A Promised Land?

by Alan Collins

  ‘‘What’s the matter, Jacob, are you frightened of my stepfather?’’ Ruti asked. Jacob ignored her. She went back to him and took his hand. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ she teased, ‘‘he’s gone to the Randwick races. There’s only Mutti at home.’’

  It seemed a lifetime since he had last entered those gates. And there was Ruti urging him on, ignorant of his knowledge of what was once his home. The white painted mortar of the bricks was cleaner than he remembered; the ironwork fence shone with its coat of glossy black and its pretentious gold painted finials. The lawn down which he and Solly had sledded so many times was as neat as a set table. Ruti was already unlatching the heavy iron gate. It swung back without the familiar protesting squeak he knew. Their father used to say, ‘‘Got to get some mouse oil on to that, Jake!’’

  Jacob almost repeated the silly joke to Ruti. But would it appeal to her European sense of humour? He stood outside the gate and looked up the grassy slope to the mock grandeur of his former home. Ruti had reached the top of the flight of sandstone steps and was fumbling for her key. After a brief search, she gave up and twirled the doorbell, then called down to Jacob.

  ‘‘Are you coming, Lumpen?’’ Their finely balanced relationship had progressed to the stage where Ruti had actually bestowed a nickname on Jacob. ‘‘Lumpen’’, he knew from his days in the Communist Eureka Youth League, was short for Lumpenproletariat. Ruti prized Jacob for still being working class and thus of great value to her and her student friends. It enabled her to show off her university-learned egalitarianism. Jacob had not yet decided whether to accept this as an accolade or an insult. He didn’t like the word — it smacked of coal heavers and reminded him of the blue-singleted workmen he suspected had edged his father over the cliff top at Bondi. Yet coupled with ‘‘proletariat’’ it just might be acceptable.

  Jacob decided that as a ‘‘Lumpen’’ he would not enter Ruti’s house. Superficially at least, that would be his excuse; in reality, he was afraid of the emotions it would stir within him. His childhood was not so far behind him that he could risk the memories that would surface.

  ‘‘Lumpen cannot be seen entering the portals of the rich, Ruti. You should know better than to ask,’’ he had said with contrived sarcasm.

  ‘‘Who’s watching?’’ she had called mockingly. ‘‘I don’t see too many of the working class taking their Sunday stroll in Bellevue Road.’’

  Jacob had pulled the iron gate closed and stood back on the footpath. He waved up at Ruti just as the front door opened. He caught a glimpse of the former Mrs Kahn, now the wife of industrial waste dealer Abe Lewis.

  Ruti’s mother had raised her arm in shy greeting to Jacob but it was stifled as Ruti pushed her back through the doorway. The door closed with a rich clunking sound that Jacob did not recall.

  Jacob acknowledged the none too subtle presence of Mrs Rothfield in the room with him. He turned away from the window and looked into her flat features, tanned from sitting on her little balcony with her face tilted to the afternoon sun. She ignored the tiny pile of sand beside his shoes, made no comment on his socks still jammed under the window-sill.

  ‘‘You think I don’t know what troubles you, Yakov? That you stand at the window and stare out at the big house beyond the trees? It is the house from your parents, yes?’’

  ‘‘I will never enter it again.’’

  ‘‘Ach, at your age, it is not wise ever to say never!’’ She took his socks from under the window-sill almost without thinking. ‘‘It hurts you to think that Ruti lives there now, does it not? What do you want of her life and of her mother’s? That she stays poor? That she sews shirts all her life? This is a country for making good — but when you do, they think you are a goneff, if you don’t, they say you’re a nudnik with not enough kopf to make a go of it.’’ She took Jacob’s head in her hands. ‘‘Don’t envy the rich, Yakov. They have problems too.’’ Under her breath, he heard her sigh: ‘‘I should have their problems!’’

  She left the room abruptly. A few minutes later Jacob heard the wireless being tuned. Finally, through the static, there came a squeaky tenor singing in German and Mrs Rothfield’s cracked voice accompanying it. ‘‘Roseline, Roseline, Ich liebe dich,’’ they sang in disembodied harmony. When the song ended, Mrs Rothfield put her head around his door.

  ‘‘They killed him, you know.’’

  ‘‘Who killed who, Mrs Rothfield?’’

