by Mark Dapin
He was shin-deep in surf when a lifesaver, who’d been watching from the flags, grabbed him from behind. Jimmy struggled and pushed, tried to wriggle out of the lifesaver’s grip, but his strength quickly faded and he allowed himself to be dragged back to the beach, panting and soaking.
‘What were you doing out there?’ they asked.
‘I saw a man drowning,’ he said.
‘That was you, old fella.’
Jimmy was still wet like a dog when we got back home.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ asked Grandma as she towelled him down in front of the fire.
‘He was out there,’ said Jimmy, ‘drowning.’
Grandma breathed deeply and quickly.
‘Don’t do this to me,’ she said. ‘You bloody bastard.’
She threw down the towel, stormed out of the house and slammed the door.
Jimmy opened a can of beer at the living room table.
‘Why don’t you ever talk about the war?’ I asked him.
‘Because the war’s over,’ said Jimmy.
‘Myer’s handjob’s over, but you still talk about that.’
‘That was over before it started,’ said Jimmy.
There was something I’d been meaning to ask.
‘What’s a handjob?’
‘Manual work,’ said Jimmy. ‘Something Myer would know bugger all about.’
‘But what was the war like?’ I asked.
‘It wasn’t like anything,’ he said.
Jimmy dragged the ashtray around the table. He lifted one finger then dropped it. He started the same sentence twice, then gave up.
‘I want you to understand some things, David,’ he said.
‘I want you to understand that there’re some things I don’t want you to understand.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘The past is called “the past” because it’s passed. It’s gone. The Zayde was right. There’s no point in thinking about it. There’s nothing good to learn from it, nothing that’ll make your life happier. I don’t want you to know it.’
‘But I want to know,’ I said.
He closed his eyes and was silent for a long time. I thought he might’ve fallen sleep.
‘I’m starving,’ I said.
‘Starving, are you?’ asked Jimmy.
I nodded.
Jimmy took lunch out of the oven and cut his pie into six small pieces. He stripped one slice of its pastry and prodded it with his knife.
‘See that?’ he said. ‘That was a week’s ration of meat on the line. That was all the Japs gave us. Can you imagine what it’s like to live on so little food? No, you can’t. Because you think “starving” is when you’ve waited ten minutes for a meat pie. I might as well talk to you in Japanese.’
Then, alarmingly, Jimmy started speaking Japanese, very quickly and loudly, while slamming his fork on his plate.
‘Did you understand that?’ Jimmy asked me, his fingers flecked with gravy. ‘It means, “This war will last one hundred years, and you will die building this railway.”’
‘We did Japanese for a year at school,’ I said.
‘But you didn’t understand,’ said Jimmy slowly. ‘Did you?’ He bared his teeth, his eyes narrowed.
‘You told me what it meant,’ I reminded him.
‘But you didn’t understand.’
‘I don’t really speak Japanese.’
He growled at me like a dog.
‘Well, maybe you’ll fucking understand this!’ he roared, and he punched me in the head so hard that I flew backwards off my chair. It felt like I’d been hit by cricket bat. I put my hands to my face and blood ran between my fingers.
By the time Grandma came home, we had managed to stop the bleeding, but I was sitting with a cotton bud stuck up each nostril and tears in my eyes.
Jimmy was saying, ‘Sorry, son, sorry, I’m so, so sorry.’
I told him it didn’t matter, but really I was scared of him and I wanted to go home to my mum.
‘We should call a doctor,’ said Grandma.
‘The boy’s all right,’ said Jimmy.
‘Not for him,’ said Grandma. ‘For you.’
Jimmy reached out and gripped Grandma’s shoulder.
‘Don’t tell the others,’ he said. ‘Please. Don’t tell Solly.’
That night, Jimmy got arrested for digging up the memorial gardens.
*
I was asleep when the police knocked. Grandma ran to the door in her salmon dressing-gown, with curlers in her hair. I followed, suddenly frightened again. It was four o’clock in the morning. Two officers, a man and woman, escorted Jimmy into the house. Angry and confused, he kept trying to shake the policewoman from his arm.
