Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

  ‘What happens if you get caught?’

  ‘I’ll go to jail.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘No one’s gonna get caught.’

  I thought about the Doctor and Johannes all through dinner at Leo Fein’s house. Again I held one of Leo Fein’s secrets and it was a complex one that deserved turning over in the mind.

  I felt some affinity for the Doctor (if not for Johannes, wielding his threats) and a little fright went through me as I thought of the man, his grey speckled hair and heavy spectacles flashing in the glare of a police torch; I felt another kind of shiver when I pictured Johannes placing a limpet mine under the pictures of the state presidents in the school foyer; as an alternative, I forced a scenario of them swimming the Limpopo into Botswana, floating Leo Fein’s blue suitcase along with them. But who they really were and what, if anything, they were wanted for, I had very little idea of.

  The man talking to my mother with a full mouth had raised his standing once more with me. His motives for helping the cane gang may have been a little hazy to me, but his role as an undercover agent or a fixer of some kind overshadowed the details.

  Leo Fein and Ma searched for their cigarettes and I took up my sugarcane.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ asked Ma.

  ‘He got it for me,’ I said.

  ‘He was a good boy today,’ said Leo Fein.

  ‘He always is,’ said Ma. Between Elliot’s rebellion and Will’s demands it was the space I’d been lumped with.

  Leo Fein turned on the TV for me, and he and Ma went out to the courtyard to smoke. I tried a bite of the sugarcane but I’ve never been able to stomach such overriding sweetness without feeling ill: it’s why I chose lucky packets instead of chocolates.

  I got up to throw the soggy stalk in the rubbish bin in the kitchen. I could hear Leo Fein talk – not his words, just the voice, and his laugh that accelerated and burst through sporadically like hiccups.

  And Ma’s laugh, too, came through. They exchanged laughs, overlapped laughs, built laughs together until they subsided and there was only the scrape of patio furniture on a tiled floor.

  What the day had done to repair my feelings towards Leo Fein, whatever gloss he’d added with the meeting at the cane fields, was scratched away by the sounds from beyond the sliding glass doors.

  * * *

  The drive to cheder was even more of a drag after the Standard Five Tour. Shoshana would pull the rear-view mirror to look at herself: a pimple or an application of lip gloss, then a nudge so that it angled towards me in the back seat. I averted my gaze, unwilling to enter into any kind of exchange with her, and I was sure she took this as a personal victory. She was exerting a new, more forceful version of herself on me.

  ‘Ben’s going to be a man soon, Mommy,’ she said in a register more girly than necessary. Carol, inspired by the subject matter, overlooked the delivery.

  ‘That’s right. Not long now, hey Ben?’ said Carol, snapping the mirror back in place for the cars behind her on Jorissen Street. I’d had my thirteenth birthday but celebrations were postponed till the bar mitzvah. ‘The invitations are divine, you can tell your mother for me.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell her.’ My voice tripped up the stairs on these last two words, landing higher than planned.

  Shoshana pulled the mirror back onto my face.

  In cheder in these last weeks I had the feeling of being propelled towards a target. Sometimes I’d have to stay on after the others and cram in all the things they already knew. The letters on the Torah parchment looked different from the ones in the book the Rabbi had lent me; the members of the alphabet had sprouted growths in some of the scrolls and my eyes searched for signs of pronunciation everywhere. The Rabbi himself was rushing through as much as he could so that, when he held my wrist and guided the silver pointer to the correct line, I felt the spasms up his arm, firing off like a Stalin’s organ.

  The Rabbi’s voice droned from my bedroom every day and in shul I tried to pay careful attention to the order of the liturgy for the first time. I had developed a fear of singing the wrong section.

  I’d have to lead both the Friday-night and Saturday-morning service. Friday night, if I had to choose, was more fun. The songs were better and the service was shorter, so it had a lot going for it.

  Saturdays left me feeling lost and drained. The service was servitude, long and plodding, confusing because of the different Torah portions read each week, and I knew I’d never accumulate in two weeks the customs, traditions, processes and rituals that took a lifetime to imprint.

