Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Sid Goldstein looked at his daughter in alarm.

  Leah smiled.

  "All right," said Wysbraum, "you will go with Leah and inspect the house. I will buy the bed."

  "Maybe", Sid said, "there is a better place."

  "Better, no," Wysbraum said. "There is no better place, and besides the train leaves in three hours."

  Sid looked at the house. He wondered if this was how Wysbraum had chosen his surgery. He did not approve of buying the first thing. He looked at the rusted guttering, the thistles amongst the nasturtiums, the desolation of Parramatta Road with its lorries, carts, horses.

  "I will buy the bed," said Wysbraum trotting sweatily down the steps.

  "How much is the bed?" asked Sid helplessly.

  "Cheap," Wysbraum said. "I will buy her a double bed and she can sleep in it forever."

  Sid frowned. Leah blushed. "Poor Wysbraum," her father said, but more from habit than conviction. They walked upstairs to meet Mrs Heller and assure her they were not Catholic.

  10

  It was cold at Crab Apple Creek and Leah Goldstein tugged at her long black woollen socks, pulled so hard that the perfect round white hole that had occupied a spot at the very centre of her left shin now suddenly became long and thin, almost invisible, as it darted up towards her lovely knee. She wrapped her blue-dyed greatcoat tight around herself. She found a half-burnt stick on the ground and threw it back into the flames of the fire. She shivered.

  "Well," she said.

  Charles moved closer to her and she felt his warty hand come creeping towards her, like a lost crab wandering in the dark. The hand was so hungry and cold she held it in both of hers. Its back was hard and rough, its underbelly soft.

  "Where's your father hiding?" She rubbed the rough-textured skin, trying to warm it. "If he thinks he's entertaining us, he's upter."

  She looked across at the little girl who sat exactly where she had been before the con-man had done his trick. All Leah could see of her emotions was the camp fire reflected in her eyes.

  "Timing, Mr Badgery," the dancer said sarcastically to the night. But she spoilt the effect by the way she jerked her head to look, bird-fast and nervous, over her shoulder.

  "He disappeared," Sonia said and Leah did not know her well enough to realize that the tone was not quite normal.

  "An illywhacker," Leah Goldstein said loudly like someone fearful of burglars who descends the stairs, flashlight in hand, in the middle of the night.

  "What's an illywhacker?" said Charles.

  "Spieler," explained Leah, who was not used to children. "Eelerspee. It's like pig Latin. Spieler is ieler-spe and then iely-whacker. Illywhacker. See?"

  "I think so," Charles said.

  "A spieler," Leah gently loosened the painful crab hold of the boy's hand. "Your nails are sharp. A trickster. A quandong. A ripperty man. A con-man."

  Sonia pulled her cardigan down over her knees and stared into the fire where solid matter was reappearing in thin blue cloaks of turbulent gas.

  "When will he come back?" asked the dancer.

  In later life Charles would recall only the brilliance of his father's magic, but now, hearing the nervousness in the adult's voice, he was suddenly very frightened. He began to cry. Sonia immediately moved to comfort her brother.

  So they sat, the three of them, side by side on one log, huddled against each other, waiting for Herbert Badgery to reappear. And you, dear reader, will do me the kind favour of emulating my patient daughter and neither make sarcastic comments like the ill-informed Goldstein (who thinks me engaged in some simple trick) nor snivel like my fearful son who is so easily convinced that I am gone for good. Thus you will not waste time staring out into the night but will, alone with Sonia, appreciate the thin green tower of flame which rises from the wattle log to meet – like a comet on a chance collision – the blue penumbra of the yellow flower made by the dancer's broken stick.

