Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

  ‘The other thing was, there were a few blokes who’d worked on railways and they were keen to get stuck in again. They missed it, you know. They didn’t exactly want to build a railway for the Japs, but they wanted to do what they were good at. God knows what they thought they’d be working as: stationmasters or something.

  ‘Me, I didn’t trust the Japs – and nor did Callaghan – but I thought things couldn’t get worse than Changi. It was just a failure of my imagination, that’s all.

  ‘The officers drew up the lists of blokes to go on the line. They wanted volunteers, but they also wanted to keep units together. They reckoned we’d have more chance of surviving that way. There was no shortage of willing blokes for that first draft, but me and Townsville Jack held out until they raised the second force, before we decided it was better the devil you don’t know than slowly starving in Singapore.

  ‘We were always putting our names on lists in those days: lists of trades, lists of the sick, even lists of fellas who were after a place on stage. The concert party held auditions at the end of every month, to make sure no talent in the camp had been overlooked, or one of the untalented blokes hadn’t developed a talent overnight. The Japs ordered them to keep their strength at forty, so if a new fella came in, somebody else had to leave, and probably join a working party where they’d have to wear blokes’ clothes and talk in an ordinary voice.

  ‘Myer fancied himself as a comic, and he wasn’t bad. He didn’t do Irishman-Scotsman-Englishman-Jew jokes, he invented his own, and they were usually about life in the camps. “What’s the difference between a bowl of rice and Christmas dinner?” “Bugger all.” That’s the one I remember. He probably had some that were better than that.

  ‘One of the comedians had resigned to become a contortionist. He’d got so thin that his body could do things he’d never imagined before. The contortionist knocked out the Indian fakir, who wasn’t Indian, which left a place for a comic.

  ‘Five blokes were auditioning: Captain Galbraith, who was the usual army bastard, Myer, Bluey and Little Bluey, and a double act from Launceston that pretended to be one bloke with two heads. The idea was funny, but they didn’t really have any jokes.

  ‘Myer worked out all these punchlines like, “Laugh? I thought I’d wet myself, but it turned out to be the monsoon.” Galbraith did a bit of Jew-baiting about why are synagogues round, which might have been funny if synagogues were round.

  ‘The judges were split and wanted a couple of days to make their decision. While they were out, Galbraith had Myer’s name put on the list for the line. Myer said he was sick, but they told him it would be a good place to recuperate. Then he said he’d recovered, and they told him he could give the sick blokes a hand. Myer said he didn’t want to go, but they told him it was an order, and the day before the judges came back with their decision, he was gone.’

  Jimmy spat on the ground.

  ‘The judges chose Galbraith anyway,’ he said. ‘They thought he’d be more popular with the men.’

  *

  Sometimes, listening to Jimmy’s stories got too much for me. All the pain and hunger and disappointment started to seem real, and I had to ask him to stop.

  ‘Stop what?’ asked Jimmy. ‘We’re not bloody doing anything.’

  He went to the fridge to fetch a bottle of beer, came back and opened it on the step.

  ‘I’m tired of talking anyway,’ he said.

  And then he sulked.

  I wondered if anyone would make a movie of Jimmy’s life, and whether they’d get someone Jewish to play the hero, or if they’d just use Bryan Brown like always. I didn’t know who was going to turn out to be the hero anyway, and who was going to die in the end, although I was fairly sure the Japs wouldn’t win the war.

  ‘We should get to the gym,’ said Jimmy suddenly.

  Jimmy had many different ways of saying he was going to the Club, including ‘taking a breath of fresh air’, ‘walking around the block’ and ‘popping out to see a bloke about a dingo’. It was ‘shule’, ‘the elephants’ graveyard’ or ‘the Rookwood waiting room’, but I’d never heard him call it ‘the gym’.

  When we reached the Club, Jimmy chatted to the man with the guestbook but didn’t sign me in. Instead, we took the elevator to the basement, where the Club’s minibus, The Tank, waited to transport members home within a five-kilometre radius of Bondi Junction, at the discretion of Johnny the Head, a Maori with a skull the size of a basketball. The Tank was mainly used by gamblers on pension day, when they’d dropped the train fare back to Redfern into the Queen of the Nile, but Johnny the Head had occasionally driven Jimmy to my grandmother’s house after a long lunch, although Jimmy always made him park around the corner.

