by Trevor Sacks
‘Whatever the details,’ said Will, ‘the fact is, you conned her out of our property and ran off with our money.’
‘And I lost my money too,’ he said and he slapped his chest. ‘Spent five years in exile.’
‘Exile!’ said Bowling Pin.
I couldn’t wait any longer. It was time to confess, here in shul, in front of the Rabbi, my family and everyone, before I was outed. The room rushed at me, and like an automaton I shot up.
‘I got him arrested,’ I said, standing up.
‘Stay out of this, Ben,’ said Will. ‘You’ve got nothing to do with this.’
‘I’ve been working for him.’
No one reacted for a while. ‘Working for him?’ said Ma. ‘That’s your job?’
‘Ben!’ said Carol in a whisper, her hand going up to her mouth.
‘It was to try and get our money back,’ I said.
‘Jeez, Ben,’ said Elliot. ‘I said you’ve got to do something, but not work for him.’
‘Who else could I work for?’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be in the army.’
‘You could’ve gone to Israel,’ said one Kisch.
‘You could be IDF,’ said the other Kisch.
‘What about the plan?’ said Will. ‘Getting the lawyers, going after the skatofatsa?’
‘Northern Horizons – it’s him,’ I said, pointing to Leo Fein. ‘I didn’t know if it was for real or a scam. I had to get our money out. Your money, Carol.’
‘What do you mean, a scam?’ said Julian Gross.
‘I’m in Northern Horizons,’ said Meyer Levinson, clutching his tie clip. ‘I’m deep in Northern Horizons.’
‘Northern Horizons is the best-performing fund of the past five years,’ said Leo Fein as if addressing a boardroom with the very lines I wrote for his annual report. ‘And we believe our best results are ahead of us.’
‘Can everyone settle down,’ said Gershon. ‘We’ll discuss this afterwards. We have to start.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Bowling Pin. ‘You say, you got him arrested?’
‘I wrote a note to my teacher, Mr Coetzee,’ I replied. ‘It said that Leo Fein was involved with terrorists. I was with him one day when – I don’t even know what it was that happened, actually. Maybe he was selling them arms, or helping them escape. I thought they were terrorists. Maybe that’s not even why I did it, really. But I wrote the note.’
‘That’s why he was arrested?’ asked Elliot.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Ma, I’m so sorry – it’s my fault he was sent into exile and we lost all our money.’
The way Ma looked at me then was as if she were seeing me for the first time; or as if she were seeing a thing, not her son, not even a person. A mother doesn’t look her child over from head to foot and back again.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Will and then to Elliot. Will was about to say something more to Leo Fein and sat down instead. Elliot pulled his eyes away from me and looked at Will, then at Ma.
‘That’s not why you were arrested,’ said Bowling Pin. ‘Come on, Dad. You were arrested because you ripped off some government people – you left them out of a deal, and they didn’t like it.’
‘You don’t know anything,’ said Leo Fein, flapping a hand at Bowling Pin and crossing his legs away from him. It was Michael Fein, the mourning son at Leo Fein’s shiva. ‘I don’t know why you’ve come. You ruin everything.’
Michael Fein took on a blank, meek look, a benign smile that sought, perhaps, to alleviate the strong feelings in the room. Is this what it’s like to be Leo Fein’s real son? I thought. Leo Fein began to walk through the chairs towards the aisle.
‘You know,’ said Ma, ‘I would have given you more than just money. You poor, poor man, Leo.’
He kept on walking without turning back.
‘You didn’t get him arrested,’ said Michael Fein. ‘I don’t know about your note, but that’s not what got him arrested. He did business with the wrong people. That’s what happened. We had to leave in a hurry.’
Where did Michael Fein find the strength to speak out against his father after all this time? The impression I got of him at his father’s shiva, was of a man adrift, floundering. If my time as Leo Fein’s stand-in son was filled with such tortuous deceit, what had it been like for Michael? Living through his father’s staged death, his faux exile, witness to countless cons of government con artists. Perhaps the confession in shul was a relief for both of Leo Fein’s boys.