  11

  When Edith Goldstein questioned her husband about their eldest daughter's accommodation in Sydney he realized he did not even know the name of the street it stood in. It was this, not weariness, that gave him flu symptoms. It was panic that his carelessness would be uncovered. His normally sallow face coloured and he opened the taxi window to get air. Edith watched her husband with alarm as he began to talk. She held his hand and, without making any comment about what she was doing, felt his pulse. The room, Sid told her breathlessly, had a good bed. It was a double bed. He considered this quite appropriate. She could keep this bed forever. It was good enough to marry with, of first quality, made in America. The room had an excellent view ("You could not stop himself) the tapestries on the wall and he saw (now he thought about it) that these depicted not only camels, men in red fezzes, pyramids and dancing girls but also, in the bottom right-hand corner, a small shrub that looked very like an Australian Bottlebrush. The landlady was a widow. Her husband had been a Commissioner of Police in Cairo. This is where the tapestries in their daughter's bedroom had come from.

  "Stop, stop," cried Edith Goldstein. "I will write to her. She will tell me. Poke out your tongue."

  But to write she would need the address. She did not have an address. He could not put out his tongue, "I will write," he said, so firmly that his wife – although surprised – did not question him.

  "I will write," he repeated, saying nothing about the concrete steps, the odd smells, the nasturtiums, although these were things that troubled him deeply. "I have written", he declared, "already. On the train. The porter is posting it for me."

  Thus was invented that rickety thing, the Missing Letter. Edith was too worried about her husband's health to query him as to why he would give a letter to a porter, and so the Missing Letter was allowed to survive. It is mentioned often in the early correspondence between father and daughter, e. g. "Have you yet received the Missing Letter?"

  Had it not been for this imaginary letter there might have been no correspondence between father and daughter at all. "I must first tell you", Sid would write in his second letter to his daughter, "what was in the letter that the porter did not post." The letters, at first, are shy and stilted on both sides, and Leah's are ponderous and dull. There is no indication of the dialogue that would later develop. This was not due, on Leah's side at least, to a lack of amusing incidents or new sights to describe but rather to the fact that she was just learning to talk.

  Leah, at this time, was unaware of the virtues of discussion and had long been in the habit of making her mind up on important matters without any help from anyone. She would come to a conclusion slowly, tortuously, and she would go over and over it (her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the ceiling) until it was smooth and flawless. In this manner she arrived at ideas that were often original, but not easily accepted by others.

  She did not, however, consider herself clever. If she was to succeed at the university she would have to work five times as hard as anyone else. She brushed aside any suggestion of joining debating societies or amateur theatricals and when there were pig worms to be dissected she managed to slip an extra one into her handbag so that she could bring the little pink parasite home to her room and there perform the dissection a second time. The pig worm, being only five inches long, was easily smuggled into the house and escaped Mrs Heller's attention. However, when she carried home a dogfish, the odours of formaldehyde and fish gave her away, and Mrs Heller, her red scaly skin hidden beneath Wysbraum's black tar treatment, came to complain about the smell.

  Leah politely declined to place the "thing" in the large brown paper bag her landlady held out into the room. Whereupon Mrs Heller – as white-eyed and black-faced as Al Jolson – announced she would send up Mr Kaletsky.

  Leah knew nothing of this Mr Kaletsky. She had promised her mother, in answer to a specific question, that there were no men in the house. She had not noticed the small room, tucked away beside the laundry in the concreted backyard, where Izzie Kaletsky slept. He did not pay full board and so did not c
ome to table.

  Leah, waiting for the mysterious Mr Kaletsky, sat in front of her dissection board where the dogfish's nervous system was being untidily exposed. She took out her notebook and began to sketch the pale ganglia, using her eraser too much so that pieces of indiarubber and paper found their way into the dissection.

  This is how Izzie found her when she bade him "enter", a very prim and serious young lady, dressed in black, sketching a dead fish. To Izzie, this was an appealing sight. He did not, however, as Leah mischievously claimed on other occasions, introduce himself by saying: "My name is Kaletsky and my brother is a revolutionary in Moscow."

  Leah had expected an old man with a belly. This did not look like a "Mr" anyone. He was tiny. He had dark ringlets of hair, small hands, and a wide mouth that hovered in the tantalizing androgynous no man's land between pretty and handsome. His good looks were spoiled only by his skin, and yet even that was interesting, being coarsely textured, a little like a lemon.

