with the big bosses, and we all became witnesses to the performance of this guy, the actor. No sooner had the bosses appeared in the doorway of the shop, when our actor rushed up to them from the other side of the factory and started bowing incessantly to them in the traditional Korean way. All the while looking obsequiously at the owners like a dog begging for a bone.
I like eastern etiquette, but this was too much. But my opinion was just that - the people in charge had decided things their way, awarding him his bone; that is, he was promoted up the ranks. The bosses knew better. But bosses are only people, and people have a weakness for flattery.
Incidentally, this time the bosses had made a mistake. This bowing specialist soon, through his own conceit, bowed so low that he caused the factory a loss of at least several hundred dollars, which is where his acting career ended. At least in this factory.
For the moment though, the fact was this brownnoser had taken on the role of moral arbiter, saying to me, ‘She’s pregnant, you know’. He was announcing this to me, a doctor (though not any more). He said this in such a falsely confidential tone, as though counting on my understanding; he had obviously got a whiff of my good relationship with the director. I shrugged my shoulders.
A couple of hours later, convinced that the pregnant woman, like before, would not come out of her love trance, the newly appointed boss ordered me in a firmer tone to ‘stop hypnotising her.’ He had me confused.
A guy called Romeo from the Philippines, a smiling funny fat man, whose comic appearance and romantic name didn’t at all fit with each other, gave me a conspiratorial wink and with a nod in the direction of the pregnant woman, stuck his thumb out secretly. Just who this gesture was for - me or the woman - was unclear.
I felt like I was stuck in some sort of piece of fiction, but didn’t know what kind until they dropped another hint about hypnosis at me. In the factory worked two Vietnamese women friends (excellent workers from the old ‘Guardia’ factory) who I met the first day I arrived and who I was on friendly terms with. One was larger and more serious, the other was a puny little sparrow you could easily have taken for a teenager. There was no way you would have said she was the mother of two children.
This little sparrow, a desperate flirt, gave me a sideways glance and in a playful little voice said, ‘Why are you hypnotising this woman? Can you hypnotise me?’ And they both burst out laughing.
At the factory they knew that in my former life I had been a psychiatrist. Someone had spread the rumour that I knew hypnosis and had hypnotised the pregnant woman into a fog of love. I didn’t know who had done this - rumours have no authors.
And how were they to know that I, on the contrary, was ideologically opposed to any kind of hocus-pocus, and had a sceptical attitude towards hypnosis, an attitude which turned extremely negative in regard to its unethical use?
It’s well known that the more absurd the rumour, the more easily it is picked up and spread. The tale of the insidious psychiatrist and his unfortunate victim looked very spicy against the background of the grey factory days. I became ‘popular’ in no time. The infamy of the hypnotist overshadowed the fame of the tailcutter.
Factory Khvan stopped showing me off to the beginners as a pacesetter of production. He, who always won people over with his open, friendly manner of communicating, now began upsetting me with short, cold glances whenever we met. At first I couldn’t grasp what the reason was for such a sharp change in Khvan’s attitude toward me.
But once when I dropped in to see him on some work business he avoided my eyes and asked, ‘Where is your wife?’ I was surprised by this unexpected question and answered that she had gone to Tashkent to look after her very sick mother. Khvan thought for a moment then threw a judgmental look at me and answered, ‘I see’. I didn’t see what he saw, but when he said, ‘Your wife is a good woman’, in such a tone as if he wanted to also say, ‘but you’re a son of a bitch - what are you doing?’ I began to get the essence of our ‘warm’ conversation. When he muttered something about hypnosis, it all fell into place.
Khvan turned his back to me, indicating he no longer wanted to have anything to do with me. Either he was furious at my matrimonial unfaithfulness, or worried about the strength of the young Korean family’s ties, or afraid that I might even put a hex on him… One thing was clear: Khvan had crossed me off his list of friends. It is painful when a person you are grateful to turns away from you without justification.
My friend Boris, who could have helped me, had by this time left Australia for good. And with my embryonic English I was unable to shed enough light on this delicate situation for everyone to understand that I wasn’t the problem here. What’s more, I didn’t feel the urge to explain myself.
In the first place, my conscience was clear; at least I thought so. Was I supposed to now cover my face shyly every time I saw a pregnant woman? Secondly, to foist all the ‘blame’ onto this poor woman, who had also thrown her reputation and possible her family’s well being onto the altar of love wouldn’t have been a manly thing to do.
