Illywhacker_ A Novel Part 28

14.

The letters were an agony to her. Sometimes she would sit an hour between sentences. She could not say that she had danced the foxtrot with a young man who did not reach her shoulder, nor that the young man was a socialist, nor that she had, on one sweet balmy evening, walked past crumbling houses whose tiny gardens were heavy with frangipani, to hear this young man speak in an awful hall which echoed with the heavy boots of working men. Her father had no time for socialists, but how could he have not been moved to see Izzie do battle with his shyness? When he had opened his mouth she had heard, quite clearly, the sound of a throat so dry with fear that its membranes might adhere and strangle him. He wrung his dainty hands and shut his eyes. The audience went, suddenly, very quiet. She did not know that this was the way it was, would always be with Izzie, that he would, in these moments of mute terror, move huge gatherings of people to wish him well, to will him success, to sit with their own throats dry, their own hands clenched, wishing him eloquence. And then his foot, like a band leader, hit three times, haltingly, and then (as if he felt the audience sigh and lean towards him) he began to speak, lightly, intensely, personally. When the meeting was over, she stayed in her seat, limp, quite drained. She saw large working men with arms as thick as Izzie's skinny legs come up and shake his hand.

Nor could she say that the young man made her feel stupid, that almost everything, every day, made her curse the inadequacy of her previous life, the lack of talk, lack of ideas, lack of laughter. There had been few books in Malvern Road, and these were novels, hidden away in the musty big bedroom her mother and father shared, a room she rarely entered and then only secretly, perhaps intent on unearthing the mysteries of marital s.e.x. (She discovered nothing more than a little blue-labelled bottle of vaseline with dust clinging to its greasy lid and two romances by Walter Scott, always the same two, inside which-had she been more curious about books-she would have discovered a rubber contraceptive sheath in a little paper envelope.) She had walked through the Domain, her high-arched feet blistered from new shoes, and seen men camping in huts made from corrugated cardboard boxes and a little sparrow-limbed girl in George Street dressed in a pitiful fairy costume, begging with a tin in one hand and a silver wand in the other. These things moved her far too much to write about in letters. But this was not the end of the secrets: she had begun to help Izzie in his Labour Party work. She cleaned halls after meetings and ruined her grey silk dress with ink from the Roneo machine. Not only could she not mention this to her father but Izzie had warned her not to tell Rosa who, he said, would scorn her for reformism.

For a person who prided herself on her honesty these burdens were hard to bear.

15.

She did not know that she had fallen in love with Rosa, only that her heart lightened when she was called downstairs to the telephone.

"You must not come if I am interfering with your studies," Rosa would say.

"No, no. I am just finishing."

She would run upstairs again, run downstairs to iron a blouse, upstairs to clean her shoes and when the taxi tooted outside she would leave her normally neat room in a mess of books and stockings, discarded slips and rejected skirts, and arrive at the taxi out of breath. At this moment, laughing, collapsing into the seat next to Rosa, she would not think of the guilt and anger she would feel when the picnic was over, when she would walk heavily to her room and look with disgust at the evidence of her indolence.

They picnicked everywhere, in Centennial Park, Cooper Park, but most often near the harbour. They took ferries to Manly, to Taronga Park, to Mosman and Cremorne. They sat, always, at the bow, in front of the ferry captain, and held their hats with one hand while their faces pressed against the soft-gloved salt air. Then, when the engine bells rang, they would clatter down the stairs with basket and rug to see the harbour framed like a painting in the wide wooden doorway.

Then they would walk along paths above tangles of morning glory and wild lantana and spread their rug and take off their hats and let the warm March sun bathe their uplifted faces. When she was with Rosa she felt as if the world was about to burst open, like a delicious tropical fruit, and spill its seeds into her cupped hands.

It was her youth that Rosa liked, her youth that she celebrated, and yet it seemed to Leah that it was Rosa who was young, whose pleasure in the world made Leah feel old and wooden. Rosa was filled with pa.s.sions and enthusiasms, sudden squalls of anger and equally sudden exclamations of childlike (Leah thought) delight. It was Rosa, for instance, who would stop to point out streaky cirrus clouds that Leah had not even noticed: "Feathers of ice," she had said as they spread the rug on white-flowered clover. "Oh Leah, I love this city. It is so beautiful. Whenever I am unhappy I come to the harbour. It is always splendid, but it is so much nicer when I can share it with someone who does not know it."

Rosa did not show Leah the battle with unhappiness that made these trips so necessary to her, her empty days, all those days, those years of days since she had stopped being Rosalind the dancer. She lived with an almost crippling sense of wasted time and sometimes it seemed that she only lived to read the letters from the son she really loved, the son she had, so carelessly thrown into the arms of the revolution.

But Leah saw none of this. She loved the way Rosa sat on the rug, the looseness of her limbs, the way she had of holding her hands together, the right hand circling the left thumb. She liked the fine wrinkles around her blue eyes, the wideness of her mouth, the wind-tangled curly honey hair.

