Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

  I awoke alone on the couch, just a cold space in front of me where the girl I’d lost my virginity to had been. She and her friend emerged shortly thereafter, Cowboy Boots wearing, confusingly, the mirror sunglasses of Mirror Sunglasses, and that girl squinting into the lounge. I zipped up and stood immediately.

  Elliot skulked behind them, carrying his jacket. He stood next to Boots; she moved closer to her friend and put an arm around her.

  ‘You have to go,’ said Boots.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ I said.

  ‘Her parents, you know,’ said Mirrors.

  ‘We have to go anyway,’ said Elliot. ‘The car.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you even going to ask me my name?’ said Mirrors by the door.

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  She turned and scanned the room for her bag, then scrambled inside it. When she stood, she presented me with a torn strip of paper – a phone number and ‘Marieke’.

  ‘And you are—?’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘Bye, Ben.’

  Elliot and I didn’t speak much in the car. We were both tired, I guess, and had our own thoughts to receive. The topic of girls was something I had no experience of talking about with Elliot, anyway. Finally he asked, ‘Did you …?’

  ‘Uh, yes. Did you?’

  ‘No. Too drunk. She was,’ he said. ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay.’ But something had happened to Elliot.

  In the kitchen at Victor’s house, Ma was finishing her coffee before work. ‘Where were you?’ she asked. ‘Nadine had to take Victor to work this morning.’

  ‘We didn’t want to drive drunk,’ said Elliot. ‘We stayed at some friends.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the safe thing. But Victor’s going to get it from Nadine. He was getting it already.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that woman?’

  ‘She’s been very understanding,’ said Ma, ‘taking me and Ben in.’

  ‘Boy, doesn’t she let you know it, though,’ I said.

  ‘And she’s got Victor right there,’ said Elliot squashing a thumb down on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Makes him happy though, I suppose,’ said Ma.

  ‘Got him so uptight he files his cigarettes,’ said Elliot.

  ‘So uptight he alphabetises his ties,’ I said.

  ‘He’s so uptight he wipes his arse in triplicate.’

  ‘I’d better meet Carol,’ said Ma, looking at her watch.

  ‘Right, I’m off to bed,’ said Elliot.

  Ma often caught lifts to work with Carol in her new Fiat Uno since she lived across the road from Victor’s. For the past two years Ma had been working at Doren’s Outfitters in town. The shop was owned by Benny and Frieda Doren, a couple a few years older than Ma who’d had the store for about thirty years.

  Benny was a neat, diminutive man who wore his pants high and platform shoes to make him look taller. Frieda had been a beautiful woman in her youth, I believe, but had widened considerably in later years. When they offered Ma the position in their shop, Victor suggested it was because Frieda kept returning perfectly good orders of women’s wear for being labelled small, and Benny didn’t have the heart to tell her she didn’t fit into the same dress size any more.

  Doren’s was for many years the only place women could go to find a half-decent outfit, and they still allowed their customers to take items home on approval. Ma herself must have bought dozens of skirts and belts and bags there over the years.

  Many of the customers were Ma’s friends or acquaintances, and she held down the shop well on her own whenever Benny had to go to the cardiologist or urologist, or Frieda visited family in Welkom.

  It wasn’t a bad job and Ma still remembered a few tricks from her time dressing windows at Asper’s in Johannesburg, where my father had walked in and bagged my mother along with six black polo shirts. Wary of straying from an old formula, the Dorens thought her use of fairy lights or mirrors avant-garde.

  One night Ma brought home the mannequins and, with a borrowed airbrush, re-sprayed them and applied more contemporary make-up to the lady dolls. The Dorens were very grateful and after that they gave her more or less free rein.

  Ma never complained about this job – or anything, really – even though they were stingy with their pay and their lunchtimes, and rotated cheap compilation cassettes of questionable hits and Enya.

  Ma looked at her watch again and took her second-last sip of coffee. Like the growth of a child that goes unnoticed by a parent until someone else points it out, Ma’s progression into her current, passive form was something I might not have picked up had it not been for Elliot.

