A Promised Land?

by Alan Collins

  “No bloody fear, Missus,” he replied and swung himself into the driving seat.

  Mrs Kahn turned her back on him and led the way upstairs into her flat. From a kitchen cupboard she took down a bottle of brandy and a delicate wineglass.

  “For you, Jacob,” she said, then smiled. “Why not for all of us? It has been a terrible experience and I am sorry to say, worse is to come. I know only too well.’’

  She took down two more glasses and poured a small drop of brandy into each, adding water to hers and Ruti’s.

  “LChaim — to all of us.” She and Ruti sipped theirs and I gulped mine, enjoying the harshness of the liquor. It coursed through me like fire, burning up the ice in my blood before attacking my head.

  “You are used to brandy, Jacob?” She poured me another. Ruti signalled her mother not to give it to me.

  I nodded and proffered my glass. I had never drunk brandy in my life but the pleasure of feeling my senses slip away from me at such a time was wonderful.

  “Slowly with this one, Jacob or you will soon be shicker!” I ignored her and swallowed hard on the second glass. Ruti said something angrily in German. She took the glass from me and led me to a bedroom.

  “You have had a terrible shock today, Jacob. You need rest more than brandy. You can lie on my bed and later we shall see what is best to do for you.”

  I said dreamily, “Is this what you learn at university, Ruti?”

  “I am only in my first year but I am also a girl and I —’’

  “I may be drunk but I can still tell the difference.” I put my arms around her neck as she bent over me.

  “I said rest, Jacob, rest and nothing else.” She put an eiderdown over me and stood up. I heard the door close as I drifted off.

  As the traffic thinned out along the highway, the old hearse seemed to gather speed. I watched in horror as it swayed over the bumps. Ruti saw it too and held my hand tightly. Our driver shook his head.

  “We have a new man on,” he said apologetically. “Our regular driver is by now in the North African Desert, driving a tank.”

  Mrs Pearlman murmured something about the war affecting us all and resumed chatting to Mrs Rothfield who leaned over the back of the seat and offered me a banana. I took it mechanically and ate it, the soft fruit sticking in my throat.

  When next I looked up, the hearse had entered the cemetery and was winding its way along unkempt paths, halting beside a little Gothic building. Our car stopped behind it and then the car with Mitzi Strauss and Uncle Siddy. A man in overalls came out, consulted a note-book and pointed to a heap of freshly dug earth a few yards off. He joined another man and they leaned nonchalantly on their shovels.

  We had been more than an hour in the car. Now I wished the journey had gone on forever; I feared leaving its dark and musty interior. Mrs Kahn and Ruti got out and stood aside for me. Mrs Pearlman came to the car door.

  “You have a duty to perform, Jacob,” she said gently. “Our religion says that you must bury your brother.” She took a skullcap from her handbag and put it on my head. “When they put your brother in the grave, you must say a prayer and you must help fill it in.

  Uncle Siddy came up to her. “Why don’t you leave the kid alone, Rosie. I’ll do all the necessary.”

  I looked at him gratefully. Siddy at once became the master of the situation. He ordered the women to stay where they were, supervised the drivers as they removed the small coffin with its black cloth cover from the hearse and helped them carry it to the graveside. He watched them lower it, calling out softly to them to “watch yer end mate, not too quick now”.

  When it was done, he beckoned me over. “We shoulda had a rabbi here Jack, but what with one thing an’ another …” He took a shovel from one of the workmen. “You say a prayer, Jack, if yer know one and when yer done I’ll fill ’it in — the poor little fella.”

  I looked across helplessly to the others standing well back, as though the grave held an undefined threat to the living. I was hypnotized by the darting yellow feet of the starlings that fossicked for worms in the freshly turned earth.

  “Please help me,” I called out. “What will I say?”

  Mrs Rothfield detached herself from the tight little group. She stood by my side. “Now, Jacob, what does it matter? Praying is something adults do when they cannot think what to say from their own heart. What do you remember best about Solly? You don’t have to say it — just think about it.’’

