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KADDISH FOR LEO FEIN

When I first learnt of Leo Fein’s death, I assumed it was at the hands of some enemy. He was a man who had generals for friends, who busted through steel gates and stole lucky packets for kids. What could stop a man like that?

It was Carol who told us, me and Ma, after dropping me at home from cheder. As much as possible, Ma tried to avoid all contact with Carol, though she felt grateful and guilty for her shul-shuttling. I could see the slight nauseating effect Carol had on Ma. It got right into her, Carol’s misery, attacking like jaundice, but today Ma stayed to talk to her.

‘Hang on, Carol,’ she said. ‘Forget the Chevra Kadisha stuff. Leo Fein is dead?’

‘Yesterday. Heart attack, I heard.’

Heart attack! The same brutal phenomenon that took my father.

‘You know, I’ve been trying to get hold of him,’ said Ma. ‘He won the generator.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t bother about that, Margot. He’s not even having a funeral. Didn’t want the Chevra Kadisha – too good for the Chevra Kadisha! And what about his son?’

Leo Fein with a son! I felt disappointed. The knowledge of this grieved and confused me as much as Leo Fein’s death. Where did this leave me? I would never rob another shop with the man, and he’d never tell me anything about my father now. He already had a son with whom he’d probably robbed and busted down doors in every town in the Far Northern Transvaal.

‘At least the boy’s sitting shiva. I’m going over this afternoon with some things. Phyllis and I usually bring the food but we didn’t know what to do if there’s no funeral. She’s mad as a snake. I said to Phyllis, “Phyllis, we have to be the bigger person here.” And she agreed. “You’re right, Carol,” she said. “It can’t be helped what that man has done but he’s left his son like a useless piece of flesh to schlump around the house, and no mother to take care of him.”’

‘I have to do something with the generator,’ said Ma.

‘No funeral, Margot,’ said Carol, trying to instil the same outrage in my mother.

I felt a little lost inside my own house. I took out Birds of Prey of Southern Africa in tribute to Leo Fein. The first moments of grief are often spent groping for something concrete to hang on to, however insignificant in the towering shadow that death casts. I wondered about the stuffed birds – would his son take them? Could I have them?

I put the bird book aside and went to the Encyclopedia Americana. Whatever life didn’t prepare me for, I hoped the encyclopaedias would. The black-and-blue bound-leather volumes held the whole world, it had always seemed to me. Their references to the world to come, however, left me none the wiser and I began to cry. I couldn’t go to Ma for consolation without explaining why I was so upset about a man she thought I hardly knew. I would never betray Leo Fein over the raid at Roy’s – in the wake of that conspiracy, and of his death, I considered it an honour thing, our thing. And I would never betray, to Ma or myself, just why the death of a man I connected to my father, who might have begun to fill that hole in my imaginings, upset me so.

I wandered back to the passage where Ma was on the phone to Will, and overheard enough of the conversation to know Will was delighted at the news of Leo Fein.

‘Don’t say, “What a relief!”’ said Ma. ‘The man’s dead, Will. And left a son behind.’

‘We’re off on a technicality, Margot!’ he kept repeating, but she stuck firm and ended the conversation.

She told me afterwards that Will’s idea of drumming up business using the raffle prize wasn’t panning out and he was eager to save face in front of Morgan. ‘I’m going to give the generator to the son,’ she said. ‘It’s only right. Once everything’s settled down.’

Ma decided the right thing to do was to go to the shiva home to show face, as she put it.

‘Can I come?’ I asked. What the Encyclopedia Americana couldn’t give me, I hoped religion could. Perhaps it could give a shape to the sadness and confusion I felt. Jews would know how to deal with tribulations, I thought.

‘You don’t have to, my boy. You didn’t know him.’

‘I did,’ I said, and had to scramble a little to think how to explain. ‘From the Dorfmans.’

‘Well, if you want.’

‘Did Daddy know him?’

‘I don’t know. Probably. Everyone knew your father.’

But on the way there I grew apprehensive. I’d be meeting the son of Leo Fein. Was he my competition, in some way? Just who was good enough to be Leo Fein’s son?

Michael Fein was sitting on a turquoise leather couch when we arrived, even though Ma had told me the bereaved sit on low chairs during shiva. It was late afternoon and, while everyone spoke quietly, they more or less ignored Michael. Michael, whose face I may have seen in shul, but never with Leo Fein, sat alone and forlorn.

I tried to see Leo Fein in the son. He had the start of a good, heavy body going, and although he was maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, he seemed like a boy. Perhaps it was how his arms hung flaccid at his sides, and his hair, also limp, was arranged in a middle parting. Who wore middle partings but milksops whose mothers brushed their hair? None of the steel shavings of Leo Fein’s curls had fallen to this boy.

