Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 25

It was the cleanest thing in that muddy place. Its feathers shone. Its long neck glistened. It also had the most remarkable pair of legs I was ever blessed to cast my eyes on. They were long and shapely and tightly clad in fishnet stockings.

Sonia squeezed my hand and rubbed herself against me with delight. Charles gawped and went bright red. The emu jerked its head towards us and then away. Sonia hugged herself with pleasure. The emu started to shake. It started slowly, a mild vibration that built and built until it was quivering all over. It stamped its feet, one, two, three. It waggled its backside. It b.u.mped and ground. It went into the most astonishing s.e.xual display I have ever witnessed in my life. There was no mistaking its intention and I was embarra.s.sed in front of the children. It set up a display with its backside, getting lower and lower to the ground, then sprang like a dervish and scissored its legs. It hopped on its haunches. It squatted. It showed itself like I have seen red-a.r.s.ed bool-bools do in spring.

"Egg," shrieked Sonia, tugging painfully on my wedding ring. "Egg, egg, egg."

"Shut up," said Charles.

The egg was black and shining, about eight inches across, an emu egg of course. The emu pecked it. And out of the egg came a little emu, bright blue, rocking back and forth on a metal spring.

"No, Charlie," Sonia cried.

But it was too late. Charles was running, his head down, his little arms outstretched, his warty hands open, towards the emu. He got a hold of a net-stockinged leg and would not let go.

The emu now unravelled itself. The front of the chest detached itself and revealed itself to be a woman's head with a feathered hat. The emu's head and neck dropped so we could see they were not neck and head at all, but an arm with a glove made in the shape of an emu's head. Another naked arm emerged from somewhere and stroked my son's bristly head.

"Did you get it?" the emu asked.

I stood as gawp-mouthed as my son had.

"Did you get the photographs," the emu said, "or didn't you?"

"Mummy," Charles said.

"Are you a journalist," the emu said, "or aren't you?"

"No," I said, "my name is Herbert Badgery."

"Mummy," said Charles.

"I have waited here all morning," the emu said. "I have waited here for the dills to arrive. G.o.d d.a.m.n them. What do you need to get written up in their silly rag?" She stamped her foot. "I gave them a map. I told them I would be here and I walked here, two miles. They wanted me to do it in town but they don't understand publicity. I need all this," she gestured at the blackwoods, blackberries, the cow dung, the dead winter gra.s.s, "for atmosphere. It's not so much trouble for them to come. They have motor cars. Look at my shoes. Look at them. How in the h.e.l.l do I get a break? Mervyn Sullivan has stolen my act. The police won't make him take down my picture. What do they expect me to do: starve? Bendigo is a lousy town. I should have gone up to Ararat. Where is the boy's mother?"

She squatted down beside Charles and wiped his nose with a little square of newspaper she had tucked away in her feathers. "You should look after children," she said sternly. "They are the hope of the future. Just because you are unemployed it doesn't mean your children should have no hope."

"My shoes hurt," Charles said.

"I am employed," I said.

"Bully for you," she said. "Buy your boy boots then."

I am giving a bad impression of Leah, but she has only herself to blame, for she was not at her best beneath the Castlemaine Road that day, nor I guess would she have been at her best when she asked the police to force Mervyn Sullivan to remove her picture from his sideshow. She was not one of life's diplomats at the best of times, but she could never control herself in the presence of a policeman.

She had an austere face, and you would hardly call it pretty. It was a flinty sort of face, with a small mouth, grey eyes and a little parrot's beak of a nose which I later came to admire although at the time I was not well disposed towards parrots or anything that reminded me of them. She had short dark wavy hair, olive skin, a slight smudge on her upper lip, and a long graceful neck. Her ears stuck out. The emu dance, which she had learned direct from its inventor, certainly made the most of her best features.

If I had known she was carrying snakes, I doubt whether I would have let her come to our camp. However, once Charles had decided she was his mother he had no intention of being parted from her again. He picked up her two suitcases and no one could persuade him to let anyone else share the load. He struggled along on his two st.u.r.dy bandy legs, jutting his jaw, more like a midget than a child.

Sonia led the way through the blackberries, holding aside brambles for her brother. Leah followed her luggage. I followed her.

She did not walk like a dancer at all. You would not think it the same person. She held her head high on her long neck and locked off her upper body into a rigid unit while her long legs perambulated independently beneath her.

"My name is Leah," Leah said. "And I am a married woman."

