by Rose Zwi
‘Come, Oom,’ he said gently. ‘It’s time for us to go home.’
Jan helped him on with his coat and together they walked out of the bar. The wind had died down and the stars shone brightly in the clear dark sky. The veld was burning quietly in the night and the sky mirrored the sparks with icy stars.
‘What if the grass roots are burned, will the grass never grow again?’ Berka mumbled. ‘Look, Jan, how dark the sky is, how cold the stars are…’
‘Don’t worry, Oom, it’ll be all right.’
Jan grasped him firmly under his elbow. Several times Berka’s knees buckled under him. He looked back sadly at the bar and knew that he would never enter it again. His world was shrinking daily.
Neither he nor Jan spoke on the way home. It was only when they reached his house that Jan patted him awkwardly on the shoulder and said:
‘Please don’t worry about it, Oom. They’ve all got a lot of dirty mouths.’
Berka drew in his breath at the musty smell in the passage of his house. Although Yenta no longer made wine and cucumbers, the smells lingered on in the passage, like memories of old times.
14
‘It’s black, it’s black,’ Berka sighed looking at Raizel over the top of the Sunday paper. ‘This war will make all others look like Purim parties.’
Raizel smiled at him absently, glanced nervously at her watch and turned back to her knitting. Knit one, purl one, she mouthed. How many anguished days had she knitted into garments, a tear a stitch, an ache a row. Her father’s jersey should cry out in agony from the pain of its creation. Empty, emp-ty, emp-ty, the needles had clicked rhythmically in the days following that dreadful night. Bitter, Bit-ter, bit-ter, they tapped on as she made a cardigan for Yenta, a jersey for Berka, a dress for herself, clothing them all in her misery. Only now as she knitted a pullover for Jan did she feel a sort of peace.
The first few months had been torture for her. Hostile stares followed her to and from work each day. ‘Homebreaker!’ one woman had shouted while her husband smirked in a shame-faced manner, loath to associate himself with the crude attack, yet aroused by Raizel’s apparent availability. At work she sat like an exhibit in her glassed-in office while customers bought their packets of pins and measures of ribbon, and peered inquisitively at her. ‘Shameless hussy’, they said smugly to one another.
She did not know which was more painful: the open hostility or the prurient curiosity of her friends. Her instinct had been to run away but Berka dissuaded her from it.
‘If you leave,’ he said, ‘the Mrs. Pinns of this suburb will have gained an easy victory. They’re the evil ones, not you. You simply erred.’
Her bitterness and resentment grew daily. Had she succeeded as a homebreaker, life might have held out some promise. As it was, it stretched before her like the dry empty winter veld. She might have coped more easily had she not seen Dovid. Working in the same street, living on the same block, it was inevitable that they should meet though several weeks passed before they did for the first time.
As she walked wearily out of Nathan’s one evening, she came face to face with him. They stood for a few moments looking helplessly at one another, unable to move. His face was white, his eyes red-rimmed and he looked like a wraith from another world. Her heart contracted painfully. The memory of warm summer evenings and honeysuckle; of tailor’s chalk and steamed cloth overwhelmed her as she stood trembling at the door of Nathan’s Drapery Store.
“Betrayer!” Berka had shouted while Sheinka collapsed in hysteria. Yenta and Gittel clung to one another and Ruthie, apparently unconcerned, played in a corner with Zutzke. Tell them, Dovid, Raizel had pleaded with her eyes. Tell them that you love me, that your life with Sheinka is over, that we’re going away together. He remained silent, rooted in anguish, while his very life blood seemed to seep out of him. Not a word did he say to protest his love for her.
‘I must speak to you,’ he said as they stood at the entrance to Nathan’s Drapery Store. ‘Please meet me somewhere.’
‘Leave me alone, Dovid Erlich,’ she said, retreating into the doorway. ‘I don’t ever want to speak to you again. You smell of Vicks and carbolic soap. I hate you.’
‘Knit one, slip one, pass slip stitch over,’ she murmured in agitation, her heart pounding at the memory of that meeting.
‘Did you say something Raizel?’ Berka looked up from the newspaper.
