Читать книгу Lucky Packet - Trevor Sacks - Страница 10

SATANISTS

Uncle Victor and Elliot’s relationship was one that continually surprised me. I’d missed its germination, since it had started before I was born, but when Elliot was a boy the two would go to professional wrestling matches together. It’s hard to imagine Elliot enjoying such an event at any time of his life, but the fights cemented a mutual affection that lasted beyond Elliot’s childhood days.

Victor grew up in a place without a shul, had never had a bar mitzvah, and never practised the religion. But he was proud of being a Jew. Whenever a Jew of some prominence came into the discussion, he would list great personages of history who may have been Jewish, and we’d say Victor was playing ‘Who’s a Jew?’ again.

Sometimes the claims were dubious. ‘Julius is a very Jewish name,’ Victor said of Caesar and my aunt Bernice just glared at him. Whoopi Goldberg wasn’t out of the running completely, either. ‘She’s in Hollywood,’ said Victor. ‘Look at Sammy Davis, Jr. I’m just saying it’s possible.’

While Victor was a one-man Anti-Defamation League in town, scouring it for anti-Semitism, it did not preclude him from using other forms of bigotry himself. But in our town, that was more or less expected of everyone, even Jews.

It’s true that some South African families sacrificed their nice Jewish boys and girls to Causes, perhaps more than their fair share, and Victor would be able to list every last Jewish bomber, unionist, mastermind and Red. But for the most part, our small-town Jews had opinions on race very much like the other white English speakers. If broad experience begets broad views, perhaps urban Jews had them, but our small town begot small minds, Jew and Gentile alike.

While no supporter of Afrikaner national ideology, I believe Victor voted National Party (which would have counted as liberal in some quarters in our town anyway). He also sprinkled living-room talk with the K-word and bemoaned the laziness of Transvaal blacks (Natal blacks were much better, he said).

Yet no representative of any so-called type retains his sharp edges under greater magnification. Victor’s brand of racism worked on a macro level. But on the micro level, when he actually dealt face to face with black people, his affable self emerged. He couldn’t help himself. I believe he truly liked his black clients (of whom, it must be said, there were increasing numbers).

How Elliot maintained his loving relationship with a man who had exactly the kind of attitude Elliot railed against, I’ve never been able to fathom. Perhaps it had something to do with a bond formed in the aftermath of our father’s death; perhaps Victor was Elliot’s Leo Fein.

Not long after the flag and menorah protest, the high school came by the intelligence that my brother was involved. Ma took a phone call from the headmaster, Mr Cullinan, saying that they’d found a can of blue spray-paint in Elliot’s school bag. Cullinan was a man with an already hostile predisposition towards my brother and he asked my mother whether, as a single parent, she’d prefer the school to punish Elliot.

‘Don’t you touch him,’ she said down the phone. ‘Just send him home right away.’

Worried that Elliot would be expelled from school, she called Victor. My uncle was ready to defend Elliot against anyone, and even more so in the case of Cullinan since he’d already built up a store of antagonism towards him. He’d overheard the headmaster call Abe Kotzen a Jewboy at the country club some time back and, although Victor had contempt for Abe Kotzen for the way Abe bullied his own son, he believed the remark was inexcusable. When Abe thanked my uncle for defending him, Victor had told him, ‘Abe, you may not be a Jewboy, but you’re still a fucking cunt.’

I don’t know if Victor considered himself a Zionist, but I think if anyone else had painted the swastika, it would have been different. Because it was Elliot, Victor saw only a favourite nephew who needed protecting from a bully. And since he liked to lord it over his little sister, a tendency that only worsened with time, he liked to relay to us at Sunday-night family dinners the details of his confrontation with Cullinan.

Victor told us how he’d called up the headmaster and told him what a coward he was. Then he’d taken him through such twists and squirms until Cullinan actually began to believe that expelling my brother would amount to an inexcusable anti-Semitic act.

‘But Julian Gross himself called me up to ask me to keep an eye on the boy,’ said Cullinan, the way Victor told it.

‘And who is Julian Gross? He doesn’t represent every Jew in town, let me tell you, sir. Don’t you know about the Holocaust, Cullinan? About the fascists? There’s a lesson there, my boy. You want to tell a Jew where to live, where to work, to walk through the streets with a star on his arm?’

‘What? Of course not.’

