Another Year in Africa

by Rose Zwi

  One cold winter’s evening about eighteen months ago, Dovid had been sitting in front of the coal stove with Ruth on his lap. He was alone. Gittel and Sheinka had gone to visit Yenta. In the glow of the sabbath candles Dovid sang Yiddish songs for Ruth. He sang of workers who built mansions for the rich but themselves lived in hovels; who sewed for the idle and wore rags; who ploughed the fields but owned no land. There were songs about families parted by war, by poverty, by persecution; about refugees herded in cattle trucks, going into exile through snowy wastes. He sang of lonely orphans in a hostile world, and about crossed lovers. There seemed to be no other lovers in Yiddish folklore.

  ‘Sing “Oyfn Pripetshok”,’ Ruth requested. Dovid sang about the Rabbi who teaches his pupils, with the first letters of the alphabet, that the world is a vale of tears:

  …As you grow older, dear children,

  All too soon you’ll learn,

  How many tears the eye holds

  And how to weep and yearn…

  ‘And now about the man who doesn’t know when it’s his birthday,’ she said sleepily.

  He sang about the man who had nothing by which to measure his years. The rich man measures his days by his money, the happy man by the passing hours. If misery were the measure of life, he would be ancient; if happiness were, he is not yet born.

  Eib leben heist laiden, dan leb ich shein lang,

  Dan hob ich genug shein die yahren,

  Eib leben heist heren fun glick chotz ein klang,

  Dan bin ich noch garnisht geboren.

  Ruth knew all his songs. They took the place of bedtime stories. At least part of his heritage would live on, he thought gratefully as she slept in his arms.

  What was he doing in this harsh alien land where he would always be a stranger? His life was bound up with der heim, the old country, where he was born, where his family lived, where his father lay buried. His fate was linked with theirs. Like his father before him he longed for the pinewoods of Ragaza, and for the river which flowed through such fragrant banks.

  As he wiped away his tears, he heard a light step across the floor. He turned around, startled. Raizel stood behind him in the flickering candlelight with tears in her eyes. She bent down quickly, kissed him full on the lips, then fled.

  Had it really happened, he wondered afterwards, or had it been a wraith from one of his songs? From Raizel he had no sign. She remained as lively and as provocative as ever. When she was not looking he searched her face, he hardly knew for what. For traces of tears he had seen in the candlelight? But he sensed she had changed, that she was conscious of him. Once, when Ruth asked whether only Jews lived in Russia, Raizel laughed and said that as a child she too had thought that Russia was a Jewish country; it was der heim for everyone she had known. Then she herself began to ask Dovid questions: about der heim, about Jewish festivals, about Jewish history. And the previous year she had offered to give him English lessons, to correct his pronunciation.

  As the religious man works and battles through the week towards his soul’s repose on the sabbath, so Dovid yearned for Sunday nights when he would sit at Berka’s kitchen table, his books in front of him, listening to Raizel. Like this, she would say putting her tongue against her even white teeth. He turned from her with a hammering heart. You put your tongue so, then blow out: ‘th’, not ‘d’, this thing, not dis ding. Hey, you’re not watching. You’ll never learn if you keep your nose in the book. Look at me!

  And when he turned to look, not at her mouth shaping a ‘th’ but into her eyes, he found what he was looking for.

  Dovid moved away from the window and began to clear the room feverishly. He must hurry, he must hurry. He tore the jacket from under the presser foot, threw it over a hanger, then grabbing his own jacket, rushed out of his workshop down the flight of dark stone stairs, into the street.

  The office in Nathan’s Drapery Store stood on a glass-enclosed platform at the far end of the shop. Here Mrs. Nathan, in her working days, had sat at a desk beside Mr. Nathan, looking down sternly upon her domain. Raizel now sat at her desk. She opened the oblong capsule which had been sent on the pneumatic cable from Mrs. Cole at Napery, checked the invoice and gave the change. Mr. Nathan, in the meantime, walked slowly around the shop, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Raizel longed to go home and soak the tiredness out of her limbs. It had been an exhausting week. She glanced at her watch. Quarter past five. If she hurried… No. She would not hurry. She would cash up, wait for Mrs. Cole and Gloria Brits to tidy up their counters, then remain on to discuss the week’s takings with Mr. Nathan. He would be delighted. She must also tell him that she would be late on Monday morning because she was taking Ruthie to school.

