Illywhacker

by Peter Carey

  Rosa kept her own hands beneath the table and watched. She felt critical of herself, and foolish, just as a married man catching sight of himself in a brothel mirror may suddenly see himself in a more objective light.

  Indeed, looking at the two men, she discovered them both smiling at her.

  "If you don't like it," she told her son, "you don't have to stay." She imagined them sneering at her. They were smiling because they had guessed the contents of the basket and were waiting for her reaction.

  When, less than a minute later, Rosa saw the chook, she did not shriek. She caught her breath silently and took herself in a notch.

  "I am allergic," she said softly to Dora, begging her with her eyes to put the thing back.

  "You cannot be allergic to the future," said the insensitive fat woman, clasping the bundle of white feathers so that the inert chook moulded itself to her and became a feathery extension of her bosom.

  "It is blind," Dora confided.

  "Ah," Izzie said, "so the future is blind?"

  "No," Dora corrected him, "the future is not blind. We are blind. The chook is blind."

  "I cannot believe in a chook," Rosa said, looking for help from her husband. Lenny, perfectly capable of exacting small revenges, was suddenly busy cutting bread.

  "If you don't believe," Dora said hurriedly, placing the chook on the table, "it makes no difference." The chook cowered, a soft centreless thing. "It is not like a seance where you have to believe. Are you swimming?"

  "No, I am not swimming."

  "I am swimming, every morning." The chook stood and started tapping at the tabletop with its beak.

  "I am sleeping," Rosa said.

  "Ah, now, you see. It has taken a green one. You must write this down."

  "You write it, Dora. I am paying you."

  "No, no, you write. Quickly, now it is blue."

  "I will not," Rosa folded her arms firmly and sank back against the caravan wall. "It is stupid. I am allergic."

  "Suit yourself," said Dora sulkily. She produced a slim tortoiseshell pen (Rosa withheld admiration). She wrote down the colours of the grains of wheat as the blind chook ate them. She did not write down the ones that were knocked from the table. "Tell me, why don't you swim? When you first came here, always, you were swimming. Every day, you told me."

  "Can it smell colours?" Rosa asked.

  "It can smell smells, not colours."

  "Colours, though, have smells. I can smell yellow."

  "How does yellow smell, darling?"

  "It has a yellow smell – what else? Are you writing down the colours? Such a nice pen," she said. "I think it was the green again."

  "How is your other business, Dora?" Izzie asked. The bread on his palms now held slices of cheese and grated lettuce.

  "Miss Latimer to you," Rosa said.

  "It doesn't matter," Dora said. "Mrs Davis," she added. "Not so well," she told the industrious end of the caravan.

  "There is more demand for fortunes than enemas?"

  "Yes, there is more fortune in the future," she giggled. "That's one of my sayings, one of my slogans. I think success makes one rather American, don't you?" (Izzie scowled.) "Now, darling," she said to her client, "we have ten colours written on our chart so we can put our chookie back in its little house. Bad times", she told Izzie, "are good times for fortune-tellers. Rosa is worried about money. She is worried about her son."

  "I am her son."

  "The other son, your brother, the clever one, Jacob."

  "Clever?" Izzie asked. "Who told you he was clever?"

  Rosa blushed. "Such a jealous little boy," she murmured. "Since he was little."

  "Clever? Joseph, my brother? Clever?"

  "Always this one did things," Rosa whispered. "Steel wool in with his brother's Weetbix. You understand? The same shape. He tried to kill his brother. Now his brother is in Russia," she raised her voice, "who knows what has happened to him, but this one is only worrying about itself. He is safe and sound. His wife sends him money. He does not need to work. So rich. All around him, people worry. He is a king. His father makes sandwiches to sell. See: what is the son doing? He holds out his hands."

  "Leave him alone, Rosa," Lenny said. "You know why he is upset."

  "He is expelled. From what? From nothing."

  "Why do you pick on him? Leave him alone. Talk to your chook. Gossip with it." Then, more quietly, he told his son: "Take a walk. I'll finish these. Maybe you meet the postie."

