by Mark Dapin
‘Get on with it, you bludgers!’ shouted Solomon.
When they came back for the third round, the red fatty rushed at the blue fatty, who looked at him sideways and stuck out his fist. The red fatty ran straight into it, fell onto his back and wouldn’t get up.
‘You know why nobody watches boxing any more?’ said Solomon. ‘It’s because it’s shit.’
The announcer spent five minutes trying to marry the winner to his belt, which looked like my grandmother’s Seder plate, then asked him if he had any words for the crowd. The man thanked them for their support, said his opponent had been a tough, experienced fighter, and promised he’d be back here in Marrickville for his next fight.
Lots of nothing happened for a long time. Old boxers climbed into the ring and wandered around, as if they’d got lost on the way to somewhere else. A collection was held for a former State champion with a broken leg, who Jimmy swore he’d seen running on the road the day before. Nobody was watching the ring, but they all turned to look at the door when Mendoza walked in wearing his navy blue suit, followed by a line of short-haired boys in tight T-shirts and heavy jewellery, and took his seat on the stage.
‘And now,’ roared the announcer, ‘it’s the event we’ve all been waiting for, the Bondi Junction fight of the cennnnnnnnntury. We’ve got two local boys squaring up for the Pan-Pacific International Professional Boxing Foundation of Australia and New Zealand Interim Welterweight Championship of the World. From the leafy lanes of Woollahra via the mean streets of Odessa comes Yuri “the Cosssssssssssssmonaut” Kogan! And from the beautiful beaches of Bondi via the bloodhouses of South Auckland is Hone “The Headhunter” Harris!’
Yuri jogged out of his dressing-room looking pale and small. The bigger Maori swaggered in from the other end of the hall – I think he must’ve got changed in the bathroom – with his hands on the shoulders of his trainer.
The fight started quickly. Yuri felt out the Maori with a couple of jabs, then caught him immediately with a straight right.
‘Watch his hands!’ shouted Johnny the Head to Hone.
‘Wash your hands!’ shouted Solomon to Yuri. ‘You’ve got Maori all over them.’
Hone tried to hit Yuri, who swayed and ducked and slipped, then realised he didn’t have to do any of those things and could make the Maori miss him just by stepping back.
‘Look at him!’ shouted Johnny the Head. ‘He’s shitting himself.’
But Yuri wasn’t even bothering to hold up his hands.
Hone charged at Yuri, dropped his head and tried to push him against the ropes, but Yuri caught him with two uppercuts and ducked out from under him. I looked around to see that Jimmy was breathing with Yuri and mimicking his punches with his fists.
‘Hook him, Yuri!’ shouted Jimmy. ‘Fucking hook him!’
Yuri smashed into Hone’s chin with a left hook and the Maori went down.
The crowd began to leave immediately. Mendoza led them out.
‘What a load of bloody rubbish,’ said Jimmy.
I thought he’d be happy.
‘The Maori couldn’t fight,’ he said, ‘so now we don’t know if our boy’s got the goods. It was a Mendoza match. I should’ve known.’
‘What a waste of time,’ said Solomon.
‘A heap of crap,’ I agreed.
My head was tingling. My heart was banging. I had loved every second.
SIAM DIARY
1944
I don’t know where we are. I don’t think this place even has a name – not in English, anyway. The Japanese call it kassoro, the airfield, but there is no airfield here and there never will be. I call it Tartarus, the dungeon of Hades, and I cannot understand why they need an airfield out here in the jungle.
As near as I can guess, we’re about one hundred miles from the border with French Indochina, so perhaps they hope to fly missions into the north of the colony, or resupply their troops in bases around the delta. We have had no news of an Indochinese campaign since we became captives. We know the Japs marched into Hanoi and the Siamese reclaimed their lost territories, but perhaps they have been beaten back. There could be loyal French troops massed on the Thai border, or even the Red Army.
Our Christian soldiers no longer believe in salvation. We buried another today, a man called White Alf, who had family in Cairns. White Alf had dark skin. His mate, Black Alf, was as pale as an albino. They used to play the harmonica together and sing. After Black Alf died, White Alf lasted two days. We have abandoned our cherished formalities: the service, the prayer, the Last Post. Men volunteered for the burial party so as to plunder the body. They gave Black Alf a timber cross as a marker, but Grimshaw, whose dour name suits his demeanour, tipped the sack of White Alf into a shallow pit, then drove a single stake into the ground above him.
