by Alan Collins
I was introduced to them as Comrade Kaiser.
Everybody was comrade this and comrade that. There were Greek and Italian names sprinkled in among the ordinary Australian ones. I was asked politely whether I was of German descent, ‘like the Kaiser’. By golly, no I protested, my name was pronounced Kayser! All men are created equal, one of them said to me. A chorus went up:
“And are everywhere in chains!”
Cheered by this newfound egalitarianism, I said, “Well, I’m Jewish, y’ know.”
A deep voice from the back said, “Religion is a crutch for the masses.” Another chorus: “Karl Marx!”
A girl sitting next to me then asked me if I was a Trotskyite. And so it went, throughout the afternoon. My head was spinning with a new glossary of strange terms — Anarchist, Bolshevik, Menshevik, Deviationist, Stalinist, Capitalist. I learned to say Workers of the World Unite, You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Chains with something approaching conviction.
They wanted to know if I was persecuted at work for my beliefs. I responded to their interest by telling them that now and again I was called ‘Ikey’. No, no, Comrade, they chorused, is it because you are a Communist?
The meeting broke up shortly after four o’clock. We were given bundles of leaflets to stick up on telegraph poles.
“You must fulfill your Stakhanovite norm, Comrade,” I was told.
“What is that?”
“The brave workers of the Soviet Socialist Republics must produce their quota for the State.”
I had twenty-five posters to stick up — that was my quota. I was given a badge, assured I would make a good comrade and let out into the pale wintry sunshine. The meeting had been grim, impersonal, dedicated and humourless. I was not so sure that I would make a worthy member of the ‘lumpen proletariat’. Besides, when I had asked an earnest looking girl whether she had read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, she dismissed it as ‘typical of the weak-kneed English working classes’. We parted at the corner of Market and George Streets. I never went back.
Once again I felt alone and drifting. I dumped the leaflets in the gutter and pushed them down the drain with my foot. George Street on a Sunday afternoon was no place to try to find oneself. In either direction it stretched out from the Bridge to Central railway, deserted and silent. A few dejected soldiers wandered aimlessly in search of girls, a fight or a drink. Had they looked more carefully, they might have discovered Mitzi Strauss frothing up Vienna coffee and slicing up cheese cake for equally lonely German Jewish refugees.
Against my will, I started to walk in the direction of the Vienna Waldcate; there I would get news of Solly and perhaps Uncle Siddy. I had only seen Solly a few times since we left the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home. He had put on weight, he spoke to me with a cunning beyond his years and always had money in his pocket. Even in wartime Sydney, Mitzi Strauss had been able to get a telephone connected. Uncle Siddy was conducting an SP betting business and Solly and Manfred were his runners.
I had only gone a few yards when I saw a gathering of young people all wearing what appeared to be some sort of uniform. The boys had on navy-blue pants and light-blue shirts with scout type scarves; the girls were dressed the same only they wore skirts. They were talking loudly and there was much laughter. As I drew near they entered a doorway between two shops. I hurried and reached them just as the last few were entering. A girl looked up and down the street then called out: “We’re all here now, I’ll close the door.”
It was Ruti. Still shepherding people around, I thought absurdly; still being the little mother. I ran up, calling her name just as she slipped behind the steel grille door.
“Jacob, oh Jacob, I’ve thought so much about you. How are you, where have you been, where are you living?” She pressed her body against the grille, making criss-cross patterns on her chest. I put my hand through and took hers.
“God, Ruti,” I said, “can you get this thing open?”
She slid the grille back nearly jamming our hands in it. A voice called out from up the stairs. “Hurry up Ruti! The meeting is about to start.”
My heart sank. “What meeting, Ruti? Why are you dressed like that?”
She dragged me inside and shut the grille again. I put my arms around her. She did not resist but neither did she return my warmth. In the darkness of the doorway I tried to kiss her. She said gently, “You never came to see me, Jacob.” She pulled away from me and led me up the stairs.
“Where are you taking me, Ruti?”
“To our meeting.”
“Not another one,” I said dejectedly.
