‘Come to bed why don’t you? It’s late. You must be tired.’
‘Yes Laura,’ he says. And he looks at her blonde hair, lying unpinned on her shoulders and sees her burning blue eyes gazing at him.
Light floods the doorway. He looks into the shop. Pa is behind the counter. He is counting out pound notes. He turns to look at Jackie. Yes, it’s Pa. It’s Pa but it’s also Jackie. It’s himself, Little Jackie, counting out pound notes behind the counter in the store. There is sawdust on the floor and strips of biltong hang from a hook. He tries to cut them down but the string is tough and the knife blunt. He saws away at the string but it will not break. Pa looks at him and frowns. He wags a finger at Jackie and kneels down under the counter. He opens up a floorboard and pound notes tumble out. They scatter across the floorboards and drift up into the air like pieces of burnt newspaper, ashy fragments, floating towards him. Pa places a single finger to his lips and stares at Jackie.
‘No, Pa. No.’
He hears his voice. It is a surprise. He is speaking. ‘I didn’t think I could speak,’ he thinks. ‘But I am speaking.’
Laura looks at him. Her face, which is perhaps Ouma’s face, is angry. Her face, which is perhaps Renee’s face, is sad. Her face, which is now Ma’s face, crumples into a grimace of grief, like a tragic mask, a howl of pain.
‘Why did you speak?’ she says, ‘Why didn’t you stay silent?’
Jack woke up. His pyjamas were soaked in sweat; his forehead felt cold and clammy. Renee was asleep beside him. He heard the soft bubble of her breathing. He went down to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It was dark on the stairs. He felt for each carpeted step with his bare feet.
He sat down for a few moments at the kitchen table and sipped at his water. Then he swallowed the rest down in one gulp. He needed some sleep; van Heerden would be coming to see him in the morning and tomorrow was going to be an important day. He rinsed the glass, then quietly made his way back to bed.
Chapter 19
1948
I lay in bed looking up at the gardenias on the wallpaper, trying to persuade myself into a sleep that was looking increasingly unlikely, as the first light of day began to filter through the thin curtains of my room.
In the bed across from me, Saul was sound asleep, his face turned towards the wall. And my younger brother Mikey too, tucked up in the sheets of his smaller cot-bed, was breathing loudly and peacefully. Though both had witnessed the scene of the night before, they seemed oblivious to its full significance. It would have had little impact on either of them, young as they were, and not yet ready to think of such things, but for me they were a devastating blow. At twelve years old I knew what this would mean for me and for my future. Pa had refused to pay for my bar mitzvah, for the teaching, for the ceremony, for the celebration. He had rowed with the rabbi, refused to make the customary donations and ended up angrily proclaiming that he would leave the synagogue altogether.
‘Why do we need the synagogue? We’re not frum or anything; we don’t even keep a proper kosher home. They just take our money and run. And we’re not really part of the community anyway. What do we get from them? Nothing. Not a thing. We’re Jews, of course we are, but we don’t need some know-it-all rabbi telling us what to do and taking all our money, with nothing in return. When it comes to it, let them bury me in the public cemetery too. I don’t need to go on paying for a Jewish burial plot for the sake of a load of old mumbo jumbo said over my grave. We’ll just stop paying them altogether and be done with it. No burial, no bar mitzvah, no stuck-up rabbi telling me what I should and shouldn’t do and putting his hand in my trouser pocket to extract money for the privilege.’
I had begged him to change his mind. All Jewish boys had a bar mitzvah at thirteen, where they were welcomed into the adult community of men. The Jewish boys at my school were all talking about it, planning for it, complaining about the work involved in learning the Hebrew section of the Torah that they would have to read aloud, in front of the whole congregation, but secretly fiercely proud of their new status in their families and among their friends.
‘I must have a bar mitzvah,’ I said to Pa.
‘Must? Must? What’s must? Why must you? I didn’t. Am I not still a Jew?’
‘Everyone else is having one.’
