by Rose Zwi
Raizel propelled Jan out of the room into the dark passage.
‘Go now,’ she whispered urgently. ‘I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
‘Tell him now,’ Jan demanded. ‘I’m sick of everything, of all the lies and the hiding away. I’ll tell my father tonight and we can leave for Rhodesia next week. I’ve got enough money.’
‘Not now,’ she pleaded. ‘Please be patient a while longer. I’ll tell him but not now.’
Berka was standing where she left him. Raizel took him by the hand and led him to the sofa. She put her head on his shoulder and he stroked her face gently. For a while they sat in silence.
‘Older but no wiser,’ he said eventually as his breathing slowed down. ‘Older, lonelier, more unsure. You think you’re sure because you’re young, Raizel. When I was young I lay in in the forest while the Cossacks murdered my family, and I cried out to the black empty sky: “If there is a God let him strike me dead!” So I knew there was no God and I put my trust in men. When they failed me I cried: “Eili, Eili, lama azavtani?” I was reproaching the God I didn’t believe in for forsaking me. How can one live without faith in God, without faith in men? I am utterly, utterly alone.’
‘You’re not alone, Dad. Everyone loves you.’
‘Like they love an idiot child. Poor Berka, they say. They pity me for the loss of my son, they pity me for my drunkenness; they pity me because I’m losing my daughter to a goy.’
Raizel drew away from him. The tears streamed unchecked down his leathery wrinkled face into his bushy moustache.
‘I know, Raizel, I’ve known for a long time.’
She put her hands over her face. She longed to deny it.
‘It’s my fault. I didn’t teach you to be a Jew. I brought him here. But I’ve tried to show you he’s not for you. I ridiculed him and you pitied him. I saw it. You were moved by his tales of hardship, by the struggles of his people, by his pathetic bouquets, just as you were by Dovid’s songs…’
‘Don’t talk about Dovid!’
‘You don’t love Jan, you don’t belong to his world any more than you belonged to Dovid’s. You must find your own world. I understand Jan, I even like him. When he spoke about the Boers, I saw the veld again, smelled it after the rain, watched the cold wind blowing through the grass that bent and swayed like Jews at prayer. I remembered the marvellous sense of solitude in which I revelled because I knew it would end. Now my solitude is real, unending…’
‘Dad, listen to me…’
‘…because I denied what I was. Tolerance,’ he laughed bitterly. ‘That’s the prerogative of gods, not of man.’
‘Dad, I can’t bear to see you like this…’
‘Don’t go with him, Raizel. Stay with your own kind, inadequate as they may be. You’ll never be one of them. They won’t let you. You’ve seen their thin frightened women with curlers in their hair, scrounging around for credit after their husbands blow their wages on drink and on the dogs…’
‘Jan’s different, Dad. He’s a good man. All he wants is a plot of ground, a cow, a few chickens. When all my good Jewish friends turned away from me, he was my friend.’
‘He’ll call you a whore later.’
‘For that he’s got a precedent, Mary Magdalen.’
‘Then he’ll call you a bloody Jewess and for that he’s got plenty of precedents.’
‘He won’t, Dad. I’m converting.’
‘You’re—converting?’
‘Don’t look so shocked. To you it doesn’t matter to what God the superstitious pray. And I’ve got to have a God. You killed the Jewish one for me.’
‘In these days you’re talking about converting? When they’re hunting down Jews like wild animals, robbing them, killing them? Did you hear what Jan himself said just a few minutes ago?’
‘You don’t understand Dad. I have to belong to someone, to something. I don’t know who I am any more.’
‘Don’t do it, Raizel.’
‘I’m not converting out of cowardice, because I’m ashamed or afraid of being a Jew. I simply don’t know how to be one any more. And that first day I walked into the dark cool church, not Jan’s church, and saw the statue of the mother and child in the candlelight, folded so lovingly in one another’s arms, some forgotten memory leaped up and I felt at peace again. Please try to understand Dad.’
She threw her arms about Berka’s neck and wept bitterly. He drew her tenderly into his arms and stroked her hair, whispering:
‘Shah; shah. Shah; shah.’
No other words would come. His mouth felt full of dust.
15
Dovid let the handbills slide out of his hand onto the polished stoep.
