by Alan Collins
Ruti watched her mother mechanically preparing food in a kitchen that was half the size of the entire flat where they used to live. The only knock on the door to frighten them was the blue-singleted iceman, who didn’t wait to be admitted but charged through the kitchen to the scullery, trailing water behind him and dumping the block of ice in the ice chest. The children of the Anglo-Jews who attended University with her told her jokes centred on the Silent Knight refrigerators they now had in their homes. These jokes superseded the ones about the iceman.
Ruti was the ‘‘reffo who had made good’’, marked out but not down by her accent, redeemed by living at an approved address, not overtly handicapped as the stepdaughter of a rag man, and sought after by the boys for her innate difference and northern hemisphere beauty. Those boys were the children of first and second-generation Australian Jews. Their comfortable homes were the sparkling jewels in the crown of Bellevue Hill; the gold and filigree of the crown were the old gentile families to whom Scots College was the unifying alma mater. It took the Jewish boys a generation or so to make it, but some actually enrolled and paraded in front of their Polish and German-born parents wearing tartan kilts. They partied in Palm Beach while their parents still visited the spas and played gin rummy at Blue Mountains resorts.
This evening Ruti sat on the steps of Bondi Beach. Jacob sat stiffly beside her, listening to her unsympathetically. After leaving Mrs Rothfield’s flat he had gone to a phone box and rung Ruti — as much for the need to talk to her as for the novelty of knowing someone who had a telephone. Her soft, guttural accent came down the wire tinctured with discontent. She asked him to come to her house, but he refused. Better to talk on ground he had chosen and on matters he wanted to talk to her about. So now Ruti, her arms hugging her knees, a white cardigan about her shoulders, sat on the concrete steps still warm from the day’s sun. She stared into the phosphorescent sea and talked not to Jacob but to the night air.
‘‘These people, these well-off Jews that live around me and the ones that I see at Uni — they’re different in so many ways to you and me and to Mutti especially. You, Jacob, you were born here and yet I know you feel it too.’’ She swung round and faced him. ‘‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’’ She gripped his arm. ‘‘They mean well I suppose but whatever they do or say I know they are patronising me.’’
Jacob said coldly, ‘‘Yeah, Ruti, I know what you are saying all right. I understand, my word I do. They are doing to you exactly what you bloody well do to me.’’
She was surprised by his outburst. ‘‘I suppose you’re right Jacob. I just never thought of it that way — about us, I mean.’’
She sat closer to him now, hoping her nearness would somehow make amends. ‘‘What is it that I am doing to you, Jacob? Am I being snobby — I mean about Uni and all that?’’
Jacob concentrated his thoughts on all the things he loved about Ruti. He seemed to have known her a lifetime, going back to the day they first met over the dishes in the kitchen of the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home for Jewish Children. There they had come to love each other with a binding purity. Now the barriers of education and class — even politics — had sullied it for him.
What he wanted to say to her must be said standing up, he reasoned. Whenever he touched her, love flowed into him and weakened his arguments. He stood up and moved a few steps down from her.
‘‘Ruti, you and me, we should stick together. Like it used to be. Like it was before you went to university and then on top of that, took on all that Zionist stuff. I can’t get used to it, Ruti. It’s too, too…’’
‘‘Intellectual, Jacob?’’
‘‘Well, I don’t know which is the worst snobbery — that or the Jewish kids of Bellevue Hill hanging around — our — er — your house.’’
Ruti looked past him, out to the long line of white breakers. ‘‘Maybe it’s you who is the snob after all, Jacob. You think that being in a trade sets you apart from those who do other things — you know, clean work. Oh damn, that’s not what I mean at all.’’ She pulled the cardigan tightly around her shoulders and buried her head in the sleeves. In a muffled voice she said, ‘‘Perhaps that is exactly what I mean only I haven’t said it to you before because I didn’t want to upset you.’’
