by Mark Dapin
They said they’d work with the Paddies but not the Yids, on account of the death of Jesus, which they saw as a hit on one of their own. And the Micks had problems with the Jesus thing too. They swooped onto the track in the morning – when the bookies were making deals with the stablehands and trainers – wearing crucifixes and waving razors and clubs. My grandfather had his throat cut by an Irish standover merchant they called St Peter, after his medallion. According to him, when St Peter sliced through his neck he said, ‘This one’s for our Lord and Saviour.’ But my grandfather was prone to exaggeration and drama.
He should’ve been a journalist.
If there’s drama in the Australian Jewish Times, it’s passed me by.
I meant a proper journalist.
With respect, Mr Rubens, you don’t know my history.
So get on with it. That’s what we’re here for. But you’ve been talking for ten minutes and your uncle hasn’t even been born yet.
The Jews tried to organise against the Paddies and the Surry Hills mob, but they didn’t have the numbers or the stomach for a fight. Most of them faded into SP betting or illegal casinos, but Bill Fry left Sydney and went to ground in Warrnambool. His scar made him look like he was easy to cut but hard to kill, and he was worried that some fellas around the place would take it as challenge. That’s how I remember my grandfather, as a big old man with a pink ridge around his neck. As a boy, I used to worry his head would fall off. He always said, ‘If it hasn’t happened by now, it never will.’
He used to tell me St Peter had cut him like a shochet butchers a cow. He lost a lot of blood, more than he thought he had in his body, and when he didn’t die, my grandad turned to God. It often happens like that. He became religious, although there wasn’t much he could do about it in Warrnambool. The nearest shule was in Geelong. He dropped ‘Fry’ – which had become a dangerous name to carry in sporting circles anyway – and reverted to Spiegeleier, although he still went by ‘Bill’.
He settled down with my grandmother, a schoolteacher, and they had two girls and, I always thought, one boy – my dad, Stan.
Bill was a wonderful grandad, really, full of long stories and little kindnesses, but he couldn’t stand straight at the pisser. He always had a rort running, a con going. He was bookie from his cap to his boots, even though in Warrnambool he ran a horse stud.
I used to go down there for the summer, and he’d try to teach me about life. He told me the most important thing in the world was family, and I thought he meant my dad. I never knew Dad had a brother.
Bill grew angrier as he grew older. His religion didn’t seem to comfort him any more. He just sat on his deck, smoking cigars and raging at the sunset over the paddock. He died when I was twelve, a month before my bar mitzvah.
Dad had to organise the funeral. He tried to track people down. He got a couple of the old yiddisher bookies together, to compare the scars they’d earned from the Surry Hills mob, and found a cousin of Bill’s, Harold, who hadn’t seen him since 1938. I was with Harold at the wake when he asked Dad what had happened to Joshua. It was the first time I’d heard his name. Dad told Harold Joshua had disappeared.
‘What do you mean “disappeared”?’ asked Harold.
I’ll always remember the way he said that word, as if he thought Dad had thrown Joshua into the garbage and had him buried in the dump. It’s funny, though: I knew straightaway they were talking about my uncle.
Dad told me the story that day. I suppose he was too sad about Bill to keep it a secret any more and, with Bill dead, the secret didn’t matter anyway.
His older brother grew up in the tack shed and on the track. He loved him and looked up to him, but he could never keep up with him. Joshua wasn’t a nice yiddisher boy. He was a throwback to something else, a tinker from the old country, always in trouble.
He spent a year in a boys’ home, the only Jew. People said that was what made him hard, but Dad said he wasn’t hard, just tough. He was a man around the hotels of Warrnambool, and fought in the tent when Jeremiah Cain’s World Famous Boxing Troupe came to town. He even went off with them for a season, from Horsham to Mildura.
