by Mark Dapin
‘One massaman beef,’ she said. ‘One beef with basil.’
‘But Solomon wants to know what religion was the cow,’ said Katz.
‘Animals have no religion,’ said Dee.
‘Lionel Kirtz had a Jewish dog,’ said Myer.
‘Lionel Kirtz was meshuganneh,’ said Dee. ‘Like you.’
‘What we know as “Jewish” food,’ said Solomon, ‘salt beef, gefilte fish, chicken soup etc, is actually Ashkenazi food.’
‘Listen to the gastropod,’ said Katz. ‘He thinks he knows everything about food.’
‘A gastropod is a mollusc,’ said Solomon, ‘like a fat slug. The word you were looking for was gastronome.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Katz.
Solomon picked all the potatoes out of the massaman curry and piled them in his bowl.
‘The Thais,’ said Solomon, ‘claim to be the only nation in Asia not to be conquered and colonised. They achieved this, as far as I can see, by allowing the Japanese to overrun them without a fight, thus sparing them the indignity of losing.’
Dee glared at him.
‘There was fighting at Chumpon,’ said Katz, ‘and Pattani and Nakhon Si Thammarat and Prachuap Khiri Khan and Surat Thai and Songkhla.’
‘I’ll have them all with sweet chilli sauce,’ said Solomon.
‘You really are an imbecile,’ said Katz.
Myer swapped Solomon’s chopsticks for two drinking straws.
‘Ernie Katz,’ said Solomon, ‘is an Orientalist. In the case of some of the finest painters of the nineteenth century – men such as Horace Vernet, Gustave Doret and Eugene Delacroix – this meant artists who trekked bravely through mountains and deserts, to tug away the veil from the odalisque, to stand before the pyramids in awe, to catch glimpses of life as she was lived in the days when Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked the earth, and capture them in the bright, swirling colours of Persian rugs, Ottoman robes and Moorish script.
‘In the case of Katz, however, it signifies simply that he has buck teeth and a small cock. Am I right, Ernie?’
When his rice was finished, Katz turned over his bowl, looked at Jimmy and said, ‘Leggi? ’
The old men wiped up the last smear of sauce with the last piece of meat and scooped the final grain of rice from every bowl. At the end of the meal all that was left were the sticks from the satay. Jimmy slipped them into his pocket.
Sollykatzanmyer asked for Irish coffee to sober themselves up. Jimmy said hold the coffee, he’d just take the Irish. He went to the bathroom and didn’t come back.
I found him in the corner of the restaurant, staring at a model villa the size of a bar fridge, with a peak like a steeple. Its walls were red and its roof deep green and trimmed with gold, as if a dragon had wrapped himself around the guttering. Two sweet joss sticks smoked in a cauldron on the decking. Around the altar stood the figures of an old man and woman.
Dee pushed Jimmy aside and laid petals around the incense burner.
‘A gift for the guardian,’ she said.
A flower in her fingers was the loveliest thing I had ever seen.
Jimmy’s eyes clouded. ‘I remember these in Siam,’ he said. ‘In the war.’
‘Every Thai home has one,’ said Dee. ‘It’s for the spirits. It keeps them from making mischief.’
Jimmy rubbed his chin.
I watched Dee’s arms, her back, her neck.
‘I need to buy a spirit house,’ said Jimmy. Dee smiled sweetly.
‘This is a restaurant,’ she said, ‘not a fucking junk shop.’
Jimmy winced, because he didn’t like to hear a woman swear. (I found it exciting.)
‘So where can I buy one?’ he asked her.
‘Thailand,’ said Dee. ‘Are you ready for the bill, or would you like to eat the plates?’
‘I’m serious,’ said Jimmy.
She gave him her sad and hostile stare.
‘Last month, you stole a spoon,’ she said. ‘You think we don’t count them, but we do.’
Jimmy cringed.
‘Can I buy your spirit house?’ he asked, and took out his wallet.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Why not?’ asked Jimmy.
He counted notes into his hand.
‘Because you are old and drunk and mad,’ said Dee.
