by Mark Dapin
He looked into his empty glass.
‘Nobody ever mentions Mick,’ he said, ‘and that makes it harder. Especially as you grow older and you start to see things the way they really were, instead of how they looked to people at the time. Mick should be with us now, eh? He should be drinking with me in this pub. It should be his fucking round.’
Solomon’s eyes were fat with tears.
‘He’d’ve been proud of you,’ he said. ‘He would’ve been your “Mad Uncle Mick”. He’d’ve told you all the stories, tapped out the songs on his tobacco tin. I don’t know what he’d’ve thought about Jimmy marrying his sister, but. I don’t think any of us would’ve wanted that.’
He examined the bubbles that clung to the walls of his glass.
‘Let’s have another beer for Mick,’ he said, and bought me a middy of Old by mistake.
‘Mick Zimmer,’ said Solomon, licking his plump lips. ‘Mick fucking Zimmer.’ He raised his glass to the window. ‘Today, we remember you, Moishe, with your oily hair and your silly bloody dancing shoes, and the fag hanging out of the side of your mouth.’
I clinked glasses with Solomon and drank the beer. It tasted old.
‘Frida was a rose that bloomed in wartime,’ said Solomon. ‘When I got back from overseas I didn’t even recognise her. She’d grown big round boobs and . . . I don’t suppose you want to think about your grandmother like that, eh?’
I liked it better when we were talking about the war, but that never seemed to last very long.
*
We picked up the car and drove back to Bondi Junction to meet the others at their usual table. When Jimmy saw me, he shook my hand.
The Club doorway was draped in union jacks, and a man like a small general walked between them, nodding to either side, as if the flags had been hung for him. He wore a short ribbon of service medals across the breast pocket of his blazer and was followed by a much bigger man who wore none.
‘Well, take me up the Patton with a sergeant major’s baton,’ said Myer. ‘It’s the King of the Cross.’
Jake Mendoza put a hand on Katz’s shoulder.
‘You’re looking well, Ernie,’ he said. ‘How’s your love life?’
‘Happy Anzac Day, Jake,’ said Myer.
Mendoza stared hard at him, as if he were trying to make him vanish.
‘Who’s this?’ he asked Katz.
‘Pincus Myer,’ said Katz. ‘He used be thinner with more hair, and his nose was more nose coloured.’
‘A faygeleh?’ he asked. ‘Did he used to dress up as a woman?’
‘Oh no, your kingship,’ said Myer. ‘You’re thinking of Solomon.’
Jake Mendoza nodded at Jimmy.
‘What are you doing here, Jake?’ asked Jimmy.
‘On Anzac Day, I like to be with my fellow returned servicemen,’ said Mendoza.
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Jimmy, ‘is where it was that you’re supposed to have returned from.’
‘I served my country,’ said Mendoza.
‘They also serve,’ said Jimmy, ‘who only rob their mates.’
‘Now, now,’ said Mendoza, smiling, ‘let’s not fight amongst ourselves. Let’s remember, instead, our victories against common enemies – the Japs, the Nazis and the Maltese.’
Mendoza caught me looking at his Star of David signet ring.
‘And who’s this little fella, then?’ he asked. ‘Don’t tell me it’s Leah’s boy.’
Jimmy didn’t answer, so I nodded for him.
‘Your brother Daniel was at school with my grandson Martin,’ said Mendoza. ‘We often asked him to our home, but he was always busy. He lived a very full life for an eleven year old.’
‘He’s in France now,’ I said.
‘Well, tell him to drop by when he comes home,’ said Mendoza.
‘He’s still busy,’ said Jimmy.
Mendoza lowered himself into a chair and sat on it like a throne.
‘We go back a long way, eh, boys?’ said Mendoza. ‘Do you remember the Patton? Aphrodite’s? I’ve still got that wardrobe you made for the girls’ dressing-room, Jimmy. What a lovely piece of furniture.’
‘You never paid us, Jake, you snake,’ said Jimmy.
‘Ah,’ said Mendoza, waving away his words, ‘you were under my protection.’
‘Your protection?’ said Jimmy. ‘Other blokes did your fighting for you in the Cross, and other blokes did your fighting for you in the war.’