Grandma lit the gas fire and offered everyone a cup of tea. Jimmy said he’d take whisky, but the policeman told him he’d had enough.
‘Has he ever done this before?’ the policeman asked Grandma.
‘Well, he always was a dirty stop-out,’ she said, ‘but he usually comes home when the pubs close.’
‘Desecrate a war memorial, I mean,’ said the policeman. Grandma made a pot of tea and opened a tin of biscuits. The policeman said they had been called to the scene when a driver had noticed somebody digging a trench around the Anzac statue in the memorial gardens.
‘We believe he might’ve been trying to steal it,’ said the policeman.
Jimmy laughed.
‘What would I do with a bloody statue?’ he asked. ‘It’s the size of a house.’
‘You tell us,’ said the policeman.
Jimmy shut his mouth, to show he would never tell them anything. When they didn’t ask him anything, he opened it again.
‘Am I under arrest?’ he demanded. ‘What’re the charges?’
The policeman was big and gentle, with a slow, deep voice.
‘We’re here to help you,’ he said.
Jimmy shook his head.
‘If you’re here to help me, pick up a shovel,’ he said. ‘You jacks are the idlest bastards in the army.’
‘Watch your language, sir,’ said the policeman.
‘I’m not your “sir”,’ said Jimmy. ‘And you’re not mine.’
The policeman made a note in his book.
‘My husband is a returned serviceman,’ said Grandma, ‘and sometimes he forgets he ever came back.’
Jimmy crossed his hands on his lap, covering patches of dirt and grass.
‘What were you doing out there, sir?’ the policewoman asked him.
Jimmy rubbed his thighs.
‘There’s a digger standing in the field,’ he said. ‘A tall man, bigger than life, with a heart the size of a fucking lion –’
‘May I remind you, sir –’ said the policeman.
‘You remind me of the guards at Changi,’ said Jimmy.
Jimmy stood up like a sentry and stuck out his chin and chest.
‘All piss and wind,’ he said. ‘All mouth and trousers. All spit and polish. All cock and bull.’
‘Stand at ease,’ said the policeman, and Jimmy relaxed.
Everybody took a bite of biscuit.
‘We found these in the hole,’ said the policeman, and showed Grandma a tin of corned beef, a can of tuna and the shortbreads.
‘He’s always burying the shortbreads,’ said Grandma. ‘I’m not going to buy them any more.’
Jimmy rolled his fist in his palm.
‘The Japs’ve had that poor bastard standing out there for days,’ said Jimmy, ‘with bugger all to eat or drink. I brought him some tucker.’
‘So, you were feeding the statue?’ asked the policeman.
‘Fuck you,’ said Jimmy.
The policeman flushed.
‘If you continue to speak to me like that, I’ll have to take you to the station, sir,’ he said.
‘Do I look like a bloody Abo?’ asked Jimmy.
While the policeman stared at him, Jimmy bent his elbows to scratch his armpits, and made monkey noises.
Grandma slapped him on the head.
‘My husband was at the Battle of Singapore,’ she said. ‘He was sent to Changi. He worked on the Burma Railway.’
‘Choo-choo!’ sad Jimmy. ‘Chuggety-chug, chuggety-chug, chuggety-chug!’
‘I see,’ said the policeman.
Grandma stabbed Jimmy in the arm with her finger and hissed at him to hush.
‘He is an active member of the local RSL,’ she said.
The policeman nodded and played with his shirt buttons.
‘And we’re Jewish,’ said Grandma, pointing to the Star of David on the mantelpiece.
The policeman wrote that down.
‘So he’s not likely to go desecrating war memorials,’ said Grandma, ‘is he?’
The sun came up behind the television, casting a glow on Jimmy and lighting the downy hairs on the policewoman’s arm. The policeman looked at his watch.
‘What’re you doing here anyway?’ Jimmy asked him. ‘Haven’t you got thieves to catch?’
The policeman closed his notebook.
‘How about he goes back and fills in his hole, and we don’t say anything more about it,’ offered the policeman.
‘How about you fill in the hole,’ said Jimmy. ‘You cunt.’