Jimmy dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet.
‘I thought you people were supposed to respect your elders,’ he said.
‘I thought you people were supposed to be sober,’ said Dee. ‘Go back to your seat, old man, and get your hipflask out from under the table. It’s time for the Last Post.’
Dee locked the restaurant door, and turned the Closed sign to face the street.
‘Five minutes,’ she warned them.
Solomon stood up, clicked his heels and made a toast.
‘To absent friends,’ he said.
Jimmy rose too.
‘To fallen comrades,’ he said.
Katz and Myer joined them and, in one low, quiet voice, the old men began to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
SYDNEY DIARY
DECEMBER 1941
I spent the morning lost in painting and memory, because painting is memory. Even when you are working with a model’s body, you are remembering every other body you have known. I was drawing from life, a silent woman who sat in my studio scowling, killing time before the boys came back from their training camps in Bathurst and Tamworth. The William Street girls are eager to pick up extra pin money in the slow summer afternoons, but Matilda wordlessly made it clear that she would rather be lying on her back beneath a schoolboy soldier than posing modestly on a table with an arm across her breasts and a hand between her thighs.
She wrapped herself in a blanket and smoked a cigarette while I took a break to listen to the radio upstairs. The Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, in the islands of Hawaii. The United States had joined the war, but without the battleships California, Arizona and Nevada. I listened, excited and dismayed, as the world stepped closer to destruction or salvation.
At the same time as her navy had quashed America’s armour in the Pacific, the Japan’s Twenty-Fifth Army had invaded Malaya from Indochina.
Matilda received the news with the expressionless equanimity characteristic of her profession. Her red lips were tight, her brown eyes blank. She could have been wondering what effect the fighting would have on her income, or if her burden might be lighter under Japanese occupation.
I have kept careful watch on the rise of the new thinking across the globe, and the Japanese plan is clear to anybody who has been studying the strategy and diplomacy of the imperial court. Japan was opened up to trade by force, by the gunboats of Commodore Perry in 1853, after two hundred years of isolation. From that time on, the Japanese have struggled with Western ideas – from democracy through to communism – and sought ways to either incorporate or annihilate them. They learned from us how to organise a modern army, and immediately set it to work savaging the Russians in the Baltic, tearing Korea from the tzar and seizing Manchuria. They saw the great empires of the European powers and lusted after colonies of their own, to feed their industries and spread their influence. Just as the white man brought Christian enlightenment to the savages, the Japanese seek to deliver an oriental peace to Asia.
Their experiment with political parties failed. The people were taught to respect only the Emperor and the military. A nation led by its army will inevitably go to war, and the Japanese chose to march first into China. The whole world knows what the Imperial Japanese Army did to the innocents of Nanking, the tens of thousands of murders, the rapes and mutilations they inflicted on an unarmed populus, and we have looked to these atrocities for clues to the Japanese character and concluded they are nothing but blood-crazed pirates. Yet they are what we made them. They reflect what they see in us. Today, they most admire the Nazis. In Germany, they see a nation where authority has triumphed and order is respected; a country which, lik
e Japan, was humiliated into accepting uneven treaties and now wreaks vengeance on its neighbours in the name of uniting them under a single flag of prosperity.
When the IJA invaded French Indochina, to secure supply routes into China, America placed an embargo on oil sales to Japan, and a wider war became inevitable to anyone whose round eyes were not blinded by blinkers of hope. Without fuel, Japan could not continue to fight the conflict in China, on which rested the fulcrum of her ambitions and the prestige of her army.
Now they must expand south, to plunder oil from the Dutch East Indies, but who is to say that Japan is not, in fact, the natural colonial master of the region? Why should Javanese petroleum go to the Netherlands rather than Tokyo?
I explained this to Matilda, as best I could. Suddenly time was more precious than ever. Every moment might never be repeated. By this day next year, we may both be dead. She looked at me as if this were happy news indeed.
‘Are you going to paint me first?’ she asked.
‘First?’ I said.