Mendoza smiled at his knuckles and fondled his ring.
‘There wasn’t a lot of fighting in the POW camps,’ he said, ‘as far as I know.’
Jimmy arched his back like he was about to jump.
‘You know fuck-all,’ said Jimmy.
‘I know the difference between you and me,’ said Mendoza. ‘I’ve never surrendered.’
Jimmy clenched his fists. Mendoza raised an eyebrow. I wished I could raise an eyebrow. His bodyguard came to attention behind him. Jimmy sat forward in his chair. Mendoza leaned back, as if he were lying on a big, soft bed.
‘It’s funny,’ said Mendoza, ‘but I don’t remember you as a tough guy. You must have hardened with your arteries.’ He sucked the salt off a peanut. ‘Instead of softening with your cock.’
The bodyguard’s hand held Jimmy down as Mendoza snatched a glass out of Myer’s fist, rested one foot on Myer’s thigh and climbed onto the table. He pushed aside the ashtray with his foot. A nest of cigarette butts spilled like slaters into Myer’s lap. Mendoza finished Myer’s beer in one gulp, pulled a silver pen from his breast pocket and banged it against the empty glass.
‘Diggers!’ he shouted. ‘Cobbers! Heroes! Cooo-eee!’
‘Get off that table, you short-arsed cunt!’ someone shouted.
‘Jake Mendoza!’ said Mendoza.
‘He’s not here!’ called an old sailor.
‘He’s AWOL!’ yelled another.
‘He’s in the fucking nick!’
Mendoza laughed with them. His grin seemed to glow. When the joshing and whistling had stopped, he addressed the crowd.
‘Jake Corporal Mendoza!’ he cried. ‘Number N213136! Reporting for duty! And it is my duty, as a returned serviceman, to buy a beer for every man in the house! And a whisky!’ The men cheered, Mendoza beamed. ‘And another beer!’ he cried. ‘And another! The fucking bar’s on me, boys, from now until the Last Post!’
‘We’ve already had the Last Post!’ shouted the sailor.
‘Until the last man standing then!’ called Mendoza.
I had to trot to catch up with Jimmy, who was trying to push his way out the Club doors. I pulled them open for him and he almost toppled into the street.
‘I’ve had enough of this bullshit,’ he said. ‘Anzac Day, regimental fucking blazers, everyone in their units. Another couple of drinks and those senile old fuckers’ll be dancing on the tables with Jake Mendoza.’
He stopped to steady himself against a fence.
‘Give me a fucking cigarette,’ he said.
‘I don’t smoke,’ I told him. ‘I’m only thirteen.’
‘Lot of fucking use you are,’ he said.
‘I could go back and get you one,’ I said.
Jimmy laughed blindly. A man in a suit tried to slide past him, but Jimmy bent his knees and cupped his palms.
‘Smoko for an old soldier, sir?’ he begged. ‘Penny for a fool?’
The man patted his pockets. ‘Steady on, digger,’ he said.
‘Steady on,’ agreed Jimmy. ‘If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, then you’ll spend the whole rest of your fucking life wondering why you’re still walking around with a head on your neck and they’re all lying six feet under in Kanfuckingburi.’
‘You should take him home, son,’ the man said to me.
I cupped Jimmy’s elbow and steered him along the street, past white-haired officers drinking on the pavement. Jimmy set his head so he wouldn’t see them, thundering forward.
‘They say
you should remember,’ said Jimmy. ‘Mick Zimmer, Bathurst Billy, Townsville Jack . . . Boys dressed up as fucking soldiers. Do you think they want to be remembered like that? That wasn’t who they were.’
He wiped sweat across his forehead with a grey handkerchief.
‘I remember them,’ he said. ‘I remember every word they said.’
Jimmy slowed as we came closer to my grandmother’s house, and stopped by the electrical substation. He lingered in the street, as if he wasn’t going home.
‘What’re you staring at?’ asked Jimmy. ‘You silly-looking cunt.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything.’
‘No,’ said Jimmy. ‘You didn’t do anything, you don’t know anything, and you’ve got everything.’
BONDI
THURSDAY 26 APRIL 1990
While Grandma was stirring porridge, Jimmy folded open a sketchpad at the table and took a pencil from behind his ear.