‘I decline with thanks,’ he composed in his head, ‘your invitation to a riot.’
He got up and paced out the length of the stoep. Two and a half long steps, four shorter ones, the size perhaps of a prison cell. But then he had the hinterland of home beyond this, a prison of more insidious dimensions. From the bathroom he heard Sheinka crooning a Yiddish melody for Phillip. She had put aside her Vicks bottles and clutched the child to her chest instead. She refused to recover completely, however. When he went to the Anti-Fascist meetings, she lay on her bed in the darkened room with vinegar compresses on her brow.
‘Those Blackshirts will kill him, the hero,’ she would wail. ‘Shushide he wants to commit, a man with his responsibilities.’
On the other hand, Dovid reconsidered, he would accept the invitation, even if it was to a riot.
He looked with distaste at the potted geraniums along the ledge, then towards the dumps where the sun was setting. A mild breeze rose from the south, nudging the heavy pink clouds across the sky.
There was no sign of rain: The meeting would take place.
It was inevitable that it should. ‘Afrikaner Girls Kicked by Jews’; ‘Jewish Hooligans Assaulting Our Girls’, the Afrikaans headlines had screamed after last week’s meeting. Leib, an eye witness, had a different story to tell.
He and Dovid had gone to a meeting in the City Hall to protest against the latest Nazi atrocities. In the crush they had been separated. Dovid got into the meeting and Leib joined the overflow outside the City Hall. Squashed into a doorway, Dovid listened to the Archdeacon and an Afrikaans professor condemn the Nazi outrages. They were alien to Afrikaner culture and tradition, the professor said, warning South Africans to guard against the intrusion of Nazi ideas.
The Chief Rabbi appealed for a place of refuge for the homeless Jews of Europe.
Out in the streets, however, there was chaos and dissension. In the midst of the unruly mob David saw Leib tearing apart a banner with a swastika on it. He interrupted his task only to swing out at an attacker. Dovid pushed his way through the mob and managed to propel the protesting Leib towards the tram terminus.
‘When we couldn’t get into the Hall,’ Leib told him on the tram, nursing a cut cheek, ‘we decided to have our own meeting. It was peaceful until two men and a girl marched towards us, waving a banner with a swastika and shouting “Heil Hitler!” The crowd went beserk. As we moved towards them a group of their storm troopers appeared and the battle was on. The police did nothing until we got the upper hand. Then they moved in. I wonder how many of our boys landed up in hospital.’
Dovid bent down and picked up the handbills from the stoep. One, written in Afrikaans, called for an anti-Jewish protest meeting that evening at seven thirty. ‘Forward!’ it concluded. ‘There’s a fight to fight!’
Dovid reread the other, issued by the South African Anti-Fascist Movement. He had helped to distribute them, reluctantly. The sentiments were impeccable but violence, which he abhorred, was bound to follow.
‘Citizens, workers, trade unionists! Hitler’s agents in South Africa—the Blackshirts, Greyshirts, Nazis and Fascists—have called a meeting in Johannesburg (City Hall Steps) on Thursday, November 24, 1939. They have instructions from Nazi Germany to start pogroms and concentration camps in our land. Are you going to stand by
and see Nazism start this butchery in our country? NEVER! Then come in your thousands to a mass meeting to condemn Nazi terrorism in South Africa, this Thursday evening, November 24, at 7 p.m., City Hall Steps to demonstrate your abhorrence of Hitler’s methods in Johannesburg. NOW. Before it is too late. Down with Inquisition Methods in South Africa.’
They would come, those fascists, with their bicycle chains, loaded piping and knuckle dusters, perhaps with knives and guns. Dovid had never overcome that sick feeling in his stomach as both factions moved towards one another. All he did at meetings was to shout ‘Down with Hitler!’ in answer to their ‘Down with the Jews!’ The thought of smashing his fist into a human face made him nauseous.
‘I’m no hero, believe me,’ Dovid had assured Sheinka when he limped into the house with Leib the previous week. ‘My only injury is a twisted ankle acquired in the act of running away from a policeman’s truncheon. But we must protest. Like Leib says: “Open your mouths! Don’t let them shit on your heads!” ’
‘But why you? Why Leib?’ Sheinka cried, incensed by Dovid’s bantering tone. ‘Why not Weinbrin’s son or Steinberg’s big brutes? You’re a married man, with a family to support.’