6.

Bedevilled by vanity, troubled by falling hair, I had my skull shaved quite bald in 1926, a fashion I maintained for twenty-one years. And although I was much given to romancing about the s.e.xual attractiveness of a man's bald head there had been no practical proof of the theory. Nor, with the advent of Leah Goldstein, is there going to be any change. So there is no use-as you watch me roll up a log to the camp fire for her, as my children squeeze on either side of her like bookends-no use at all in you skipping pages, racing ahead, hoping for a bit of hanky-panky. Leah was not only a married woman, but one with a firm sense of right and wrong and, having modestly discarded her feathers, she armoured herself against misunderstanding with a severe black dress, long woollen socks, and a blue-dyed greatcoat of the type dispensed to the unemployed.

The three of them sat in the firelight watching me prepare a meal, a dish known as Bungaree Trout which is made by slicing large potatoes, dipping them in batter, and frying them. If you eat it in daylight your eyes will tell you that you are eating fish, but if you eat it in the dark there is no fooling yourself: you're a poor man eating spuds.

We, the Badgery family, were in the habit of keeping ourselves to ourselves, and I cooked the potatoes in a mingy sort of spirit. If the dancer had once expressed a desire to leave I would not have argued with her. But she stayed and when it was teatime I had no choice but to feed her.

I piled the trout high on a tin plate and invited her to tuck in. The loud noises coming from her stomach had given me fair warning of her appet.i.te.

"So tell me," Leah said, when she was half way through her third trout, "what sort of business are you in?"

"Mining," I said.

You see what has happened: how the lies that once smoked like dreams have diminished to such an extent that by 1931 they are ign.o.ble snivelling things, excuses more than lies, the sort of lies my son told when he was caught stealing at State School Number 1204. They sent him home with notes about it. They strapped his hands; they caned his backside; they hit his warty knuckles with wooden rulers. This did no good at all. He rubbed peppercorns on his palms to stop the pain. He rubbed gum resin on his knuckles to ward off the sting. He put handkerchiefs in his pants to cushion the blows. In Castlemaine he stole an American dollar from the parson's son and claimed he had found it in the gutter. In the gutter! I understood his interest in money, but it was subsistence lying and it has no lasting value no matter how you look at it. And I, with this c.o.c.k-and-bull story about mining, was no better. I lied to this strange woman (this trout-wolfer) because I was unemployed and could not bring myself to admit it. I did it to ward off the look I had seen in those Ford agents, whose sugary glaze of compa.s.sion did nothing to prevent-in fact intensified-my sense of failure.

Likewise, when I was forced to line up with the unemployed at Bungaree at spud-digging time, in Mildura when the grapes were on, at Kaniva and Shepparton for the soft-fruit season, I held myself aloof from my fellows. I, having shone my boots and ironed my shirt, was not one of them. When some stirrers up at Bungaree tried to organize a strike against the spud farmers who were paying only sixpence a bag, I was called a scab. There were plenty of us, don't worry, and it was us scabs who brought in the spuds for those celebrated spud c.o.c.kies at Bungaree.

"What sort of mining?" my guest inquired politely, while my Son, unseen by anyone, jiggled a little piece of wire inside the lock of her battered brown suitcase. (If you look at him now, pressing his body against the dancer while he undertakes his inquiry, you will be certain he will grow up to be a thief. He has all the qualities, the most important of which is sheer persistence.) "Gold-mining," I said.

The dancer snorted. An extraordinary sound. The shape of her body, the elegance of her legs, the broomstick spine, the tidy contours of her flinty face, gave no indication that such an untidy explosion could emerge from her. Sonia was entranced. She liked odd things and I could see the noise attracted her. She came and sat beside me and squeezed my hand secretly. A joy to Sonia was nothing if it could not be communicated.

"It is gold," the dancer said sternly, reaching for a fourth Bungaree trout, frowning, and then deciding against it, "that is the curse of this country." She wiped her mouth with a little square of torn newspaper, a gesture that smacked of both fastidiousness and complacency. "It is what is wrong with it, has always been wrong with it, and once you look at what gold has done, you can go back and look at the att.i.tude towards land ownership and find it is exactly the same."

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was offended just the same. I took the last slice of trout, broke it in half and gave it to my children.