‘What’re you doing?’ I asked.
‘I’m busy,’ he said.
I was tired of him going off at me, and I was starting to feel like it wasn’t worth staying at my grandmother’s house, even for a Nintendo. I was sad, because he had always been such a good grandad and now he had turned sour, just like Mum and Dad.
‘How can you be busy?’ I asked. ‘You’re retired.’
‘He’s off with the fairies,’ said Grandma.
‘Go and play in the yard,’ said Jimmy.
‘I will not!’ said Grandma.
‘I was talking to the boy,’ said Jimmy.
‘It’s freezing out there,’ I said.
‘Freezing, is it?’ said Jimmy.
‘What’re you drawing?’ I asked him.
‘A pension,’ said Jimmy.
I tugged at the corner of his sketchbook. He rapped my knuckles with a ruler.
‘Keep your hands to yourself,’ he said.
Jimmy went to the shed, came back and laid his tools on the table. He chose a hammer, a screwdriver and a chisel for his belt, and he gave me a bag of nails.
‘We’re going to make everything right,’ he said to Grandma.
She cleared a space among his tools for his breakfast.
I ate my oats slowly, waiting for one of them to say something about it being a school day, but neither did, so I just took the nails and waited.
Jimmy waved me to follow him outside, and together we looked at the narrow strip of lawn between the front of the house and the fence.
‘We’re going to build it here,’ he said, as if he were planning a city in the desert.
He unveiled his diagram. Two boys my age came walking up the road, so I pretended to be interested in the sketch, which looked like a picture of a doll’s house on a pole. I guessed it must be some kind of complicated bird table.
‘I’m sorry about last night,’ said Jimmy. ‘If you’ve got questions, ask me now. I’ll talk to you while I’m working.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t care any more.’
Jimmy scrubbed away at his drawing with an eraser.
‘Don’t sulk like a sheila,’ he said. ‘What do you want to know?’
Two other boys passed in their blazers and ties.
‘Where did you meet Sollykatzanmyer?’ I asked Jimmy quickly.
‘I knew Solomon before the war,’ said Jimmy, still staring at his sketch. ‘He lived with his father in Bondi and worked in the shop on Darlinghurst Road. I’d heard of Myer. He was older. His family used to have a tobacconists in the city with a bright orange sign. Katz was my age, but he was from Balmain, so I’d never met him. But we were all at the same dances, chasing the same girls.’
‘What about Jake?’ I asked.
‘Who’s Jake?’
‘Jake Mendoza.’
Jimmy squinted into the pale sun.
‘I had nothing to do with him. He was a gonif, even then. You’d hear about him selling stolen car radios, but you had to look for him to find him, and I had other things to do. Cabinet making was hard work, but then there was the dancing . . .’
Jimmy looked down at his motionless feet.
‘Solly wasn’t good with the girls,’ said Jimmy. ‘They were afraid of him because he was so big. They thought he’d crush them, but he was as gentle as a lamb with any sheila who’d go near him. He was handy in a blue, but. You wouldn’t think it, but he could cop a flogging and come up smiling. I suppose it was all the padding he had. But Solly was different from the other Jewish lads. He was always looking for some kind of adventure. And he had that goyishe spirit in him: he liked to smash things up.
‘I used to wonder if Solly would have lasted on the line. Sometimes it was the big ones that gave up first.’
‘Did you all join the army together?’ I asked.
Jimmy shook his head.
‘Solly signed up pretty much the day the war began,’ he said. ‘His father was angry. He thought fighting was for goys, that Jewish boys should be tailors. Me and Mick waved him off at the docks, and I never saw him again until 1945. I enlisted in June 1940.’
‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked.
Jimmy rubbed his chin, pushing back bristles as if he were pressing through long grass.
‘Scared? No,’ he said. ‘I joined up so I could be like the Zayde. In those days people were religious and they were patriotic. I was British first and Jewish second, because the Zayde had a problem with rabbis. He had a problem with everyone, although I didn’t understand that then. But I was proud of the Zayde, and proud of the Anzacs, and proud that they’d fought under Monash, because he was an Aussie and a Jew. I wanted to have what they had, and so did Mick. Moishe was my age, and he knew all the newest dances. Frida was his baby sister, six years younger, all curls and freckles. Me and Mick were best mates. They said we were inseparable, but it turned out we weren’t.’
