A Promised Land?

by Alan Collins

  I stood up. “You’ve still got your socks on Peg,” I said inanely.

  “You can keep yours on too, Jack, but you’d better take those wet strides off.”

  I went across to the darkest corner of the room and took my pants off. The deep-brown eyes of the Clydesdale horse seemed to reassure me — against what I did not know. I took off my shirt and stood shivering with cold and fright. It seemed miles from where I stood to where Peg lay under the blankets with just her head showing.

  “The working class can kiss my arse, here we’re snug in bed at last!” she sang to the tune of 0 Tannenbaum.

  I measured the distance to the bed, put my head down and ran across the room, knocking over a chair as I went. Peg had the blankets back and I hopped in. I lay beside her, rigid and unyielding. My heart was banging away and did not quieten down until the warmth of our bodies fused and my breathing steadied enough for me to speak.

  An ambulance with siren blaring was halted in the traffic right outside the window. We heard a voice calling to someone to ‘‘Get out of the way, yer mug!’’ Peg, lying on her back, said, “Another one for St Vinny’s. I hear ’em all night long.” She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at me. “Well, I’ll be blowed Jack, you haven’t got a Jewish nose.”

  “How many Jews do you know, Peg?”

  ‘‘Well, there’s, um, Doctor whatsisname in Casualty. A really nice bloke. He gave me some pills for my hay fever. And then there’s —’’

  “Okay, that makes two — one has and one hasn’t. So you’re only half-right, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, what does it matter anyway, Jack. Come to think of it, my uncle in Bathurst has a big nose but I reckon that’s the booze.”

  Peg turned towards me. The hard wiring of her brassiere poked into my chest. I moved away. I also had a problem that I pretended Peg had not noticed. She stroked my forehead.

  “You’re really only a kid, Jack,” she said softly. “Don’t take any notice of me. When you’re raised in the country and you come from a big family, well, you sort of learn about — things.” She sat up and thumped the pillows then lay down again on her side with her back to me. “I tell you what, we’ll lie like spoons — you cuddle up to me and I’ll bet before you can say ‘antidis-establishmentarianism’ we’ll be sound asleep.”

  As far as Peg herself was concerned, she was right. I listened to her even breathing and tried to make pictures out of the cracks in the ceiling plaster. I saw the Murray River and its tributaries and named them over and over until my erection subsided, then I sneaked out of the bed. Peg never moved. I dressed except for my soggy shoes, and let myself out of the room. I had no idea of the time. I sat on the stairs and put my shoes on, snapping the rotten laces. Outside the rain had stopped but the wind, now clean and sharp, was at my back as I started to walk from Darlinghurst to Bondi Junction. When I reached Oxford Street I could see the face of the Paddington Town Hall clock. It was a few minutes after midnight.

  There were two long and lonely stretches on that walk. The first was alongside the high wall of the army barracks. Soldiers were asleep inside there, each in his own single cot without the comforting warmth of a Peg Piper. I hugged myself with smug satisfaction at the thought of it.

  Next, up past the Town Hall, past the hundreds of darkened shop fronts until the road widened at the first corner of Centennial Park. Through the railings I could see the classic statuary, white, cold and nude on sandstone plinths.

  I called out loud to them.

  “Hullo Ruti, hullo Peg, hullo Ruti, hello Peg, hullo … hullo … hullo.” Until I had passed them all.

  nine

  As if it were not enough that it was winter, Bondi beach was festooned with barbed wire. The army had laid coils of it from one end to the other. The wire was the official response to an imminent Japanese invasion, the fore-runner of which was a Japanese submarine mother ship said to be cruising off the coast. It lobbed a dud shell right in the heart of the Bondi shopping-centre. There was panic among the Jewish community, many of whom had fled there from Europe. Some of them removed their entire households to the comparative safety of the North Shore, perhaps in the belief that Japanese invaders would not attempt to cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  Good time girls took over the empty flats and entertained American soldiers. For a shilling or two, I showed the Americans how they could get access to the beach by following me on a zig-zag path through the barbed wire.

  With the money I earned from this and other small enterprises such as filling discarded whisky bottles with cold tea or ginger ale, I was able to buy the cheap books in the Everyman Library senes. On those cold, crisp and sunny wintry Sunday afternoons, I would wedge myself into my secret place in the rocks and read.

