Spirit House

by Mark Dapin

Mum once said they were ‘the Three Wise Monkeys’.

  ‘The Three Prize Flunkeys, more like,’ said Jimmy. ‘“Earn No Money”, “Save No Money” and “Spend No Money”.’

  ‘And which are you?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Just “No Money”,’ said Jimmy.

  I loved the RSL, its bingo and keno and glass cabinet filled with regimental plaques and samurai swords. Jimmy signed me in and we walked into the bar like men. I was only thirteen, but I was allowed to sit near the bistro, where Jimmy sometimes bought his rectangular fish. Behind us were the banks of singing poker machines, but we took a table with our mates because we came for the conversation, not the gambling. Katz (‘Earn No Money’) slipped a packet of lollies into my hand. Myer (‘Save No Money’) tweaked my ear. Solomon (‘Spend No Money’) lifted his empty glass.

  ‘Are you familiar with the “shouts” or “rounds” system of drinks procurement?’ Katz asked Solomon. ‘Otherwise known as the “rotating purchase method”?’

  ‘I’ll rotate you,’ said Solomon, ‘if you don’t watch it.’

  ‘It’s an ancient arrangement,’ said Katz, ‘and nobody knows when it was first adopted, but archaeologists and historians agree that it emerged in an attempt to stop tight-arsed trombeniks bludging off their more generously inclined peers.’

  ‘What’s he on about?’ Solomon asked.

  ‘I knew it,’ said Katz. ‘He’s never even heard of it.’

  Katz pulled his spectacles down his nose and looked up at Solomon like a kindly teacher.

  ‘According to the conventions of the shouts or rounds system,’ he explained, ‘when one member of the circle or “school” finishes his middy, another member purchases a further drink for every person at the table.’

  Solomon relented, disappeared for a moment and returned with a jug of Old.

  ‘Tonight is the night that jugs are cheap,’ said Solomon. ‘They call it “Cheap Jug Night”.’

  ‘I wonder who came up with that name,’ said Katz.

  ‘The same bloke who writes this,’ said Myer, peeling the Club newsletter from the table. It was called Newsletter.

  ‘Who’s deceased?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘The Last Post,’ read Myer. ‘Life member Fred Linderman passed away in the war vets’ hospital in Narrabeen.’

  ‘I don’t remember him,’ said Solomon.

  ‘He was the unknown soldier,’ said Jimmy.

  The men took off their hats, poured black beer from the jug and raised their glasses to Fred Linderman.

  ‘Rest in peace, dig,’ said Solomon.

  ‘By the going down of the sun, we won’t remember him,’ said Myer.

  I smelled soft lavender through the old men’s aftershave and hair cream as a woman a little older than Mum showed Sollykatzanmyer a book of cloakroom tickets. She had hazel eyes and bare brown arms.

  ‘Can I interest you gentlemen in the meat raffle?’ she asked, and she pushed back her hair with her hand.

  ‘I’ve got enough meat for any man,’ said Solomon.

  She pretended he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘It’s for the Ladies’ Auxiliary,’ she said.

  ‘It is indeed,’ agreed Solomon, and pulled out his wallet.

  ‘Ach du lieber Gott! ’ said Myer.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ asked Katz. ‘It looks like a relic from some bygone age.’

  Solomon took out ten dollars and bought five tickets.

  ‘Who’s that on his banknote?’ asked Myer.

  ‘It’s Edward the Seventh!’ said Katz.

  As the woman hurried politely away, the men watched her buttocks wobble in her blue crocheted dress. Her perfume hung in the air like potpourri. The sight of her thighs reminded Solomon of girls he’d known during the war, and Myer of the handjob he’d got from a blonde shiksa at the National Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen’s Anzac Day march in 1951.

  ‘It’s coming up again,’ said Myer.

  ‘You’re kidding yourself, mate,’ said Katz.

  ‘Not this bloody deserter,’ said Myer, prodding his crotch. ‘Anzac Day.’

  Myer pointed to an announcement on the back of Newsletter: minibuses were leaving the Club for the war memorial in Martin Place at 3.30 am on 25 April.

  ‘I’ll be on the march,’ said Solomon.

  ‘He didn’t march enough in the army,’ said Jimmy.

