A Promised Land?

by Alan Collins

  ‘‘What about so many of my friends who just disappeared?’’ Irma asked him. An honestly earned snore would come from beside her. Irma would nudge him fiercely. ‘‘Where are they now?’’

  ‘‘Don’t worry, Irma ol’ girl,’’ Abe said sleepily, ‘‘they’ll turn up here, you mark my words.’’

  To Abe, Germans were still the enemy he had faced in the Western Desert of North Africa, who had chased the British Army all the way to Benghazi and there and at Tobruk had been beaten back by the Australian Divisions. Desert warfare against Germans and Italians had still managed to retain for the Australians all the seriousness of a football game, unlike the war against the Japanese, tainted by the propagandists with racial loathing. Abe hadn’t hated the German army any more than his commanding officers required him to. It was a long time before Abe Lewis saw newsreels of Buchenwald concentration camp. A long time after his marriage to Irma.

  He had not joined the army as a volunteer. He was already thirty-four in 1940, the only son of a long widowed mother who took comfort in Jewish religious orthodoxy on the death of his father and until the day she died, supplementing her pension by working as a body washer and vigil keeper for the Jewish burial society. She had a wide network of first, second and third cousins, most of whom dealt in the accessories that went with the clothing trade. ‘‘Never take a job’’ was the axiom by which they endeavoured to live, ‘‘Don’t work for somebody else’’ their constant catch-cry, as though it was more honourable to live in near-poverty, as a self-employed button maker, pants presser, shoulder pad stuffer or any of the hundred and one dreary operations that made a suit of clothes, than to take employment — if you could get it.

  Abe Lewis could have had a job as a plumber, as a bricklayer. Next door to them lived Bert Woodward, one of those Australian tradesmen, skilled but uncertified by a trade board, proficient by experience in all aspects of building. Left without labour when the war started, he eyed Abe’s rugged frame and offered to teach him the building game. For a year they worked happily together. ‘‘Shit and cement — who needs?’’ chided his mother’s cousins, their bodies twisted from twelve-hour days on the tailoring workbench and sewing machine. Abe didn’t mind. The girls who walked past the building sites straightened their stocking seams and gave him sidelong glances. Bert Woodward had pleaded with the Manpower authorities to leave Abe in his ‘‘protected occupation’’, but the day arrived when he sank his pick in the earth for the last time and went as a conscript into the army.

  Now Abe Lewis looked at the iron wheels of his trolley and remembered the richly patterned carpet square of the lounge room. He took a piece of rope from the trolley and made a sling of it. He put one loop over his shoulder and one around the veneered radio cabinet.

  ‘‘Reckon I can lift it, Irma ol’ girl?’’

  Irma looked for support from Ruti. Should they show this simple man love or contempt for his efforts?

  Ruti paused for the merest moment then said, ‘‘Of course you can…Daddy.’’

  Abe glowed, not with the suffused blood of his exertion but with this rare and unsolicited acknowledgment of his position in the household. He bent his knees, took the strain and lifted the wireless cabinet clear off the tiled veranda. ‘‘Okay, then, Ruth, hold the door open and in we go. Get this bugger in then I’ll come back for the fridge!’’

  In a warehouse in Redfern where Abe collected the occasional bale of waste paper (a side of business he was slowly expanding) they sold items for a woman’s dressing-table — cut-glass, squirty perfume bottles with gold tassels, powder-puff bowls in pink china with lids that had ballerinas with toes pointing to the sky. But what caught Abe’s eye was the ivory backed hairbrush set with a silver edged comb. (Except that it wasn’t ivory but Xylonite, not silver but chrome.) It came with all the pieces nestling in a case lined with red velvet. He would buy it for Ruth…Ruthy? How did that sound? Would she permit him to call her Ruthy? He could not bring himself to call her Ruti. But such a gift for a stepdaughter who had finally called him ‘‘Daddy’’ — surely this would be the beginning of the thaw in their relationship. It was not the saccharine diminutive for father he liked, but the recognition it implied. Perhaps now he could get to talk to her about that young bloke Jake, whose parents used to own the house.

