Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  "Do you like to dance?" she asked Leah, but Lenny was now standing before them. He insisted Leah pick up the bar, even though it was oily.

  He placed the bar between his stained teeth, shut his eyes, positioned his pale legs like a weight-lifter and began to pull down on it with both hands.

  The bar began to bend, but then Lenny pulled a face. He took the bar out of his mouth and spat into his hand. He looked at what was in his hand and looked up and grinned. He had broken two teeth.

  "You silly man," said Rosa Kaletsky. "Oh, you silly man." But she did not seem upset about her husband's teeth and indeed neither did Lenny, who having rinsed his mouth out with beer, went back to sit by his son.

  Rosa began to quiz her about her family and pretended to be shocked that they observed none of the Jewish customs, not even Passover. She had never heard of matzo, never tasted the bitter herb, never waited, impatiently, for the moment when she could eat the charoset.

  "Ha," Rosa called out to her son. "So you were bringing home a nice Jewish girl to meet your mother."

  Izzie looked uncomfortable but smiled.

  "A Presbyterian, a shiksah. Oh dear," she laughed and Leah's face hurt from trying to smile against the current of her embarrassment.

  "Shut up, Rosa," Izzie said, suddenly serious.

  "Don't you 'shut up' to me, mister," Rosa snapped, fiercely. "You wash out your mouth."

  There was silence amongst the combative, confusing Kaletskys for a moment and then Lenny began to explain to Leah that he was not a real Jew either, that his mother had been a shiksah, a dancer in Ballarat who stole Lola Montez's Spider Dance.

  "Her name was MacDonald. You never met a woman so kosher. We had two sets of everything, two sinks, two sets of bowls for cooking. By the time she was sixty she looked like a Jew," he giggled. "Her nose grew. She was very pious. When my father died we had to sit on the floor formonths. Poor dear Sheila, oh dear."

  "A nasty old woman," said Rosa.

  "Not very nice," Lenny admitted, feeling inside his mouth with his finger. "I broke a gold one too."

  "Whereze cats?" Rosa said suddenly. "Where are they?" The dog jumped out of her lap, its ears cocked, and began to race around the yard. "We will give him a b-a-t-h," she announced. "Come, Leah."

  "It is too late for a bath. It is too cold," Lenny said, standing and carrying two empty beer bottles to the rubbish bin.

  But they washed the dog anyway and when it was done all ran around, giggling, trying to keep clear of the showers of water the shaking dog sent in all directions. The dog scratched a bare spot in the lawn and rolled itself in the dirt and Leah watched it sadly, thinking herself a dog who has lost its doggy smell. She envied the Kaletskys their jokes and their tempers, their matzos, their gold mouths, their bookish uncles, their shiksah dancers. In comparison her own life felt white and odourless. She felt herself dull, a person without a history, or even a character. She wished she could roll in the dirt like the dog, roll and roll, and rub her chin along the sandy soil and get her doggy smell back.

  When, walking to the tram, Izzie held her hand, she did not, as she had imagined in the morning – anticipating this very event -take it back, but found herself, instead, holding it tightly. They both misunderstood her emotions, and the misunderstanding would continue, would grow greater rather than diminish as that year of 1930 continued and finally reached its zenith in 1931 when she would marry Izzie Kaletsky when it was really Rosa that she loved.

  14

  The letters were an agony to her. Sometimes she would sit an hour between sentences. She could not say that she had danced the foxtrot with a young man who did not reach her shoulder, nor that the young man was a socialist, nor that she had, on one sweet balmy evening, walked past crumbling houses whose tiny gardens were heavy with frangipani, to hear this young man speak in an awful hall which echoed with the heavy boots of working men. Her father had no time for socialists, but how could he have not been moved to see Izzie do battle with his shyness? When he had opened his mouth she had heard, quite clearly, the sound of a throat so dry with fear that its membranes might adhere and strangle him. He wrung his dainty hands and shut his eyes. The audience went, suddenly, very quiet. She did not know that this was the way it was, would always be with Izzie, that he would, in these moments of mute terror, move huge gatherings of people to wish him well, to will him success, to sit with their own throats dry, their own hands clenched, wishing him eloquence. And then his foot, like a band leader, hit three times, haltingly, and then (as if he felt the audience sigh and lean towards him) he began to speak, lightly, intensely, personally. When the meeting was over, she stayed in her seat, limp, quite drained. She saw large working men with arms as thick as Izzie's skinny legs come up and shake his hand.

