by Alan Collins
‘‘What? What are you talking? Can’t I remember for this young man how his — his father came to my George Street shop with his …’’ She tucked a stray hair into place, ‘‘with his mother.’’
Joshua said in a strained voice, ‘‘Please, Mrs Strauss, just bring us some fresh coffee.’’
Mrs Rothfield was torn between the wish to quit the coffee shop and the desire to press Joshua for further information. As Joshua made no move, she opted to stay. When Mitzi Strauss had gone and the fresh coffee had arrived Joshua spoke.
‘‘Those men,’’ he began in a low voice, ‘‘are protesting against the war in Vietnam.’’
He saw her puzzled look. ‘‘They want me to print things for them.’’ Joshua smiled. ‘‘You wouldn’t believe it, Boobe, one of them is from Kibbutz Jezreel where … well, you know … where my mother, Pnina, is buried.’’
Mrs Rothfield murmured, ‘‘May she rest in peace.’’ She leaned across the table. ‘‘So what is a Jewish kibbutznik doing here in Sydney?’’
Joshua told her he was here to study irrigation. It was through him that the protestors had made contact with Joshua.
Mrs Rothfield looked dubious. ‘‘Yakov should know nothing of this, don’t mix in,’’ she whispered. ‘‘I don’t even want to know!’’ she added.
Joshua said to her tantalisingly, ‘‘Not even about the girl?’’
‘‘Ach, that’s different. Tell me all and don’t leave anything out.’’
Their heads met and Mrs Rothfield’s sighs could be heard above the hissing of the coffee urns.
THREE
Laura Philips was a girl with an abundance of causes; she was never short of a mission. They overflowed her army disposals haversack; they covered all the happenings that stirred her to protest. Being Jewish, she told Joshua pointedly — and she shook her finger at him as she repeated it — gives you and me and people like us a head start when it comes to the whys and wherefores of protesting.
‘‘We should be the leaders, fighting injustice everywhere no matter what the race, religion or politics of the …’’ Joshua took her finger and pressed it against her lips to silence her. At the same time, he was stirred by her passion, wondering if it could be aroused for more intimate reasons.
At any one time Laura’s haversack could contain leaflets condemning Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam and the visit of the hated South Vietnam commander Marshal Ky, billed on those same leaflets as ‘‘the murderer of President Diem’’. Five hundred kilometres south, the State of Victoria was hell-bent on hanging Ronald Ryan, convicted of shooting a prison warder. Laura had a petition protesting against capital punishment. It sidled up against a clipboard for signatures supporting the Vote for Aborigines.
Increasing bombardment of Israel’s northern border settlements by Syrian gun emplacements on the Golan Heights at first presented Laura with a dilemma. The Left circles in which she moved supported the Palestinians, a loose alliance of Syrians and Lebanese backed by Moscow. Then she met Ilan, the Israeli kibbutnik from Jezreel. He reminded her firmly where her loyalties should lie. He also told her of Joshua’s background and how his mother’s courage was enshrined in Kibbutz Jezreel’s history.
One way or another, Laura was determined that Joshua Kaiser was going to become a committed activist. She was honest enough in her own commitment to the various causes she espoused. There were times though when she felt as though wearing shapeless clothes and tawdry jewellery was a high price to pay. The second time she went with the others to call on Joshua at the printery, she wore a pretty Indian dress and just a suspicion of make-up.
That was when Joshua asked her to stay after the others had left. He stood close to her, breathing in a scent that was partly perfume and partly redolent of incense. A heady aroma that made his heart beat a bit quicker. He took the bulging haversack from her shoulder. Relieved of its weight, she rose on her toes and kissed him on the lips.
The machinery outside the office clanked on, oblivious. Jacob, passing along the passageway, saw the two figures momentarily appear as one through the frosted glass. By the time he turned to look back, Joshua was alone once more and he caught a glimpse of coloured cloth as the girl turned the corner and left the building. He waited a few minutes then went back to Joshua’s office.
As Jacob entered he sniffed. ‘‘What sort of printing ink are we using now?’’ he asked Joshua with unaccustomed sarcasm. He peered around the office. ‘‘The young lady’s gone but what has she left behind? I can’t see any printing order.’’