Even the house seemed more demure now without the General and the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black. This was a quiet cocktail party without the cocktails but with the same formations of people standing and sitting in the tiled room, with the high ceiling and the silver ornaments. Vases, platters, spoons; etchings of Prague or a street in some other dark European place; a bland watercolour landscape of cherry blossoms, local; a gloopy wildlife oil painting, even more local.

The double doors to the study with the birds were closed. Would that room, which already encased so much death, contain Leo Fein’s body? I pictured his pale corpse laid flat on a gurney, beneath the suspended talons of those other dead bodies.

My mother and I approached Michael.

‘Long life,’ I said to him. I’d been coached by Ma that this was what Jews say to one another when one of us dies. I found it a comfort to recite the formula for it gave me something to say at a time when I might have been bewildered for a lack of platitudes in my quiver. But besides that, I liked the sentiment, how it swung the lens back among the living with a caring wish for one another. And it didn’t hurt that it smacked of Star Trek, which only added to its dignity in my twelve-year-old eyes.

Michael Fein placed his large hand in mine without gripping and mumbled the same words back to me.

‘It’s a terrible thing to lose a father,’ said Ma. I was glad she could think of something else to say – a talent of adults, I thought: they build up enough of these moments and collect answers and questions and fillings for silences. ‘We’re very sorry for your loss. Was it very sudden?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

‘You weren’t with him, then?’

‘The lawyers: they told me.’

‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know. Your father actually won something—’ said Ma, but Michael continued his speech and Ma shut up about the generator.

‘They told me, no service. He wanted cremation, they said.’

‘We’re very sorry for your loss, Michael,’ said Ma again.

‘Long life,’ I said.

It was someone else’s turn to wish Michael a long life, so we shuffled along to a corner of the room and stood next to Carol. She repeated the news of Leo Fein’s cremation in a low hiss. ‘The cheek of him,’ she said. ‘Well, they won’t allow him into the Jewish cemetery like that.’

‘No?’

‘Well, it’s not Jewish, is it? You’re supposed to be buried, simple as that. In the ground.’

‘The son mentioned lawyers were involved,’ said Ma.

‘Michael? Bah! Doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Shame. He’s sitting shiva, at least.’

‘Well, it was his father’s choice, though, wasn’t it?’

‘Life is for the living, Margot. His poor son, thinking about his father burning like a chop on the braai. It’s an insult to us all.’

‘Not to me,’ said Ma, but Carol wouldn’t have heard.

‘These things are there for a reason,’ whispered Carol. ‘One has to grieve. And for your parents, the most. What chance does he have to say goodbye now? He’ll have this hanging over his head for the rest of his life. Selfish, that’s all it is.’

In Leo Fein’s house, I had hoped to find the vessel to hold what I was feeling, for its walls to resonate with my feelings, for others to find the words to express what it was I felt. I hadn’t been to my father’s funeral, was too young to remember or understand the full extent of the grief.

But this sitting shiva was just so foreign to me, as foreign as the Hebrew prayers and hymns in shul – designed to fill you with great awe, or sorrow, or who knows what, but really, just a series of actions that would remain arcane to me forever.

The Rabbi arrived and a few minutes later he’d gathered a few of the men around him. They stood facing the same direction, as if on a bus, and the Rabbi began to recite Kaddish. Michael just sat on the couch, looking straight ahead.

I’d forgotten the Michael of my imaginings, my competition for the position of accomplice – let’s face it, of son – to Leo Fein. I felt sorry for him. A schlemiel is what Carol called him. The sound of it seemed to fit the shape of him, hunched on the turquoise couch.

The men began swaying forward and back, responding to the Rabbi’s voice with their own. Michael rose and came to the table with the crackers, where I stood. Putting one in his mouth, then another, he spoke loudly, as if there were no men saying Kaddish in his house, as if there were no floury cracker bits in the pit of his mouth.

‘So, what now?’ he said, not looking at anyone in particular.

I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure he was talking to me but figured one had to be very polite in such circumstances. ‘I don’t know,’ I said softly, trying to remind him of the right level to speak at. ‘Your father was a good man,’ I whispered. It seemed obvious to me then that Leo Fein had never taken Michael on any escapades, had never shown him how to break into a warehouse, had never driven a getaway car with him sitting in the other seat. And now he never would.

As Ma and I were leaving, Michael started talking to Carol, who shushed him angrily, then hugged him, patting him on the back.

‘I can’t stand all the swaying and whining,’ said Ma outside. ‘Can’t carry a tune, any of them.’

‘What’s Chevra Kadisha?’ I asked in the car.

‘It’s the burial society. You pay a contribution every year and when you die they come and clean the body. Prepare it for burial.’

‘Is that what you want?’