‘You’re a great disappointment to me,’ said Leo Fein, heading to the door, and in my whirl of feelings from all I’d said, I neglected to determine whether he said those words to me or to Michael.
‘What about the money, you skatofatsa?’ called Will after him.
‘Have you been telling people we’re political exiles?’ asked Michael but Leo Fein was already outside. ‘I’d better go. Sorry.’ Michael followed his father out the hall, calling after him.
Julian Gross and Meyer Levinson were talking seriously with each other at the end of the row of chairs. I heard the name Northern Horizons, and I heard Leo Fein’s Mercedes-Benz driving away.
‘Well,’ said Gershon, slapping his hands to his thighs, ‘we’re down to nine now.’
None of us said anything. None of us knew how to begin to approach one another, I suppose, or how to think about all we’d just heard and said, what to do next.
My confession had been snatched away from me; it was worthless now. My guilt had been snatched away, too, but like a heavy weight that had been lifted, it left an impression, having sat there so long. It would take some time for the sensation to clear.
‘Well, at least there’s no service,’ said Elliot, rising. The rest of us were frozen to our spots: the Rabbi, looking at me with a tender, worried expression; the Rabbi’s wife, looking at her husband with her mouth wide open; Ma, looking dead ahead into space; and Carol, looking at Ma. Will chewed his lips, calculating.
Then there was the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside the hall. ‘They’re back!’ said Gershon, stepping behind the lectern-bimah again. But he cut off his words when he saw who entered. Not one but three men came through the doors. Two giants, black men in suits, and the dowdy figure of the Bishop ahead of them.
‘Shabbat Shalom,’ said the Bishop.
‘Shabbat Shalom,’ said the Rabbi. ‘Can we help you?’
The Bishop regarded the functional hall with its makeshift altar, the plastic-and-tube-steel chairs, the fluorescent lights, and the sparse congregation. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘this is possibly the final Friday-night service in your place of worship?’
‘It was meant to be,’ said the Rabbi, ‘but we don’t have our quorum so we can’t hold it.’
‘If it is not offensive to you, I would like to join in. And if that helps your minyan, then please, go ahead.’
‘You’re not Jews,’ said Gershon. This new event, the arrival of the Bishop, allowed us a rest, a diversion from the prior event whose aura still hung around us.
‘Thank you for your offer,’ said the Rabbi, motioning for Gershon to sit down. ‘I’m afraid it has to be Jewish men to make up the numbers. We can’t have our service tonight.’
The Bishop glanced around the room and saw me between my brothers in the second row. He nodded, then turned to leave. At the door he paused, looked back and said, ‘Good luck.’
‘Who does he think he is?’ said Gershon once he’d left.
‘If he has to go,’ said Ma, standing up, ‘so do we. Come, Carol.’
‘You should let them stay,’ said Elliot. ‘You could keep the shul going.’
We all rose and followed Ma out the hall.
‘Again,’ said Carol, mainly to herself. ‘The shvartsers are always trying to get in here, I tell you.’
* * *
‘I can’t believe you made me go through that,’ said Elliot. We were all squeezed into Carol’s Fiat Uno.
‘There wasn’t even a service, Elliot,’ said Carol.
> ‘I know, but still.’
Pressed between my brothers on the back seat, I tried to untangle my feelings. One was knotted upon another, but at the forefront was fear. All my life I’d been on the outskirts: the English-speaker, the Jew, the believer, the unbeliever. But I’d always had my family.
‘You work for him?’ asked Ma.
‘Not any more,’ I said.
‘What sort of thing?’ asked Will.
‘Paperwork, answering phones, doing the mail.’
‘Sounds dead boring,’ said Elliot.
‘Mostly,’ I said. ‘He has meetings, but I don’t get involved if I can help it.’ It was enough confession and besides, I’d had enough of snitching on Leo Fein.
‘So, what about Northern Horizons?’ asked Carol.