  Resentment welled up in her. Raizel will do it, her mother always offered. And that miserable Sheinka lay around all day with Vicks-soaked cotton wool on her chest and an injured look on her face.

  I hate her, I hate her! I wish she were dead! Raizel raged inwardly, breaking a nail on the cash register.

  It wasn’t the child’s fault. Poor Ruthie. Ruthie at school. She could hardly imagine it. No one realised how difficult it would be, how cruel children were. She had seen them form a ring around an unfortunate newcomer who still wore his trousers tucked into thick grey socks, Russian style. Bolshie! Bolshie! Isaac is a Bolshevik! they sang as they danced around the unfortunate boy who was trying to control his tears. Perhaps they would be gentler with a girl.

  Father and child. How uncanny the resemblance was between them; the high pale forehead, dark brows beneath red hair, large green eyes, vulnerable, puzzled, the eyes of a perplexed child.

  When she had come into the kitchen that night they looked so close that they might have been carved from one stone. In the glow of the candles they reminded her of a religious picture she had once seen.

  For a long time she stood quietly in the dark, listening to Dovid’s songs. She had always been irritated and bored by tales about der heim, the old country. The life there seemed so remote, so melancholy. But when Dovid sang songs or told tales, he opened up for her a world that was complete and beautiful. Purim, Chanukah, Pesach had had no meaning for her other than as festivals when one went to synagogue, heard the rabbi pray in an unintelligible tongue, then returned home to delicacies traditionally associated with these festivals: hammentashen, latkes, kneidlach.

  When Dovid sang about these festivals, she caught a fleeting image of a past in which there was dignity, a passion for freedom and pride in ancient heroes. The songs of the shtetl were different, more accepting of sorrows and hardship. But they too had bound people together in adversity.

  This was her past as well, and she wanted desperately to be part of it. She existed only in the present, a heritage which her father had foisted upon her. He needed to cut himself off from his painful past; she needed to acquire one. She envied those who belonged and believed: the girls at the convent with the crosses around their necks, the Jewish girls walking to synagogue together. Her father had made religion unattractive for her at an early age. The hypocrites! he raged about seasonal shul-goers. They don’t even understand what they’re praying about. Or to whom. A merciful, all-knowing, all-loving God indeed! A vindictive, punishing God, that’s who!

  He had taken away the possibility of God and given her nothing in its place.

  He scoffed at Dovid’s love for the Jewish past. A singer, a dreamer, he said, full of inconsistent ideas. But Raizel understood that things were not clear-cut for Dovid because he allowed himself to doubt. He loved Jewish tradition but could not believe in God. He was intensely involved in Jewish life but longed for what he called the brotherhood of all men. His nostalgia for der heim had another dimension: He felt that he was missing out on the greatest experiment in human history, a real socialist revolution.

  He stood somewhere between Hershl and Berka in the unending arguments which began on the veranda in summer and continued around the kitchen table in winter. Hershl nodded his approval when Dovid spok
e about the wonder of Jewish survival throughout the centuries, attributing it to their passionate adherence to the Torah.

  ‘Fool!’ Berka would shout him down. ‘They’d have survived better if they had merged with the people around them, instead of shutting themselves off with their holy books in the ghettoes.’

  ‘The German Jews are still trying that,’ Hershel interpolated quietly. ‘But the Nazis are keeping them Jewish.’

  ‘You’re speaking about a political aberration, not a law of history,’ Berka answered heatedly.

  But Dovid disagreed with Hershl that there was a contradiction in being a traditional Diaspora Jew and a devout socialist. He laughed at his suggestion that such a combination would only succeed in a Jewish State. Dovid was not a Zionist.

  Raizel did not understand many of their arguments. She only knew that when Dovid spoke it seemed right. And when he sang the sad songs about der heim and the rousing ones about Jewish heroes and workers, the melodies reconciled any contradiction which the words might contain.

