Passion in a time of war
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 35: Surviving
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lee Kofman
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Lee Kofman’s biography and other articles by this writer
‘I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets.
My overcoat too was becoming ideal.
I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! And I was your vassal.
Oh dear me! What marvellous loves I dreamed of!'
- Rimbaud
EVENTUALLY it would be Miriam Papuashvilli, the queen of hashish and orgies, the professional teenage runaway and con artist, the most unlikely candidate for such benevolent matters, who would help mend my rapidly breaking heart. I was turning seventeen when love invaded my life as suddenly as the Iraqi Scud missiles would invade my country soon after. But what was Saddam's threat compared with falling in love for the first time?
Miriam was my age and already a mythical figure, at least in our neighbourhood perched on the edge of Ashdod, an industrial port city on the coast of the Mediterranean. She had been mysteriously absent for more than a year, having run away from home shortly before my family moved into her building from another equally seedy place full of people without means. Miriam's parents lived on the fifth floor, directly beneath our apartment, theirs mirroring ours in shape and size. Like my mother, hers was obsessed with God and, to please Him, covered her hair. Miriam's mother's headscarves were always black, and she reminded me of the Georgian grandmas with equally dark headscarves who used to sit on our chipped street benches, lazily baking their decaying flesh. Miriam's father, a bald, silent man, spent most of his time working on the crew of some commercial ship. There were other daughters too - so many that I lost count. I wondered how they all coped with Miriam's absence. And with her reputation.
Rumours about Miriam trailed like ghosts between our giant housing commission edifices that smelled of piss and sweat, and the poorly restored 1960s American cars, and the overflowing rubbish bins left out front that provided a home to stray cats. I had heard many stories about her, in several accents and dialects: from the Moroccan guitarist with the black man's wide lips who claimed to have slept with Miriam once, from the shy Ethiopian schoolboys who hadn't yet sufficiently mastered Hebrew, and from Boris, the Russian representative of the housing commission, who warned me not to go near her if she reappeared.
There were debates about Miriam's fate, and all the options sounded equally fascinating to my eager ears. The guitarist talked with a knowing air about some smuggling business she might have been involved in. An unemployed alcoholic from the middle building suggested she had joined a hippie commune where they practised sex with horses. Others maintained she was probably a junkie by now, or else dead.
Despite the latter prediction, I still fantasised about meeting Miriam. Restless and lonely, I felt trapped in Ashdod. It was a city where tradition oozed through every pavement crack, where suntanned skin and a taste for mediocrity were cultivated. I, the recent Russian arrival equipped with oversized glasses and a passion for the classics, lacked both these attributes.
Already adamant about becoming a writer, I hoped this occupation would rescue me from the drudgery of my existence. Enthusiastically I copied a quote from Arthur Rimbaud into my diary: ‘the poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence.'
I was impressed with Rimbaud's formula of the disordering of senses as a fertiliser for creativity, or perhaps liked the permission to transgress that writing could grant. Whatever it was, I believed him that it was at the margins that life laid itself bare, and spent my days daydreaming of all things dark, forbidden, carnivalesque: anything that took place at night or in back rooms.
Indeed, in my mid-twenties, I - the good Russian girl - would publish a collection of short stories populated with psychopaths, minor gangsters and women living on the edge. But in 1990 this was still an unknown future. Cowardice made me worry about the poisons' side effects. So I opted for voyeurism. I hoped one day to meet Miriam, to live out my fantasies through her.