Lucky Packet

by Trevor Sacks

  ‘And those are the best reasons you can think of, why we should vote yes?’ said Elliot.

  Victor looked bewildered, then said, ‘Well, I think it’s all going to pot anyway. Not one good leader on this continent.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the referendum,’ said Carol. ‘No, tomorrow night could be the last Shabbes. The Rabbi’s leaving, and then Silberhaff will do the rounds, they say. He’s got to do from Louis Trichardt all the way down to Warmbaths.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Victor.

  Elliot hoisted his eyebrows sarcastically and chewed on his lamb chop.

  Carol sighed. ‘We can only hope we get a minyan together for it. It’s been touch and go the last few months.’ She looked up expectantly but everyone had their mouths full, or made sure they filled them quickly.

  ‘We’ll be there, Carol,’ said Will.

  ‘Pshh,’ said Elliot.

  ‘We’ll all be there,’ said Will.

  ‘We’ll be there, Carol,’ I said, too.

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ said Carol, a pleased look seeping into her face. ‘At least finish things off respectfully.’

  When we were clearing the plates, Elliot cornered Will in the kitchen. ‘What the hell did you say that for? I’m not going to shul.’

  ‘You will go to shul, and so will you,’ Will said, pointing at me.

  ‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘I think we should all go.’

  ‘You can go, but I’m not,’ said Elliot. ‘If the community is dead, good. They’re a bunch of narrow-minded freaks who always hated us, anyway.’

  ‘That may be,’ said Will, ‘but this isn’t about Jews or shul. This is about her. She’s helped us out more than our own family. And it’s important to her, so stop being a selfish child and do something for someone else for once.’

  For a few seconds I expected a fight, as both of them held their tongues. I thought maybe Elliot would take up a fork and begin to chase Will around the kitchen as he’d once done when we were all children, but he cleared his plate in silence.

  Elliot went to the living room and turned on the TV to watch the news and I followed him. ‘Fine, I’ll go,’ he said.

  ‘Okay, then.’

  ‘So you’re back together with Marieke?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘Well, you know more than me, then.’

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing me an envelope. I read the letter inside:

  Letters are fucking stupid. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for helping my brother. He’s a doos, but he’s still my brother, you know? Are you going to vote tomorrow? See? I ask a question and you can’t even answer it. That’s letters for you … stupid. So, if you’d like to see me, come to vote at Noordskool tomorrow at 2:30. By the drinking taps. Wear something sexy cos I will.

  XXX

  Marieke

  ‘Good?’ asked Elliot.

  ‘Good,’ I said, grinning. The newsreader had the cartoon square over his shoulder in which sat illustrations of a hand grenade and a machine gun, drawn in thick black outlines and filled with flat colours. The report spoke of a violent incident in an East Rand hostel, where six people were killed and fourteen injured.

  The warmth I’d felt from Marieke’s note chilled over with the thought of Leo Fein and my confession, which lay in wait for me and my family. After the referendum, I thought; but then I’d have to do it.

  * * *

  Noordskool was the Afrikaans primary school just beyond our old house. I walked there on that clear, warm afternoon and entered the gates along with a steady flow of white citizens.

  They wore their best smart-casuals for the occasion. Ladies stabbed the sports field with their smooth high heels, weighed down by big hair and padded shoulders. The men swung gold chains between the V’s of button-up short-sleeved shirts. There were old ladies in crisp summer dresses come to do their duty and younger ones representing their parties in jungle-print dresses and pantsuits, party-colour rosettes sitting proud on their breasts.

  Along the fronts of the desks and bordering the edges of the tents of each of the political parties were the yes/no posters. The orange, white and blue VOTE YES messages of the National Party, the cluttered VOTE YES FOR A NEGOTIATED CONSTITUTION of the Democratic Party, and the predictable NO TO THE ANC of the Conservatives.

  I cut across the flow of people and headed to the drinking taps in the quadrangle to the left of the fields. I saw Marieke leaning against a wall and my breathing quickened. She looked sulky at first, her arms crossed, but didn’t hold the expression for long; she gave in with a smile as I neared her.