  Katz said he was never in the army, so he would stay at home and think about his mates who’d died. Solomon punched him on the arm.

  ‘This one never used to miss a chance to march,’ Solomon told me. ‘He marched against the bomb, against the Vietnam War, against Apartheid in South Africa, against Aboriginal rights.’

  ‘That was for Aboriginal rights,’ said Katz.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Solomon. ‘If the commos ever needed somebody to walk from one place to another, they could rely on Ernie Katz, the hiking kike.’

  ‘I stood up for what I believe in,’ said Katz.

  ‘You stood up, and you walked a bit, and then you stood somewhere else,’ said Solomon. ‘Nobody can take that away from you.’

  Solomon hooked his thumbs into the lapels of his pinstriped jacket.

  ‘Who will join me on the march?’ he asked.

  Jimmy looked into his glass. Myer tapped his bad leg.

  I liked war, all the guns and tanks and uniforms – especially the helmets – and boots and knives and mines. I loved to look at pictures of my dad when he was a nasho, lined up with his mates, with the tallest standing at the back, like they were posing for a class photo. Dad never went to Vietnam, but I knew Jimmy had shipped out to fight the Japs in 1941.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  Solomon grinned and patted my head.

  ‘Listen to the little soldier,’ he said.

  ‘Listen to the fat idiot,’ said Jimmy.

  But nobody listed to anyone.

  ‘He wants a handjob,’ said Myer.

  ‘Let the boy come with me,’ said Solomon. ‘We can march together.’

  Jimmy shrugged.

  ‘The boy can do what he likes,’ he said.

  ‘The grandkids are allowed to wear your medals,’ said Solomon.

  ‘He’s welcome to,’ said Jimmy, ‘if he can find them.’

  ‘They’re in the drawer under the TV,’ I said.

  ‘I know where they bloody are,’ said Jimmy.

  There was a silence at the table while the old men searched for something else to fight about. Solomon pulled on Katz’s sleeve to expose the paperback in his liver-spotted hand.

  Katz always carried a book to read on the train between Bondi Junction and Kings Cross. Tonight, it was Herodotus: The Histories.

  Solomon snatched it from him and held it in the air.

  ‘Ernie Katz,’ said Solomon, ‘is a cultured man, an artist, a tortured soul. He is like our haimisher Vincent Van Gogh, in that he has sold no paintings and remained unrecognised during his lifetime. Am I right, Ernie?’

  Katz looked at Solomon with brutal pity.

  ‘The day he is right,’ he said to me, ‘this man, Solomon Solomons – or, to give him his full title, “Solomon Solomons of Solomon Solomons & Sons, continental tailors to the wealthy and discerning citizens of Darlinghurst Road, such as various drug addicts, pimps, hoons, child molesters and pornographers, including Mr Sin, the King of the Cross, Jake ‘The Take’ Mendoza himself ” – the day he is right, I will eat my kippah wrapped in bacon, rolled in pork and topped with cheese.’

  ‘What kind of cheese?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘The cock cheese of the uncircumcised,’ said Katz.

  Jimmy thumped the table.

  ‘Watch your language,’ he said. ‘He’s only a boy.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Solomon, patting my head. ‘I went to his bar mitzvah nearly one year ago. It was a wondrous, moving event, marred solely by the drunken, lecherous behaviour of his maternal grandfather, who would’ve been knocked down by every husband in the Hakoah Club had he, of course, been a
ble to stand up in the first place.’

  ‘He’s my grandson,’ said Jimmy. ‘I drink because I am proud. He can read Hebrew. He sings like a songbird. The shiksas will flock to him like homeless people with the need to urinate flock to Solomon’s awnings in the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘He has a voice that would charm the birds out of the bees,’ said Myer.

  Solomon tried to silence the others by spreading his arms.

  ‘The point I am trying to make,’ he said, ‘is that Katz is an artist. He studied art, while the rest of us went out to work to give something back to the parents who’d raised us. He is well versed in the history of art, and God knows that’s exactly what you need when you’re seventy years old and spend every day in the RSL. Yes, Katz may be an artist, but I’ve never seen him with a pencil or a sketchbook, let alone paints or an easel.’

  Katz yawned, throwing back his head and opening his mouth like a bird waiting for a worm, and looked from side to side, as if trying to find someone more interesting to listen to in the pokies lounge or in Myer’s ear.

