TEN
Ari
I placed the menorah in the shed and rewired its swinging arms, the repairs invisible, and polished it until I could see my own tiny reflection in its curve. However, the letter I could not have mended even were I Houdini himself. I unfolded it from the envelope: it was miraculous that the paper held together for there were so many holes, words excised with the precise cut of the razor. The handwriting looked familiar, and then I remembered with a sickening feeling that I had seen the odd words, mainly Yiddish, stuck within the folds of my uncle’s scrapbook.
Dear Israel
It is a cold day here, my friend. Not like where you are every day sunny as Eden, complete with snakes. Perhaps that is why you don’t write so much; perhaps you are busy out there in the wilderness fighting them off with a stick, getting sunburned for your pains! Well I have almost finished my apprenticeship. You may have always been the better student, Israel, but you should know how I have caught up. Who knows, maybe you will require the services of a sofer, someone to be a scribe for you over there?
To think that when I first started as a scribe my letters looked fashioned by a finger in mud! Now I can use turkey feathers and with a stroke of a blade turn it into a quill that will be the servant to my hand. Press too hard and the quill pierces the parchment. The ink is made from gum arabic, gall nut, sulphates of iron and copper, which, when combined, make the ink turn black, like some sort of sorcerer’s potion. Of course the letters rust after years, the copper sulphate shining through, so that the letters of the tefillin look like they have been written in ancient blood.
Each letter floats in its own little universe of parchment, no other character coming too close, each letter in sequence, each letter formed by writing, not scratching a globule of ink – all this precision to create the beauty of the word.
The parchment is made from the hide of calves. They are tethered together in the stable and though I know they are working for G_d as we are, their little brown eyes seem to know me, their tongues tickling my palms, in search of the salt of my perspiration from clutching the quill all day. They are still just babies; their bleating for their mothers is mournful when the butcher comes. We are all creatures serving G_d’s will. Of course before we see the little fellows again, the tanner has them dried and lime washed and stretched, all waiting for me to say the blessing and sanctification of G_d’s name.
How are yourself and your lovely wife Hephzibah? We all miss her here. For some reason when I think of you there in Sydney I imagine you two like Adam and Eve in the garden with no one but the animals to keep you company. That is foolish, I know – you are no more in a garden than the country is overrun with criminals! It is so far away I can barely imagine it. I think of those strange animals and the strange names given them.
The old village looks smaller upon returning to it, like looking at an old pair of children’s shoes and wondering how one’s feet ever fitted in them. I passed your sister __________ the other day, she is no longer a girl. It will soon be Tisha B’Av, I wonder if she will be there at synagogue? Maybe I shouldn’t write such things to you, but I assure you my intentions are honourable. Would that be so bad, Izzy? I should send this letter for it will be old news by the time it reaches you. All the best my friend, next year in Jerusalem.
_______________
I turned the envelope over; the return address had been ripped off, so I looked for a date in the folds of the letter; if there had been one it had gone the way of the razor. Why had he been so angry he hadn’t allowed her name to remain, Zipporah, my mother. Her name had been neatly snipped out as if scratched from the Book of Life. Who was this friend of my uncle’s? He never mentioned anyone from his past, from before he came to Sydney. I had always thought that was why he was so angry with me when I arrived – my existence was final proof that his mother and sister had not survived. He held me accountable, weighed me down with his expectations, for had he not plucked me from the reeds of my fragile life, just as Pharaoh’s daughter had Moses? I was my uncle’s bargain with G_d, his covenant. If I didn’t follow in his footsteps, the covenant would be broken. I was the one possibility he clung to. For to be born in shame, and raised dubiously, and then to follow his path, was proof of G_d’s existence.
But how could I be his compass when I could not find my own? All I had, like the stranger in the letter, was the beauty of a word.