  Rosa went back to her conference with Dora who had now produced a large volume, like a telephone book, that explained the significance of the chook's choice of colours.

  "He won't give me my mail," Izzie told his father. "He says it must go into the letterbox. If I stand at the gate and hold out my hand, he won't give it to me. 'How do I know this is your letterbox?' He is a little bureaucrat exercising his power."

  "You have much pain," Dora was telling Rosa, "much pain with children."

  "Sixteen stitches. This one. I was torn."

  "Oh shit," said Izzie and walked out. Rosa shrugged. Lenny put the tops on the sandwiches he would try to sell at Circular Quay. Izzie waited under the eaves of the house until he saw the postman drop two envelopes into the small tin letterbox. Neither of them was airmail and he approached them with no expectations. although he did not open it immediately. The second was, in fact, the letter he had waited for so long. Its stamp was perforated, not cut, and it bore a profile of an English monarch, but it was from the comrades in Sussex Street and it invited him to come and resolve certain matters in respect of his membership.

  His first feelings were light and joyful, but by the time he had walked six miles in light drizzle he was cold and slightly bitter. He rehearsed a small speech he was to make to the comrades. He amended it, forgot it, and made another one. He looked forward to their apology.

  And yet when he was in those little rooms on the fourth floor above Sussex Street it became obvious that there would be no resolution, no discussion, no apology. Instead they asked him to write a pamphlet on Japanese militarism and said, straight-faced, that the Unemployed Workers' Union needed someone to train speakers for the field.

  He should have been happy. He wished to be happy. He looked at these two men and the greying woman whom he had respected and wished to emulate and found they could only meet his eyes with difficulty. It was not because there had been a mistake, but because they did not know what the mistake was. They were decent people who were embarrassed to be found acting contrary to their principles. He tried not to despise them.

  His suit was soaked through and he began to shiver. The ink of the sentences in Leah's letter began to run, blurring the outlines of the letters and giving them a soft blue woolly character out of keeping with their meaning.

  39

  We lay in our truck, us Badgerys. The children kicked at me with their feet, and put their elbows in my eye.

  "Do you love Izzie?" Sonia asked me.

  "I don't know, Sonny. I haven't met him."

  "Leah loves Izzie."

  "Yes, I know."

  "Izzie is Leah's husband," said Charles. "They were married, but not in church. Izzie is a communist. He doesn't believe in God."

  "I know," Sonia said. "Do you love Izzie, Charlie?"

  "No," said Charles. "And I want him to go away."

  I lay on my stomach and looked through a chink in the back door. The hessian hut glowed yellow with the light of a kero lamp. Leah, dressed in white, sat up in bed, writing. The whole hut was her veil. Charles farted. Sonia giggled. I was a fool again, in love.

  40

  Izzie stood there, for some minutes, just inside the door. His wife was writing, jabbing impatiently at the paper; just so must she have constructed the cloudy outlines of his jealous dreams. His eyes were bloodshot with travel; they took in the dirt floor, the small objects on the packing case beside the bed, a tiny black-and-white photograph pinned to the hessian wall. The photograph reassured him. It had been ta
ken during the party for the Silly Friends.

  She looked up and smiled. She looked neither young nor old to him, merely very beautiful.

  He was as frail as a sparrow. His face was very white, his lips very red. He wore his shiny dark suit with books protruding from the jacket pockets.

  "You found us?"

  "A good map, Goldstein," and although he grinned he was already irritable because he felt so shy. He shoved at one of the bush-poles that supported the roof. He pushed at it angrily.

  Leah stopped herself asking him not to shake the pole. She patted the bed and when he sat – reluctantly she thought – took his hand in hers.

  "You smell like a dog," she said, squeezing the hand.

  "Sweat. Jumping trains." He was looking into her eyes, trying to find some reassurance. "Where is he?"

  "In the truck, with his children."