  ‘‘Joseph Schmidt, that ach so beeutiful singer. The Germans killed him.’’

  ‘‘Well, I’m glad it wasn’t Perry Como. He’s a real ripper singer. One of the blokes at the printery’s got a record of his.’’

  Mrs Rothfield had left his socks in a tight ball on his bed. Jacob tossed them from one hand to the other. If his mother had lived, would she have done these things for him, he wondered. He went to the chest-of-drawers and saw the neatly folded clothes in it, folding that Mrs Rothfield did unasked after he had carelessly stuffed them in. Would his mother have also sat like Mrs Rothfield in front of the wireless in the gathering darkness, her eyes focussed on the little yellow dial light, waiting in comfortable anticipation for the Sunday night serial to begin?

  He knew what his father would have been doing on a Sunday night. Felix Kaiser would have been packing his case with samples of hotel crockery, cutlery and glassware ready for his early-morning start to call on the hotels west of the Blue Mountains. The Chevrolet, with its huge chrome and black headlights, its leather seats, would have been at the kerbside, a spare tin of petrol strapped to the running board. In a shed up the back, curled up on straw in a pineapple case with chicken wire across the front of it was Rastus, the five foot long carpet snake. Moments before Felix was due to leave, he would fetch Rastus from his cage and nonchalantly drop him onto the Chevy’s back seat alongside the sample cases. ‘‘Best damn watchdog I ever had, boys,’’ he’d boast to Jacob and Solly. ‘‘Nobody’d dare lift anything with that snake sitting there.’’

  A cheeky toot on the horn and he’d be gone, not to return until Friday afternoon. Jacob still started involuntarily whenever he saw an old-fashioned car with canvas hood and openings for windows. His Uncle Siddy had a canvas-topped car, but he called it a convertible, Yankee style. In the summer he drove with the top down, some tarty woman beside him with a scarf over her hair, the wind shimmering his silk shirt and whisking his tie over his shoulder. Only last weekend he had parked the car outside Mrs Rothfield’s flat and tooted for Jacob to come down. Siddy hadn’t set foot inside the flat since the day before Solly’s funeral.

  ‘‘Well, how y’ goin’ Jake,’’ he drawled, ‘‘gettin’ any?’’ and he winked lugubriously for the benefit of the woman sprawled on the car seat. Jacob had entered into the spirit of the moment to earn the pound reward he knew would follow. He hated himself for it.

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ he said with matching world-weariness, ‘‘I’ve ’ad to put another fella on the job.’’

  The woman in the car giggled. ‘‘A real chip off your uncle Siddy, aren’t you?’’

  Siddy whispered to Jacob. “Reckon y’ could handle her, sport?’’

  Jacob smirked, as expected of him, and made a hard fist with his hand. Siddy roared with laughter and flicked a pound note out of his fob pocket. ‘‘Stick this in yer kick, son. Yer might need to buy a bit one day.’’ He clapped him on the back, leapt behind the wheel and took off with such violence the woman was thrown back hard, squealing in mock fear.

  Jacob would be twenty next week. Soon the printery would have to pay him adult wages. It worried him that others had been sacked when reaching the end of their apprenticeship. Now he would be a journeyman, a fully qualified tradesman, a compositor, an inheritor of the traditions of Gutenberg and Caxton. Would the old tradesmen he had worked alongside for the past five years still call him ‘‘Inky Ikey’’? They had, to his dismay, tried to pass this soubriquet on to the returning soldiers who were now re-employed after the war. But most of them ignored it; they had had enough
of years of official indoctrination of hatred. They told the xenophobic foreman Frank Williams to lay off him. Williams struck back by warning Jacob, ‘‘Now the boys are back from the war, you’d better not make any mistakes, Mister Jacob Inky Ikey Kaiser, ’cause there’s plenty o’ blokes need work and the gov’ment says we gotta give ’em jobs.’’

  Mrs Rothfield had framed his trade certificate. She used an old frame that had held a picture of a languid girl in a diaphanous white dress leaning against a fluted pedestal. The picture had hung in the hallway of the flat where the light never reached. Mrs Rothfield denied it was a picture of herself, but never with enough vehemence to convince Jacob entirely.