  Suddenly I had a picture of Solly with his head under the tap at the back of the milk cart with the cold white milk streaming all over his upturned face. I started to smile and the smile became a giggle that turned into a harsh laugh. I could not stop; the sound reverberated around the headstones and came back to me but by then I was crying and Mrs Rothfield was leading me back to Ruti. With my head sunk in her shoulder I thought I heard clods falling on wood or it could have been the pounding of my heart.

  We sat close together all the way home. Mitzi Strauss invited everyone to come to the Vienna Wald for coffee. The offer was refused; Siddy said he needed something stronger. I noticed that as our car passed the little Gothic house, another cortege had arrived. A bearded rabbi led a procession of mourners that seemed to stretch back as far as the entrance gates.

  Mrs Pearlman sniffed. “That’ll be old Mr Schwartz, the kosher butcher. Ninety-three he was and tougher than the meat he sold.”

  I must have fallen asleep on the return journey; the sun came through the car window like nourishing food, Ruti’s steady breathing was like a murmuring sea that soothed and quietened me. As the car reached Bondi Junction, the women argued over where I was to spend the night. Mrs Rothfield laid the strongest claim to me.

  “A boy — no — a young man needs to be in his own bed in his own pyjamas after such a terrible business. Leave him to me.”

  Ruti blushed at the mention of bed; Mrs Kahn told Mrs Rothfield to give me a brandy. “You like brandy do you not, Jacob?” It was the nearest she had yet come to making a joke.

  I was exhausted. I left the car and Ruti without a backward glance. Mrs Rothfield stood by my bed while I undressed; I was too worn out to be embarrassed and she knew it. Yet there was one thing more I had to do before I fell asleep. After she left me, I put a sheet of newspaper on the floor then took my pocket knife and scraped the clay of the cemetery off my shoes. When that was done I lay down between the cool sheets and thought of nothing.

  ELEVEN

  The men at Roberts and Orayson’s treated me with gruff kindness when I returned to work. It was if I had been through some manly, cathartic experience, put to the test and emerged if not actually triumphant, at least as a survivor. Their attitude was far more bearable than the cloying affection the women showed me, which only made me want to escape to the lavatory and cry. One of them had pinned a cutting from the newspaper on the lunchroom wall. Solly’s death rated two inches on a page mainly devoted to the shooting of a racehorse with a damaged fetlock.

  The foreman compositor said I need no longer call him ‘master’ — Mister Tindale would do but I was never to use his first name, which was Archibald or ‘Arch’. I was never sure whether these grudging concessions were due to Solly’s death or because I really worked hard at learning the printing trade. The job meant a lot to me; it was the only solid, tangible, real thing in my life. I poured all my waking hours into it, staying back after the working day was done to improve my standards. The machine-room apprentice chipped away at me, telling me, “Whaddya reckon, Ikey, they’re gonna take you on as a bloody partner or somethin’?”

  I finished my first year at the technical college with credit certificates in all subjects. It was the first time in my life I had ever had recognition for any achievement. I told Mrs Peari-man, who told the President of the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home, who wrote me a letter attributing my small success to the education and care they had given me and enclosing a postal order for ten shillings.

  Mrs Rothfield said if her English we
re better she would have written a testimonial letter to Cornwall’s Malt Extract, which had assuredly been the reason for my “beating the goyim”.

  If my world had been full of printers I might have had a pleasant existence I could now talk with assurance about typefaces, paper, book binding and ink and did so — to the seagulls on Bondi Beach. I had grown up enough to be aware of my ignorance of the world around me and yet had developed a snobbishness towards learning, a protective carapace that saw me make half-a-dozen starts to call around to Ruti’s flat and get no further than standing outside on the footpath.

  The printery sometimes sent me on errands that took me past the university. From the tram I could see boys and girls walking up the hill with books and notepads or sitting under the Moreton Bay fig trees in tight discussion groups. I knew Ruti was among them, somewhere, ‘swotting’ as they called it. It was impossible to relate that life to the work-stained boys in their overalls who attended the tech college under threat from their employers, that if they failed there were plenty of others glad to take their place.