Joshua threw his arm around his father’s shoulder. ‘‘Well, there you could be wrong, Dad.’’
‘‘You get a kiss with the order? Is that the custom now?’’
Joshua grinned then seated his father behind the desk. He pushed a few of Laura’s pamphlets towards him. Jacob glanced at them, then pushed them away. Joshua pushed them back.
‘‘I don’t need this sort of work, Joshua. It can only bring trouble. A brick through the window, a place like a printery where everywhere there are tins of solvent and stacks of paper. Spare me the worry, I need that like a hole in the head.’’ He got up to leave.
Joshua said, ‘‘You’re exaggerating, Dad. This is not Nazi Germany. These things don’t happen in Australia.’’
‘‘Let them go to another printer — a non-Jewish printer who can fight back if needs be. No one is going to call him a bloody Jew communist. No one is going to accuse me of making profit from the workers’ protest.’’
‘‘But Dad …’’
‘‘Now you listen to me. I will not print anything against Australia like this Vietnam war-protest stuff. This is our country, mine — and yours.’’ Jacob paused at the door.
Joshua barred his way. ‘‘I’m sorry, but I promised Laura.’’
Jacob pushed him aside. ‘‘Let me tell you, son, that this business is not yours to promise anything. And as for Laura — may she go in good health!’’
Joshua called down the passage after his father. ‘‘Do you know that the Syrians are shelling the farms around Lake Kinneret — that’s not far from Kibbutz Jezreel, is it?’’
‘‘So?’’
‘‘So Laura wants me to print some leaflets about a meeting to discuss the Israeli situation. Egypt is massing an army along the banks of the Canal. What do you say to that? Or should I ask Mrs Rothfield what you really think? After all, she’s known you longer than I have.’’ His jibe was swallowed up in the rumble of the machinery.
Joshua went back into the office and looked at the leaflets fanned out on his desk. Laura would be a busy girl if she followed up all these causes. Rallies or protest meetings (was there a difference?) for February alone covered venues as disparate as Martin Place and the Sydney Cricket Ground car-park, besides university and college campuses. All round Australia, 1967 was shaping up as a great year for activists!
Was there any future for him with a girl who could kiss him on the lips with politics on her mind? Joshua burst out laughing at the very thought. Great Uncle Siddy would tell him he’d been well and truly conned and urge him to ‘‘give her one to even up the score’’. Abe Lewis would say, ‘‘there’s a sheila with a bit of go in ’er, Josh. Not like Ruti’s daughter who only wants to swan around Double Bay.’’
Joshua riffled through the leaflets. He took the one that dealt with the fighting in Israel and flattened it out on the desk. It was still in layout form. He recalled Ilan telling him Laura was an art student at the Tech. Her design was bold and unapologetic, much like her own character, he suspected. The leaflet called for volunteers to take up non-combatant positions to free soldiers for active duty. He stared at the sketched artwork showing the volunteers in kitchens and fruit tree groves. His skin grew clammy with a nameless fear and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled.
Was he imagining it or did the man look uncannily like his father, Jacob, in a photograph taken on Kibbutz Jezreel’s avocado plantation over twenty years ago? The illustratio
ns had been cut from an Israeli publicity magazine and Laura had stuck them down. The young woman, very dark with tight curly hair much like his own, flashed him a whitetoothed smile. A Yemenite, Joshua murmured, certainly not like his mother Pnina with her auburn hair and freckles.
He swept the other leaflets off his desk into the wastepaper bin. The ‘‘volunteer’’ leaflet had two telephone contact numbers — one was Ilan’s, the other Laura’s.
Down the passage he could hear Abe Lewis’s laughter as he joked with the women in the book-binding department. This was his day to collect the bales of paper offcuts. Lately he had brought a brawny bloke with him who actually did all the work; Abe drove the big truck and yarned with the customers. Jacob’s printery was the last on his round, giving him time to join Jacob and sometimes Joshua for a cup of tea.
If Joshua had wanted to conceal the Israeli leaflet — from whom, he was not sure — the chance was lost. Abe burst into the office, flopped heavily into a chair by the desk and declared for all to hear, ‘‘I’m buggered, I am, I tell you. By the end of the week I couldn’t go two rounds with a revolving door!’’ The large lettering on the leaflet caught his eye. He reached over and picked it up, at the same time putting on his glasses.