  He was smoking a roll-up in the underground carpark when Jimmy and I climbed into his bus. The cigarette looked the wrong size for his head.

  ‘City of Sydney Police Boys Club,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘This isn’t a taxi service,’ said Johnny the Head. ‘You know I can’t take you to another club.’

  ‘It’s not a bloody RSL,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘So why would you want to go?’ asked Johnny the Head.

  ‘What do you care?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘Why do you people always answer one question with another?’ asked Johnny the Head.

  ‘Why do you?’ asked Jimmy.

  Johnny the Head drove us across town to Riley Street, near the Domain, arguing with Jimmy about the All Blacks. Jimmy firmly believed rugby union was a soft code and all Coconuts were cannibals. Johnny the Head, who lived in a red brick apartment block two streets from my grandmother’s house, thought Jews were weak and comically small, too busy talking to ever get anything done.

  Johnny the Head bit into a spongy doughnut, and smeared his mouth with blood-red jam.

  ‘Wipe your face, mate,’ said Jimmy. ‘You’ve got missionary on your chin.’

  ‘You people’d be a damn sight better off if you’d listened to the missionaries,’ said Johnny the Head.

  ‘You people wouldn’t have diabetes if you hadn’t eaten them,’ said Jimmy.

  Johnny the Head let us out at the door of the police boys club. A team of junior gymnasts from Gymea tried to board the minibus. Jimmy encouraged them.

  Inside the building, a plaque on the wall above the drinks machine acknowledged Jake Mendoza’s contribution to the club. Boys’ voices, hardly broken, echoed across the basketball court like crows in a cave. Jimmy led me upstairs to the boxing room, where schoolboys changed into board shorts and singlets, and left their long gym bags crowded around a box of scuffed and crumpled gloves.

  Jimmy took a seat facing the boxing ring next to Slow Eddie Finkel on the bench along the wall.

  We breathed leather and sweat, while big men bullied bags that hung like fat corpses from a beam.

  ‘Have you seen Yuri before?’ asked Slow Eddie. ‘He’s the same weight as Kid Berg.’

  ‘My cock’s the same weight as Kid Berg,’ said Solomon, panting from a climb down the staircase and pushing Slow Eddie aside with one buttock.

  ‘What’s this? Tush week?’ asked Slow Eddie.

  ‘Move up and shut up,’ said Solomon.

  ‘What’s your business here, you fat-arsed faygeleh?’ asked Slow Eddie.

  ‘I come,’ said Solomon, ‘to feel what my faux French faux friend Earnless Cash might call the frisson sportif of the presence of a future champion. I am also drawn here by a sense of nostalgia for the winter afternoons when I myself laced up the twelve-ounce gloves and faced a variety of young opponents including one Edward Hyman Finkelstein, known then as “Eddie the Virgin”, due to both his unparalleled unpopularity with the fairer sex and the fact that his name appeared to contain the word “hymen”. If my memory serves me correctly, I knocked him from one corner to the other using little more than my famously accurate jab and an uncanny grasp of the physical geometry of the square ring.’

  ‘You were twice my weight,’ grumbled Slow Eddie.

&nb
sp; ‘You gave away half a stone,’ said Solomon. ‘Rumour has it that was the last thing you ever gave away.’

  A boy with eyes as flat as his nose climbed into the ring, followed by a hawk-faced trainer wearing focus pads on his hands. The trainer asked for a round of uppercuts on the pads. The boy bent his knees, squared his shoulders and bounced his fists off his targets with the rhythm of an avalanche.

  ‘Everything else has changed,’ said Solomon, ‘but boxing gyms have stayed the same. It’s like they were perfect to start with. You can’t improve on the ring and the bags, just like you can’t invent a new punch. And that smell . . .’ – he sucked up perspiration and liniment – ‘If you could bottle it, you could sell it.’

  ‘They do,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s called Fosters.’

  ‘It’s the smell of guts and fear,’ said Solomon, ‘of young men ready to fight.’

  ‘It’s just leather and sweat,’ said Jimmy. ‘You make everything out to be more than what it is.’

  ‘You’re a miserable old bastard,’ said Solomon, ‘did you know that?’

  ‘I thought I was your little ray of sunshine,’ said Jimmy.

  The walls of the gym were papered with yellowed curling posters advertising fights that were over between fighters who were dead.

  ‘You see him,’ said Jimmy, pointing to a picture of a little man peeping out from behind a pair of fat gloves. ‘He’s still with us. That’s Henry Nissen, the best Jewish boxer to come out of Australia.’