  ‘Did you vote already?’ I asked.

  ‘Stupid question,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I forgot. I’m not supposed to ask stupid questions.’

  ‘No – I mean, I can’t vote yet. I’m seventeen.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Thanks for the other day – with Hannes. He’s an idiot.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Carlien’s mom was there, too. She’s in the Kappiekommando.’

  ‘They’re hardcore,’ I said.

  ‘Ag, you think we’re all like that.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re like that.’

  ‘What do you think I’m like?’

  ‘You’re hardcore in your own way.’

  ‘They told Hannes at one of the meetings that Jews control the world’s gold supply.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘He asked me this morning – “Marietjie, is that really his Mercedes?”’

  ‘It’s nice to see you,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry about The Ranch.’

  ‘Ag, shut up,’ she said. ‘Come, let’s go make a good citizen out of you.’ She kissed me on the cheek and took my hand.

  ‘See there?’ she said, pointing towards a corner hidden by a creeper. ‘That’s where I had my first kiss. Who did you kiss at school?’

  ‘No one,’ I said. ‘But I felt a girl’s boob at the Voortrekker Monument.’

  ‘Nice.’

  We walked towards the tents on the field. Each party had their tables covered in crisp white tablecloths, and flowers sat atop them, splayed out in dome shapes from their green foam cores. Festive balloons in appropriate colours twirled in the air, moored to the table legs.

  People walked between the tables, clutching their green ID books, allowing themselves to be directed to the voting booths in the cordoned-off areas. Police patrolled with rifles slung over their shoulders, and panned over the crowds with careful eyes.

  Accompanying the Conservative Party stall was a brigade of AWB members, newly arrived. They were affixing some of their own paraphernalia. One picture showed a flaming tyre around a charred human body in a township street. ‘YOUR FUTURE?’ read the text.

  Was that the future Victor saw for us, the ones who were staying? And did it coincide with the positive, profitable future Leo Fein saw?

  Another poster showed F.W. de Klerk, labelled ‘THE ANTICHRIST’. One of the khakis was trying to stack tyres next to the tent, to echo the poster, while another had a handwritten sign that read ‘NO NEGOTIATIONS WITH TERRORISTS’.

  As we walked towards the voting stations I saw Gina, and maybe she saw me; I steered our steps in a different direction. ‘So, is Hannes here?’

  ‘The whole family,’ Marieke said.

  ‘Mine too, somewhere.’

  ‘I know. Hannes found Carlien and Elliot – he’s following your brother around, copying him, the same way he used to with Tjoppa.’

  ‘So Elliot has a disciple.’

  ‘Hannes threw away his AWB book.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He should be into Scope and Playboy by now, anyway,’ I said. ‘It’s healthy for a boy his age.’

  ‘Sies. Go vote.’

  I walked to the desk and presented my ID book for the stamp, took a ballot and waited for a booth to open up.

  Behind the screen, it was just me and the
question:

  Do you support the continuation of the reform process which the State President began on 2 February 1990, and which is aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?

  I ticked yes quickly and felt I hadn’t been given sufficient time to savour the importance of this personal act before I’d have to leave the booth. Whether it was legitimate or not to ask this question of the ruling class, it was a chance to submit to the course of righteousness. Whether it brought change, whether it would be painful or complicated, it was right – there was never any question of that. But to be given a chance to say so gave me a sense of might.

  We were never a family of the struggle and I suppose we took the skewed luck apartheid gave all the other white families from the things that were withheld from black families: education, safe neighbourhoods, basic utilities. And not even in direct and obvious ways but in softer ways too, ways that eased paths that may otherwise have been rough, that mollycoddled, that elevated. Some lucky packets were loaded.

  As a family, we didn’t support apartheid, we objected to racist comments, we talked with one another about equality and a non-racialist future. This was Ma’s doing. Each one of us – Ma, Elliot, Will and I – bristled at the word ‘kaffir’. If I heard the K-word (and I heard it plenty in our town), I’d speak out, unless – and this, I suppose, is the dividing line between activist and tacit collaborator – it put me in danger to do so.