‘I still don’t know what it is exactly. But I have your cheque at home, Carol.’
‘Thank God for that,’ she said.
‘And all this time,’ said Ma, ‘you thought you were to blame? For the money I lost?’
‘He stole, you mean,’ said Will, correcting her.
‘I thought I turned him in,’ I said. ‘I thought that was why he left with our money.’
‘Why did you write the letter?’ asked Ma. ‘What did you see, Ben?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. How would I answer? That I didn’t want to share Ma with a man like Leo Fein? I hadn’t been able to construct a good enough narrative to explain it even to myself in ways that I could live with.
We sat in silence while, I suppose, everyone considered my reasons. Finally, Will said, ‘That skatofatsa deserves more than exile.’
Elliot put a hand on Ma’s shoulder. ‘Can you imagine how fucked up things would have been if you’d stuck with him?’
I was grateful for that, and it seemed enough for everyone, even me.
‘You never said anything,’ said Ma. ‘Why?’
‘I thought you’d blame me. It was so bad, what happened to all of us.’
‘Worst for you,’ she said.
I rode along, wedged between my family in that small cabin, scot-free. I’d imagined repercussions after coming clean with them, that I’d be flung out of the family, treated as an abomination. They’d be a unified force against me, not even sitting shiva like devout families do for living sons who’ve gone wayward, but letting their jet of hatred burn full-blast forever.
None of it had come to pass. It had burned off like vapour. For five years I’d let guilt define me, contort me, hobble me. Over the next few days I tried to pick through my feelings, trying on the idea of relative innocence to see if it suited me.
I felt free, but puzzled at the feeling and found myself laughing, shuddering myself out of reverie. I exhausted myself thinking about it and couldn’t rid myself completely of the imprint five years of guilt had left: I had, after all, written that note, even if it hadn’t found its mark.
On Saturday I asked Marieke if I could see her to tell her something serious. She was nervous to talk to me, looking at me askance. When I told her all I’d been through in the past five years, my mistaken guilt, the responsibility I’d felt for my family’s misfortune, her shoulders dropped.
‘Ah, fuck,’ she said with relief. ‘I thought you were gonna tell me something bad.’
‘Marieke, did you hear what I said, though?’
‘Ja, but if no one’s upset or blaming you, then what’s the big deal? Let’s go to a movie – I’ve got to look after Danie this afternoon.’
So we took Danie to Silence of the Lambs. The staff at the Astra Cinema didn’t mind selling us a ticket, though he was underage, since they knew him as a regular movie-goer and inattentive movie-watcher. While Marieke and I held sweaty hands, Danie curled himself over his Electrolux brochure with his small torch, looking up and laughing at the worst parts in the film.
Marieke may have been able to still the remnants of guilt that worked inside me, but not the anger that rose up in its place. After all, whatever my deceit, only one person was actually responsible for whipping away the Aronbachs’ source of income and security, our independence and our future. Finally I could join Will’s fury at Leo Fein without the encumbrance of my complicity; I planned what revenge I could take on him.
* * *
By the evening, the results of the referendum were in. Over two-thirds of white South Africa had voted yes in favour of negotiations and the end of apartheid. Our town, though – the only region in the country to do so – had said no.
Marieke and I sat cross-legged in front of the TV on the floor of Victor’s living room, holding hands; Victor, meanwhile, held his tongue. I’m certain it was a struggle not to make me or Marieke squirm with an embarrassing comment, and I suspect I have Nadine to thank for it.
Ma was absorbed by the news reports and results. I couldn’t remember when last I’d seen her so immersed in anything. She was joyous at the yes vote, ordering Victor to find her the good whisky, and downright spitting at our town’s no.
Our town aside, it was a confirmation that most white people in the country recognised the foolishness of continuing a false form of government, and admitted the wrongdoing all around them. If, like Victor, they did it because they wanted their sports team to compete, or didn’t want to hide the fact that they were white South Africans when they took their overseas holidays, or because it was good for business, or because they really felt it to be right, it didn’t matter that evening. Many more than expected had turned out and many more than expected had said yes.
