Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Leah wrote a long and detailed letter in which she introduced the Kaletskys, one by one, and explained her motives for both of her seemingly precipitous actions. With this careful testament to his daughter's seriousness in his hands, Sid Goldstein ceased his melodramatic telegrams and wrote a long letter.

  Leah treasured this letter for years, and not merely because the flowery copperplate hand seemed more considered than usual, but for the whole list of good advice it contained, i. e., Read if you can. Keep your mind alert. To describe the towns you visit will be a good exercise and train you in much more than English composition. It will encourage a critical frame of mind – to describe an object is to ask why the object is shaped the way it is. Likewise a horse, a building or a nose. All this will be good for you, whatever you do. I will not insult you by offering money, but if trouble strikes please be assured that your parents are always here and here to help you. I send my kindest regards and best wishes to your husband and hope some time we shall have the pleasure of meeting this young man.

  The whole of this letter, by the by, was a masterful piece of deception. Sid Goldstein was depressed, miserable and unhappy but considered, wisely, that venting spleen on his daughter would merely drive her from him. One gets a whiff of the real state of his emotions in the irritable PS: "I cannot see", he wrote in broader, fatter strokes, "how you can possibly have betrayed Wysbraum. Are you thinking of the rooming house he rushed you into?"

  27

  The eccentrically spelt letters are all, I suppose, gone now -stranded in drawers with perished rubber bands and verdigrised door keys as companions, or have – worse – become the accumulated capital of fastidious great-nieces who marvel at the time you could send a letter for tuppence and regret – having consulted a stamp dealer on the subject – that their great-aunt did not treat the perforations of her stamps with more respect. She was not like Rosa who tore corners off and stood the King on his head, but she did not treat the perforations with the care her crabbed handwriting led one to expect.

  The great-nieces would do well to examine the dates on the stamps: the badly torn perforations are from winter in Victoria -their dancing great-aunt had chilblains on her pretty hands.

  Following her father's instructions, Leah managed to forget who it was she was writing to. She lost sight of his mournful eyes, his prim mouth, his watery silence, his fear of discord. She wrote things in her letters she would never have dreamed of saying to his face and, as a result, he also wrote things that he would have considered previously unthinkable. He began to use words with a recklessness quite foreign to his speech. I do not mean that he used words incorrectly or inaccurately – he remained, to his death, a pedant – but that he did not stint himself in the quantity of words and this is attested by the increasing value of the stamps on his long manila envelopes and the rare black one- shilling Kookaburra is directly attributable to this new garrulousness.

  Sid Goldstein filled page after page with an often disjointed but touchingly vulnerable inquisition into the nature of his life, his business, the depressed economy and, at last, his Jewish-ness. "It is not enough for you to say that it might be 'useful' or 'comforting' or that you feel a fool not knowing the simplest Yiddish word or are an outsider when you sit at Passover. Technically speaking you are not a Jew anyway because your mother is not a Jew. You do not show concern for the important issue, which is whether there is a god or not, and if there is a god if he is likely to behave as the God of the Jews is reported to. Obviously I have made my decision as best I can." They discussed the secular state. Leah spoke favourably of Marx, Sid unfavourably of communists he had known, saying that they were men who appeared to have left no room in their lives for kindness. Leah replied with a passion. Her father wrote of Russian anti-Semitism revealed in the indignities of life in Minsk. All the while they described for each other's eyes the more ordinary stuff of life: thistles by a roadside, a man playing a saxophone on a crowded bus.

  The postmarks of Leah's letters show the progress of Mervyn Sullivan's Chevrolet. They dip down towards Bateman's Bay, halt, lose courage, and the next day they have crossed the mountains and materialized in Yass. Albury must have been successful for there are many letters to and from Albury Post Office, even a rare letter from Izzie in his distinctive loopy hand: vast tails to the "y"s and "g"s that tangle with words two lines beneath, long crosses to the "t"s that fling themselves emphatically beneath the line above, appearing to underline, to add emphasis where none was intended, with the result that to read his short letters is a stuttering process, a series of misunderstandings, halts, clarifications.

