by Trevor Sacks
Instead, he held my hand, the way he’d done when I was a child, before I became embarrassed by such gestures.
‘It’s late to be angry,’ he said.
Shadrack made it clear, as he always did in his gentle way, what a child I still was. I was isolated in my anger and felt ashamed of having such feelings while Ma was dying. In fact, my anger was hollow, like Leo Fein’s stuffed birds, a stand-in for the feelings I was avoiding in the face of Ma’s death.
By the time I received a message that Leo Fein had something for me, my anger had withered. If it was money he had for me, maybe I could be useful instead of angry. I returned to the Nedbank building, riding the lift to the twelfth floor and found at my old desk a black kid of about my age. He had sorted the post into the in-tray and was writing out the cheques for Leo Fein’s signature.
‘Is he here?’ I asked.
‘No. He’s out.’
‘Did he tell you to say that?’ I said, taking a seat.
‘He’s not here. He’s not coming in.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. The kid went back to writing out the cheques, copying the totals from a sheet of paper.
‘You’re doing it wrong,’ I said.
He glared at me for a second, then picked up the chequebook and turned his head to the side. ‘I thought you write here, in the lines.’
‘Can I show you?’ I said.
He hesitated, then pushed the book and the pen to me. I wrote the amount in words across the lines in the backdrop design.
‘Isn’t it supposed to go in the blocks?’ he asked.
‘I did it wrong the first time, too.’
He shrugged.
A contingent of black men walked out of Leo Fein’s office. Some wore ties and lapel badges in the colours of a recently unbanned organisation.
Leo Fein shook their hands warmly and thanked them for stopping by. A man with spectacles with heavy black rims approached the kid at the desk and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Work hard, Johannes,’ he said to him.
‘Yes, Doctor,’ said the kid.
The man with the spectacles shook my hand too, though he didn’t recognise me.
Leo Fein noticed me. ‘You’ve met before – at the farm. These two cut sugarcane together.’ I stood up, remembering then the Doctor and Johannes from the cane field.
‘An old friend, isn’t it?’ said the Doctor. ‘You still like sugarcane?’
Johannes, the kid with the chequebook, looked at me anew; no doubt, I had an equally startled look on my face as the group of men stared at me, awaiting an answer.
‘It’s too sweet for me,’ I said.
‘Lucky for you. The problem is when you become accustomed to it. Then nothing’s sweet enough.’
Leo Fein said goodbye to the Doctor and his colleagues, and invited me inside his office. I approached Elliot’s collages of weapon-slinging metalheads, hanging side by side on the wall.
‘I hope they appreciate fast – I want them off my wall,’ said Leo Fein. ‘But now this I understand. Such movement, don’t you think?’ He turned to a familiar body that straddled the entire surface of his desk, a legavaan, frozen mid-stride with small obsidian eyes in its head.
‘It’s for the Bishop. He admired my birds so much, and I’ve wanted to give him a present. Then this turned up.’
I thought of the birds I once admired in Leo Fein’s study. Gutted, filled with sawdust, twisted into poses, they represented to me now a great misapprehension of life. And I imagined the reptile in the Bishop’s office years from now, dusty, stiff, moth-eaten and still filled with nothing but sawdust.
‘Come,’ he said, returning to me, ‘let me give you your bonus.’
Perhaps it was this reminder of Leo Fein’s gifts, that they were only ever down payments, that caused me to change my mind. Even the risks he took on behalf of the Doctor and Johannes seemed to have brought some kind of recompense. Once more anger rose up, replacing my resolution for usefulness. ‘No, I don’t want it.’
‘What? You deserve it.’ They were damning words indeed. ‘You made it happen.’
‘Made what happen?’
‘The deal with the ZCC.’
‘If you’re selling arms to the ZCC now, I don’t want a part of it. I don’t want to know about it.’