‘No Dad, I was following the pattern.’
‘The world is falling apart and she sits and knits,’ Berka grumbled.
Raizel glanced up involuntarily at the yellow patch on the wall where Dovid’s wedding photo had hung. She smiled scornfully when she remembered the gold-rimmed glasses on his nose. False, like his intellectual pretensions, like his avowals of love. False, like the literature he had foisted on her. Lies, the lot of it. People did not die of love. They lived on from day to day with the bitter taste of ash in their mouths. In real life Anna Karenina would not have thrown herself under a train. She would have bought a ticket, boarded a train and returned to her husband. She would have grown fat and ugly and sat about, waiting for nachas from her son. Raizel looked at her watch again.
‘Expecting someone? Going somewhere?’ Berka asked.
‘Perhaps,’ she answered defiantly.
‘You’ve changed, Raizel,’ he said sadly.
‘So have you, Dad. I remember when you used to bring Jan to the house. Now you’re barely polite to him.’
‘There’s an old Yiddish saying, Raizel, that the innkeeper loves the drunkard but not for a son-in-law.’
‘You’re so pious these days and so fond of Yiddish sayings,’ she scoffed, but her hands trembled as she knitted.
When the full implication of the bar room fight had filtered through to Berka he was shocked and angry. He did not need Jan to defend his daughter’s honour. She, on the other hand, was touched by the gallantry and the gaucherie. Her knight in miner’s gear. At least he defended her. Dovid had denied her.
Jan became a regular visitor to the house and she accepted his offerings of marigolds and wild kosmos from the veld. Berka received him with mixed feelings. He did not want to encourage the friendship between Jan and Raizel, but he did enjoy Yenta’s discomfiture. He also enjoyed provoking Jan into political arguments.
‘Ag, your father doesn’t understand,’ Jan told Raizel. ‘My grandfather had to plough with one hand and shoot kaffirs with the other. After the Boer War he lost his farm and his children became bywoners on a stranger’s farm. We nearly starved. We lived like kaffirs on the land. So my father came to town and worked as a labourer and here he had to fight the kaffir in another way, for a job. I’m sick of it, man. Wherever I turn I’m called a bloody Boer; they laugh at my English and say Afrikaans is a bastard language. I want to have my own farm, my own life, like my grandfather had before the War. The Boer War they call it. It was the English War. Do you understand how I feel?’
Raizel understood. That, and many other things. When Jan talked about turning the red soil and planting mealies in the spring, he wanted her to be there. When he spoke of a little house under bluegum trees, he wanted her to share it. She listened to his dreams as she had listened to Dovid’s songs and tales, only now she was part of the dream. She looked beyond Jan’s clumsy frame and found a vulnerable human being.
Berka was elated by old Burger’s distress over his son’s friendship with the Feldmans.
‘Verdomde Jode!’ they heard the old man bellow through the thin kitchen wall.
‘That’s me,’ Berka would smile. ‘Old Burger is losing his hold over Jan. I’m weaning him away from his volkskultuur.’
‘And throwing him at your daughter,’ Yenta said bitterly.
‘Rubbish,’ Berka had said. ‘Raizel’s too sensible to fall for a Boer like him.’
But when he saw that Jan and Raizel were growing closer to one another his attitude to Jan changed abruptly. An open attack would have alienated Raizel so he used more subtle means. With the pr
actice acquired from years of debating with Dovid and Hershl, he enmeshed Jan in complicated arguments and verbal traps out of which the perplexed man could not extricate himself with dignity. His forehead would wrinkle painfully as Berka’s irony pierced him, exposing his muddled thoughts and eliciting a response so poor in language and content that Berka read both repugnance and pity on Raizel’s face.
But Berka misread the proportion of repugnance to pity. She leapt to his defence and drew closer to Jan. I should have encouraged her to leave the suburb when she wanted to, Berka thought as he looked on in helpless frustration.