  But it is not this that makes Izzie's letters so frustrating to read. It is because he never once talks about the things that are on his mind. He forgives his wife for something we will come to in a minute but which he does not dwell on, will not even touch. The words are plain, short, hurried: a man cooking without benefit of a pot holder, and they become more understandable when you realize what he is replying to.

  Here, in this note from Shepparton: "I have done it again," she confesses. "I would not be your wife if I could not tell you. I would be a cheat and a liar, not merely unfaithful."

  The longer she is away from him, the more her idealization of him continues. She thinks of him as "a good person, absolutely good; it is for this reason that I love you and will never love anyone else. I am proud of you, my darling Izzie. When I see men humping their swags along these dusty roads I know that at least one of us is doing something useful. I love you."

  Four times he jumped the rattler, his knuckles bleeding from punching walls. Twice he found her, once in Benalla, as the truck pulled out, and, again, in Shepparton where they spent a night as tearful as their wedding night, taunted by the watery ghost of Mervyn Sullivan who winked at Izzie lewdly at breakfast and asked him how old he was.

  He could not tell her. He was not brave enough to tell her. She put such weight on his goodness and usefulness, that he could not tell her what had happened to him, that he, like his mother before him, had been expelled by the Communist Party of Australia.

  28

  The committee of the NSW branch of the Communist Party were, with a single exception, decent men and women. They were embarrassed that they could not yet produce evidence to back up their charges, but they had no doubt that the evidence existed. They been advised of its existence by none other than the Comintern.

  To understand the effect of this upon them, you must realize that they often imagined that the Comintern had forgotten that the Party ever existed in Australia. Certainly it was not in the habit of displaying an interest in individual comrades. So when they were advised that the Australian I. Kaletsky had indulged in activities against the revolution, they not only believed it, but were sure that the activities must be particularly serious.

  It was a misunderstanding and it came to play an important part in Izzie's life, to be, for months, the business of his life. And in this he was supported by his mother.

  "Fight them," she said. "If you accept it, you will always be sorry. What have you done? What have you said? Don't shake your head. There is always something."

  He became like a fellow who has been sold an unsatisfactory Vauxhall who will stand in front of the town hall with his whole sad story written on a blackboard. He attacked, buttonholed, angered and confused any comrade who would listen to him. There was a stage, in August 1931, when the CPA headquarters in Sussex Street had its door locked for weeks on end and it was necessary to knock out a code to gain entrance. This was not as a precaution against fascists or Australian Intelligence but against Izzie Kaletsky who would not give up.

  He wrote letters to the Tribune which were never published and to the Comintern which were opened by Intelligence and copied by hand before they were sent on their slow way by ship across the world.

  Izzie changed that year, like a man who has been tortured and who, walking down the street amidst his fellows, shows no crude scars or telling limp – merely a wearine
ss in his smile which sometimes gave the impression that his lip had curled.

  He tried to live off the money Leah sent him. But just the same, when de Groot cut the ribbon on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Izzie and Lenny were there selling bright balloons.

  "Buy a balloon," Leah's husband said, "buy a balloon."

  29

  Both Leah Goldstein and my son seemed to have interpreted my disappearing as a clever stunt which might be useful. They did not tremble on the edge of an abyss, or question the substantiality of matter. Leah began to sew spangles on my suit and Charles tried, belligerently, to disappear in class before the incredulous eyes of Mr Barry Edwards and twenty-eight children who suddenly erupted into wild hooting and cat-calling when Charles Badgery stood in such a queer way.

  Mr Barry Edwards giggled, even while he strapped my son's winter-white legs.

  The red weals of pain were still there later as my son continued his obsessive game with his sister, near the camp. He tugged at his odd socks (one bright blue, the other overchecked with brown diamonds) but the socks would not stay up. They fell, and revealed the marks of Mr Edwards's handiwork.

  "I need garters," he announced.

  "What are garters?"

  "Hold your socks up."