  Solomon flicked through the coffee-stained pages of The Histories, searching for evidence against his friend.

  ‘Ernie Katz,’ he declared eventually, ‘is a classicist. He has the inside word on events that occurred in both ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and often notes parallels between these occurrences and apparently similar happenings in modern times. He is able to do this because he was schooled at Fort Street High, a selective school that was not, nonetheless, sufficiently selective to screen out the Yidden. At Fort Street, Ernie Katz learned of the lives of emperors, the strategies of generals, and the myths and legends of the great goyim who invented civilisation. This set him in good stead for his later life, when he became a signwriter of some local renown, responsible for both the design and typography of such famous artistic landmarks as the for-sale sign used throughout the 1950s by Gilbert Levy Real Estate, and the no-entry sign at the bottom of the Hakoah Club steps.’

  Katz lightly lifted the tail of Solomon’s wide maroon tie, and gently rubbed it in a small puddle of spilt beer on the table. When Solomon didn’t notice, Katz dipped the dampened, darkened tip into the ashtray.

  ‘Ernie Katz is an aesthete,’ Solomon carried on regardless. ‘This means he doesn’t believe in God.’

  ‘You’re thinking of an anaesthetist,’ said Myer.

  ‘Ernie Katz is anathema,’ said Solomon, ‘to polite society. When he trained as a painter, a painter was a rogue who only got into the game to get into the life models. Women like an aesthete, because they believe he is a poof, so they allow him to watch them undress, a process which took a lot longer in those days than it does today, I might add. It is a sad thing for a tailor that the youth have largely abandoned wearing clothes – but a good thing for an old perv.

  ‘Ernie Katz chose to be a figurative painter in the days of abstraction. He would have you believe this was a political decision, brought on by his commitment to social realism, but I would point out that an abstract painter has no need for models, whereas a realist must spend his mornings gazing at a young woman’s breasts in order to secure his inspiration.’

  ‘You know what?’ said Katz. ‘Fuck you.’

  He stalked off to the bathroom on his drainpipe legs.

  ‘What did I say?’ asked Solomon, turning his palms to God.

  ‘You called him an amateur,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Perhaps he’s just an agnostic,’ said Solomon.

  Jimmy raised his eyebrows, put a finger across his upper lip and twisted his mouth as if he were chewing a cigar.

  ‘What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic and a dyslexic?’ he asked.

  Myer shook his head.

  ‘Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a dog,’ said Jimmy.

  He pronounced dog as ‘doig’, because he was imitating Groucho Marx.

  ‘During the war,’ Myer told me, ‘we used to call Jimmy “the Man of a Thousand Voices”. Even though he only had three.’

  Jimmy liked to impersonate the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges and Al Jolson. I had no idea who any of them were.

  ‘We were always making something out of nothing in those days,’ said Myer.

  When Katz returned, he pulled his book out of Solomon’s hands.

  ‘Katz knows his history,’ said Myer.

  ‘Katz’s nose is history,’ said Solomon, leaning over to grab it. Katz pushed him aside.

  ‘Look,’ said Solomon, ‘that bright, meandering vein on the north face of his schnozzle maps the wanderings of the children of Israel through the desert – where they invented, among other things, fish and chips – and onwards to the Promised Land.’

  ‘I thought his nose was the Great Pyramid,’ said Myer.

  ‘From one nostril alone hang the gardens of Babylon,’ said Solomon. ‘Yes, Katz is a historian, but the question remains: what mark will Katz himself leave on history? If he had stuck with his vocation, he could’ve been a minor Australian painter, spoken of today in the same breath as Herbert McClintock and Rod Shaw, who are never spoken of today. But in the absence of an oeuvre, will he be remembered for his pants, which he always wore an inch too short, giving the unusual impression of an adult male who had somehow grown taller in his dotage?’

  ‘Will he be remembered for his shirt?’ asked Myer.

  ‘An item which, I believe, I sold to him in 1973,’ said Solomon, ‘at cost price, when such generous collars were highly fashionable and cheesecloth was la fabrique du jour – modelled by the stars of stage and screen – as opposed to today, when the few surviving examples of cheesecloth shirts can only been seen on homeless people and the mentally ill, or purchased from the WIZO thrift shop on Bondi Road.’