The lyrebird flicked his silken tail forward and over his head, the tigery feather standing up like an orange flame. I had taken to letting him scratch about the shed rather than putting him in a cage. It was what I had promised the Birdman. Every now and again he would break into song – a rosella or a parrot or the slow chuckle of the kookaburra. His song was so full of the sounds of others I wasn’t quite sure which one was his own. Was that me, espousing a tune made up of others’ thoughts? How could I live between my uncle’s expectations and the vague associations made from ink ground into my skin? The lyrebird was singing for a mate to call his own. The currawong just rolled her eye in his direction.
I looked into the basket of my belongings from my room, to see what my aunt had included, looking for some sort of note of reassurance, a blessing, an offering of peace. To go into that theatre without it felt wrong. Yet if it wasn’t the Sabbath, what did it really matter? Houdini’s father was a rabbi and had taken him to magic shows. Houdini even performed on the Sabbath. I tipped the contents out onto the camp bed – my clothes tumbled out, as did the leather threads and box of a tefillin I’d not seen before, the lacquered box tangled with the web of leather cords. My aunt had packed it, but it made me feel my uncle wanted to tie them tight on me himself, his message clear. I weighed the tefillin in my palm. Reading the letter to my uncle from the scribe made me think of the tongues of parchment inside the boxes and the infinite care that had gone into their creation, the serifs of the letter, universes unto themselves.
I looked down at my hand, why these letters from the aleph to the tav, the Alpha to the Omega, the A to Z? There was a universe created in an alphabet. Why had my aunt put them in the basket? Or had it been my uncle? I turned them over in my hands. Were the leather boxes filled with parchment written by the scribe who had written the letter? Was his hair shiny black and slick with ink, from wiping the droplet heavy pen to save the page from the spill, just as Moses did? I put the tefillin on.
My uncle had showed me how when I was thirteen. He had tied the leather and I had followed his instruction as best I could. The tefillin on my forehead had slipped and his eyes had taken their measure of me and found me wanting, before helping me tie it right. Now I wrapped the cord leather around my finger, the black line of it crisscrossing the letters of my tattoo, erasing them. I felt a pricking at my eyes, a breath held prisoner in my throat.
‘Ari?’
I spun around. Lily was standing there in the shed doorway, her trousers and a shirt billowed around her with the breeze. I tore the tefillin off quickly, the leather string knotting in my fingers as I threw them on the bed. The box rocked on the blanket, the tail bobbing, a strange tocking sound coming from within like trapped dice. I felt caught out, observed as if naked.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ she said. ‘Is that something for our act?’
The shadow of a bird clutched at her shoulder – the raven I had seen before with the Birdman. Her blue eyes swivelled in a forest of dark feathers, taking us both in.
‘No, it’s a little box of vellum, we use them to pray with,’ I said. ‘As a reminder to keep the commandments.’ I looked at the menorah and the letter still sitting on the bed and felt the shame of the thief I had become.
‘The Birdman asked me if we could mind Beauty here.’ As she said the bird’s name, the raven butted her head up under her chin, then ran her beak through her hair like a comb. ‘Isn’t she beautiful? After all he has done for us I couldn’t really say no. She lives up to her name to start with, don’t you think?’ The raven lifted up her head so Lily could scratch her sha
g of feathery beard. ‘Also, your uncle came around.’
The way she said it made me uneasy. Had he found that I had not only come and collected my things, but had raided the attic also? The birds were ready, the stage awaited. Had my uncle renounced me or come with an apology?
‘What did he say?’
Lily looked away from me and ran her hand down the slick feathers. He wouldn’t come in, even after I asked him, and then Miss du Maurier tried, but he just wouldn’t step over the threshold.’ Lily looked at the menorah. The raven sprang from her shoulder, the movement of wings making her blink several times. The raven flapped once more, so that the parrot hopped anxiously from foot to foot and the lyrebird ran on his pencil legs to the safety of the stable wall, head low, his long tail barely hovering above the dirt. The currawong stood still, as if by doing so she could disappear. The raven raised her wings, and I could see the leathery black claws curled up beneath her feathered body like the tendril of a fern. She alighted on the upheld arm of the menorah, her claw scratching for a grip on the newly shined brass.
‘Was it because of me that he wouldn’t come into the house?’ she asked, tucking her legs up under herself as she perched on the chair.