She knew where my hands would travel before I realised myself. They sought her skin and stroked it, from her ankles to her thighs. She made a sound she had heard through plaster walls, or perhaps imitated a noise she’d once made in passion, and drew me to her, unbuttoning my smock.
I let my face fall into her breasts and I told her, ‘I love your smell.’
‘I smell of soldiers,’ she said, and it was almost poetry.
I had already made love to her body with my eyes, followed every youthful curve, explored each cheapened mystery. I told myself I was attracted by her mixture of innocence and guile, or girlishness and steel, but in truth she could have been any woman. I needed some warmth before the frost to come.
Afterwards we smoked, passing the one cigarette back and forth between our lips. I called a cab to carry her back to William Street, then filled my pipe with tobacco and walked to the stationers to buy a diary.
I spent the afternoon lost in writing and war.
BONDI
WEDNESDAY 25 APRIL 1990
I was shivering in bed, half-awake, when Jimmy brought in a mug of tea. I pressed it against my lips, but it was too hot to drink: my grandparents used powdered milk because they thought it was more hygienic. The house was dark, with only a lamp lit in the corner of the living room. The clock on the mantelpiece said 3 am. I felt like I was walking through a blizzard. I flopped onto an armchair and smelled the toast before Jimmy carried it to me on a plate. The bread was burned. Like my dad, Jimmy scorched everything he cooked. He coughed softly and gave me two medals. I pinned them onto my shirt. He straightened them, turned down my collar and fastened my top button.
Before I left the house, he kissed me on the forehead.
Solomon’s Volvo was waiting in the street. Solomon saluted Jimmy on the porch, and held open the car door. Jimmy shook his head and waved us off. We drove into town through empty streets, down corridors of lights. Solomon whistled softly, as his fingers marched on the steering wheel cover.
Thousands of old men were huddled together in blackness in Martin Place, some smoking cigarettes, others watching the steam of their breath. Solomon kept me close to his stomach, one veined hand on my shoulder. He found his regiment quickly. They shone torches under his chin and squinted to recognise him through spectacles as thick as windows.
‘G’day, dig,’ they said, and asked after friends.
Solomon had been to the funeral of his sergeant. Another man, Alfie, had buried two mates in Queensland. Solomon said he would have flow up if he’d known. Alfie took his phone number, for the next time.
They paraded in lines, in their berets, toupees and blazers, with their walking sticks and hearing aids. They bowed their heads as the bugler sounded the Last Post, then looked up as he played the Reveille and the sun rose over the post office and banks.
There were minibuses waiting on George Street to take the old men to breakfast. Solomon’s regiment had booked a hotel looking over Hyde Park. The tables were laid with silverware, but Solomon ate standing. He fished sausages out of the bainmarie and rolled them into hotdogs with slices of white bread.
‘He’s lost his appetite,’ said a stiff-backed man. ‘Fifty years ago he’d’ve finished the lot by now.’
Solomon ate half a hotdog in a single bite.
‘This is Henry,’ said Solomon, patting the old soldier’s arm. ‘Harry to his friends. So I call him Henry.’
A waiter in whites offered rum for the men’s coffee.
Solomon and Henry kept touching each other, on the wrist, the elbow, the back of the hand. Once, I saw Solomon’s fingers rise to Henry’s face, but he let them drop before they brushed his cheek.
‘This one here,’ said Henry to me, prodding Solomon’s chest, ‘this one here was a right one, he was.’
They both laughed.
‘Anything that moved,’ said Henry, making a rifle out of the air, closing one eye and pulling the trigger. ‘Bang! Bang! Couldn’t shoot straight, but. Couldn’t hit a bloody barn door.’
‘It’s a good thing we weren’t fighting barn doors,’ said Solomon.
He finished one hotdog and made himself the next.
Alfie the Queenslander had found a bottle of beer. The men passed it around, each taking a swig.
‘Couldn’t hit a barn door, this fella,’ Alfie said to me.
‘There was never any need to,’ said Solomon.
Alfie feinted a punch at his head.
‘Is it true what I hear,’ Henry asked Solomon, ‘that a mate of yours got a handjob off a blonde sheila after the march in 1951?’
