Читать книгу Lucky Packet - Trevor Sacks - Страница 8

THE WOMEN’S ZIONIST LEAGUE RAFFLE

They were always raising funds for Israel in those days. There were always more trees to plant, more desert to reclaim, more settlements to settle, more terrorists to fight.

‘Could be good for business,’ said Will when Ma told him about the Women’s Zionist League raffle. ‘Our name up there. I mean, Abe Kotzen’s got a fleet of trucks, or if we could get in with Friedman – might be worth it.’

Whether it was just Carol’s persistent gnawing at my mother, or Will’s harassment, I can’t say, but when Carol phoned Ma and asked for something to donate as a prize, she agreed.

Elliot, unable to form the words of objection yet, sat stiff and listened. It was a strain for him to be in the same room as Will, but the topic had kept him there.

‘We can’t give brake pads as a prize, though,’ said Will.

‘Clutch kits?’ said Ma.

‘We need something more glitzy.’

‘No, Morgan will never agree to that,’ she said.

‘Morgan only knows how to cut costs. He doesn’t think of the future. You have to spend money to make money. Trust me on this.’

‘Are you serious?’ said Elliot. Ma and Elliot stared at him. Elliot’s interests didn’t usually dip into commerce. He fled the room when no one answered, leaving their shrugs in his trail. Ma and Will brushed off his huff as just another inexplicable revolt.

It was hard enough for Elliot to be understood in his own home, never mind out in the town. Some of Elliot’s ideas were so extreme, I must explain, that most people in our town would not have known enough to be offended by them. Instead, they were clumped together and labelled under one banner to keep things simple. It was a town, after all, of simple tastes. Like steakhouse dinners that bore ‘Medium Rare’ or ‘Well Done’ toothpick flags, Elliot’s particular concoction would have emerged through the kitchen swing doors marked Kommunis.

Anything that wasn’t instantly understood in town was labelled ‘communist’; they stuck that toothpick in Elliot’s rump without a moment’s hesitation. Slight in build, Elliot nevertheless grew up tougher than most of the other Jewish kids, thanks to all the kickings he’d taken.

Afrikaners, and a few English boys too, objected to his kind of communism, a kind that announced itself in rip-sleeved punk T-shirts, earrings, winkle-pickers, chains and studs. More than those, though, I think it was the black coat he sometimes wore, repudiating the Far Northern Transvaal climate, that raised his critics’ temperature highest; it turned them red, though only with rage. The coat: this was the most communist of all.

With Elliot in his room, Ma and Will agreed on a diesel generator as the prize with the biggest impact. It wasn’t a glamorous prize, no, but it was valuable, and truly desirable for many who, for instance, owned weekend-getaway game farms beyond the stretch of power lines.

After Will went back to university in Joburg, Elliot was more able to express himself. At lunch, while Ma handed me a booklet of raffle tickets, he did just that.

‘I can’t believe you would support the Zionist cause like this without asking us.’

‘What, I have to ask your permission to do things?’ asked Ma.

‘Well, it’s coming from the business, the prize, isn’t it? So it’s like I’m donating it too. And I object.’

‘You’ve never cared about the business, Elliot.’

‘Zionism is a fascist cause and I won’t support it.’

‘They’re not fascists, the Women’s Zionist League, Elliot. They asked me to help out – what’s wrong with helping out?’

‘Some people you shouldn’t help.’

‘And it’s not just Israel. They raise funds for other things too.’

‘Like what?’

‘Orphanages.’

‘Jewish orphanages?’

‘I suppose.’

‘What about Palestinian orphans? What about black orphans?’

‘Come on, Elliot. You’re being dramatic.’

‘Oh, so just the Jewish orphans, then? And tanks, missiles, bombers, fighter jets, that sort of thing?’

‘Elliot, Carol asked me very nicely. Ida Rabinowitz from the League is sick and they need some help. You know how Carol helps with taking Ben to cheder. Come on.’

But Elliot was already heading to his bedroom, leaving me and Ma sitting at the table alone.

