by Rose Zwi
This was the picture with which Benjamin had wooed Berka on her behalf. The other one is prettier, he agreed, but she’s eight years older and she’s married. Yenta may not be the most beautiful woman in the world but what a character she’s got, what a character! And what a character she turned out to have. Berka should have been warned by that all-knowing smile.
Next to it hung the second half of the wedding picture, the one of Berka which Benjamin had sent to Yenta. He stood in front of a mining magnate’s house and his features were sacrificed to background. He leaned possessively against an ornate iron gate, his thumb lightly hooked into the chain of a watch—kindly lent by the photographer. His hair was parted in the centre and his moustache, which he later trimmed down to Yenta’s specifications, stretched from ear to ear, like his smile.
‘I thought the house belonged to you,’ Yenta would throw up at him in later matrimonial disputes.
‘And I thought you had character,’ he countered. ‘Looks I could see you didn’t have.’
‘So, who asked you to bring me out from Ragaza?’
‘Your brother. And I was tired of wandering about. They all said I needed a good Jewish wife, a home. Some home you made me. A bed of nails.’
‘If not for me you wouldn’t have had nails either.’
‘I should have married Maria du Toit. Her father promised me the farm when he died.’
‘You deserve a goya. You’re a peasant. Who else but a poor orphan like me, living with her married sister, would have come out to a strange country to marry an even stranger man?’
‘On your holy brother’s recommendation. For once he showed good judgement, on your behalf. And tell me: Who brought out your sister and her children to South Africa when her husband died? Benjamin or me?’
‘Who said you didn’t? Will you throw that up at me for the rest of my life?’
Berka sighed. He never won an argument with Yenta. She was convinced that he disliked Benjamin because he had been instrumental in their marriage. She could not conceive of the fact that Benjamin was a repulsive human being in his own right.
Berka heard a light shuffle of feet behind him. Yenta stood in the passage with a large cup of coffee in her hand, motioning him towards the veranda. Benjamin was probably staying all week. He got up quietly and followed her. She waited until he had settled himself in the cane chair before she handed him the strong sweet coffee. Then she leaned against the veranda ledge again, looking expectantly up the street.
Raizel was due home, her sabbath dinner was ready and when Benjamin returned from synagogue they would eat. Not that the sabbath dinner differed much from weekday meals. Berka had discouraged her years ago from making a fuss of the sabbath. A white table cloth and her mother’s silver candlesticks were the only concessions to tradition which Berka, after many battles, had allowed her.
The sun had already set behind the plantation and the air was fresh and cool. The smell of warm damp earth and bruised marigolds mingled with that of sabbath cooking which floated down the street. On every block from the top of Main Street to the end of First Avenue, lived at least two Jewish families. On their own block there was their landlady Mrs. Zaidman and her spinster daughter; the Schwartzmans and Dovid’s family. Over the road lived the Pinns and Reb Hershl’s family. They were surrounded by friends. Except, of course, for their new neighbours, the Burgers.
Berka sipped his coffee loudly then listened. Old man Burger sat just behind the wall which separated their verandas. He was also drinking coffee, noisily. He had moved into the other half of the semi-detached house a few months ago. A balding bull-necked man with a red angry face, he had barely returned Berka’s greetings since he moved in. His wife and six children—goodness only knew where they all slept in their two-bedroomed house—were no friendlier. Only their eldest son Jan whom he often met in the bar, greeted him politely.
Perhaps Hershl was right. He would have to revise his ideas of Boer friendliness and hospitality.
The Burgers were urbanised Afrikaners but the dedication with which the old man tended his garden made Berka suspect that he had once been a farmer. All the other houses had crushed stone from the mines covering their tiny patch of garden. Burger dug and manured the soil, planted sweet-smelling flowers, bushes and creepers, and spent all his free time either in the garden or hammering in the cellar which he had converted into a workshop.
