by Alan Collins
PART THREE
JOSHUA
ONE
Ruti’s mother had died a few years back of a wasting disease that hardly altered her skinny frame. Jacob had gone to the funeral and taken Joshua with him. It gave him an inner strength and pride to show off the handsome boy to Ruti. Through her meagre grief she had eyed them. The Jewish community had soon ferreted out the story behind the man and boy.
‘‘A child saved from the Holocaust,’’ they breathed respectfully. This was usually followed by: ‘‘The mother wasn’t, you know, the real mother,’’ and with mock concern, ‘‘not Jewish either — well, not properly Jewish. A girl from Bathurst, a nobody. Still, what a tragedy, to die like that.’’
Jacob Kaiser, also a nobody when he left Australia nineteen years earlier, was grateful that his self-effacing status limited the volume of gossip. What there was soon dwindled after he and Peggy had sailed for Israel. It flared up only briefly when he returned a year later with a child and no wife.
The flat where Jacob lived with Joshua was perched on the jagged edge of the northern clifftop of Bondi Beach. It was a green-painted ugly concrete block streaked with rust. Cars in the street were soon pitted by the salt-laden air. Jacob’s mantel model radio lasted a year before succumbing to corrosion. The casement windows flaked iron every time they were opened. Jacob asked himself what power drew him to rent such a flat; it offered a breathtaking panorama of Bondi Beach, but there was also an uninterrupted view of the southern headland rotunda from which his father had fallen to his death years ago. Beyond it, clinging to the hillside and defying gravity by not sliding into the ocean, were the graves of Bronte cemetery, among them that of his mother.
At the end of the day, Jacob liked to sit by the window. He was just over forty yet there were times when he felt twice that age. His thoughts roamed over those people who had most affected his life. Mrs Rothfield, his former landlady, sunk in her armchair and searching the radio dial for news of war in Israel — she did not care if the rest of the world went up in flames. Her only other interest was as putative grandmother to Joshua, a role she had rushed to assume at first meeting.
Although Jacob tried to keep Uncle Siddy at a distance, the irrepressible seventy-year-old kept what he called a ‘‘weather eye’’ on him, dropping into the flat uninvited, brimming over with yarns about the terrible tenants he had in the flats he owned. ‘‘Dunno why you two stay in this rotten dump, Jake. Now I gotta lovely place just up Bondi Road near the Waverley cricket ground — handy to the Junction and all …’’ Without asking, he would make a pot of tea, settle down and, if Joshua was there, rabbit on about being family — ‘‘that counts for everything with me, do you get me, Jake?’’
This claim to closeness irked Jacob. The old saying, ‘‘you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives’’ held all the frustrations of truth for him. His friend in need had been and still was Mrs Rothfield. Then there was Abe Lewis, Ruti’s stepfather. The tough, squat, pugnacious waste merchant had remained his cobber all these years. He had seen straight away that a marriage between Ruti and Jacob would have been a disaster. The restless, indecisive Jacob and the academically ambitious girl had tried to build on a childhood friendship, each clinging to the other for selfish reasons.
Abe had been the one to spot the little printery down by the Quay. Buying scrap paper from the elderly, tired owners, he could hardly wait to tell Jacob. ‘‘A bonzer little business, mate. Struth, I can see you in it right now.’’ Over Jacob’s half-hearted objections, he haggled with the owners. When a price was reached, he told Jacob: ‘‘Listen Jake, I want to put a few bob into this. I’ve got money eatin’ its head off in the bank. We’ll swing it together and … and … I’ll tell ya somethin’ else, I’m gunna put my share in Joshua’s name. Now whaddya say to that?’’
What could Jacob say? Ruti certainly did not need Abe’s money. She had married a dentist, ‘‘a fang farrier’’ Abe called him. ‘‘And he charges like a wounded buffalo so she don’t need my hard-earned shekels!’’ That was Abe Lewis, the original rough diamond, self-appointed godfather to Joshua. The man who many years back had shown Jacob Kaiser how to use a Lee Enfield rifle.
Sitting by the window, Jacob never tired of watching the long fingers of shadows and the dancing shafts of sunlight on the beach he loved and where so much of importance had happened to him. Storm or stillness, it would always remain a womb, a cradle, a mother to him.