"It is gold," Leah said, "that has led ordinary working men and women into terrible delusion; it has made them think that they can be the exception to ordinary working men and women all through history; it has made them think that all they need is luck. They have been blinded by gold. They have imagined that all they need to do is drive their pick into the right spot in the ground and they will be another Hannan-they'll be bosses themselves. It has corrupted them. It has been the same with land. Men who spent their lives suffering from the ruling cla.s.ses went out and stole land from its real owners. Hey, presto, I'm a boss. There has been no history here," she said. "The country has woken like a baby and had to discover everything for itself and only now are people learning what the ruling cla.s.s has done to us, that we have been lied to and deceived about some Working Man's Paradise and we need more than luck to have freedom. So if you are still, in 1931, looking for gold to solve your problems, I must say you are barking up the wrong tree."

"I did not ask you to share my tucker," I said, "to hear you insult me in front of my children."

"It's not personal," she said. It may have been a trick of the light but I imagined I saw her eyes flood with tears. "Why do people always take it personally? I try to have an intelligent conversation, but there is no tradition of intellectual discussion here. When a subject is discussed the women simper and say they have no ideas and the men want to settle it with a fight. I am not attacking you personally, Mr Badgery." Her voice was half strangled. "I am attempting to a.n.a.lyse the history of this country and point out why the working cla.s.ses have always acted as if they're going to be bosses tomorrow. I'm trying to point out why we're in this mess. But if you want to take it personally, that's your right. You can give me my marching orders now, and I'll go."

She took another square of newspaper from her pocket and blew her nose. It would have taken a hard heart to evict her. She rubbed the corner of her eye with the sleeve of her coat and stared into the fire.

"You must understand," she said after I had begged her to stay, "the difference between a criticism and an insult. Do you do well from your alluvial mining?"

Honesty, like temper, has a habit of coming on me without fair warning. Before I knew what I was doing I'd tossed her my specimen bottle and she'd caught it with a snap. A few gold specks glinted in the firelight.

She threw back her head and laughed and her laugh was as remarkable as her snort: a tangle like blackberries, sweet, p.r.i.c.kly, untidy, uncivilized, and it is an indication of the difficulty I have with her, for her character will never stay still and be one thing, refuses to be held down on my dissecting board, pulls out a pinned-down leg and shakes it in the air.

Sonia loved the laugh. She nudged me conspiratorially, silently asking me to appreciate this marvel, this genie released from an austere and flint-grey vessel.

While the laugh raged around him, Charles's persistent wire at last hit the secret of his mother's lock and, from the battered three-strap suitcase, came the unfiltered odour of his flesh and blood.

The blue-bellied black snake that came first to his hand was only an average specimen, no more than three foot long and sleepy and stiff with the cold. Yet this is not to take credit away from my son who handled this, his first snake, with an instinctive sympathy.

Sonia gurgled, but whether from amazement or fear I could not tell.

"Shiva," the dancer said softly. "Don't let the others out."

"I shut it," Charles said, stroking a finger along the snake's spine.

"I had it locked."

Charles bestowed a magnificent smile upon his new friend and I cannot remember him smiling at all until that night. Perhaps it was the first time in his difficult life that he dared expect happiness, and when I recall him by the fire it is not, any longer, as a child, but as the big-jawed, heavy-necked, sloping-shouldered, wide-hipped, fifteen-stone business man whose rare smile could so charm those who saw it. It was a smile to treasure, a smile people would try to induce, the more wonderful for being so rare. I have felt a similar emotion when splitting open a dull piece of rock to discover a fist of opal hiding inside: that such splendour could exist captive in such ugly clay.

"There is a rule of the road," Leah told my son gently, "that you do not go messing with another fellow's swag."

"It's a suitcase," Sonia contradicted, leaping to her habitual defence of her brother.

The snake moved through my son's hand, ran along Leah's arm, and stopped. They both stroked it. The creature did not seem inclined to move any more.

"It is an unusual person," Leah said to me, "who will be at home with a venomous snake."

Let me tell you, I was no longer one of them. You can mistreat a horse and be forgiven it. You can kick a dog and it will come back and lick your hand. But a snake is another matter, and once you have wronged it, it will carry the memory of you with it, like a bolted convict with lash marks on its back, criss-crossed, burned in like a loaf of fancy bread. And there is no doubt that the greatest mistake I ever made in my life was to keep that Geelong snake a prisoner in a hessian bag, to starve it, to use it for tricks. Had I not been so foolish my whole life would have taken a different course: Jack would not have died, I would not have been permitted to marry Phoebe, and I would not have been troubled by the sight of my son besotted with a snake-dancer.