‘What would the ZCC do with arms? They’re a church. It’s funeral policies I’m talking about. I had the idea one day in my study. There’s a million people waiting for a funeral they’re worthy of.’
‘And the Bishop went for this idea?’
‘The Bishop knows good business when he sees it.’
We walked back to the front desk and Leo Fein took the chequebook from Johannes. In his meticulous hand he wrote out a cheque and gave it to me. I folded it and put it in my pocket.
‘You deserve it,’ he said again. ‘And listen, there’s more work in this if you want. Someone’s got to write the sales materials, the brochures and so forth. You’ve got the mind for it, you know.’
‘Bye, Leo,’ I said.
My bonus bought Ma a trip to Joburg and a round of treatment in a private hospital. With new doctors and new tests, she was reminded of her helplessness. I tried to be calm around her but the way she cried, with a keening, stricken murmur, it scared me too.
The doctor, a small stiff man with dark-grey and silver hair oiled in a side parting, was plain-speaking. ‘It’s not worth it,’ he said. ‘You can keep coming here but she may as well go home.’
‘We’ve only started the treatment, though,’ I said.
‘She’s come too late. The treatment will help stop the seizures but it’s temporary. She feels numb, a little pins-and-needles, a little dizzy; she’s lucky there’s no pain.’
For the next five weeks we took turns at Ma’s side and every day we noticed another piece of her fall away. Our mother would have watched the daily accumulation of abilities in each of her sons from birth; now we witnessed their daily diminution in her as she approached death.
Her speech one day was slow, the next, slurred on L’s, and by the following week there were gaps in sentences as her tongue became more and more obstructive. The numbness down her left side became near-paralysis, then it swept over the right side.
She walked, then stepped, then shuffled, then sat. Her fingers, once capable of the fine detail she’d etch into her pottery, and an elegant calligraphy to rival Leo Fein’s, became spongy in their grip.
By this time we’d moved her bed into Carol’s living room so that, if she was dying, at least she would have life around her. So it was that the furniture gave way to her illness. It was surely a sign that this was a one-way trip, though I pretended not to recognise it.
Carol’s cleaner didn’t come to work for a week after seeing one of the seizures, saying she was sure my mother was possessed by evil spirits. Will told her to stay away, but it brought to mind my own baptism at Zion City Moria. I brought Shadrack from the cement wall plant to see Ma.
He took out his hankie and wiped his eyes when he saw her. Shadrack could hardly bring himself to speak, and so Ma, as if in answer to an inquiry into her health, said impetuously, ‘I’m dying, Shadrack!’
I took him outside and we talked there.
‘You must bring her to the Bishop,’ said Shadrack.
‘He won’t help, Shadrack.’
‘You know him. Maybe it can work.’
‘Not for her.’
‘She will be okay. Yes-thanks.’
‘No, she’s right – she’s dying.’
Shadrack wiped his eyes while I held his hand.
After his visit Ma asked me not to bring anyone, not even to tell anyone else that she was ill and dying. Shadrack still came once a week anyway with the avocados she loved.
My daytime nodes now were Ma’s nodes and they filled my hours with her cups of tea, or soup, or pills, or pillows, or TV. It was a vigil and a duty, an occupation, but I kept at a distance the idea that each day was one of a finite series of appointments to spend time to
gether (as some acquaintances were wont to advise; I began to understand Ma’s wish to cloister herself).
I would make no move out of my ordinary pattern; I was successful at this self-deception and for the most part regarded my chores as a regular drag, and wiled away the time in bored conversation of things we’d covered before over the years. It was the kind of complacent relationship I’d had with her most of my teenage years. If ever I felt ashamed at not making the most of every moment together, I suppressed it; Ma had always felt contemptuous of that kind of sentimentality.
When we spoke, it was mostly of the everyday things like breakfast, or to express annoyance at each other’s habits, or about Carol’s idiosyncrasies. Though we were all grateful for Carol’s generosity, we were a family who could never resist talking behind someone’s back, if there was anything to talk about, and Carol’s insistence on writing notes and labelling everything made the grade.