  I devoured Conan Doyle, R.L. Stevenson (too long-winded), R.M. Ballantyne, Mark Twain (envious of Tom for having a mate like Huck) and Henry Lawson, whose working men showed a lot more guts than the toadies in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I read while travelling to and from work on the tram and I read during meal breaks at the printery. “You’d read the label off a jam tin, wouldn’t ya, Ikey?” The men said.

  I read my way right through the winter. Mrs Rothfield saw my light on late at night and decided that too much reading would ruin my eyes. She ordered me to switch the light off at half-past nine. I bought a bicycle torch and read under the blankets. When spring came at last I had acquired the detection skills of Sherlock Holmes, the survival ingenuity of Robinson Crusoe and the egalitarianism of Henry Lawson’s characters.

  None of their qualities was applicable to my predicament as a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy in wartime Bondi. They did not assuage my desire for compatible company. What was worse, I did not know with whom I was compatible. Ruti had held out a hand then withdrawn it; Peg had offered herself with disarming honesty and I had rejected her. In my heart I knew my failings all too well; I had the capacity to love but lacked the courage to show it. I was afraid of being hurt. At work, I was morose, unable to respond to rough kindness and all too ready to react to real or imagined slights.

  I pinned all my hopes for happier times on the arrival of summer. It became an obsession with me. I bought a thermometer; my spirits rose and fell with the mercury. I told myself once it stayed over seventy degrees for three consecutive days, things would get better. Until then, I would go on reading, transplanting myself into unattainable situations and, of course, nurturing my discontent as the only reality in my life.

  Mrs Rothfield bought me tins of Cornwall’s Malt Extract. On the label was a chubby napkinned baby holding aloft a huge iron girder. She assured me it would improve me all over. “Even the mind, Jacob; the brain needs feeding too.” I agreed to eat the treacly stuff only until the day when the temperature reached seventy degrees.

  By the end of October, it happened. Three glorious days on end dawned with cloudless skies and a warming westerly breeze that wrapped me in its folds. Early on the first Sunday morning following my official first days of summer, I took all the books and tied them in a bundle. With only the whirling sea birds as witnesses, I stood on the sheerest part of the cliff walk my father had helped to build and hurled them into the sea.

  Looking to the north I could see the sparkling crescent of Bondi Beach. The barbed wire reminded me of the religious pictures of Jesus with a crown of thorns pressed down on his forehead.

  “Filthy bastards!”, I screamed into the wind, “stinking, rotten wire, I hate you, I hate you!”

  I ran down the cliff path, climbed through the railing and thrust the harsh gorse bushes aside until I felt the sand beneath my feet. I tore my clothes off and rushed into the sea where rocks and giant kelp weed broke the surface of the water. The waves beat me against the rocks, the blood ran down my body only to be wiped away in the next instant by the kelp fronds. A dog was tearing up and down the beach at the water’s edge; its demented, frenzied bark reached out to me over the roar of the wind and the waves. I dived beneath the waves, down to t
he very bottom to where the kelp was rooted in the sand. I stayed until my lungs exploded then shot to the surface. The dog was paddling frantically through the surf towards me.

  “Go back, go back,” I called, “leave me alone!” It swam on strongly, its tail streaming out behind like the sweep oar of some strange miniature surf boat. As the dog reached me I tore off a frond of the kelp and lashed at it.

  The dog circled me, its eyes flecked with white. “You poor bugger,” I relented, “you’re scared stiff. Here boy, come on, let’s get back to the beach.”

  I surfed into the shore and lay exhausted. The dog made it minutes later, shook itself and dropped down beside me, sides heaving. With its head between its paws, it watched me dress, its tail giving a sporadic wave.

  “Mrs Rothfield doesn’t like dogs,” I told it, “and what’s more I bet you’re not even Jewish.” I gave it a farewell pat and set off up the beach through the barbed wire. When I reached the promenade and looked back, the dog was still lying on the sand.

