Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

  ‘We’re raising funds for Israel,’ Joss said. ‘With a raffle.’ The men with the accents nodded.

  ‘The Women’s Zionist League,’ said Leo Fein, looking at the form in my hand. ‘The women in town raise funds for the troops in Israel. Very good thing.’

  The men with the accents said something in their language but neither asked for a damn ticket. The Afrikaans man with the cleft chin and the sunglasses said, ‘It’s very important we support our friends in Israel.’ (Uhs-rrile was how he said it.) ‘We’re both fighting to protect our land and keep it safe for our people.’ He looked serious, like we’d angered him. ‘Here, boys, give me some tickets.’

  He took a roll of cash from his trouser pocket. It was so thick with fifty-rand notes, he had to peel it open in his hand to find two twenties. He gave one note each to me and to Joss and I handed over the tickets.

  ‘Good luck, my friend,’ said the man in the sunglasses as he presented the tickets to Leo Fein. ‘I hope you’re a winner.’ He looked angry again, and held onto the tickets when Leo Fein put his fingers on them. Then he laughed a broad laugh and the other men joined in.

  ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ said Leo Fein, fanning his face with the raffle tickets. ‘You’ve done some good business with the General, hey boys?’

  ‘You boys,’ said the General, ‘next time I’ll take you up in the Cessna, okay? Tell them, Fein.’

  Leo Fein walked us to the door and Joss asked, ‘Is he really a general?’

  ‘He’d better be, boykie,’ said Leo Fein. ‘Thanks for coming, boys.’

  We were still holding our twenties in our hands when we walked out.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  ‘Twenty bucks,’ said Joss.

  ‘Each,’ I said.

  We looked around and stuffed the notes into our pockets.

  ‘What’d he take? Like, twenty tickets? That’s only ten bucks.’

  ‘Think we need to get him change?’

  ‘Fuck that,’ said Joss. ‘Did you see how much money he was flashing around? He wanted us to have it.’

  ‘I need to give ten bucks to my mom for the tickets.’

  ‘That’s still fifteen bucks each,’ said Joss. ‘Or, I mean, we could give it to the Women’s Zionist League.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘My brother says they’re fascists. Anyway, the General wanted us to have it.’

  ‘He’s a general. It’s like an order.’

  ‘Who do you think those other guys were?’

  ‘Israelis,’ said Joss.

  ‘How’d you know?’

  ‘They were talking Hebrew.’

  Cheder lessons hadn’t quite stuck the language in my ear yet. ‘What are you gonna buy?’ I asked as we walked through the streets of Bendor.

  ‘Sea Monkeys,’ said Joss with hardly a pause.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’ I was too old for lucky packets, but there was little else that offered the same satisfaction. At home I stuck the money and those thoughts under the badges in my drawer for later reveries.

  * * *

  The first time we met, Leo Fein had mentioned my father; the second time, my mother. How much did this man know about my family, I wondered. The secret ties between us, strung before my birth and tugged at now in my twelfth year of life, were a revelation.

  A few days later, I had my savings plus the fifteen bucks from the General in my pocket, and was flipping through the pages of Photography Basics in the town’s only newsagent. As a hobby, photography had a lot going for it – I wouldn’t need to actually draw anything (Elliot’s realm), and it involved impressive gadgetry, and the possibility of naked flesh.

  The photography book offered information on aperture, exposure, ISO speed, composition, black-and-white, filters, and one nude and two semi-nudes. But on my way to the checkout with the book, a bateleur caught my eye on another cover.

  I walked out of the CNA gripping Birds of Prey and hardly felt a pang of mourning for losing the nudes. Instead, the bodies of Leo Fein’s raptors sped through my thoughts like feathered blades, swooping, spinning and intersecting.

  With this book I would know the names of each of those hunters in Leo Fein’s study, their tastes in prey, their tactics and habits, and I would string another link to him.

  * * *

  Elliot could be pigheaded and obsessed with his own ideas but he was never deliberately cruel to any of us. So, when he said he’d like to come to the raffle draw, Ma didn’t comment on his change of heart. I guess she didn’t want to jinx a rapprochement, and Elliot had been unusually quiet recently.