I was forty-five years old when I met Leah and a man, at forty-five, is meant to be mature. Certainly he should not be dependent on the good opinion and respect of total strangers who blunder into his camp.

"Most men," Leah said to me, "will run a mile from a snake," and I felt myself compared to my son and found lacking and I was led by my emotions rather than my common sense which told me to let my son have his moment of glory and not to worry that this blue-coated lecturer thought me a coward. My emotions, however, ruled. I could not stand it, this invasion of the one place on earth-my camp-where I might be confident of some respect.

Leah was engaged in conversation with Charles. I poked the fire irritably. "I was doing a show once in Wollongong," she was saying, "with one of Jack Leach's pythons, a dance show. I was a support act to Danny O'Hara's boxers and the snake got around my neck. It was choking me. I was going blue, and not one of those men would come near me. They wouldn't touch the snake."

"I would have," Charles said.

"I know you would have," Leah smiled. "That's what I'm saying."

"What happened?" Sonia asked and I imagined she moved a fraction away from me.

"I bit its tail," the dancer said, "and it let go enough for me to get it off."

"I've often considered show business," I said.

"Oh yes," said Leah, but she was more interested in Charles.

"Yes," I said. G.o.d d.a.m.n it. I did not even want the woman to stay. I would rather she left. I did not like her tone. I did not even care for her looks and I certainly had no thoughts of anything as dangerous as a f.u.c.k. I am Herbert Badgery, I thought, a man who nearly had an aircraft factory, a pioneer aviator anyway, a salesman of more than usual skill, and here I am being patronized by a girl who is self-important because she can touch a snake. I, who have travelled the country with a cannon behind me, have built mansions, resumed land, skinned a crow with nothing but air from my lungs, and disappeared from human sight before witnesses.

"Yes," I said, "the entertaining arts have always attracted me."

"It's a hard life," Leah said, "and full of trickery and deception, people like Mervyn Sullivan who will steal your act and leave your picture up when you no longer work for them."

"Magic was my field," I said. For the admiration of a woman I did not know, I spent this little piece of gold which was not intended as currency at all. It was all I had in my empty pockets.

"Disappearing acts," I said, the master of self-delusion, imagining I could simply say it and not have to go through with a performance.

"Very common," she said, "but hardly enough to run a whole show on. You'd be surprised at the number of people I meet who think that they could make a living because they can throw a few b.a.l.l.s into the air. One trick is not enough. One dance is not enough. I do the Emu Dance, the Fan Dance, the Snake Dance, the Dance of the Seven Veils. It is the snake that gets them in, but it is not enough by itself. Anyone who has read Cole's Funny Picture Book Funny Picture Book knows how to do a disappearing act. Nothing personal," she said quickly, seeing me rising from my log. "I am merely pointing out the difference between a professional and an amateur." knows how to do a disappearing act. Nothing personal," she said quickly, seeing me rising from my log. "I am merely pointing out the difference between a professional and an amateur."

I stood before them. I can still see their eyes in the firelight, the Dodge, in the distance, half hidden by mist, the frying pan sitting amongst the cracked river rocks of the fireplace, the sheen on the snake's black back as it pressed itself against the warmth of a child's and a woman's body.

I made the dragon.

I put my foot on my knee. I held my arm in the air. I teetered on my toes. I summoned up the terrible flag of the English, the pipes and drums of the band, their blue shirts and white moleskins, the brains of Goon's father like the brains of the pig. The river banks flowed with the Chinese, a yellow river of fear over boulders as smooth and unyielding as dragons' eggs. The cart ran down Han and the bone splintered his leg: it thrust outwards like a dagger, drove through his smooth hairless thigh and he looked at it with astonishment: this enemy he had harboured innocently within him. My father galloped his team, his eyes bright, clear blue, dragging his cannon, cracking his whip.

I wanted to call out but I could not. The dragon came and it was bigger than the dragon I knew before, for a child does not know enough to make a powerful dragon. A child makes a childish dragon from children's fears, a cub with soft paws and breath that smells of warm milk.

Thirty-four years of locked-up terror came spurting at me and I knew I would drown in it. I tried to talk, but the dragon had me and dragged me away into the s.p.a.ces between the mist of Crab Apple Creek while my audience, I must suppose, innocently applauded such a clever trick.

7.