‘Anyway, I’m not selling these,’ I said, ruffling the tickets with a thumb.

‘What do you know about Israel? Anyway, this isn’t about Israel, it’s about Carol Richler and the raffle. They take you to cheder every week and we owe them.’

‘I hate her, and her stupid daughter. And what do you care if I go to cheder? You don’t believe any of it.’

‘For your father’s side, that’s why. Come on, I got you out of Shoshana’s birthday, didn’t I? And the swimming gala.’

‘Okay.’

‘Your brothers give me enough trouble.’

‘I said okay.’

‘Okay. Just try sell half.’

* * *

Ma suggested I walk door to door, which was safe in most parts of town. I roped in my cousin, Jackie, who was a year older than me, half-Jewish and totally bored. But in the evening I had to hand all the untaken stubs back to Ma.

‘No one wanted them. I tried.’

‘Why are these ones torn already?’ she asked.

‘Because we sold them and then they didn’t want them any more.’

‘Who?’

‘These people at the Indian Plaza.’

Elliot let his fork fall on the plate and produced his shocked look. Jackie and I had tried to go door to door selling the tickets. We walked from her house in Compensatie Street past Dungeon Park with its dust and yellowing grass, skipping most doors based on scant evidence of possible rejection: they had people visiting and probably didn’t want to be disturbed; the whine of a circular saw at the back of the house meant they would never hear the doorbell; their car had the born-again Christian fish badge on the boot.

Jackie had wanted reggae beads, which is how we ended up at the Indian Plaza at the industrial edge of town, near the railway station. It was where Indian shop owners had to move their businesses after the law forced them out of town. Two storeys sat in long rows around square parking lots. Metal signboards of a standard size were riveted flush in a strip over the doorways. There was little of the exotic at the Indian Plaza, except perhaps for one and a half Jewish white kids wandering from shop to shop.

In Jada’s Outfitters, Jackie explained the plastic reggae beads – the red, the yellow, the green – but Mrs Jada didn’t know anything about them.

Jackie, in an enterprising flash, offered the Jadas my raffle tickets and had me list the prizes. ‘A Ford bakkie,’ I said, ‘a diesel generator, a TV, a hi-fi …’

‘Good stuff,’ said Jackie. ‘And it’s for charity.’

Mrs Jada, a woman so beautiful I hardly believed she was hidden behind a counter in an anonymous shop on the edges of town and not lauded somehow in magazines and TV programmes, took pity on us, putting a hand under Jackie’s chin. After its plodding start, the day was working out surprisingly well – Mrs Jada had her flawless hand on my shoulder, this triumph layered with the success of selling most of a booklet of tickets I thought I’d be lumped with forever.

Mrs Jada, Mr Jada and an elderly man I took for Mrs Jada’s father bought several between them and were about to see us out the door when Mr Jada noticed the Star of David on the tickets.

‘What is W.Z.L.?’ he asked.

‘The Women’s Zionist League,’ I said, happy to provide a smart answer and hoping to impress the family of Jadas with my talent for abbreviations.

‘For Israel?’ said Mr Jada.

‘Israel?’ said Grandfather, looking at his son-in-law in case he hadn’t heard right.

They all stood there looking at us. ‘And orphans,’ I said, trying to retrieve additional impressive information.

The Jadas wanted their money back and I had to take back their tickets, separated forevermore from the perforated stubs in the booklet.

‘You tried to sell them to Muslim people?’ said Elliot. ‘You moron. You’re lucky they didn’t string you up. I would’ve.’

‘Elliot,’ said Ma.

‘What?’ said Elliot. ‘I mean, if I was Muslim. Ben, come on, don’t you watch TV? Muslims and Jews? The PLO? The war in Lebanon?’

‘Ja, but our Muslims aren’t like their Muslims,’ I said.

‘Our Muslims? See what you’ve done?’ said Elliot to Ma. He was standing up now.

‘What I’ve done?’ said Ma.