  I also feared that if I once more resumed reading and took refuge in books I would fall back into a pit of introspection and never get out of it.

  In all this I found in Mrs Rothfield an unexpected ally.

  “You are doing well at your trade Jacob?” she asked pointedly.

  “Yes, but …” I replied.

  “But what? You don’t enjoy?”

  “I’m worried.”

  “That I can see for myself. So tell me.”

  “Well, take Mrs Kahn — she’s always on at Ruti about learning and how Jews should strive for an education. Isn’t what I’m doing, learning too?”

  “You’ve been to that Mitzi Strauss’s cafe, haven’t you? You’ve seen all those educated Jews sitting around with their degrees bursting out of their briefcases? Nu? What good has it done them, I ask you?” She threw an arm dramatically at the picture on the wall showing her farming in Palestine, “Better if they had got a little dirt under the fingernails!”

  “You don’t understand, Mrs Rothfield,” I said, bursting with frustration. “I want to be with Ruti but I’m afraid —”

  ‘‘What’s to be afraid?’’ She slapped the side of her face. “Afraid she won’t think enough of you because you are a boy who works? With his hands? Who keeps himself? Who doesn’t get in trouble?” She stopped and apologized for her slip. “Ach, you know what I mean Jacob. Go to her, be proud of what you have achieved. Three credits you got! What does she want of your life?”

  I was not convinced. Mrs Rothfield’s rumbustious reasoning only served to widen the gap. Whenever I thought back to the Habonim meeting where I had seen Ruti so at home with that cluster of Jewish students, with Wolfgang solemnly holding forth, I felt more and more isolated. It was enough to blot out all those occasions when Ruti had been so understanding. In my heart I knew it was not conviction I lacked but courage and a belief in myself.

  One Friday afternoon, the foreman asked me if I would work next Sunday on a very special job. “You shouldn’t mind too much, Jack,” he said half-jokingly, “after all it’s not your Sabbath, is it?”

  We met outside the printery in the strangely quiet street. He unlocked the door and we went upstairs to a factory unnaturally still. All that day, we worked side by side setting type by hand for a beautiful book on early Sydney Cove. By three o’clock it was done. It had been proofed on a parchment paper and the historian would come on Monday to inspect it. The foreman gave me a playful push. “Well done, mate,” he said, “now off you go, there’s still time for you to meet your girlfriend.” He slipped a pound note into my hand.

  “No,” I said, unable to match his bravado, “I’m too tired. l’m going home.”

  But once out in the street, I felt like a pup let off the leash. I ran up the street then stopped. Why shouldn’t I meet a girlfriend? The Town Hall clock chimed four. About now, the Eureka Youth League would be finished its meeting and the Habonim starting theirs. Oh, the luxury of having a choice! Peg Piper or Ruti Kahn? A Socialist worker or a Jewish intellectual? With one I had a common bond of religion, the other had shown me spontaneous, unquestioning acceptance.

  If I went to Ruti would she understand that today I had created something beautiful with my own hands, something I had done almost intuitively, that I was entitled to call myself a craftsman rather than a tradesman? Could I equate this accomplishment with her goal of a higher education?

  I had only minutes left to resolve my dilemma. Was I going to be ‘Chaver’ Jacob, a pioneer in Habonim, dedicated to rebuilding the Land of Israel with Ruti at my side or Comrade Kaiser, working for the revolution with a girl who had lived in the same street as Ben Chifley?

  I saw Peg first. Or, rather she saw me. Her voice rang down the empty street. “Got a deener for the gas meter, Jack?”

  Her very boldness put spirit into me. I shouted back at her, oblivious of the absurdity of two kids slanging each other in an empty street on a Sunday afternoon.

  “I can do better than that Peg. I’ve got a quid to spend.”

  She walked towards me, high heels ringing on the deserted pavement. “I’ll bet the moths have eaten it, Jack.”

  I took out the pound note and waved it at her. “What’s that look like then, eh? Scotch mist?”

