Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Mr Goldberg?’ Jessica asked tentatively.

  ‘Solly Goldberg, kosher butcher,’ Moishe’s father announced. Then, placing the basket at his feet, he wiped his hand on the backside of his ample trousers before extending it to Jessica.

  ‘Nice ter meetcha, Mr Goldberg,’ Jessica replied nervously, her hand lost in his huge, clammy paw.

  Solly Goldberg took a step backwards and, with his head tilted slightly, he appraised Jessica. ‘So pretty,’ he said, ‘but too thin! If you were a chicken I send you to the fat farm.’ He had a merry laugh and Jessica’s nervousness began to disappear. ‘Come, Miss Bergman, we make a picnic. I talk, you eat.’

  Jessica helped Solly Goldberg to spread a picnic rug under one of the English oak trees in the asylum grounds. He set about the task of attending to her appetite. With a sweep of the hand he indicated the large basket. ‘Miss Bergman, everything we have here, compliments Mrs Goldberg. Eat, my dear, tomorrow maybe comes a pogrom, who knows?’

  Jessica, who hadn’t seen as much delicious food in over a year, could scarcely believe her eyes.

  ‘Eat, eat, there’s no shame, only if I go back, Mrs Goldberg finds maybe something in the basket, then shame!’ Solly Goldberg clapped his hands and rolled his eyes in dismay, mimicking his wife’s voice. ‘So tell me, Solly, your shiksa girlfriend, she don’t like my strudel?’ But eventually, despite Solly’s exhortations to ‘Eat, eat, my dear!’ Jessica could not manage another morsel. ‘Okey-dokey, first we eat and now we talk,’ Moishe’s father declared, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. ‘Maybe a little more lemonade, Miss Bergman? For the throat?’

  Jessica laughed, shaking her head. ‘I’m full as a goog, Mr Goldberg. Couldn’t manage another crumb.’

  Solly shook his head sadly. ‘Tush! Such a no appetite, maybe you should be a bird, a sparrow no less.’

  He hadn’t partaken of any of the food himself, content to watch Jessica eat alone, but now he started to dispose of what was left in the interests of not making Mrs Goldberg angry. Jessica had left at least three-quarters of the contents of the basket. After eating steadily for twenty minutes, describing to Jessica between mouthfuls how each delicacy was cooked by his wife, Solly indicated the empty basket and, producing a large bandanna, he wiped his mouth carefully then declared happily, ‘I pray every day I die first — without Mrs Goldberg’s cooking, to be alive would be a big disappointment.’

  ‘My mother is a good cook, but she couldn’t hold a candle to your wife, Mr Goldberg.’

  Solly looked pleased. He’d placed his back against the oak tree and stretched his fat legs straight out in front of him, his big butcher’s hands resting comfortably upon his stomach. ‘Miss Bergman, what you’ve done to Moishe, it can’t be paid back. He is an entire different boychick. But also, I got to thank you for saving my business.’

  Jessica looked puzzled. ‘Saving your business?’ Solly spread his large hands. ‘I ask you, who’s heard a kosher butcher his boy is married to a shiksa?’

  ‘A shiksa? You said that word before.’

  ‘A gentile, my dear. Moishe is a Communist. He tells me it don’t matter no more — religion is dead, God is finish. Communism is coming next, a Jew can marry a gentile, who cares!’

  Jessica laughed. ‘Religion is the opiate of the people?’

  Solly looked up, surprised. ‘He said it to you also? Maybe he told you as well that Mr Marx is a Jew, but now dead, a German and the son of a rabbi already, so what’s the problem, it’s not the end of the world? “Moislie,” I tell him, “maybe not for you it’s the end of the world, to be a Jew is not a religion, it is a pain in the tukis!” You know what is a tukis, Miss Bergman? In English, if you’ll excuse I say it, to be a Jew is a pain in the bum!’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘So I say to him, to the boychick, the Communist, “But understand, it’s God’s pain in the bum and when God scratches his tukis, a Jew knows he’s somebody chosen by God special and must keep the faith. So tell me, Mr Shlemiel, Moishe Goldberg, whose pain in the tukis is a Communist? Let me tell you something for nothing, my boy, I’m a butcher, what do I know from Communist? What I know is a chicken is Jewish or gentile, you can’t have both in one butcher shop. I wish it could be so, I could make a lot of money.” Then I say to him, “Moishe, Communist kish mit in hinten!” You know what means that, Miss Bergman? Of course not. It means, Communist can kiss my bum!’ Solly Goldberg shook with laughter and clapped his hands, overjoyed to have Jessica laughing with him.

