by Mark Dapin
‘“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.
‘“I have no brother,” she told me.
‘She looked at me hard.
‘“I remember your name,” she said. “You were Billy.”
‘“No, no,” I said, “Billy was my little mate.”
‘“No,” said Mei-Li, “Billy was a tall man. Maybe an American.”
‘“I’m Jimmy,” I said, “from Sydney.”
‘“Ah,” she said, “you knew Frank.”
‘“Your brother,” I said.
‘“He was not my brother,” said Mei-Li. “He was a comrade. I know you. You visited the union with your friend. You didn’t give us weapons, so many comrades had to fight with bird rifles and died. And now you are back. Why? To enforce British rule?”
‘“I couldn’t give a fuck who rules Singapore,” I told her.
‘“Do you have a weapon?” asked Mei-Li. “Give me your weapon.”
‘I stood to try to hold her. She picked up a knife. The other rickshaw men gathered around silently and watched until I sat back down with my noodles.
‘I stayed there all afternoon, all evening, all week, watching Mei-Li as she made food for the rickshaw men and taxi drivers. I bought a sleeping mat and rolled it out on the pavement at night, and I ate noodles four times a day, waiting for Mei-Li to talk to me. She said “Go away”, “Leave me alone” or “You’re worse than a dog”, and asked if I had mates with guns. The rickshaw men made friends with me, they called me “Noodles” and we sometimes played fan-tan to pass the time.
‘“The noodle stall was a commo front, a place to hand over money and information. At first nobody would come because of the Australian soldier, so I sold my uniform and bought a blue vest and Chinese pants, and a hat like a lampshade, and I became a part of the street. One day I started helping Mei-Li with the noodles.
‘“Thank you, Noodles,” she said, but that night she asked a couple of thugs to move me along.
‘“I am sorry, Jimmy Noodles,” she said. “We have had a long war, and now another is coming. I think you were a kind soldier, but there were many soldiers then. And what we need isn’t kindness, it’s guns. If you do not have them, go now.”
‘I tried to kiss her but the thugs dragged me away. That night I found Chun Lau’s, where Townsville Jack had met his whores, and started smoking the pipe. It was weeks later that Katz came for me. He’d been upcountry with the War Graves Commission. I woke up on the floor, with Chun Lau shaking my shoulder.
‘“Noodles,” he said. “Noodles, Noodles.”
‘He pressed a bowl of warm Chinese tea to my lips. I drank, then slid back, breathing hard.’
‘He picked me up and pointed me to the back exit.
‘“This way, hurry,” he said.
‘He thought Katz was the military police, but Katz took me back to hospital and, in the end, it was Katz who told me it was time to take the boat home to Sydney.
‘The day we left Singapore I was waiting for the boat in a sailors’ bar at the quay when I got talking to a planter from Ipoh. He said he was surprised to see a healthy soldier like me – because I was fit then, at last, and strong – going back to Australia when they’d soon be needing me to take on the commos. He asked what I’d done in the war and I told him I’d been in Changi.
‘“Well, I’d think you’d want to catch the next one,” he said, “since you sat out the last one.”
‘The commos launched their insurgency a couple of years later, and diggers went back to Malaya to kill the only blokes who had been on our side all through the war, but I’d come home by then, to find the Zayde had died. My mother didn’t recognise me. I thought it was because I was so damaged, but after she buried the Zayde she couldn’t see anybody. It was as if he’d been her eyes.
‘I frightened her, and I’d waited months to come back to her. I was drinking and yelling and punching holes in walls. Everyone was angry with me, and my sisters told me to leave. When I first saw your grandmother again, I was living in a unit in the Cross with Katz. To me, being with him was like being alone, because I was so used to his body, his smell. There’s no part of Katz I haven’t seen, no inch of his skin I haven’t touched. We’ve got the same stories.
‘The unit was owned by Jake Mendoza. Katz lived there rentfree, but every now and then he’d come home to find Jake in his bed with a showgirl or two, and – if it was Ernie Katz’s lucky day – Mendoza might move over and make a space for him.