It was hard for Jimmy to talk about Mick, too.
‘The Zayde told me not to go, but then he always told me not to do everything. Back then, people cared a lot more about what other people thought. In the Jewish community it wasn’t respectable to go off and be a soldier – not in 1940, at least. There were a lot of . . . weak men. There were boys who’d run away from other wars, old fellas who’d served thirty years in the tzar’s army. And the English Jews who’d been here the longest, they were too good to be cannon fodder. I was the son of an Anzac, but the Zayde hoped for better for me. I didn’t know it then, though. I thought he felt I wasn’t up to it.
‘There were so few Jewish blokes signing on at the start that they didn’t even have an Old Testament for me and Mick to swear on. They had to send out a runner to pick up a proper bible. “Five-bob-a-day murderers” the conchies called us. We got one pound and four shillings a week and three square meals a day, and for some blokes who’d been on and off the swag since 1929, it was like they won the Melbourne Cup every week. Or at least a chook raffle.
‘The funny thing was, I ended up working for ten cents a bloody day and three cups of rice. I’d’ve been better off starving in the bush, or locked up in the Bay with the real murderers.’
Jimmy coughed and opened his handkerchief to catch the spit, but his throat was dry.
‘Me and Mick joined the infantry, thinking we’d go to Africa and fight the Germans. The Japs weren’t even in the war then. We trained for desert warfare, the sand dunes and the wide open spaces, and they sent me to the jungles of Malaya. It was like learning to play cricket for a footie comp.’
He thumped his chest to unclog his lungs.
‘We were with a training battalion, then the AIF, under Lieutenant Colonel Jack Callaghan. “Callaghan’s Greyhounds”, they called us. Well, we were greyhounds soon enough: blue-skinned and bone-thin and cowering like whipped dogs.
‘But when we joined Callaghan, we were fit and hard. We were young blokes who’d just come out of months of bloody drill training, ready to defend our country or anything else, but Callaghan took a look at us and told us we weren’
t soldiers. Soldiering, to Callaghan, wasn’t about fighting. It was about being in an army, being subject to discipline, being hard in a way that wasn’t about what you could give out but how much you could take. He wanted to make us into a group that followed orders without question, because that was how you won a war. He started to train us again, the Callaghan way.
‘He was a career soldier. He’d been in uniform all his life. What type of bloke stays in the army when there isn’t a war, marching around like a madman, cleaning old guns? But Callaghan loved the military. His head was full of army regulations and King’s Regulations and clothing regulations and every other bit of bullshit. He needed those rules to live by, every bloody one of them, like the meshugannehs who read the Talmud to tell them which way they should wipe their arses. Mick hated him.
‘Callaghan was made of muscle and pomade. He stood straight as a bloody steeple, as if somebody had slipped a drainpipe up his arse. He liked to shout and strut and say you weren’t a soldier. Sometimes I think he thought he was the only real soldier in the world. Apart from the Japs.
‘I wouldn’t’ve got through it without Mick. We watched out for each other. It wasn’t always easy to be Jewish in the army, even for two fellas with Irish names – Moishe joined as Mick Ryan; I kept Rubens, which was lucky, in the end, because Callaghan liked everything done alphabetically, and Rubens and Ryan were usually put together, along with our little mate Bathurst Billy Rutherford, the third bloke on our team.
‘Me and Mick were the rough end of the Jewish community because we worked with our hands, but we weren’t hard men. We kept quiet about the Jewish thing, never used Yiddish words and didn’t take the holidays. At first we tried to keep away from bacon, but after a month’s hard training we’d eat anything just to keep our strength up.
‘We gave anything to anyone, threw our money around to show we weren’t Jews like that. And we talked like bloody Queensland cockies: fair dinkum, my oath, mate, mate, mate.
‘Mate, mate, mate,’ said Jimmy. ‘Mate, mate, mate. Fancy a durrie? Buy you a schooey? Bet you a Teddy? Mate, mate, mate.’
The way he said it, it sounded more like ‘might’. Jimmy wiped spittle from the corners of his mouth.