Dovid crumpled up the handbills angrily and smashed his fist down on the veranda ledge, throwing over a potted geranium. He winced with pain. If those bastards wanted a fight they’d get it. He walked into the house to fetch his jacket.
‘You’re going somewhere?’ Sheinka asked as she came out of the bathroom carrying Phillip in a large bath towel.
Dovid still smarted with humiliation over his son’s name. Sheinka had refused to call him Yehuda, after Dovid’s father. Phillip, she called him, after Faivel Meishe, Gittel’s revered uncle.
‘Put him down,’ he said brusquely. ‘He’s big enough to walk.’
‘I asked if you were going somewhere, for a change,’ Sheinka replied holding Phillip closer. ‘What’s it this time? A jacket to finish off? A Workers’ Club meeting? An Anti-Fascist demonstration? Anything, as long as you can get out of the house.’
‘As a matter of fact the Prime Minister’s invited me to advise him on the international situation.’
‘So, don’t tell me.’
‘I know where you’re going,’ Ruth whispered to Dovid when he came into her room. She was sitting at the table drawing on a sheet of rough black paper. ‘You’re going to fight Hitler on the City Hall steps, now, before it’s too late. I read the paper. I can read nearly everything but some words I didn’t understand.’
‘Everything she knows,’ Dovid said with a mixture of pride and alarm. ‘Don’t say anything to your mother for heaven’s sake. She’ll…’
‘I know,’ Ruth replied calmly. ‘She’s afraid of pogroms. When I was little I also was. Do you remember?’
She had drawn closer to Dovid in the last few months but continued to speak English to him.
‘How do you like my drawing? On that ox wagon is Zeide Berchik. You can see his moustache. The grass is high because it’s summer and there’s been lots of rain.’
‘If there’s been lots of rain, why is the grass grey?’
‘Because Zeide Berchik is all alone in the veld. He says that he’s not so sure any more if he’ll reach a farmhouse before dark. So I made the grass grey. Grey is lonely.’
‘Do you see Zeide Berchik often?’
Ruth looked towards the door and lowered her voice.
‘Oh yes. Two or three times a week, after school. He waits for me then we go to Ron Davis’s for chips.’ She blushed and turned away. ‘We eat them together in his workshop. Don’t tell Mommy. When I was small Zeide Berchik told me there wouldn’t be any more pogroms but I don’t think he’s so sure any more. I tell him not to worry. Daddy, he said I mustn’t say he said it but that I should tell you not to go to meetings on the steps any more. He says they’ll split your head open and that anyway you haven’t got so many brains. He was joking. About the brains I mean.’
‘Daddy,’ she added, suddenly tearful as he moved away. ‘Why don’t you sing any more?’
‘Why don’t you speak Yiddish to me any more? Why am I “Daddy”, not “tatteh” any more?’
‘Because, because I’m big now and it’s easier to speak English.’
‘So you see, people change. But I’ll sing for you any time you like.’
He kissed her again, took his jacket off the hallstand and walked quickly out of the house. He was due to meet Leib at the tram stop in five minutes.
They sat on the lower deck of the tram. A crowd of noisy miners occupied the top deck. Leib pointed his thumb upwards.
‘Our playmates for the evening,’ he said.
The sun had set but the buildings beyond the Dip still reflected, on their steel and glass, the rosy glow from the west. Main Street was quiet. How strange and empty it felt, Dovid mused, as they rode past Nathan’s Drapery Store. Smaller, dingier, like a place revisited after many years’ absence. Raizel had run away with Jan Burger to Rhodesia. Yanke was installed in Chidrawi’s fruit shop and Chidrawi himself had become a wholesale fruiterer on the market. The Pinns still sold second-hand junk together with gossip and slander, and in Steinberg’s butchery, the flypaper still hung from the ceiling black with victims.
Only Hershl’s bakery livened up Main Street. Late shoppers were leaning over the counters, buying the hot bread and the pickled meat for which Hershl had become famous in Johannesburg.