  Nor could she say that the young man made her feel stupid, that almost everything, every day, made her curse the inadequacy of her previous life, the lack of talk, lack of ideas, lack of laughter. There had been few books in Malvern Road, and these were novels, hidden away in the musty big bedroom her mother and father shared, a room she rarely entered and then only secretly, perhaps intent on unearthing the mysteries of marital sex. (She discovered nothing more than a little blue-labelled bottle of vaseline with dust clinging to its greasy lid and two romances by Walter Scott, always the same two, inside which -had she been more curious about books – she would have discovered a rubber contraceptive sheath in a little paper envelope.)

  She had walked through the Domain, her high-arched feet blistered from new shoes, and seen men camping in huts made from corrugated cardboard boxes and a little sparrow-limbed girl in George Street dressed in a pitiful fairy costume, begging with a tin in one hand and a silver wand in the other. These things moved her far too much to write about in letters. But this was not the end of the secrets: she had begun to help Izzie in his Labour Party work. She cleaned halls after meetings and ruined her grey silk dress with ink from the Roneo machine. Not only could she not mention this to her father but Izzie had warned her not to tell Rosa who, he said, would scorn her for reformism.

  For a person who prided herself on her honesty these burdens were hard to bear.

  15

  She did not know that she had fallen in love with Rosa, only that her heart lightened when she was called downstairs to the telephone. "You must not come if I am interfering with your studies," Rosa would say.

  "No, no. I am just finishing."

  She would run upstairs again, run downstairs to iron a blouse, upstairs to clean her shoes and when the taxi tooted outside she would leave her normally neat room in a mess of books and stockings, discarded slips and rejected skirts, and arrive at the taxi out of breath. At this moment, laughing, collapsing into the seat next to Rosa, she would not think of the guilt and anger she would feel when the picnic was over, when she would walk heavily to her room and look with disgust at the evidence of her indolence.

  They picnicked everywhere, in Centennial Park, Cooper Park, but most often near the harbour. They took ferries to Manly, to Taronga Park, to Mosman and Cremorne. They sat, always, at the bow, in front of the ferry captain, and held their hats with one hand while their faces pressed against the soft-gloved salt air. Then, when the engine bells rang, they would clatter down the stairs with basket and rug to see the harbour framed like a painting in the wide wooden doorway.

  Then they would walk along paths above tangles of morning glory and wild lantana and spread their rug and take off their hats and let the warm March sun bathe their uplifted faces. When she was with Rosa she felt as if the world was about to burst open, like a delicious tropical fruit, and spill its seeds into her cupped hands.

  It was her youth that Rosa liked, her youth that she celebrated, and yet it seemed to Leah that it was Rosa who was young, whose pleasure in the world made Leah feel old and wooden. Rosa was filled with passions and enthusiasms, sudden squalls of anger and equally sudden exclamations of childlike (Leah thought) delight. It was Rosa, for instance, who would stop to p
oint out streaky cirrus clouds that Leah had not even noticed: "Feathers of ice," she had said as they spread the rug on white-flowered clover. "Oh Leah, I love this city. It is so beautiful. Whenever I am unhappy I come to the harbour. It is always splendid, but it is so much nicer when I can share it with someone who does not know it."

  Rosa did not show Leah the battle with unhappiness that made these trips so necessary to her, her empty days, all those days, those years of days since she had stopped being Rosalind the dancer. She lived with an almost crippling sense of wasted time and sometimes it seemed that she only lived to read the letters from the son she really loved, the son she had so carelessly thrown into the arms of the revolution.