‘You’re not everyone else and the sooner you learn that the better. You must carve your own path in the world, plough your own furrow, not look left and right all the time to see what other people are doing. Learning all that ancient Hebrew, where’s that going to get you? Better to spend your time helping me in the store.’
My fury overflowed.
‘If it’s to do with the money,’ I said, ‘you have enough to pay for it. I know that. I’ve seen it.’
Pa flushed red, the veins standing out on his forehead and in his neck. Ma rushed over to him.
‘Don’t hurt the boy,’ she cried. ‘He’s only asking for what he should be entitled to.’
‘What? Do you think I’m going to hit him? Do you think I’m going to hurt him? What do you take me for, Sarah? You and your son, you’re both the same. You think the worst of me, when all I have done has been for you, all my efforts have been to build up the store and make it a success. And who for? For you.’
‘But the boy needs to become a man, a Jewish man. Don’t shame him like this, Sam.’
‘The shame comes on me, if I continue to bow my head to that rabbi of yours, that big brains scholar, who doesn’t know the first thing about anything. Put that man in front of a handsaw or a plane and he wouldn’t know what to do with it. No. Jackie will survive without a bar mitzvah, I promise you. And what little money I’ve managed to save can be put to better use.’
‘Like what?’ Ma said. ‘Like giving money to that –’ She looked at me and stopped short.
‘Whatever you’re insinuating, Sarah, it’s all lies. You know that and you’ve always really known it, whatever you may say, whatever meshugas you’ve got swimming around in that head of yours. I keep something back for emergencies, that’s all. A man’s entitled to do that, isn’t he, when he has a wife who fritters away his money, who thinks that it falls like manna from the trees, rather than being the product of hard work?’
The row had gone on and on, circling and circling round the same old arguments, but this time with me and my bar mitzvah right in the middle of it. Once Ma had come out on my side, Pa was never going to budge. So I left them to it and went up to my room, to shut it all out and try to come to terms with the hurt, the sense of lack, the shame that I believed I would carry around with me for the rest of my life. What decent Jewish woman would want to marry a man who was not fully accepted into the faith? And if I did ever find someone who would marry me, what would I say to my own son, when he asked me to tell him the stories of the big day when I became a man?
Now waking in the morning, dull-eyed from lack of sleep, I lay in bed as long as I possibly could, wanting to avoid my parents, hoping that Pa would be too busy to make reference to the discussions of the night before. I ate my breakfast in silence and went to school without having said a word to either of my parents. When the school bell went at the end of the day, I hurried out and rather than going straight home as usual, I stopped off at the garage to see Terence.
Terence and I had gone to different high schools, his the rough one on the other side of Main Road, mine the more desirable one, which I was only able to attend because I had won a hard-fought battle with my classmates for the single full scholarship available. Terence wasn’t back yet, but Walter was there, in the garage, taking a break from his work. I sat down on a stool in the workshop and he offered me a cup of strong tea.
I had got to know Walter well by now and felt comfortable in his presence. I knew that my parents had doubts about him and, in particular, about his relationship with Mrs Mostert, but to me it wasn’t an issu
e. Though I knew he was coloured and that Terence and May were not, and I was quite aware of the mutterings of the people around me, I’d got so used to seeing them all together and enjoying their company that, when I was with them, thoughts about his colour never entered my mind.
He wiped his hands on his overalls and opened a drawer of the big cupboard that stocked the nuts and bolts and spare parts, and took out a packet of Marie biscuits, which he offered to me, pulling open the wrapping with his teeth to avoid staining them with grease and car oil.
‘Looking glum, Jackie,’ he said. ‘Something wrong?’
I told him that I’d had a row with Pa, but didn’t tell him what it was all about. I wasn’t sure that Walter, even with all his powers of empathy, would be able to fathom the complexities of my family life, nor the significance of a bar mitzvah to a Jewish boy like me. And anyway, I was ashamed. What would a man like Walter make of my parents, constantly carping and bickering, when he and Terence’s mother were so very different? They seemed to actually like each other, where my parents so clearly did not.