On an electric plate warmer: SWITCH OFF. On the security gate: LOCK TWICE. On one of a trinity of kitchen bins: GLASSES HERE. On her freezer: THIS DOOR DOESN’T CLOSE PROPERLY – PUSH HARD AND MAKE SURE. These notes were handmade in different colours and were not meant just for us (since they’d existed before we arrived) but for her.
Carol’s voice was another source of juvenile amusement for us (‘ice’ and ‘arse’ were vocally identical), as were her conversations with Shoshana over the phone. Here her voice modulated up a tone, and the questions and advice to the poor girl were so invasive they made us cringe: ‘But what kind of discharge?’
We collected these peculiarities of Carol’s existence to pore over for our amusement later, and one day after we’d done with them, Ma fell silent for a moment, and settled into a reverie. Out of the blue, she said, ‘I miss him, you know?’
It was with some trepidation that I asked: ‘Leo Fein?’
‘God, no,’ she said. ‘Your father.’
In the full expanse of my childhood, I don’t ever remember her saying this before.
‘It’s not fair, is it – what you got; you missed out. Oh, he wasn’t like fathers you see today, you know – involved. He was only interested in children when they started to speak. A bit impatient.’
To hear of a fault of his gave my father a human shape. It gave me an idea of him I’d never had before, of a real person. I’d heard the rest – his steadfast honesty, his friendship and lack of pretence. Leo Fein had not been alone in saying, as he had in Meyer Levinson’s garden all those years before, that my father was a good man.
‘Honest, yes,’ said Ma, ‘too honest, sometimes. I could never make up excuses for turning down an invitation. “Just tell them I don’t want to see them.” But I’d have to be the one to tell them, wouldn’t I?’
I’d never doubted her admiration for him, but admiration keeps its distance, whereas fondness has intimacy. She spoke of his fondness for her, for me, and I gained a fuller understanding of her loneliness in the years after his death, one that hadn’t been available to me as a child.
Finally, at the end of her life, she was allowing herself to look back. For me, however, the past had always been present, inescapable, so the night in the Acropolis Café came easily to mind.
I told Ma the story as I recalled it. She was the only person who might know the truth of that Sunday night. The missing elements were a mystery I’d always believed might somehow explain my genesis, my entanglement with Leo Fein, my weak character, my future path. So who’d had more of a hand in shaping my life? Leo Fein or Eddie Aronbach? The skatofatsa or the good father? Who was it who’d handed me the packet?
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said, once I’d finished. ‘Why would lucky packets be illegal?’
The details that made the story significant to me were an irrelevance to Ma. Instead of the scene in the Acropolis all those years ago, she talked now about the future. She told me what she hoped for me – love and learning and adventure and safety and happiness, all the things mothers hope for their children.
I’ve often thought about why she avoided answering me. Perhaps the metastases had jumbled her mind so she couldn’t grasp the question. But maybe she was trying to say that, despite my having known my father for only five or six years (she was sure it was five), he’d shaped my life as much as she and Will and Elliot and Shadrack had. She was trying to downplay Leo Fein’s role, to take it down a notch, to free me of it.
Perhaps she was simply choosing, now, to talk only about what she wanted to, about the future, though a future she wouldn’t be part of, and to remind me that I was the one to direct my life, not Leo Fein, nor my father, nor Will, nor her.
But I don’t believe any of us escape our pasts entirely. The dreams and visions of our histories, whether true signs or the detritus of the mind, are ours, the private manufactured goods of our inner machinery. We feel ownership over them; truly, they have ownership over us.
Even now, nearly twenty years after Ma’s passing, I’m left wondering who I am at heart. In one sense, I was exonerated of my imagined crimes against Leo Fein; but it’s impossible to regain your original innocence.