‘The political consciousness in this house is at an all-time low. Are you aware of what’s going on even in your own country? Do you know there’s a State of Emergency? People can be arrested for nothing at all, put in jail for as long as the fascists want. They can search you.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ asked Ma.

‘Black people have curfews, like children.’

‘Cool it, Elliot—’

‘What are we doing about it?’ asked Elliot loudly. ‘Selling raffle tickets for fucking Israel. Your son is trying to get Muslims to pay for your filthy war. This is what you get for associating with Zionists.’

He walked out the room.

‘Stop calling them Zionists,’ she shouted after him. ‘It’s Carol and Aunty Phyllis and the rest. You know them.’ Turning to me, she said, ‘Ben – don’t go to the Indian Plaza any more unless you’re with me or Elliot, okay? Now I suppose I’ll have to buy the ones that have already been pulled out and give them away.’

‘Jackie wanted reggae beads and we were there already. I didn’t know.’

‘Okay, we’ll sort it out. I’ll explain. Which shop? Do you remember?’

‘I think it’s the one we went to for Elliot’s bar mitzvah outfit.’

‘Jesus, Ben.’

* * *

Joss and I sat next to each other on the gritty hardwood floor while Mr Groenewald, the headmaster, told a boy to shut the assembly hall doors. I didn’t tell Joss about what had happened at the Indian Plaza. He probably knew it wasn’t a good idea to sell Women’s Zionist League raffle tickets to Muslims. The pinched expression on Mrs Jada’s face still stung. It was embarrassing that I hadn’t taken in Elliot’s views about Zionism, though he’d laid them out often enough. These things just didn’t seem a part of my childhood world.

‘I can’t sell those fucking things,’ I whispered to Joss. ‘Nobody wants them.’

‘I got rid of mine at Friday night dinner. One shot.’

‘Who’m I gonna sell them to?’

‘Hey, you know who you should try? Leo Fein. After the thing at Roy’s he’ll definitely help you.’

‘He’s probably got already. Anyway, I can’t just pitch up and ask him. And I don’t know where he lives.’

‘I know,’ said Joss. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Mr Groenewald commenced his announcement. ‘This is a very serious job. That is why we have chosen you, because it is serious and we think you can be responsible. You might know that there are elements in our land who want to destabilise things, destroy what we’ve built here and cause chaos. They don’t want to talk, they use violence.

‘Boys and girls, there are terrorists who are trying to take away our country. They don’t come out and fight, like soldiers. They use bombs, and they run away. That is why we must be vigilant. Do you all know what “vigilant” means? It means we must use our eyes, we must use our ears, and if there is anything funny, you must always tell a teacher.’

Frequent mention of the words ‘limpet mine’ on TV news, and culminating in two explosions in a bar and restaurant in a coastal city, seemed to agitate a particular paranoia in some of the town’s adults. For twelve-year-olds, though, with shorter timelines to reference, it seemed normal; after all, normal is just what you’re presented with.

Mr Groenewald showed us a kind of chart, which we’d become quite used to seeing in schools and other government buildings. It was a three-dimensional moulded plastic poster that displayed full-colour representations of various explosives: a limpet mine, a hand grenade, a stick grenade, a landmine, an oily letter bomb, a block of plastique.

‘If you see anything strange, tell us immediately. Someone puts down a strange packet: you tell us. You hear people talking about something that could be dangerous to you, your friends, your family or your school: you tell us.’

We were broken into groups and told we’d have to come in to school fifteen minutes early from now on, to patrol the area we were assigned. Barry Jennings and Georgina Melck were in my group, and our area of inspection included a passageway at one end of the school offices and the foyer of the school hall.

I’d always felt drawn to Gina, or at least ever since I’d heard the story of her mother having tried to kill herself. This gave her a darkness, a hidden life, a complexity and a gravity that were rare and appealing.

I don’t know whether this story was true because neither I nor anyone I knew was brave enough to ask her. That she was beautiful was not even something I considered. She was unusual, and that, to me, was more important.