  The swaying during prayer was an example of one such arcanum and, with so little time left, I felt embarrassed to be asking questions I should already have known the answers to. I tried to mimic the back-and-forth rocking and it felt wrong, like I was trying to act out the involuntary movements of the dear Rabbi. (It was, at least, the one time of the week when the Rabbi moved just like everyone else.)

  The crowning achievement of my faith was that I memorised Sh’ma Yisrael, the prayer Jews are meant to say before sleep and upon waking. I recited it, hoping to earn popularity with the Lord and perhaps receive in return a transmission of Jewishness in time for my bar mitzvah.

  Markos and Sean were interested in – envious of, even – the firm traditions of the faith, the ones I could remember, at least. What charmed my friends were the minor customs, not the grand mechanics of the religion. Quaint ones like kissing the mezuzah or taking care not to put other books on top of the Bible or Chumash or whatever the name was of the blue book with the ribbon bookmark the Rabbi had lent me.

  Elliot teased me about the Rabbi’s tape when I spoke to him on the phone. He was fitting in with some of the other misfits who’d been shifted to art school and he was drawing more than ever, he said. I heard him tugging on a cigarette throughout the conversation.

  ‘Forget that Hebrew shit,’ he told me. ‘You should sing “Anarchy in the UK” at your bar mitzvah.’

  Will tried to motivate me from an economic standpoint. ‘Think of all the presents, man. The money,’ he said to me over the phone one day. ‘That’s what you need to focus on here.’

  I would try to focus.

  ‘So how’s Ma doing?’ asked Will.

  ‘Okay, I suppose. Why?’

  ‘Well, are things going well with Leo Fein?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must know something. Are they spending lots of time together? Does he sleep over there?’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘Well, why wouldn’t he?’

  ‘They’re friends. I don’t know. Do we have to talk about this?’

  ‘Friends?’

  Denial is a powerful drug, and reality (though you might know it) is buried by it; but the truth seeps up eventually, and there’s no way to stop it. I wished they were just friends – I prayed without forming the words that they were just friends – but I knew they weren’t just friends, even without seeing it. I knew with every scrape of the patio furniture.

  I suppose Ma did try to talk to me, but I would never let her tell me the full truth. Preparation for my bar mitzvah was a handy distraction at the time. Distasteful as it was, it was preferable to the contemplation of any kind of union between my mother and Leo Fein, because I was sure that meant a distortion of our current lives.

  Would I move to the house in Bendor, I wondered, the house without books? Would they go on holidays, leaving me alone in that tiled wasteland, except for the woman in spearmint uniform? I saw myself sitting on the blue couch, becoming steadily used to Leo Fein’s body noises and smells; I imagined Ma growing more and more like him, and me more and more like his milksop son, Michael.

  ‘Ben, they’re not just friends,’ said Will.

  ‘And you’re so happy about it. What, are you trying to, like, sell her off to him?’

  ‘Hang on, buddy. I’m just asking what’s going on. Look, all I’m saying is, he’s a successful guy: if they get together
, it wouldn’t be so bad for us. That’s all I’m saying.’

  I shut up, and shut out all possibility of it.

  * * *

  Into the lucky packet Leo Fein had handed me I wanted to put back the shards of laughter from the patio, put back his resurrection and death, his raffle tickets, his Israeli friends, the General, the bottles of booze from Roy’s Uptown Liquor; put them all back and burn that fucking lucky packet up.

  I didn’t like seeing myself in a household headed by Leo Fein, even if it came with the restored empire of Will’s longing; I feared that whatever good he might bring into our family would be soured by the secrets he kept; and I hated seeing my mother happy at the hands of Leo Fein.

  This happiness of hers, it washed over her, opaque, a cataract obstructing her from seeing who Leo Fein really was: a man who lied about his death, who robbed liquor stores with little boys, who fraternised with terrorists. He was a danger to Ma, I willed myself to conclude.

  Shadrack pulled grey weeds out of the seams in the red-brick driveway. ‘What would you do if you met a terrorist, Shadrack?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Aren’t they dangerous? At school they said they’re dangerous.’

