Raisins and Almonds pf-9

by Kerry Greenwood

  'Certainly,' said Phryne. 'I am very anxious to get Miss Lee out of quod, though I have no doubt that she is furthering her studies while there. Good. Well, if you would like to use my telephone, you can reassure your father that I have not eaten you alive, and call your friend.'

  'Oh, he's not on the telephone, Miss Fisher. He's a bootmaker, and he lives in Carlton. But I'll telephone my father. Mother worries,' he explained.

  Phryne ate strawberries and cream and smiled.

  Carlton was unimpressive under a harsh light and the wind-blown dust of an unseasonable north wind. Phryne, who disliked dust as much as the cat Ember— neither appreciated having their sleek black fur ruffled—pulled her cloche firmly down and wished she had not chosen to wear a looseish, buttonless crepe de Chine coat and carry a pouchy handbag, as it was difficult to keep her ensemble together in a manner which was both decent and fashionable.

  After five minutes of walking, she would have settled for just decent, or even partially effective.

  Lygon Street, however, was always fascinating, even on a Sunday when all the shops were shut. Phryne noticed the Kosher Butcher's sign, and the strange angular black writing on the window. She turned the corner past the hardware shop into a street of little houses, dominated by the huge red brick wall of the Nurses' Home. Yossi Liebermann, it seemed, lived in Faraday Street in a boarding house, and Faraday Street was entirely lined with resting vans and horseless drays. This had meant that Phryne had to park her own car in Lygon Street and walk directly into the gale. She wished for a huge safety pin to secure her coat. She was confident of her ability to make this fashionable, if necessary The hot wind grabbed at her hair and pulled at her garments. She lost her grip on the edge of the coat and it bellied and flapped like a sail. Phryne Fisher was about to lose her temper with her garments, and her young man watched with some interest as she dragged the coat off and rolled it into a loose, crease-forming bundle.

  'There are times when I swear I consider that all fashion designers hate women,' she snarled. 'Give me a man who designs clothes that can be worn in weather! What's the number of the house, Simon?'

  'Here, I believe.' Simon opened the front door of a small single-fronted house. Simultaneously he put his fingers to his lips, reaching up and touching a little tube, like a metal casemoth, nailed aslant inside the doorway 'What's that?' she asked, coming in gladly out of the dust into a dim hallway and a very strong smell of soup. Someone was making stock. Phryne smelt an odd addition to this domestic scent: something like glue?

  'It's a mezuzah. It's a bit of the Torah, the Book of Laws, the part of the bible which tells us to love God,' he said. 'Shalom, Yossi! How are you, old fellow? This is my friend, Miss Fisher.'

  A thin young man, already balding, stooped down and took Phryne's hand very gingerly, as though she might bite. 'Delighted,' he said in a thick accent which was not quite German or Russian but had elements of both. 'Simon, I have no fitting place to entertain a lady, you know that, and it's Sunday, only Kadimah will be open ...'

  'Never mind, Yossi, Miss Fisher is investigating a mystery, the death of Michaels in the bookshop in the Eastern Market. My father has retained her.'

  Yossi's dark doe-like eyes had been examining Phryne closely, though without offence; a strangely dispassionate gaze which took account of her youth and undoubted sexual allure without being personally affected in the least. Now he exclaimed, 'Well, then, if your father knows about this, Simon, it is all right. Of course, please, lady, come in. There is only the kitchen to sit in, or perhaps the yard, would you care for some tea? It is a hot day,' he continued, leading the way down the hall, which was long enough to play cricket, and down an unexpected step into a large kitchen which was full of light, people and the mixed scents.

  A plump woman in an apron turned from the stove, where she was adding an onion to her stock. Two young women looked up from the big table, where they were assembling sequin-covered buttons next to a boy who sat in the corner, draped in a prayer shawl, reading a thick book. A young man in his shirtsleeves stopped in mid-pour of a glass of tea from a silver samovar and stared. Three young men stood up in the yard outside, dropping newspapers and hats at the sight of Phryne, bare-armed and dusty.

  'Yossi, Yossi, you schlemiel, how could you bring me Mr Abrahams without any warning?' exclaimed the woman furiously, bustling forward to take Simon's hands. 'Come in, come in, sit down—girls, put away the sequins and help me, find the good tablecloth, the good glasses, quickly, quickly!'