  He nodded. Although he had left Sydney in a rage, he had made himself become strong and positive along the way. He had exorcized his jealousy. He had patiently, mile after stolen mile, rebuilt his life, at least in his imagination. But now all this gave way before a flood of emotion, all these good intentions floating like broken packing cases in swollen waters. He was overcome with a desire to hurt.

  "Is this where you do it?"

  "Izzie, please."

  He did stop himself, but not before he had sipped the exquisite flavours of his hurt and experienced an intoxicant so potent that it made him slightly faint.

  He crushed her against him. It was a rough, demanding embrace, made cold and clammy by his rain-wet jacket, and Leah tried not to resent it.

  "Your lips are hard," he accused.

  She shrugged. "What would you like them to be?" She too tried to smile, but she was now as irritated as he was, irritated that the man she wrote to so tenderly should embrace in so wet and cold a manner.

  She looked up and saw him curl that fondly remembered lip. He showed her his teeth right up to the gum.

  "Izzie, what has happened?"

  "What do you think I am?" he hissed. "What do you think I can take?"

  "I promised…"

  "I never asked for it."

  "… to tell the truth, to never lie to you, Izzie."

  "I won't be your confessor."

  "You want me to lie to you?"

  "I want you to come home with me." His hand, on hers, was gentle and not demanding. The voice suggested no recriminations, but Leah felt herself shrinking from him. She did not want to go home. This was too shocking for her to admit to herself: she could not bear to be so selfish. So she made excuses and the excuses contradicted each other and made no sense.

  The truth, in comparison, was a simple thing. Leah was enjoying her life. She liked travelling and she enjoyed, even more, the life in the letters she wrote to everyone, to her father in particular. You can see the pleasure in their yellowed pages now: the minute details of life, whole streets of towns peopled with bakers, shoppers and passing stockmen. The life in the letters has a pattern and a shape if not a meaning. Here, in the letters, she can come dangerously close to admitting why she remained on the road and what she got from it. But when Izzie told her, perhaps untruthfully, that the dancing was financially unnecessary, she could not admit to him that she did not want to give up the life.

  Also, as she lay beside him on the bed in awkward intimacy, separated from his body by a tugging blanket, she was shocked, once again, to feel that shudder at the prospect of his skin. In memory she had blanched it and smoothed it, but there was no denying it here and she was overcome by guilt and confusion by her feelings for she thought it wrong to be repelled by his skin. She had liked his skin well enough as a friend. There was noreason why she should not like it now, as a wife. And the skin, more than the coarse blanket, continued to keep them apart and bring the conversation to matters that seemed safe. It was then that she learned of the whole ordeal he had gone through with the Party. She did not ask him why he had kept it secret from her, but as she watched him and saw the hard gleam in his eyes as he talked about his vindication she thought, not of the unsympathetic nature of his triumph, but of the extent of his shame during the period of his expulsion and she remembered the way – the day in Tamarama – he had curled up in hurt in the hollow of a rock above the sea.

  He held her hand as he talked and began to stroke her arm. She was ashamed to not welcome this intimacy. She distracted him by quizzing him about the mechanics of his vindication. They were, the two of them, alike in many respects and she smiled to listen to his approach to the problem. There had to be areason. There was a reason for everything. The comrades in Sussex Street knew nothing about it, therefore the reason for his dismissal must exist outside of Australia. He had hypothesized another Isadore Kaletsky and begun a search of leftist papers and periodicals from 1911 to the present day. In this he had been helped by old friends of Joseph's, political academics but not Party members. Finally, when he found the article he had known, from theory, must exist, he felt, he said, like an astronomer who posits the presence of a star by mathematics before locating it with his telescope. The article, written in 1923 for a little English Marxist periodical(New Times) was most critical of Lenin and very warm towards Comrade Trotsky. The article concerned issues in Australia. He then wrote directly to the Comintern pointing out that he had been only twelve years old at the time and had never been to London. In short, he was not the I. Kaletsky they thought he was.