  I had never set foot in the Vienna Wald cafe. The windows on to George street had half-height lace curtains on brass rods; the door was fully curtained and always closed by means of a pneumatic spring. An extractor fan above the door blew delicious coffee fumes onto the street. The only way to see inside was to wait until someone entered and get a quick glimpse before the door shut behind them. I had done this a few times.

  Now, on this mild Sunday afternoon, George Street did not look nearly so depressing; the clothing stores were showing off spring fashions. Soldiers, just returned from the Middle East, looked tanned and fit. Girls clung to them and begged to be taken to Luna Park. Vienna Wald was not the sort of cafe they would ever dream of entering; they knew instinctively that it was not for them. Down by the Quay they could get a cup of tea and a buttered bun served by a perky girl in black with a lace-edged apron and a cap to match.

  I stood at the kerbside and watched them pause for a second or two; they sniffed the coffee aroma. A soldier might say, “Dunno how they drink that stuff — must be them reffos, just like the wogs at Port Said.”

  This was a day of enormously important decisions for me. In my mind I listed them: One, I had decided to cease living vicariously through fiction. Two, I would never ever try to drown myself in the surf at Bondi. Three, I had a choice of going back to ‘The Eureka Youth League’ and meeting Peg again or hanging around and waiting for Ruti — only this time I would insist on going with her. And finally, I could enter the Vienna Wald for news of Solly.

  Decisions one and two, I felt sure, would never have to be faced again. I shuffled the others around, enjoying the luxury of having so many options. It made me feel stronger, grown up; no more Cornwall’s Malt Extract for me. Set me a problem and I would solve it, give me a choice and I would like to talk to someone, but, Jacob Kaiser, the responsibility for a decision once taken is all your own.

  I pushed open the door of the Vienna Wald. A tinkly bell rang. A voice called out, “So, please to come in, Comm, comm, take a seat.”

  I moved a few feet inside the door.

  “Costs nuzzing to sit!”

  The cafe was long, narrow and dark. The only light came from tiny table lamps, one to each cubicle. Heavy cigar smoke mingled with the smell of hot chocolate and coffee. It made me queasy. I pulled the door open and gulped in fresh air. The little bell tinkled again.

  “So … stay, go, stay, go, only please to shut the door.”

  I slammed the door and marched resolutely down the carpeted aisle. After all, was I not the new Jacob Kaiser who no longer lived in a fictional dreamworld, who rejected death by drowning, who was in love with one girl and had spurned another and was now ready to take responsibility for his little brother?

  “Gott sie Dank, it’s only you, Jacob Kaiser. I thought it was the ration coupon inspector here again.” Mitzi Strauss’s plump hand folded over mine. She led me to the only vacant cubicle in the cafe and sat me down.

  “Not a word, Jacob until you’ve had coffee and cheesecake.” She bustled off to the end of the cafe to where the urns hissed.

  Without exception, Mitzi Strauss’s clientele were all refugees. Even on this mild Sunday afternoon, they sat in their long coats, their velour hats and battered brief cases on the seat beside them. The tables were strewn with papers; some were writing furiously. Others looked weary and beaten — except for the women, who talked animatedly and puffed on black cigarettes in long holders.

  A man across the aisle was staring at me. Finally he got up and came to my table. “You are an Australian?” he asked politely.

  “Yeah,” I said carelessly.

  He took a tin of tobacco from his pocket and opened it. “I would be most obliged, dear sir, if you could instruct me in the method of making from this a cigarette.”

  I was about to tell him that I did not smoke; I had, on the other hand, spent hours rolling cigarettes for Uncle Siddy — racehorses, he called them, about half the thickness of a tailor-made cigarette to conserve the tobacco. I took the tobacco and papers from the old man, hung the paper from my lip as though I had been doing it all my life and rolled a smoke. The old man watched every movement.

  “Now you have a go, mate.” I handed the makings back to him.

  “You are a Yid?” he asked me in wonder.

  “Well, yes, I’m Jewish, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Das ist wundabar,” he sighed, “you are surely a member of the proletariat.” He examined my neatly rolled cigarette. “In Germany I was a Communist at your age and later I became an official of the Garment Workers’ Union. In such a position I could please nobody. The members elected me because they thought I would get a better deal for them from the Jewish manufacturers. The factory owners said I was a disgrace to our religion — and the Nazis beat up the lot of us.” He lit the cigarette and drew the smoke down into his lungs. As he expelled it, he said bitterly, “Solidarity! What a joke!”