VOLUNTEERS WANTED he read. Help Israel by helping free a soldier for active duty. His eyes flowed down the sheet, then he placed it very carefully back on Joshua’s desk. The warmth of Abe’s manner deserted him; he looked around nervously. He touched the leaflet with his fingertip as though it was contaminated.
‘‘Whaddya think ya playin’ at Josh?’’ he whispered. ‘‘Don’t ya think there’s been enough tzooris (trouble) in ya dad’s life without …’’
Joshua came around the desk and put his hand on Abe’s shoulder. ‘‘Without what, Abe? Without pissing off overseas and running the risk of getting my head shot off? Look, we’ve only been asked to print a few leaflets. What’s the harm in that?’’
‘‘Plenty mate, let me tell you. Ya get sucked in over things like this.’’
‘‘Were you ‘sucked in’ when you went to the war back in … in …’’
‘‘1943. Struth, that seems a lifetime away. No, I wasn’t sucked in. It was a fair dinkum war against the bloody Nazis and the Japs.’’
‘‘And this isn’t? Or the war in Vietnam? Anyway, who’s talking about joining anything? All Laura asked was if we would run off a few leaflets.’’ Joshua leaned across the desk to pick up Laura’s layout.
Abe clamped a hand around his wrist. ‘‘Laura? Was that the little sheila dressed like a Bombay bazaar I saw leavin’ as I came in? Pretty little thing — if she took a bit more care of her looks.’’ He let go of Joshua’s wrist. ‘‘Ah, me boy, you’re blushin’. It’s not just her politics that’s got you in, is it?’’
Joshua had to make a snap decision whether to be offended by Abe’s remarks or take them in good spirit. He leaned back in his chair and laughed.
Abe said, ‘‘That’s the way old son. Don’t take life too serious, especially where the young ladies is concerned.’’
Abe’s observation brought back the memory of Laura’s kiss. Joshua was nowhere near sure it was a laughing matter. Surreptitiously he selected the only other leaflet Laura wanted printed. It urged attendance at a mass rally against the compulsory call-up for service in Vietnam by birthday ballot of young men aged twenty.
That night, after yet another of Mrs Rothfield’s terrible home-cooked dinners, which he was commanded by the formidable old lady to attend every second Monday, Joshua walked all the way down Bondi Road to his new flat. Its Mediterranean whiteness stood out against the cloudless night sky. He would have taken more pride in it had he done something to deserve it, other than being sole heir to Great Uncle Siddy’s nefarious wealth and sole beneficiary of his open-handed generosity.
The day Joshua had settled somewhat hesitantly into the new flat, Siddy had poured a drink for them both. ‘‘LCham,’’ he toasted. ‘‘Here’s to the mugs in the Taxation Department. There’ll be bloody slim pickings for them after I’ve gone.’’ A few drinks later, he confided in a slurred liquor-laden voice: ‘‘You’ll get the lot, Josh. Unnerstan? Get me? Knew yer mum I did. Well, you know who I mean like. She was a good sort, poor old Peg. Should’n have gone like she did, shot down like a rabbit.’’ He paused and looked around. Joshua was out on the balcony staring at the silvery expanse of Bondi Beach. Siddy joined him in silence. After a while he said, ‘‘Ah, Josh, I haven’t got a head for booze. Shouldn’t touch it. Shouldn’t get shikker, talk too much.’’ He reached up and ruffled Joshua’s hair. ‘‘But by God, I meant what I said — about me money an’ all that.’’
When Joshua got home this night, he drank a glass of fruit saline to combat Mrs Rothfield’s dinner. He felt that events were bearing in on him. Laura was occupying too much of his thoughts. She was a pretty smart girl who was using her charms to make an ally of him. Did he mind that, he asked himself. Well, it could cut both ways; he felt sure he could get around Jacob and have the leaflets printed. He could also get a lot closer to Laura Philips — and that was not an unpleasant prospect.