They ate prawns from newspaper and drank wine: Leah, one gla.s.s; Rosa, the rest of the bottle.

And it was under the influence of this single gla.s.s that Leah, on their third picnic, began to unburden herself of secrets.

"No," Rosa said, when Leah had made her first confession. "You are not dull or stupid. You are young. Of course you know nothing. You are a baby. Don't smile. You have strong feelings and don't know how to argue in their defence. You will spend the rest of your life finding justifications for your strong feelings. I watched you, the day you came to my house-the way you sat, so meekly. Your hands were-so-in your lap, your head bowed, very meek. And inside, I knew, you were boiling with all sorts of things you would like to say. You were not meek at all. So, tell me, what is it you really want to do with your life?"

Leah's hands were sticky with prawns, her head light with wine. She tore a piece of bread from the loaf and threw it to the jostling crowd of orange-legged seagulls.

"I would like," she said, watching the seagulls fight but not seeing them, "to do one really fine thing."

"I knew you were a dangerous girl," said Rosa, laughing. And then, seeing how shy and embarra.s.sed the girl was, added, more tenderly: "What thing?"

"I don't know," the girl said.

"Only one?"

"It would be enough, wouldn't it?"

"I don't know." Rosa poured herself more wine and lay on her back. She held the gla.s.s in one hand and shaded her eyes with the other. "When I was young, I was just like you. Very moral. Very serious. But my character was flawed. The real reason I left the Party was nothing to do with what they did to Trotsky (Trotsky was not a saint himself). The real reason was because I couldn't spend my life in dark rooms when the sky is like this. I could not believe there would be a revolution here. I blamed the gold, working men with gold in their mouths, but, really, it was the sky. Look at it. It has no history. But is this why you study medicine? To do one fine thing?"

Leah sat cross-legged, her hands folded in the nest of her pleated skirt. She blushed, but although she wished to bow her head, did not. "Do I seem silly?"

"Not at all. But why a doctor? Why not a baker?"

The girl smiled.

"But why not? Have you never smelt bread?" Rosa shut her eyes and her nostrils flared as she smelt imaginary loaves. "You wish to be of use. I was the same. I joined the Party. Of course I was often travelling, on the road, but I did whatever work I could. My husband thought I was mad, but I did dull and menial things for the Party and I felt that being a dancer was of no worth. But a dancer is is of worth of worth and and a baker ... candlestick makers too." a baker ... candlestick makers too."

Rosa sat up slowly and rubbed her eyes. "I will tell you why, really, I left the Party. It was because they could not take a dancer seriously. They could not imagine I was a serious person. I was not dowdy enough for them. Do you believe me?"

"Yes, Rosa," said solemn Leah.

"It is a lie," said Rosa, looking out across the harbour where a liner was coming around the point from the Quay, coloured streamers still dangling from its sides. "I am so used to saying it, I believe it." When she turned her gaze was so fierce that Leah averted her eyes and began to fiddle with the loaf of bread. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds expelled me."

Leah blushed.

"Because," Rosa said, "they are puritans and hypocrites, because I had an affair with a married comrade. We used to come on picnics, like this, and tell secrets to each other. But they did not expel him. He was a man. They expelled me. It's quite true. He was very senior too. That is why I can't forgive them." She drank her wine, thirstily, emptying the tumbler and refilling it. "So now, darling, you have my secret. You are shocked?"

"No," said Leah, who was shocked. "Not at all," she said, as if she heard about such things every day. "I was thinking about your son, Joseph, in Moscow."

"What else is there for him to do?" said Rosa hotly, rubbing her eyes. "How could he be anything else but a Marxist? Better a Marxist than some wishy-washy social democrat." And to emphasize the point she threw a prawn head at a scavenging seagull.

"Oh, Rosa!"

"Yes, I know Izzie is your friend, but he is my son." This time it was the wine cork she threw.

"He is very kind," said Leah, "and that is what is important."

Rosa's face then underwent one of those transformations that would always delight Leah-it sloughed off its tired miserable lines and became drum-tight with a splendid smile.

"And that is what's important? Kindness?"

"Yes."

"Yes," said Rosa, shaking out her hair. "Kindness and dancing. Can we agree on that?"

Leah could not say yes but smiled instead.

"I will teach you to dance," said Rosa with a shyness that Leah did not understand. "Then you will understand what I am talking about." But it would be another week before Leah realized how important the dancing lessons might be to Rosa and now she only smiled, relieved that Rosa's mood had pa.s.sed.

But even then, as they contented themselves with the progress of a tugboat pushing its way back to Pyrmont, a man came up to them and asked them for money. His eyes were downcast and he had cardboard tied to the bottom of his shoes. He was a young man too, no more than thirty. Rosa gave him the money and he went away.