  'Don't trouble yourself, Mrs Grossman, we just came by on the off chance that Yossi was at home. This is Miss Fisher, she's working for my father, trying to find out who killed Michaels in the Eastern Market.'

  'Miss Fisher,' said Mrs Grossman, raking Phryne with a hard glare, then relaxing. Phryne wondered what Mrs Grossman had found in her face which reassured her. 'Sit down, sit down, please. This is an honour. Don't trouble yourself, he says,' she grumbled, flinging a snowy tablecloth over the wooden table, freshly wiped by one of the silent girls. 'Here is Mr Abrahams' son and a distinguished lady visitor and my house looks like a cattle market and he tells me not to trouble myself! Oy, vey, men!' She dusted the crockery as her daughter put down the tray.

  'Let's all say hello, shall we?' asked Simon a little uneasily 'Phryne, this is Fanny and this is Helen.' The two girls shook hands. They were dark, with curly hair tied up with red ribbons. Helen, the younger, gave Phryne a mischievous smile which flashed across her face for a second and lit it like a shooting star. 'This is David Kaplan, his brother Abe, and their cousin Solly, they are all newly arrived here from Poland.' The three young men, who had squeezed into the kitchen, all bowed and squeezed out again as Mrs Grossman flapped her apron at them, as though she was chasing chickens. 'Out, out, you've been introduced, what's the matter, never seen a beautiful lady before, eh?' They returned reluctantly to their newspapers, but Phryne could feel their attention.

  'This is Phillip Grossman,' said Simon, and the young man in shirtsleeves, who had looked round frantically for his coat and not found it, offered Phryne the hand with the glass of tea in it, blushed, and was only saved from destruction at the hands of his mother, who would not have been happy if he had spilled it on her hand-embroidered tea-cloth, by Helen, who took the glass, patted his shoulder and abjured him in a whisper not to be a schlimazl.

  'What's the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazl?' asked Phryne, sitting down on a hard wooden kitchen chair and noticing that of all the clean kitchens she had been in this was undoubtedly the cleanest, and probably the poorest.

  'Ah, well, a schlemiel means well but he is clumsy and foolish and things don't work out the way he expects. A schlimazl is just unlucky. If he made umbrellas it would stop raining. If he winds a clock, it stops. If he inherited a coffin business people would stop dying. To him it all happens badly,' said Simon. 'Eh, Mrs Grossman?'

  'Easier if you give the lady an example. Picture the scene,' said Mrs Grossman, spreading her arms. 'A cafe. A customer. A waiter. The customer is wearing his best suit, hoping to impress maybe a young lady, eh? The one who spills the soup into his lap, that is a schlemiel. The one on whom the soup is spilled—a schlimazl.'

  'Abraham ibn Ezra,' announced the boy in the prayer shawl and yarmulke unexpectedly His siblings looked at him with slightly exasperated affection and his mother with whole-hearted adoration. There was no doubt who was Mrs Grossman's favourite son.

  'My son, Saul.' Mrs Grossman was bursting with pride. 'He is studying Torah, all the time Torah and Talmud, we are all so proud of him! What do you want to say to us, bubelah?'

  'Rabbi Ezra,' said the boy, lowering thick lashes over bright eyes modestly. 'He said about the schlimazl, "If I sold lamps/the sun/in spite/Would shine at night." He was a poet in the twelfth century.' With this bit of information, Saul dried up and went back to his text. Phryne was impressed.

  'He is preparing for his bar mitzvah. Mr Abrahams is his friend, his father not being here to see him, Yo
ssel, God rest his soul in peace, alav ha-sholom, he would have been so proud! Rabbi Cohen says Saul has a real gift.' Mrs Grossman wiped her eyes and poured out tea from the samovar—thin, straw-coloured and flavoured with lemon—into thick glasses in silver holders wrought in Europe with delicate artistry. Like the tea-cloth, these were clearly treasured possessions and perhaps all that Mrs Grossman had been able to bring from her old life in a city or a village or a shtetl, and perhaps she had left her own house in flames as she fled with one suitcase and several children from city to port until she finally fetched up, so improbably, in Australia, which was after all the end of the world. Phryne asked.