  Abe had seen Jacob and Ruti many times as he eased the ex-army truck up the steep side drive at the end of the day. He had seen Jacob watch as he struggled single-handedly to unload a bale from the truck and wondered if he would come across the road and offer a helping hand. Jacob never did. He never crossed the road; he left Ruti to cross and enter the gate by herself. And somehow, Abe felt some curious affinity with the boy. Ruti had not spoken to Abe about Jacob, but then she rarely told him anything but the most inconsequential news.

  Abe would have liked to know more about the previous owner. Not the Yankee showman who had built it nor the Negro boxer, but Felix Kaiser, who had lived here and lost the house in the Depression. In the garage he had found a fruit box with rusting and mouldy toys in it. He had not thrown it out then and would not do so now; maybe he might eventually learn at first-hand from Jacob something of his life in this house.

  Abe understood. Abe too was on the threshold of building a life for himself.

  Irma’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘‘We haven’t got any gramophone records.’’

  ‘‘Bloody hell, Irma ol’ girl, I’ve forgotten ’em.’’

  ‘‘Oh, you didn’t — did you?’’

  ‘‘Go on, look in the cupboard underneath. Go on, you look, Ruthy.’’

  ‘‘What’s this, wrapped in white paper? It certainly is not a record.’’

  ‘‘I’ll bet a bale of waste it is a bloody record! Now you tell me where I can get two pound o’ rump steak, no coupons. That’s what I call a record!’’

  Abe kneels down beside Ruti and reaches deep into the cupboard.

  ‘‘What about this, then? Something for your mother. Die Fledermaus. The bloke in Chappels recommended it. ‘It’s all about a bat,’ he says. ‘I’m not takin’ that,’ I says, ‘no bloody fear.’ But he says it’s lovely Viennese romantic stuff, so — well, Irma ol’ girl, I hope you like it.’’

  It floats out over the street, over the cicadas and crickets, over the front fences and seeps into lounge rooms that have only heard Gladys Moncrieff and Peter Dawson. What a shame it cannot reach across the treetops and down the hill to where Mrs Rothfield and Jacob wait for something to happen in their lives, not knowing that it already has.

  Jacob knew that Abe Lewis had been a soldier. Apart from the familiarity he showed in his handling of the old army truck, Abe usually wore as his working garb remnants of his army uniform. In the summer, he wore baggy khaki shorts and a shirt with the sleeves torn out of it — the better, Jacob knew, to show off his short powerful arms; his legs, too, were like hand-adzed jarrah fence posts. Abe’s only concession to winter was a woollen battle jacket or, in extreme cold, an army greatcoat. Sometimes, as Abe swung down from the truck’s cabin, Jacob thought he saw one arm go up in a suspicion of a wave, but he could never be sure. On those occasions, Ruti would edge Jacob around so that his back was to Abe Lewis.

  Jacob yearned to talk to Abe Lewis about the fact that he had once lived in the house in Bellevue Hill. It was one of the secrets he had clung to since leaving the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home. He kept it with all the other secrets of his short life which (as is proper with secrets) only a few shared with him. Mrs Rothfield knew, and of course so did Uncle Siddy. Jacob felt pretty sure Abe must know it had belonged to his father — it would be written in the title deeds — yet he was quite certain that neither Ruti nor her mother knew. This gave him a tiny edge of power over them. Still, in his small world that lay between the printery in the city and the beach at Bondi, between the clifftop cemetery at Bronte and the Palladian splendour of Bellevue Hill, the fact remained that he had once lived in that house — even belonged there — among the Jewish-Australian
establishment.

  Now he was linked to the house by two emotional threads. He had known but not enjoyed his first sexual experience with a girl who now probably slept in the room he had once shared with his brother Solly. The way in which she had given herself to him made him feel proud, humiliated and resentful. Perhaps his relationship with Ruti would always be like that, veering up and down like the sensitive gold scales his father had once used.

  Jacob also envied Ruti her access to Abe Lewis, for he admired the man without ever having spoken to him. He tried to suppress the disloyalty that arose in him when he compared Abe with Felix. His father, all his life, had ingratiated himself with his customers and built up his considerable business by cultivating a contrived fellowship that masked a barely concealed contempt by both parties.