  Mitzi Strauss appeared out of the half-light of the cafe. “Now Leon, have you been annoying my young man?” She pointed to the door. “If so, out you go.” She set down the coffee and cake in front of me and slid her plump figure behind the other side of the table. “Did he tell you he once knew Berthold Brecht?”

  Waves of Mitzi’s heavy perfume wafted over me. It permeated the coffee and the cheese-cake and even managed to overwhelm the cigar smoke. I leaned back against the booth. She leaned forward, urging me to eat and drink, then she said, “So, let us talk about important things, yes? First, you must know about little Solly. Ach, I have a lot of trouble with him. At school he is always in the fights. That is when he is at school. And my Manfred learns from him.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Such a beautiful looking child to do such things. He steals from my purse — what does he need? I give him — both of them — everything what they want.’’

  As I listened to her I saw my first summer Sunday, the Sunday of my new resolution, being destroyed. Mitzi Strauss’s voice continued to catalogue Solly’s and Manfred’s misdeeds. Words — liar, thief, police — hit me like pellets from a shotgun. I looked past Mitzi’s head, down the rows of cubicles where men and women with the troubles of the world on their shoulders tried to rebuild their lives. I felt some sympathy for them but I did not want to be one of them.

  “… und tomorrow comes the man from the Children’s Court to tell me that Solly will be charged with stealing — I can’t believe it — they say he stealed, sorry, stole bottles of beer from a delivery truck.’’ Mitzi Strauss slapped the table with her open palm. “Enough is enough already. What do I need such troubles for?”

  A feeling of unutterable tiredness came over me. I needed fresh air and sunshine so badly at that moment that I half-rose to leave. Mitzi Strauss said sarcastically, “You are just like your Uncle Siddy—when there is trouble, poof, he’s disappeared.”

  “Isn’t Uncle Siddy with you, Mrs Strauss?”

  “Well, sometimes he is and sometimes he isn’t. Listen, you are not a chi
ld any more. I can tell you, Siddy Kaiser is what you call in Yiddish, a goneff — a thief who makes jokes while he is robbing you. I am very fond of him. Sometimes he is in my bed and sometimes I don’t ask where he is. He gets me the coffee and tea for the ‘Vienna Wald’ with no questions asked. Enough! What am I — no, what are we going to do about Solly?”

  The bell over the door rang. Mitzi Strauss got up, telling me not to go, she’d be back in a moment. I looked up to see Ruti’s mother, Irma Kahn, enter the cafe. I stood up.

  “Hullo, Mrs Kahn, remember me — Jack Kaiser — from the Home?”

  “Why yes Jacob, of course I do. How are you? And your little brother — Solly, isn’t it?”

  Mitzi Strauss tried to steer her to a table. Irma Kahn coldly disengaged herself from Mrs Strauss. “You know Jacob, you are welcome at our flat but we never heard from you. Ruti told me she had seen you at the Habonim meeting and then you went off by yourself. You do know where we live?” She took one of the Vienna Wald cards and wrote on it. “Come soon, Jacob. Ruti would like to talk to you about her studies.” She smiled warmly at me and allowed herself to be led to a table.

  I sat down again. Mitzi Strauss came back, wagging her finger at me. “So, who’s got a girl friend then, eh? Mr grown-up Jacob Kaiser? You should always be so lucky, younger man.” She looked around the cafe. “Sit here long enough and half the Jews of Germany and Austria will drink Mitzi Strauss’s coffee. But where were we? Ah yes, the police say Solly stole beer from a delivery wagon — not much — what can a small boy carry? But beer, here in Sydney, Jacob, is as scarce as … how does Siddy say it? Scarce like hens’s teeth!”

  In spite of the seriousness of the matter, I laughed.

  “It is not so funny,” Mitzi corrected me, “tomorrow he must go before the magistrate. I have called Mrs Pearlman.”

  “What was he going to do with the beer?”

  I had come as near as I ever would to embarrassing Mitzi Strauss. She patted her forehead with a hankie and hesitated.