Whereas before I’d felt change all around me, coursing and surging around my legs, now I gave myself to its current; I felt part of the change, blind to where it would push us, but hopeful and heady with new possibilities.
As for the town, if it had a soul, somehow its flourishing had been cramped; it was deformed, ingrown. But despite the shame of the result it had spat out, the rest of the country had been our saviour.
As children, Jackie and I would look at the map of the world in my bedroom in Jorissen Street and wonder why our families had ended up in this town. Why couldn’t it have been London, or New York, or Chicago? Even Moscow and Danzig sounded better to me. They had their own literature, music, architecture, sense of place. What did we have? We were stuck between cultures – the white volk who dominated us, the black folk who were separated from us, the rest of the world who rejected us.
You’re given no choice where you’re born; maybe you’re not given much choice about anything.
All week after the referendum, our town would be mentioned in newspapers and TV reports around the world, described as a conservative bastion, a stubborn right-wing outpost, the backward spoilsports of the world. We were finally on the map.
EPILOGUE
Ma fell completely unconscious one morning and remained that way into the evening. When her breathing took on a click and rattle, a sound unlike my mother’s breath (for breathing is like the voice: connected uniquely with a person), Carol sent the three of us to bed and said she’d stay up with her.
Ma’s body was still warm in the morning and Carol, who’d been sitting up with her until her death before 6 am, told me to spend time with my mother. I could tell her goodbye, she said.
I could hold her soft hand. I could tell her I loved her. I could call her ‘Mommy’. Like a stupid letter, I thought, which had no way to reply.
She’d had her first seizure a few weeks after the referendum. Victor and Nadine had left for Perth already, and Ma, Will, Elliot and I were staying with Carol. I’d just returned from Marieke’s house and saw Ma shaking, and her eyes flickering like a film reel come to the end. To see her like that left us all vacant when it came to actually doing something – all except Carol, who’d had the sense to call an ambulance.
An X-ray soon pulled the shroud from her body and we could easily see the clouds in the lungs (thirteen) and the brain (four, as far as I could make out, but I didn’t like to look).
Metastasis. It was a new word to me, one I couldn’t look
up in the Encyclopedia Americana because it was long gone with the family fortune, nor in the Britannica because it had been jettisoned by Nadine in the streamlining for Australia.
How long had they been there, germinating? Leo Fein, the loss of Great North, the hurts and disappointments of three sons – metastases all, emanating perhaps from the original affliction: the death of Eddie Aronbach.
I wondered at their cause, and it was the thought of Leo Fein that drove the gears of some internal motor in me, one that had once churned out guilt and now sputtered anger. All my fantasies of revenge had played out weakly and impotently; nothing I could think up would have the power to harm him. I knew how he’d shrug off my assaults before I even played out each fantasy to its apotheosis.
I couldn’t even rely on Will as an ally any more. In the face of Ma’s illness, he’d dropped the pursuit of Leo Fein and taken on a new rationality. ‘Forget him, buddy,’ he told me. ‘We’ll chase him for years and never get anything out of him.’
‘What about Ma?’
‘Ma wouldn’t want you wasting your time.’
I didn’t bother going to Elliot to confirm my anger, or for help in designing a plan to extract justice. In my desperation, I went to Shadrack. I explained how Leo Fein was to blame, why he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.
‘You’re angry,’ he said.
‘Yes, I’m angry, Shadrack. We should all be angry, and I’m the only one who is. That man stole from us.’
‘Mom is sick.’
I told myself his limited English prevented him from fully grasping the story (certainly, I didn’t have the Pedi or Venda to explain it in any other way), but I’d always used Shadrack to test myself, to test out which road to take; most often I chose what I wanted to hear from him and took the path I was planning on taking all along. ‘Maybe this made her sick. If it weren’t for that man, we would still have Great North, Will would be the boss. I could go to university. We would still have our house, Shadrack, you would still live with us.’
But he was unmoved by all I said.