Joshua worked as a bookie’s runner and a cockatoo, then started his own SP business out of the Station Hotel. He got into trouble with the local Irish like his dad, and he hopped freight trains all the way to Sydney to try to join up with Phil the Jew. But by the time Joshua arrived in the Cross, Phil the Jew had retired, and Jake Mendoza was still a petty crook fencing car radios, so Joshua tried to make something out of his boxing. He fought at the Sydney Stadium, at the bottom of the card with the beginners and bums. He had a talent for feints and evasions, and a chin that could keep him on his feet if the other bloke got through his guard, but he didn’t have much patience for the discipline, so he settled into losing to pad the other fella’s record.
My dad went up to see him fight once. He was calling himself Vic Brown for some reason. He was up against a fat baker, and he put on a proper show because he knew Stan was in the crowd. They went toe to toe for six rounds. Joshua lost, but the crowd threw coins into the ring and cheered for both of them.
He told me about that fight.
I think it was his last.
Yeah, he said that.
He went the distance for his brother.
In his story, it was a sheila.
There was a woman too. Dad said there was always a woman. After the fight, Joshua took Dad drinking with his mates. It was like a circus, Dad said. There were strongmen and wrestlers and spivs dressed like ringmasters, and even a dwarf.
Joshua followed the sun north to Brisbane, where he met the shiksa. That’s all she was ever called. No one knew her name – or even her religion, except that she wasn’t Jewish. She was supposed to be beautiful, but that’s just what people assumed, because of Joshua being a ladies’ man. They said she was bad, but Dad didn’t know in what way. Maybe she was the madam of a brothel, or maybe she was the barmaid at the pub. Anyway, Joshua moved in with her.
Bill Spiegeleier sat shiva for a year, in a shule in his own head, and told Dad and his sisters never to speak to Joshua again.
They did, of course, but not often, and always from a distance. They heard Jack’s girl died of influenza, and Jack went back on the swag. A drifter in the Station Hotel told them Joshua had got into a fight in Brandon and ended up in jail in Townsville, and they’d only let him out when he promised to join the army. He sent a letter to Dad from Singapore, saying the goyim all called him ‘Townsville Jack’.
We never knew he’d enlisted as Fry, let alone Peter. I’d never have thought of it.
It would’ve been the name he used in court. He would’ve made it up on the spot.
He named himself after his father, and the bloke who cut him.
You might be reading too much into it.
My dad loved Joshua, but when he disappeared he never tried to look for him. He’d just let it lie, to protect his mother, he said. But as he grew older his childhood became real again, and he wanted to be with his brother. He remembered Joshua rubbing his face up against the head of his horse, riding bareback through the paddock, firing shotguns at tin cans.
Just before he died, Dad would wait in the drive of his house for Joshua to saddle up and take him out riding. He wrote him long letters to an address overseas, and waited by the mailbox to get a postcard back.
And that’s it. That’s all I know.
Thanks, mate. Are you sure I can’t get you a drink?
I’m fine. Honestly.
You won’t mind if I have one myself.
Look, I’ll take an orange cordial.
L’chaim.
L’chaim.
Your uncle preferred something stronger.
He sounds like a stronger man than me.
He was a fucking army.
*
The story was printed in the paper on Friday morning. By lunchtime there was a policewoman in my grandmother’s street, trying to move along all the old
people who had come to look at our spirit house, and some others who had stopped by to find out what all the old people were looking at. Barry Dick and the frummers walked up and down the line offering the men the chance to put on teffilin.
I didn’t recognise most of the crowd, although they all looked pretty much the same, with tremendous eyebrows and pursed, puzzled lips.
‘It’s like the line-up for an Arnold Zwaybil concert,’ said Jimmy.
Daniel Spiegeleier interviewed people about why they were there, for a story about the enormous influence of the Australian Jewish Times in Bondi Junction and the Waverley area. Several readers had misunderstood the story, or only looked at the picture. One thought there was supposed to be a spirit house outside every Jewish home in the street. Another tried to put money in the roof. Two Maoris believed they had joined a bus queue.
Spiegeleier passed Jimmy an envelope, which he opened slowly. Inside was a fragile grey photograph of a tall, smiling boy with deep-set eyes, holding his big hands under his chin like a boxer, and a smaller picture of the boy grown into a man, wearing a uniform and crouched by a mortar.
‘Yes,’ said Jimmy. ‘That’s him.’