  He noticed how quiet she was when Nadine passed comment on her cooking or varicose veins. Or when Carol dragged her through the mire of her depression. Or when Will siphoned savings and hope from her.

  She was staring into the bottom of the coffee cup and, placed as she was in a block of light from the kitchen window, would have made a good subject for a study. She was wearing the light-blue floral blouse the Dorens had given her, which she wore sometimes twice a week. Her eyes were wide, giving her a look of faint astonishment. They hovered between grey and amber so that you might at first glance think they were only blue, but you’d have to look again. They cut right through the mug and seemed to find a place not in that room, not in that time.

  ‘I really have to go now,’ she said, finally taking the last sip.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked as she rubbed her left arm; it had become a habit, another tic Elliot had picked up that I’d simply become accustomed to.

  ‘I feel numb sometimes, that’s all,’ she said.

  3

  TEN MEN

  I obsessively copied the numbers from the paper onto the keys of the cream-coloured phone. It rang through the speaker and a male voice, Afrikaans, answered with ornate courteousness in his tone.

  ‘Is Marieke there?’ I asked.

  A pause.

  I tried again in Afrikaans.

  ‘Nee,’ said the voice, firmer than before. ‘She’s not here.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said and dithered over leaving my number, but the phone came down on the other end anyway.

  I replaced the receiver just before Uncle Victor and Nadine came in through the front door. Use of the phone always set off some tension. Calls weren’t charged but that arrangement might have been preferable to the disingenuous ‘Oh sorry are you still on there?’ and the snide ‘Is that thing glued to your head?’ I was liable for.

  Victor dropped his leather-bellied attaché case on the dining-room table and Nadine swept past me without looking, which was her usual manner. She had feigned politeness and interest when she had first moved in with us but it had faded fast, and actually, it suited me better.

  ‘The Audi better not have any dings in it or you’ll be paying for it,’ said Victor by way of greeting. ‘With what money, I don’t know. What job, I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s no dings,’ I said. ‘Elliot drove, anyway.’

  ‘You better not have been driving.’

  ‘I told you – Elliot drove. I don’t have a licence.’

  ‘Where’s Elliot?’ said Victor, as he wrung his tie from his neck with a crooked index finger.

  ‘He’s gone out somewhere.’

  ‘Next time you come back with the car when you say you’re coming back, okay?’ he continued, since Elliot was out the house. ‘This was a major thing, a major inconvenience, you hear?’

  ‘Nadine pissed off cos she had to take you to work?’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that. That’s not your concern. It’s a major inconvenience. For her, too.’

  ‘She works, like, three blocks away from you.’

  ‘We’re independent people. We have different lives. Not different lives, but we have to go to meetings and such. Look, I don’t have to stand here explaining to you, in my own house. All you need to remember is I’ll break your neck if you take my car
out all night again.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, palms in the air.

  He went over to the oak bar in the corner and unlocked the side cabinet door from which he removed a bottle of Viceroy brandy.

  ‘Now I better make it up to her,’ said Victor. We heard Nadine coming through the kitchen. ‘How about dinner at Die Klause tonight, doll?’ he called to her.

  ‘The German place?’ she said. ‘It’s revolting.’

  ‘Didn’t you like the baby chicken there? I thought I remembered you liked the baby chicken.’

  ‘No – I said the chicken was undercooked. Bloody.’ She kicked off her patent leather heels and curled her legs up on the couch.

  ‘Oh, that was it. Right. Okay, Villa Italia, then.’

  ‘Every weekend, Villa Italia. No,’ she said, pulling at her stockings. ‘No, you can give me a foot massage.’

  Ma called for help with the shopping bags, rescuing me from the sight of Victor wavering between going to Nadine’s feet and staying with his brandy. My pleasure at my mother’s return, however, collapsed when Carol followed close by. Ma didn’t even manage to roll her eyes like she used to do.

  ‘Shabbat Shalom,’ said Carol. ‘I know you people don’t go in for that, but it’s nice anyway, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hello, Carol,’ said Victor, still halfway between the bar and Nadine’s feet. ‘Get you a drink?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to make my mutton stew tonight,’ said Ma and she went into the kitchen.