‘Some people have got it and others haven’t,’ Leib sighed looking at his smithy. ‘I don’t begrudge Hershl his good fortune, but as a neighbour for so many years, a little bit of it should have rubbed off onto me.’
‘Set fire to your smithy and claim insurance,’ Dovid advised.
‘The only inflammable thing in there is my furnace,’ Leib said ruefully. ‘Anyway, if I’m a schlemazel I’m in good company. Berka isn’t exactly a roaring success. Nor are you. You’re still at your old Singer, turning out works of art and struggling for a living, while that trouser-maker, that haizenschneider, Yaakov Koren has just opened up a trouser factory.’
‘He’d have done better to open up a shirt factory. Blackshirts, greyshirts; he’d make a fortune.’
‘It hasn’t made him any happier,’ Leib said. ‘Since his marriage to the widow Kagan he looks darker and gloomier than ever.’
‘He’s got his wife and children on his conscience.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Leib said. ‘It’s probably because he has to pay his workers too much or because the black widow spider is eating him up. Anyway, I’d rather be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy. As long as I’m healthy…’
‘You won’t be healthy for long if you keep going to these meetings,’ Dovid said sharply. ‘And why I schlepp along I don’t know. This isn’t my country. Why should I fight its battles? I should be in Europe, in a direct confrontation with the Nazis.’
‘This is direct enough,’ Leib said looking upwards.
The tram clattered through the Dip, past Berka’s darkened shop. From his workshop window Dovid often saw him walk slowly up the hill, stopping for breath more frequently than ever. His shoulders were stooped and even his moustache seemed to droop wearily. Dovid was glad that Ruthie saw him often.
The tram clanged to a halt outside the Library and the miners shuffled down the iron steps. Many of them were still in their working clothes. Others, with beards grown for the Centenary celebrations, wore Voortrekker dress. They streamed off the tram towards the Library gardens.
‘That’s where they’re massing,’ Leib said. ‘And from there they’ll march to the City Hall steps. Look at them. Thick as flies on Steinberg’s flypaper. Four hundred of them if there’s a man. They’ve come in from all the mining towns on the Reef. I wonder where they’re hiding their lead piping.’
Dovid’s stomach lurched. If he had to die or be injured, he wished it could have been for a better cause. He did not take these Nationalists seriously and did not believe, as Leib did, that South Africa was seriou
sly menaced by Fascism or by anti-Semitism. The Nationalists had enough on their plates with the black people. A wave of dizziness swept over him. He closed his eyes and saw the flushed triumphant face of Jan Burger.
‘Come on,’ he said angrily. ‘If they want trouble we’ll give it to them.’
People were coming in from all directions towards the City Hall. Dovid greeted some acquaintances from the Jewish Workers’ Club and together they walked in silence around the back of the City Hall, past the Municipal offices towards the square where several hundred people had already gathered. The Committees stood on the steps under a red banner: ‘Join the United Front Against Fascism.’
Leib nudged Dovid.
‘Look at the police. They’ve surrounded the square. Those truncheons look ugly to me. I wonder if they’ll use tear gas?’
Dovid disliked Leib’s morbid interest in violence. He looked nervously over his shoulder towards the Library Gardens. A murmur of excitement spread through the crowd as the clock on the Post Office tower struck seven. As the last chime died away there was an expectant silence. But the meeting did not begin.
‘It’s seven. What are they waiting for?’ Dovid asked.
‘For them.’
The sky had grown darker with clouds which were floating in from the south. Too late for rain, Dovid thought as he heard the sound of singing in the distance, interspersed with shouts and cheers. As the marchers drew nearer Dovid heard snatches from ‘Sarie Marais’. The crowd around the steps grew silent and tense as the marchers’ footfalls were heard. Then suddenly they appeared, about twenty abreast, carrying banners with anti-semitic slogans.
They waved to the police and jostled against the silent demonstrators as they took up their positions. A bearded man leapt onto the steps and shouted in Afrikaans:
‘God is on our side in maintaining Christianity in this country!’
Boos and cheers greeted his statement. The meeting had begun. Dovid stood at the edge of the crowd trembling with rage at what could be heard of the speaker’s anti-semitic tirade. Most of it was drowned by the booing and the singing of the anti-fascists.