‘Why did six million of us die? Do I need to remind you? So if a Jew wants to paint on the wall of a synagogue, what’s it to you? Not that he did it, mind you. Not at all, but even if he did – would you victimise a young boy for being Jewish? Do you think the other Jews in town are going to like that? Picking on Jews is not advisable, my friend. Not any more. Not since forty-five.’

Uncle Victor’s picture was far from accurate, though, because most Jews in town wanted nothing more than for the perpetrator to be victimised. It was all supposed to be confidential but we saw the Kisch brothers drive past our house several times that week.

‘We never talk about this to anyone,’ said Ma after calling a family meeting with me and Elliot, something I thought only happened in American sitcoms. Victor assured us that Cullinan would avoid Julian Gross’s phone calls, and Elliot told the headmaster the spray-paint can was for an art project. It was never openly revealed outside the family that Elliot had been responsible.

The flag-and-menorah combo was something Ma wanted to keep a family secret. Neither Elliot nor I liked seeing her scared, fretting on the line to Victor every day. It took all she had to keep a grip on the family, and she threatened Elliot: ‘If you ever do anything like that again, or if you ever talk about it at all, to anyone, I’ll send you to boarding school and you can spray-paint swastikas on the headmaster’s arse for all I care.

‘Ben,’ she said, turning to me, ‘if anyone asks at school, or shul – I don’t care if it’s a kid or a grown-up, or a policeman or a teacher – you say you don’t know what they’re talking about.’

Will tried to get involved, pushing for a full apology from Elliot, and payment for the damage by working, under his watch, at Great North Diesel and Auto Electric. So Ma had to fend Will off, too, and instruct him never to speak a word of Elliot’s transgressions to anyone outside the family – in fact, to shut up about it altogether right this minute.

Uncle Victor was the only one in the family who still wanted to talk about the swastika, and each time I could sense Elliot straining to trap the urge to correct him with ‘modified Israeli flag’. No one talked about the slogan or the menorah. No one got it.

Carol still took me to cheder with Shoshana and her pity for me had only grown deeper. She’d study me as I walked out of the shul grounds to her car, as if the lessons were a dose of strong medicine and she was watching for their effect. The Dorfmans still fetched me for shul and I still slept over at their place from time to time, but Joss always gave excuses when I invited him to mine. Everyone still shook my hand in shul and wished me Gut Shabbes, but I felt more than ever that I was allowed access only through largesse.

With the Rabbi, however, I didn’t notice even the slightest change in attitude towards me. He still joked with me during cheder and explained patiently the things other kids already knew, like how to wear the tallis and how to recite brochas for the wine and bread. But even Disney Yarmulke started giving me a hard time. ‘My dad says you’re not going to have a bar mitzvah,’ he told me after cheder one day. ‘They won’t allow it.’

I began to think it would be better if I didn’t have my bar mitzvah after all. I was just going to mess it up anyway. My Hebrew was unsteady and I was nervous in front of large groups as it was. And now the whole community hated us.

More humiliating than performing in front of an audience – what if no one came? Or they came and were hostile, they threw things at me, booed and hissed? I didn’t get into an argument with Disney Yarmulke because I thought it quite possible he was telling the truth.

Then something happened to divert the darts meant for my family. Another swastika turned up in another part of town. It wasn’t as neat as the stencilled ones outside the shul, but it was fresh to the eyes of the vigilant. This one was on a wall near a reservoir. At school the rumour spread that black candles and painted pentagrams were also discovered in the reservoir grounds one night during a police patrol.

It was unmistakably the work of Satanists, which, in our Dutch Reformed town, usually meant teenagers so bored and angry at their parents that they conjured up the most shocking rebellion they could think of. Two Afrikaans boys from the technical school were arrested and caned by police, the official punishment for misdemeanours committed by minors at the time.

This seemed to cap the matter off in everyone’s heads. En route to cheder, as if to square things with me, Carol said, ‘Well, they caught those Nazis.’

‘Not Nazis,’ said Shoshana, ‘Satanists, Mommy.’

‘Well, I hope they learnt their lesson: not to mess with Jews. Right, Ben?’

Everyone was relieved the Satanists had been caught. Nobody wanted to explore the glaring differences in the two incidents, and nobody talked about the slogan. It was the swastikas that had caused all the trouble and people wanted to put them behind them. Everyone except Elliot.