BONDI
SUNDAY 20 MAY 1990
I woke before dawn when I heard Jimmy pissing and spitting in the bathroom, his cough echoing around the walls. He knocked softly on my door, and I pushed my penknife inside my pillowcase and hid my present under the bed. I pulled on a hooded top and followed Jimmy outside, where he stood watching the sun rise over the spirit house.
He waited at attention, his bent old back pulled straight like a flagpole, the palms of his hands flat against the pockets of his pants. He wore two medals over his heart, and the light winked on the polished metal as the sun climbed past.
We ate breakfast on the deck while Grandma slept: cream-cheese bagels, orange juice and eggs on toast from a café in Bondi Road. Jimmy wrapped a red ribbon around the house, with a bow tied across the front door like rose petals, or a wreath.
I recognised the ribbon from a box of chocolates Mum had bought my grandparents for their ruby wedding anniversary.
‘I knew it’d come good one day,’ said Jimmy.
Grandma came out of the bedroom dressed in her best purple frock. She put on the kettle and sang a sad song in the kitchen. Jimmy shuffled and watched his feet, as if he were afraid to look at her, but Grandma smiled and passed him a small neatly packaged parcel.
Jimmy unwrapped a tiny red cheongsam with a golden bow across one shoulder.
‘For Mei-Li,’ said Grandma. ‘Something modest to wear in that house full of men.’
Jimmy laid the cheongsam on the sleeping mat in the timber extension of the spirit house, and kissed his wife on the lips.
The frummers always woke up early, to make sure they fitted enough God into their day. Barry Dick and two bearded Americans crossed the road carrying trays of cakes and bags of teffilin. They stopped at the gate to mutter a broche, and mumbled another at the door.
‘You can put the tucker on the dining table,’ said Jimmy, directing them through the bead curtain, ‘and the teffilin in the fridge.’
Grandma dusted the mantelpiece and plumped up the cushions, pulled back the curtains and opened the blinds. She took all the bottles out of the drinks cabinet and arranged them like chess pieces on the shelf below.
Myer and Solomon turned up at 10 am in the Volvo. Solomon was wearing his hair slicked back and his Dracula shirt.
‘Where’s the booze?’ he asked. ‘I’m as dry as a camel.’
‘I thought in the war you’d learned how to get a camel wet,’ said Myer.
‘That was no camel,’ said Solomon, ‘that was your wife.’
They rolled towards the drinks table, pushing and pinching each other. Grandma had poured whisky into a decanter. I gave them each a glass. They closed their eyes, threw back their heads and drank. Solomon shook his face. His jowls quaked.
Myer pulled Jimmy’s sleeve.
‘Here,’ he whispered.
Jimmy opened his palm to a tiny pair of spectacles.
‘Moishe needed them after the war,’ he said. ‘I found his prescription in the vaults.’
Jimmy held them to the light, as if to see it through Moishe’s eyes.
‘Moishe always stood his round,’ said Myer. ‘He was a mensch.’
All the men had a drink for Moishe then another for Mick, even though they were the same person.
‘I wonder what he would’ve been,’ said Jimmy, ‘who he would’ve been.’
‘A bank manager,’ said Solomon, ‘a family man. Respectable. Grandchildren.’
They stood quietly for a moment, until I said to Jimmy, ‘I’ve got something too.’
I showed him a carving I’d made from a clothes peg.
‘Gottle of gear,’ I said, ‘gottle of gear.’
‘Have you gone berko?’ asked Jimmy.
‘It’s Little Bluey,’ I said, ‘for Bluey.’
I thought it looked like a doll, anyway.
‘Bluey . . .’ said Jimmy. ‘He’d’ve been anything but a ventriloquist.’
‘He couldn’t throw his voice,’ said Myer.
‘He fell at the first hurdle,’ agreed Jimmy.
‘We’d all’ve been different people without the war,’ said Solomon. ‘Except Katz.’
Sylvia and Maurice parked their Volvo behind Solomon’s car. Maurice carried a cake into the house.
‘It’s from David Jones,’ said Sylvia.