Long shadows spread over the sand. Hillocks that bathers had thrown up as windbreaks earlier that day now left hollows that looked like chasms. Jacob would like to have crawled into one with Ruti, to feel her body fill the corresponding curves of his own, to be assured that at least that part of their friendship would never change. He walked down the steps on to the sand. It still retained the vestigial warmth of the day. Looking back, he saw Ruti, her knees drawn up to her chin. He stared hard at the dark recesses of her dress, needlessly imagining what was there: only a few days earlier he had seen her in her swimming costume, her body so white compared to those around her. He was evenly tanned; Mrs Rothfield called him a svartzer, a black man.
She stood up and came towards him. By the time she had reached his side, Jacob was sweating slightly. It was not merely the cool night air that made him shiver; it was the pleasure of anticipating her nearness. They walked across the sand until they reached the water’s edge. Now they were in the precise centre of the curve of the beach. To the north, the lights of the flats went on and off like signals. A jazz tune was blown in their direction. To the south, the sandstone cliffs were crowned by the rotunda which Felix Kaiser had died building.
Jacob took Ruti’s hand and together they sloshed through the shallows, away from the lights on the promenade, towards the giant fallen boulders at the foot of the cliff. It was a silent progress, broken only once by Ruti’s shudder when she trod on a jelly fish. At the end of the beach, where the sand gave way to the rock pools, it was Ruti who steered Jacob away and drew him down beside her on a little island of grass at the foot of the cliff. She broke the silence first.
‘‘Say something.’’
‘‘What? What do you want me to say?’’
‘‘Anything — anything that comes into your head.’’
‘‘Rapunzel!’’ Jacob shouted.
‘‘What?’’
‘‘That’s what came into my head. The very first thing as I saw you lying there with your hair all sort of — like Rapunzel,’’ he finished limply.
Ruti slid her arm around Jacob’s neck and drew his ear down to her mouth.
‘‘What an idiot you are, Jacob! Rapunzel, for heaven’s sake. Is that —’’ But Jacob’s lips were on hers in a thin kiss that was intended to show his love and also to stifle the mockery that hurt. He moulded himself into her, just as he had so often dreamed he would, his leg between hers and one hand kneading her breast fiercely. Ruti looked up at him coolly. She took his other hand and taught it how to stroke her cheek and then her forehead and finally led it to her mound where she kept her hand over his as though she was soothing a captive bird.
Jacob’s heart was racing. Was it wrong that at this moment, he thought not of Ruti but of the time five years ago when he lay beside Peg Piper in her dingy Darlinghurst room and tried to make pictures out of the cracks in the plaster? Since that day he had not been with a girl, although he had a stock of imaginary stories to tell the boys at the printery. He wondered if he and Ruti were like those couples he had seen on his solitary walks around the cliff tops. He fought down his fear, as his hand lay on Ruti, but by then he was entering another world. They began tearing clumsily at each other’s clothes. In a detached yet menacing voice, Ruti was urging him to hurry. He could not cope.
‘‘Be still,’’ she told him. ‘‘Let me do it.’’ She pushed him on to his back and unbuckled his belt.
Jacob felt like an observer at his own execution. He finally offered to unbutton his trousers but found it had already been done for him. Ruti left him alone while she drew her summer skirt up and snaked her pants down.
‘‘Now Jacob, now,’’ she said desperately, ‘‘for God’s sake do it, oh please, do it.’�
�
She hauled him roughly on to her and locked her arms around him. Jacob lay heavy and unsure until his body deserted his mind and took charge. It marshalled his nerves, muscles and lungs in a co-ordinated effort that sent his head reeling with a fierce new pleasure but brought only a scarcely stifled cry of pain from Ruti.
There was sweat on her forehead, little specks that gleamed in the light of the rising moon. Jacob wiped them away with his lips; the salty taste aroused him again but Ruti pushed him away from her. He raised himself and looked down at her.
‘‘You’re hurt,’’ he said in alarm, ‘‘you’ve got blood on you. Oh Ruti, did I do that?’’
Ruti stood up and looked down on Jacob. She ruffled his tight curly hair.
‘‘You did and I’m glad — glad it was you. I never wanted it to be anybody else but you. I don’t know if it is love, Jacob. Perhaps it’s more than that, a way of binding us together so that if we never met again after tonight we would always be —’’
‘‘In love?’’ Jacob almost pleaded with her.