  He said nothing and continued his work from his squatting position.

  ‘Do you think they’re dangerous, Shadrack?’ I asked, brushing a hairy weed with my toe.

  ‘To who?’

  ‘To us,’ I said automatically, though his question prickled. I didn’t like to imagine Shadrack being apart from us, felt a guilty jealousy when he spent time away from us with his own family. But as deeply embedded in our family as he was, and as deeply needed as he was, it wasn’t him the freedom fighters were fighting against.

  ‘Don’t worry about that, Ben,’ he said.

  ‘But aren’t they dangerous to us? I mean, if I met some and they knew where I lived.’

  ‘They won’t come here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He said nothing for a while again. ‘Why will they come?’

  ‘Maybe they made a mistake.’

  ‘If anyone comes, you call the police.’

  ‘But aren’t the police bad too?’

  ‘Yes-thanks.’

  ‘What if Ma was in danger? What then?’

  ‘You call me.’

  ‘What if you’re not around?’

  ‘You call Will.’

  ‘He’s at university.’

  ‘Uncle Victor,’ said Shadrack.

  ‘He’ll take too long.’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘What if it was just me and Ma?’

  ‘Then you hide.’

  ‘What if they were going to get Ma, and I had to save her?’

  ‘If you can save her, then save her.’

  That was finally the answer I was pushing for, though Shadrack didn’t know it, and simply wiped his brow, happy to be rid of my questions. I walked up the driveway towards the house. I convinced myself that I had to prevent my mother from being dragged into some business with terrorists. It was illegal, even if it were moral. She’d face danger from both sides – the terrorists her suitor was involved with and the authorities they were at war with. The kid with the panga could threaten her, or the men who climbed our wall to check Shadrack’s pass might lock Ma up.

  I would have to do something – for Ma. I had to act. This was how my young brain, that squirming little organ with its furrows and bends, dog-legs and endless doubling back on itself, worked.

  After the Sh’ma that evening, I asked God to eliminate Leo Fein from our lives; and the next morning before school, I undertook a composition, a note that took aim at the ballistic imminence of Leo Fein’s future with my mother. It was written with my left hand, to avoid identification, and indeed I meant it to be sinister. As I wrote, some of the anger and hate that had set my hand in motion gave way to pleasure.

  To whom it may concern,

  This note serves to confirm that Leopold Fein of 18 Arnotha Drive, Bendor, is, if not a terrorist himself, then at least, in league with terrorists, and if not, then at the very least, associating with terrorists. The anonymous author of this note witnessed a meeting between Leopold Fein and said terrorists on a farm on the Tzaneen road, although he (the author) can’t be certain of the exact location. However, he is certain that terrorists were present, possibly planning terrorist activity IN OUR TOWN and that Leo Fein is, if not a mastermind of the group, then at least an essential part of it.

  The anonymous author hopes this note finds the correct authorities and that they act with the utmost swiftness to apprehend Leo Fein. Lives are in danger.

  Anonymous

  I really wanted to use the word ‘peril’ instead of ‘danger’ but was aware that the note might end up in the hands of Afrikaans policemen and I had to rein myself in for the sake of clarity. I thought I’d been vague enough about the cane gang’s whereabouts, and they should’ve been long gone, according to what Leo Fein had told me, anyway. It wasn’t them I was after, even if that kid had threatened me with a panga.

  I was unsure whether I needed to sign off ‘Anonymous’ or not, but did, and then regretted it. The final line I thought particularly strong and it might have been more convincing left on its own but since I’d taken so long to put the thing together and I needed to get to school, I left it.

  My heart ran like a pile driver throughout History class, and while Mr Coetzee smoked his Gunstons outside the door, instead of writing my paragraph on Griqualand, I wondered how I would get my note to him without revealing myself.

  I’d chosen Mr Coetzee because I knew he was a member of the Commando, the volunteer army reservists, and thought he’d be the best link to the police or military police or secret service, whichever was necessary.