  'We called it the Goldene Medina,' said Mrs Grossman, arranging little almond biscuits on a silver plate. 'Have a biscuit, please, Mr Abrahams, Miss Fisher. The golden land, Australia, where you could pick up nuggets in the streets. We saved for years, Yossel and me, working, working, always picking up anything we could do—my Yossel was a carpenter, I could embroider, but also paint and gild and carve, he taught me, what my father would have said I didn't like to think, but he said, Yossel said, we must leave Russia, the new laws are killing us, and when the war comes the revolution will follow and maybe then they will be glad to see the back of us, they hate Jews, but they hate Christians too, and unless you want to see our Philo a soldier and our little Helen a whore, we must leave ... ai, ai, what a time, we worked all the hours God gave, but he was right, my Yossel alav ha-sholom, the revolution did come and they did let us leave, and they let us take some goods, too, only the one big box, and the children's clothes, but we made the frame of the trunk out of gold, and stitched heavy cowhide over it, and then we sat with our hearts in our mouths, oy in case the customs men dropped it and it split and showed the gold ...' She rocked herself as she spoke, and her son Phillip took her hand. 'We came down into Germany where they did not want us either but let us pass, and they stole my mother's silver spoons as we passed the border and took a ship for Australia. It was so funny, we had only what we stood up in and our papers and the children and I was pregnant with Fanny, and in the hold we had a treasure which we couldn't get at.'

  'I remember the ship,' said Phillip quietly. 'I was seasick for days and we met bad weather and Papa prayed. I remember his voice and thought that as long as he kept praying we wouldn't sink.' He gave a half-apologetic smile and his mother cried, 'Well, did the ship sink? So, we heard at some places that they were killing the Jews in Russia, that we had escaped in time because they had closed the borders, that our old village was burned and gone. My dear Yossel alav ha-sholom, he told me that the revolution would treat us no better than the Czar had. Then we came here—I remember, we saw this Australia first from Fremantle, a terrible dry dead flat place, and my little Philo said, "This is the Goldene Medina, Mama?" and I was so disappointed I could have cried, but when we got to Melbourne there were people waiting, it was so strange, we were standing on the deck looking at the quay and I took Yossel's hand, I was suddenly so afraid, what had we done, leaving our own place and coming to this new country, and then someone yelled from the shore, "Shalom aleicheml" out loud, like that, so that anyone could hear and know it was a Jew speaking, and I was so relieved that I cried anyway, nu, where was I? Please, Mr Abrahams and lady, have some more tea.'

  'What happened then?' asked Phryne, sipping more hot, thin, refreshing tea.

  'We were safe then. Yossel spoke to Mr Abrahams, and he took charge of the trunk and paid us the full gold price for it, and we bought this house, and then just when we were settled and we all had jobs and we were happy, my Yossel he took tuberculosis and died, ai, ai, he lasted long enough to see his son, and then he was gone. My Yosselah, alav ha-sholom. God rest his soul, he was a good man.' Mrs Grossman wiped her eyes with her apron. 'But we are doing well. I keep a boarding house and Mrs Hallenstein sends me some of the new ones from the boats, so I have a household to feed and they have a good kosher home. My daughter Helen makes buttons and my daughter Fanny works in an office and my son Philo—who would have thought he would grow so tall?—he has his own shop in the Eastern Market, a picture frame maker. And my Saul is a son of the Book. And we are all happy except that Yossi brings me distinguished visitors without any warning.'

  Phryne took Mrs Grossman's hand and said, 'We are very glad to be here and your house could not be any tidier or cleaner if you had ten years' notice. I like this tea. Do you buy it locally?'

  'King and Godfreys,' said Mrs Grossman promptly. 'But maybe you can come again, and we will make you perhaps some French coffee, and my seed cake which I make better than any woman in Faraday Street though I say it myself, it was my mother's recipe. Now I will not intrude any more on this business of the death, a terrible thing, such a young man.'

  She collected her daughters and bustled away Yossi Liebermann and Phillip sat down at the table, pushing aside the plate of biscuits, and Simon laid out the Hebrew notes and the strange pictures on vellum. They looked at them for some time in silence. Phryne saw a white bird rising out of a black cage, a red-robed woman crowning herself with gold and a face perhaps of the moon with the subscription 'Luna'. In the middle of the flames, brilliantly red and gold, a small pale couple lay, crowned, limbs entwined, clearly making love. Phryne looked at the tiny female face blank with ecstasy and fought down a pang of lust.

