by Alan Collins
‘‘If you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t ask such a question, eh, Yakov?’’
‘‘Well…’’
‘‘Well yourself, nudnik! Of course you want to see what they have done to your house. Who wouldn’t? Only if there are bad memories you wouldn’t want to see it again. And you and little Solly — may he rest in peace — you had a good life there.’’ She pushed him aside. ‘‘So go! Don’t hang around my kitchen on a public holiday.’’
Jacob went to his room. He looked at the meagre assortment of clothes that hung there. It was a mild October morning. He chose fawn cotton pants and a check shirt, then rejected them when he recalled that Ruti had last seen them when they had made love together among the rocks on Bondi beach. He left the house wearing his second-best outfit, and felt that it too was a mistake. The road wound around the top of Cooper Park, then plunged downwards to branch off into leafy streets that contoured the hillside. His old home in Dunara Road clung to the side of the hill, held in position by sandstone brick piers. The sun was on his back but he felt the cold of the unknown around his heart.
He walked on the opposite side of the road to where his house stood; he recalled, as he passed by, the other Jewish families in the houses up and down the curving road. Most of them seemed to have weathered the storm of the Depression and the shock of war quite well. Their houses shone with new paint and in two of their driveways big, black American cars were parked. Their children were the university friends of Ruti. No wonder they looked with disapproval on the battered ex-army truck with A. LEWIS, TEXTILE WASTE MERCHANT painted on the door.
Jacob approached the house with measured care. Only when he was directly opposite did he cross the road. If he was being observed he did not want to appear either too bold or too reluctant. As he laid his hand on the iron gate he recalled again how stiff it used to be, how it creaked. He gave it a vigorous push. To his dismay it swung open and smashed against the brick pillar, dislodging flakes of shiny black paint. Jacob looked up the stone steps to see if this had brought anyone to the door. He took a deep breath; the sun was once again on his back like a warm, friendly hand propelling him forward. He took the steps two at a time, landed on the tiled veranda, turned and looked back down the steep lawn of buffalo grass. And in that instant he found himself imprisoned by two arms that held him in a wonderful embrace.
She stood behind him, her breath like a faint perfumed breeze on his neck. He looked down and saw her fingers interlocked around his waist, saw the fine hairs on her wrists and the little gold watch that fixed this moment for him at a few minutes after eleven o’clock on Eight Hour Day, 1947.
This was not the same Ruti who had instigated her mechanical, loveless, gritty seduction in which he had been no more than a bewildered participant. This was the girl who had given him guileless affection for all those years in the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home, and who had comforted him at Solly’s funeral. It also occurred to him, even in this moment of delicious propinquity, that this was the same Ruti who had spurned his company for that of university friends.
It was this thought that made him attempt to free himself gently from her encirclement — or perhaps it was the jaunty little sports car that slowed almost to a halt outside her gate, then accelerated away. Jacob turned to face her. She kissed him, quite simply, without the attendant drama of closed eyes and searching tongues, a soft brushing of the lips that lasted the merest instant.
‘‘We shall begin again, you and I, Jacob,’’ she said.
He was overwhelmed. He felt the need for a joke to break the tension, to give him time to absorb the full portent of what she had just said.
‘‘Like the unionists, Ruti — with eight hours work, eight hours play and eight hours sleep.’’ Then he wished he hadn’t said the last bit.
‘‘I don’t understand what you mean.’’
‘‘Never mind, don’t worry about it, it’s a trade union joke.’’ He led her to the edge of the veranda and they sat close together. The little sports car came past once again, but faster than on its earlier trip. Jacob could see that this time a girl lolled on the seat beside the driver. If Ruti noticed, she gave no sign. She said, ‘‘This is a good place to start again, don’t you agree, Jacob?’’
But the little car disturbed Jacob. It seemed aggressive, impudent, self-assured. It would always only seat two, thus excluding him. He stepped back from Ruti and looked at her, searching for a sign that would tell him where her allegiance lay. Ruti watched his face grow hard.
‘‘Does being here upset you so much, Jacob? Why do you look so angry?’’ She took his hand in hers. ‘‘I knew you would come here one day. It just had to be. So why the frown?’’