So far he had avoided any committed political position. At university he had been a bit of an outsider, a serious student who took a combined arts and commerce degree. He was not a joiner; club secretaries of this and that campus association soon gave up on him. After all, there was no shortage of students like Laura who would sooner carry a banner than a handbag. Jewish groups on campus covered the spectrum from extreme non-religious left to rightist Jewish orthodoxy. The two hottest political events of the day made strange alliances. A Jewish student could find him or herself passionately for the defence of Israel against Arab forces and just as committed to stopping the war in Vietnam. Joshua was fully aware of all this; what held him aloof was Jacob’s bitterness about all conflict.
From his balcony on a clear night he could see right across the bay, to the light in the front room of Jacob’s North Bondi flat. Joshua stood on his white-tiled, imitation Greek balcony. He felt an urgent need to talk to Jacob, to speak with him on an equal footing away from the distractions of the printery.
He ran downstairs, intending to walk along the promenade then up the short steep hill to Jacob’s flat. Maybe he would call in at Mitzi’s cafe and buy some cheesecake. He looked at the printery’s van parked at the kerbside. ‘‘Kaiser Son, Quality Printers’’ proclaimed the gold letters on both sides; it gave him a warm feeling towards the ‘‘old man’’. He had to remind himself that his father was still only forty-one. The funny thing was that Abe, twenty years older, and Uncle Siddy, ages and ages older, at times looked and acted younger than Jacob.
Joshua checked that the van was locked. As he walked around it, a figure stepped out of the shadows. A voice said softly, ‘‘Got the van keys with you, chaver?’’
Who would call him chaver, the Hebrew word for friend, on a Bondi street late at night? He bunched the keys tightly in his fist and swung around. Now, from the light of a distant street lamp he could see it was Ilan, the Jezreel kibbutznik. The man’s laconic manner, and his sparing use of English made for direct and simple communication.
Joshua replied, ‘‘So what?’’
Ilan said, ‘‘You drive or me?’’
The Israeli had a mesmerising effect on Joshua. He opened the driver’s door and climbed in, then reached across and opened the passenger door. Ilan swung himself into the seat, checked his watch and told Joshua: ‘‘Now we go to Woomooloo to …’’
Joshua laughed nervously. ‘‘You mean Woolloomooloo, don’t you?’’
Ilan shrugged. ‘‘Whatever, it is by the docks we are to meet at 2300 hours.’’ Before Joshua could ask whom they were to meet, he growled, ‘‘Now drive.’’
Joshua took one last look across the bay to Jacob’s flat. The light had gone out. He had better humour this intense clock-spring of a man. The van moved off; neither spoke until, at the bottom of MacLeay Street, Ilan indicated a spot alongside the ir
on railings of the dockside. Joshua turned the headlights off but left the parking lights on.
‘‘Off,’’ Ilan ordered. He got out, patted his hip and walked into the darkness. For once Joshua wished he smoked. He often admired the dexterity of Abe Lewis who could roll a cigarette as neatly as a tailor-made. Instead he drew his breath in deeply and exhaled the smoke of a make-believe cigarette.
FOUR
Through the railings Joshua could see the pinpoint lights of harbour craft. Their darting movements only served to heighten his anxiety. He began to resent how easily he had been persuaded into this, this … what? He was not sure. Ilan had a power over him that had its origins in his mother’s death nineteen years ago in Israel’s War of Independence. What gnawed at Joshua was what Ilan left unsaid; there was an implied bond between them that somehow he could not ignore.
Joshua jerked awake as the van door opened. Ilan stood there; behind him were two other men. They were carrying a sports bag between them. Ilan did not bother to introduce them to Joshua. He asked for the key to the back of the van, holding his hand out as though there was no possibility of Joshua refusing. Joshua handed over the keys; Ilan steered the men around the back and watched in silence as they sat down on the floor. The door slammed shut and Ilan joined Joshua up front.
‘‘OK, we drive now to La Perouse.’’
Joshua repeated the name stupidly.
‘‘We go to test guns,’’ Ilan said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘‘There is quiet — sandhills — no people — looks like the Negev desert!’’ He called back to the men in a language that Joshua knew was not Hebrew. They grunted, then there was silence.
As the van moved off, acrid tobacco smoke filled the cabin. To Joshua’s surprise he found he could identify the brand. He hadn’t smelled it since his university days when the smart-arses smoked them: French Gauloises. Taking a chance, he called back to the men, ‘‘Comme c’est va?’’ There was an immediate response: ‘‘Bien, merci.’’