She took his hand and helped him to his feet. Jacob clutched at his trousers and managed to tighten his belt.
‘‘No, I don’t think so,’’ Ruti replied, ‘‘I think it’s more adult than that.’’
They began walking toward the beach. At the water’s edge, they stopped and both looked at the little plot of grass now springing up after the imprint of their bodies.
‘‘Bondi beach means a lot to you, doesn’t it, Jacob? Things — important things in your life happen here.’’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘‘I’m glad that what we did, we did here.’’
The tide was ebbing, leaving a wide shelf of hard-packed sand. Fishermen had arrived since they passed that way earlier and stood with their backs arched against the pull of the tide on their big surf rods. In the moonlight, drops of water hung like strung jewels from the taut lines. Jacob and Ruti walked beneath them, to the very centre of the beach. They plodded up the concrete steps.
Jacob said, ‘‘Things will be different between us now, Ruti, I don’t care what you say.’’
‘‘Oh? In what way — apart from — you know — giving you my virginity.’’
Jacob was shocked; her words were destroying the idealised image of her he had locked within him ever since he had first known her.
‘‘Is that university talk?’’ he said bitterly. ‘‘Or is that for the benefit of the lumpenproletariat?’’ He walked a few paces ahead of her and let his words float back, half-hoping that she might not hear them. ‘‘I think you made the wrong choice, Ruti, you should have gone to bed in a Bellevue Hill mansion with a rich university bloke.’’
‘‘Jewish?’’ she called out to him.
‘‘Who cares?’’
She caught up with him and squeezed his hand. ‘‘You do, don’t you?’’
He swung round on her and held her tightly. ‘‘Yes, I bloody well do, Ruti, very, very much. What we did can never be taken away from either of us and I’ll always have that to keep.’’ He kissed her gently. ‘‘Now I’ll take you to the tram. Have you ever noticed, Ruti, that the Bellevue Hill tram and the Bondi tram start out from the same terminus but reach very different destinations?’’
She was silent until she boarded the tram and settled in her seat. As it started, she leaned out and called to him, ‘‘What about the return journey, Jacob?’’
THREE
Abe Lewis left the house every week morning about seven. He knew that the sight and sound of his khaki coloured ex-army truck was an affront to his neighbours. The wagon was a brutal piece of machinery, all sharp edges, festooned still with the hooks, straps and chains of its military life. The body sat atop enormous springs that lifted it high off the ground. The truck still had a winch and cable at the front and a gigantic coupling at the rear. The canopied tray was as big as an army tent. Except for civilian number plates and the roughly painted sign on the cabin door — A. LEWIS, TEXTILE WASTE MERCHANT — the truck could have gone to war again at a moment’s notice.
Abe steered it around the narrow streets of East Sydney, occasionally ripping off the side mirrors of parked cars as he made his calls on the sweatshops that sold him their offcuts. He saw the migrant women bent over their machines, jammed into what were formerly the parlours and bedrooms of tenements. Although Irma had never spoken in any detail about her working life, he knew she had sewn army shirts in conditions not much different to these.
But these migrants were not Jewish women. They were called, contemptuously ‘‘Balts’’. They came from the Baltic States of Estonia and Latvia. For the most part, they were heavily built with wide, peasant faces and would have been much happier on Australian farms than cooped up in dingy workrooms. Their husbands worked on the assembly lines of factories now reverting to peace-time production, making cars they themselves could not afford, or lawn mowers for the quarter-acre block with the fibro-cement house on it they aspired one day to own.
As Abe emptied the waste-bins from beside the women’s machines he saw beneath the benches their sturdy legs and wondered what it would be like to make love to one of them compared to the thin, disinterested but unresisting Irma. But it was never more than a thought. ‘‘Don’t buy your meat where you buy your bread’’, as the old saying had it. The textile waste went into a hessian bale which he sewed up tightly with a packing needle. Stocky, nuggety Abe Lewis liked to show off to the women how easily he could hoist the bale onto his shoulders and then heave it into the back of the truck. He told himself that later, when he could afford it, he would buy a simple gantry hoist that would take the hard labour out of the job. In the meantime, he was proud of his firm, compact body, so different to the other Jewish men he met in the course of his business, whose flabbiness he scorned.