“What do you mean — not another one? You’ve never been here before, have you?”
“Skip it,” I replied, “you lead and I’ll follow. Just tell me: what is that uniform you’re wearing?”
She said, over her shoulder and a little out of breath, “It’s called Habonim — it means ‘The Builders’ — in Hebrew.”
“Ruti,” I begged, “it’s a lovely afternoon. Won’t you come for a walk with me? We could go to the Gardens and talk.”
“Oh no, Jacob, this is very important. It’s all about our future in Palestine. Yours and mine,” she added hastily.
As we entered the room I had a quick mental picture of Ruti scrabbling in the earth like the Rothfields, with me standing guard over her with a rifle.
The first person I saw was Bill. He was seated in the room with a semicircle of boys and girls around him. He nodded recognition as though it was the most natural thing in the world that I should be there. Ruti pulled me down on the floor beside her. I noticed everyone was wearing a pin-on badge that had the Star of David on it. Behind Bill, a huge flag with the same emblem hung on the wall. His voice had deepened since I had last seen him; there was a faint patina of reddish whiskers on his chin. He was talking about camps that had been planned to fit in with everyone’s study. I looked at Ruti. She was taking notes in that same spiky German handwriting I knew so well.
“You will all take your Hebrew grammar with you and your extracts of Herzl’s speeches to the Vienna Zionist Congress,” Bill said.
He looked over all the heads directly at me. “What about you, Jacob?”
“Oh, I shall take Robert Tressall’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,” I said sarcastically.
“I do not know such a book,” he replied calmly.
“What about Karl Marx’s Das Kapital then, Bill?”
“You are studying economics?” he replied with the nearest he could come to sarcasm.
I stood up. “No, Wolfgang, I’m just a poor bloody worker.”
There was a scattering of nervous laughter. Ruti was tugging at my coat. Bill held up his hand for silence. “Our national home also requires workers,” he said quietly. “It could not exist if all its citizens were students.”
Ruti whispered, “What is the matter with you, Jacob? It is not like you to be rude.”
I gripped her hand fiercely. I tried to explain my inner conflict to her — how I had just come from a meeting of young Communists who wanted to destroy the world then rebuild it, who preached a doctrine of equality I could not comprehend. And now, here I was trying to grapple with another philosophy of rebuilding a desolate country that I only knew as a Biblical dream.
“It takes time, Jacob, to sort out one’s feelings and beliefs,” she said. “It is not only you who has such a problem. What about all those kids who came from overseas to Australia? And what about their parents? ‘Reffos’, they’re called from now until the day they die.” She stopped suddenly, realising what she had said. “At least you were lucky enough to be born here,” she finished lamely.
Someone was winding up a portable gramophone. Strange Middle Eastern music blared out. Boys and girls formed a ring and began to dance to it. Ruti grabbed me by the arm and pushed me into the ring. In spite of myself I found my feet following the gyrations of those around me. The rhythm was infectious, kids were singing to the music and I was a part of it all. When it stopped we
were all out of breath and laughing together. Except Bill. He was still sitting down, writing furiously, oblivious to everything that went on around him.
Ruti, her cheeks flushed, started a round of introductions. Without exception, everyone I met was from some part or other of Europe. I was the only Australian-born kid there. And we were all Jews.
I had a lot to learn about the world, about this new Australia, about Jewish society and where I fitted in. I would help Ruti and she would help me. That is the way I hoped it would be — only time would tell. But when the meeting was over she did not leave with me. She went off with the Habonim group to one of their member’s homes. I was not invited.
The only life to be found in Sydney on a late Sunday afternoon was down at Circular Quay. The ferries would be returning from Manly and the Zoo with families tired and cross after a day’s outing. Or lovers would leave the Middle Harbour ferry arm-in-arm, their hair awry, their cheeks glowing from the wind as they hung over the ferry side. The Quay would smell of diesel oil and fish and chips. As the families left the boats they would run the gauntlet of tired men selling fairy floss and windmills on sticks. Fathers would fumble in their pockets, make a quick calculation for fares home, then buy something from them to placate a grizzling child.