The little car had gone. A faint blue exhaust haze hung in the air then dispersed, and with it went Jacob’s dark mood. Ruti’s affection for him flooded through her fingers into his. In return he gave her the warmth of his smile as she led him into the house that had once been his home.
He noticed the small things first. In the hall, the Lewis’s had used the same picture hooks but their pictures were of a different size; the wallpaper showed a patina of the previous pictures, making it easy for him to identity their ghosts to himself — that’s where the painting of the Blue Mountains was, and next to it was the oval picture of the Kaiser grandparents. Next he noticed there was no smell in this house. Not of the occupiers or their possessions, not of cooking or even of cleaning. There was no message for his nose, nothing to tell him anything about the Lewises the way Mrs Rothfield’s little flat did. Even Mrs Rothfield’s clothes were permeated with a fusion of Polish and Middle Eastern cooking smells and the musky sweets she was addicted to. It was a welcome smell when he came back from the printery each day; he had become quite fond of it. In addition, she used a carbolic cleaner at half the recommended dilution. This reminded him of the days in the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home.
But the house in Dunara Road was sterile. Ruti’s delicate perfume had made no impression on it. Jacob was reluctant to go any further than the entrance hall, where he now stood alone while Ruti went to find her mother. The doors opening off the hall were closed, giving the house a segregated, even segmented appearance. It reminded him of the museum when certain areas were roped off and a sign read, ‘‘This area temporarily closed to the public’’.
He jumped as a telephone bell rang in the echo chamber of the hall. He had never before been in a private house that had a telephone. He found out later the bell had been placed there so that Abe Lewis could hear it if he was in the street unloading the truck. The ringing stopped and from a room on his right he heard a man’s voice.
‘‘…yeah, a quid each way, Gypsy Girl, a fiver straight out Lord Ludwig. Got that? No, I’m not going to Randwick this arvo, got to work on the truck. See ya later, Charlie, thanks.’’
Jacob’s regard for Abe Lewis, a man he’d never met, grew immensely at that moment. Lord Ludwig was the same horse Mr Williamson at the printery had told the boss to back on the strength of its win on a remote country track. Mr Williamson, on his own say-so, was ‘‘well ahead of the game’’.
This incident reminded Jacob that one of the reasons he had decided to come here was to meet Abe Lewis face to face, to find a man he could trust, much as he had put his faith in Mrs Rothfield and had never found her wanting. Jacob realised he badly needed a man to talk to.
It didn’t worry him that Abe Lewis backed horses S.P. After all, he had no grounds to criticise; hadn’t he been a bet collector for Uncle Siddy? He hoped the similarity between the two men ended right there.
Abe Lewis was in the room that used to be Jacob’s mother’s ‘‘best room’’, furnished almost entirely with the proceeds of her many pre-wedding parties that yielded up (as was intended) very little that was practical in setting up a home but many ornaments to fill glass-doored, bow-fronted china cabinets, for all to see and admire. Jacob and Solly had always disliked the room for the restrictions the decor placed upon them. They called it the ‘‘Dontuch Room�
��’.
Jacob watched the brass door knob turn; the door opened. At the same moment Ruti and her mother appeared at the end of the hall. He sensed them but watched as Abe Lewis emerged from his mother’s former sitting-room. In later years, asked to describe what he recalled about his first meeting with Abe Lewis, he would recall looking at his hands. Although constantly stained by printing ink, his own were like a young girl’s compared to Abe Lewis’s: stubby fingers with broken nails, black curly hair that flourished between the knuckles and callouses that felt like sandpaper.
And the grip! Slow at the beginning but growing in strength, as though he were being put through some manly test. Jacob tried to retaliate but made no impression. He could hear the clink of coins as Abe Lewis sifted through them in the privacy of his pocket. Then he took his hand out of his pocket and parked an unlit roll-your-own smoke in the corner of his mouth.
‘‘Got a match, young fella?’’
Jacob patted his pockets. ‘‘Can’t say I have, Mr Lewis. I don’t —’’
‘‘Never mind, come with me down to the truck, sure to find one there.’’
Jacob turned to the two women, who had watched the meeting from a distance. ‘‘Oh, sooner go with the ladies would you?’’ Abe Lewis said with a smile. ‘‘Get it over with, then you can come and have a yarn to me.’’