  But Leah saw none of this. She loved the way Rosa sat on the rug, the looseness of her limbs, the way she had of holding her hands together, the right hand circling the left thumb. She liked the fine wrinkles around her blue eyes, the wideness of her mouth, the wind-tangled curly honey hair.

  They ate prawns from newspaper and drank wine: Leah, one glass; Rosa, the rest of the bottle.

  And it was under the influence of this single glass that Leah, on their third picnic, began to unburden herself of secrets.

  "No," Rosa said, when Leah had made her first confession. "You are not dull or stupid. 'You are young. Of course you know nothing. You are a baby. Don't smile. You have strong feelings and don't know how to argue in their defence. You will spend the rest of your life finding justifications for your strong feelings. I watched you, the day you came to my house – the way you sat, so meekly. Your hands were – so -in your lap, your head bowed, very meek. And inside, I knew, you were boiling with all sorts of things you would like to say. You were not meek at all. So, tell me, what is it you really want to do with your life?"

  Leah's hands were sticky with prawns, her head light with wine. She tore a piece of bread from the loaf and threw it to the jostling crowd of orange-legged seagulls.

  "I would like," she said, watching the seagulls fight but not seeing them, "to do one really fine thing."

  "I knew you were a dangerous girl," said Rosa, laughing. And then, seeing how shy and embarrassed the girl was, added, more tenderly: "What thing?"

  "I don't know," the girl said.

  "Only one?"

  "It would be enough, wouldn't it?"

  "I don't know." Rosa poured herself more wine and lay on her back. She held the glass in one hand and shaded her eyes with the other. "When I was young, I was just like you. Very moral. Very serious. But my character was flawed. The real reason I left the Party was nothing to do with what they did to Trotsky (Trostsky was not a saint himself). The real reason was because I couldn't spend my life in dark rooms when the sky is like this. I could not believe there would be a revolution here. I blamed the gold, working men with gold in their mouths, but, really, it was the sky. Look at it. It has no history. But is this why you study medicine? To do one fine thing?"

  Leah sat cross-legged, her hands folded in the nest of her pleated skirt. She blushed, but although she wished to bow her head, did not. "Do I seem silly?"

  "Not at all. But why a doctor? Why not a baker?"

  The girl smiled.

  "But why not? Have you never smelt bread?" Rosa shut her eyes and her nostrils flared as she smelt imaginary loaves. "You wish to be of use. I was the same. I joined the Party. Of course I was often travelling, on the road, but I did whatever work I could. My husband thought I was mad, but I did dull and menial things for the Party and I felt that being a dancer was of no worth. But a danceris of worth and a baker… candlestick makers too."

  Rosa sat up slowly and rubbed her eyes. "I will tell you why, really, I left the Party. It was because they could not take a dancer seriously. They could not imagine I was a serious person. I was not dowdy enough for them. Do you believe me?"

  "Yes, Rosa," said solemn Leah.

  "It is a lie," said Rosa, looking out across the harbour where a liner was coming around the point from the Quay, coloured streamers still dangling from its sides. "I am so used to saying it, I believe it." When she turned her gaze was so fierce that Leah averted her eyes and began to fiddle with the loaf of bread. "The bastards expelled me."

  Leah blushed.

  "Because", Rosa said, "they are puritans and hypocrites, because I had an affair with a married comrade. We used to come on picnics, like this, and tell secrets to each other. But they did not expel him. He was a man. They expelled me. It's quite true. He was very senior too. That is why I can't forgive them." She drank her wine, thirstily, emptying the tumbler and refilling it. "So now, darling, you have my secret. You are shocked?"

  "No," said Leah, who was shocked. "Not at all," she said, as if she heard about such things every day. "I was thinking about your son, Joseph, in Moscow."

  "What else is there for him to do?" said Rosa hotly, rubbing her eyes. "How could he be anything else but a Marxist? Better a Marxist than some wishy-washy social democrat." And to emphasize the point she threw a prawn head at a scavenging seagull.

  "Oh, Rosa!"

  "Yes, I know Izzie is your friend, but he is my son." This time it was the wine cork she threw.

  "He is very kind," said Leah, "and that is what is important."