‘I hope I got his heart,’ I heard him say. ‘We wouldn’t want him back as a vampire.’
The other men laughed – diggers, gravediggers, the henchmen of Hades – through toothless mouths and bloodless lips. They have to make a joke of this to survive. They must set themselves apart, and act as if a man’s life were no more precious than his harmonica, which they traded with the Japs for a jackfruit and beans.
But I cannot become detached from death. Each Australian’s passing grieves me as if I he were my blood. It is like losing a child, watching a son and heir perish, and with him my dreams. I despair of this softness in me, the weakness that cleaves me. But it means I have not lost my humanity. The Japs have not stripped me of my soul.
I always was a lonely man. Once I thought it was the artistic sensibility that set me apart, then I believed it was my ambitions. Here, we are all the same – miserable tortured wretches. All the same but me.
Some of the men are coarse and tough, and honest and loyal, and brutal and stupid. If the warder’s boot were on the other foot, they would deal with Japanese prisoners the way the IJA treats us, like farm animals or flies, to lose their wings for a passing amusement, or be slaughtered because it is the season to kill.
Others are good men who have shed their compassion because it left them only pain. They struggled to become debased and hardened, and treat everyone but their mates – officers, ORs and enemies – with a bitter, sarcastic disdain. They have embraced their hopelessness and no longer remember a time when they were free. Their only liberty comes through choosing the attitude they take to their slavery, and pitting themselves against their own kind.
I heard of a man removing the photograph of a comrade’s wife from the pocket of his corpse and selling it to the Japs to abuse and ridicule. She does not matter because she is distant, and safe, and he has no further call on the living because he is dead, and safe.
It seems to me that those who love life the most are frequently the first to perish, while others survive as shadows who have long forgotten that there is any good reason to be human.
I wish it were easier to divide the thieves from the rest, but the thieves are not in a group, they are in a place where men fall. It is not an easy thing to snatch food from the mouth of a starving man, a fellow who was once perhaps your friend. What little we have in our stores is disappearing before it can be rationed out. The rice has always been taken by the cooks, now it is also taken from them. When two sets of hands have already dipped into the supplies, there’s little left for the working men, and they view their reduced rations as yet more proof that systems have broken down, leadership is illegitimate and it’s every man for himself. They compare our performance in the field with our running of the camp and, on both counts, they see cowardice where there should be cunning, frailty where there should be strength.
The law is enforced by vigilantes. They are not the worst of men, but no one can ignore the pleasure they take in inflicting punishment on their pitiful comrades.
From Changi to the railway to this, the last camp, the only thing that has kept us alive – we unlucky few who live – has been our organisation, our dictatorship, our communism. Without it, we are dying
, even here where the work is lighter, the guards uninterested and the weakest long dead. Our society has collapsed, and the men look for scapegoats rather than solutions. We are a Jacobite mob, the baying crowd at our own guillotine.
The thieves take licence to behave as they do because they have lost their faith. Anarchy is destroying us, and the answer to anarchy is order. Surely they can see that.
There must be a way to save us all.
BONDI
TUESDAY 1 MAY 1990
Jimmy and I worked undisturbed while the lorikeets danced like acrobats on the wire. By late afternoon our spirit house looked like a temple.
‘Six o’clock?’ said Jimmy. ‘Is that the time? Iron a shirt, you scruffy bugger. We’re off to see your girlfriend.’
We were almost late for the Thai Dee because I couldn’t find the iron. Then I couldn’t put up the ironing board. Then I couldn’t make the iron work because I didn’t know you had to fill it with water.
Dee was sitting behind the counter, under the picture of the King of Thailand, filling in a crossword and ignoring Sollykatzanmyer. When I came in, she grinned and cried, ‘Hot chip boy!’
I blushed because she had remembered me, even though she hadn’t remembered my hot chips last time. She adjusted my shirt collar at the table, because I had ironed one tip pointing upwards and the other aiming down.