Abe Lewis sold the waste to large engineering firms and to printers, trades where oily machinery and grimy hands prevailed. Pieces of pretty printed flannelette, once destined for a night dress, ended up wiping grease off the hard hands of engineers. It was a good living. A simple buy-and-sell operation with a reasonable profit along the way — Abe didn’t expect more from it and was not concerned with its lowly commercial status. It grew steadily alongside the country’s need for household goods.
For his new house, which was not yet a home, Abe was able to buy direct from the factory a refrigerator and a massive console wireless with a record player. Once again Irma was not consulted about these purchases. Abe brought them to the house himself on the truck; the first she knew of them was his call to her to open the front door as he struggled up the steep drive with a rickety hand trolley. It took him two trips, while the lace curtains of the adjoining houses twitched with curiosity. Impatient, he rang his own front door bell. Irma appeared, dressed, as she nearly always was, as though she had either just arrived home or was about to leave.
The refrigerator and the wireless stood side by side on the tiled veranda. Abe stood between them, glowing as though they were his favourite nephews come to visit.
‘‘Silent Knight.’’ He slapped the refrigerator. ‘‘Stromberg Carlson.’’ He gave the wireless a more respectful greeting. ‘‘Whaddya think, eh, Irma old girl?’’ He flung open the refrigerator door, twiddled the knobs on the wireless and taking Irma’s impassiveness as a sign of approval, actually kissed her on the cheek. He was about to follow this up with a playful slap on the bottom when Ruti appeared.
Abe Lewis eyed her warily. She had so often, in this delicately balanced relationship, discouraged him from sharing his exuberance with her, and he was not about to be snubbed again in full view of her mother and who knows how many stickybeaks watching. He attempted to deprecate what he had done.
‘‘Well Ruth, you can kiss the iceman goodbye now, luv, he won’t be coming round the back door any more.’’
Ruti replied curtly, ‘‘I never kissed him, in fact I hardly ever saw him.’’
‘‘Well,’’ Abe said winking, ‘‘you’d be one of the few who haven’t.’’<
br />
Irma ignored the refrigerator and moved slowly towards the radiogram. She opened the top and spun the record turntable. Then she too twiddled the knobs.
‘‘Can it…will it…oh, do you think, Abe that it might —’’
‘‘That gramophone will play anything from grand opera to the Refrain From Smoking!’’ Abe said, hugging himself with the pleasure of being able to make a joke for Irma.
She managed a laugh, not quite understanding the joke but at least sure that one was made. ‘‘Really, Mr Abe’’ — and she went to him and put her arm through his — ‘‘I was going to ask you if I could listen to the BBC on it.’’
‘‘The what?’’
‘‘The BBC — the wireless broadcasts we heard while we were in the holding camps in England before we came to Australia. We listened every night to hear how the war in Europe was going. One country after another fell to Hitler. Then, one day the English camp commander took the wireless away from us. He said the authorities had realised we were German and that we could be spies!’’
Ruti nodded her head in agreement. She had heard this story before from her mother and also from her father — how he had protested that they were Jews fleeing from Hitler and as such could not possibly be thought of as spies for Germany. Poor Henry Kahn, had he lived a bit longer in Australia, might have experienced the same official insanity that prevailed in England. German Jewish refugees had been interned in Australia, confined to camps in remote country districts until wiser heads realised there was an untapped reservoir of talent behind barbed wire on the western plains of New South Wales.
One of the bonds that both divided and bound Irma and Abe was the war. Yet for all they knew of each other’s experiences, it could have been two different and unrelated wars taking place on two distant planets. Sometimes they talked about it, usually just before Abe fell into a heavy and undisturbed sleep. What Irma and Henry Kahn had suffered, Abe maintained, was no more than the inconvenience of moving from one country to another. Did they hear a shot fired in anger? he asked, not unkindly, thinking of his own experience as a soldier in the Middle East.