Raizel enjoyed the scandalised stares she drew when she and Jan began to court openly. With him at her side she felt strong and protected. In the eyes of the community she was ruined beyond its wildest expectations. A pregnancy in one so immoral they might have expected, even hoped for, perhaps forgiven, but to flout their most sacred unwritten law —‘thou shalt not consort with goyim’—was unforgivable.
Only Yaakov Koren, the other outcast in the suburb, greeted her sympathetically. Thus he had been hounded when he divorced his wife in Lithuania and married the widow Kagan. Raizel often saw him wandering distractedly around the dam, peering into its acidy depths as though looking for a solution to his problems.
Only once had she encountered Dovid when she was walking with Jan. The experience had been so painful that for a while it had taken the joy out of her defiance.
Her parents, of course, presented a different problem. She was reluctant to hurt Yenta, to deprive her of that crippling nachas which Jewish parents exacted from their children in return for having brought them into the world. But Raizel was determined to make her own life, even if it hurt her mother. At worst, Yenta would grieve for a week, as she had done for Joel, perhaps less in her case, then throw herself into her work at Sharp’s. She was a strong woman.
As for Berka, let him now practise what he had preached to her all her life: tolerance.
As she sat in the lounge waiting for Jan, however, Raizel felt apprehensive. Perhaps they should have waited. She got up and looked out of the window. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon, but a cold wind had arisen in the south and was lifting the mine dust like a veil above the dumps. She would not miss this dry windy season when she finally left Mayfontein. In the country autumn would come slowly, graciously, as Jan had described it, revealing itself in the subtle change of colour in the veld and in the blue cloudless skies. There at least, one would not see the dumps and the headgear wherever one looked and there, perhaps, she would find a measure of peace at last.
The dust, the dust, Yenta sighed as the wind blew up Main Street, ruffling her dyed hair, exposing the grey at the roots. It burned her eyes, stung her nose, lodged between the roof of her mouth and her dentures, rubbing blisters into her gums. She stopped for breath at the top of the hill. Below her the houses lay huddled together, enclosed by the city on one side and the dumps on the other.
This was Berka’s great big beautiful world from which he and Raizel had refused to move. In the last few years it had become a dust-ridden prison for them all. But she had a plan. If it worked Raizel would be with her cousin Sorrel in Durban within the next few months, away from her past humiliations and her future dangers.
And this time she knew she would have Berka’s support.
Tolerance, Berka had preached all his life. And what was more, it had to be his special brand of tolerance where goyim were as good as Jews and kaffirs the equals of white people. For his own family he had shown precious little tolerance. She could understand his threat to throw Benjamin down the nearest mine shaft if he ever appeared in Mayfontein again; she could understand his loathing for Uncle Feldman (he should rest in peace, one spoke no ill of the dead). But that he should not forgive his only son, that was beyond her comprehension. Raizel he had forgiven readily enough and God knows, there was much to forgive her for. But when Joel had rejected his heritage of hate, Berka had driven him from the house. Out of their lives, Yenta thought bitterly, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She shivered: these autumn winds cut one to the bone.
So Joel had worked for Uncle Feldman. Could Berka have made him a better offer? So he had not finished his studies. Did that prevent him from marrying a rich girl and from becoming a director?
After Uncle Feldman’s death some months ago there had been a picture of Joel in the newspaper. ‘Young director appointed to the board of Feldman Holdings’ the caption read. He had looked so distinguished, so handsome, Yenta recalled with pride. She had put the paper on Berka’s chair and found it torn into little pieces.
Berka would have preferred Joel to fail rather than to be proved wrong.
She had not seen Joel for almost two years. In the beginning he had phoned her occasionally. When she suggested meeting him he said: It will hurt Dad. She knew her Joel. Below that cold exterior was a warm heart. He had not asked her to his wedding because he was afraid of causing conflict between her and Berka, not because he was ashamed of his family as Raizel claimed. Raizel should only show such consideration for her parents.
Hershl was the only one of their friends who had seen Joel since he left home. He had gone to Joel’s business to collect for the Refugees’ Fund.
‘He’s broadened out,’ he reported to Yenta, evading her question about the size of his donation. ‘And he’s got a very smart office. On the door, in golden letters, is written Joel M.Feldman, Director. I didn’t know he had a middle name.’
