Yvonne Bornstein - Eleven Days of Hell

We were not about to be scammed, and within minutes, the car was surrounded by about three hundred people from the town, who began banging their fists on the hood and rocking it back and forth like a toy. We were petrified. Vinod, thinking quickly, grabbed a first-aid kit from the glove box and somehow managed to get out of the driver’s side door. He threw the kit into the mob along with approximately a hundred dollars. When the crowd dispersed to pluck up the money, Vinod jumped back in, floored the gas pedal, and drove us safely away.

Avi and I owed Vinod our lives, though there is a very sad postscript to that story. Some years later, this brave man faced a terrible tragedy when his sixteen-year-old son, Vikram, died of a brain hemorrhage. Vinod and Vina were devastated.

Avi came to believe my place was strictly in the kitchen and the bedroom. The problem was, he did not ease off his own business trips. Romy and I saw less and less of him. He would be gone for up to eight months out of the year, leaving us alone and usually without enough money for me to buy food or pay the gas and electric bills. I believe he did this intentionally, to keep me in my place. By now, though, the abuse and the absences made it a marriage in name only. I plucked up the courage to take Romy and move to a nearby apartment, which must have seemed like the ultimate insult to Avi.

Romy was just starting kindergarten around this time, yet he still would leave us high and dry. I had to apply for a separated-wives pension, which, even though was very little money, it kept Romy and me fed. Her paternal grandparents were still in Israel at the time, so I asked my parents for some monetary help, though out of some form of guilt and shame, I could not tell them about the details of why the marriage had fallen apart.

Through all this, Avi would not let go of me as a possession. He was always trying to get me to come home, albeit in some rather bizarre ways. One night, he came to the apartment, and I swear I thought he was going to kill me. He bashed in the door like a raging bull, and he was delirious. He grabbed me by the throat and hurled me against a wall, nearly choking the life from me. His gaze was fixated on a gold bracelet that his mother had given me, and he tried yanking it off my wrist, not stopping even after my forearm began to bleed from the metal clasp digging into it. Not knowing what to do, I took the bracelet off and threw it out the open door. When he went to look for it, I slammed the door and called the police—not for the first time. And not for the first time, they did nothing. The drama ended when Avi couldn’t find the bracelet in the dark and, in a complete personality turnaround, knocked on the door and said softly, almost like a child, ‘I can’t find it,’ then trailed away into the night.

At a different time, Avi had organised two men to come to my apartment to practically tear my car to pieces. They put sugar in the petrol tank, smashed the carburetor, and pulled the seats out. I knew Avi was behind it, though I couldn’t prove it. For one thing, he was less than surprised about the incident, and even though I had no car to drive Romy to school for days, he seemed not to care one whit. In his mind, I was convinced; this campaign of violence and threats was all part of a plan that would eventually get me to come back home.

Finally, he knew there was not going to be a reconciliation. In 1981, he agreed to a divorce and gave me a very stingy settlement—though he made me go through hell to get it out of him. While he was ordered by the court to pay me a lump sum, he pleaded poverty on the matter of child support and was allowed to pay the least possible amount. I had just enough to buy a small house—which I nearly lost when Avi conveniently disappeared to England when I needed the settlement money to close on the house—and some furniture. I would hear little of or from him over the ensuing years. And yet, in October 2002, when I was notified that he had died of cancer, I felt an ache in my soul. Mostly, I ached for Romy, whom I had tried to shield from the bad events of the marriage. She hurts because he’s gone. I hurt because he never knew how much he was hurting her, though, gladly, he did make a genuine effort to get closer to Romy after the divorce and treasured her until the day he died. For that, I was proud of him.

On my own, I tried to revive the dormant music career that had eluded me at age eighteen. I took a job at Mushroom Records in Melbourne as a personal assistant to the top executive there. I had seamlessly fit back into the music scene and even got up enough nerve to market my demo tapes to people in the music industry. Then, of course, came that deal with Polygram—and the horrific incident at the Billboard Club that put me back in my place again.

Fortunately, I was able to get to my feet again after my divorce and quickly find another man. And what a man!

Meeting him was the work of the father of one of Romy’s kindergarten mates, who invited me to his New Year’s Eve party. A few days after, he saw me at school picking up Romy and told me there was a guy at the party who was anxious to go out with me. Reluctantly, I agreed to meet him. At my door appeared a tall, elegantly handsome, bespectacled man carrying red roses. His name was George Jozef, and from his first smile I was hooked on him, and he on me.

George, whose roots were Romanian Jewish, was young but seasoned at age thirty-four. Like me, he was recovering from a marriage that ended in ashes—his wife had tragically died of cancer at twenty-eight, leaving a four-year-old son and an eighteen-month-old daughter. Unlike me, he was well to do, the owner of Ultimo Menswear, and had six retail shops in and around Melbourne. He lived opulently in a sprawling, three-level, million-dollar home in a molto affluent section of Toorak.

Things moved fast for us. Within three months, he asked me to marry him. I agreed, and we planned a honeymoon in Hong Kong. We left the date open, and Romy and I moved into his house in April of 1982—though not ‘officially.’ I still kept my apartment. For all intents and purposes, we were a married couple, very much in love.

Then came the night of May 14.

It was a Friday, the end of the work week, when George would take all of the money from the safe in his office and bring it home and keep it there until he could get to the bank on Monday. On those nights, I would usually hire a babysitter and drive to the office, and we would go out to dinner. I would also harangue him for carrying all that cash with him, telling him that he should keep it in the safe. He would just laugh. ‘Who’s going to rob me?’ he would say.

On this Friday night, however, the babysitter couldn’t come over, so I stayed home with George’s kids—by an act of providence, Romy was staying with her father that weekend. And because I was to be at home, I wanted to do something different, something that would surprise him. George always had a rule when it came to the kitchen: It was not to be used in any grand manner for cooking; mainly, it was for show, just to say we had a beautiful kitchen. That night, though, I decided to cook him a sumptuous Shabbas dinner. I had lit the oven when the phone rang. It was George, on his last stop before coming home. He asked me if I needed anything. I smiled to myself, knowing the surprise that awaited him.

‘Only some orange juice,’ I said with a little giggle.

That was at around 8pm, and he said he would be coming right home. An hour later, I heard the sound of his Mercedes turn into the driveway, as I always could because of the vroom of the turbo engine. After a few minutes, he still hadn’t come through the door. I thought he may have stopped at the bottom of the driveway to check the mailbox. I was then jolted by the sound of a loud boom.