Jacob was drawn to the man. For one thing, he was no taller than Jacob and although twice his size, posed no threat — yet Ruti and her mother, for all their womanly presence, still seemed to want to take some part of his inner self from him. This puzzled Jacob.
Abe Lewis, his braces hanging down, his shirt-tail out, sauntered to the front door. ‘‘Be in the street if any one wants me,’’ he called over his shoulder, ‘‘and this young fella too, I suppose.’’ He winked at Jacob and put one of the braces straps on his shoulder, hooking his fingers through it. Jacob halfwaved to the two women.
‘‘Yeah,’’ he said in imitation of the insouciance of Abe Lewis, ‘‘won’t be long, Ruti, Mrs Kahn — er — I mean, Mrs Lewis. Be down in the street with Abe — I mean, Mr Lewis.’’
He followed the broad back down the garden steps and with relief seated himself next to Abe Lewis in the cabin of the truck.
It was a good place to talk. Jacob felt it the moment he settled into the broken springs and cracked upholstery. The gauges, all resting at zero in the brown bakelite dashboard, seemed to tell him that this was the right starting point for what he might have to say to Abe Lewis. The man had sunk into the driving seat, his hairy hands resting lightly on the steering wheel. His feet barely reached the pedals, Jacob noticed. The cabin of the truck was an enclosed world where confidences could be exchanged, where two men could be equals, where unwanted words could be tossed out the window and left to flow away in the gutter.
There was a bulldog clip on the sun visor; it had a list of names on it, most of them with a line scored through them. Abe took it down, screwed it up and threw it out of the window.
‘‘Well, Jake, that was last week’s little lot of trouble. I hope you’re not bringing me another load.’’
Jacob thought he could hear the little sports car jarring the quiet of the holiday morning. It spurred him on to speak.
‘‘You know — well, I’m sure you do — that I — we — my family used to own your house. We lived here before the Depression, me and my brother Solly and my mother Alice, and Dad — he’s dead now, well, so’s my mum and so’s Solly, and I met Ruth in the Children’s Home and that’s where Mr Kahn —’’
‘‘— cashed in his chips, yeah, I do know all about that, Jake,’’ Abe Lewis interrupted gently. He looked straight into Jacob’s eyes. ‘‘And I’ve got a fair idea that it took a bit of guts for you to set foot in that house again — guts, and maybe you’re a bit soft on young Ruth as well.’’ He winked at Jacob. ‘‘Between you and me and the steering wheel, how about we make an agreement here and now to call her ‘Ruth’ instead of that German way of saying it?’’ He stuck out a hand which Jacob gripped with even more assurance and liking for the man.
Encouraged, Jacob asked, ‘‘Are you happy in my old house, Abe?’’ He drew in his breath; he had gone further in that sentence than he had intended to. He had called it his house, he had asked a very personal question and he had spoken to Abe Lewis as an equal. He waited for the reaction.
The man was troubled by the question. He wound down the window, cleared his throat but didn’t spit, and said half to himself, ‘‘Hard to say, son. Very hard to say. Some days I belt home in the old truck and I want to tell ’em of the funny things that I saw and did during the day, but when I go through that bloody front door it all dries up inside of me. They’ve got that bloody highbrow simpanny music on and I mustn’t speak till it’s over, then she — Mrs Kahn — see, I still think of her like that — she says, ‘Better wash first, dear, then you can tell me what’s been happening to you’. Well, by then, all the talk’s gone out of me Jake and I just sort of…’’
He threw up his hands in frustration. ‘‘Sorry, Jake, I’m sure that’s not what you wanted to hear. Yeah, I suppose I’m happy in a mixed-up sort of way but maybe that’s just me. Funny though, when I bought the house and before Mrs Kahn — I better stop saying that — Mrs Lewis had those pansy decorators in, the house was just what I always wanted. It was real snug.’’
He looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘‘Here comes that little two-bob lair Daryl Aarons in his bloody MG. I wonder if he knows just how many dresses his old man has to sell to pay for that rich kid’s toy?’’