TWO
At nineteen, Joshua was nearly six feet tall, broad and strong with jet-black curly hair and deep-set dark brown eyes. In the summer he loved to wear shorts to show off his muscular legs. He walked with an easy swagger that, somewhere deep down in Mrs Rothfield’s worn-out old frame, made her respond like a schoolgirl whenever they strolled out together. From the moment when he had first waddled across the shabby carpet of her lounge room it was mutual love.
She could hardly wait to parade him along the Bondi beachfront to Mitzi Strauss’s glittering new coffee shop. At first, Jacob did not want to go in there, but Mrs Rothfield shoved him forward.
Mitzi Strauss eyed them carefully. She knew none of the three was a blood relation of the other, yet she was tinged with envy at the unity they represented. ‘‘I heard from my Manfred that you were back.’’ She stared down at Joshua. ‘‘Such a beautiful child. My Manfred — he manages my George Street shop for me — is also a father. Such a nice, Yiddisher girl he married.’’
Mrs Rothfield rose to the bait. ‘‘This is my …’’ she began, then checked herself. ‘‘This is my Joshua. His mother, Pnina, may she rest in peace, died in the War of Independence.’’ That ought to fix Mitzi Strauss. How many Gentile girls get a name like Pnina? Mrs Rothfield shepherded the three of them into a booth. ‘‘Coffee and cake for Jacob and for me — you should be so kind!’’ She ostentatiously bent down and stroked Joshua’s head. ‘‘My grandson,’’ she said defiantly, ‘‘likes chocolate cake with ice-cream, don’t you darling?’’ Mitzi Strauss got the message.
These outings with Joshua were the highlight of Mrs Rothfield’s days. While she understood Jacob’s bursts of melancholy, she could not restrain herself from telling Joshua, during his earliest years, what a heroine his mother Pnina was. ‘‘Like Ruth from the Bible she was, Joshua. A stranger in a strange land.’’ As he grew older, she impressed on him to ‘‘remember, darling, two women died to give you life.’’
One lay at the bottom of the Mediterranean, the other beneath a pine tree in Galilee.
Joshua had an education.
‘‘You will have what I didn’t have,’’ Jacob told him. ‘‘You will go to the university and learn about the world. Not about one narrow thing like being a lawyer or a doctor nor even about business. I want you to be a man who can talk and listen and keep learning long after you’ve got your bit of paper. That’s what a university is for.’’
He would not apprentice him but made him work in the holidays in the printery. Abe disapproved. ‘‘There’s no shame in a bit o’ dirt, Jake. It never done you or me any harm.’’ To cut Joshua down to size, he always made the strong young man carry out the bales of waste paper to the truck.
Jacob still liked nothing better than to use the beautiful moveable typefaces for artistic work, despite Joshua’s urging not to spend valuable time when there were machines that could do it so much cheaper and quicker. Joshua, while not showing much affinity for the craft side of the printing trade, was nevertheless a good businessman, quick with figures, and an able salesman despite a somewhat abrasive manner.
There was often tension between father and son. Disputes usually arose out of Joshua’s desire to modernise the printery. In this he was supported by Abe Lewis, who moved around and saw other places with advanced machinery. If he had Abe’s backing, Joshua could go against his father’s wishes and get his way.
In early 1967 there were callers whose business obviously had nothing to do with the printery. Young men, some bearded, dressed with se
lf-conscious carelessness and wearing their hair long in a determined effort to be different. Their sandalled feet slapped on the ink- and oil-stained printery floor boards. Occasionally they were accompanied by a girl with long, plaited hair, her arms jangling with delicate bracelets. She had a glowing, scrubbed look about her and carried an old army haversack slung across her shoulders. Sometimes she would remain in Joshua’s cramped office after the young men had left; Jacob could see through the frosted glass their blurred figures standing close together. When these visitors came, the printing machinery seemed to be at its loudest, swishing and clanking so that not a sound escaped from Joshua’s office, not even when through the glass Jacob could see arms waving and figures taking combative stands.
Unlike Jacob, whose teenage years had been filled with left-wing political activism which merged without too much disruption with Socialist Zionism, Joshua, it seemed to Jacob, had avoided any similar involvement. His days at university had been unmarked by extremes of any kind. When Jacob pointed out that his life, while it might be blameless, was also directionless, Joshua turned angrily on him.