‘I slept on the lounge. I didn’t care where I lived, as long as it had a roof to keep out the rain. There was a bathroom down the corridor, but that was full of showgirls half the night too.
‘It was good for us, living in the unit. It brought us back into the world slowly. In Kings Cross nobody minded much what you did, if you were mad or if you were drunk, and me and Katz were mad and drunk a lot of the time.
‘We worked around Mendoza’s club. Katz was painting signs and the backdrops for the shows. I was trying to rent space for a workshop, but doing odd carpentry jobs for Mendoza while I waited for something to come up. The bastard never paid us, but we drank for free and there were plenty of women.
‘I met up with Moishe again, and he took me home to meet his sister. I asked her if she’d come dancing with me, and a year later we were married.
‘We had children right away. I hoped for boys. I wanted to name them after Townsville Jack and Bathurst Billy, but she gave me three girls.’
‘Four,’ I said.
‘But now there’s only three,’ he said.
I shook my head.
‘What happened to the fourth?’ I asked.
He turned his face away from me.
‘She’s dead,’ said Jimmy.
‘Did she throw herself out of a window?’ I asked. ‘Or take poison?’
Jimmy spat.
‘Are you going to build a room in the spirit house for her?’ I asked.
He ignored me.
‘Then you could board it up,’ I said.
He glowered.
‘That would be a grown-up thing to do,’ I said, and I knew it was.
BONDI
SATURDAY 5 MAY 1990
We glued matchsticks together to create a raffia suite for the lounge, and laid sticky-back plastic as lino in the kitchen and bathroom. Jimmy cut a bathtub from a pill bottle. We tried to coax a toilet from another medicine container, but the proportions were wrong. If the bath was the width of one spirit, then four of them could’ve fitted on the dunny seat.
Although we couldn’t install working taps, we did manage to plumb in a shower. When the shower filled with water, it drained through a network of twisted drinking straws like the one that led from the guttering to the gate.
‘Katz went commo after the war,’ said Jimmy. ‘He knew a wharfie who raised money for the Malayan Communist Party. He told us Mei-Li was killed in the emergency that the government wouldn’t call a war because that would frighten off the planters’ insurance companies. When I heard she’d died it was like a train rushing through my heart. I couldn’t speak. Because I’d never given up the Mei-Li I’d had before the fighting, never replaced her with the Mei-Li I’d met when the war was over. In my memory they were two women, and I’d always love the first one because she had helped me survive the camps. And if I hadn’t been able to save her from the commos or the fascists – or the diggers or the Poms – then that was my fault, not hers.
‘I was in this club once – this fucking club here – and there were young blokes – young in 1960, they’re probably dead now; I hope they’re fucking dead – back from Malaya, passing around photographs of dead guerrillas. They called them “CTs”, communist terrorists. There was one Chinese corpse with long black hair, still beautiful, although her cheeks were puffy with death, wearing British MPAJA khakis, next to a British-supplied Sten gun, and her killers had ripped open her shirt and torn a breast out of her bra. This young fella boy said, “Come here, digger, and take a look. This’ll put le
ad in your pencil.”
‘But it wasn’t Mei-Li,’ said Jimmy. ‘At least it wasn’t Mei-Li.
‘In war some people just disappear forever. They vanish from the place they lived, they even vanish from its memory. But Mei-Li is still there for me, like a bamboo fire on a cold night.’
He swallowed.
‘I didn’t want to talk to anyone about the war,’ said Jimmy.
‘The Japs had me locked up for nearly four years, and I wasn’t going to give them another minute of my life. Frida never asked questions. It wasn’t a crime to have secrets in those days. Women weren’t supposed to understand things. They were told the best thing for us would be to forget what’d happened and start again.
‘I sometimes worried that people would think I didn’t speak because I was ashamed, and I was ashamed. I was ashamed not to be Superman, not to be God, not to be able to rise above it and save everyone. In the end, I suppose, I was ashamed not to be Townsville Jack. But what did he accomplish in the end? Five-eights of bugger all.