‘Could we have the menu, please, darling?’ asked Solomon.
‘Get your own,’ said Dee. ‘You know where they are.’
Solomon sighed.
‘Thailand,’ he said, ‘is often referred to as “the Land of Smiles”.’
‘Auburn,’ said Dee, ‘is sometimes known as “the Place of Fuck Off ”.’
Solomon waddled back from the counter with the menu.
‘You’re looking tired, Ernie,’ he said to Katz.
‘I’ve been sleepwalking,’ said Katz, who was carrying a pocketbook Macbeth.
‘Really?’ asked Solomon. He turned to me. ‘Ernie Katz,’ he said, ‘is a somnambulist. Human history – of which Katz is a self-styled student – is rife with examples of famous people who were also somnambulists, including Lady Macbeth. Ernie Katz, on the other hand, is known for his somnambulism but nothing else. His is a tidy life, entirely uncluttered by achievements.’
Katz fished Solomon’s handkerchief out of his jacket pocket.
‘Philosophers interpret the world,’ said Solomon. ‘The point is to change it. That is a quote from Charlie Marx, once a great hero of Ernie Katz, now widely regarded as the biggest single cause of human misery since Arnold Zwaybil first pushed his stool to a piano and began banging the keys like they were five-bob whores he’d picked up in the Patton.’
Katz blew his nose on Solomon’s handkerchief.
‘Nominally,’ said Solomon, ‘Ernie Katz adhered to Marx’s credo, but in actual fact he resolved to change the world as little as possible while interpreting it ad nauseam, the word “nausea” stemming from the feeling experienced in one’s guts when one is forced to listen to a political diatribe delivered by Ernie Katz, the workers’ champion who refuses to do a day’s work.’
Katz carefully folded Solomon’s handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.
‘It is as if Katz has taken a pledge to leave the world exactly as he found it, and not litter it with children, grandchildren, works of art or anything else, apart from a small billboard that used to sit in the window of the New York Restaurant on Kellett Street, advertising Today’s special: lamb chops (2) and chips. There was something of a flourish to the tail of the 2, as I remember, a hint of artistic promise that was never to be fulfilled, because Ernie Katz was lazier than a lizard, and even his somnambulism is notable only for the fact it offers a unique glimpse of Katz doing two things at the same time: to wit, walking and sleeping.’
‘Leave him alone,’ said Jimmy. ‘None of us sleeps soundly.’
Dee told Sollykatzanmyer what they were going to eat.
‘And the handsome young man will have hot chips,’ she said, tickling the back of my neck. ‘In his dreams.’
‘That’s not all he’ll have in his dreams,’ said Myer.
‘We all wake up screaming in the night,’ said Jimmy.
‘Nisht,’ said Myer. ‘Forget it.’
‘Why do we still pretend?’ asked Jimmy.
‘Have a drink,’ said Solomon. ‘You’re turning into a faygeleh.’
‘I can feel his hand creeping up my leg,’ said Myer.
‘That’s not his hand,’ said Solomon.
As was customary, Solomon made a fuss over the prawn crackers.
‘A prawn is not kosher,’ said Solomon. ‘It has neither fins nor scales. It is a bottom feeder, a faygeleh.’
‘A tribe of cannibals could feed off your bottom for a week,’ said Myer.
‘His mind is always on my tush,’ said Solomon, taking the cracker and biting into the cloud. ‘According to the sages, it is permissible to eat traife to save oneself from starving. I have a hunger for Dee that I know will never be sated.’
He licked the curves of the cracker with his long grey tongue.
‘You think she’d taste like prawns?’ asked Katz.
‘She’d taste like tinned fish,’ I said.
The old men stopped talking and stared at me. Jimmy blushed. Even Solomon’s ruby cheeks turned redder. Katz, who had been about to take a drink, snorted beer down the twin channels of his mighty nose.
‘Where did you get that idea?’ he asked.
‘Modern girl,’ I said.
‘What’s Jimmy being saying to you?’ asked Katz.
I munched a prawn cracker.
‘I need another beer,’ said Katz.
‘Self-service,’ said Dee, throwing her hand towards the fridge. Her fingernails were painted red, like her lips. She fetched the entrees from the kitchen while Katz collected Singha beers.