Ever since the falsely accused Satanists had received their punishment, he’d wanted to come forward and take responsibility. ‘Now you want to own up?’ said Ma. ‘Oh no. Now you shut up, Elliot. We’ve managed our way out of this one, and only just. Don’t mess things up now. Think of your brother – he still has to have his bar mitzvah.’

‘I don’t have to …’ I said.

‘It’s not up for discussion,’ said Ma. ‘Elliot, you’ll do a lot more harm than you’ve already done if you say anything now. And if you do, you’d better pack your bags for boarding school, my boy.’

That threat quelled his rebellion. With Elliot’s resistance limited to long silences and smoking openly, I found the space to raise my own protest. ‘Do I have to have a bar mitzvah?’ I asked Ma. While I still gripped secretly to belief, the idea of standing on the bimah, reading – singing! – in a foreign language was terrifying. And I still had months of cheder ahead of me, with those children I was so unlike, and I so disliked.

‘Once you’ve done the bar mitzvah,’ said Ma, ‘you can do whatever you like. You never have to go to shul.’

‘You don’t even believe in it. What’s the point?’

‘Your brothers did it. Even Elliot. Please, Ben – there’s enough going on right now. It’s almost over.’

Later that day I made a brave sortie to Elliot’s room. Strength in solidarity, I thought. ‘It’s so unfair I have to do a bar mitzvah,’ I said. ‘I mean, you don’t go to shul, she doesn’t – who cares?’

‘Just do it and then it’s over,’ said Elliot, rubbing at a charcoal sketch he was working on. It wasn’t often he tolerated me in his room.

‘I can’t believe you did yours. I’m not gonna do it.’

‘Don’t you get it, stupid?’ he said, pausing from the sketch. ‘She doesn’t make us do it for her, it’s for us. She hates that shit. She thinks it’s bullshit, too – so did Daddy. But what if something happens to her?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like she has an accident, dies.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who’s going to look after you then?’

‘I don’t need anyone to look after me.’

‘Don’t be stupid. Of course you do. She wants us to be able to go to Daddy’s side of the family in case we’re ever in trouble.’

‘I wouldn’t go to them.’

‘You don’t know that. They’re family. Fuck, you’re stupid.’

My father’s side of the family lived in other backward towns and in urbane suburbs of Johannesburg. For me, they were another absent history from a period before my father’s death, from before memory. My brothers had their memories of shared holidays with them, cousins sleeping seven or eight on blankets on the floors of crush-hugging aunts and teasing uncles I hardly knew; I had photo albums and my brothers’ anecdotes, inadequate memories a few steps removed.

I couldn’t help thinking of these dangling links to my father’s family, which inevitably brought me back to the dangling link of Leo Fein, and I felt his loss all over again.

* * *

Usually, Friday-night dinner at the Dorfmans was an ordeal of half-remembered rituals on my part and half-remembered identities on the part of the Dorfmans’ guests. ‘And you are …?’ was the phrase most likely to be heard in connection with me.

On this night, the guests knew exactly who I was, which didn’t make the prospect any more enjoyable, since they were Carol and her daughter. Potato Latke was tamping the chicken down with her jaws when the name of Leo Fein came up.

‘What a thing this is, Gail,’ said Carol.

‘What happened?’

‘What happened was Michael found him alive and well in Joburg.’

‘No,’ said Gail Dorfman with exaggerated disbelief. Mr Dorfman shrugged.

Leo Fein, alive! Joss and I looked at each other.

‘Michael went to Joburg,’ said Carol. ‘He’s got cousins there, you know. He’s never learnt how to look after himself. So he goes out while he’s at the cousins’, to buy cigarettes or who knows, and who does he see eating a big T-bone at MacRib but his flesh and blood, his father.’

‘No,’ said Gail.

‘Well, Michael almost fell over, of course. Not that he and his father have the best relationship, but you don’t see your dead relatives walking around every day, do you?’

‘My God.’

‘So anyway, Michael goes up to his father. He says, “Dad, you’re alive!” Leo is still chewing. He goes like this …’ Carol, playing the role of Leo Fein, stuck out her bottom lip and shrugged one shoulder.

‘Carol, no!’

‘“Dad, what happened?” Michael wants to know. “Oh, you know,” his father says, like it’s just one of those things. Oh, you know! It’s all he says, Gail, and he carries on eating his steak. He’s back from the dead and he doesn’t even invite the boy to come sit with him.’

‘Shame,’ said Mrs Dorfman in sympathy for Michael.