We did know that her parents were divorced and even that seemed unusual in our town. I liked the blackness of her hair, how boldly it had chosen its hue – not in an is-it-black-or-just-dark-brown way, but an extreme, definite, saturated black. You knew where you stood with that hair. And not only that, but Gina had a fine rasp to her voice that scared me but held a promise I couldn’t quite grasp at the time.

* * *

After Mrs Dorfman dropped Joss off at my house that afternoon, we walked up Ireland Street, past the house with the half-built boat that had sat half-built forever in the yard, past the reservoir, and over Potgieter Street, so long and straight it ended nowhere.

On the other side was Bendor, a newer section of town – or at least it seemed so, because the face-brick here was brighter, rougher, redder, and there were thickly painted walls like slabs of plastic. The lawns were spongy and sliced by driveways of interlocking paving stones leading to shaded entrances. Baby palms with brush cuts and fan-tailed cycads were in beds of dark soil and each garden was edged with considerate, sloping kerbs.

We came to one of those face-brick houses, one with a kind of rounded tower that rose out of a flower bed. We could hear voices and laughter from the back – men’s voices. Joss rang the bell and the voices died. I heard a chair scrape and footsteps, and could imagine Leo Fein walking through the house towards us. He opened the door and looked from Joss to me and back again.

My trepidation in approaching Leo Fein was not born merely of shyness, but lay in my dread of his reaction to my arrival at his front door: after our joint escapade, how would he react? Would he be angry? Should I be laying low? Worse, would he even remember me?

‘Boys,’ he said, ‘what can I do for you?’

I took the booklet from my pocket and said, ‘Would you like to buy some raffle tickets?’

‘Raffle? For what?’

‘For the Women’s Zionist League,’ I said.

‘For Israel,’ said Joss. The Dorfmans had a natural grasp of the power of dramatic presentation.

‘For Israel, hey? Come with me, boys. Today might be your lucky day. Maybe we can do some business here.’ He led us into his house. ‘Want some juice?’

‘Ja, please,’ said Joss. We could hear the laughter of men who smoked heavily coming from beyond the sliding doors to the patio. The tiled room where we stood had a high ceiling and the biggest TV I’d ever seen. To my right were double doors that led to a room, somewhat darkened. I pointed inside to Joss, who followed my finger with his eyes and nodded, impressed.

It was a study with a heavy desk, and floating around it, like the recreation of a WWI dogfight, were stuffed birds – eagles and hawks and such, swooping and hovering, some perched. I froze at the threshold of the sanctum sanctorum with its aerobatic, deathly tableaux. The glass eyes saw beyond their prey, beyond time, beyond me.

Leo Fein came out propping a tray with our juices and an ice bucket on one arm and closing the door to the study with his free hand. He landed a look on me, a brief consideration, and I wondered what it meant: an enquiry as to my identity, or an offer of advice. But it was Ma he asked about instead.

‘She’s fine,’ I answered.

‘Good. Let’s go, boys.’ We took our glasses and followed him to the patio.

Around a wrought iron table sat three men, all tanned, all smoking. One was in his early sixties with grey hair at his temples and a cleft chin, wearing Aviator sunglasses. The other two both wore sandals, one in a safari suit and the other, with curly hair almost to his shoulders, in denim shorts. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black stood more than half-empty in the centre of the table.

‘Gents,’ said Leo Fein to his guests, ‘these are our town’s finest Jewish boys. Say hello.’

We shook hands with each of them.

‘Transvaal Jode,’ said the man with the sunglasses. ‘Just like you, hey, Fein? Boerejode. Glad to meet you.’

The other two barely spoke and when they did it was with accents I couldn’t place. French, maybe.

‘We’re raising funds for Israel,’ Joss said. ‘With a raffle.’ The men with the accents nodded.

‘The Women’s Zionist League,’ said Leo Fein, looking at the form in my hand. ‘The women in town raise funds for the troops in Israel. Very good thing.’

