Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  That Sid, the son of a Minsk tailor, owned fifteen stores, all of which featured high mirror-encased pillars, was one of the miracles of this suit.

  But the other miracle was considered (silently, separately) a greater one. And this, of course, was what it had done for Poor Wysbraum.

  He had always, Leah remembered, been known as "Poor Wysbraum". "Poor Wysbraum," her mother might say after he had departed, or just before he arrived and the family sat anticipating the amplified sounds of their visitor's high cracked voice. She did not elaborate on what she meant by "Poor". The house did not permit elaboration, and besides anyone could see that Wysbraum was Poor Wysbraum because he was short and dark and ugly, with huge bruised beetroot-red lips far too heavy for his little doe-eyed face, his ears stolen from a bigger man's head, his huge veined hands emerging from his frayed cuffs. He was Poor Wysbraum because he had, it was silently considered, used the suit to take the braver course, the better, more noble course, and had suffered for his goodness.

  For Wysbraum had taken fifteen years of his life to become, at last, a doctor. He had given up everything, all hope of companionship, marriage, children, a house, just so he could be a doctor, and, when the time came, at last, on his fortieth birthday, he could afford no more than a new practice in Brunswick where the people were even poorer than he was and could not pay their bills.

  When Leah was older she came to resent this description of him as "Poor Wysbraum", found something offensive in it, but when she was a young girl at home she understood the term better, and heard the soft strum of approval, envy even, in the word as well as pity for his loneliness. Later, when she came to analyse things, she did not understand so well and she forgot that it was not just she but all her family who loved Poor Wysbraum who was like food too rich for their ascetic taste, or a scene that was too colourful for eyes attuned to the bleached colours of St Kilda in summer. Wysbraum brimmed with an excess of emotions, angers, fears. He boiled over with stories, his big mouth full of food, while the Goldsteins, quite replete and accepting their headaches without complaint, sat with their hands on their laps and only Sid, their representative, would say: "And then Wysbraum, what happened then?"

  You did not need to accompany them on their visit to the suit in the cupboard to know what sort of bond there was between these two men. You could listen to each of them, at table, extol the virtues of the other, and it was Wysbraum, because he spoke more, because he was not restrained by the house, who shouted his praise the loudest.

  "An honest man", Wysbraum said, "will always do well. And it is this", he told Sid, "that is behind your success."

  "Ah, but it is self-interest."

  "Self-interest, yes, of course," Wysbraum would say, eating five pieces of fried fish or ten pieces of bread, not at once, of course, but the Goldstein girls were all counting. "And also self-interest to have your staff paid more than the union demands, and to know their names, but also honest. I drink to your success. It gives me pleasure, Goldstein. If you had been a bad man and done well, then I would be jealous." Lettuce hung from his mouth. "More. I would be angry. But you have behaved honourably."

  "A kind man", Poor Wysbraum said, "has more importance in the eye of God than a man with a holy book."

  "It is only his way of explaining," Sid said. "Isn't that true, Wysbraum? When you mention God it is your way of explaining your idea. He is not religious," he told his daughters. "Which God?" he demanded of his friend.

  "Who knows?" said Wysbraum. "Not me. But He would not be much of a God if He did not say the kind man was the better man." Beetroot from the salad widened his lips and smudged his mouth amiably across his face.

  "This is not Jaweh."

  "Sit still, Goldstein, be calm."

  "Because the fellow is a bully."

  "Is a bully, was a bully," said Wysbraum. "I agree. I like you better than Him because you are kinder. Ah," he said, considering the table full of uncertain faces, "never tell jokes at the Goldsteins. The Goldsteins are kind, but they are no good with jokes."

  When Wysbraum spoke in favour of kindness no one could doubt his sincerity. So who could have predicted his reaction when Sid Goldstein took it into his head to give away the suit he had shared with Wysbraum?

  It was not, as Wysbraum assumed, a premeditated act. One minute Sid was walking on stockinged feet to answer the door and three minutes later he was waving to a stranger who, having come to the door selling shoelaces, was now walking away with the celebrated suit.