  ‘I never thought of a chicken having a religion. A chicken being Jewish,’ Jessica said at last.

  ‘You better believe! A chicken ain’t Jewish, I’m out of business! But if a chicken is also a Communist, I’m out of business double. How long you think I’m going to be a kosher butcher I tell people they should eat Communist?’

  Jessica laughed again. ‘About as long as you’d be a kosher butcher in Bondi if Moishe married me?’

  Solly Goldberg clasped his plump hands to his chest.

  ‘You got it, Miss Bergman, kosher chickens and gentile chickens, they can’t be in the same shop and Communist chickens, they got no profit.’ He pauses and smiles at Jessica. ‘But what you done for my boy Moishe, how can I thank you?’

  Jessica smiled back at him. ‘He done a lot for me too, Mr Goldberg. He taught me to read books.’

  Solly looked down at his hands, suddenly silent. Then he spoke quietly, not looking up. ‘I’ve come to ask, my dear. You could maybe turn convert? Become a Jew?’ He looked up tentatively to see if the thought offended her, but seeing Jessica smile he continued, ‘We could talk to the rabbi, you could take Jew lessons.’ He spread his big hands. ‘Why not?’ He smiled suddenly. ‘It’s not so hard to be a pain in the tukis.’ He looked about him and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand, taking in the handsome sandstone buildings about them. ‘You already done your fair share of suffering, in this terrible place. If you don’t mind my saying, already you’re practically Jewish, my dear.’

  ‘That’s just it, Mr Goldberg, I’m in the Hospital for the Insane,’ Jessica reminded him, laughing and liking Moishe’s father immensely. ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I’m supposed to be crazy. You know, in the loony-bin?’

  Solly Goldberg seemed unimpressed with this line of reasoning. He spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders. ‘So? Who’s crazy, who ain’t? Most my customers, they crazy. You should see how they look at my chickens. A kosher chicken is already blessed one hundred per cent, but in the shop comes a Mrs Chicken Shopper to buy one my nice kosher chickens.

  ‘’’You got a nice chicken for me today, Mr Goldberg?” she asks.

  , “Not today, every day I got a nice chicken,” I say to this Mrs Chicken Shopper.

  ‘’’That one!” She show me a chicken. It’s a nice chicken, hanging quiet and content in the shop. I take it down. “A beautiful chicken,” I say and give it her.

  ‘’’Ha!’’ she says. She takes it up, pulls the legs away - already she is hating this chicken, she smell its tukis, puts her finger inside, pulls out the giblets, looks down the neck, shake to see if something I don’t know what comes out. Push a finger here, there, everywhere she pokes. If that chicken is alive, believe you me, it’s dead already from cruelty to chickens. Then she point to another chicken she ain’t never touched. “I take that one, Mr Goldberg. This chicken you give me is a disgrace, you ought to be ashamed yourself!”

  Solly Goldberg was an excellent mimic and it had been a long time since Jessica had laughed so heartily, thrown her pretty head back and laughed. Solly rolled his eyes. ‘You think that’s crazy? From chicken shoppers I got lotsa stories much worse. And from buying a turkey, you wouldn’t believe.’ He stopped, struck by a sudden thought, bringing his hands up to his face. ‘Oh mine God! That the qualification! To be Jewish you got to be crazy.’ He tilted his head to one side as though he was examining Jessica. ‘Believe me, you
could make already a first-class Jew in no time, my dear.’

  Jessica declined Solly’s invitation to take Jewish lessons but thanked him for the honour. ‘I weren’t much good at being a Christian, Solly, I don’t suppose I’d be much good at being Jewish neither.’

  Solly laughed, accepting her decision. ‘Being good at being a Jew is impossible, my dear. If you come even close it’s a miracle from God.’