The men with the accents said something in their language but neither asked for a damn ticket. The Afrikaans man with the cleft chin and the sunglasses said, ‘It’s very important we support our friends in Israel.’ (Uhs-rrile was how he said it.) ‘We’re both fighting to protect our land and keep it safe for our people.’ He looked serious, like we’d angered him. ‘Here, boys, give me some tickets.’

He took a roll of cash from his trouser pocket. It was so thick with fifty-rand notes, he had to peel it open in his hand to find two twenties. He gave one note each to me and to Joss and I handed over the tickets.

‘Good luck, my friend,’ said the man in the sunglasses as he presented the tickets to Leo Fein. ‘I hope you’re a winner.’ He looked angry again, and held onto the tickets when Leo Fein put his fingers on them. Then he laughed a broad laugh and the other men joined in.

‘I’ve got a good feeling about this,’ said Leo Fein, fanning his face with the raffle tickets. ‘You’ve done some good business with the General, hey boys?’

‘You boys,’ said the General, ‘next time I’ll take you up in the Cessna, okay? Tell them, Fein.’

Leo Fein walked us to the door and Joss asked, ‘Is he really a general?’

‘He’d better be, boykie,’ said Leo Fein. ‘Thanks for coming, boys.’

We were still holding our twenties in our hands when we walked out.

‘Fuck,’ I said.

‘Twenty bucks,’ said Joss.

‘Each,’ I said.

We looked around and stuffed the notes into our pockets.

‘What’d he take? Like, twenty tickets? That’s only ten bucks.’

‘Think we need to get him change?’

‘Fuck that,’ said Joss. ‘Did you see how much money he was flashing around? He wanted us to have it.’

‘I need to give ten bucks to my mom for the tickets.’

‘That’s still fifteen bucks each,’ said Joss. ‘Or, I mean, we could give it to the Women’s Zionist League.’

‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘My brother says they’re fascists. Anyway, the General wanted us to have it.’

‘He’s a general. It’s like an order.’

‘Who do you think those other guys were?’

‘Israelis,’ said Joss.

‘How’d you know?’

‘They were talking Hebrew.’

Cheder lessons hadn’t quite stuck the language in my ear yet. ‘What are you gonna buy?’ I asked as we walked through the streets of Bendor.

‘Sea Monkeys,’ said Joss with hardly a pause.

‘Wow.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’ I was too old for lucky packets, but there was little else that offered the same satisfaction. At home I stuck the money and those thoughts under the badges in my drawer for later reveries.

* * *

The first time we met, Leo Fein had mentioned my father; the second time, my mother. How much did this man know about my family, I wondered. The secret ties between us, strung before my birth and tugged at now in my twelfth year of life, were a revelation.

A few days later, I had my savings plus the fifteen bucks from the General in my pocket, and was flipping through the pages of Photography Basics in the town’s only newsagent. As a hobby, photography had a lot going for it – I wouldn’t need to actually draw anything (Elliot’s realm), and it involved impressive gadgetry, and the possibility of naked flesh.

The photography book offered information on aperture, exposure, ISO speed, composition, black-and-white, filters, and one nude and two semi-nudes. But on my way to the checkout with the book, a bateleur caught my eye on another cover.

I walked out of the CNA gripping Birds of Prey and hardly felt a pang of mourning for losing the nudes. Instead, the bodies of Leo Fein’s raptors sped through my thoughts like feathered blades, swooping, spinning and intersecting.

With this book I would know the names of each of those hunters in Leo Fein’s study, their tastes in prey, their tactics and habits, and I would string another link to him.

* * *

Elliot could be pigheaded and obsessed with his own ideas but he was never deliberately cruel to any of us. So, when he said he’d like to come to the raffle draw, Ma didn’t comment on his change of heart. I guess she didn’t want to jinx a rapprochement, and Elliot had been unusually quiet recently.

The shul hall was decked in blue and silvery-white ribbons, and Meyer Levinson was at the microphone on the little stage. Besides the raffle, they were holding a cake sale, a jumble sale and fundraising dinner later, which I was grateful we’d be skipping.