  But even if you did speak out – you objected to a racist remark – you’d be treated like you were delicate, as if others were obliged to feel sorry for you, to make exceptions for you, to walk on eggshells for you. To them, saying ‘kaffir’ was like uttering the name of your recently departed relative: to be avoided for fear of upsetting you. They missed the point; you settled for them not upsetting you.

  There was never any doubt that my family wished for fairness and freedom. I’d been tainted, though, and subsumed into Leo Fein’s indiscriminate deal-making. Sure, I’d done it for family, you might say if you were a generous sort; but really, it was just the easiest path I could take.

  By saying yes on the ballot, I was being given a chance to wipe some of that clean. It was a chance to protest against all that had gone on before. I wished then, as I stood over my cross, that it wasn’t a secret ballot but an open one, so I could show my disapproval of all of it, of everything that had gone on in my name.

  Having felt for so long that my future was not of my own choosing, here I was, finally being given a simple choice, yes or no, this or that, a glimpse into the lucky packet.

  I walked to the box and inserted the folded sheet, lingering there as my fingertips waggled the final corner into the slot. Then I looked up and found Marieke.

  She was looking at a small woman in her fifties who was shouting angrily up at the block-like figure in khaki and his cohort of six or seven other young AWB men. The men stood silently, a little aghast even, as she barked at them.

  She was admonishing them like a mother. She was my mother. She took her hand from her hip and formed a fist; she was pounding into her palm with this fist; she was stirring the air in front of the man’s face with this fist. This same fist belonged to an arm that, moments ago, was without feeling.

  ‘This is disgraceful,’ Ma was saying, pointing up at the gruesome picture of the necklacing. ‘You’re just trying to frighten people. Take that down.’

  ‘That woman is ang-gry,’ said Marieke.

  ‘That’s my mom,’ I said, hardly able to believe it. ‘She’s not normally like this.’

  One of the young men in khaki dashed around the back of the pile of tyres, dousing them with petrol from a square plastic bottle.

  ‘Don’t you dare light that thing,’ said Ma. ‘You’re bullies, you are. Cowards. Have some respect, and let people vote how they like.’

  ‘Do you want a civil war?’ said the man in khaki, becoming agitated himself and pointing at a picture of the necklacing. ‘This is what they do to their own people. Imagine what they’ll do to us.’

  ‘You’re the ones we should be scared of,’ said Ma. ‘A future with you lot – that’s scary.’ Lit by her own interior flame, she tried to grab a box of matches from the man. She was the strongest I’d seen her in years: her voice was unashamed and roaring, her eyes unyielding, her body at the ready.

  The man snatched the box to his breast and asked her to move away for her own safety; he called her dame, madam, tannie, lady, aunty. Finally, in no uncertain terms, he warned her to step back with an outstretched palm.

  ‘I won’t move,’ she said.

  I left Marieke and stepped forward to try pull Ma away from the scene while the men in khaki widened their circle and one among them opened the matchbox. I got there too late and I could feel the heat where I was, pushing out from the initial rush of flame.

  I grabbed Ma at the same moment Elliot arrived with three policemen. Carlien came behind two others who were trotting with fire extinguishers they’d taken from the school corridors. The fire was dead before it had taken hold of the tyres themselves.

  It was an unusual scene: Elliot was allied with cops; Ma was shouting and raging; also, Carlien had shaved her hair off completely, and her features, thrust into the limelight, were strong enough to hold their beauty still.

  We examined Ma. She had singed eyelashes but was otherwise unharmed, except that she shook a little and her jaw was stiff. I explained to Marieke that there would be a better time to meet my mother.

  ‘Where did that come from?’ said Elliot to Ma as we walked her towards the school gates.

  ‘Do you feel okay, Ma?’ I asked.

  ‘I feel great,’ she said. ‘Let’s go paint the shul wall.’

  ‘Cool it, Patty Hearst,’ said Elliot. ‘Wait till tonight at least.’