  A friendship had been struck between Jessica and the kosher butcher from Bondi that would last a lifetime. Solly Goldberg visited Jessica once a month for the next two years and always came alone. ‘The boychick don’t know about picnics, only books and Communist chickens,’ he’d say as if to excuse Moishe’s absence. But Jessica knew Solly wanted to come alone and she was greatly flattered that he would make a trip so obviously arduous for someone of his stature.

  Moishe, however, never failed to visit Jessica once a week to bring her books and talk to her and often one of the books might have a white feather stuck in it.

  When Jessica first asked him about the feathers, thinking it was simply a bookmark made from one of Solly Goldberg’s kosher chook feathers, Moishe laughed. ‘Women come up to me in the street or on the tram and hand them to me,’ he’d said. ‘But why?’ Jessica asked, curious.

  ‘It’s to tell me I’m a coward for not joining up to fight in the war.’ He’d smiled quietly. ‘I’m keeping myself for the revolution. When the workers rise up, Jessie,’ he paused and looked up over the summer trees, ‘now that will be a battle worth fighting in.’

  ‘But you told me they wouldn’t take you because you had flat feet, Moishe Goldberg!’ Jessica laughingly accused him.

  ‘Yeah, that too,’ Moishe laughed, embarrassed at being exposed, ‘and the bottom of lemonade bottles for specs. But that was before I became a Communist, before I’d read Marx and Engels. I wouldn’t join up now, not blinkin’ likely.’

  Jessica hadn’t told Moishe about Jack, the man she loved with all her heart, who had joined up the moment he could with just as much fervour and belief in the British Empire and all that it stood for as Moishe felt about his silly Communist revolution.

  Jessica thought about these two young men who, together with Billy Simple, had so affected and influenced her life.

  Moishe Goldberg, the Semite, pale as first light with a blueish tinge to his chin no matter how closely he shaved, his dark obsidian eyes made large as a possum’s by the lenses of impossibly thick spectacles. Moishe, thin as a rake with bones which seemed to rattle about in his clothes, too timid even to touch her, his fine mind filled with theory, revolution and failure, determined to save a working class with whom he had nothing in common.

  Jack Thomas, solid, muscle-hard, blue-eyed and tanned by a merciless sun, his hair the colour of ripened wheat, the sum of a hundred generations of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon blood. His mind always on the soil, unimaginative, except perhaps for his precious irrigation canals. Fascinated by the internal combustion engine and the role of mechanicals on the sheep station, yet the finest of horsemen. But he too was vulnerable, as she’d seen often enough when his father had a go at him. Jack, who would come home and take up where he’d left off, never questioning his entitlement. ‘A real good bloke for an owner, fair dinkum,’ folk would be bound to say about him. ‘Married the Bergman girl, the pretty one.’

  Both were men with dreams of a world that was a fair and honest place, though each had a vastly different image of what this should be. Both decent men, down to their bootlaces, except that Moishe’s were usually undone and Jack wore riding boots with elastic sides. It was Jewish and gentile chickens all over again, Jessica thought wryly.

  She greatly enjoyed Moishe’s weekly visits, but if the truth be known, they were not anticipated as enthusiastically as Solly’s monthly picnics, which had become known as ‘Compliments Mrs Goldberg’. Solly would leave her at four o’clock in the afternoon when the gates closed. ‘I see you next month, my dear,’ he’d say, ‘same time, same place, compliments Mrs Goldberg.’ The visits of Solly, with his big basket filled with his wife’s culinary love for him, with his stories of the doings in his kosher butcher shop and his life as a child in Poland, became the high point in every long, tedious and always frightening month.

  Solly was not only an entertainer, he had the rare ability to be a good listener as well and he grew to love Jessica’s stories of the bush. At first she’d been too shy, thinking he was only trying to be polite. But Solly persisted and one day Jessica said, ‘I’m no good at stories, Mr Goldberg, but I could do you a poem me father taught me when I was a young ‘un.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘It’s a bit rude, though.’ ‘A poem? I like that, Miss Bergman.’

  The Black Soil Plains

  ‘The herring clouds are stretching Across the black soil plains.

