EIGHT
Ari
My expulsion was a bitter pill to swallow and the judgement unclear. Was this to be just for one night, to teach me a lesson, or for good?
The shed was the one patch of earth that had afforded me my freedom, yet as the temperature dropped, my breath pearling on the windows, it felt like a cell. I wished I had worn my thickest jacket. The birds at least had feathers to nestle under, soft bodies forming their own little eiderdowns. I had the old kangaroo skin and was grateful for its warmth even though my toes were cold as hailstones.
Would I ever be welcomed back? In my ignorance I had assumed my uncle’s constant reminders were just hopes, yeshiva an option, not something he insisted upon absolutely or else endure exile. I had foolishly thought he would come to understand my ambitions. I was not his son, though he had been all the father I had ever known. It was my Uncle Israel who had taught me to read – not just the aleph and tav of the Hebrew letters, but the English ones as well. His patience was limitless as he would go from the Russian to the Hebrew to the English, never once raising his voice if I got it wrong, encouraging me to try again. It was my Uncle Israel who had placed my stubby childhood fingers on the board of the violin, tattooed finger and all, and guided the bow in my hand across the strings. He had helped my eyes follow the black and white dance of notes in their parade between the fence of lines. It was my uncle who had tucked me into bed and told me the stories of the Torah and the Talmud, like the story of Noah.
Once, tucked around the corner of the kitchen door, I overheard my aunt and uncle discussing the name. At first I thought they were talking of the naming of a child not yet born, that perhaps my aunt was expecting and I would find myself with a cousin, to be just like a brother or sister. But I was wrong.
‘Why couldn’t she have called him Noah?’ my uncle said. My aunt ignored him and carried on scrubbing the same dish in the sink. ‘Noah is a righteous name.’
‘So is Ari,’ she said, and so I knew they were talking about me.
‘Ari is the name of a beast. Noah is the name of the Venerable. A lion attacked Noah on the ark and crippled him. Samson fought a lion with his bare hands.’ When I heard that, my name sat uneasy on my shoulders as if somehow it was not mine. ‘If he were my son I would not have called him so. Nothing good can come of naming your child after an animal.’ No father ever named me; my father had died before I was born.
My aunt paused, and in the silence I could hear the slow whisper of the suds subsiding in the sink. Then she spoke quietly so that I strained to hear her voice. ‘He is our child but not our son.’
These words confused me and I wanted to call out and ask what they meant, but that would have exposed me as an eavesdropper, a disobedient child who had snuck out from under the covers when I had been told to stay in bed until morning.
‘Zipporah was your sister, Israel. And even her name means “bird”, have you forgotten this so soon? Whatever frustrations you feel about what happened, it is no fault of the boy’s.’
‘I cannot forget soon enough,’ was all he said.
The next night, after I had said my prayers, my uncle tucked me in and was about to tell me the story of Samson and Delilah, when I interrupted and asked for the story of Noah. He shifted uneasily on the edge of my bed, pressing the springs to a squeak. Why was Noah’s name better than mine?
‘When G_d announced the flood and Noah built the ark, he took birds, including the Raven and the Dove. When the Raven resisted the order to find land, Noah declared that the world had no need of it and cursed the Raven and cast him out, not knowing that the Raven would return one day and rescue Elijah in the wilderness. If G_d could save Noah, why not my mother?
So Noah was forced to send the Dove. When she returned with a green sprig, Noah knew his ordeal was over, but still the loss of so much life weighed on him. He asked G_d why he had let the Flood happen and G_d chided him. “You knew you were going to be rescued, but yet you didn’t care for others. If you had begged for clemency then and there, there wouldn’t have been a flood at all.”’
If I had known what was to happen to my grandmother, my mother and me, if I had begged for mercy, would G_d have stopped what happened? I curled more tightly under the kangaroo skin, as the parrot stretched his green wings in his sleep, iridescent in the gloom. Was speaking the words power enough?