  Nadine muttered something and vengefully took up the TV guide.

  ‘I actually just came in for Ben,’ said Carol.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘I hate to ask,’ said Carol. ‘I know it doesn’t interest you, but I would really appreciate it. So would the Rabbi. Meyer Levinson’s sick and we can’t make ten.’

  ‘For the minyan,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right!’ said Carol, delighted, I suppose, that I even knew the word.

  That I was considering going to shul surprised even me. Since Elliot’s return, his presence promised, if nothing else, at least another personality in the living room that had become my prison. But I couldn’t count on him to be home when I wanted him there. He said he didn’t like taking holidays, hadn’t been on one since he’d left the country, in fact, and wanted to keep busy. Ever since the town show, he’d been out the house for hours at a time.

  Everything in that room of Victor’s, from the corduroy couch to the carved African-market souvenir head to the oak bar with the smell of its old plastic ice bucket, was just there, forced down the gullet of my soul every night. And not only that – if only it were just that! – the unchanging conversations, Nadine’s impregnable stiffness and Ma (as I was now inescapably aware of, thanks to Elliot) with her threadbare spirit, gone from a shrew to a mouse.

  ‘Sure, Carol,’ I said. ‘I’ll just get changed.’ She lit up, then remembered to contain herself in case her enthusiasm spooked me, I guess.

  The finger of nausea touched me at having done something pleasing for such a woman, but to scuttle from under the oppression of Victor’s living room was an escape I couldn’t pass up. So I put on a shirt with buttons, searched for a yarmulke, and walked with her to her new, cyan Fiat Uno two-door.

  ‘Can you drive?’ she asked. It saved her from sinning on the Sabbath.

  I considered the risks of driving without a licence, of being stopped by police and questioned. I was, after all, an absconding conscript, and wasn’t too sure how tightly linked government agencies were (some civil servant once boasted to Victor of a BIG GOVERNMENT COMPUTER that held information about everyone).

  I thought we might look respectable enough to risk it, and agreed.

  ‘How’s tricks?’ asked Carol, as I reversed the little car into Compensatie Street.

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  ‘Well, Shoshana’s started at the hotel school.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘She’s missing home already. What a baby. Bet you miss her, too, hey boy?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. After my bar mitzvah, Shoshana and I had barely spoken. Moments between us – a chance meeting at breaktime at school or forced interaction in class – contained the same frozen feeling I would get from some deep humiliation, although nothing terribly humiliating had actually happened between us; the incident at the Voortrekker Monument loomed large in childhood but was only one minor humiliation in life’s great accumulation of them. She’d clearly moved on from the Standard Five Tour, whereas I carried the futile guilt long after.

  ‘How’s Will?’ asked Carol melodiously while flipping down the vanity mirror to adjust her hair.

  ‘He’s in the army now, in Pretoria. He’s got a girlfriend there,’ I added as casually as I could, although it felt starkly out of place as I said it. It was an attempt to cancel out the carnal links between Will and Carol, whether they existed in reality or only in Victor’s insinuations.

  She flipped the mirror back up. ‘Oh, yes? And the other one’s back now?’

  ‘Elliot. Yes, back from London.’

  ‘Can’t believe you’re not going anywhere, Ben. University or somewhere?’

  ‘Maybe next year, Carol.’

  ‘You’re not going to the army, are you?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘They hate Jews, you know.’

  I nodded, checking my mirrors with a sideways motion.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Carol. We were passing the Checkers Centre where, in the past year, black street children had begun to cluster after sundown. Even before the referendum, apartheid was losing its power to separate. Poverty couldn’t be contained any more beyond the town’s limits in the locations and homelands.

  ‘See what’s happening here? They really aren’t looking after this town like they used to,’ said Carol, but the misery of the scene overpowered its untidiness. ‘Ag, shame – look. Kids, hey?’