‘It wasn’t because of you,’ I lied. Why should Lily wear the weight of his prejudice?
‘I could feel the disapproval coming off him in waves.’
‘I’m sure he is just angry with me. What could you have possibly done?’
Lily shifted in the chair and whistled to the parrot to come to her, but he was staying put, one eye drowsy, the other on the raven who at that moment cared for nothing more than to put her beak beneath her wing, in pursuit of sleep. ‘There was something in his tone that reminded me of my mother.’
‘How so?’ I looked at her with curiosity. Surely there was only room on earth for one like my Uncle Israel.
‘She has an anger that never passes.’ Lily sighed, running a hand through her hair.
Lily twisted in the seat, her arms pulling at the sides of her shirt and I was afraid. Upon her back were darkened welts, a latticework of scars, as if waiting for a vine to grow upon it.
The raven let out a sorrowful arc-arc-oh and I wished I had words to offer or some other salve, but nothing but a jagged breath fluttered out of my mouth.
ELEVEN
Billy
The curtain rose and there was my Lily of the Valley, my Rose of Sharon, standing in that leg revealer, blinking, the lights bright in her eyes. I could tell she was resisting the urge to squint. The Jew stood beside her. The musicians killed the notes of their instruments one by one, and they were left alone in the light, a silence around them except for the breathing beast that was the audience, waiting, waiting, waiting.
The Jew struck the violin, a harsh series of loud notes, and Lily stood, the feathered fan at her buttocks poised like an exquisite tail. Behind them rose the brass candlestick, huge arms raised as if about to conduct an unseen orchestra. A series of birds sat on the brass holders, like winged creatures of the Gospel, minus one – partridges in a golden pear tree. A lyrebird, the largest of them all, flipped its feathered tail over its face. Lily did the same with the plumed fan, my beautiful white toreador.
From nowhere, suddenly lovely beyond imagining, the lyrebird sang, its song a second violin, a duet with the Jew. It flicked and shimmied its tail, then jumped from its golden pew to Lily’s feet, the other birds shuffling aside to avoid the whip of its tail feathers. Lily stepped around the lyrebird, stately as the orbiting moon. The last notes of the violin faded, but the lyrebird kept going, the sound of strings blending into a strange treetop cacophony, imitating all the voices of sunrise – the screech of the parakeet and rosella, the chortle of the magpie, the disturbing laugh of the kookaburra, the strange dark sob of the lonely crow.
The audience sat in rapt silence, unsure of whether to clap or if there was more to come from its tiny throat. I myself felt a certain dread that the lyrebird might speak once more, its voice human. Whose voice would come chirping out? My father’s? His accusations ripe for me? My top lip prickled with sweat and I drew a breath as Lily helped the lyrebird gently back onto its brass perch.
‘Now,’ the Jew boy’s voice rang out across the waves of heads like a cymbal. ‘Now we will have the currawong communicate.’ A ripple of excitement set the heads nodding across the divide between him and me. Lily offered her finger to the currawong and it stepped eagerly onto it and shuffled up her arm. The Jew slipped a blindfold over her eyes. That he came so close to the soft nape of her neck made me vitriol impersonate. That should have been my right. If I had pried my little oyster open earlier I would have found the pearl of her secret. Perhaps then I would have been in the place where the Jew was now, close enough for her to feel my breath upon her tender neck.
‘Who would like to test the bird’s ability? You sir, in the third row, hold up the paper and the bird will whisper the word.’ In my haste to get back to my seat I had dismissed the large pieces of paper the punters were scribbling words on. ‘Hold it up to the audience, sir, so they may see it too.’
The house lights rose, an electric dawn. The man had written the word Love in large, clumsy letters. It was enough to make one sick. It was probably his sweetheart who sat so pertly next to him, her face burning red from the spotlight’s embarrassing glare. The currawong twitched upon Lily’s shoulder and she cried out, her voice slightly sibilant as the nervousness overtook her.
‘Love!’
Love! The word sent my heart into a panicked beat.