‘I think I like Leo Fein’s way, actually. No fuss. I bet he didn’t want all that stuff in there – the prayers and all that. A simple, clean exit.’

‘But he came to shul.’

‘Did he? I thought maybe he was an atheist.’

‘No, he came, lots of times,’ I said. ‘So if he went to shul, why didn’t he want to be buried the proper Jewish way?’

‘Well, plenty of people go to shul just because they like the tradition, or just to mix with people. They like mixing with people they think of as similar to themselves. Besides, there’s no proper anything. It’s just people – people making up silly traditions.’

‘But aren’t you supposed to say goodbye? That’s what funerals are for.’

‘You never say goodbye, Ben. It’s a myth. That’s a silly tradition. You miss them and you don’t stop missing them, every day. You just kind of deal with it.’

I never witnessed Ma dealing with it. Maybe even ‘dealing with it’ was another myth in the pantheon of self-deceptions as Ma saw it. She hid it away in her fretting over Will and Elliot and the business, trying to mend the weak joins of our family with whatever means she had.

Perhaps it was she who started our family’s national sport, of which the only strict rule was never to show that what any of us said or did got to you. You were the winner if you could remain so firm in your self-assurance that you could brush off an insult like you hadn’t even noticed it. Perhaps that was ‘dealing with it’. (Elliot was the consistent loser of the game because you always knew how he felt, but we all competed.)

‘So you don’t want any funeral?’ I said, turning the focus of all the feelings of my frustrated grief now at my mother.

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

‘What if I want you to have one.’

‘Well, I won’t exactly be able to stop you, now, will I? But I don’t want one, and it’s my life. Or death, at any rate.’

‘Well, it’s my life, too,’ I said, close to crying, close to rage (or as close as I could get without losing the family game).

‘Don’t I get to choose how to finish up my business?’

‘What do you care? You believe you won’t even see it. You’ll be matter or whatever. When you’re dead, you’re dead, right? No ghosts or spirits. So what do you care if the Rabbi’s there or not? Or if there’s a prayer? Or if you get buried or burnt?’

‘When you’re dead, you’re dead. I do believe that,’ said Ma. ‘And I don’t want my funeral to be used as propaganda for religion. Some rabbi is going to stand there and say things about me, about my spirit, that it’s gone to heaven or some bullshit, when in life I didn’t believe any of it. It’s dishonest. And I don’t want to be remembered as someone who went in for that sentimental crap, either. It’s not real. I shouldn’t have brought you today.’

She was losing the game. We both were, and we travelled in silence for a block.

‘The Rabbi says souls can be reincarnated,’ I said.

‘Come on, gimme a break. Listen, if everyone’s soul is reincarnated, how come the world’s population keeps growing? Where do all the souls come from?’

‘Maybe they come from something else. Cattle or something.’

‘Or ants, I suppose they’ll claim.’

‘Amoebas.’

‘Exactly. Bacteria. They make this stuff up. How do they know? They can believe what they want but from what I’ve seen, there’s no coming back.’

‘What about Daddy’s funeral – he was buried, right?’

‘Chevra Kadisha and everything. Well, we had to have that, didn’t we? And I don’t think it would have been his choice, but we did it for the family – for his side.’

‘Like the bar mitzvahs,’ I said.

‘Like the bar mitzvahs.’

I sighed. The bar mitzvah I could have skipped, but funerals I wanted for everyone.

* * *

The swastika hadn’t gone away. I even heard about it at school. One of my teachers, Mrs Verwey, called me aside after the Afrikaans lesson to ask what I knew about it.

‘Nothing,’ I said, nervous at the implication that I might.

‘Satanists,’ said Mrs Verwey, taking hold of my arm. ‘Very dangerous. And they’re in this town, Ben. You tell your people to be careful.’ Finally she let go of my arm but repeated the word – ‘Satanists’ – before I excused myself for break. I dreaded Mrs Verwey finding out my family were atheists – at least Satanists believed in something, but atheists?

At home that afternoon, Ma decided the situation was becoming serious enough to warrant talking to Elliot in private. I hovered in the passage outside his bedroom door, pretending to fetch things from my own bedroom.

‘You know you’ve caused a lot of trouble,’ she said. ‘More than I think you knew you would.’

‘I know,’ said Elliot.

‘People think it was Afrikaners now – neo-Nazis. Do you know that? You could have stirred something up that’s out of control now. I heard Julian Gross was thinking about getting the Jewish Board of Deputies from Joburg involved even. Julian was going to get an appointment with the mayor.’

‘Damn.’

‘I know you didn’t mean it to be like this. I’m glad you see it was a mistake.’

‘It was a mistake – it doesn’t look like the Israeli flag. Nobody knows what it’s supposed to be.’