As Meyer began the draw, we saw Carol.

‘Thank God we got that bakkie from Arnold for a prize or we’d be sunk,’ said Carol.

Ma didn’t reply, but I could tell she was startled, assessing now whether that diesel generator looked rather less glitzy compared to a Ford Cortina bakkie.

On stage, Meyer gave away a weekend for two at a game lodge to a lucky winner. In his even voice, Meyer congratulated the winner, and introduced the next prize: the diesel generator.

‘I’m leaving,’ said Elliot, at Ma’s side. ‘It’s fine, I’ll walk.’

I watched Elliot walk out of the hall, but Ma didn’t turn her eyes away from the stage. Meyer drew the winning number for our diesel generator. ‘Leo Fein!’ said Meyer, as the man I’d stolen booze for made his way through the clapping crowd, the faintest twist in his straight mouth, his rendition of a smile. ‘He wins the diesel generator, sponsored by Great North Diesel and Auto Electric.’

‘Leo Fein won,’ I said to Ma, tugging her sleeve. She stared ahead while Leo Fein collected an envelope on stage from Meyer.

‘Thank you, Great North Diesel and Auto Electric,’ said Meyer, ‘for a special prize, for a special cause.’

‘It’s Leo Fein,’ I said to Ma. He’d walked off the stage and directly up to us. Leo Fein took me by the shoulder and smushed me into his side.

‘It’s a wonderful prize,’ he said.

‘I hope it’ll be useful to you,’ said Ma.

‘Very useful, Margot. I’m very eager to have it. Perhaps I could stop by next week and we could discuss delivery and such.’

‘Fine,’ said Ma.

‘Call me Leo.’ A line that must have been well practised, and practised not to seem so. ‘Bye, boy,’ said Leo Fein to me, and he glided into the little crowd.

We stayed a while longer, Ma chatting to acquaintances, faces familiar to me from shul. Now that the prizes had been handed out, and it hadn’t turned out to be the failure Morgan had hinted at, she seemed more relaxed. Until, that is, she asked finally about Elliot’s whereabouts. She pulled me to the door when I told her he’d left.

As Ma combed her bag for the car keys by the kerb, a few men were spread around the low wall that surrounded the Rabbi’s residence, talking in urgent voices. They were looking at something on the wall, and turning their heads up and down the street.

On the wall had been spray-painted two blue horizontal lines and, between the lines, a cocked swastika, in the same blue paint. It was beginning to attract more attention, some of it aghast, some already furious.

Ma didn’t let me gawk too long. She pulled me by the sleeve and guided me to the car. When we arrived home, Elliot had his winkle-pickers up on the little sidetable and was watching TV. ‘Elliot, I saw something outside the shul,’ said Ma. ‘Elliot, did you do it?’

‘What are you talking about?’ he replied. Ma’d been single-minded about confronting Elliot, not speaking in the car. She seemed to have forgotten I was there, and I relished the chance to be in on the clash.

‘I know it was you. A swastika, Elliot? Why would you do that?’ She’d wound herself into that angry, pleading pitch she used whenever one of us (and it was usually Elliot) did something she’d have to fix. ‘On the shul wall? You’re just looking for trouble, aren’t you?’ She threw the keys onto her chair and they jangled her anger while she remained standing.

‘It’s not a swastika,’ said Elliot quietly.

‘Elliot,’ said Ma, speaking more quietly herself now, ‘you painted a swastika on the shul wall.’

‘It’s not a swastika. It’s a modified Israeli flag.’

‘A what?’

‘A modified Israeli flag. The swastika instead of the Star of David between the stripes. It’s symbolic.’

‘Why, Elliot?’

‘You know why. Because the Israelis have become Nazis. They’re persecuting Palestinians.’

‘Elliot, Israel was set up when the whole world, none of them, wanted the Jews. And after what happened in the Holocaust – you know this.’

‘I know. But they should know better. That’s why they should know better. After you’ve been kicked around for two thousand years, you’ve got a responsibility. Don’t kick the next guy. You know what it’s like.’