  It’s more than folk dare hope for As they pray for summer rains.

  ‘Six years of drought and hardship, The dams and rivers dry.

  The bank owns a second mortgage And our sheep and cattle die.

  ‘“Lord, fill our creeks and rivers, Let pastures green our lands,

  Squeeze the moisture from the heavens With Your ever loving hands.”

  ‘God looked down and saw our suffering And a miracle came to pass.

  His tears dropped down from heaven Just enough to wipe my arse.’

  Jessica ended the poem and Solly clapped and chortled. ‘I always thought that was the end of the poem until one day a shearer told it to me proper,’ Jessica then said. ‘Would you like to hear how the rest of it goes?’

  ‘More? I got more? Certainly, with pleasure, my dear.’ Jessica repeated the last verse and corrected the final line, then added another verse.

  ‘God looked down and saw our suffering

  And a miracle came to pass.

  His tears dropped down from heaven

  Just enough to rinse my glass.

  ‘So, let’s drink to pluck and courage

  To the folk on the black soil plains

  Who bury their dead on the highest ground

  To protect them from the rains!’

  Solly Goldberg clapped again. ‘But not so good as the first, I think your father has got it better, eh?’

  Solly constantly tried to encourage Jessica to speak about her life and soon she too could tell a story or two to entertain him. Solly would urge her on when she lost her confidence, digging out the facts and the colour of an idea or experience by constant questioning. His interest was always apparent, never wavering, so that Jessica was encouraged to continue, knowing that what she had to say was genuinely interesting to him. Under his skilful guidance she began to understand the way a good tale is constructed and how to bring the characters within it to life.

  ‘Jessica,’ he would say, ‘listen for the voices. When you hear their voices then also you know the story.’ Over a period of three ‘Compliments Mrs Goldberg’ picnics, Jessica told Solly the story of Billy Simple, ending it where she left him in front of the Narrandera courthouse, though without mentioning Jack Thomas’s presence in the story at its very end, how he’d picked her up and carried her into the courthouse. Her love for Jack was a secret she would never share. It was as though his memory was fixed in time and that even by talking of him she might disturb the very core of her love.

  When Jessica came to the end of the final episode of Billy Simple’s journey into captivity, Solly remained silent for a long time, while tears ran down his huge, round face. He’d taken his large bandanna from his trouser pocket and wiped his eyes, then used it to blow his rubbery nose several times, furiously pushing it about within the folds of the large handkerchief, buying time so that he might control his emotion.

  Finally he’d looked up at Jessica. ‘Miss Bergman, you could have been a wonderful Jew,’ he sighed, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘So who cares? Already you a wonderful human being.’

 
Solly demanded ever more stories from her and so Jessica told him about Billy Simple’s trial. Between his visits she thought about what she’d tell Solly on his next trip, and she began to realise the true value of what Joe had taught her.

  All the years of Joe’s silences, when they would be working together and he would be quiet, thinking and observing, sometimes leaving her to complete a task while he followed a bird call or a trail of migrating ants, now came back to Jessica. They provided the colour she needed to satisfy Solly Goldberg’s stringent demands for a good yarn. Those occasions with Joe were quite different from his darknesses, his moods of terrible despair. These were the silences where he watched and took time to enchant Jessica with what he’d seen and what he supposed it might mean.

  Joe, she realised, translated for Jessica over their years together what he thought was the nature of things on the land and elsewhere. The habits built into a fox’s behaviour, the manner in which a bird builds its nest to defeat a predatory snake that can twist and curl from the end of a branch to enter a nest at any angle. The different calls of a bird and what they might signal and the various gestures of a kangaroo looking out for the safety of his females. The way of an emu with its chicks, the peculiar way a rabbit twitches its nose when it senses danger, and how the leaves of the eucalypt constantly change their angle to the sun’s rays so that they maintain a constant temperature and survive the drought. Joe would kick at a cow pat and announce that summer would bring a plague of black flies (mind you, Jessica never thought this was much of a prophecy, the summer always brought a plague of black flies). He’d point to the sort of rock most likely to conceal a scorpion beneath it, and he knew why a snake could move up the surface of a seemingly vertical rock.