I am forced to tell you more about the history of this woman who finally trapped me into appearing beside her on a dusty stage in Bendigo, and if I begin by showing you her funny-looking family as they take their const.i.tutional it is not so I can blame her parents for her character, but that I may point out the odd silence of the group as they walk. There are five of them, all with sloping shoulders and tall overcoats, but it is not the height I am concerned with, nor the graceful angle of descent from neck to arm, but the lack of chatter. It is my contention that the behaviour of these five people (and to a lesser degree, their appearance) is not the result of genes, but of a house, an odd redbrick place in Malvern Road, Malvern, a drumming, echoing construction which has finally triumphed over them, made them as sparing with their talk as Mallee farmers are with drinking-water: they are at their most comfortable (I must except the mother from the generalization) sitting in armchairs, wordless, bookless, their hands clasped in patient laps. Even released from the house (I except the mother, again) they will only talk for a purpose and never for amus.e.m.e.nt or diversion. I do not mean to suggest that they are lonely and unhappy because of it. Let me hypothesize the opposite: as they move along the battle-grey St Kilda seafront one can sense a rare harmony between them, although it may be a trick of the light, or a product of their uncanny physical similarities. But there are no tricks of light in the brightly illuminated lounge room in Malvern Road and when they sit with their hands in their laps after dinner-there is no wireless, naturally-one can look at them as, say, a field of poppies which, moving slightly on a windless day, give the distinct impression that some silent conversation is going on. And this impression is confirmed when one of them smiles, another chuckles, and a third stares hard at the ceiling as if trying to catch the gist of it. This, I must warn you, is merely an "impression," a fancy. There is no ESP taking place. The Goldsteins (pere et filles) (pere et filles) are merely engaging in their own quite separate thoughts in the way that has given them reputations for eccentricity in the world outside, and made poor Edith Goldstein have small fits of madness as rare as sunspots when-all this poppy-waving getting too d.a.m.n much-she leaps to her feet, smashes plates, talks gibberish and (while the poppies stay ramrod stiff) sweeps up the broken pieces and sits down again with a sigh. are merely engaging in their own quite separate thoughts in the way that has given them reputations for eccentricity in the world outside, and made poor Edith Goldstein have small fits of madness as rare as sunspots when-all this poppy-waving getting too d.a.m.n much-she leaps to her feet, smashes plates, talks gibberish and (while the poppies stay ramrod stiff) sweeps up the broken pieces and sits down again with a sigh.

Edith Goldstein knew it was the house. The silence had not been natural to Sid who had arrived in Melbourne as a poor refugee from Tsarist Russia. He stepped off the ship with a swagger in his walk, a glide to his step not out of keeping with a man who will shortly make his first hundred pounds in a dancing school in Exhibition Street. When he and Eddie Wysbraum shared both a room and a suit, he was not known to be a silent man. He had opinions which he voiced about manufacturing (he was for it) and religion (against).

Neither was the silence natural to Edith, a fine-boned redhead from Scotland who had made sandwiches in the railway rest rooms during the day and, having added dancing to her list of ambitions, had met Sid and fallen in love, not silently, but in a happy noisy G.o.dless confluence of Scots and Yiddish.

It was the house, I swear it, pushed them into its mould, made them meet its requirements. It stretched their necks by forcing them to peer over its high windowsills and Edith Goldstein who was five foot eight when she married Sid was five foot nine and a half by the time Leah got on the train with Sid and Wysbraum to go up to Sydney University.

It was a dark, dull, dank redbrick house that would amplify both success and failure. It made the pages of the Melbourne Sun Sun sound like sheets of falling metal. It made the failure of Sid's Electrical Suction Sweeper a deafening event, and while this merely sent Sid back into retailing it produced a profound effect on Leah who came to develop many theories about the "Product" (as it was known) while she sat silently in her chair. Inside that echoing house Leah saw that the Product was a thing that had appet.i.tes of its own that must be served. Her father was kind, benevolent, but the Product was the real ruler. It was like a queen bee which must be carefully bred, served by workers huddling around it. The Product demanded a market, economies of scale, it cried for these and, should its needs not be met, it would weaken and die as would the workers who had sustained it. sound like sheets of falling metal. It made the failure of Sid's Electrical Suction Sweeper a deafening event, and while this merely sent Sid back into retailing it produced a profound effect on Leah who came to develop many theories about the "Product" (as it was known) while she sat silently in her chair. Inside that echoing house Leah saw that the Product was a thing that had appet.i.tes of its own that must be served. Her father was kind, benevolent, but the Product was the real ruler. It was like a queen bee which must be carefully bred, served by workers huddling around it. The Product demanded a market, economies of scale, it cried for these and, should its needs not be met, it would weaken and die as would the workers who had sustained it.