  The shul hall was decked in blue and silvery-white ribbons, and Meyer Levinson was at the microphone on the little stage. Besides the raffle, they were holding a cake sale, a jumble sale and fundraising dinner later, which I was grateful we’d be skipping.

  As Meyer began the draw, we saw Carol.

  ‘Thank God we got that bakkie from Arnold for a prize or we’d be sunk,’ said Carol.

  Ma didn’t reply, but I could tell she was startled, assessing now whether that diesel generator looked rather less glitzy compared to a Ford Cortina bakkie.

  On stage, Meyer gave away a weekend for two at a game lodge to a lucky winner. In his even voice, Meyer congratulated the winner, and introduced the next prize: the diesel generator.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ said Elliot, at Ma’s side. ‘It’s fine, I’ll walk.’

  I watched Elliot walk out of the hall, but Ma didn’t turn her eyes away from the stage. Meyer drew the winning number for our diesel generator. ‘Leo Fein!’ said Meyer, as the man I’d stolen booze for made his way through the clapping crowd, the faintest twist in his straight mouth, his rendition of a smile. ‘He wins the diesel generator, sponsored by Great North Diesel and Auto Electric.’

  ‘Leo Fein won,’ I said to Ma, tugging her sleeve. She stared ahead while Leo Fein collected an envelope on stage from Meyer.

  ‘Thank you, Great North Diesel and Auto Electric,’ said Meyer, ‘for a special prize, for a special cause.’

  ‘It’s Leo Fein,’ I said to Ma. He’d walked off the stage and directly up to us. Leo Fein took me by the shoulder and smushed me into his side.

  ‘It’s a wonderful prize,’ he said.

  ‘I hope it’ll be useful to you,’ said Ma.

  ‘Very useful, Margot. I’m very eager to have it. Perhaps I could stop by next week and we could discuss delivery and such.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Ma.

  ‘Call me Leo.’ A line that must have been well practised, and practised not to seem so. ‘Bye, boy,’ said Leo Fein to me, and he glided into the little crowd.

  We stayed a while longer, Ma chatting to acquaintances, faces familiar to me from shul. Now that the prizes had been handed out, and it hadn’t turned out to be the failure Morgan had hinted at, she seemed more relaxed. Until, that is, she asked finally about Elliot’s whereabouts. She pulled me to the door when I told her he’d left.

  As Ma combed her bag for the car keys by the kerb, a few men were spread around the low wall that surrounded the Rabbi’s residence, talking in urgent voices. They were looking at something on the wall, and turning their heads up and down the street.

  On the wall had been spray-painted two blue horizontal lines and, between the lines, a cocked swastika, in the same blue paint. It was beginning to attract more attention, some of it aghast, some already furious.

  Ma didn’t let me gawk too long. She pulled me by the sleeve and guided me to the car. When we arrived home, Elliot had his winkle-pickers up on the little sidetable and was watching TV. ‘Elliot, I saw something outside the shul,’ said Ma. ‘Elliot, did you do it?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ he replied. Ma’d been single-minded about confronting Elliot, not speaking in the car. She seemed to have forgotten I was there, and I relished the chance to be in on the clash.

  ‘I know it was you. A swastika, Elliot? Wh
y would you do that?’ She’d wound herself into that angry, pleading pitch she used whenever one of us (and it was usually Elliot) did something she’d have to fix. ‘On the shul wall? You’re just looking for trouble, aren’t you?’ She threw the keys onto her chair and they jangled her anger while she remained standing.

  ‘It’s not a swastika,’ said Elliot quietly.

  ‘Elliot,’ said Ma, speaking more quietly herself now, ‘you painted a swastika on the shul wall.’

  ‘It’s not a swastika. It’s a modified Israeli flag.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A modified Israeli flag. The swastika instead of the Star of David between the stripes. It’s symbolic.’

  ‘Why, Elliot?’

  ‘You know why. Because the Israelis have become Nazis. They’re persecuting Palestinians.’

  ‘Elliot, Israel was set up when the whole world, none of them, wanted the Jews. And after what happened in the Holocaust – you know this.’

  ‘I know. But they should know better. That’s why they should know better. After you’ve been kicked around for two thousand years, you’ve got a responsibility. Don’t kick the next guy. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘You can’t use the Holocaust like this. Nazis, swastikas – it’s off limits. It’s too painful.’