Khvan wasn’t the only one who changed his attitude toward me. The until-then friendly group of young Koreans began to treat me with undisguised animosity. What stood out in particular were the athletic builds of these fit guys, who would openly clench their fists whenever they saw me.
I’m not a shy and retiring type. Naturally, I didn’t come to Australia to add to my collection of black eyes (which since childhood had become very rich), but it wouldn’t have been a drama if they gave my body a good ‘massage’ or ‘tickled’ my sides. But then, these guys were hardly Eastern martial arts stars; those types don’t hang around in factories. This was just the right place for overseas scholars burdened with academic titles, not people with black belts…
I wasn’t afraid of fighting. I was afraid of losing my job. Obviously my opponents couldn’t make any decisive action either for the same considerations. And perhaps they were wary of my ‘magical charms’. Who knew what these psychiatrist-magicians were capable of? There was already one victim – who was next?
I couldn’t hold a grudge against the young Korean guys. They were showing national solidarity, which can often be expressed in a foreign land. But I was disgusted by the watchdog Paul, who I mentioned before. He constantly chased us with a mocking-derisive shout of, ‘What are you doing?’ but until now he hadn’t let fly with his fists. At least not at me. But making use of my unenviable position as a social outcast, he grabbed me one time by the shoulder for no reason and shoved me. I struggled to suppress the impulse to smash him right in his fat face. With a right hook, and with all I had. But even this pleasure was denied me. A violation of my rights, in a word.
I was comforted by the fact that the director Jacob remained friendly with me and in neither word nor action dropped any hints about what had happened. He even gave me some glasses in an expensive case, after breaking my five-dollar ones himself and throwing them in the rubbish bin. As he was doing this he announced that a doctor shouldn’t be wearing cheap glasses. The director was either out of touch with the whole melodrama bothering the factory folk, or was wise enough not to give in to the fuss of the crowd. Most probably it was the latter.
I remember director Jacob with gratitude to this day. In fact his support was more than just moral. The factory was keeping my family afloat; I was the only breadwinner in the family at the time. We had no other source of income, nor any stash under the bed. And if the director had also believed this nonsense with all its pious anger, as Khvan had, I wouldn’t have been spared the deadly words ‘don’t come tomorrow’. Whoever has experienced this ‘joy’ of the unemployed, will understand what I’m talking about.
But not all the workers there condemned me - some stayed on my side. My closest friend, a likeable young guy from Eritrea who dreamed of a career as a politician, but for the moment was gathering life experience, expressed his support in a laconic but extremely clear way: ‘She’s stupid!’ The subtle political subtext to this phrase was, ‘if it’s a chick, she’s stupid – there’s no reason to blame the bloke’.
Whether this woman was stupid or just in love wasn’t for me to judge. What did I know about her? I hadn’t even asked her her name. But to this day I still don’t know what I was supposed to do to clear up or defuse this situation.
Afterwards kind people said that I should have had a chat with the woman and explained it was not good in front of your husband to show interest in another man, who probably has his own family… I can tolerate the moral lecturing at me, but to sermonise to someone else… for Christ’s sake! I would rather cop one in the face.
This story was cut short and didn’t reach its culmination due to the fact that I ended up in a serious car accident. I have to disappoint lovers of the detective novels - the amorous woman’s husband had nothing to do with this whatever.
The accident was my fault. I was tired and had turned against a red arrow. I ended up with two broken ribs, and what was sadder, my (or rather my sister-in-law’s) faithful Datsun had breathed its last, and was taken away to the automobile graveyard. Without music. In the meantime I left the working class - for good, as it turned out - and never returned to the factory.
A year later, now working as a doctor in a hospital (however paradoxical, the aforementioned car crash had worked out in my favour), I ran into the woman in the supermarket. She rushed up to me with joy and started asking me about my life. I noted to myself that rather than languishing after our separation, she had become more attractive. The joys of motherhood had turned out to be stronger than her longing for the foreign prince.
What’s more, nursing a child was probably easier than working her guts out in a stinking factory while heavily pregnant. By the way, I won’t draw any conclusions about that last point – I don’t have the personal experience.
When the woman suddenly became interested in where I lived, what my address was I took fright, muttered something unintelligible and waved my hand in the opposite direction to my home.
Now, at a safe enough distance in time away from that situation, I’m curious as to how the story would have played out if the accident hadn’t happened. But that is from the series ‘what if?’ with all its wide range of plot variations.
In the past you have only a single subject – your life.