Aaron Blecher and his family had been very different neighbours. Trust his wife to drag him off to a ‘better’ suburb, to provide a good address for their marriageable daughters. When they left, Berka lost an invaluable klabberjas hand and Yenta a close friend. The low backyard wall which divided their houses had hummed with a constant traffic of loaned cups of oil, flour and sugar. Now Yenta was greeted by the implacable pale face of Mrs. Burger. In spite of this Yenta still wanted to buy the house they had lived in for the past twenty years.
‘Mrs. Zaidman was here again today,’ she said as she took away Berka’s empty cup. ‘She only wants a hundred pounds down, the rest to be paid in monthly instalments. She says…’
‘She’s selling cheap because she needs hard cash for her krasavitza’s dowry,’ Berka said irritably.
‘Molly’s not ugly and she’s not unmanageable. She’s only twenty-seven.’
‘Not counting Mondays and Thursdays.’
‘She wouldn’t even sell it, but since her husband died…’
‘Forget it, Yenta. I’m not going into real estate.’
Yenta sighed. Why did she persist? She and Berka had discovered long ago just how far they could push one another. In fact, they understood one another so well that there seemed little point in talking at all. The turbulent days of their marriage when Mrs. Pinn on her veranda could report word for word of an argument taking place in their own kitchen, were over. If they argued now it was simply a matter of form, to acknowledge that the other existed.
‘I had the strangest dream last night,’ Yenta changed the subject. She rarely had ordinary dreams. ‘I dreamed I ordered two baskets of black grapes from Yanka to make wine. His horse ate half of one basket. I was so angry that I went to the Syrian and he delivered two baskets to the house. As I sat down to press them into the wine barrel, I discovered that there were cucumbers in the baskets, not grapes.’
‘And so?’ Berka asked, waiting for the inevitable interpretation of signs and portents which always had a bearing on dog racing.
‘The double for tonight will be two and two,’ she said. ‘I’ve already placed a bet.’
‘Foolish woman. One of the baskets was half empty. The double for tonight will be two and one and a half. Or, if you add the Syrian’s baskets to Yanka’s and subtract…’
‘Another Joseph!’ she said with infinite contempt. ‘Go tell it to Pharaoh.’
She watched Mrs. Pinn’s progress down the street. Yenta had seen her turning into First Avenue when she went into the kitchen to make coffee for Berka. So far she had only covered three quarters of the street, describing a zig-zag course as she crossed from one house to another. To beat a hasty retreat into the house as Mrs. Pinn approached meant you had something to hide. To receive her with equanimity was a sure sign of a clear conscience. Unlike the Angel of Death she passed over all the non-Jewish houses, stopping only at her co-religionists’. The goyim’s gossip, it seemed, was not worth collecting.
Tonight her stops were shorter than usual. Mrs. Pinn observed the sabbath and she wanted to be home in time to light the candles.
‘Have you seen mine Raizel?’ Yenta asked when she finally arrived at her veranda. She always spoke English to Mrs. Pinn although the latter, who was born in South Africa, had learned to speak Yiddish after the first lot of immigrants arrived from Lithuania. In a suburb of immigrants Yiddish was an occupational imperative.
‘Oh yes,’ Mrs. Pinn answered in her gritty voice. She felt slighted by Berka’s curt nod. ‘She was walking slowly along Main Street with Mr. Erlich. They seemed in no great hurry to get home.’
‘They say,’ Berka mumbled angrily, walking into the house. ‘They say. Who the hell is They?’
‘They say,’ Mrs. Pinn continued, disconcerted by Berka’s abrupt withdrawal but refusing to be silenced, ‘that Yaakov Koren has stopped sending money to his wife and child and that they’re living on charity from the shtetl. He’s sending her a divorce instead and he’s going to marry the widow Kagan before Rosh Hashana.’
When Berka came into the lounge he found Ruth sitting upright in the chair, a dazed sleepy expression on her face. Zutzke was stretching himself luxuriously at her feet. She smiled happily as Berka picked her up and she put her thin arms around his neck. The smell of bluegums and acidic dump sand clung to her curly ginger hair. He hugged her warmly then sat on the armchair, holding her in his lap.