  Mr Coetzee was full of wonder and respect for the institutions of our government, what he considered the ingenious and Levitical construct of apartheid and, perhaps above all, the military. He told us on many occasions that the highest honour any of us could achieve would be to serve in the defence force.

  When class ended I lingered and, with Mr Coetzee nearing the filter of his Gunston, I placed the envelope onto his desk. Then, as I walked towards the door I shuddered, realising he’d find it straight after class and know someone in 5A had written it; it was only a matter of time before he’d figure out it was me.

  I turned back inside to retrieve it. ‘What is it, Aronbach?’ said Coetzee, stepping into his class. ‘Want me to give you a haircut?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘You’d better get that floppy mess cut soon, though. Before next inspection, hey?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Mrs Verwey appeared at the door. ‘Can I get one?’ she said, eyeing the Gunstons in Mr Coetzee’s hand. He turned towards her and splayed the cigarettes out the top hatch of the soft-pack. While Mrs Verwey selected one, with her head tilted down and her eyes raised to Mr Coetzee’s, I picked up the envelope and slid it into the side pocket of his briefcase.

  I skirted past the teachers without either one paying me any attention and considered a career in espionage.

  10

  PINK FISH MOULD

  Most afternoons now were spent singing along with the Rabbi, whose voice rang from the tape recorder’s speaker; or on my new and more fearful work: practising my bar mitzvah speech in front of the mirror.

  Hebrew was one thing, and a thirteen-year-old could be forgiven for fluffing an ancient language, but the bar mitzvah speech would have to be in English. I’d have to thank the Rabbi, the ladies of the Jewish Women’s Guild, the family and friends for attending, my mother – and do it wittily, because everyone expects entertainment.

  At home I avoided any topic that involved Leo Fein, and that meant sometimes steering conversations towards my impending doom in front of the Jewish community. ‘The whole family’s coming next week,’ said Ma. ‘All those people just for you.’

  I knew she was trying to make me feel important. I
imagined aunts and uncles and newly bar mitzvahed cousins all on the edge of their seats, shaking their heads at my cracked and fumbling chanting. But because I knew Ma was doing her best to give me a boost, and since she’d put aside – for the moment – Leo Fein for me, I tried to act pleased.

  ‘Have you thought about what you want to wear?’ she asked. ‘We’ll go this week.’

  ‘Not burgundy,’ I said. There was a craze for burgundy and that year two bat mitzvah girls had worn the colour, and Joss had sported a burgundy shirt at his bar mitzvah.

  ‘Anything you want,’ she said. ‘After Elliot, anything.’ My brother had refused a jacket and tie and my mother had hunted to find something that wasn’t a suit but was smart enough to mark him out as the bar mitzvah boy; something acceptable to the family and something, I suppose, that would protect her from accusations that she hadn’t bothered at all.

  In the end, the Jadas at the Indian Plaza helped Elliot by ordering some kind of smart-casual shell suit. By then Ma had given in to Elliot’s other demand for sneakers instead of proper shoes.

  Will’s bar mitzvah photograph was up in the passage and he’d worn a wide cream tie framed by a woolly chocolate-brown jacket. I had no strong pull in either direction but didn’t want to be seen as a total sellout so at the Jadas’ store I intended to choose, modestly, a smart shirt but no tie.

  The Jadas were graceful in allowing me full access to their shop after I’d tried to sell them the raffle tickets. ‘We’re not Zionists any more, are we, Ben?’ said Ma.

  ‘No,’ I replied shyly.

  Mrs Jada, so beautiful I couldn’t think of her as a mother to the two teenagers slouching at the counter, put her hand under my chin and made me blush. It became more excruciating and at the same time intoxicating when she embraced my arms, my waist, and my inseam with the measuring tape.

  The shirt I first chose, I think, had light blue checks but I could be mistaken, so unexceptional was my outfit. There were new shoes, too, and Ma wanted to buy a jacket for me. She kept pressing me into the change room with various suits and shirts, snaking belts around my hips and asking whether I wanted sneakers too, not for the bar mitzvah, just for wearing, and maybe those Jordache jeans?