Everything, Jessica assumed, was already known and decided upon and if she came up with a viewpoint which contradicted the one held by conventional wisdom, then she must be wrong and ignorant.
But Moishe didn’t see things in quite the same way. He held that most of what we believed in was wrong. That the world could be a better place without so many fixed ideas, that humans were like sheep allowing themselves to be led by the dog who barks the loudest and bites the hardest. He told Jessica that all this was about to end, that a couple of really big-time thinkers called Marx and Engels had finally found the answer to the misery and oppression of the working classes.
Moishe would excitedly read to her from the works of these men, outlining the doctrine called Communism — the first political movement, he explained, ever to represent the common people. The workers of the world, ‘the proletariat’, as they seemed to be called, were about to unite to overthrow the capitalist system and bring justice to society.
‘People just like you and me, Jessie,’ Moishe would say. ‘It’s a system of government that delivers the common people from the clutches of the greedy capitalists and the privileged classes. Imagine, no more wars, no more killing — man’s inhumanity to his fellow man will stop, Jessie.’ Grabbing her impatiently by the shoulder as though he wished to shake the sense of it into her, he’d continue, ‘Greed and disregard for the welfare of the worker is what drives the capitalist world. Generosity and goodwill towards people like you and me is the Communist manifesto! Jessie, we can’t have another war like this one again. There must be a revolution in Australia, just like the one that’s coming in Russia.’
Moishe’s enthusiasm for Communism knew no bounds and his greatest disappointment occurred when he finally realised that Jessica failed to share his vision or even to understand it.
Jessica kept reminding herself that Moishe was mad — otherwise why was he at Callan Park? While she didn’t believe for one moment that she was crazy, she wasn’t silly enough to assume that everyone in the place was similarly wronged. Quite clearly the place was full of loonies, and Moishe, when his dark moods descended upon him, was one of them. Jessica was a country girl with no real experience of being exploited by the ruling classes beyond the greed of George Thomas, who’d never been thought of as a member of the ruling classes so much as a mongrel in his very own right.
Jessica had been brought up by Joe to believe that life was meant to be a huge bloody struggle. And, except for the bank, which he never thought of in human terms anyway, it wasn’t man’s inhumanity to man that made life miserable. It was nature that supplied most of the toil, disadvantage and heartbreak.
Therefore she was pretty lukewarm over Moishe’s enthusiasm for Communism, a doctrine she believed had no chance of working, out in the bush. Especially when Moishe spoke to her about the concept of the collective farm, where everyone worked the land for the mutual benefit of all of the people.
‘This bloke Karl Marx, does he come from the bush?’ she once asked Moishe.
‘No, he was born in Trier and educated in Bonn and Berlin,’ Moishe replied, showing off the depth of his knowledge.
‘That the big smoke?’
‘What, Berlin? It’s the capital of Germany.’
‘Yeah, thought so,’ Jessica sniffed.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Moishe asked.
‘Well, this Marx bloke, he ain’t never put his theory to country folk, that’s for sure.’ ‘Why ever not?’
‘Well, mate, you can’t get two blokes to agree on bloody nothing in the bush, except maybe that the government don’t know its arse from its elbow. They’d think this bloke Marx was talkin’ out the back of his head.’
But Moishe, a lad from the city, didn’t care to have a country bumpkin like Jessica contradicting him. ‘It is precisely by harnessing the vast discontent felt by the Russian workers towards the Tsar that Communism will s
ucceed,’ he protested. ‘It is the same here — a movement that will be led by the masses, by the proletariat, the people on the land and in the factories. We must begin with the overthrow of the landed gentry and the capitalists, and often enough they’re the same people,’ Moishe explained patiently, though Jessica could sense his frustration with her.
The only landed gentry Jessica could think of was Jack Thomas, the man she loved, and George Thomas, whom everyone agreed to hate. But the idea of overthrowing Riverview Station and turning it into a collective sheep station was just plain silly. ‘Bullshit, Moishe,’ Jessica said.
The idea of rising up against George Thomas or any of the other squattocracy simply didn’t make sense. George was a liar and a cheat but you already knew that, so you made a deal and you kept to it. It was never totally fair or unfair neither, just George Thomas wanting to show you who was the boss. But once you shook hands, the both of you made it work. It was all part of what happened in the bush, Jessica thought, and by no means the worst part.