  Izzie's pointed feet would not stay still. He grinned, mocking either her or himself – it wasn't clear. He had thin wrists like a girl.

  "Miss Goldstein."

  She was not above a little theatre – she leaned back and sharpened her pencil, squinting all the time at her smudgy drawing. Her cheeks were burning, but who was to know that this was not her normal colour?

  "I am Kaletsky."

  "Come in," she said. "Complain."

  He moved into the room a little but left the door, as was proper, wide open. Leah could hear the voices of the student teachers in the stairwell.

  "You are famous," he said. "First they talk about nothing else but how little you talk. Then it is all about how much you work. Now you have given them a smell. They love you."

  Leah heard a clatter on the stairs, fast whispers, and then heavy brogues marching across the linoleum in the front hall.

  Izzie grinned. "See what excitements you produce. They never talked to each other before you came. Mrs Heller only wanted to remember her husband the Police Commissioner and tell everyone how nice it is to have servants – 'When I had servants my skin was beautiful.' And the students were dull and made toast because they had nothing to say."

  He talked on and on. Leah had never heard, she thought, somebody use so many words in all her life, not even Wysbraum, nor seen anyone who made such a confusing, contradictory impression of confidence and shyness. For while his words were so confident (so interesting, so light, with a rhythm like soft erratic rain) his body looked as if it feared rejection – the small feet moved to and fro, the hands clasped each other and the dark eyes could not hold hers for more than an instant. The effect was puzzling but, on the whole, pleasing.

  He came to look over her shoulder at the dogfish.

  "We are having a meeting about Germany" he said, "tonight. Would you like to come?"

  Leah imagined castles on the Rhine.

  12

  Rosa Kaletsky opened her eyes and surveyed her backyard. It was an untidy place, graceless, with concrete paths. A rusting caravan occupied the centre of the lawn. A clothes-line ran across one corner, above some roses which the sheets now tangled with. Forty-four-gallon drums containing scrap metal stood on either side of the high gate in the paling fence, and Leah Goldstein, when she entered this world fifteen minutes later, would be shocked at its untidiness, the weeds amongst the cabbage bed, the rusting tricycle tangled amongst the passion-fruit. But Rosa, sitting on the cracked concrete step, smelt the salt from Bondi Beach, the lovely perfume of her drying sheets, and when she opened her eyes she saw green oranges and the splendid glow of copper appearing in the verdigrised cauldron her husband was now polishing with Brasso.

  Izzie was bringing a girl to meet them and Rosa was at once curious, impatient and also irritable that she would have to surface from her pleasant reverie in the sun. She was a well-preserved woman in her early fifties, large-boned and well proportioned. And although her frock was an old one and her hair was tangled and needed a brush, she could still be said to be a beauty.

  "I'm going to give Bo a bath," she said, but did not move. She was looking at the sky between the leaves of the orange tree and imagined she could see the light of the shining copper bathing the green fruit.

  "I should get changed," she said a moment later. "And so should you," she told her husband. "Those shorts." But she smiled. "If you must wear shorts you should get your legs brown."

  Lenny Kaletsky didn't answer her. He was immersed in the great copper cauldron which stood on a heavy cast-iron base. What sort of scrap-metal dealer, she thought, brings home a bit of junk to polish because it is beautiful? "Mark must have laughed at you," she said.

  Lenny looked up and grinned. He had a mass of grey hair and owl-like eyebrows the colour of nicotine. His face was crumpled, like a paper bag. He was broad-shouldered and chested, but his legs were thin, like a cocky little sparrow, Rosa thought. He was shorter than Rosa by a good two inches and looked older. In their early days together, when they were both show people, travelling the tent shows in the country towns, when she had been Rosalind and he Leonard, he had never shown this interest in beautiful things. She had had to teach him how to dress.