  ‘That’s exactly why I used it.’

  ‘Think of people who survived that, the death camps, the war. Or people who lost family in the Holocaust. You should have found another way.’

  Elliot crossed his arms.

  ‘Elliot – there’s a swastika on a shul wall, for God’s sake.’ Ma went to her room, probably to phone Uncle Victor, leaving me and Elliot together.

  ‘It’s a modified Israeli flag,’ he said.

  ‘It just looks like a swastika,’ I said to Elliot.

  He made a sound, as if I’d just told him an interesting fact, like the Eiffel Tower has two-and-a-half million rivets holding it up, and he went to his own room, leaving me there.

  * * *

  No one saw that it was a modified Israeli flag. People called it a swastika on a shul wall, and theories were created to fill in who could have painted it. ‘There are a lot of Nazis in this town,’ said Carol on the way to cheder. ‘Who do you think the Afrikaners supported in the war? There’s even a street named after a Nazi sympathizer. Hans van Rensburg Street.’ She mock-spat after saying the name. ‘I don’t even like driving on it.’

  I was afraid that at any moment I would burst with what I knew about the swastika, in an involuntary spasm, like the Rabbi. I kept as quiet as I could.

  The Kisch brothers were standing at the shul gate when we arrived. They were both wearing sunglasses, the brothers Joel and Nathan, monstrous from lifting weights. Both had completed national service in the Israeli Defence Force just a couple of years back.

  A black man in overalls was scrubbing at the graffiti with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water a few meters from the brothers. A blue smudge was growing around the swastika.

  I was on a hair-trigger with the anticipation of the subject of Nazis and anti-Zionism coming up in cheder; I even imagined an interrogation from the Rabbi. But the lesson unfolded normally, boringly. Finally, it wasn’t the Rabbi who brought it up.

  ‘Do you really think it’s safe for us to have our lessons here?’ asked Potato Latke.

  ‘Shoshana, I don’t want you to worry about that,’ said the Rabbi. ‘That’s my job, to worry about your safety, okay? And if I was worried, we wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘There could be a bomb,’ she said.

  ‘There isn’t a bomb. And Joel and Nathan are looking after us.’

  ‘They can’t do anything about a bomb,’ said Disney Yarmulke. ‘If there’s a bomb, it would blow everyone up, even Joel and Nathan.’ His little sister was sitting behind him, and she shaped her face in preparation to cry.

  ‘There are no bombs here, David,’ said the Rabbi, with the firmest voice I’d heard him use. It smoothed the wrinkles in the little sister’s face. ‘I think it was just some kids playing a stupid joke, and now everyone’s a little bit tense. We’re just taking precautions, that’s why Joel and Nathan are outside.’

  When the lesson ended, we waited for our lifts while Joel Kisch talked to Nathan Kisch and vice versa.

  ‘I don’t think the Dutchmen are organised enough to be a real threat,’ said Joel or Nathan.

  ‘Could have been some punk,’ said Nathan or Joel and a pulse shot through my heart at the thought of Elliot.

  ‘To do something like that while a Zionist event is going on? That’s chutzpah, my friend. No, the Muslims – they’re the danger.’

  ‘Ja, but a Nazi sign?’

  ‘Smokescreen – deflect attention away,’ and Joel (or Nathan) indicated ‘away’ with a sweep of the hand, like a traffic cop.

  ‘Fuckers.’

  I looked over at the man in the overalls. He was still working away at the offending image. The arms of the symbol clung to the wall, but the colour spread itself like the cancerous animation I’d seen on maps in The World at War, the Sunday-night documentary series that fascinated Uncle Victor. It showed always the advancing Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in a spreading puddle over Europe, when the Third Reich was still winning.

  Possibilities leapfrogged through my mind: Jesus, first Jews try to sell Zionist raffle tickets to Muslims; next, Muslims are being blamed for anti-Semitic vandalism. I’ve stoked a war.

  4

  KADDISH FOR LEO FEIN

  When I first learnt of Leo Fein’s death, I assumed it was at the hands of some enemy. He was a man who had generals for friends, who busted through steel gates and stole lucky packets for kids. What could stop a man like that?