  * * *

  For the first time since my bar mitzvah, all three Aronbach boys and our mother were back in shul. None of us wanted to be there, but it was for Carol. I had a particular ache to be with Marieke, now that I’d seen her again, and to run away from the confession I knew I’d have to make eventually. After Ma’s outburst at the referendum I put if off again. After shul, I told myself.

  Gershon checked his watch, the Rabbi paced, the Rabbi’s wife sat with her hands in her lap, and Carol looked with loving wonder to my brothers and me and back to Ma. We’d been sitting for ten minutes, with Elliot taking two smoke breaks outside already. ‘It’s getting late,’ said Gershon.

  ‘Fein said he’d be here,’ said Julian Gross and Will snapped his head in the direction of that utterance. I looked over at Ma, rubbing her arm. Carol took her hand, and patted it, as if she’d suffered a shock; perhaps she had.

  It shocked me, too: Leo Fein was going to be here in the same room as Ma, me and my brothers. I hadn’t considered it; I should have confessed my sins earlier.

  ‘Even so, it’ll only be eight,’ grumbled Meyer Levinson.

  ‘I think we’d better call it quits,’ said the Rabbi.

  ‘He said he was coming,’ said Gross.

  ‘I’m going for a smoke,’ said Elliot.

  ‘Stay put,’ said Will.

  ‘I don’t think it’s gonna happen,’ I said hopefully.

  Joel and Nathan Kisch and their mother arrived and took their places. ‘Yes!’ said Gershon, pulling a fist. ‘We only need one more.’

  ‘What about Woolf Morris?’ said one of the Kisch brothers.

  ‘In Canada already,’ said the other one.

  ‘We don’t have much longer,’ said the Rabbi.

  There were footsteps on the gravel outside and we all turned our heads to the door. I had the urge to hide somewhere but knew it was too late to avoid my fate.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Gershon, bending to see through the doorway. ‘Eleven!’

  Leo Fein nodded to everyone as he walked in, accompanied by a smiling man in his thirties whose head seemed dragged down by the weight of his belly. He was shaped, in short, like a distended bowling pin and, though he looked familia
r, I didn’t recognise him as one of the regulars from my shul-going period. I noticed Will fidgeting, working up to something.

  ‘Right,’ said Gershon, flouncing up to the makeshift bimah, ‘let’s start.’

  ‘Last time I saw you in shul you were being arrested,’ said Will, turning around to talk to Leo Fein.

  ‘Now, there’s no need for that,’ said Julian Gross.

  ‘You were there, Julian,’ said Will. ‘Don’t you remember him being arrested for stealing money from a widow with three children?’

  ‘That’s not what happened exactly,’ said Leo Fein. ‘I never stole from your mother. And I certainly wasn’t arrested for it.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Gershon from the bimah. ‘We have to start.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Will, ‘she just misplaced it, did she? You ripped off a vulnerable woman, Fein. She sold our property to invest in some scam with you. Don’t deny it.’

  ‘Hello, Margot,’ said Leo Fein, politely leaning into his greeting across the aisle to the women. ‘It’s nice to see you.’

  Ma turned her head away from him.

  ‘I was arrested,’ he said, continuing to Will, ‘for something unrelated. Political. And I lost everything too. I didn’t scam anyone.’

  I was too tense to breathe even, watching the scene compress to a point of infinite density at the spot in the room where I stood. I had to speak before he did.

  ‘Please, let’s stop this,’ said the Rabbi. ‘Now’s not the right time. This could be the last Shabbes we have here.’

  ‘Political, my arse,’ said Will, ignoring the Rabbi. ‘How can you show your face here again, you skatofatsa?’

  ‘It was out of my hands,’ said Leo Fein. ‘They were trumped-up charges. Hey, I didn’t ask for that – I tried to help her. I was trying to help you, Margot.’

  ‘Help me, Leo?’ said Ma, speaking to the man for the first time in five years. ‘You painted a very different picture back then. The money was the least of it. All those letters you sent. The poetry.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ said Leo Fein.

  What the burning tyres had ignited in Ma was still smouldering. This was a fight that hurt more than the earlier one with the AWB men, I knew.