‘‘What do you want of my life? Is it not enough that both my real parents died for politics? And what about your Peggy — Pnina, my mum, shot for politics in a war that is never going to bloody-well end? How much more do you want this family to give?’’
In the face of these and similar outbursts, Jacob gave up. He complained to Mrs Rothfield, who shrugged it off as ‘‘a boy just growing up. What do you want of him, Yakov? That — God forbid — he should be a soldier? Let him have some pleasure in his life.’’
Abe Lewis, however, showed his anger and disappointment in Joshua’s indifference to events in the world around him. At first he tried to tell Joshua of his own World War Two experiences in the Middle East as a gunner in the AIF. Abe was puzzled by the war of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam. At the Returned Servicemen’s League where he went once or twice a year, the attitudes were based more along racial lines than political. The Vietnamese were just another Asian race that might sneak down from the North. The politicians called it the Domino Theory. Asian countries would be toppled, one after the other, by Communism. Invariably a speaker would declare, ‘‘They breed like bloody rabbits, y’ know. Then they’re going to need the wide open spaces of Australia to live in.’’
Abe told Joshua: ‘‘It’s a crook world, old son, but you can’t sit shtum and take no notice of what’s goin’ on around yer.’’
For the first and only time, Joshua attempted to ridicule Abe Lewis. ‘‘You were a ‘bloody Jew’ when you went into the army and you came out just the same,’’ he told Abe contemptuously. ‘‘What good did it do you? Why should I fight everybody’s wars?’’
Abe, who only came up to Joshua’s shoulder but in every other way was his physical superior, gripped his jaw with his club-like hand and squeezed it, his stubby fingers making deep indentations in Joshua’s cheeks.
‘‘If there’d been more like me, there’d be more of us alive today, including two women. I’d ’ve thought you would have shown more respect.’’ He released his grip on Joshua’s jaw. ‘‘And as for that crack about comin’ out just the same — well, old son, I’d sooner be a live Jew in Australia than a gassed one in Germany.’’
Joshua moved his aching jaw from side to side. After a few moments he offered his hand to Abe. ‘‘Struth, what a grip,’’ he said ruefully. Abe took his hand and shook it, then before releasing it began to squeeze Joshua’s hand. The older man and the younger one tested each other before Abe relaxed his grip.
Abe smiled and winked. ‘‘This is between us, eh? No need for the old man to know.’’
Shortly before Joshua turned twenty, he decided to move out of the Bondi flat. He had anticipated objections from Jacob but none was forthcoming. While he rarely missed a day at the printery, Jacob had become withdrawn. As Uncle Siddy put it, Jake had gone froom, become religious.
At first Joshua noticed that Jacob took a bit longer in the morning to get ready for work. He found him in the bedroom putting on the phylacteries, winding the leather strap around his arm and fingers, then wrapping himself in his prayer shawl. Book in hand, Jacob prayed silently, his lips scarcely moving.
In a rare burst of understanding for the older man, Joshua refrained from either questioning or belittling what he did. Kosher food began to appear on the table. Jacob lit candles on the eve of the Sabbath, ordered the specially baked plaited bread and poured the sickly sweet sacramental wine. Although by unsaid agreement neither of them would eat pork or ham, now the other dietary law of not eating milk products at the same time as meat became the rule in the little North Bondi flat.
And on Saturday mornings Jacob started going to the synagogue. Observing the injunction against riding on the Sabbath, he walked up the hill at a cracking pace, enjoying the exertion and taking a perverse pleasure in passing others around his own age.
Uncle Siddy thought he saw in Joshua some of the bravado of his own character. Shutting his eyes to the facts, he went around muttering: ‘‘It’s in the blood y’ know. That kid’s as sharp as a tack.’’ The flat he now offered Joshua was perched on the southern headland on a rise overlooking Bondi Baths. It was a fairly modern block built by a Greek speculator whose gambling debts forced its sale at a give-away price. Called the Olympia, each small one-bedroom flat had its own wrought-iron enclosed balcony. The white-painted block shone in the afternoon sun.