‘Ruthie’s had a hard day. Tell me about it,’ he said softly in Yiddish.
She leaned contentedly against his chest, saying nothing.
‘Tell Zeide Berka what you did today, Ruthie.’
‘I, I don’t know if I dreamed it or if it really happened,’ she said with a frown.
‘Tell me the dream then. Bobbe Yenta always tells me her dreams. Maybe if I know what you dreamed we’ll be able to work out the double for tonight’s dog racing.’
Ruth smiled. Everybody knew about Yenta’s dreams.
‘It was like last time,’ she began, hiding her head on Berka’s shoulder. ‘I dreamed, I think I dreamed, that I heard horses and I knew that I must run away. In the snow it’s hard without a sled, so I took the iron from Bobbe Gittel’s chicken run. And I ran to the, dumps, to the snow mountain. With the lake and the forest, like Daddy told me.’
She dug her face into his shoulder again and was quiet for a while.
‘And it happened again, like last time. It didn’t look like Mayfontein. It looked like that picture on the wall, that one,’ she pointed without looking at the street scene of Ragaza. ‘All the houses were on fire and those men with the big swords came on horses and, and…’ She burst into tears.
‘Finish, my child. Then it will be over and out.’
‘And they killed everybody who was running out of the houses. And the snow in the street was red,’ she blurted out, ‘and I ran into the forest.’
Berka sat, silent with guilt, holding her tightly against his chest.
‘And I didn’t know if I dreamed it or thought it or if it really happened,’ Ruth said. ‘And Mamma shouted and hit me and said I was a liar.’
‘Shah, shah. It did happen, my poor child, but not to you. To someone else and a very long time ago. It is all over now and it will never happen again, so you mustn’t worry. It will never never happen again.’
He sat very still until he felt all the tension leave her thin body. Then he heard a loud voice on the veranda. Within seconds Sheinka had rushed into the lounge, preceded by a strong smell of Vicks.
‘I knew she’d be here, the little liar! Steals the iron off the roof to play dangerous games on the dumps, then tells silly stories about pogroms. She’s either crazy and doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she’s an out and out liar. Come home immediately!’
Ruth clung to Berka.
‘Quietly, quietly,’ Berka told Sheinka sternly. ‘I’ve just managed to calm her.’
‘It’s you and Dovid who fill her head with nonsense!’ Sheinka cried. ‘Stories, stories, stories! No wonder the child’s an idiot. She doesn’t know what or where she is half the time.’
‘Sit down, Sheinkala, and don’t excite yourself. Remember your health,’ Berka said quietly.
At the mention of her health Sheinka collapsed into a chair with one hand over her heart and the other over her stomach.
‘The baby will be born dead, I know it!’ she wailed. ‘How can any living thing survive such upsets? And it will be her fault.’
Ruth tensed up against Berka and looked at him in mute appeal. He tightened his hold on her.
‘Yenta, bring Sheinkala a cup of that delicious hot coffee,’ he said.
‘No. I’m going home. Come,’ she said to Ruth as she wriggled out of the chair.
Ruth turned around slowly to face her mother and said haltingly, in English.
‘I don’t want to go home mit you.’
Sheinka fell back into the chair. Her face crumbled as she cried: ‘In English! Did you hear? She spoke to me in English! What am I, a stranger? Gott in Himmel! What sin have I committed to deserve such a strange child?’
3
Dovid looked towards the mine dumps over which the sun was setting. It was all so ugly: The sun like an evil eye in the red sky; the yellow sand; the turgid water. Even the birds recoiled from that foul-smelling pool and the silent bluegum plantation at its edge. The trees were dull green all year round and smelled of eucalyptus. Like Sheinka. They did not shed their leaves in winter nor put out new ones in spring. Like everything else in Africa they looked artificial. Here the earth seemed governed by laws which did not respond to a benign nature. Forests were planted, mountains built from mine refuse and lakes pumped up from hell. Dovid shuddered. And that infernal headgear just kept turning and turning. One’s very soul felt lashed to its wheels.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Berka walking into the bakery with his arm around Hershl’s shoulders. Berka loved the country. Johannesburg’s not Africa, he frequently told Dovid, describing the rolling grasslands, the mountains, the valleys. But Johannesburg does have a beauty of its own, he said. Perhaps. Dovid could not see it. If his father, Red Yehuda, had remained in Africa twenty-five years ago instead of returning to the old country, Dovid might have grown up with a different view of Africa.