  Abe Lewis would not be like that. He imagined him shouldering his way into a factory with a ‘‘G’day, sport’’ to the owner, not begging him to buy or sell but assuming as a matter of course that a deal would be done among equals. Money, in an uncounted roll, would change hands because they trusted each other. Abe Lewis would whistle his way into and out of the factory and the truck would groan off to the next call.

  Certainly Abe’s was a different life to his own as a journeyman printer. A five-year apprenticeship completed and still he was the Jewboy around the place. He didn’t drink, didn’t bet SP, didn’t even follow Easts, the rugby league team from the suburbs where most of the Jewish community lived. He read books and played gin rummy with his landlady. And he was no longer without sexual experience, an event which had far less effect on his life than he had been led to believe it would. For Jacob, its value lay in binding him closer than ever to Ruti. If the lunch-time talk among the apprentices at the printery was the yardstick for measuring sexual activity, Jacob had no need to boast; he now knew that some of the loudest talkers were still dependent on magazines and masturbation.

  There were other pressures building up inside him, directions that needed to be explored. Soon he would be twenty-one, eligible to vote. He read the political pages of the paper as avidly as the men in the printery read the sports pages. It seemed as though the post-war Labor government would go on for ever. Ben Chifley, the Prime Minister, had seen the country through to a victorious conclusion. Chifley embodied all that Australia held dear: an egalitarianism based on mateship. It held good so long as jobs were not under threat from outsiders; and change was brought about slowly in a society that was, in reality, still a bastion of nineteenth century British imperialism.

  FOUR

  The School of Arts in Bondi was a modest enough municipal version of suburban architectural grandeur. Collonaded, por-ticoed, balconied and marble-stepped, it had once stood alone on a small elevation of land in keeping with its lofty and unabashed aspiration of bringing education to the working class. When Jacob had taken his first shy steps beyond the glass-panelled double doors, the building was a landmark. Now it fought for its identity with a red brick Masonic hall on one side and a gloomy block of flats on the other.

  From age eight to eleven he had sat imprisoned every Saturday morning in a small room inside the School of Arts. Old men of thirty, forty, maybe even fifty, wrapped in yellowing prayer shawls, stabbed their fingers at the place in the prayer book. Sometimes a man would be missing, his passing marked only by the kaddish, a prayer for the dead. If Jacob asked about the missing man, he would be told, irrationally he thought, ‘‘Well, life goes on, don’t it?’’

  A finger stabs the prayer book. ‘‘Here, here yingele, here is the place. You can’t read Hebrew yet? So, who’s your teacher? Mr Margolis?’’ (A sucking in of breath.) ‘‘Well, what can you expect from a Shabbos goy?’’

  From the other side of him: ‘‘Listen, Jacob, tell me, are you a Cohen or a Levi or maybe — maybe like most of us — just an Israelite?’’

  At that age he was expected to know which of the three priestly castes, descended from an ancient Semitic heritage, he belonged to. The Cohens were the most elevated, intermediaries and conduits to God. He looked at his shabby clothes. No, not for him such exalted status. Perhaps a Levite? One who served as an acolyte and administrator in the temple. Perhaps? Maybe? After all, he had very ably assisted Uncle Siddy in the running of his SP betting business. Why not be a Levite? He was about to inform the smelly alte that yes, he was a Levite, when a tall man strode into the little synagogue. He went straight to the front pew, put a prayer shawl of blinding whiteness over his crisp pin-stripe suit, bowed toward the ark and began to pray in a voice that was vigorous and clear. It filled the dustiest corner of that little room, it reverberated from the mock gothic ceiling and overcame and destroyed the sound of a passing tram. The man did not bend and sway like the other congregants; he stood his full height, he enriched the prayer with operatic gestures that displayed his starched white shirt cuffs — Jacob could see the gold links, each with a diamond set in it that twinkled even in that poor light. Only once did the vocal richness of his devotions falter. He paused momentarily and turned right around so that Jacob could see the thick wavy hair that escaped from the gold embroidered edge of his prayer shawl and the solitary pearl as big as pea that reclined on his tie.

  ‘‘Where is east?’’ he asked in a rich baritone.