I woke with a strange feeling upon me. Lily was leaning over me, silent as the moon, white and shining. She made no effort to move away, and waves of her silvery hair, the tips damp from the morning air, touched my face. But before I could say anything she stood upright. I could still feel the tickle of her hair on my cheek. The morning light filtered weakly through the window.
‘Wake up, sleepyhead, we’ve work to do,’ she said, resting her hip on the arm of the chair, tickling the parrot under his chin. ‘Most people try a bed.’
‘My uncle has thrown me out,’ I said. It felt strange to say it so plainly. ‘He’s cast me out.’
‘What for?’
What could I tell her about my uncle’s decision when it was his silences that communicated more than his words?
‘He has his own reasons. They are his alone. They are not something we share,’ I said, sitting up on my elbow. I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. I didn’t want to think of my uncle any more. He had more pity for himself than any other living being.
She opened her mouth to ask another question, but I cut her off. ‘But you know you’ve never told me of your home, Lily, where you’ve come from,’ I said, desperate to deflect, to forget myself, to not be like him.
‘It is not a pretty tale,’ she said, looking away from me.
‘Try me.’ She looked up at me and held my gaze a moment, then looked away again. I could hear the quake in her voice as her words came out in a rush of breath.
‘I worked at a petrol and service station. Did I tell you that before?’
I shook my head.
‘I told my mother I was working at another shop. I’d worked at the general store, but the owners had to let me go when their son returned. He’d tried to make a go of it in Sydney after the war. But he’d beaten his wife in his sleep, gambled away the family home, his wounds all on the inside. The tremor in his hand the only tell. When he returned to town, they could hardly keep me on as well. So I got whatever job I could get. The war widow’s pension only went so far. She would have hated that I worked at a petrol service station, not a proper job for a lady. Funnily enough she never asked which shop. She was too preoccupied.
‘Every afternoon I left the house wearing a pair of my father’s trousers under my dress, the legs rolled up under my hemline, until eventually I did away with the frock altogether. It was better that way. No need for the spectacle of a girl in a dress pumping petrol reaching my mother’s ears. It was on the outskirts of our town. One petrol pump and a bathroom and a meagre stand that stocked peanuts and soft drink.’
She paused, her eyes narrowed, and her face went pink from her cheeks to the tips of her ears. She pulled at the sleeves of her cardigan, trying to make mittens of the ends.
‘But the man I worked for had other plans for me. He said …’ She looked alarmed, her breath grew shallow and I wanted to still the trembling of her hands.
‘What was it that he said to you?’ I asked her, and immediately regretted it. Down her cheek trickled two tears, her voice choked, so that I had to lean closer to hear her. She exhaled before she spoke, a little cloud disappearing into the cool air. She began to shake and I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t. My hands were as useless as stones. She looked at me then, her strange dark eyes, the darkest things in her face, measuring me. Her trust was a fragile thing, it hovered somewhere in the room between us.
Her voice was hardly audible, barely more than a whisper, the enormity of what she wanted to say wedged in her throat. Her voice gave out then, her mouth opened and closed but nothing came.
I didn’t know what to say. Her silence stung my ears an
d I wanted nothing more than to blow away what troubled her like a dandelion clock. The parrot gave better comfort than I did, squeaking quietly into her ear, rocking on her shoulder. How can a man be jealous of a parrot, I thought helplessly.
‘Ready to practise when you are,’ she said quietly when she found her voice again, and I felt ashamed of my own speechlessness.
All day I felt I had let her down; a space gaped where my apology should have been. What had the man said to her? She wouldn’t tell me now; I didn’t blame her, for I was a fool who knew nothing about the ways of women. When we spoke we stayed to a strict script, though I desperately wanted to say something, anything to deserve her trust in me. Every time Lily brushed by, my nerves stood on end, in anticipation that there might be a conjunction of our fingertips.