The next audience member stood up, the word Home writ large on the white paper. The currawong warbled, and after a certain beat Lily called out the word and was correct. How I wished I had taken note of the paper in the foyer: what words I would have written – my declaration, my SOS, my warning flare – a sonnet would not have been as sweet. MINE.
I knew how Lily could tell the words on the pieces of paper; my apprenticeship with Doctor Cuthbert Professor Crisp had not been for nothing. I knew the difference between the power of the mind and the trick thereof. All Lily had to do was be aware of the Jew’s subtle gestures. That they must have devised their own private language, their own little love code, made me twist in my chair. The memory of Crisp’s ruse rose to my mind, the one that held Merle and I together: we too had had our own special code, or so I’d thought.
I concentrated on the Jew’s movements, jealous of his proximity to her, the hours they had spent so close painfully obvious, heads bent together like two hands clasped in a prayer. Perhaps it was the creak of his foot on the floorboard, a scratch on the fabric of his collar, a clearing of his throat, or a sigh? The rules of their secret language were hidden to me, but she was directed by his clues as delicately and intimately as if he had taken her hand and led her to his lips. I banished the image from my mind.
Of course, it was possible to get it wrong, but the more it was done the more refined it could become. It was elegant in its simplicity, tricky in its complexity – but Lily, by God, stayed true. There were no tell-tale signs of their cipher. Her blindfold, made from a strip of Miss du Maurier’s bridal dress, made her look like an innocent about to be executed. How I wanted to tear it from her face and liberate her from the darkness!
A middle-aged woman beside me stood up and flapped open her piece of paper. Minx, she had sat down with it between her ankles and I hadn’t seen it. Oh, if I had I would have hijacked the page and written my love in one perfect action. I could stand on the red velvet chair and shout it to the theatre rafters. But if interrupted her act, disturbed the concentration, would my honey of the honeycomb, still be receptive to me? I was sat still and quiet with my constancy.
‘Thank you, madam,’ the Jew said. The currawong hopped up onto Lily’s head, a black and white smudge of feathers, making the audience titter. ‘What is the word, Miss Del Mar?’
‘The word is Vengeance,’ she replied.
Oh how sweet a word, how it warmed my cockles. The audience appl
auded but my heart was an ovation.
Lily removed the blindfold and led the currawong to the brass tree where she scooped up the green parrot, who babbled at the mere touch of her fingers, speaking in tongues. She placed it on the floor close to the footlights and stood behind it. The Jew walked in behind her, as if in a sacred procession. I watched close to make sure he didn’t lay even a fingertip upon her. With a cloud of smoke the whole stage wavered and vanished and they were gone, the parrot left behind squawking:
abracadabra,
Abracadabra,
ABRACADABRA
as if it was surprised to find itself all alone. Then before the applause began, another little puff of smoke obscured the green blur of feathers, and it too was gone. Hands clapped, the curtain came down with a swish. Now I knew.
A new act appeared on the stage, I didn’t wait to find out what the hell it was – the sight of their pasty makeup and the flimsy sparkle of their costumes sickened me. I skulked back to the box office and sat on the hard arse-numbing stool and let my hand swim through all the shillings, pennies and thruppences, reminding me of all the money that once was mine but had disappeared like a dream.
TWELVE
Ari
In the dressing room before our debut, her hands slid into my hair and I held my breath. Her fingers ran across my scalp, combing out curls, before starting up again, working the oil into subduing my hair. The scent of it, the feel of her touch, made my skin tingle.
I had helped her with her buttons and though I had been careful, had tried not to touch her skin, it was unavoidable. The filigree of the scars on her back had shocked me. Who could do such a thing to their own child? Up close I could see how the blows had pierced her skin, a spiderweb tattoo. The buttons were as small as seeds, the loops silk slippery, and my hands did a nervous flap, like two grey moths around the brightness of her flame. She was the first woman I had touched, as a man. I willed the buttons to their conclusion, but my fingers turned to fish, swimming between the silk of her dress and her skin, and for a moment I didn’t care if the buttons were never done, my fingers electric in the current of her moonlit skin.
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