I was still wearing my barmitzvah suit, now unbearably tight. I could not close the coat against the encroaching cold wind that whistled up George Street as though it was being forced through a funnel. I walked towards the Quay, on the opposite side of the street to Mitzi’s Vienna Wald cafe. At the water’s edge, by the grimy green railing, I stared at my distorted reflection. It was covered in the detritus that eddied around the pylons.
“You’d think people would be a bit more careful where they threw their rubbish, wouldn’t you?”
I looked up. It was the girl from the Eureka Youth League, the one with glasses who had scorned my reference to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. She was hanging over the railing beside me.
“I’ve just come from Manly,’’ she said. She pointed to the berthed ferry. ‘‘I saw you from the top deck. You looked like a wet week so I thought I’d come over and cheer you up.’’ She linked her arm through mine. “We workers have got to look after each other,” she said, laughing.
With her beside me I immediately felt at one with the crowds that were crossing the road to the trams. A child that had a moment before seemed to me a snotty little beast was now simply an accepted member of a loving family. We didn’t walk so much as saunter among the homegoers, content to be swept along in the gathering dusk.
“Which way are you going, Jack?” She laughed again. “See, I remember your name. I’ll bet you don’t remember mine? No, of course you don’t. It’s Peg or Peggy if you like, Peggy Piper. And your second name is Kaiser. That makes ‘P.K.’ like the chewing gum. I reckon I’ll have to stick to you, Jack!”
The trams were lined up; conductors were changing the destination boards: Botany Bay, La Perouse, Maroubra, Bellevue Hill, Bondi.
Peg said, “Take your pick, Jack. Tuppence to Bondi, four-pence to La Perouse, we’ll go Dutch.”
“Where do you want to go, Peg? Point Piper, where the nobs live? Is that where the ancestral home is?”
“Nope, I’ve got a little room in Darlinghurst. But I bet you live in Bondi where all the Jews hang out.”
I swung around and looked at her. Behind her glasses, her eyes shone without malice. Her lips were still parted in a smile. The anger died in me. Still, I felt I had to fight back for the real or imagined insult.
“Some pretty crook girls live in Darlo,” I said.
“It’s you blokes that make ’em like that,” she came back at me.
I thought of Uncle Siddy and his skiting about the ‘pros’ he knew and the shiksers he had flaunted in front of our father. And here I was, on a Sunday afternoon at Circular Quay with a shikser, a Gentile girl hanging on my arm. Was I in danger of following in his footsteps? A little thrill went through me. I pulled Peg closer to me and said, “Let’s go to Darlo. We can get a cuppa tea at the Cross.”
“Oh, mister big spender eh? You sure you’re not related to Eisenberg the bookie?”
There it was again. The Ikey jokes that I could never get away from. “Shit, Peg,” I gritted, “can’t you ever stop picking on us?”
She took off her glasses and wiped them carefully on her jumper. “Do you believe in equality, Jack?” she asked. “That all men are created equal, that —”
‘‘Is that straight out of your Eureka Youth League Handbook, Peg?’’
She laughed out loud. “Strewth, Jack, is that how it sounded?”
I laughed with her. “Come on Peg, if you want to play at being equal, I’ll pay the tram fares and you can make me a cup of tea.”
As the tram trundled up William Street she told me she was a pantry maid at Sydney Hospital. She hoped to become a nurse as soon as she was old enough. Her family came from Bathurst.
“We live only a few doors from Ben Chifley,” she said proudly. “My dad was a shunter in the railway yards before he got hurt.’’ She rummaged in her handbag. I told her I was paying the fares. “Don’t get upset, Jack,” she said, “I’m only looking for a fag.”
I was astounded. She pulled out a packet of Cavaliers, five for threepence, and lit up. A man opposite me winked. I blushed and looked out at the rain sweeping over Wooloo-moobo. Peg puffed away and as the tram reached the top of the hill, she flipped the butt away and said, “Righto Jack, we get off here and then it’s a short trot down past the fire station.”