  ‘Nissen, pischen,’ said Solomon. ‘He wasn’t even the best Jewish boxer called “Nissen”.’

  ‘Henry won the national flyweight championship from Harry Hayes in 1970,’ Slow Eddie told me. ‘Me and Jake were at ringside in Melbourne.’

  ‘His brother Leon held the amateur title,’ said Solomon. ‘Now he could fight.’

  ‘They were identical twins,’ said Slow Eddie. ‘They boxed the same. It’s genetic.’

  ‘The Schiller twins had the same box, and it was certainly genetic with them,’ said Solomon.

  The boy in the ring wore a Star of David embroidered on his shorts.

  ‘It’s a nod to the nineteen-thirties,’ said Solomon, ‘when Jewish fighters held titles all over the English-speaking world. Except Australia.’

  ‘There was Jack Kid Berg and Ted Lewis in London,’ said Slow Eddie. ‘And Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom and Barney Ross in New York and, of course, Benny Leonard –’

  ‘The greatest fighter who ever lived,’ all three old men chanted together.

  ‘Although Ring magazine only ranked him as the all-time number eight,’ said Slow Eddie.

  The boy in the ring threw punches that left holes in the air.

  ‘Boxing went to shit when the schwartzers started winning everything,’ said Slow Eddie. ‘Nobody cared any more.’

  ‘The best negro fighter was Saoul Mamby,’ said Solomon, ‘whose mother converted to Judaism when he was four years old. Even though he was only a light-heavyweight, he could’ve beaten Muhammad Ali when he won his world title in 1980.’

  ‘I could’ve beaten Muhammad Ali by 1980,’ said Slow Eddie.

  Slow Eddie gave a dawdling imitation of the Ali shuffle, without moving from the bench.

  ‘There was also the schwartzer Ronnie “Mazel” Harris,’ said Solomon, ‘who joined a shule after he had been hit by a car.’

  Jimmy slapped his thigh.

  ‘What a mensch,’ said Slow Eddie. ‘He even wore his yarmulke in the ring.’

  ‘And he beat Sugar Ray,’ said Solomon.

  ‘Was that Sugar Ray Robinson or Sugar Ray Leonard?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘It was Sugar Ray Seales,’ admitted Solomon, ‘the lesser known.’

  ‘Wasn’t he legally blind?’ asked Jimmy, closing his eyes.

  ‘Not at the time,’ said Solomon. ‘That came several years later.’

  ‘At least the diagnosis did,’ said Jimmy.

  All around me, I saw hands, some of them moving faster than my eye could follow. There were gloves flying towards fractured mirrors, knuckles sinking into sagging bags, scarred and swollen joints wrapped in grey bandages that covered sailors’ swallows tattooed on the muscle above the thumb. They were all working hands, like Jimmy’s, not soft gladhands like my Dad’s.

  The old men turned back to the ring, where the boy threw a jab and a cross, then ducked a pad and came back up with a hook.

  ‘Nice lateral movement,’ said Slow Eddie, miming the combination.

  ‘Yuri’s the first Australian Jewish professional fighter in two generations,’ said Jimmy. ‘A Russian kid. All the old yiddisher fight fans come to watch him.’

  ‘Who else turns up apart from you?’ I asked.

  ‘No one,’ said Solomon.

  The trainer towelled the boy down.

  ‘Yuri’s not sparring today, fellas,’ he called.

  The trainer unlaced the boy’s gloves, and Jimmy, Slow Eddie and Solomon walked up to the ropes to shake his hand.

  ‘Zol zion mit mazel,’ said Solomon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the boy, ‘my English is not very good.’

  *

  I thought Jimmy and Solomon would stop off at the Club on the way back from the gym, but they both seemed exhausted by watching somebody else exercise. Solomon drove us to the shops on Bondi Road, where Jimmy looked around for a new set of pencils while he took up his war story with a vague, distracted determination.

  ‘Before we left Changi, we collected all the kit we were told to take along,’ he said. ‘Blankets, mosquito nets, musical instruments, books, a bit of medical gear. We didn’t want to carry too many medicines because the Japs’d said there were hospitals already set up for us. We imagined wards and corridors, microscopes and X-ray machines, men in white coats prescribing penicillin.