‘He’s been walking the city pretending to be a corpse … not even a corpse – ashes, he’s meant to be! While his son mourns for him. Sits shiva, even though – even though! – his father couldn’t care less.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mrs Dorfman. ‘And the cremation?’

‘The cremation!’ said Carol.

‘He couldn’t have a nice Jewish burial?’ said Joss’s father, as if delivering a punchline.

Mrs Dorfman glanced at her husband impatiently. ‘But why, Carol? Why would he do such a thing?’ she asked.

‘Why does he do anything?’ said Carol, leaning her head forward over the table. ‘Money.’

‘From where?’

‘Search me. But it has to be.’ Carol helped her daughter to more chicken. While Gail Dorfman sat with her mouth still open, I realised I had a smile on mine. The silver Mercedes rides again!

‘What’s Leo Fein involved in, Stephen?’ Gail Dorfman asked.

‘I’ve told you before – it’s high-level stuff,’ said Mr Dorfman.

‘What kind?’

‘It’s way beyond me.’ Mr Dorfman rose up to slice more meat off the carcass.

‘And this thing – first dead, then alive?’

‘Probably a misunderstanding,’ said Stephen Dorfman.

‘Doesn’t sound like a misunderstanding.’

‘Michael’s a schlemiel,’ said Mr Dorfman without looking up from the cooked bird. No one disputed him.

‘Why play dead?’ asked Gail Dorfman.

‘Who knows – to get out of a deal, maybe.’

‘That’s what I’m saying,’ said Gail Dorfman. ‘Wasn’t he showing those Americans around Silicon Smelters? I think that’s what I heard. Am I right, Carol? Where were they from, love? NASA? NASA was looking for silicon for their chips.’

Mr Dorfman saw Joss and I were watching him for a reply. ‘If you believe that …’ he said. ‘Next thing Disney will be here looking for Mickey Mouse. What do you think, hey kids?’

We looked at Mr Dorfman, not sure what kind of joke he was making. NASA was no joke, the Space Shuttle was no joke.

‘It’s exactly the kind of thing that gives Jews a bad name in town,’ said Mrs Dorfman. ‘It’s all we need them to say – “They don’t care about anything but money. Don’t care about their family, not even their own religion or traditions when you dangle money in front of them.” They already think this, and what is this man doing? Playing right into their hands.’

‘Right into their hands,’ said Carol.

‘I don’t think we know the full story here,’ said Mr Dorfman with raised palm, a self-deputised traffic warden against what he saw as runaway hysteria. ‘Leo operates on a different level. NASA? Maybe. Multinationals, politicians, influential people – without a doubt. He’s connected beyond our little world, and good luck to him. He’s got a brain for it.’

‘Well, a brain’s not enough,’ said Mrs Dorfman.

I didn’t see the same faults in Leo Fein that Gail Dorfman and Carol Richler saw. He’d risen from the dead, reconstituted from the ashes, as if death were nothing, a joke the others refused to get. If anything, this latest exploit augmented his legend for Joss and me.

Michael had his father back and what in the world was wrong with that? I’d often imagined my own father ringing the doorbell one day after all those years. I was a spy, Ben. I couldn’t say anything. Secret mission. But have I got stories for you!

What a lucky packet that would’ve made.

* * *

Elliot heard that the boys of his year were to be locked into the school auditorium and made to sign their Defence Force registration papers for National Service, with the teachers standing sentry.

He ducked out of school for the rest of the day, and the next day he evaded the male teachers for as long as he could.

Many of the teachers were fresh returnees from the Angolan border, and they had a craving to blood their young wards in battle. For them it was more than just fulfilling an official requirement; it seemed to give them personal satisfaction to put the sixteen-year-olds in their care on the military’s register.

Elliot couldn’t escape them forever, though, and he told me how it happened. Mr Verwey, the Guidance teacher (who guided Mrs Verwey, our Religious Instruction teacher, with a hand across her face almost nightly, it was said), pulled Elliot out of History, brought him to Cullinan’s office and, with his fingers clamping the back of Elliot’s neck, made him sign the form.

Two weeks later, Elliot was expelled. It disappointed him that the expulsion was for prosaic instead of political reasons: he’d been caught smoking a joint behind the squash courts. Not the sort of high-minded achievement he’d hoped for.

Officially, he was ‘asked to leave’, not expelled, but it amounted to the same thing, except that Cullinan, in between his gloating, was willing to write a reference letter for Elliot’s next stop, the art school in Johannesburg.