  She stopped a few yards off, feet apart, hands on hips, her head thrown back. “Well, well, my little Jewish comrade,” she drawled mockingly, “you could have had me for a shilling once and turned me down. Now you want to buy me for a quid!”

  I crumpled the note in my hand and stuffed it back in my pocket. Peg watched me then said sardonically, “Don’t you reckon I’m worth it?’ She turned to leave. “You’re a real ragged trousered philanthropist aren’t you, sport?’’

  I caught up with her and we walked side by side down George Street, together but separate. Once, when her swinging skirt brushed against me it brought back the warmth her words had cancelled. Peg kept her head turned away from me as though she was only interested in the shop windows. I looked straight ahead, my eyes fixed on the arch of the bridge. I did not want to lose her, nor did I want her to think that I was angling for an invitation back to her room.

  I said, “Ever walked across the Harbour Bridge, Peg?”

  ‘‘No.’’

  “Like to?”

  “With you?”

  “Yes.” I took a deep breath, flourished the pound note in front of her and said, “We could have a beaut time at Luna Park with a quid.”

  Without taking her eyes from the shops, she laughed. “Last of the big spenders, that’s my Jack.” Then she turned to me. “I reckon you’re all right for a four-be-two, as my old man used to say.”

  Before I could take offence, she added mischievously, “Try to keep a shilling back for the gas-meter!”

  Peg thrust an arm through mine. I wanted to tell her of Solly’s death but was reluctant to spoil the pleasure I imagined might lie ahead. Instead I talked about the work I had done that day. She took my hand and examined the printing-ink stains approvingly, then showed me how her own hands were cracked from so much washing up at the hospital. It was a small bond between us, not needing political rhetoric to reinforce it.

  “I start real nursing next month,” she was saying, “with a uniform and a red cape and all. But I’ll be going back to Bathurst to do my training and — ” She broke off. “You’re not listening to me, Jack. I said I’m going back to Bathurst.”

  I heard her all right. I tried to steer her across to the other side of the road. Directly ahead of us I could see the blue-and-white uniforms of the Habonim kids gathered in a bunch on the footpath. Even at a distance I could make out Wolfgang’s red hair and the familiar figure of Ruti Kahn in her usual role of rounding up the stragglers.

  Peg saw the group too. She resisted my attempt to cross over. “What’s going on down there Jack?” she asked. I didn’t answer. “Come on, let’s have a look — after all, there’s not much happens in Syd
ney on a Sunday arvo.’’ She let go my arm and ran ahead. Suddenly she stopped, turned around and called out to me. “Hey Jack, come here, I think they’re a bunch of Jewish kids — scouts and guides sort of, by the look of their uniforms.

  There was no turning back. I dragged out each reluctant step of the way with Peg still beckoning me on. When I finally reached her I was resigned to the inevitable. Wolfgang saw me first. His greeny-grey eyes took in Peg, recognised at once that we were together, and greeted me with an ironic wave. Peg said, “Fancy that, the red-headed fella knows you, Jack. Who is he?”

  I shrank from telling Peg of all that had gone before; a girl from Bathurst could not possibly understand how a boy from Cologne, Germany, could come to be leading a youth group on a Sunday afternoon in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

  I mumbled something about Bill being just a bloke I knew. He was pulling the grille of the door back. The kids filed through. Ruti was still rounding them up. Only when the last one had gone in did Bill go up to Ruti and point to the two of us. My vision of a walk across the Bridge, rides at Luna Park, and a sputtering gas-fire in a Darlinghurst room dissolved in an instant.

  Bill and Ruti came up to us. Peg took off her glasses, patted her hair and said, “Well, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends, Jack?”

  I felt a chill wind on the back of my neck. I was conscious of my ink-stained hands. I could not speak. In that moment I was aware not merely of the two girls but of the two worlds they represented and the choice confronting me.

  Bill said, “You do not look so well, Jack, perhaps you are having a cold?” He bowed slightly and put out his hand. “My name is Wolfgang Schlesinger and here is Ruti —”