BONDI
TUESDAY 24 APRIL 1990
Jimmy was arrested and spent the morning at the police station. He would only give the police his name, rank and army number. He called the desk sergeant ‘gunso’ and insisted on speaking to him in Japanese.
‘Hurt me and you’ll hang,’ he shouted when they brought him a cup of tea and a sandwich.
They let him out at lunchtime, and I got the feeling he had enjoyed himself.
‘They thought they could break me,’ said Jimmy, ‘with their cheese and tomato sangers, but I’d never betray my mates. Although I gave them Solomon’s name, obviously.’
Grandma hugged him.
‘You’re a mad old bugger,’ she said, ‘and you’ve got to see someone.’
Jimmy shook his head and looked away.
Grandma said Mrs Ethelberger’s son, Arielberger, was a psychologist.
‘Not clever enough to be a doctor, eh?’ said Jimmy.
He had a practice in Macquarie Street, specialising in post-traumatic stress.
‘Making money out of the diggers,’ said Jimmy.
Mrs Ethelberger thought he could help.
‘And Mrs Ethelberger’s qualifications are what?’ asked Jimmy. ‘Apart from a tochis like a bear?’
Jimmy rolled and lit a cigarette.
‘I’m not going back on meds,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to,’ said Grandma. ‘Mrs Ethelberger says there’re other ways of dealing with it.’
*
Every Tuesday night, Sollykatzanmyer ate at the Thai Dee Town restaurant on Bondi Road. If any of them missed a dinner, he was shunned by the others for days – if he hadn’t already been black-banned for buying a soft drink; driving a Japanese car; leaving food on a plate; leaving drink in a glass; disputing a known fact about the war – such as the superior fighting spirit of the Aussies, the uncanny mechanical skills of the Kiwis, the generally cold and treacherous nature of the Dutch, the big-noting showboating of the Yanks, and the methodical but justified savagery of the Red Army; saying something complimentary about the pianist Arnold Zwaybil, the gonif Slow Eddie Finkel or the crooked artists’ manager Izzy Berger; or failing to share the sausages when they won the meat raffle. There were at least six hundred and thirteen commandments in the lives of Sollykatzanmyer, all of them unwritten but handed down by God.
Jimmy put on his special fawn pants, matched with a brown cardigan with buttons as deep as biscuits. Katz and Myer wore jumpers, as it was a cool evening, and Solomon was dressed in a suit. The restaurant was empty, but the waitress, Dee, eyed the old men unhappily.
I thought she was beautiful, with black hair down to her shoulders and lips that were red and fat, as if swollen by kissing.
‘Good evening, Miss Suzie Wong,’ said Myer, taking off his invisible cap.
‘You ready to order?’ she asked.
‘You haven’t brought us the menu, darling,’ said Solomon.
‘You always have the same thing,’ she said.
‘But we like to look at the menu,’ said Katz.
‘You like to look at my arse,’ said the waitress, as she walked back to pick up the menus.
The walls of the restaurant were decorated with posters of elephants and temples, beaches and boats. The waitress’s dress mirrored the colours of sand and sea.
She collected the menus, bound in boards, and held them to her chest.
‘This one’s banquet,’ she said, ‘and this one’s standard.’
It looked as though she was talking about her breasts.
‘Which one’s bigger?’ asked Solomon.
She glowered at him.
‘There are three entrees, four mains and two desserts on the banquet menu,’ she said. ‘And one hundred and three dishes available à la carte.’
Solomon tried to count to one hundred and three on his fingers.
‘What does “à la carte” mean?’ asked Myer.
‘It’s French for “at great cost”,’ said Solomon.
‘Listen to the polygon,’ said Katz.
Solomon spread his hands, then grabbed Katz’s book, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others.
Katz fought him for it, half-heartedly. When he lost the battle of pushing and pulling hands, he took hold of Solomon’s earlobe and twisted it like a knob. Solomon backhanded him, and almost knocked him from his chair.