A pile of flyers on the cash desk caught his eye.
‘Look at this,’ he said.
Solomon grabbed a leaflet.
‘Arnold Zwaybil,’ he read. ‘In concert. “In concert” with who?’
‘It’s at the bloody Club,’ said Myer, reading from the back.
‘We ought to picket,’ said Katz.
Dee swayed over with a plate of curry puffs.
‘Do you like him?’ she asked. ‘He’s a famous singer.’
‘Arnold Zwaybil,’ said Solomon in the tone he generally saved for ‘Ernie Katz’, ‘is known as the Eastern Suburbs Frank Sinatra. He did not earn his title by singing, dancing, acting or even bedding shiksas of every race and nation. No, he was given the guernsey by the gunsel Jake Mendoza, on account of his being the cousin of Jake’s lovely wife, the long-suffering Deborah, who chose to inflict some of her pain on the rest of us by insisting her husband promote Arnold as a lounge singer, when he displayed as much talent for crooning as Pincus Myer shows for the curious new Olympic sport of synchronised swimming. And yet this disgrace to the musically gifted race that gave the world not only Allan Sherman and Herb Alpert but also Bette Midler and Neil Diamond found no difficulty in securing concert space anywhere in New South Wales, since his promoter typically offered clubs the choice of either booking his artiste or burning down. Similarly, customers were permitted to leave the building while Arnold Zwaybil was playing, but only if they were prepared to do so on their knees, which can be a difficult manoeuvre for a punter with shattered kneecaps.
‘Yet even these innovative techniques failed to build Arnold a following beyond – or, indeed, within – his immediate family, and he eventually disappeared from the public eye along with Jake’s other unfortunate protégés, Giuseppe Milano, “the Western Suburbs’ Frank Sinatra”; Alf Cockburn, “the Sinatra of Sydney’s South”; Col Tanner, “the Aussie Tony Bennett”; and Freddy Freed, “the Dover Heights Dean Martin”.
‘And there he would’ve rightly remained, buried under radiograms, eight-track cassettes and a mountain of cheesecloth shirts in what Trotsky called “the d
ustbin of history”, were it not for an inexplicable nostalgia that grips the community once a year, and which sees the Arnold Zwaybil Show resurrected in all its former glory – which is none – and tour the Hakoah Club, the RSL, Rose Bay Bowling Club, Woollahra Golf Club and, to the mystification of its regular clientele, the Coogee Bay Hotel.’
Dee nodded.
‘They gave me tickets,’ she said. ‘Do you want them?’
‘If I forget he’s shithouse,’ said Solomon, ‘may my right hand whither and my tongue cleave to my palate – which is what seems to have happened to Arnold.’
‘Do you want tickets?’ asked Dee, showing the old men a fan of passes. ‘If you don’t go, I will.’
‘I’ll take them,’ said Myer.
He reached out, but Dee jerked her hand away.
‘Say “please”,’ she said.
‘I don’t want these seats for myself,’ said Myer. ‘It’s for the Jewish people. As long as we can pack the hall with our own kind, the goyim will not bear witness to the depth of our humiliation.’
Dee tossed the tickets onto the table. Myer swept them into his lap.
‘So,’ said Solomon to Jimmy, ‘I hear Frida has gone to visit the divine Mrs Ethelberger. And taken her suitcase. Is it true she left because you wouldn’t fix the wardrobe?’
‘I’ve got other things to do,’ said Jimmy.
‘Like building the ghost house?’ asked Solomon.
‘Like keeping your big fat faygeleh nose out of my business.’
Solomon’s eyes widened, and he pretended to be hurt.
‘Current thinking has it,’ said Solomon, ‘that ghosts are what they call a “low priority” for housing, on account of the fact they’re dead. Frida, on the other hand, an aged pensioner and returned serviceman’s wife, would be somewhere near the top of the list for a comfortable home, ranked above all but recently released paedophiles and retired serial killers.
‘For this reason,’ said Solomon, ‘the majority of sane individuals who intend to stay married would undertake the necessary repairs to their own fibro palace before constructing a similarly unfashionable residence for pixies, fairies and so forth.’