  She had watched Dovid wipe away his tears that evening and wanted desperately to become a part of his world, the key to which he carried within himself. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she ran across the kitchen floor, put her arms around his neck and kissed him full on the lips.

  ‘Mr. Nathan!’ she called across the shop. ‘Is it all right if I leave now? I’ll be in early tomorrow morning.’

  As she stepped out of the shop she saw Dovid rush out of his building, his tie awry, his hair, redder in the dying light of the sun, falling over his forehead. He stopped when he saw her, put on his jacket and crossed the street slowly. She, in the meantime, had turned towards Chidrawi’s fruit shop. They met at the door.

  ‘Is your building on fire?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. No!’ He looked away. ‘I mean, you know how it is on Fridays. The week’s at an end and one gets tired of working.’

  ‘Don’t they look marvellous!’ She pointed to the pyramid of yellow cling peaches which Chidrawi had arranged in his window.

  ‘I don’t like strange fruit. Peaches have hairy skins and they set my teeth on edge. Nor do I like bananas or pawpaws, and grapes remind me of my childhood illnesses. They were supposed to have curative properties in the old country. Give me pears and apples any time. And those wild strawberries! What a scent they had.’

  ‘I want to buy some peaches, wait for me,’ Raizel said, happy to find him in an outgoing mood. There were times when they walked home together without exchanging more than a dozen words.

  Mrs. Pinn was in the shop, leaning on Chidrawi’s counter, a small brown paper bag in her hand. You should see her choose fruit, Chidrawi often complained to Raizel. Everything she touches and squeezes. And she chooses her cabbages from the bottom of the pile. When she leaves after spending a few pence, I have to begin building it up again. But I don’t complain. If I did, there’d be a rumour in Mayfontein that I cheat with the change or that I sell rotten fruit.

  ‘Yanka is a stupid stingy man,’ Childrawi was telling Mrs. Pinn, certain that the message would reach him. ‘He’ll ride around on his horse and cart like a coolie all his life if he doesn’t cough up another hundred pounds. I worked for fifteen years to build up my business… Oh hello, Miss Feldman,’ he said turning to Raizel with a smile.

  ‘Goodbye Mr. Chidrawi,’ Mrs. Pinn said after greeting Raizel coolly. ‘And don’t keep Miss Feldman long. She has a gentleman waiting for her outside.’

  Raizel watched her walk up to Dovid who reddened at something she said. He looked after her in anger as she walked away. He was still upset when Raizel came out of the shop.

  ‘What did she say?’ Raizel asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered abruptly, his happy mood destroyed.

  Raizel took his arm but he sprang away as though he had been stung.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he muttered, looking around anxiously. ‘There are people all around us.’

  ‘May I do it when they’re not?’ she asked brightly, suppressing her tears. He had never reacted like this before.

  ‘For you everything’s a joke. Why don’t you act like a grown woman?’

  ‘Because you keep telling me I’m only a child.’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ he appealed. ‘To fall into Mrs. Pinn’s black pit of a mouth is just about the worst thing that can happen to a young girl.’

  ‘Or to a married man. Look at Yaakov Koren. I’d tear her mouth to pieces if I fell into it and she knows it, the old sow. What did she say, Dovid? It’s upset you. You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he echoed.

  They walked on in silence until they reached the barbershop. Dovid slowed down, looking into the brightly-lit shop. It was full of miners in their working clothes who were pushing money towards Sam, the barber. He sat at a small table making notes in a little book. The barber’s chair stood like an empty throne in the centre of the shop.

  ‘Samke and the dog racing,’ Dovid said, frowning. ‘He should try working for a living.’

  ‘At least his family eats. Look at those poor kids,’ she said, pointing to two bare-footed boys with their younger sister who were sitting on the pavement outside the bar. Their clothes were grubby and their feet caked with mud. The boy in the centre held a packet of chips and solemnly doled out one at a time to his brother and sister. ‘They’re probably waiting for their father to come out of the bar.’

  Just then the doors of the bar swung open and a tall blond man stepped out. He stared at Raizel insolently, made a mock bow and said:

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss Feldman. Did you like my flowers?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she nodded. ‘Don’t denude your father’s garden for me.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure.’