It should come as no surprise that Elliot had real talent. He’d applied it in the shul grounds quite skilfully, after all. Whether or not the schoolteachers supported his politics, they couldn’t deny his technique. With the headmaster’s letter and a hurriedly assembled portfolio, he was easily accepted into the Johannesburg Art, Ballet, Drama and Music School.

It happened so quickly, Ma hardly had time to be angry or disappointed. She fell into pragmatic mode, even meeting with Cullinan to discuss the transfer.

Will came home from Joburg to take Elliot back with him. ‘Well, you really fucked up this time,’ he said.

‘You had to wait till you finished school to get out of this dump. Way I see it, I’ve been released early. Sentence reduced for good behaviour.’

‘Ja, well, fuck up again and it’ll be the army for you, loser.’

‘Ag, what do you know? At art school, it’s the teachers who smoke joints in class.’

When I was younger, Elliot refused to hold my hand crossing roads if his friends were anywhere near, and I had to grip onto his shirt. The toughest guy I knew was leaving town; I hung close while he packed.

‘So you’ll probably want my room now,’ he said.

‘Maybe.’

‘You can keep my posters. You gonna bring girls back here?’

‘No.’

‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Who do you like, then?’

I wanted to let fly Georgina Melck’s name, but knowing that I ran the real risk of somehow being humiliated for it, I held on to it.

‘Okay, don’t tell me, then. Do you have protection, though?’ he asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Condoms?’

‘Oh. Then, no.’

‘So, no girls?’

‘No.’

‘Well, come visit in Joburg. I hear those art girls are easy.’

‘Are you sad you’re leaving?’

‘Fuck, no,’ he said straight away. Then after a while, ‘You’ll get out of here, too, soon.’

‘Maybe I’ll also spray-paint the shul wall.’

‘That was a mistake.’

‘You did it twice.’

‘There’s shit going on right here in this country we should be thinking about. Not fucking Israel. That was my real fuck-up.’

When my brothers had left for Joburg, I went back to Elliot’s room. Shadrack was stripping the linen already. I wasn’t there long before Ma came in, too.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose we can talk about you taking Elliot’s room if you want it.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. The room was forlorn without his jeans and stud belts and rolled cardboard lying around. Shadrack balled up the linen and the motion floated a sheet of rough paper to the ground from Elliot’s desk.

Ma picked up the sketch. It was a heavily shaded picture of a Hasid at the Wailing Wall. The rugged stones must have crumbled from the charcoal stick as he drew it, and the figure’s hat and coat sat thick on the page. Somehow Elliot had captured the candy-floss wispiness of the beard, but also the sheen of a double lightning bolt SS insignia on the Lubavitcher’s lapel, and a skull and crossbones on the crown of his hat.

‘Thank God he didn’t put this one on the shul wall,’ said Ma.

In the time after Elliot’s expulsion, I felt that much more vulnerable. Elliot, I suppose, gave me a sense of the possible. Even if you got kicked in the teeth for it, you could still do something out of bounds – that was what he represented for me. Just being his brother gave me a sense of power, however small. He seemed, if not dangerous, then at least ungovernable and unquantifiable. Without him, we were somehow weaker.

More than ever, I kept a lookout for Leo Fein around town.

The congregation wasn’t as pleased as I’d been at the news of his resurrection. Too New Testament for their tastes, perhaps. Maybe Leo Fein had tangled with something too sacred to Jews – death. It wasn’t to be fooled with. There were deserving souls awaiting the pleas of Kaddish. Decent members of the community had wasted their petitions to God to absolve and receive him.

I saw Leo Fein sitting in shul, at the back, looking the same as he had before. He’d come through death unscathed. The wavy forelock shock, the straight lips – all restored. I don’t know what I expected to see – perhaps that he’d changed in some way, come out of the harrowing of hell or something, come out covered in pink ectoplasm like afterbirth, the way that little girl in Poltergeist had. But he was just there, breathing through his nose, scratching an itch on his chin like a live human being.

Though a few of the men downstairs were wary at first, soon they were talking business and Leo Fein was listening in again. But looks dropped from the gallery where the wives sat and the following week the men sat away from him.

I’m not saying the congregation’s displeasure with Leo Fein drove him towards my family but, since we were both on the outskirts anyway, it must have made it more natural for him to gravitate there.