‘Elliot, it’s gone far enough,’ said Ma, firmer again. ‘You have to take responsibility for it. There could be trouble because of this. People could get hurt. The wrong people will be blamed.’

‘I’ll take responsibility.’

‘So, okay,’ she said. He’d caught her off-guard. ‘So, should we call Julian now?’

‘No, I’ll do it. Just give me a little time.’

‘Don’t take too long. It’s the right thing.’ It sounded like she was starting to walk so I scooted further down the passage. ‘I’m proud of you,’ I think I heard her say.

Elliot spent most of the night in his room.

I didn’t see it but apparently it was a three-by-two-metre sheet that was hoisted up the flagpole at the shul that night. Elliot must have spent some time on it, making sure the stripes were parallel, that the swastika was even and tilted at just the right angle, and that the images were on both sides of the flag. There was no mistaking now, I believe, that this was a modified Israeli flag, blue stripes above and below a cocked swastika in place of a Star of David.

For good measure, next to the blue smudge of his first attempt, he stencilled the Israeli coat of arms, the menorah, with a swastika adorning the centre candlestick holder. Beneath it he’d spray-painted:

END NAZIONISM NOW!

* * *

Perhaps I couldn’t quite believe that Leo Fein was gone forever; if he was, so was my father. I wasn’t at an age where I was immune to imagining my father’s comeback, but it wasn’t something I ever spoke about with Ma or my brothers.

It was Joss to whom I could talk about the possibilities, the malleability, of the rational known world. (The longing I felt for Georgina Melck, I still kept to myself.) We had to have these discussions – at least, I did – because, as much as I wanted to make myself a believer, questions presented themselves. Joss was my fellow philosopher and through our examinations we could reason our way through any doubts.

We pondered, Joss and I, why it was that God appeared all the time to people in Bible stories – in person, as it were – and performed miracles, but was largely absent in our time. That, in the biblical era, He could move oceans aside and spontaneously combust bushes, give clear instructions in dreams and waking life, appear on the scene like a friendly/wrathful neighbour, but not do any of it in this era – all of this was simply a function of the times, we concluded.

In those days, see, some of the laws of physics and so on were suspended. Perhaps this explains why it took so long for Galileo, Newton et al. to ‘discover’ the universal principles governing movement etc., etc. The looseness of the laws back in the Bible days, for some divine reason, was made firmer as we crept into the modern era and God retreated simultaneously through the shrinking cracks to take up more of a neutral-observer-type position.

‘I think there’s a heaven,’ said Joss. ‘In heaven you get to hang out with everyone who’s dead. If you want to speak to Einstein, you can. You can have a game of chess with him. In heaven everyone knows everything and they’re all good at stuff.’

‘But if everyone knows everything, why would I need to talk to Einstein?’

‘He just seems like a cool guy.’

‘I suppose. Do you think Leo Fein’s there too?’

‘I’d want him there,’ said Joss.

‘He’d be a hit in heaven.’

‘Busting in with his Mercedes-Benz.’

‘Showing everybody the nose-picking thing.’

‘So I guess we’re never going up in the Cessna with the General now,’ said Joss.

‘Guess not.’ I didn’t ask whether he thought Leo Fein and my father would be there together, and I was glad to end the subject.

That afternoon we cased out Radio-Rama. We wondered whether, with my heist experience, we could pull off a robbery. Inside, I was eyeing out a tape player and some Commodore 64 games. Joss was into the tape player, too, but also the Walkman and some pre-recorded cassettes of Juluka.

He picked up the tapes and put them down again. South African bands, no matter how good they were, were never going to be considered as good as even the second-rate shit from overseas. Other kids would judge you for sure; to be seen with a South African band’s music could ruin you.

There were CB radios there too. The craze had gone, but I was reminded of Jackie’s story of Good Buddies contacting spirits on the other side with their breaker-breakers and wondered whether Leo Fein would be listening in, and what his handle would be.

It was half-hearted, anyway. After Shadrack’s badge, I didn’t want any more robberies. Besides, without the getaway car, what would be the use?

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

‘Leo Fein would’ve known how to do it,’ said Joss.

‘For sure.’

‘My dad was talking to Meyer Levinson and old Meyer said Leo Fein took the Americans for a ride.’

‘What Americans?’

‘NASA,’ said Joss with that old trademark Dorfman drama.

Every kid had heard the rumour that NASA wanted silicon from Silicon Smelters outside town for the microchips in the Space Shuttle. I still don’t know whether that’s true, but we all longed for it to be so.

‘But why would Leo Fein rip them off? I mean, it’s for the Space Shuttle,’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Just what I heard.’

As puzzling as it was to me why anyone would work against NASA, Leo Fein’s association with them was further proof of his exceptionality, and his death all the more of a loss.