  My son is stubborn. He has always been stubborn. If the milky poison – that curdling creamy stuff in the whisky bottle that the actress procured in Carlton – could not budge him from his mother's womb, then neither could Barry Edwards's strap change his mind. He decided on garters, firstly to hide his marks from me, to stop me discovering that he had been playing the game he was forbidden; but also because it seemed to him -quite suddenly, but very clearly – that they were the ingredient he lacked. As a grown man he would have the same attitude towards electronic equipment, hi-fi, ham radio, things in black boxes with dainty buttons, glowing dials, esoteric wiring diagrams and languages of their own, as if these products and their associated rituals would somehow bring about the changes he wanted in his life.

  It was getting dark and the air was dank like a stone church with a defective damp course. The crows mourned above the darkening waters of Crab Apple Creek and Charles slashed at the tall column of a blackwood wattle with a heavy stick.

  He was thinking about garters, about how perfect it would be to have his socks held neatly on his chubby calves. His sister watched him. She wanted to know about garters and how they worked. He stopped to explain it to her, with a solemnity that made the simple gadgets fittingly mysterious. He pulled up his socks again and folded them over an inch from the top.

  "When you do that," he said, "it hides the garters."

  Sonia knew he was mistaken about the garters, but she could not tell him. Unlike Charles, who saw new opportunities for escape, revenge, triumph and – most of all – making money, Sonia knew that this was not a trick. Her child's fingers had silently questioned my skin, hugged my heavy thigh, or held the fob watch that had disappeared with me, looking inquiringly at its coded face.

  "If you disappear," she asked her garter-worshipping brother, "where do you go?"

  "Nowhere," Charles said, hitting the tree. "You're just invisible."

  Goon Tse Ying's dragon was not a great scaly monster that any fool could see. It was a tiny thing, a thread, a slippery worm. It had entered my daughter without me even glimpsing it. It slunk into her viscera and lodged there.

  "You go to heaven", she whispered, "and see Jesus."

  "Bullswack."

  "You can't do it."

  "I can. I can. If you help me, please, Sonny."

  "No."

  "Pur-leeese." Charles put his big arm around his sister; it was a wooden hug carved from Mallee root, the big head grotesquely askew, pleading gracelessly. "You take the stick," he said, putting it across her pleated lap and folding her little hands around it. "And you run at me, and say Ching Chong Chinaman."

  "I won't."

  "And hit me," Charles said, "hard."

  "No," she said, and moved away from the stick which dropped to the ground.

  "What do you pray?" asked ingratiating Charles.

  Sonia said nothing.

  "I need garters," Charles said firmly, and with that settled strode on ahead of his sister, leaving her to hurry through the last light towards the little hessian humpy I had made for Leah Goldstein who was now busy sewing spangles on to my best suit coat and arguing with me about the write-up I had got for her in the paper.

  "It's all lies, Mr Badgery," she said, threading one more spangle on to her relentless needle. "I have never been to Gay Paree, as you call it. I will not dance with a death adder, not in any circumstances. And it says nothing about you and your act which you were so desperate to impress me with."

  I watched the spangles unhappily and saw that I had not, as I believed I had, delivered value to her. It was a first-class write-up in anybody's language.

  I tried to explain the nature of publicity to her. She listened to me patiently enough. I explained how I had been written up in papers everywhere and that a good editor expected a little exaggeration – the colours strengthened, so to speak. And it was my understanding of this that had allowed me to get a page-one write-up for her when she had been unable to get any. No one at the paper had ever heard of Mervyn Sullivan but everyone in Bendigo would now know about Leah Leonda, as I had called her.

  "Well," she said, holding up the suit coat critically to the kerosene light. "I don't want to have a barney with you, Mr Badgery. You've been very kind. But if I can't do a show honestly I don't want to do a show at all. It's a good show. It's not like some old-fashioned aeroplane that you're ashamed of, no offence. I don't need to tell lies. We did ten shows in Myrniong. We got everybody in town, and some of them twice. And now we've got your act, Mr Badgery, which is really breathtaking. I think you underestimate the effect of your own act."