  I continued down Jorissen Street and the brakes on the Uno gave us a soft landing outside what was the new shul. They often had trouble making up a minyan now. It wasn’t just that Meyer Levinson was sick. The Jews who remained in town were of the older stock. It was who was left – the parents and grandparents of the latest diaspora to Johannesburg, Canada and Australia.

  And now that the Rabbi had found a wife there were rumours he was going to find a new community, too. Who was there left to minister to?

  They’d already moved the shul to the old hall next door and sold the synagogue building to Braam van Jaarsveld, who gave them a very generous price for it, I believe – he’d been less gracious with Great North. Now filling the space in which I’d had my bar mitzvah, and where my brothers before me had struggled with the heavy aleph-bet on parchment scrolls, was a stationery distributor.

  We walked inside the hall, Carol going to the left with the other women. ‘That’s nine,’ said Julian Gross. ‘We’ll have to wait.’

  ‘Hello, Ben,’ said the Rabbi.

  ‘Is this it?’ said Gershon, home from the Yeshiva College and almost a rabbi now himself. We’d lost the pews and it was now just the plastic-and-tube-steel chairs you could find in any school hall, arranged in four rows of twelve, separated by an aisle.

  That night, there were more than ten congregants if you counted the women, but women don’t count for a minyan. Sitting, waiting, were the Kisch brothers, Woolf Morris, and Attie Pollock, a Jew who spoke English like an Afrikaner; as for the women, it was Ida Morris, Mrs Kisch, Carol, and the Rabbi’s new wife.

  The Rabbi’s wife sat in the front with her hands in her lap. She was a small woman of about twenty-five, and not at all what I imagined a rabbi’s wife to look like, i.e. a sort of witch of very wide and low proportions dressed in black, cocooned in shawls, perhaps carrying a soup ladle. Our rabbi’s wife blushed a lot and wore light blue or pastel yellow.

  Gershon checked his watch, the Rabbi jerked a shoulder, and Julian Gross blew his nose in an oversize hankie.
There was very little of the mystery and ritual architecture of the actual shul in this makeshift one. There was no more bimah; instead, the Rabbi would deliver the service from a low, square lectern.

  If I missed anything from the old shul it was the star-studded lampshades, the light twinkling out the holes. Now the pulsing fluorescents above made my jaw quaver in sympathetic rhythm.

  Then I heard the scrape of sand between sole and linoleum at the back of the hall. ‘Ah,’ said Julian as another member walked through the door. ‘Who is this now?’

  The latecomer walked a little slower than before but his hair still bounced atop his head. The grey streaks weren’t as prominent any more and matched more closely the rest of his hair.

  ‘Well-well-well,’ said Julian Gross.

  ‘Gut Shabbes, everyone,’ said Leo Fein.

  ‘Welcome,’ said the Rabbi uncertainly. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘Thank you, Rabbi,’ said Leo Fein. Gershon handed him a siddur and he took his seat behind me. In all my gefilte-fish-out-of-water years in shul, I never felt my heart run with such anxiety. It took me back, in fact, to the day of my coming of age, when Leo Fein was whisked away by men with moustaches, leaving me with the guilt of betrayal.

  Now he sat at my back, free to do to me anything he pleased.

  The other eight men and four women turned around and nodded and stared at Leo Fein and, because he was directly behind me, their attention (or so it seemed) was on me too.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ said Leo Fein behind me, softly and almost into my neck, in response to some of the tepid welcomes. There was an uncomfortable mix of trepidation and wonder at the man’s reappearance, his second coming, in the faces of the congregants.

  How was I to greet the man I betrayed? Why did he choose to sit behind me of all people? The thought churned in me that he wanted something and, I supposed, I did owe him something. Was it not my fault that he had spent five years in exile? Was I not to blame that my family, too, had been driven into their own kind of banishment?

  I didn’t turn. And as the service began, the fear of turning around brought on a kind of automation in me. I remembered the songs, the responses, the standing and sitting – as if the primitive Hebrew part of my brain knew how to take over while the rest of it fired in more contemporary Jewish panic. I was an insect squeezed under a boot, unable to move. But each time I caught his voice in the hymns and Amens, it jolted me.