  Rosa yawned. "I must get changed." Then (was it so late?) she heard the squeak of the front gate. She suddenly felt irritated and not interested in having to talk to anyone and so watched the girl – the first girl this son had brought home -silently, a little critically. She admired the austerity of her beauty, the simple grey silk dress which, she thought, would scandalize her son if he knew how much such simplicity cost. She offered her cheek to Izzie and told him he was too pale. Did he bring this girl home, she wondered, because she was a Jew? They gathered around the cauldron while Bo jumped up on Izzie and then sniffed the girl's shoes.

  Izzie was teasing his father.

  "Melt it?" said Lenny, smiling at the girl. "Melt a thing like this? An heirloom?" He said nothing of the other thirty cauldrons they would have already melted. Before the day was over he would be showing off, eating fire or bending an iron bar.

  "It is disgusting," Rosa said. She was doubly irritable because she did not want to be. "If you say it is beautiful you're not thinking. You would not say it is beautiful if you had to work over it every day."

  The girl's grey eyes looked at her with alarm, and then away.

  "Ah," Izzie nudged his father, "the Marxist critique."

  "A Marxist, perhaps," said Rosa, standing, trying to smile. "A communist, no. Don't you make fun of me." She ruffled her son's head. "You wishy-washy. Look at your clothes. Do you think they make you more appealing? Come and sit with me, Leah. In the sunshine. Leah dresses nicely," she told the men who were standing, as usual, in the shade. "Sit here, the concrete is clean. Have you noticed", she asked the girl, "that the left are always drab? When I was in the Party they thought I was frivolous. They did not trust me because of my dresses."

  "Don't listen to her, Leah," Lenny called. "This is her hobby-horse."

  "They dressed like they had no hope. It is capitalism, I told them, that is bleak, not socialism. When there is a revolution the people should wear wonderful clothes, streamers, flags, balloons. It should be full of joy and love, not look like a funeral. Do you like picnics?"

  Leah Goldstein smiled. "Yes, I do, very much."

  "Would you like to come for a picnic with me, one day when you are free?"

  "Yes."

  "Good," said Rosa smiling, "now I am cheered up," and she laughed. "I apologize for my mood."

  The two women sat on the concrete step smiling at each other.

  13

  Leah Goldstein would leave the Kaletskys that night with a splitting headache. She had laughed too much, heard too much, eaten too much peculiar food. There had been discord, vulgarity, and such shifts in mood, from sombre to carefree and back again, that she became lost and dizzy. She had drunk a glass of sweet wine on the grass beneath the orange tree, patted the dog, and heard Rosa's life story, how her young mother had r
un away from her father and walked all the miles from Poland to Vienna, how they had arrived to find her mother's uncle all packed to go to Australia and how they had gone too. Her uncle, a cultured man, had disliked Australia and within a year he was packing all his books again and dragging his family across the seas, this time to Palestine. Rosa's mother had wanted to go, but the uncle would not pay – she had taken a goyim for a lover and was out of favour. Later the goyim left but she had found another, a man who ate fire for a living. The story went on and on, while the men, sitting in the shade with a bottle of beer, called out their teasing comments.

  Rosa had left the Communist Party when they turned on Trotsky and talking about this she began, quite inexplicably, to cry and Leah, bewildered, quite out of her depth, could do nothing to comfort her but pat – she felt so inadequate – the back of her hostess's honey-coloured hand while the dog leapt up and licked her face.

  Then Lenny announced he would bend a bar of steel between his teeth and Rosa stopped crying and began teasing him, saying he was an old man trying to impress a young girl and Leah blushed and became uncomfortable. She looked at Izzie who was sitting on the laundry steps, and he smiled at her, and raised his eyebrow in the direction of his cock-sparrow father who was, at that moment, fossicking in one of the rusty forty-four-gallon drums, looking for a piece of suitable iron.

  "Too thin," said Izzie when his father held up a piece of bolt-studded metal. "Thicker, thicker."

  Lenny frowned, hesitated, and went back to the bin. Finally he found a piece of steel rod that Izzie applauded. The dog raced round and round the yard barking and Rosa was again tranquil as she lifted her handsome face to the sun.