Uncle Siddy mortgaged himself up to the elbows to buy the whole block. He had to have it. For two reasons. It was the first real and visible evidence that he had made it within the new elite of property owners. It really was quality. The other blocks he owned were, as he called them in Yiddish, dreckishe, rubbish. The other reason Uncle Siddy would have killed to own Olympia was locked deep inside him. It was built on the site once occupied by The Balconies, the dilapidated warren of a rooming house that his brother Felix, Jacob’s father, had lived in when the Great Depression had killed him as surely as a gunshot. Siddy would never admit to sentimentality but this gesture was one way he could express it without showing it.
When Joshua moved out of his father’s decaying flat it was as though he had grown wings and flown across Bondi Bay to land in a sun-drenched nest from which, with bird’s eye clarity, he could see Jacob still sitting at his front window. There was a momentary feeling of guilt that perhaps he too should have gone with the political activists who now took over the workers’ cottages in Annandale, Leichhardt and Woolloomooloo.
But he didn’t, being quite unable to resist the pull of living beside Bondi Beach.
Joshua mimicked Uncle Siddy’s con-man voice: ‘‘Don’t worry about the rent, my boy. Your Uncle Siddy will take care of that.’’
Siddy tapped the side of his nose, ‘‘Tax dodge, Josh; it’ll cost me nothin’.’’ Furniture appeared courtesy of another cobber of Siddy’s having a hard time.
Mrs Rothfield had to be coaxed into the tiny lift that took her to the fourth floor flat. Nothing would persuade her to go out onto the cantilevered balcony. She clung to Joshua and addressed him by the Yiddish version of his name. ‘‘Yossele, I know from where all this comes. Darling boy, be sure it doesn’t blow away in the night. Your Great Uncle Siddy is what we called in the old country a luftmensche, a person made from air.’’
Mrs Rothfield was not comfortable in the flat. She edged around the furniture with sniffs of disapproval. Joshua did not wish to distress the old lady. They left together by the stairs and walked down the hill to Mitzi’s cafe. Once seated in the cubicle she called Mitzi over. ‘‘My grandson, here, my Yossele, he’s just moved into that beautiful block of flats. You know, the luxury units? What’s the name, Yossele?’’ And before he could answer: ‘‘Olympia, that’s it — where the gods lived!’’
Joshua stared at her in amazement. The old lady would have lauded a pig-pen just to be one up on Mitzi Strauss. She pushed aside her coffee cup and took Joshua’s hand. ‘‘Listen, Yossele, in s
uch a flat you don’t live alone. Yakov tells me sometimes into the printery comes a young girl who stays by you alone.’’
Joshua held her hand tightly. ‘‘Did Dad say anything — about anyone else?’’
The old woman did not flinch from his grip. She looked Joshua in the eye. ‘‘He knows you’re up to something. All those visitors and not one order, he said to me. Not that they looked as though they had a penny to spend. From such a smart business man as you, Yossele, he wants some answers.’’
‘‘But he never mentioned …’’
‘‘He’s worried — about a lot of things, he tells me.’’ Her voice trailed off and she took her hand away. There was a silence; their coffees cooled to a skin of milk. Then Mrs Rothfield went on: ‘‘What meshugas (craziness) are you up to, Joshua? Yakov says you go out late at night — not to the pictures and not to visit people he knows — you don’t talk to him except for printery business. So, you will tell Boobe (grandma) Rothfield or, or …’’ She couldn’t immediately think of a powerful enough threat so let it hang.
Mitzi Strauss came to their table. Although she wore a simple black dress and an embroidered white half-apron, she looked (as she imagined) as sexy as a sixty-two year old former Viennese sophisticate should. She draped her decolle-tage over Mrs Rothfield’s shoulder for the benefit of Joshua and pointed to the cold coffee.
‘‘Shall I bring more?’’ They shook their heads. ‘‘No charge!’’ She beckoned to the waitress. ‘‘This young man,’’ she said cocquettishly to Mrs Rothfield, ‘‘has now a lady friend who drinks whole cups of black coffee!’’
The waitress picked up their cold cups. Mitzi sighed heavily. ‘‘Ah, I remember when Jacob used to come with …’’
Mrs Rothfield said with suppressed anger, ‘‘You talk too much.’’