  Sid Goldstein was not sorry to see the suit go. He did not grieve for it. He meant what he said when he spoke to the young man, whose pale blue eyes slid off the dark ones of the donor, embarrassed at the weight of emotion they contained.

  "Here," the tall Jew said, "this is a lucky suit. It was lucky for me. I shared it with my friend and we both got what we wanted. May you", he held out the offering, "have what you want also."

  He did not tell the young man that he had slipped a ten-shilling note into the pocket of the suit. He did not tell his family that the suit had gone. Neither did he communicate this to Wysbraum until he was, once again, seated at family lunch, devouring roast potatoes which were cooked in excessive numbers in deference to his appetite.

  He waited for Wysbraum to begin his final appreciative scrape of the plate, watched the bread being torn, the plate wiped clean, and the gravy-smeared bread despatched into his friend's gaping mouth.

  "Wysbraum," he said, when his friend had folded his napkin and threaded it untidily through the silver napkin ring. "Wysbraum…"

  Wysbraum smiled at his friend and patted his stomach.

  "Wysbraum," Sid Goldstein said with much emotion, "the suit is gone."

  Wysbraum blinked. He pulled the napkin out of its ring and opened it slowly, peering at it as if it contained a tiny pearl he was anxious not to drop. "Gone?" he said, and blinked again.

  "I gave it," Sid said.

  "Gave it?" Wysbraum said incredulously, holding up the napkin to show there was no pearl. "You gave it. To whom did you give it?"

  "To whom. A stranger," he smiled. "A nobody. A young man with no money and no suit. I said to him, this is a lucky suit. It was lucky for Wysbraum and I, and now it can be lucky for you."

  Wysbraum did not move, but his big hands held each end of the napkin like a paper bon-bon he might tear apart with a bang.

  "You had no right," he said quietly, placing the napkin gently on the table.

  "Ha ha," said Sid. "Dear Wysbraum."

  "Not joking," Wysbraum said softly. "You had no right." His tiny dark-suited body bent over the large white plate and he placed two tight fists on either side of the plate, in the places where the knife and fork should rightly sit.

  "I told him our story," Sid said softly. "Maybe, who knows, he will be lucky too, and then," he spread his pale hands, "when he passes on the suit he will pass onhis story as well."

  But Poor Wysbraum, the Goldstein girls saw, was not interested in this fancy. They watched in silence as he squinted his eyes as if to keep out an unpleasant light. Wysbraum's hands uncurled and fluttered anxiously. They took the bread-and-butter plate and stacked it on the dinner plate. They snatched the dessert spoon and placed it on top. Poor Wysbraum shook his head. He rose. He carried his plates and cutlery out into the kitchen. The Goldsteins regarded each other in silent misery, like animals who are unable to express pain. They could hear him clattering out there, but no one moved. The house took the noise of his washing up and blew it up to fifty times its size. The Goldsteins listened to the noise and their frowns deepened and their pale hands began to press hard down into their laps.

  Poor Wysbraum emerged at last, holding a tea-towel in his wet hairy hands.

  "You," he said to his friend with a great shaking voice. "You have all of this." His great lips trembled to hold the weight of his smile as he indicated (waving his tea-towel like a flag) the house, the wife, the three girls. "Past, present, future." The lips quivered but he did not drop the smile. "You
have a history. You deserve it, my friend. Well done."

  There was a silence while they waited, all of them, for the house to stop thundering.

  Wysbraum did not see the girls. He did not see Edith. He saw only Sid Goldstein. It was in his direction he, at last, threw the tea-towel.

  "You have given away my history," Poor Wysbraum shouted before he fled the house trampling on the eardrums of his hosts with his shocking oversize black boots.

  The Goldstein women considered the desolate eyes of Goldstein pere with emotions that Leah at least, when she was older, was to recognize as grief of the order one feels in the face of death.

  8

  That Sid Goldstein then remade the missing suit himself by hand, that he rubbed miserably at the fabric with pumice-stone, rubbed for hours on end to make it shine, that he laid the nap with lard and onion dissolved in gasoline, that he lovingly counterfeited the tear Wysbraum had made falling off the cable car twenty years before, that he shortened and lengthened the trousers almost as many times as he had in the days when he shared the original, that he occupied himself night after night was all known to his family who quietly observed his thin frame bending over the fabric, saw every silent stitch without feeling it necessary to make any comment on the melancholy hobby.

