Читать книгу Life Underwater - Ken Barris - Страница 8

Simon

Simon walks to shul through the evening light. By now it has softened, and the air is kind. He walks lazily because the synagogue is near and because he anticipates an hour of boredom, of droning voices, in other words, a time devoid of meaning. He knows only one thing will punctuate his boredom: his hatred of Rabbi Greenblatt. The rabbi is a small red-headed man with an irritating goatee. He was Simon’s Bar Mitzvah mentor last year and proved to be a foul-tempered tyrant.

Simon struggled to learn his portion of the Torah. He hardly understood a word of Hebrew, like many of the Jewish boys of Summerstrand. There is a system of punctuation to dictate the melody, a simple musical system that he didn’t understand either. He suffered under the rabbi’s harsh regime, struggling not only to learn a tract of scripture in a foreign language, but to chant it correctly as well. The rabbi suffered too, not gladly, the young fools he was obliged to teach.

Now Simon sits in the back row of the synagogue next to his friend David Goldberg, chatting quietly through the service. Rabbi Greenblatt stops his incantation abruptly, and fiercely looks about. His face is milky and dissatisfied. Even at this distance, Simon can see that caustic face. It helps him hate the rabbi more. The mutter of conversation dies away, and the rabbi continues. He is obliged to halt several times. There is always a constant murmur of voices throughout the service, adults and children alike.

The boy stands up and sits down, automatically, as the congregation rises and falls to the tide of the ritual. He dreams his way through the loosely harmonised murmuring, everyone reading or chanting off by heart, but never at quite the same tempo. His heart lifts when the congregation finally launches into the stirring call-and-response melody that closes the service, and for the first time this evening he sings with real pleasure.

Outside he falls in with his elder brother Jude and walks home with him.

“What did you do with those oysters?” asks Jude, who likes to interrogate Simon about his own business.

“Sold them to Bernard Kessel.”

“What do you charge these days?”

“Sixty-five cents a dozen, ten cents more if we open them.”

“Not bad. I think you and David should charge more, though.”

“Maybe.”

“I reckon you could double that and get away with it.”

“You reckon?”

“Yes, I reckon.”

Simon prefers not to argue with Jude. His brother doesn’t know how to stop arguing.

“You should take up scuba diving,” says Jude. “Now that would be an achievement. Peter Berman goes scuba diving. He says it’s incredible. They go down to Thunderbolt Reef. He says he’s seen a manta ray out there, a huge bloody thing.”

Simon sees himself floating in twenty-five metres of water at Thunderbolt Reef, far out in Algoa Bay. A giant manta ray surges up from below, sending him spinning, making his stomach lurch. He buries the image, and buries the idea that follows even more quickly, that he is a coward. He blushes with shame, grateful it is too dark for Jude to see. His brother is inclined to seize on weakness where he can, and grind on it.

“It was about the size of a car, Peter said. Huge bloody thing.”

“What kind of car?” asks Simon. “A Ford Anglia?”

Jude glances quickly at him in the near dark. Simon turns too, sees a half-smile form on his brother’s face and freeze there in suspicion. Perhaps he fears sarcasm. They walk on.