  It was Carol who told us, me and Ma, after dropping me at home from cheder. As much as possible, Ma tried to avoid all contact with Carol, though she felt grateful and guilty for her shul-shuttling. I could see the slight nauseating effect Carol had on Ma. It got right into her, Carol’s misery, attacking like jaundice, but today Ma stayed to talk to her.

  ‘Hang on, Carol,’ she said. ‘Forget the Chevra Kadisha stuff. Leo Fein is dead?’

  ‘Yesterday. Heart attack, I heard.’

  Heart attack! The same brutal phenomenon that took my father.

  ‘You know, I’ve been trying to get hold of him,’ said Ma. ‘He won the generator.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t bother about that, Margot. He’s not even having a funeral. Didn’t want the Chevra Kadisha – too good for the Chevra Kadisha! And what about his son?’

  Leo Fein with a son! I felt disappointed. The knowledge of this grieved and confused me as much as Leo Fein’s death. Where did this leave me? I would never rob another shop with the man, and he’d never tell me anything about my father now. He already had a son with whom he’d probably robbed and busted down doors in every town in the Far Northern Transvaal.

  ‘At least the boy’s sitting shiva. I’m going over this afternoon with some things. Phyllis and I usually bring the food but we didn’t know what to do if there’s no funeral. She’s mad as a snake. I said to Phyllis, “Phyllis, we have to be the bigger person here.” And she agreed. “You’re right, Carol,” she said. “It can’t be helped what that man has done but he’s left his son like a useless piece of flesh to schlump around the house, and no mother to take care of him.”’

  ‘I have to do something with the generator,’ said Ma.

  ‘No funeral, Margot,’ said Carol, trying to instil the same outrage in my mother.

  I felt a little lost inside my own house. I took out Birds of Prey of Southern Africa in tribute to Leo Fein. The first moments of grief are often spent groping for something concrete to hang on to, however insignificant in the towering shadow that death casts. I wondered about the stuffed birds – would his son take them? Could I have them?

  I put the bird book aside and went to the Encyclopedia Americana. Whatever life didn’t prepare me for, I hoped the encyclopaedias would. The black-and-blue bound-l
eather volumes held the whole world, it had always seemed to me. Their references to the world to come, however, left me none the wiser and I began to cry. I couldn’t go to Ma for consolation without explaining why I was so upset about a man she thought I hardly knew. I would never betray Leo Fein over the raid at Roy’s – in the wake of that conspiracy, and of his death, I considered it an honour thing, our thing. And I would never betray, to Ma or myself, just why the death of a man I connected to my father, who might have begun to fill that hole in my imaginings, upset me so.

  I wandered back to the passage where Ma was on the phone to Will, and overheard enough of the conversation to know Will was delighted at the news of Leo Fein.

  ‘Don’t say, “What a relief!”’ said Ma. ‘The man’s dead, Will. And left a son behind.’

  ‘We’re off on a technicality, Margot!’ he kept repeating, but she stuck firm and ended the conversation.

  She told me afterwards that Will’s idea of drumming up business using the raffle prize wasn’t panning out and he was eager to save face in front of Morgan. ‘I’m going to give the generator to the son,’ she said. ‘It’s only right. Once everything’s settled down.’

  Ma decided the right thing to do was to go to the shiva home to show face, as she put it.

  ‘Can I come?’ I asked. What the Encyclopedia Americana couldn’t give me, I hoped religion could. Perhaps it could give a shape to the sadness and confusion I felt. Jews would know how to deal with tribulations, I thought.

  ‘You don’t have to, my boy. You didn’t know him.’

  ‘I did,’ I said, and had to scramble a little to think how to explain. ‘From the Dorfmans.’

  ‘Well, if you want.’

  ‘Did Daddy know him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably. Everyone knew your father.’

  But on the way there I grew apprehensive. I’d be meeting the son of Leo Fein. Was he my competition, in some way? Just who was good enough to be Leo Fein’s son?

  Michael Fein was sitting on a turquoise leather couch when we arrived, even though Ma had told me the bereaved sit on low chairs during shiva. It was late afternoon and, while everyone spoke quietly, they more or less ignored Michael. Michael, whose face I may have seen in shul, but never with Leo Fein, sat alone and forlorn.