Mr Clay had clapped at the end of our audition, a slow appreciative staccato. Lily and I had together stared out into the darkness, following the tip of his cigarette rise from the seats to the stage stairs until he was on the stage himself. He walked around us in a semicircle, his eyes on the birds, and they, as was their want, ignored him. Lily and I exchanged a tentative glance. Clay extracted his cigarette from his lip and stubbed it out on the sole of his shoe, before he stepped toward the parrot resting on Lily’s shoulder. With an outstretched thumb he reached to caress the parrot, but received a decisive nip, a clear rejection of his advance. At the clack of the parrot’s beak the lyrebird whipped his tail forward like a sail, sending the currawong back to the safety of her cage. ‘Wonders never cease,’ Clay said. ‘You need a stand, or a prop tree, to give it that Garden of Eden feel – what do you think? How about a trial performance to see how the audience reacts? How does that sound to you?’
We had come so far, but in the shed, with my violin beneath my chin, watching the graceful arc of her arms, hearing her quavering voice, I knew I’d stepped too far. We practised until the sun reached the conclusion of its arc across the sky, the last of winter’s chill slowly descending, the mauve shadows stretching towards us. She helped me usher the birds back inside their respective roosts around the shed, tenderly casting an eye over them before I walked her back up to the house, the proximity of her hand so close to mine that I could have reached out and held it.
‘Night then,’ she said, and I watched her as she mounted the back stoop.
‘Lily,’ I called to her, and she stopped and turned around to face me, my heart leaping in my chest.
‘I’m sorry about what happened.’ I’d said it. It was out. The weight of it lifted off me.
Her face crumpled for a moment and then she regained her composure with a tired smile. She took a step toward me and squeezed my hand. ‘What do you have to be sorry for?’ she said, standing a little straighter. ‘Sleep well with the birds,’ and then she was gone, swallowed into the house.
The lights turned on one by one and lit the back lawn. Tracking her movement through the house, I felt my eyes were trailing her like an astrolabe does the stars.
The birds turned to look at me as I entered the shed and one by one I stroked their feathers, filled their trays with water, replenished their seed bowls. Carefully I quartered an apple. The parrot swooped and sank his beak joyfully into the crisp fruit. His squawks and trills were louder than before, as though he were transmitting the unspoken things that had passed between Lily and me. The currawong clacked her beak as if she could speak, a low whistle muffled in her throat, and plunged her talons that bit deeper as I helped her to the perch.
The pricking of my skin made me think of the softness of her touch. The lyrebird had folded his feathers under himself and made a substitute bower out of some old rags that Miss du Maurier and I had used as drop sheets when I had helped her paint the house. The cat was suddenly at my feet, an apparition out of nowhere, eyeing up the birds with what I had thought was hunger. But as the lyrebird snapped and fanned out his imperious feathers, asserting his right over his kingdom, I realised that the cat watched them out of fear, three to one, the odds against him.
I looked at the cot in the corner, now heaped warm and welcoming with the blankets Miss du Maurier had loaned me. She had offered me a room in the house, but I felt I was trespassing enough, and was grateful that I would have more than the kangaroo skin to curl under later. I struck a match and lit the kindling in the old fireplace. The flames licked and curled around the few sticks I could find, the chimney’s lungs inhaling it up into the sky. I put the grille in front and braced myself for what I had to do next.
It felt strange to knock on the door of a place I had only ever known as home. The handle would not give way to my grasp. I walked around to the side door, my hand pausing on the twist of the doorknob, hearing the low murmurs of voices next door in the synagogue. I remembered with a jolt. It was the start of Tisha B’Av. Next door my uncle would be leading his congregation, some sitting on the floor, others on low stools, while Lamentations was read in the solemnest of voices.
Tisha B’av marked the day that Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the first temple and the Romans the second, six hundred and fifty-six years apart on the very same day. On the ninth of Av, when the bricks fell and the offerings were covered with dust, the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of G-d, left. Every year on the ninth of Av we ate our bread dipped in ashes, we wore no shoes, we fasted, we read only from the book of Lamentations and did no work. But not this year for me. I turned the handle and walked silently up the stairs, cursing the creaks and moans of the steps that complained of my presence. As much as I loved my aunt and uncle, I didn’t want to see them at this moment, as I sneaked up their stairs like an errant child.