And, in fact, I did betray the man, in my intentions and my actions, even if the events that followed weren’t truly of my making. It darkened my childhood, it caused me to hide things from my family, it drew me back to Leo Fein’s camp and his liaisons – my liaisons – with the worst of the worst.
The unpleasant question remains: how much of Leo Fein is part of me? I thought that, by setting down the stories on the page, I’d have a clearer picture, but I expect it won’t be long before I begin to unwind it all, and to replay the scene in the Acropolis Café, hoping this time to glimpse my father’s face.
Acknowledgements
You’re supposed to write for the joy of writing, or the artistic challenge, or because of a burning need to express what you have inside, but not for the approval of others, lest it produces a pandering style or dilutes your ‘truth’. Well, I’ve written for all those reasons at some point or other; but, more than anything else, it’s been the encouragement of others that has sustained my writing of this novel. I thank you all:
My family, who were my most dedicated readers.
Imraan Coovadia, who helped me select a suitable story, then set me free to write it, and without whose constant enthusiasm I would never have completed it.
Carolyn, Helené, Stevlyn and the team at Kwela for your warmth, encouragement and ceaseless work.
Angelo Skordi, for the story that inspired Leo Fein.
B.N., for the information on services at Zion City Moria. I took great licence with the truth when it comes to the usual practices of the church, and hope I haven’t offended anyone (too much).
Graeme Jenner, for an incredible jacket cover and other design elements – it’s always a joy to collaborate with you. Also, thanks to Graeme J. and Rob McLennan for invaluable music advice.
Susie for such valuable writing and publishing advice.
My army of proofreaders who helped catch my errors in an earlier draft: Beanie, Graeme S., Jared Osmond, Dave Glass, Annette de Klerk, Elliot Powell, Hanneke Schutte, Jonathan Beggs, Mimi Cooper, Mark Grainger.
The writing group at UCT, whose own writing I miss.
Quincy, my spirit animal, whose constant affection nourished me.
And finally, my love, Vicky, the reader whose admiration I crave most, and whose honesty, insight and belief made me work harder.
Summary
Twelve-year-old Ben Aronbach doesn’t fit in anywhere. In his small town in the 1980s, he’s an English-speaking Jew among Christian Afrikaners; among Jews, he’s the latest grudging bar mitzvah boy from a family with little interest in religion. But when he meets Leo Fein, a man who says he knew Ben’s late father, he thinks he’s finally found his place.
It soon becomes clear, though, that the man has designs on Ben’s mother and the family’s modest fortune. As the end of apartheid approaches, Ben is thrust among political fugitives, right-wing extremists, church lea
ders, and renegade military men in an attempt to save his family – and find redemption for his part in their downfall.
“One of the best novels of recent years, and likely the most readable.” – Imraan Coovadia
“An exquisite read!” – Rahla Xenopolous
About the author
Trevor Sacks was born in Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg) and now lives in Cape Town. He’s written non-fiction pieces for the New York Times and n+1, as well as music and lyrics for bands he’s performed in. He began Lucky Packet, his first novel, while enrolled in UCT’s Master’s programme in Creative Writing.
Although set against the backdrop of real political events,
all of the characters and incidents described are fictional and should
not be construed to refer to any actual people, living or dead.
Kwela Books,
an imprint of NB Publishers,
a division of Media24 Boeke (Pty) Ltd,
40 Heerengracht, Cape Town 8001
www.kwela.com
Copyright © 2019 Trevor Sacks
All rights reserved.
No part of this electronic book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Cover design by Graeme Jenner
Cover photos by iStock/Eran Aizen; Shutterstock/rook76; Graeme Jenner
E-book design by Wouter Reinders
Available in print:
First edition in 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0890-9
Epub edition:
First edition in 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0891-6 (epub)
Mobi edition:
First edition in 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0892-3 (mobi)
Table of Contents
Title page
Dedication
Prologue
1986 1. Spandau Ballet