  Jimmy rose from his seat.

  ‘A tailor is a faygeleh,’ he said. ‘An artist is a faygeleh. A man who comments on another man’s shirt is a faygeleh.’

  He clapped his hands over my ears and picked me up by my head.

  ‘“A Jew”, as they say in France,’ said Jimmy to his mates.

  *

  Jimmy and I walked home through Bondi Junction. It was the only time I spent in the adult world at night, where people smoked and laughed and careened across the pavement, and I wished I was older and taller and stronger. I wanted to grow up to be like the surfers with their fringes in their eyes, and the women who swayed and stumbled and caught their high heels in the cracks in the pavement. But I worried I wasn’t tough enough, that my parents hadn’t taught me what I needed to know to survive. At school I was sometimes baffled by the slang and the swearing, and always surprised at the jabs and slaps that came from nowhere, the wrestling holds suddenly fixed on me by the boys on the back seat of the bus. There had been nothing like this in my life, no violence to learn from, only hot tears and Yiddish and a sticky kind of love.

  BONDI

  THURSDAY 19 APRIL 1990

  My grandmother’s house was falling down around her ears she said, but I thought it was cracking up under her feet. The floorboards rasped and groaned, as if Jimmy kept a monster chained under the house. But everything else was wrong as well. Pastel-blue paint had peeled from the kitchen walls, leaving holes the shape of faces with long trailing tongues. The door handles hung loosely in their mountings. The lounge had lost a wheel and the wardrobe in the spare room was missing a door.

  Jimmy had added a third bedroom to the house when Deborah Who Lives in Israel turned twenty and refused to share a room with her younger sisters. He built the extension out of timber, not fibro, and tacked in onto the back wall. Deborah Who Lives in Israel’s room had a small deck that looked out onto the paved backyard, but to reach it from inside the house you had to walk through the bathroom. As soon as it was finished, Deborah Who Lives in Israel moved to Haifa. It was the last piece of work Jimmy did on the house, in 1969. He had been driven to finish the job by the space race, because Grandma said they’d land a man on the moon before Jimmy made his daughter a r
oom of her own. A month later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag in the Sea of Tranquillity.

  The bead curtain jangled as Jimmy came in from the narrow strip of lawn between the front wall and the fence, where he’d been keeping an eye on the neighbours.

  ‘I don’t know why you bother going outside,’ said Grandma. ‘There’s cracks in the door you could see an elephant through.’

  Jimmy crouched behind the closed door and pressed his eye against the splintering timber.

  ‘There’s no elephants,’ he said. ‘They mustn’t be working. It’s a yasumi day for the mahouts.’

  ‘Either that or there’s no elephants in Bondi,’ said Grandma.

  ‘They need elephants to clear the tree stumps,’ said Jimmy. ‘This place is inaccessible by road.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Grandma. ‘Unless you’ve dug up the tarmac again. Lieber Gott, you haven’t, have you?’

  She pushed him aside, got down on all fours and peered through the crack.

  ‘Okay, the road is smooth and flat,’ she said, ‘but the bath is full of water.’

  ‘And the sky is full of clouds,’ said Jimmy. ‘Who knew?’

  ‘But it was you that filled the bath,’ said Grandma.

  ‘No,’ said Jimmy, ‘it was him.’

  ‘It’s not me,’ I said. ‘I don’t even have baths.’

  ‘I’m getting tired of this mishegas,’ said Grandma. ‘Why don’t you just empty the bath after you’ve filled it and not got into it?’

  ‘Because I didn’t fill it,’ said Jimmy.

  *

  The frummers were standing outside their home, where Jimmy hadn’t seen an elephant. There were eight religious students living in one cottage opposite my grandmother’s house. Their front window was broken but they had patched it over with a poster that said, Moshiach now!

  The frummers dressed in black coats and black pants, with white shirts and black hats. They looked like the bad guys from a Western, who had disguised themselves with stick-on beards so as not to be identified from their wanted posters. Like cowboys, most of the frummers were American, but there was one Australian, whose teeth were all different sizes. His name was Barry Dick, and he was the son of Sid Dick from Dad’s poker game. Barry had run away from home to become a Buddhist, then shaved his head and joined the Hare Krishnas, but now he was a Jew again.