‘He wouldn’t take orders from anyone who was less of a man than he was, he wouldn’t pretend, he wouldn’t play along, and so he died. Townsville Jack couldn’t give in to Duffy because Duffy was all smoke and mirrors, but the whole bloody thing is smoke and mirrors. Townsville Jack would be alive if he’d kept his head down, if he’d kept it bloody bowed. But he died for what? A fucking racing frog? Where’s the sense in that?’
Sweat puddled the underarms of his short-sleeved shirt.
‘I’m as dry as the bloody Todd River,’ said Jimmy, wiping his brow with his wrist, so I went to put on long pants for the Club.
Sollykatzanmyer were glowering at each other across the table. Katz read from the latest edition of Newsletter, which had a report on the RSL Bowling Club’s recent victory against the Probus Club of Avalon.
‘There’s some good sorts in the Probus Club,’ said Katz.
‘The wood is a slightly asymmetric ball,’ said Myer.
‘In that way it reminds us of Greta Torpin’s jugs of old,’ said Solomon.
‘My balls were slightly asymmetric when the blonde shiksa gave me a handjob after the AJEX Anzac Day march in 1951,’ said Myer.
The old men noticed us as Jimmy ordered drinks at the bar.
‘Here he is,’ said Solomon, ‘Jimmy Rubens, builder to the dead.’
Jimmy sat down.
‘How’s the ghost train going?’ asked Solomon.
‘It’s a spirit house,’ said Jimmy.
‘Anything I could do to help?’
‘You could stay out of our way,’ said Jimmy.
‘Don’t you need any pictures?’ asked Katz.
‘Pictures would be good,’ I said.
‘I’d have to see the house first,’ said Katz, ‘so I’d know what size to make them.’
Katz seemed to be serious, but I could never tell with the old men. Even Jimmy didn’t look certain.
‘What’re they going to wear?’ asked Solomon.
‘Who?’ asked Jimmy.
‘The ghosts.’
‘White fucking sheets,’ said Jimmy. ‘How should I know?’
‘Clothes maketh the ghost,’ said Solomon.
Jimmy scowled.
‘What the bloody hell does that mean?’ he asked.
It meant that two drinks later we all climbed into Solomon’s Volvo and drove four blocks back to my grandmother’s house.
‘Schwartzers everywhere,’ cursed Solomon, as if his steering problems were caused by veering around crowds of Maoris in the road.
‘You’d think you’d moved to Crown Heights,’ said Jimmy, ‘never mind Dover Heights.’
My grandmother had found her deckchair and was sitting out front, staring at the spirit house.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Rubens. Still as pretty as ever,’ said Solomon, kissing her forehead with his fat wet lips.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘I thought I told you never to come back.’
‘That was 1953, Mrs R,’ said Solomon. ‘You’ve forgiven me since then.’
‘Drunken bum,’ she muttered.
‘You’ve done a good job, mate,’ said Katz to me, patting the roof of the spirit house. To Jimmy, he said, ‘I’ve seen better. Can’t pretend I haven’t.’
Solomon studied the master bedroom.
‘Where are your wardrobes?’ he asked.
I was still working on them. I showed him our drawing and he made a note of the measurements on a pad he carried, with a pencil and tape measure in case somebody should suddenly need to be fitted for a pair of pants.
Grandma stayed outside while we men drifted through her bead curtain towards the drinks cabinet.
‘What’s it to be, fellas?’ Jimmy asked.
‘Whisky,’ we chorused.
Mine came in a seven-ounce glass, topped with ice and drowned in water. The others drained their drinks like vodka, and settled down to a short game of insulting each other.
Katz read from the label on the whisky bottle.
‘Johnnie Walker Black,’ he said. ‘This is going in my diary.’
Solomon grabbed his chance.
‘Ernie Katz,’ he said, ‘is a diarist, like Samuel Pepys, although a more appropriate comparison might be Charles Pooter, the fictitious author of Diary of a Nobody, since Katz, indisputably, is a nobody, and not to be confused with any of the more important Katzes in art history, such as the genuine artists Shemuel Katz, whose courtroom sketches of Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem brought him world attention; Emmanuel Mane-Katz, who was famous for his depictions of Hassidic life; or even Mickey Katz, the master of the klezmer clarinet and author of the classic Yiddish parody song “How Much is that Pickle in the Window”.