The men were happy telling stories about buglers and AWOLs and the things they got up to in Cairo on leave. They made jokes about Arabs and camels and women, and the difference between shit and falafel. They made the war sound like a school trip, where only your mates were invited and you spent the whole time hiding from the teachers and running off with girls.
Outside, the first line of wheelchairs, the bewildered survivors of the Somme, moved off, steered by their nurses. There were pipe bands and brass bands, and families waving flags. Solomon mustered with his regiment, and we marched alongside Alfie and Henry under the banner that named the battles of Litani River, Jezzine, Damour and Beirut.
‘Why doesn’t Jimmy march?’ I asked Solomon.
‘He hates the army,’ said Solomon. ‘He hates talking about the war.’
‘Why don’t you hate the army?’
‘I do,’ said Solomon. ‘I just like marching.’
As we passed a group of women, he straightened his shoulders and filled his chest with breath.
I kept in step with the old soldiers, marching like a man. We tramped past one pub and then another. We could hear the noise of drinking over the cheers of the crowd.
‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ said Solomon. ‘Let’s go and get a beer.’
He bullied his way into the Coronation Hotel on Park Street, through circles of tottering airmen with small white moustaches, and looming Vietnam veterans wearing sprigs of rosemary.
‘Do you like to talk about the war?’ I asked Solomon as he bought me a lemon squash.
He blinked.
‘It’s different for me,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t know it, but I was a madman when I was young. I loved to fight. I lost mates, but I made mates too. I had some of the best nights of my life in the army. I rooted brown sheilas. I drank petrol. I wouldn’t’ve missed it for quids.’
‘Did you enjoy the battles?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The waiting was the worst part, the boredom and the training. In battle, at least we were doing something. But they . . . it . . . I . . .’ He hesitated. ‘The battles aren’t the things I think about. If I did enjoy them, I don’t want to know why.’
He shook his head and sat silently in the bar.
‘What was Jimmy like before the war?’ I asked him.
Solomon grinned.
‘He was a bit of a la
rrikin,’ he said, ‘always after the ladies. He used to get into trouble and I had to pull him out. He wasn’t happy at home. The Zayde was a stern man, like my father. They didn’t know how to bring up kids, those blokes. It was all the belt and the strap and “I’ll knock some sense into you”. You can’t knock sense into a boy, you can only bash it out of them.
‘But Jimmy had that American kind of walk, as if he was leaning backwards into the wind, and he could dance, which goes a long way for an ugly fella. He was quick with the jokes and impersonations, his Groucho Marx thing and all the rest, and he dressed well on a Saturday night. He used to go out on the prowl with Frida’s brother Moishe ava ashalom. Two grinning skinny fellas, Mick and Jimmy were. Peas in a pod.’
Solomon sipped at his drink.
‘That poor bastard Mick,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He was another one with more balls than brawn, always in a scrape. I don’t know what happened to blokes like that. They don’t seem to make them any more. Maybe it’s evolution – they just don’t last. Jimmy and Mick, with their black hair and Mick’s green eyes: everyone thought they were Paddies, although they didn’t drink, not in those days.
‘I remember Jimmy was always at Mick’s house. Little Frida must’ve been around too, but he never talked about her. She was too young for him to notice, even though girls grew up fast back then. Most of them were married by twenty. That was until the war, of course, when it got harder to find a husband. Mick had one brother and three sisters – your Uncle Maurice, your Auntie Sally ava shalom and your Auntie Hettie the Mad One. Mick and Jimmy used to sit in the boys’ room and play swing records on the gramophone, and practise dancing together like a couple of faygelehs. Frida might have helped them along, I don’t know. She was quite a dancer in her time, too.’
Solomon remembered Frida softly, but I could hear he found it hard to say Mick’s name.
‘Frida’s father and mother were like parents to Jimmy,’ said Solomon. ‘Maurice was much younger than Mick, and they all treated Jimmy as another brother.’
Solomon finished his beer.
‘How did we get to talking about that?’ he asked.