With Terence, though, it was a different story; I could tell him everything. So when he finally came home, slung his satchel down in the workshop, peeled off his jacket and helped himself to the remaining biscuits, we disappeared up into his bedroom to talk and I told him all that had happened. He couldn’t do anything to help but he just listened and nodded sympathetically. Then we got out his Spiderman comics and his Superman annual and read them happily till, for a brief time, my problems were forgotten.
Shame is a funny thing. Pa felt shamed by the rabbi, I felt shamed by my family and by my failure to join my community as a fully-grown man. Terence felt shamed by something else, and in my preoccupation with my own worries, I scarcely noticed it. For me, Terence’s family was everything I could have wished for. There was harmony in the house, no raised voices, meals eaten together, thoughtful conversation, laughter. Often May would rest a hand on Walter’s shoulder, or Walter would ruffle Terence’s hair. The physical expression of their feelings was something I had experienced, in some measure, in Ouma and Oupa’s affection, in Ada’s love, even in Ma’s occasional brusque kisses, but it was always tinged with anxiety, always half in shadow rather than full sunlight.
I wasn’t really aware of the shadows in Terence’s world, or if I was, I chose not to let them trouble me too much. I occasionally wondered why Simey was never mentioned and I sometimes thought about what it felt like to have your father stuck in a sanatorium for years and only get to see him on visiting days, but I never asked Terence about it. If Terence had troubles, they paled into insignificance against my own, more urgent ones and I scarcely noticed even the worrying signs that stuck out right in front of my nose. Maybe I didn’t want to see them, because seeing them would have disturbed the lovely safe world of the garage that I could escape to, away from the arguments and conflicts of my own home. Afterwards, from a distance, and with the benefit of hindsight and growing maturity, it all became much clearer; I understood more about it and about my own blinkered vision, but at the time I was like a mole burrowing furiously into my own dark hole, unable to see anything of what was going on around me.
Later that afternoon, I left Terence’s and walked back down Main Street to be home in time for my supper; after the fiasco of the Passover afternoon spent at the garage, I was careful not to worry my parents by staying out too late or too long.
Nevertheless, walking down Main Street, I was in no particular hurry to get back to the store. Facing Pa after the arguments of the night before was not going to be easy; he would be certain to have something to say to me, and I would have to bite my lip, to avoid yet another angry confrontation that I knew I could never win.
I dawdled as I passed the florist’s in the hope that Rita, the pretty young florist’s assistant, might be visible, cutting up flowers or gathering them up in their Cellophane wrapping and tying them with fancy knots and curls of glossy red ribbon. She was in her early twenties but that didn’t stop me from hoping that one day she might take a shine to me despite the depressingly large age gap between us. To kiss her on her full lips, or unbutton her blouse and touch her breasts, seemed like impossibly exciting and desirable aims that kept me awake on many nights. If she saw me passing and gave me a friendly wave, I was filled with embarrassment and shame. What if she knew what I was thinking about in the secret darkness of my bedroom?
Further along the road, outside the Jewish Community Hall, there was a small cluster of boys just coming out after their Hebrew classes, some wearing their prayer shawls, others having already folded them away. Several of them nodded to me, or raised a hand in recognition – they were often in the store with their parents and knew me well, if only to say hello to, and one or two of them went to my school. I speeded up to get past quickly; I was in no mood to be reminded of the differences between these boys and me. A few yards further down, I stopped at the little sweet shop that had opened just a year or two before, and stared at the tempting array of confectionary in the window: sherbet lemons and aniseed balls, gobstoppers, toffees, Parma violets and chocolate nut clusters, sugar mice and, my favourite of all, peanut brittle. If I waited long enough, I knew that Mr Weinstock, the owner, would beckon me into the shop, with the same words that he repeated each time he called me in: ‘Jack Neuberger, you’ll be the ruin of me one day. Come, I’ll give you just a handful of broken sweets and then maybe you’ll leave me in peace.’
