Free Too Many Men by Lily Brett

I had to speak with the manager, then another manager, and a supervisor, but I got it done. Another ten minutes and the whole thing will be finished with.” He rushed off again.
    Ruth stood next to the family on the bench. They were all looking forlorn now. Maybe the parents had realized that travel would be wasted on these children. Ruth looked at them. Why would anyone want to have children?
    Ruth knew that, after the war, her mother didn’t particularly want to have children. She knew that her mother hadn’t been overjoyed to find herself pregnant with Ruth. Rooshka and Edek had not been in Australia for very long when Rooshka discovered that she was pregnant. They were both working in factories. They had no money and they spoke no English.
    “What right did we have to bring a child into this world?” her mother had said to her. Ruth thought that the world her mother was referring to was a larger world than the world of poverty and lack of language. It was a world where everything was erratic, and nothing would ever make sense again.
    This world was full of mourning and full of dead people. Dead people who hadn’t just died. Dead people who had been murdered.
    The murderers of these dead people were rarely referred to, and Ruth, as a child, often wondered who they were, and if she would recognize them if she passed them on the street. For years she used to examine the faces of passing strangers to see if they contained evidence of murderousness.
    Ruth had had a German school friend, Elfriede. Elfriede had long blond plaits and three brothers, a mother and father, and four grandparents. When Ruth was ten, she had stayed at Elfriede’s place overnight. Ruth had eaten bratwurst and Kartoffelklösse for dinner and listened to the German words and phrases flying around the dinner table. In the middle of the T O O M A N Y M E N
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    night, she had woken up with a stomachache. Was she in a house full of murderers? She had asked her mother, the next day, if Elfriede and her family were the murderers. “Who knows?” Rooshka had replied. It was a worrying answer.
    Rooshka had told Ruth that she had tried to abort the pregnancy that had turned into Ruth. Rooshka said she had jumped up and down. She had sat in hot baths, she had swallowed castor oil. But nothing had helped. The pregnancy had proceeded. “I was ashamed to be pregnant,” her mother had said. Ruth hadn’t really understood why her mother was ashamed to be pregnant. She didn’t think it had anything to do with Ruth herself. She knew that her mother had vomited, on the train, every morning after leaving Ruth in day care. She thought that that was pretty good evidence of her mother’s attachment to her.
    Ruth knew that her mother had lost two babies. One baby boy in the ghetto and another baby, also a boy, after the war. Being pregnant hadn’t resulted in a great deal of happiness for Rooshka Rothwax. Her mother must have loved babies, at one time, Ruth thought. Rooshka used to tell Ruth a story about her amazement at finding a baby in the toilet block, in Stuthof, the concentration camp Rooshka was sent to from Auschwitz. “I couldn’t believe I had found a baby,” Rooshka used to say. “It was like a miracle. It was a newborn baby. It was on the floor, in the toilet block. I ran like crazy to the hospital in Stuthof. ‘Look, I found a newborn baby,’ I said to the nurse. ‘I think it is perfectly healthy.’ They took the baby from me and threw it into the rubbish bin. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid to run to the hospital with the baby.” “It wasn’t your fault,” Ruth would say. “I am not talking about fault,” Rooshka would answer.
    The hospital in Stuthof was the reason that Ruth had been in Gdansk, a year ago. She wanted to see where it was that her mother had run to, in such hope, all those years ago. Stuthof was a forty-minute drive from Gdansk. Ruth had imagined that hospital many times. She imagined a small