She did not share her theories with her family and was thus astonished, later, to find that they had not reached the same conclusions; she was incensed that the failure of the Product had so little impression on her sisters; she thought them dull because of it.

Yet the crash of the Product only lasted for a month or two and Sid Goldstein had gone on to other successes. He was now rich, he could afford to move into a nicer house. Toorak was not beyond his reach. He could have paid cash for a house you could sing in, a house where you could tell stories and be extravagant with words, a house that did not insist you remove your noisy shoes at the door. Now Sid, as we will see in a moment, was a rational man, but he was not inclined to push his luck in the matter of wealth; he stayed where he was and kept the suit he had shared with Eddie Wysbraum hanging in its cupboard in the hallway where there was plenty of light for its proper examination.

Sid Goldstein had no time for the G.o.d of the Jews, the very mention of which was enough to make his soft dark eyes suddenly harden in temper. Yet I fancy had he only known that the Ark of the Covenant was a powerful electric generator he might have adopted a different att.i.tude entirely, for he was a great respecter of ingenuity. Be that as it may, the G.o.d of the Jews was a nonsense to him. A bigot, a pig, the sort of bully one might have found in the service of the Tsar. So although he had been born a Jew and had thought of himself as a Jew he brought up his daughters in total ignorance of what a Jew was. Leah learned she was a Jew at the Methodist Ladies' College. Her mother made some attempt to explain it all to her, but knowing little could not help much. As for her father, he said it was "superst.i.tion". He was a modern man, a rational, sensible liberal, but when he visited the suit he had shared with Wysbraum, when he stroked the poor shiny material, when he felt with his long fingers for the tear his friend had made on the second day-a misunderstanding about the workings of cable trams-or when he sought out the place where he had tucked and tacked up the trouser legs for his short-limbed friend, he was not, as he smoothed and touched, a modern man at all.

That Sid, the son of a Minsk tailor, owned fifteen stores, all of which featured high mirror-encased pillars, was one of the miracles of this suit.

But the other miracle was considered (silently, separately) a greater one. And this, of course, was what it had done for Poor Wysbraum.

He had always, Leah remembered, been known as "Poor Wysbraum". "Poor Wysbraum," her mother might say after he had departed, or just before he arrived and the family sat antic.i.p.ating the amplified sounds of their visitor's high cracked voice. She did not elaborate on what she meant by "Poor". The house did not permit elaboration, and besides anyone could see that Wysbraum was Poor Wysbraum because he was short and dark and ugly, with huge bruised beetroot-red lips far too heavy for his little doe-eyed face, his ears stolen from a bigger man's head, his huge veined hands emerging from his frayed cuffs. He was Poor Wysbraum because he had, it was silently considered, used the suit to take the braver course, the better, more n.o.ble course, and had suffered for his goodness.

For Wysbraum had taken fifteen years of his life to become, at last, a doctor. He had given up everything, all hope of companionship, marriage, children, a house, just so he could be a doctor, and, when the time came, at last, on his fortieth birthday, he could afford no more than a new practice in Brunswick where the people were even poorer than he was and could not pay their bills.

When Leah was older she came to resent this description of him as "Poor Wysbraum," found something offensive in it, but when she was a young girl at home she understood the term better, and heard the soft strum of approval, envy even, in the word as well as pity for his loneliness. Later, when she came to a.n.a.lyse things, she did not understand so well and she forgot that it was not just she but all her family who loved Poor Wysbraum who was like food too rich for their ascetic taste, or a scene that was too colourful for eyes attuned to the bleached colours of St Kilda in summer. Wysbraum brimmed with an excess of emotions, angers, fears. He boiled over with stories, his big mouth full of food, while the Goldsteins, quite replete and accepting their headaches without complaint, sat with their hands on their laps and only Sid, their representative, would say: "And then Wysbraum, what happened then?"

You did not need to accompany them on their visit to the suit in the cupboard to know what sort of bond there was between these two men. You could listen to each of them, at table, extol the virtues of the other, and it was Wysbraum, because he spoke more, because he was not restrained by the house, who shouted his praise the loudest.