  ‘Isn’t that Burger’s son, our new neighbour?’ Dovid asked as they walked away. ‘He looks like a Russian peasant.’ He turned around. Jan Burger was still standing at the swinging door, staring after them. ‘Such bold eyes he has. What flowers was he talking about?’

  ‘He’s been asking me to go out with him since they moved in. Now that’s material for Mrs. Pinn. And yesterday he picked some marigolds from his father’s garden for me. My father should only know where the flowers are from!’

  ‘Charming,’ Dovid said, controlling his voice. ‘What does he do for a living?’

  ‘I hardly know him. Mrs. Pinn says he’s an electrician on the mine. I loved chips when I was a child,’ she changed the subject abruptly. ‘What was your favourite food?’

  ‘Anything that filled the stomach. For long periods our staple diet was herring and potatoes. But on Friday nights it was different. My mother would be up at dawn to make delicious yeast buns with cinnamon. In better times we had cheese cakes too. But no matter how poor we were she always baked extra for the beggars who came around on Friday afternoons.’

  When Raizel saw the dreamy look on his face she knew that he had forgotten Mrs. Pinn and Jan Burger. He leaned towards her, speaking eagerly.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about Meishe, my oldest brother? He’s a remarkable person, always active in communal affairs and politics. He overrode the objections of the bigots and got the Party to send out a teacher from Vilna. Vera Ostrovskaya started our first secular school in Schleima-Janka’s barn. Her pupils were grown men whose education had stopped with their barmitzvahs. The religious people were horrified: To learn Russian or science or history; to neglect the Torah, was to be well on the road to apostasy.’

  Raizel had heard about the teacher from Sheinka. A frowsy old maid Sheinka once told her, whose petticoat hung out and whose stockings twisted around her ankles. Dovid was besotted with her, Sheinka said. Before he knew me of course. When I decided I wanted Dovid, that old blue stocking didn’t have a chance.

  ‘Was she old, this teacher?’ Raizel asked.

  ‘Oh no. I was then about twenty and she must have been twenty-three or twenty-four. Most of her pupils were older than her. She was a very dedicated young woman
. I, I’m afraid I didn’t treat her too well,’ he admitted, shamefaced. ‘We were sort of engaged. Then Sheinka turned up and before I knew it, that was that.’

  ‘Did girls also go to the school in the barn?’ Raizel asked.

  ‘A few did, but most of the others, like Sheinka, only joined the choir or came to the socials. They didn’t think they could learn anything from a woman,’ he smiled. ‘I did. So did the others. She started a class in Russian literature. It was she who introduced me to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the other Russian writers. How are you finding “Anna Karenina” by the way?’

  ‘Marvellous!’ Raizel said. ‘I know just how she feels. What an uncompromising love! What courage! And what terrible conflicts she must have had to leave her son.’

  ‘There’s more to the book than the love story,’ Dovid said with some irritation. Give a woman a complete world view and she’ll extract from it only what she needs. Vera Ostrovskaya was the only woman he had ever known who saw life in wider terms than love, marriage and procreation.

  When Raizel saw him smile she knew that he had retreated into his private world from which she was excluded. She walked silently at his side and made no further effort at conversation.

  They turned into First Avenue. The sun had disappeared behind the plantation, a cool breeze had come up, and a new moon was rising in an amethyst sky. They walked down the middle of the road, damp from the afternoon’s rain, whose surface bore traces of recent hoof and wheel marks.

  ‘Everyone’s on their verandas, enjoying the cool evening,’ Raizel said.

  Dovid drew away from Raizel again. He felt he was on a stage. He flushed with shame as he remembered Mrs. Pinn’s remark: They say, Mr. Erlich, that Raizel is relieving Mrs. Erlich of many of her duties. That’s real family feeling for you. It was true. Raizel had done a lot for Sheinka. She had brought Ruth back from hospital after her operation; she was taking her to school on Monday; she ran errands for Sheinka. Why then should his body burn with shame when he recalled that sharp-nosed witch’s words?