  ‘Ramsay came to our barracks to say goodbye. He wished us all good luck and told us not to expect any rest camps, because the Japs wouldn’t’ve had time to build them. He said he didn’t need to remind us that we should sabotage the bastards at every chance we got, but we didn’t have a duty to get ourselves killed doing it. He told us to keep our heads up and our noses clean, to remember we were Australian soldiers and, no matter how bad things might get, to never, ever give up.

  ‘Ramsay had a special word for Townsville Jack.

  ‘“Well,” he said, “you’re finally getting away from us, you bloody commo. And now you’re off to build a railway. Infrastructure for all men to use. There’ll be no first-and second-class carriages on the train to Burma, I can guarantee you that. Or on the way up to Siam, if what I hear is right. You’ll be as equal as when you were bloody born.”

  ‘“I’m not a commo,” said Townsville Jack.

  ‘“Oh, you will be,” said Ramsay. “You all will be. Or else you’ll bloody die.”

  ‘We shook hands with the mates we were leaving behind, and exchanged cap badges and postcards, any little things we had, souvenirs of other men’s lives. We clasped arms and slapped backs – we never hugged, I remember that – and told each other we’d never get off the island.

  ‘“Laugh?” shouted Myer. “I thought I’d pissed myself, but it turned out to be the monsoon.”

  ‘Nobody knew what he was talking about.

  ‘We were taken in trucks to Singapore station. I could’ve jumped out the back. I could’ve run. We had to wait for hours on the platform before our train arrived. The boongs just stared at us, the Chinese tried to slip us food. Most of us thought we’d get a troop train, but Snowy White reckoned they’d put us on the regular civilian express, which would get us to Bangkok faster because they wouldn’t have to muck around with the schedules.

  ‘The only locomotive in the station was a rice train, a chain of steel rice trucks dragged along behind a steam engine. We guessed the Nips used it to supply their troops, but nobody was much interested in it, because there’s nothing about an empty rice train that matters to anyone, unless you’re rice.

  ‘Suddenly the Jap guards, who’d been
asleep or drinking tea or tormenting the Chinese with sticks, decided it was tenko hour, so they counted us a couple of times and started herding us towards the rice train. The carriages had every comfort you’d need, if you happened to be a sack of bloody rice. There were no seats, no benches, no windows, nothing. The Japs crammed us thirty to a truck. There wasn’t even space for every man to lie down, let alone room for our cooking gear, so we traded it with a boong for a bag of stinkfish.

  ‘We spent the next four days in that carriage, taking turns to stand, squat and stretch out. Townsville Jack stood like a statue on one side of me, Katz wriggled like a fish on the other, and the sun came down on the roof and walls and turned the carriage into an oven. We cooked from the inside. Sick men shit themselves, everyone dripped sweat like a shower.

  ‘“Laugh?” shouted Myer. “I thought I’d wet myself, but it turned out to be the monsoon.”

  ‘“No, mate,” said Townsville Jack, “you’ve wet yourself.”

  ‘I craned my neck over the shoulders of men pissing into the wind, to watch Malaya and Thailand go by between the carriage doors. There were water buffalo grazing in the fields, rubber trees laid out in rows like bloody soldiers, peasants gazing at the sun. It might even have been beautiful, but it did bugger all for me.

  ‘We came to the line in rice trucks, cooked like rice, slept in rice sacks at night, and we were buried in rice sacks as coffins. They turned us into rice, David, into grains of men.

  ‘The train stopped every few hours. We drank water from the engine and the guards beat us back with batons and swords, and even the most wide-eyed Jap-happy fools realised there wasn’t going to be any rest camp. I’ve said our officers were all piss and wind, but bugger me if it didn’t turn out that the IJA’s officers, the chuis, didn’t know the truth from a rat’s turd either.

  ‘Men died on that train. Everywhere I went, men died. It was like our time on earth was ending and we were leaving one by one.

  ‘At a whistlestop in the bush, I climbed out of the carriage and missed the siding, tumbled down an embankment into a ditch. I tried to pull myself up with a fistful of long grass, but the stems snapped and I rolled onto my ankle and cried out. The Japs hadn’t noticed I’d gone. If I hadn’t moaned, the train would’ve left without me and somebody eventually would’ve found me. Maybe the boongs would’ve sold me to the Japs, but perhaps Chinese guerrillas would’ve taken me into the jungle. I could’ve lived off monkeys and snakes, hit the Japs in their bases then disappeared into the night.