Sucking a broken humbug, I wandered on. As I got closer to the Handyhouse, I noticed, on the other side of the road, a large group of men standing on the corner. In among them I could see a few people I recognised, among them Piet du Plessis’ father Cornelius, and Mr van de Merwe, as well as a few of our other regular customers from the store. I waved to Mr van de Merwe but he didn’t seem to see me; he was too busy tying a large piece of cardboard to a wooden stick. There was movement, men scuffing up the dirt from the road or pacing back and forth, groups amassing to talk among themselves and then separating again. An old open-topped van was parked beside the road, and some of the men were taking placards and fat piles of flapping leaflets from the back of it.
I went to cross over the road to see from closer up what was happening but someone pulled me back. It was Mr Choudhary.
‘No, Jackie. Don’t go over there. That’s not for a young boy like you to see. Go into the store – go back to your ma and your pa now.’
‘But what’s happening, Mr Choudhary? What are they doing?’
‘It’s the Nats,’ he said. ‘They’re drumming up support. They’re hoping to win out and out this time round, no coalitions or anything, just National Party pure and simple, with a mandate to do what the hell they like.’
‘Why can’t I watch though? I want to know what’s going on.’ I had begun to get interested in the conversations I overheard in the store, in Pa’s animated talk with customers and in his arguments with Ma about the United Party, led by Smuts, our prime minister. Neither Ma nor Pa liked D. F. Malan, the leader of the Nats – ‘He’s not a good man,’ Ma complained, and ‘He’s taking the country into dangerous waters,’ said Pa – but still they managed to find something to argue about. Ma had always had a soft spot for Hertzog and thought he should still be leader, while Pa was a Smuts man, despite his constant gripes and grumbles about his failure to turn the economy round. I’d heard them talking about the coming election and the growing support for the Nationalists across the country and now, here it was, before my eyes, the nervous excitement of a campaign on the streets of my very own neighbourhood.
‘Go home, Jack. It could easily turn nasty like it did when they went to Elsie’s River. There were fistfights there and the police were called. Just look what they’ve got on their signs – if someone challenges them, there could be a fight here too. I’m not hanging around myself – I don’t want to get caught up in any trouble.’
I looked
across at the placards, being raised up now by the men. Cornelius du Plessis held one that said ‘DIE KAFFIR OP SY PLEK’. Another man held aloft a sign saying, ‘DIE KOELIES UIT DIE LAND’.
‘What do they mean?’ I asked Mr Choudhary.
‘‘‘The kaffir in his place” and “Coolies out of the country”.’ He spat onto the ground. ‘Bad times,’ he said. ‘Bad times ahead.’
‘And what about that one?’
‘Which one?’
I pointed to a sign being waved around enthusiastically by Mr van de Merwe.
‘“APARTHEID,”’ he said. ‘That means “separateness”. I’ve not heard that one before, but I suppose it means blacks and whites apart, like on all the signs they’re talking about putting up around the place, “Net Blankes”, only whites, or “Net-Nie Blankes”, non-whites only. I think it’s going to be more than just toilets and park benches and buses and beaches though. There’s talk that they’ll take it a whole lot further than that, the Nats, if they get in. Who knows, maybe I won’t even be able to walk on this pavement any more, if they have their way. I won’t be able to come and talk to your Pa, or even warn a curious young man like you to stay out of trouble.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t think it’ll happen though, so don’t you worry about it. The United Party’ll hold strong, I’m sure. There’s too many decent people in this country to let the Nats in. And anyway, I’ll pray to Allah for them to lose, and that can’t fail!’
He took my arm, laughing wryly at his joke. ‘Now, I’m going to escort you safely home before this rabble start all their shouting and other nonsense.’
He dragged me, somewhat reluctantly, towards the store, where I could see Ma, Pa and Ada all peering out through the window to see what was going on across the street. Some of the customers were out on the pavement watching and talking. Mrs van de Merwe seemed to be arguing with another woman, defending her husband against her angry complaints, while Mrs Levy, her face furrowed in an anxious frown, was talking to Mr Rabinovitz in hushed tones. Billy and Maisie Edwards were there, but standing well apart from each other, on either side of the door, Maisie next to the wooden bucket filled with mops and brooms, Billy, in front of the sleek rolls of linoleum.
Off the Voortrekker Road Page 17