‘Ernie Katz,’ said Solomon, ‘is a Francophile, a long-term ardent admirer of French culture, couture and cuisine. In his youth he dreamed of dining at Claude’s, and ordering cuisses and escargot. Although Katz never reached these heights of sophistication, fate was to deal him the chance to eat frogs and snails under other, less comfortable circumstances.’
Katz made another attack at Solomon’s earlobe. The tailor defended blindly, pushing him away with his palm turned back.
‘After the war, Katz modelled a black beret, a red scarf and a long grey raincoat. He was a disciple of Sartre and the leading local spruiker of French popular song. But at the heart of his admiration for all things Gallic was, of course, the extraordinary French feeling for painting. What other nation in the world could have given us both Monet and Manet, David and Coubert, Degas – often incorrectly pronounced “de-gas” after the flatulence medication – and Pissarro (who was, incidentally, a yiddisher fella)?
‘And yet one thing that might strike you as strange about Katz’s Francophilia is this: the French were not at all Katzophiles. When the Germans overran la patria in 1940, the Vichy government called its refugee Jews “rubbish”, then rounded them up and handed them to the Nazis.
‘These days, of course, the French say that they didn’t know where the Germans were taking the Jews. But although I’ve never asked where the garbos cart my rubbish, I’m ninety-nine per cent certain they either bury it or burn it.
‘Which is why we are eating tonight in a Thai restaurant, rather than a French one.’
‘This is a Thai-Chinese restaurant,’ said the waitress.
‘And where are you from, love?’ asked Solomon.
‘Auburn,’ said the waitress.
‘And although we affectionately call you “Dee”,’ said Solomon, ‘after the humorous sign over your door, I don’t believe we have ever asked your real name.’
‘You haven’t,’ said the waitress.
‘Do you have one?’ asked Solomon.
‘I do,’ said the waitress.
‘And may we have the pleasure of learning that sweet appellation?’
‘She’s no Appalachian,’ said Katz.
‘She’s a sweet-apple Asian,’ said Myer.
‘My name is Dominique,’ she said. ‘As in, “Dominique tells you to piss off.”’
Solomon tapped my knee.
&n
bsp; ‘She’s flirting with me,’ he whispered loudly.
Jimmy was getting impatient.
‘Are you finished?’ he asked. ‘What shall we have?’
‘You’ll have fishcakes, chicken satay and curry puffs,’ said Dee, ‘massaman beef, red curry chicken, pad Thai, whole snapper, beef with basil, choo chee vegetables and fried rice. Anything for the boy?’
‘Do you do hot chips?’ I asked.
‘No chips!’ she said, scowling, then leaned over and pinched my cheek. ‘Except for handsome young men.’
Sollykatzanmyer muttered and nudged.
‘You’re in there,’ said Solomon.
‘Urine there,’ said Myer, pointing to the bathroom.
Dee brought over a plate of prawn crackers like frozen snaps of cloud.
‘I don’t eat prawn,’ said Solomon.
‘You’re crackers,’ said Katz.
The old men began a long, irritable argument about the importance of keeping kashrut. They each believed they were religious to precisely the right degree: anyone who was more observant was a maniac, and anyone less frum was a goy. Katz, by general agreement, was an atheist, an aesthete and anathema.
Dee delivered an entrée plate and the old men squabbled over three curry puffs. Dee had given us five satay sticks, but Solomon said he didn’t eat satay and Myer said he didn’t eat sticks. Jimmy bit into a curry puff, and Solomon accused him of eating a poof. Myer advised him to spit before he swallowed, and Katz said Myer was a homophone.
Dee glided out of the kitchen with a silver bucket of rice and ladled a scoop into Solomon’s bowl. As she served him, she leaned away. When she filled my bowl, she pressed a breast against my elbow, and I held onto that feeling for the next two years.
‘Why are there so many Thai restaurants,’ I asked Jimmy, ‘when there aren’t any Jewish restaurants?’
‘What’s Jewish food?’ asked Solomon.
‘It’s what Jewish people eat,’ said Myer.
‘I ate Arab food in Africa,’ said Solomon.
‘And for that he got a medal,’ said Myer.
Dee returned with more dishes.
‘Is this Jewish food?’ Solomon asked her.