On two occasions, however, she and Joe had attended a hastily convened meeting behind the shearing shed at Riverview. The stop-work had been called by Joe Blundell, the shop steward for the Shearers’
Union. The first time had been to have a bit of a whinge about the time allowed for a smoko. Another time he went on about whether, when the wool was damp, they should reduce the number of sheep shorn to qualify for the higher pay rate.
But on the way home after both meetings, Joe said it wasn’t to be took too serious. The idea of a strike over working conditions never occurred to them on Riverview Station. There were sheds that were worse and some better but that was life. There was talk that in some stations the Shearers’ Union got a bit cranky and threatened the boss. But in Joe’s book you worked hard, you got paid and you kept your trap shut. Joe was right, nothing ever came of those Shearers’ Union meetings. George Thomas just told Joe Blundell to get stuffed, and that as far as he was concerned they could collect their pay-packet and piss off the lot of them, because there was enough local labour around to fill the shearing shed twice over. As Joe said, a good union man becomes scab labour as soon as the brats start to starve. Everyone knew this was true, so they shut their gobs and took home a wage that was half decent by local standards.
But Moishe would say to her in an exasperated voice, ‘Jessie, don’t you see, Australia rides on the sheep’s back. If the common people hope to own the wealth of the land, the golden fleece, they must overthrow those who exploit them. Surely you can see that?’
But Jessica never could see it and she considered Moishe’s greatest gift to her wasn’t his belief in the brotherhood of man, but the fact that he taught her how to really read, not only for pleasure, but to search for meaning and to ask questions. It was something she would continue to do for the remainder of her life. Jessica also learned that a mental hospital is an even harder place to survive in than the bush. Avoiding being beaten up or raped by the ward attendants was a constant preoccupation. She would watch as female patients who resisted the advances of the brutes in charge of the wards were given ‘the jacket’ or, in the winter, ‘the wetpack’. They were put into strait-jackets and either marched off to solitary or hosed down with cold water and left to freeze in a cell. It was said to be a treatment to calm them down, but she could see the fear in their eyes when they came out of treatment. Most often it was an experience which caused them to sink even deeper into their misery, confusion and despair. Some caught pneumonia and died, others developed bronchitis. So a lot of the female inmates capitulated, allowing themselves to be used by the ward attendants rather than face time in isolation in the jacket or the wetpack.
Survival became Jessica’s singular purpose. She soon learned that a broken heart was of little use in a mental institution and that if she hoped to survive she must keep her grieving to herself. Jessica began to ingratiate herself with the female staff and became useful in a hundred ways. This ensured that she would be left alone, yet come under the protection of the matron, who helped to keep her safe against the groping paws and thrusting thighs of the male ward attendants. Pretty soon they gave up thinking of her as a patient and she was allowed to wander freely within the grounds without being watched over.
Jessica seemed to have an uncanny knack for calming the most agitated of inmates. In time her presence in the wards was welcomed and sometimes even regarded as necessary. Silence, or the sounds we make to comfort a small child, she soon discovered, was the best cure. She would sit with a patient for hours, simply holding a trembling hand, sometimes making soothing noises, sometimes singing softly and rocking them, often enough saying nothing but allowing them to feel her warmth. After a lifetime with Joe, Jessica was an expert at silence and at providing company without seeming threatening.
The patients learned to consider Jessie as someone their confused minds could relate to. She didn’t shout at or hector them, she didn’t beat or threaten them, or try to make them do things they didn’t want to, or were afraid of. She’d just sit and hold their hands or read to them, the gentle rhythm of her voice seeming to calm them, even when they were incapable of understanding the meaning of her stories. When an agitation in one of the wards broke out, ‘Call Jessie!’ became a common cry among those ward attendants who didn’t enjoy the business of beating a patient into submission.
Jessica was by nature a kind person, but she was no angel of mercy. In everything she did, from the moment she was wakened by the ward bell at six o’clock in the morning to the eight p.m. bell which signalled the lockup and silence for the night, she worked to gain her release from the institution. She was using Joe’s rules - work hard, keep your trap shut. Do more than the other bloke, don’t whinge, keep your head down and it’ll turn out all right in the end. If she showed no signs of being a loony, she reckoned, then sooner or later they’d have to let her go.
Jessica’s one thought in life was to return to her child. The pain she felt for her lost baby she mostly kept to herself, but she would weep for Joey in the lonely, dark hours after midnight. Her sobbing was drowned in the cacophony of moans and sudden screams and the endless weeping and nightmares of the harmlessly insane.