  The girls were all at the Methodist Ladies' College that year, and they sat at the dining table with their homework. They knew, surely, that their schoolmates' fathers did not counterfeit suits. Would Leah have invited home her schoolfriends to witness this? She claims the question is a nonsense: she had no friends.

  Once, on a sultry Sunday night, with a dusty northerly rattling the windows in their frames, Sid Goldstein quietly asked his wife's opinion of the smell of the suit, but she did not move from her chair. She smiled and shrugged which clearly meant that her opinion was worth nothing, that she had not shared the cheap meals Wysbraum had spilled on the suit, nor had she sniffed at it in its old age as it hung in the hallway cupboard.

  Sid, seeing the smile and shrug, sighed and picked up the pumice-stone again.

  Another family might, later if not sooner, have chosen to take away the pain from all of this by wrapping it in the bandages of a joke, and, by repeating the correct rituals, have changed it into something smooth and untroubled.

  But they made no jokes. Nor did they ever remark that it was at this time that sixteen-year-old Leah announced her intention to be a doctor. There seems no doubt that this serious young lady's decision had something to do with kindness but it is not an easy matter to decide exactly what or how.

  Leah assumed her father understood her, that she was paying Wysbraum a great compliment, that she had chosen the course of her life in order that he might have, in future, a history. And when, on the night her father asked her to accompany him (for the first time ever) when he delivered the suit to Wysbraum's surgery, she saw this as proof that he understood.

  Yet it seems likely that Sid took her along for moral support, to stop Wysbraum shouting at him and saying ugly words which sometimes, in spite of his awkward good manners, slipped out o*f his mouth and lay, as scandalous as bird shit, on Goldstein's clean white tablecloth.

  It is also possible that, without understanding her kind motives, he wished to discourage her and that he took her to Wysbraum's surgery to show her that being a doctor is not necessarily all roses, and that not all doctors have flowers in their waiting rooms, or even magazines, or even, in Wysbraum's case, chairs.

  Wysbraum's practice was in Smith Street, Brunswick, and I am not making a mistake and saying Brunswick instead of Colling-wood. Smith Street, Collingwood, is a big wide street. It goes somewhere; it comes from somewhere; it has definition, purpose. But Smith Street in Brunswick is nothing but a smudge, a cul-de-sac, and it was here that Wysbraum's surgery was, in a space he seemed to have (with a foreigner's impatience) elbowed between two terrace houses. It was eight feet wide, one storey high, two rooms deep and smelt of damp. The brass plaque had already been stolen and the small red lantern that he had paid three pounds for had been broken by children with shanghais. It was not an inspiring place.

  Sid Goldstein and Leah Goldstein waited in the surgery with the suit. They waited beside the woman with goitre and the man with the slipped disc who interrupted the story of his injury with visits to the doorway, from which vantage he propelled small globs of spittle into the rank summer night.

  Leah and her father examined each other's dark eyes.

  When Wysbraum at last received them, he was embarrassed. He looked as if he wished to climb into one of the cardboard boxes that littered his office floor. He offered Leah his own chair. He accepted the suit without seeming to notice what it was. He hung it behind the door. He gave Sid the patient's seat. His face wobbled. His lips were like red jelly in a field of iron filings. He straightened a leaking pen in a sea of raging papers. He looked at Sid Goldstein and then away. Someone walked into the waiting room and began to walk up and down sighing (or perhaps it was an asthmatic wheeze).

  "Wysbraum," Sid Goldstein said, "we have brought the suit."

  "Suit?" Wysbraum was a mess of misery, half rage and half apology. "Suit?"

  "Not exactly the suit." Sid stood. He held his hands up. He spread them out. "A copy," he smiled, willing Wysbraum's far larger mouth to do what his smaller one could do with so much less effort.

  "Ho," Wysbraum said, slapping his hands together like a hearty man (Wysbraum's idea of a hearty man) while all the time his eyes brimmed with old hurt and new embarrassment. 'Ho," he said again. "The suit."