‘You can’t use the Holocaust like this. Nazis, swastikas – it’s off limits. It’s too painful.’

‘That’s exactly why I used it.’

‘Think of people who survived that, the death camps, the war. Or people who lost family in the Holocaust. You should have found another way.’

Elliot crossed his arms.

‘Elliot – there’s a swastika on a shul wall, for God’s sake.’ Ma went to her room, probably to phone Uncle Victor, leaving me and Elliot together.

‘It’s a modified Israeli flag,’ he said.

‘It just looks like a swastika,’ I said to Elliot.

He made a sound, as if I’d just told him an interesting fact, like the Eiffel Tower has two-and-a-half million rivets holding it up, and he went to his own room, leaving me there.

* * *

No one saw that it was a modified Israeli flag. People called it a swastika on a shul wall, and theories were created to fill in who could have painted it. ‘There are a lot of Nazis in this town,’ said Carol on the way to cheder. ‘Who do you think the Afrikaners supported in the war? There’s even a street named after a Nazi sympathizer. Hans van Rensburg Street.’ She mock-spat after saying the name. ‘I don’t even like driving on it.’

I was afraid that at any moment I would burst with what I knew about the swastika, in an involuntary spasm, like the Rabbi. I kept as quiet as I could.

The Kisch brothers were standing at the shul gate when we arrived. They were both wearing sunglasses, the brothers Joel and Nathan, monstrous from lifting weights. Both had completed national service in the Israeli Defence Force just a couple of years back.

A black man in overalls was scrubbing at the graffiti with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water a few meters from the brothers. A blue smudge was growing around the swastika.

I was on a hair-trigger with the anticipation of the subject of Nazis and anti-Zionism coming up in cheder; I even imagined an interrogation from the Rabbi. But the lesson unfolded normally, boringly. Finally, it wasn’t the Rabbi who brought it up.

‘Do you really think it’s safe for us to have our lessons here?’ asked Potato Latke.

‘Shoshana, I don’t want you to worry about that,’ said the Rabbi. ‘That’s my job, to worry about your safety, okay? And if I was worried, we wouldn’t be here.’

‘There could be a bomb,’ she said.

‘There isn’t a bomb. And Joel and Nathan are looking after us.’

‘They can’t do anything about a bomb,’ said Disney Yarmulke. ‘If there’s a bomb, it would blow everyone up, even Joel and Nathan.’ His little sister was sitting behind him, and she shaped her face in preparation to cry.

‘There are no bombs here, David,’ said the Rabbi, with the firmest voice I’d heard him use. It smoothed the wrinkles in the little sister’s face. ‘I think it was just some kids playing a stupid joke, and now everyone’s a little bit tense. We’re just taking precautions, that’s why Joel and Nathan are outside.’

When the lesson ended, we waited for our lifts while Joel Kisch talked to Nathan Kisch and vice versa.

‘I don’t think the Dutchmen are organised enough to be a real threat,’ said Joel or Nathan.

‘Could have been some punk,’ said Nathan or Joel and a pulse shot through my heart at the thought of Elliot.

‘To do something like that while a Zionist event is going on? That’s chutzpah, my friend. No, the Muslims – they’re the danger.’

‘Ja, but a Nazi sign?’

‘Smokescreen – deflect attention away,’ and Joel (or Nathan) indicated ‘away’ with a sweep of the hand, like a traffic cop.

‘Fuckers.’

I looked over at the man in the overalls. He was still working away at the offending image. The arms of the symbol clung to the wall, but the colour spread itself like the cancerous animation I’d seen on maps in The World at War, the Sunday-night documentary series that fascinated Uncle Victor. It showed always the advancing Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in a spreading puddle over Europe, when the Third Reich was still winning.

Possibilities leapfrogged through my mind: Jesus, first Jews try to sell Zionist raffle tickets to Muslims; next, Muslims are being blamed for anti-Semitic vandalism. I’ve stoked a war.