‘Welsh fella?’ asked Jimmy.
The frummers squinted at the cake, in case it wasn’t kosher. I grabbed a slice and stuffed it into my mouth before anyone could tell me we had to say a prayer first.
We all stood on the front deck.
‘So this is it,’ said Maurice, tapping the spirit house.
‘This is what?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Whatever it is,’ said Maurice.
‘Yes,’ said Jimmy, ‘it is.’
Maurice nodded his head three times.
‘We think it’s absolutely wonderful you’ve done this,’ said Sylvia.
Jimmy grinned and folded his arms.
‘We just think it might’ve been better if you’d built your haunted house in the backyard, rather than the front,’ said Maurice.
‘Or in the shed,’ said Sylvia.
They asked if Jimmy had found the time to talk to Frida about the unit. He said it was the next thing on his list.
The neighbours filed into my grandmother’s house. Johnny the Head brought a case of beer. Nancy the Beard had baked a pavlova.
Katz walked up from the railway station in drainpipe trousers, a white shirt and a bootlace tie. He looked like a good cowboy come for a gunfight with mean Barry Dick, but the two men just shook hands and talked about painting and whether or not Hashem approved of pictures of the world.
Katz was carrying Darkness at Noon.
‘This is the first party he’s been to since the Communist Party,’ said Solomon, snatching the book and opening it upside down.
‘Ernie Katz,’ said Solomon, ‘is a disillusioned idealist. This means he is . . . This means . . . Katz is . . . I don’t know . . .’ Solomon shook his head. ‘He’s just a cunt, really.’
Solomon suddenly grabbed Katz and hugged him. Katz fought him off with a wriggle and a push.
A Rolls Royce with the number plate ‘Big One’ pulled up at the electrical substation. The chauffeur lumbered out and opened the back door to Jake Mendoza and a much younger woman with legs as brown as Dee Why sand. She took Mendoza’s arm as they walked around my grandmother’s house and into the backyard.
‘It’s the King of the Crossword,’ whispered Solomon.
‘Who the hell asked him?’ asked Jimmy.
‘I am here in my capacity as a community leader,’ said Mendoza.
Jimmy glowered, but I handed him a beer.
‘Let bygones be bygones, eh?’ said Mendoza. ‘On this auspicious occasion. Although I’ve got no idea wh
at kind of fucking occasion it’s supposed to be.’
A canary yellow Camry parked at the gate. Dad stepped out.
‘I asked him too,’ I told Jimmy.
Dad lingered at the fence. Jimmy hurried over to shake his hand.
‘You don’t mind me coming?’ asked Dad.
‘It’s a free country,’ said Jimmy. ‘Thanks to the efforts of men like Katz, who painted us fighting for it.’
I stood between Jimmy and Dad. They each put a hand on my shoulder and talked over my head.
‘I’ve missed our games of snooker,’ said Dad.
‘You always did miss,’ said Jimmy.
‘Somebody had to give an old man a chance,’ said Dad.
Barry Dick balanced his siddur on the roof of the spirit house and recited a blessing. When he was finished, the Maoris chorused ‘Amen’.
Faces turned to Jimmy, who turned too, because he thought they were looking at something behind him.
‘Speech!’ cried Solomon, and clapped.
Trapped, Jimmy took his place behind the spirit house.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ said Jimmy.
‘Brilliant!’ said Myer. ‘Churchillian!’
‘I built this house for me,’ said Jimmy, ‘but I suppose all of us have got memories we need to . . . put away. Some of us are returned men . . .’
Mendoza beamed.
‘. . . and we lived through things we’d rather forget, in Egypt, in Libya, in Singapore, in Malaya and in Liverpool.’
Mendoza nodded.
‘But there’s things you can’t just put out of your mind – mates that you promised you’d remember forever, because if you didn’t then nobody else would and they’d die without mourners and walk the earth like . . . ghosts. It takes more than just a burial to lay a soul to rest. And I mean the souls of the people who are left behind.
‘There’s blokes here who went to war with me. Ernie . . .’
He held out his hand to Katz, who joined him by the spirit house.