  A dozen hands pointed in directions that took in half of the compass card. The man looked angry.

  ‘‘East, east, for God’s sake,’’ he cried.

  Jacob had rushed over to him and grabbed his oh so strong, clean, manicured, stiff-cuffed hand and pointed it towards the window.

  ‘‘That’s east, mister,’’ he said, ‘‘I know ’cause it’s where I live — and — and — it’s where the sun rises.’’

  The man now turned his whole body to where Jacob had pointed and resumed his sonorous prayers. When he had finished he turned around and strode over to Jacob.

  ‘‘You’re a bright young fella,’’ he said, ‘‘but it’s one thing knowing where east is. It’s quite another knowing why I asked.’’ He ruffled Jacob’s hair. ‘‘First tell me your name and then tell me why I wanted to know where east was.’’

  ‘‘My name’s Jacob — Kaiser, and you wanted to know where east was because you wanted to… wanted to…’’

  ‘‘Yes?’’

  ‘‘Say your prayers in the direction where the second temple was in Jerusalem.’’

  The man slapped him on the back. ‘‘Good for you, young Jake, I reckon you’ve got to be a Levite at the very least.’’

  Jacob took a deep breath and looked into the man’s untroubled brown eyes. He saw only honesty and friendliness there, a face that would not twist in anger, that could accept a small lie that would hurt nobody.

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ he said. ‘‘Yeah, I’m a Levite okay, too right I am!’’

  In his growing-up years, Jacob had built a small fantasy around this innocently acquired position on the Jewish hierarchical ladder. It was not much but through all the hard times he had hugged this ancient status symbol to him — much as he had kept the mezuzah from his old home wrapped in tissue paper, taking it out at times of distress. He was not of the priestly Cohen class but then, he told himself, he did not wish to mix with the upper classes even in his religion. Yet it was good to know you were not at the bottom like the Israelites; there were some not as well placed as he was and that was a comfort!

  Abe Lewis would be an Israelite, Jacob decided. You only had to look at the man to see that. He worked hard, drank a beer now and then, and, according to Ruti, had never read a book in his life. All of which increased his value in Jacob’s eyes; the man was to be admired as a genuine worker. Jacob never looked on Abe Lewis as a businessman, let alone a capitalist. His lack of training set him out as a more clearly defined member of the ‘‘Lumpenproletariat’’ than Jacob himself was from Ruti’s viewpoint.

  Standing on the little balcony that led off the lounge room of Mrs Rothfield’s flat, Jacob felt the morning sun curl around his skinny, pyjama-clad body. Today was Sunday,
the second day of a three-day weekend.

  Mrs Rothfield called out to him. ‘‘You know what tomorrow is, Yakov?’’

  ‘‘Monday,’’ he replied disinterestedly.

  ‘‘Such a red hot socialist you are, Yakov, you don’t know it’s Labor Day?’’

  ‘‘You mean Eight Hour Day, don’t you?’’

  “I mean like when my husband and me worked in the socialist movement in Palestine on the land, twelve hours a day. What’s a socialist who can’t work —’’

  ‘‘Is a man who works twelve hours a day for himself still a socialist, Mrs Rothfield?’’ Jacob called through the sandblasted doors.

  She did not reply immediately; she was considering the question. Then she said: ‘‘Could be, could be, but more like he’d be a capitalist. Mind you, in my lifetime I’ve known people who could do both.’’

  Jacob looked over the treetops to Abe Lewis’s house. It was the Lewis’s house now, no good pretending otherwise. Perhaps Abe Lewis would march in the Eight Hour Day Parade from the Trades Hall to the Sydney Domain. Jacob would have enjoyed swinging along in a parade alongside him, shoulder to shoulder. Ruti said Abe had marched down Martin Place on Anzac Day with his old army unit. Jacob wasn’t sure whether she told him this with pride or student-inspired disdain.

  He left the balcony and went through to the kitchen where Mrs Rothfield stood by the stove in her baggy slacks. A badly knitted cardigan was draped over her shoulders. It was this unaffected air of graceless honesty that chiefly endeared her to Jacob. He put an arm around her middle and said, ‘‘Do you think I should go inside the house?’’