‘Morris,’ Yenta lied. ‘After my late father’s late brother, the one who was studying to be a rabbi when he was carried off with brain fever, may he rest in peace.’
He was all right, her Joel. She had nachas from him even if it was from a distance. And now, thank God, it seemed as though she had found a solution for Raizel as well.
‘Find a nice little drapery shop,’ she had written to her cousin Sorrel, a wise kindly woman who lived in Durban, ‘and I will help you buy it. Money I’ve got. Write to Raizel when you’re ready and offer her a partnership. She knows the trade well and is a good steady worker…’
Sorrel had found a business. One part of the match was therefore arranged. Now she would work on Raizel.
She heard voices from the lounge. That yoven from next door was here again. Like a Cossack he looked with that huge body, red face and blond hair. A fine drinking companion for Berka; an even better suitor for Raizel.
She would be the death of her, that girl. One scandal barely blown over and she was starting another. People were beginning to talk again and that witch Mrs. Pinn still stood behind her lace curtain, watching, listening, waiting.
‘Dad,’ she heard Raizel say, ‘You’re being unfair. Jan’s only saying that the white worker must protect himself against the black’s cheap labour.’
Defending him again, Yerita raged, walking into the lounge.
‘I’ve brought you some lunch,’ she said to Berka. ‘Oh hello, Mr. Burger. I didn’t know you were here again for a change. Here, Raizel, go warm up the blintzes for your father’s lunch.’
‘I’ve eaten,’ Berka said brusquely, annoyed at Yenta’s appearance at this stage. ‘I ate two hours ago, at lunch time. Raizel fried polony and eggs. But by all means warm up the blintzes for tea,’ he called after her as she stalked out. ‘Jannie likes them even better than koeksusters, don’t you, my boy?’
Jan was confused by the sudden change in Berka’s tone: a few minutes ago he had attacked him bitterly. His surprise, however, was short-lived. Berka leaped into the attack again the minute Yenta left the room.
‘You’ve never left the laager,’ he continued. ‘Kaffir work! What’s kaffir work? That’s why you’ve never built up a strong white proletariat, that’s why you’ve got a class of poor unemployable whites. Have you never heard of the dignity of labour? Look at these hands! I’ve never been ashamed of what you call kaffir work. You should hear Hershl Singer on the subject. You Afrikaners could learn something from the Zionists about the dignity of labour.’
‘Ahah!’ Berka got up from his chair, pale and furious. ‘In anger the truth comes out. Did you hear him, Raizel? Did you hear what he said?’ he demanded.
‘You’re different, Oom Bernard. You said yourself that you’re only a Jew in name. I’ve never seen you go to the synagogue. And you said yourself that you were a true South African. Nothing else.’
‘I’m a Jew, damn you! And whenever I try to forget it someone like you reminds me. I’m a Jew like all those others who’re being killed in Europe today. I’m the verdomde Jood your father rants about behind that kitchen wall. And you’re a bloody chatas!’
Jan stood up and looked helplessly from Raizel to Berka.
‘I’m sorry, Oom, what I meant…’
‘Chatas, chatas, chatas!’ Berka shouted at him. ‘Next time you’ll be telling me that some of your best friends are Jews. And then you’ll ask me if I want my daughter to marry a kaffir. I’ve got an answer to that one: I’d rather let my daughter marry a kaffir than a bloody chatas. And now get out! Voetsek!’
‘Dad!’ Raizel placed herself between Jan and Berka. ‘Have you both gone mad? It’s nothing, Ma,’ she turned to Yenta who came rushing into the lounge. ‘Leave us alone. It’ll only complicate matters. Please.’
‘Nothing? It sounds like a pogrom to me!’
‘Please ma, later. I promise I’ll talk to you about it later.’
‘Poyerse kep all three of them,’ Yenta muttered as she left the room, reluctantly. She did not want to antagonise Raizel now.
Jan moved towards the door. Berka stood in the centre of the room with his braces hanging down from his waist, breathing heavily. His face was pale and his left eye twitched uncontrollably.