Abe Lewis suddenly turned the engine of the truck on, slammed it into gear and accelerated away from the kerb. Above the protest of the truck’s motor, Jacob could hear the little sports car before he could see it spinning across the road as it swerved to miss the tank-like bulk of the truck. This time there was no girl in the passenger seat, just the driver fighting the wheel and bringing the car back under control. It drew up alongside the truck. When its young driver stood up on the car seat, he was at eye level with Abe Lewis, who was once more slouched in the truck seat and trying to look as though he had done nothing to provoke the incident.
Abe opened the truck door deliberately until its battered khaki edge was within a whisker of the glistening red paint of the MG. Daryl Aarons watched, then stuck out his foot to ward off any further movement. Jacob got out of his side and walked around to the front of the truck. The little car looked so vulnerable, he felt sorry for it and even for its owner, now balanced precariously on one leg on the car seat.
Daryl, seeing Jacob for the first time, said in a half-joking tone, ‘‘Why don’t you tell your friend to be a bit more careful — I mean, he could’ve —’’
‘‘I bloody well should’ve,’’ Abe called down to him. He pushed the truck door a few inches and put Daryl off-balance so that he toppled backwards. Jacob ran to help him.
‘‘That’s right, give him a hand, Jake,’’ Abe called. ‘‘Better do the right thing, his old man’s a customer of mine.’’
As Jacob bent to help Daryl, his fingers brushed the softness of the other boy’s shirt; his nose was assaulted by Darryl’s brilliantine and close up he could see hands as pink as cake icing. He wore a gold chain with a finely wrought Star of David around his neck. As he fell, it had flopped outside his shirt.
Jacob had never known a boy like this. As with Abe Lewis, he tried desperately to fit Daryl into a classification of Jews he had to try to understand.
FIVE
Jacob resented that the moment for confidences between Abe and himself had passed, swept away with the cloud of exhaust from the little red car. Daryl had thrown himself into the driving seat, slamming the car into gear with a grinding that brought another growl from the truck window.
‘‘Don’t go leavin’ them gear teeth on the road, son, willya.’’ Abe slumped down in the truck seat once again. In an endeavour to re-establish the rapport between them, he put a hairy hand on Jacob’s knee. Jacob saw the gnarled
fingers stretch over his knee like tubers dug from the earth to dry. It came to him like a revelation: Abe’s earthy hands, Daryl’s pink ones which looked as though they had never been used, and his own, a crescent of printer’s ink still visible under the nails. He laid his hand on his other knee and surreptitiously opened his fingers in a pattern similar to Abe’s. The action was not lost on Abe.
‘‘Yeah, we’re alike, you and me, Jake,’’ he said looking at their hands. ‘‘Only difference is, you’ve got a trade and me — well, I’m still schleppin’ bales of rubbish around.’’
The wind blew a few drops of water from a neighbouring garden hose. Abe wound up the window. ‘‘There’s more on our hands than soap and water will ever wash off, mate. The goys always get a bit of a shock when they see us Yids with work-stained flippers. I bet you’ve noticed that too.’’
Jacob was ashamed at his reaction to this. While he yearned for a common bond to be established between himself and Abe Lewis, he didn’t want it to be — well, quite so common. He certainly felt no envy for the effete Daryl but it worried him that he had been catalogued already by Abe Lewis as the equal of a scrap rag man. After all, he was following a trade rich in tradition. Caxton and Merganthaler, Bodoni and Baskerville, they were artists and craftsmen! A different, a better — yes, a more honourable sort of dirt! Slowly, slyly, Jacob withdrew his hands from his knees, and thrust them deep into his trouser pockets, hoping the action would not be misunderstood. Abe said nothing but took the Log Cabin tobacco tin from the top of his overalls, opened it and stuck a cigarette paper to his lower lip. His stubby fingers selected a wedge of tobacco which he rolled coarsely; he took the paper from his lip and tipped the tobacco into it. For all Abe’s roughness, the rolled cigarette came out a perfect cylinder. When he stuck it in his mouth and lit it with his wartime lighter, made from a huge hexagonal nut with pennies for sides, it burned as evenly as any factory-made cigarette. He drew deeply on it and exhaled with a sigh of satisfaction. Jacob recognised the feeling from watching the men in the printery who smoked like that in their tea and lunch breaks.