  Jacob’s relationship with Mrs Rothfield was the one constant in his life. This stolid old former kibbutznik was cynical of all officialdom, both secular and religious, contemptuous of all politicians and a mocker of philanthropists as self-seekers. She never gave up the self-appointed task of persuading Jacob to adopt her iconoclasm. Her late husband (may he rest in peace), she told Jacob over and over again, had been a believer in these things. At this point, Jacob would join in her chorus: ‘‘And where did it get him I ask you? It got him dead in a wadi in the Sinai desert, shot accidentally sure, the poor nebish, by Australian soldiers in 1917.’’

  Their kibbutz failed in spite of — or because of — her husband and other well intentioned city dwellers like him. Shulamit Rothfield, widowed, reverted to her Polish birth name of Sarah and showed mild curiosity about the country of the men who had inadvertently shot her husband. They told her they owned kangaroo farms and gold mines and grew sheep as big as bulls. ‘‘And never leave home without your waterbag,’’ she was told.

  ‘‘Such liars,’’ she laughed as she told the story for the umpteenth time. ‘‘Well, Yakov, I came here, not much older than you are now. You ask me why?’’ (He had not.) ‘‘I’ll tell you, Yakov. To go back to Poland and the anti-Semites? To admit failure on the kibbutz? To stay in Palestine without my Yosef? Sure, I’m a bit ashamed. Maybe today if I had stayed I could be somebody — like Golda Meir.’’

  Sunday evening in Bondi, in her small flat with only Jacob to talk to before settling down by the wireless for that night’s play, Mrs Rothfield believed she was a second mother to Jacob. After all, she fed him, scolded him, washed his clothes and tried to teach him Yiddish. She would have liked to give him the occasional cuddle too.

  ‘‘Anywhere in the world you can go, Yakov and you can speak with Jews. With Yiddish you are never a stranger.’’

  Now, as Jacob looked out over the balcony, he heard Mrs Rothfield call from the lounge room.

  ‘‘Come listen Yakov, tonight, a play by Noel Coward, ach, an anti-Semite but what a way with words. From him I should have learned English!’’

  He felt like a helmsman who had to pick a safe course through a shallow channel. The navigation lights were the small glow from Mrs Rothfield’s wireless and the distant windows of Ruti Kahn’s house. There was a roll of summer thunder with its counterpoint of static in Mrs Rothfield’s wireless. A heavy rainspot hit his cheek. The wind moved the branches across the lights of the Lewis’s house so that they blinked a signal. Mrs Rothfield’s light was tiny but constant, offering him no direction except where he had come from. Ruti’s signal, intermittent and intriguing, confusing and yet comforting, beckoned him on.

  ‘‘Listen, Yakov,’’ Mrs Rothfield was calling, ‘‘if you want to stay out on the balcony at night, at least it should be with a young lady, like in this play. You know a girl called Amanda?’’

  Jacob went back into his room. He put on his shoes and socks and a waterproof jacket. He had to cross the lounge room to reach the front door of the flat. Mrs Rothfield said automatically as he passed her chair, ‘‘Don’t be late, tomorrow is work.’’

  Jacob did not hear her.

  TWO

  From her bedroom window, Ruti, if she cared to look, would have seen a segment of Bondi beach, a narrow wedge framed by the red roof tops of the houses that swept down from Bellevue Hill to the waterfront. Now and again, ships moved across the bay as though wound from left to right and back again like a child’s toy. But she rarely looked out of her window or used the braided silk tassels to pull aside the satin drapes. Her room was softly, almost gloomily lit by low-powered candle globes set in a clustered pendant. A quilted satin bedspread reached to the floor in measured perfection; wardrobes, dressing-table, upholstered footstool and jardinière were all placed with planned precision. The furniture was painted cream with the fluting picked out in gold. The long mirrors on the two facing wardrobe doors reflected the bedroom interior over and over again. It had all been done by a Double Bay decorator whose embossed card Ruti had found wedged into every piece of furniture in the room. Her mother had smiled and shown Ruti similar cards she had found in her bedroom. ‘‘Charles of The Bay’’ — his name, had they read the social pages, would have been quite familiar. Abe Lewis had hired him but swore, when he got the bill, that ‘‘Charles’’ should have been in Long Bay, not Double Bay.