  The aim of the write-up had been to make my so-called act unnecessary, but she was too flinty-faced to tell the truth to. I opened my mouth. I was prepared to begin a truthful sentence and not worry where I ended up, but my son barged through the doorway, demanding garters.

  I told him there would be no garters but Leah, sitting on the bed I had made for her (hessian stretched across two wattle poles) had already produced some black elastic from her small cane sewing box.

  Charles did not dare look at me. His lower lip went all plump, like a cherub, and he went and sat beside Leah while Sonia came and squatted beside me, hugging my calf and questioning my shoelaces.

  30

  Charles oiled the snakes as he was instructed and took them, one at a time, so they might attend to matters of toilet. The snake is a neat creature, and most fastidious about where it drops its shit. My son took them to a grassy patch and waited while they extruded their firm dark pellets. From time to time he adjusted his socks and examined the curious red patterns the garters made on his legs.

  Sonia washed our dishes in the creek and managed not to break anything. She rubbed the greasy plates with river sand while Leah cleaned her single gramophone record with petrol and soft cloth. She did various exercises and displayed the emu feathers to the sunshine.

  And I put on my spangled suit coat and was much admired.

  The magpies chortled merrily, their feathers clean, and I was like one of those ageing farmers, Gus Housey comes to mind, who get behind the wheel of a motor car for the first time and know, before they do a thing, that they will crash. They hold the wheel rigidly. They stare ahead defiantly. They release the clutch with the jerk of someone who must get a nasty business done with. They give off the smell of men who are victims of their own excessive pride and now must pay the price. Their eyes seek out fences or trees and you cannot triumph over them in any wrestle for the wheel.

  "There is population in this town," Leah told me, "and there is money, and we are not leaving until we have shown them what we can do."

  Anticipating disaster, I persuaded my partner to let me negotiate a suitable venue for our premiere.
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br />   31

  I have heard people describe Bendigo as a country town. They mention it in the same breath as Shepparton or Ararat. These people have never been to Bendigo and don't know what they're talking about. The Town Hall is the equal of anything in Florence; the Law Courts would not look frumpish in Versailles. And if there are farmers in the streets, dark cafes with three courses for two and sixpence and, in Hayes Street, a Co-op dedicated to Norfield Wire Strainers and Cattle Drench, it does not alter the fact that Bendigo is a town of the Gold Age. If cattle are driven through the streets on the way to the ammoniacal sale-yards it does not make the streets less grand, does not diminish their width by as much as half a chain, and even the bellowing cattle must see, if not understand, the great white fountain near the Kerang turn-off that promised (and promises still, for all I know) a return to days when men would once again build solicitors' offices like wedding cakes and put towers on hotels and art schools alike. One could ignore, as I had chosen to, as the townspeople tried to, the men with cardboard tied to the bottom of their shoes who shuffled through the town with billycans clanking and sugar bags tied across their bent shoulders.

  There was no shortage of good venues for a variety act. For instance, there was a great big place near the Town Hall (gone now) that had a great circular upstairs gallery, electrically operated curtains, and a bank of lights which the caretaker, a newsagent and cricket fanatic named Perry Thomassen, was at great pains to show me, but not before he had demonstrated the correct wrist action for a googly and told me that he had been on the wireless, in a sporting quiz, in Melbourne. He was a lanky stooped fellow and too clumsy to be trusted with a cricket bat, let alone the fifty-foot ladder he mounted to demonstrate the spots, dimmer and floods. He got his pigeon toes tangled in the rungs and dropped pennies from his pockets while he recited the names of the men who made Australia the greatest sporting nation in the world. So keen was he to establish his case that he added Dame Nellie Melba and Mo McCaughey to his list, the point being (I think) that both of them had performed in this very hall. He was promising to show me Mo's braces (left behind in a dressing room in amusing circumstances) when I slipped quietly out into the street. I had no intention of making an idiot of myself in such a central location. Instead I booked the little wooden Mechanics' Institute in a laneway behind the back entrance to the Catholic Seminary. I got the place for two bob but had to sign a piece of paper saying I would not hold a political meeting.