  Rosa's face then underwent one of those transformations that would always delight Leah – it sloughed off its tired miserable lines and became drum-tight with a splendid smile.

  "And that is what's important? Kindness?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes," said Rosa, shaking out her hair. "Kindness and dancing. Can we agree on that?"

  Leah could not say yes but smiled instead.

  "I will teach you to dance," said Rosa with a shyness that Leah did not understand. "Then you will understand what I am talking about." But it would be another week before Leah realized how important the dancing lessons might be to Rosa and now she only smiled, relieved that Rosa's mood had passed.

  But even then, as they contented themselves with the progress of a tugboat pushing its way back to Pyrmont, a man came up to them and asked them for money. His eyes were downcast and he had cardboard tied to the bottom of his shoes. He was a young man too, no more than thirty. Rosa gave him the money and he went away.

  They watched him trudge around the path beside the seawall.

  "I am suddenly struck," Rosa said, her smile quite collapsed, "by how evil we are." She looked down at the empty prawn shells, the broken heads, the long thin feelers and something -perhaps it was only the flies crawling on them – made her shudder.

  16

  Secrets sheltered within secrets, boxes within boxes, and in the heart of this secret world, in the ultimate box, sweet as sandalwood, Leah Goldstein danced, felt her heart pump, her glands secrete, savoured the sweet ache of unused muscles and knew herself – beneath the eye of her stern-faced but contented teacher – to grow beautiful.

  In this final box, the stories had no moral. They were dancing stories set in country halls, flapping tents. Here Rosalind danced for miners. There Leonard bent his iron bar and swallowed fire to wild applause, while the man he had become drove his trucks through the Sydney streets unaware that, in his own house, his wife was romancing about their difficult past, turning those country halls into theatres as glittering as the fortune they had never found.

  It was months before they were sprung and by then it was too late. The women, both of them, were addicted. So when Lenny found them -having arrived at the house in the middle of the day, his heart set on nothing more complicated than cheese and pickles – there was nothing he could do to stop it. He opened the door of the spare room as Leah Goldstein – moving to the rhythms of Lou Rodana's Orchestra – dropped a coloured scarf to reveal her small leotard-clad breasts.

  There was a silence then. The gramophone clicked noisily. Lenny fumbled for a cigarette in his blue overalls, but even while he discarded wet matches, one by one, his eyes took in the scene -the electric radiator glowing in the corner, the wind-up gramophone in the empty fireplace, the gir
l's shapely legs, the sweat on her upper lip, the old scrapbooks spread across the little table beneath the cobweb-covered windows and – last of all – his wife's pleading eyes as she stood and smiled.

  "Show me", he said to his wife, "where you keep dry matches."

  "You know where," she said, not wishing to be alone with him.

  "Show me," he said.

  Rosa laughed, a high scratchy laugh, and followed him out of the room. Leah lifted the arm from the gramophone and wound it up again.

  She could hear Lenny's angry voice. She removed the needle from the arm and searched through a tiny tin box looking for a sharper one.

  17

  Rosa gave him his matches, holding the box at arm's length, and watched him light his cigarette. He looked around for an ashtray and, obedient as any wife in a woman's magazine, she found one amongst the unwashed dishes in the sink, rinsed it beneath the tap and dried it. Ash smeared the tea-towel, and she thought, defensively, so what?

  "Why?" he said. He did not sit at the table when she sat down. He leaned against the kitchen door and folded his arms across his chest. She took a dirty casserole off the chair so there would be somewhere he could sit, but he watched her silently and did not move.

  "Why?" he repeated.

  "Why what?"

  "Why? For what use? A dancing doctor?"

  Rosa shrugged.

  "What would her people say to you, filling her head with rubbish?"

  She would have liked to say that it was not rubbish, that it was wrong to call her new happiness rubbish.

  "What would her mother and father say? She is meant to be studying. What will you feel if she fails her studies?"

  "She wanted to…" Rosa began, but she could not meet her husband's eyes. She wished she had the kitchen tidier. She stacked two plates inside the greasy frying pan.