  Irma Kahn still found it strange to be addressed as ‘‘Mrs Lewis’’. Ruti flatly rejected the name for herself — just as she clung to the German version of her first name, despite the ribald remarks it evoked among boys who met her for the first time. Among the Australian Joans and Shirleys, ‘‘Ruti’’ was certainly conspicuous. Even Jacob rather wished she would adopt the English version, but whenever he used it she would pertly correct him. He once told her he liked the honest Australian ring of ‘‘Jack’’ and ‘‘Ruth’’ and tactlessly backed this up with a reference to her stepfather’s physical work in collecting and redistributing ‘‘industrial waste’’, as Ruti so carefully phrased it.

  ‘‘He doesn’t need to work so hard himself. He only does it to save money,’’ Ruti said.

  Jacob said, ‘‘I couldn’t help noticing how his hands are a bit like mine.’’ In fact, he had never seen Abe Lewis’s hands.

  Immediately Ruti was contrite. ‘‘He’s very generous to Mutti and me. But sometimes when he gives me money I think he expects me to kiss him — I tell you, he smells!’’ Then she turned quickly and kissed Jacob on the mouth. ‘‘You don’t,’’ she laughed.

  Jacob wanted to know Abe Lewis better. He had seen him heave his heavy hard, squat figure from behind the wheel of his truck, open the side gate of the house then spring up into the truck’s cabin and roar up the drive to the garage where his father used to park his Chevrolet. Abe Lewis still wore his old army shirt with the colour-patches of the battalions that fought at Tobruk in 1941. Because other women at Joe Symond’s factory were putting little notes in the shirt pockets, Irma Kahn, too, had written a note, in German: Be careful, soldier she put on the back of the packing slip which included her work identity number. Abe Lewis, in his desert dug-out, got the shirt, put the note in his wallet and pondered on being captured and having a note in German in his pocket.

  As a business entrepreneur, Abe Lewis was as honest as he had been as a soldier. He worked hard, drank little, swore only enough to get by in the company of the men he employed and occasionally regretted the few quid he lost on the horses — but never enough to turn him off the flutter. He never saw a film or read a book. The front section of the newspaper was discarded as of no value. Four years in the army was enough bad news for a lifetime, he reckoned. As for films, being locked up in a darkened hall for three hours struck Abe as an almost criminal waste of time.

  Essentially a loner, Abe Lewis had not the usual yardstick that men measure their sexual performance by: magazines, films and a bit of boasting across the bar. He was younger than Irma, vigorous and prosaic in his lovemaking, smoked homemade cigarettes afterwards and, although he failed to see anything wrong with it, Irma felt aggrieved that he chose their weekly lovemaking night to hand over the housekeeping. The money took on a taint she was sure was unintentional. Abe always gave her whatever extra she asked for, reasoning that by doing so, he had absolved himself from any obligation
to conform to the Bellevue Hill Anglo-Jewish establishment.

  Irma was as unacceptable to the Anglo-Jews as her husband, but for different reasons. Her English was still poor, her cooking was central European. Abe relished its richness but occasionally had to demand plain grills. She could not break the habit of making tea with a strainer. Her life centred around the classical music performances given by her fellow refugees; there she could listen and in doing so, shut out the rawness of her Australian surroundings and give opinions in German knowing that in this company at least, she would be understood.

  Abe, the outsider, had a blunt but tolerant disdain of their pretensions — those of the establishment Anglo-Jews and the refugees.

  He treasured the secret knowledge that the house, once owned by Julius Kaiser’s family, had previously stood as a brief thumb-to-the-nose gesture by the Negro boxer, Jack Johnson. In 1908 Johnson had come to Sydney to fight the Australian Tommy Burns for the world heavyweight crown, beaten him convincingly, and bought the house with the prize money. In those days it stood squarely amid the homes of the newly rich: Johnson, Kaiser and Lewis had that much in common.

  Irma did not consider herself the mistress of this house. It was a container for living in — a house of physical dimensions, but, as she told Ruti, ‘‘It is not here in the heart, nicht wahr?” Her own secret from Abe was that she never told him of her stubborn fight for reparations from the post-war German authorities. The protracted negotiations were carried on through a German-Jewish lawyer whom she met reluctantly, at Mitzi Strauss’s Vienna Wald cafe. The lawyer stroked her hand and asked her difficult questions about love and happiness in this benighted country. He hinted frequently at the possibility of a joint bank account with him, sharing what money he might win for her through the German courts.