  'This is alchemy,' said Yossi. He touched the picture of the copulating couple with one hardened forefinger. 'This is the mating of the Golden King and the Silver Queen, which is sun and moon. You see, there are their names.' He pointed out 'Sol et Luna' in the margin of the brightly coloured painting. 'I don't know what this is about.' He laid aside a list, in Latin, and a block of dark Elizabethan printing. 'But this relates to the Kabala.'

  'How do you know?' asked Phryne.

  The stooped young man replied, 'These are verses which point to it. "Immitens formas et influxus in Jacob sive subjectum Hominen", which means "Letting forth shapes and influxes into Jacob or else the subjected man". Jacob means Israel, and there is the tree. But this is Christianized, not the original Hebrew Tree of Knowledge. That is fortunate, because I would not have been able to talk to you about our own sacred mystery, but this is possibly medieval, no later than renaissance, and I think it is part of the angel magic practised by such as John Dee.'

  He smoothed the delicate painting with his work-ruined fingers. There was a supine naked man at the bottom of the page. From his genitals grew a tree, and each branch carried a globed fruit in which Hebrew letters and a Latin or Greek word or phrase was written. Perched on each branch was a creature: a dove or a raven or a snake. Crowning the whole was a king on a throne wearing the most magnificent purple robes.

  'What does it mean?' Phryne asked.

  Yossi sighed. 'Lady, that is the study of a lifetime, of many lifetimes, and I have only one and also a living to earn. But since I am begged by my friend Simon, I will tell you this much. The alchemists sought for the philosopher's stone, which would transmute base metal into gold. They used the holy Kabala in their study. Indeed, some of them were not even interested in the stone for its wealthy properties, or because it was to make them live forever. They wanted knowledge—to know everything. Myself, I am content to know a little, I do not think men were meant to know everything, I think such knowledge would burn us as Semele was burned by Zeus' fire. However, they said that they would reach perfection; the stone would make base metal into gold because gold is a perfect metal. The Kabala, it describes the works of Creation. There are ten paths, ten branches. It is a way of describing the world which can be used to call an angel or a familiar spirit, to make a golem.'

  'What is a golem?' Phryne was fascinated.

  'A servant made of clay or brass. Rabbi Elijah of Chelm made one, and it caused him a lot of trouble. He set it to sweep out his house, and it didn't stop until he had no house. He sent it to catch fish and it caught a whole lake's worth but didn't bring them back because he hadn't told it to—a golem has no mind. He animated it by writing the w
ord of life on its brow, and killed it by rubbing out one letter, which means "death". This is called the use of the divine names, it is found in the Sepher Yetzirah, and that is all I can tell you about it, lady, I have taken vows.' Yossi was apologetic but firm.

  'I have not, and I don't believe that this is mystical, it's all in the book, and it's philosophy, Yossi, not religion,' argued Simon.

  'The rabbi says it's all romance,' offered Saul. Both young men looked at him. Phryne was expecting them to squash him, as one does with little brothers, but both of them, instead, listened.

  'What else does the rabbi say?' asked Yossi.

  Without closing the book, Saul blinked, took a gulp of Simon's tea, and recited: 'It is called Sephirot because it states that there are ten palaces—that is the Hebrew word for ten,' he added kindly, for Phryne's sake. 'But the top three cannot be contemplated by men. The lower seven are populated by angels praising God always, and through the palaces, from the lowest to the highest, the soul rises until it is at last one with En Soph the mystical and transcendent.' At the mention of this name, Yossi drew in a sharp breath. 'Rabbi Moses de Leon in Spain wrote a lot about it, but my rabbi says that a life of contemplation is better spent on the Torah.'

  'There go your secrets, Yossi,' said Simon. 'Truly the little brother is a master of learning, nu?'

  'But ... please excuse me, Mr Abrahams,' said Saul, 'I have seen a diagram like this before, and I don't think it was Christian. The name was the same as on that picture.'

  'What name, Saul?'

  'Adam Kadmon,' said Saul, and returned to his text.

  'Primeval man,' said Simon. But the effect on Yossi of this statement was notable: he paled to the colour of junket and snatched his hands away from the parchment as though it had been especially prepared by the Borgias for one of their favourite enemies.