Yehuda, like other Jews from Lithuania, had come to the diamond diggings in 1912 to seek his fortune. He went for one year but stayed two. “Noch a yahr in Africa,” he wrote to his wife, prolonging his stay. Another year in Africa, in exile. He returned to Ragaza with two hundred pounds and a golden brooch for his wife. South Africa, he told her when she suggested emigrating, had no future. After the gold had been extracted from the earth all the adventurers would leave and the veld would come into its own again. How could he take his family to a land where the earth was sour from the gold in its veins, where the hills were rocky and bare and where the rivers ran shallow and brown? Nowhere had he seen green fields and forests like those of Ragaza nor a river which flowed through such fragrant banks.
Eighteen years later Dovid, under pressure from Sheinka, was the only member of his family to emigrate. Yehuda had not lived to see him go. Dovid found Johannesburg as bleak and as bare as his father had described it. But Yehuda had been wrong about one thing: South Africa, it seemed, did have a future. Whether or not Dovid wanted to be a part of it was another matter.
Dovid pressed his head against the cool glass. His family in Lithuania did not understand what life was like in Africa. They believed that the streets were paved with the proverbial gold. I hear, his mother wrote bitterly, that in addition to your wife and child you also support Gittel. For your own mother, however, you haven’t got a few roubles to send. You’ve forgotten how I slaved into the small hours of the night to support you and your brothers while your father was seeking fortunes in Africa…
Would they believe him if he wrote that last month he had to borrow three pounds towards the rent from Steinberg the butcher? He se
nt money home when he could. As explanations proved futile his letters to his mother became less frequent. But one day he’d go home again and the need for explanations would cease.
He glanced away from the mine dumps. Berka and Hershl were standing outside the bakery looking up at him. He pretended not to see them. Only when Berka turned homewards did he look down the road in the direction of Nathan’s Drapery Store. It was ten past five. Raizel was probably cashing up. He had time to sew the buttons onto the jacket.
Crazy, he was absolutely crazy. Here he was, thirty-one, with a school-going daughter, an ailing pregnant wife and her parasitic family to support and what was he doing? Daydreaming like a lovesick adolescent.
He walked angrily across the wooden boards and pulled off an unfinished suit from the hanger. The left lapel needed adjustment. His perfectionism maddened Sheinka. You could turn out two extra suits a month if you weren’t so meticulous, she complained. Look at Yaakov Koren. A rich man he’s becoming from his tailoring.
He looked at Yaakov Koren; a mere haizenschneider, a trouser maker, who couldn’t even sew a sleeve into a jacket.
His hands shook as he wound the cotton onto the bobbin. He threaded the needle with difficulty and placed the lapel under the presser foot. For a while he sat staring at his old Singer machine, with his foot poised over the treadle, then he got up and went to the window again.
‘Raizel, I love you,’ he whispered fiercely against the window, misting it with his breath. So. He had said it at last and the skies had not fallen onto his head.
She had been a child of fifteen when he arrived in Johannesburg, a lively precocious girl who had giggled at his English. He dismissed her as an unpleasant child but was stung by her laughter. He watched her grow out of her adolescent gawkishness into a rounded young woman whom all the neighbourhood boys pursued. He often walked into Berka’s house to hear the gramophone blaring out a tango and was pained to watch some young lout bending over her as he led her through the intricate steps. His pain was for Berka, he had told himself. One day he would have trouble with that girl. She’s only a child, he reproached himself afterwards. And he clung to this comforting phrase which allowed him to ignore her blossoming womanhood.