  "But who", Leah asked, "dobbed you in?"

  But he would not see the issue as dobbing in, but as a quite correct approach for a party that did not wish to fall into error. Leah, hearing his confident use of "correct" and "incorrect", felt uneasy.

  "Who", she asked, "is this I. Kaletsky and what will happen to him?"

  "He'll be expelled."

  "And if he lives in Russia?"

  "The same."

  "Put on trial!"

  "Goldstein, Goldstein, you've been reading the capitalist press."

  "Look at your face. You know it's true."

  "Perhaps there have been trials of anti-revolutionaries. What else should they do?"

  "Izzie, look at me."

  "I am looking at you, damn it."

  Leah held her husband's hands and looked into his eyes. She nodded her head slowly as she saw that it was true: that it was J. (Joseph) Kaletsky who had written the article, who had lived in London in 1923, who Moscow now knew about, who would be, she assumed, dealt with. She felt such a confusion of pity and revulsion that the two opposing tides made her whole body tremble.

  "Poor Izzie," she said. "Poor, poor little Izzie."

  From this they proceeded, misunderstanding on misunderstanding, until, finally making clammy love, Leah wept while Izzie asked her why.

  When he came outside for a piss, I was so close to him I could have tripped him over.

  41

  It was an odd, bright, windy sort of morning. The gums tossed above our camp and showed the silver undersides of their leaves like a million dazzling knives. The grasses were mirrors and even the pebbles we kicked aimlessly beneath our boots were peppered full of glittering mica. We sat beneath a contradictory sky (a soft, chalky blue) and pretended everything was normal.

  Leah sat on the petrol drum I had used in the installation of her guttering. She leaned her back against the doorpost of her hut. The October 1923 issue of New Times flapped its pages in the wind, fluttering like a captive dove or fortune-telling chook. She soothed the pages and held them against her thigh.

  She now rested her forefinger on her bottom row of small white teeth and watched us, and only the dark rings around her sunken eyes told anything of the sort of night she had had.

  As she sat on the petrol drum she was trying to write a letter, not a real letter to a real person, but some imaginary construction, flawless in its logic and clear as ice, a letter where one fact attaches seamlessly to the next, wherejust conclusions are sensibly reached. There was no one to whom she could bear to send this letter t
o and, in any case, she was so agitated she could not get the disparate elements to stay still: "If he has betrayed his brother from fear and weakness, should I then abandon (betray) him? Is this not to double the crime? Why should I reject him because he is weak? What is wrong withme that I do not like his skin? Is my skin flawless? Have I been a liar to write to him as I have and then to wish to undo my words because of his skin? Is it skin I am rejecting? Is it something else? Am I merely asking the skin to represent something else for me? How long has this skin been a problem? When I met him in Mrs Heller's I thought him fine-looking and witty. If he is my husband and he murders a man (which seems likely) I should stand by him. If his victim is his own brother, what then? I do not ask perfection of him, only the right intention."

  The article Joseph Kaletsky had written in 1922 flapped on her lap and she pretended to read it while Isadore Kaletsky stood beneath a gum tree talking to Herbert Badgery who, I assure you, had in no way been prepared for his rival, either in appearance or personality.

  At night, as a spy, I had judged him physically my inferior, but now I could not keep my eyes off his face which was so foreign and so fine, girl-like with its long lashes, limpid eyes, dark ringlets, archer's bow lips; not a soft face. Its nose, chin, cheeks all shaped by the handsome curves of good Semitic bone, the curves of scimitars but also those of harps. His skin, I assure you, seemed quite normal.

  He shook my hand, a small hand, but hard, and his speech was staccato, enthusiastic, quiet, light. He charmed me, disarmed me; and while Leah – who I would have understood better had she held a judge's black cap in her pretty hands -stared vacantly, her husband inquired about my experience as an aviator, was knowledgeable about the Australian motor industry, and expressed the opinion that it was a bad thing that the Holden Body Works had fallen into the hands of General Motors.