We ran hand-in-hand down the road, the rain cutting into us. Just past the fire station Peg pulled up. She pointed down the road.
“That’s the Jews’ Hall down there, isn’t it Jack?”
It certainly was — the very place where the taxi driver had dropped Solly and me and where we first met Mrs Rosie Pearlman what seemed a lifetime ago.
“Oh well,” she said cheerily, “they never did me any harm, not like some of the other dirty buggers that hang around here.” She took out a key. “Here we are — Peg’s Palace! I hope I’ve got a deener for the gas ring.” She steered me up a flight of stairs, took another key and opened the door. “In you go Jack, I’ll only be a minute. I’ve got to go to the lav first.”
I switched on the light. Far off I could hear the gurgle of a cistern. The first thing I did was to pull down the blind because of the wartime blackout regulations. Peg (or some previous tenant) had painted a funny face on the blind. If it had not been for that I would have felt as though I had stepped back in time to the first days when our family had moved to The Balconies. The room had the same atmosphere of tawdry cheapness, of transitory living, of impermanence, of people who had moved through it and each had left a small part of a life behind.
I found the gas-meter and fed a shilling into it. Not having matches, I could not light the tiny fire or the gas-ring. A bed in the corner was covered with a quilt bearing a Sydney Hospital emblem; so did the towel thrown across the end. The rest of the furniture had surely come from the secondhand shops along Oxford Street.
Peg had stuck Eureka Youth League posters on the flaky walls and incongruously, a picture of a Clydesdale draft horse standing proudly in a paddock. I looked in a cupboard for tea and milk.
“Right there Jack, in the canister. You’ll have to have condensed milk, though.” Peg was locking the door. “Keep the nosey parkers out, eh?”
“I put a shilling in the meter, Peg, but I haven’t any matches.”
“That was my part of the treat,” she said. She lit the gas ring and the fire. “Let’s make toast. I’ve got bread and butter and plum jam.”
“I’ll skip the plum jam, thanks.”
She put a little cloth on the table, explaining that her mother had given it to her when she left home. I had taken off my restricting suit coat and kicked off my wet shoes. Peg had also removed her jumper and shoes. She was wearing a man’s check shirt and a skirt of knobbly tweed. She had taken th
e comb from her hair which now hung down her back. The little gas-fire hissed and spluttered but did not go out. We drank our tea and munched on arrowroot biscuits with unreal decorum, attentive to each other’s needs beyond the bounds of required politeness.
It was obvious we were both nervously dragging out this little ceremony, frightened of what might ensue once it was over. Peg removed and replaced her glasses half-a-dozen times and chattered away about her childhood in Bathurst. I talked of the day-to-day happenings at the printery. I don’t think we listened to half of what the other was saying. When the last cup of tea was drunk and the last biscuit gone, Peg said, “I thought I had another shilling for the meter but I haven’t. It’s going to get darn cold, Jack.”
We both looked accusingly at the gas-fire. Peg said, “In Bathurst we used to nick the coal from the railway yard.”
The fire gave a pathetic pop and went out. I made a silly joke. “Well, I’ve paid the Piper, now you can call the tune!”
“You ought to be on the stage like that Yid comedian, whatsisname, Mo.”
Before I could reply, Peg got up and kissed me on the lips.
It was a soft kiss, almost a brushing of the lips; her eyes were open and 1 looked into them. They were blue, with tiny flecks of gold like the palest opal. I could also see the lightly tanned and freckled ‘V’ of her neckline and the embroidered top edge of her brassiere.
She left me and turned out the light. The heating elements of the gas fire still glowed faintly in the dark. I heard the rustle of clothing and a hard sound as her belt fell to the floor. She moved across the window and released the blind which went up with an angry snap. Now the room was suffused with streaky light. Peg was standing by the bed in her underwear.
“Well come on, you ninny, don’t sit there all by yourself,” she said, “let’s snuggle up and keep warm.” She turned the Sydney Hospital cover down neatly then pulled back the blankets. She gave a little shudder of cold and got into bed.