The flat was quiet except for the clock ticking on the wall. My uncle’s study door was closed. I pushed open the door to my old room and was shocked by its barrenness. It had been stripped of my presence. The mattress was bare of sheets, the blankets folded up in perfect rectangles. My few belongings and clothes were neatly piled in an old laundry basket. A label with my name was attached on the side with a piece of string, written in my uncle’s deliberate cursive. I picked up the basket and was filled with the desire to empty out the contents all over the floor to make a wasteland of my room. This was not my doing. But it was too light; there was hardly anything in there, just a few sets of clothes neatly folded. Where had the rest of my belongings gone? I never asked to leave, never asked to lose my mother, never asked to be taken in by my aunt and uncle. I never asked to follow in his footsteps. I never asked for anything. All my life I lived in silence, listening to others’ needs and never speaking of my own. And the first time I voiced a need, did he hear it? Did he think it a slight against him, at his gift of a life in a new country, at all the care and sacrifice given to a child of his sister’s, father unknown?
I took the basket and walked out of my room and I couldn’t shake the feeling that this might be the last time I took in the sight of what I knew as home. I turned in the doorway and looked around bitterly. There was nothing left of me already.
Then I looked up at the ceiling and saw that the attic hatch was slightly askew. Could the rest of my things be stored up there?
Because the synagogue had no attic, my uncle kept the old Torah scrolls, waiting to be buried, in the attic space between our flat and our roof. Words, he taught me, are living things and deserve to be treated with the same respect as the living. Usually the attic hatch was sealed tight as a tomb, its own mezuzah rarely kissed except for those occasions when the hatch was opened and something placed in there for safekeeping. I dragged a chair from the dining room and positioned it under the hole, stood up, pushed the cover to the side and I pulled myself up into the darkness.
A shaft of light shot upwards from the hall below, bleeding into the gloom. The space was dusty and dim, and I had to stoop to avoid brushing my head against the rafters of the roof. A large broken brass menorah caught a wink of light, two of its arms hanging by its sides, the candleholder having snapped off. There was an old Torah scroll beneath it, the script of which must have
been diminished in some way, and a dozen prayer books, spines peeling away. A large cardboard box sat at its base. It would have been fitting if my things had been in the box, destined for the ground, for burial. Kneeling, I reached into the box and felt not clothes but the scrolls of old parchment flake away beneath my touch. There was scroll after scroll, the print now faded and impotent, from the mezuzah and the tefillin, no longer useful. And one old out-of-place envelope. I pulled it out and stood, almost forgetting to stoop, tilting it to the available light. Could it have been from my mother?
It was addressed to my uncle in a perfect copperplate, each letter ringed with precision upon the now browning paper. Hurriedly, I shoved it in my pocket without thinking and stepped backwards, keen to be out of there before my aunt and uncle returned. My heel clipped something. As I moved, the light from below revealed my aunt and uncle’s suitcase. I had almost missed it, tucked tight under the eave of the roof, disappearing into the shadows. I went over to it, the thick icing of dust working like a charm against my opening it. My fingerprints longed to open it. My curiosity burned, but I could not touch it; it was like disturbing the bones of the dead.
I pushed the envelope deeper into my pocket, my trespass burning cold through me. As I brushed past the menorah, an arm of it grabbed at my jumper, unravelling a thread, and with clumsy fingers I snapped the thread. The brass menorah, arms like branches, lonely for candles. I would do more than that, I would give it birds, just as Clay had suggested, winged things better than any tallow, winged things for my mother, Zipporah, a little bird herself.
I took the menorah and lowered it down the hole, its loosened arms swinging by its side. A candle holder dropped with a sickening thud on the floorboards below. I swung out into the hallway and slid back the cover as if it had not been moved at all, except for the faint marks of my smudgy fingerprints, which I did my best to wipe away.
The Bird's Child Page 10