  He clumped to the door and lifted down the suit. It was hung on its original coat-hanger, the same one, exactly, with its chipped coat of green paint and its small bag of lavender.

  He examined it slowly, carefully, looking over it in every detail.

  He was so overcome he could not look at Sid, or even talk to him. He spoke instead to Leah.

  "A copy," he said in a choked voice. "A perfect copy."

  "She is going to be a doctor," Sid said behind him, smiling at Leah, nodding encouragement.

  "Are you?" Wysbraum said, his eyes brimming. "Is this true?"

  "Yes," said Leah, pleased but also alarmed.

  "Oh Leah," Wysbraum said and embraced her. She felt his tears in her hair and smelt his lard and onions. Her nose was pressed into his stale shirt. It was a long long time before Leah even guessed that the body Wysbraum had held had not been hers, and that his tears had nothing to do with either her ambitions or her kindness.

  It was because of this misunderstanding that she wrote, in that letter to her father that caused her so much difficulty, "Please apologize to Poor Wysbraum – I know I have let him down and although I feel I have disappointed you I feel that I have betrayed him."

  Sid Goldstein did not know what his daughter was talking about.

  9

  If Melbourne University would not accept his daughter, then that was bad luck for Melbourne. Sid Goldstein put on his twelve-ounce grey-wool suit and gold-rimmed spectacles and enlisted Poor Wysbraum. The pair of them went on the train to Sydney and made a nuisance of themselves from Rose Bay to Macquarie Street.

  They had no shame. There was no one they would not enlist in their cause, no old friend, no new acquaintance, no total stranger who might appear to have some influence in the matter. Poor Wysbraum did not hesitate, at dinner at the Finks', to produce Leah's report cards. They were circulated around the table while their object sat squirming in her uncomfortable chair trying to eat soup with a spoon too big for her mouth while reeling from the waste of all the words that gushed, without modesty or restraint, from the ten mouths gathered, surely, for eating and not talking.

  Sid Goldstein and Poor Wysbraum pushed and shoved and elbowed on her behalf until, in the end, they made a gap in Sydney University just big enough to accommodate her.

  The acceptance came on a steamy overcast February day exactly three hours before Sid Goldstein must return to Melbourne. Sid did not like to rush, and was already
flustered at the thought of what he must do in three hours. Walking across the quadrangle he started pushing wads of banknotes at Leah and giving her instructions on her future conduct. Wysbraum was twenty yards ahead, showing no respect for the neatly trimmed grass, clomping on echoing boots down the flagstoned quadrangle, his trousers too short, his white handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, sweat streaming from his pale forehead. Sid, following after, punctuated his normal amble with an impatient skip.

  They followed Wysbraum out of the university and across Parramatta Road. They followed him up steps cut into a steep rockface, then on to another street lined with old terrace houses.

  "Wysbraum," Sid shouted, "Wysbraum, what are we doing?"

  "Digs," said Wysbraum, opening the gate at the bottom of a steep flight of stone steps.

  "Digs?" shouted Sid Goldstein. "Wysbraum, we must pack. We must catch our train."

  "Yes, yes," said Wysbraum. "Wait, wait," and ran up the steps to the house which displayed a "Room to Let" sign in its front window.

  Leah waited with her father amidst the smell of leaking gas and dying nasturtiums while Wysbraum conducted his mysterious business at the top of the crumbling concrete steps.

  He was back in five minutes.

  "It is taken," he said.

  "What is taken, Wysbraum?"

  "The room for your daughter, to sleep in, to live."

  "Oh no," said Sid Goldstein, loosening his tie. "Oh no, I forgot."

  "Don't worry." Wysbraum's ugly face dripped with sweat. "I have discovered she has a front parlour, upstairs. She is a widow. Her husband was Commissioner of Police in Cairo. A big man. She has a nasty case of psoriasis. I have written her a prescription. Her name is Heller", Wysbraum said breathlessly, "and she has three boarders. I have persuaded her she can have four if she permits us to purchase a bed. She wishes only to be sure", Wysbraum giggled, "that we are not Catholics. I have assured her. She asks two pounds for full board. What do you say?"