‘Certainly his diaries would do much to dispel any confusion about his identity, and separate him from the more productive Katzes – or Katzen – of this world. Indeed, one has to wonder what Katz, who generally speaking goes nowhere and does nothing, finds to write in his diary: Went to club, bludged a drink, ducked my shout, slunk off home.’
Katz tapped his fingers on the table.
‘The Diary of Solomon Solomons would, of course, be voraciously devoured by the public,’ he said, ‘just as Solomon himself has voraciously devoured everything set in front of him – or to the side of him, or behind him – for the last seventy years. A typical entry might simply read got fatter.’
While Solomon and Katz together composed an imaginary day in the life of Myer, Jimmy and I sneaked out the door.
*
Grandma was out shopping when I unscrewed her mezuzah from the doorjamb, prised open the case and pulled out the scroll. I folded it and rolled it tightly, so it would fit into the tiny glass tube I’d made from an old thermometer, and I mounted it on the spirit house frame.
The spirit house now had a timber extension, and decking made from lollypop sticks that Jimmy had salvaged from every Paddle Pop Daniel and I had ever eaten at my grandmother’s house.
When Grandma came back with meat, fish and matzo meal, she asked, ‘What do you need that for?’
Jimmy looked away.
‘It took you ten years to build one for Deborah Who Lives in Israel,’ said Grandma. ‘Why do they get one now?’
Jimmy shrugged, hunched, and pressed his lips together.
‘Did they put a man on Mars?’ asked Grandma. ‘Was it on the news and I missed it?’
Jimmy coughed and it sounded like woodwork, as if he’d planed strips from his throat and sawn through his larynx with a lathe. Then Grandma went to put the shopping away and Jimmy drifted back to 1946.
‘While I was in Asia, I wasn’t thinking about what’d happened to me,’ he said, ‘but coming back to Australia was like coming back to the camps. I saw dead men’s faces on the country platforms at Central Station, corpses drinking coffee in milk bars.
‘I didn’t have much to do with the ex-prisoners’ organisations, but I was happy to see my old mates again. I was the best man at Myer’s
wedding to Mrs Myer. There were one or two others, from Changi and the line, who’d meet in hotels, and we’d share a steak and talk about the concert party and the bloody Seraphielites, and the way Professor Scaly and Croaker Keneally gyped Townsville Jack at the frog races, but they fell away or moved away or died, and the only ones I kept in touch with were the Yidden.
‘We all got our back pay and it was more money than most of the blokes had seen in their lives. A lot frittered it away on horses or stupid business ideas, or bought land at the back of Bourke and hid from the world.
‘I got a letter from Bargo, which was a surprise, as I didn’t think he’d made it out of Changi. He asked to meet at the services club in the city, and I supposed he wanted to hear how Quilpie had died.
‘I didn’t recognise him in the taproom, all dressed up like Jacky in a three-piece suit and a red bow tie. He didn’t mention Quilpie. He told me he was concerned for me, Jimmy Rubens, and worried that I hadn’t made any plans for the future.
‘He said there was no time to take a yasumi. He was calling a tenko of all the poor fellas who hadn’t provided themselves with life insurance, because life insurance was ichi bun and it was time we all went on speedo and bought ourselves a policy quick smart.
‘“You think I should insure my life now?” I said. “When nobody’s trying kill me?”
‘“I know what you’ve been through,” said Bargo. “We’ve all been through the same, Jimmy Rubens. We think we’ve survived everything the world’s got to throw at us, we reckon we’re invulnerable, but can I let you into a secret, old mate? We’re not. You know, I read in the paper the other day about a bloke who lived through the bombing of Singapore, Changi, the railway, the hell ships, the coalmines in Japan and even the bloody atom bomb in Hiroshima, then went under a bus on George Street in the rush hour, leaving behind a young wife and three children and five hundred pounds’ debt.”
‘“Where did you read that?” I asked.
‘“The Sydney Morning Herald,” said Bargo, “the paper of record. Now, that man’s family would’ve had no worries about the future if he’d only thought to provide himself with life insurance.”