They watched him trudge around the path beside the seawall.

"I am suddenly struck," Rosa said, her smile quite collapsed, "by how evil we are." She looked down at the empty prawn sh.e.l.ls, the broken heads, the long thin feelers and something-perhaps it was only the flies crawling on them-made her shudder.

16.

Secrets sheltered within secrets, boxes within boxes, and in the heart of this secret world, in the ultimate box, sweet as sandalwood, Leah Goldstein danced, felt her heart pump, her glands secrete, savoured the sweet ache of unused muscles and knew herself-beneath the eye of her stern-faced but contented teacher-to grow beautiful.

In this final box, the stories had no moral. They were dancing stories set in country halls, flapping tents. Here Rosalind danced for miners. There Leonard bent his iron bar and swallowed fire to wild applause, while the man he had become drove his trucks through the Sydney streets unaware that, in his own house, his wife was romancing about their difficult past, turning those country halls into theatres as glittering as the fortune they had never found.

It was months before they were sprung and by then it was too late. The women, both of them, were addicted. So when Lenny found them-having arrived at the house in the middle of the day, his heart set on nothing more complicated than cheese and pickles-there was nothing he could do to stop it. He opened the door of the spare room as Leah Goldstein-moving to the rhythms of Lou Rodana's Orchestra-dropped a coloured scarf to reveal her small leotard-clad b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

There was a silence then. The gramophone clicked noisily. Lenny fumbled for a cigarette in his blue overalls, but even while he discarded wet matches, one by one, his eyes took in the scenethe electric radiator glowing in the corner, the wind-up gramophone in the empty fireplace, the girl's shapely legs, the sweat on her upper lip, the old sc.r.a.pbooks spread across the little table beneath the cobweb-covered windows and-last of all-his wife's pleading eyes as she stood and smiled.

"Show me," he said to his wife, "where you keep dry matches."

"You know where," she said, not wishing to be alone with him.

"Show me," he said.

Rosa laughed, a high scratchy laugh, and followed him out of the room. Leah lifted the arm from the gramophone and wound it up again.

She could hear Lenny's angry voice. She removed the needle from the arm and searched through a tiny tin box looking for a sharper one.

17.

Rosa gave him his matches, holding the box at arm's length, and watched him light his cigarette. He looked around for an ashtray and, obedient as any wife in a woman's magazine, she found one amongst the unwashed dishes in the sink, rinsed it beneath the tap and dried it. Ash smeared the tea-towel, and she thought, defensively, so what?

"Why?" he said. He did not sit at the table when she sat down. He leaned against the kitchen door and folded his arms across his chest. She took a dirty ca.s.serole off the chair so there would be somewhere he could sit, but he watched her silently and did not move.

"Why?" he repeated.

"Why what?"

"Why? For what use? A dancing doctor?"

Rosa shrugged.

"What would her people say to you, filling her head with rubbish?"

She would have liked to say that it was not rubbish, that it was wrong to call her new happiness rubbish.

"What would her mother and father say? She is meant to be studying. What will you feel if she fails her studies?"

"She wanted to ..." Rosa began, but she could not meet her husband's eyes. She wished she had the kitchen tidier. She stacked two plates inside the greasy frying pan.

"Is that what you want?" Lenny said. "You want her to fail? You want that on your head?"

Rosa shrugged again.

"You force her to do things. She doesn't know how to say no. It is like the Pa.s.sover."

"It is not not like the Pa.s.sover," Rosa said. "The Pa.s.sover was not my idea." She was beginning to feel guilty and it was wrong. It was a trick he had. "She wanted," she whispered, worrying that Leah would hear them. like the Pa.s.sover," Rosa said. "The Pa.s.sover was not my idea." She was beginning to feel guilty and it was wrong. It was a trick he had. "She wanted," she whispered, worrying that Leah would hear them.

"She wanted, she wanted."

"She did did want." want."

"She wanted so much, she ran away. That's how much she wanted."

Of course the Pa.s.sover had been a mistake, but who was to know it? None of them. Not until it was done. The girl had been so alight, so eager. On the eve they had swept the house together and thrown out all the bread. Leah had been full of questions. Why this? Why that? They had made the charoset together. They had boiled the eggs. Rosa had shown her how the tray was set. They had starched the white tablecloth and set the table.

On Pa.s.sover she had arrived in a new dress. It was almost a real Pa.s.sover. Lenny's father and brother were there. The old man was frail and doddery but when he began to read from the book his voice, though high, was strong and clear. She did not like the old man and he did not like her, but out of his corrupt old mouth the words came-so clear and clean that she stopped hating him and was pleased he had come.

It had happened at the very beginning, when the karpas was taken. She had not known the girl well then and had not understood her. She had looked at the girl as she took the karpas and when her face changed she thought it must be the bitterness. But then Leah had stood, suddenly, with an awful sc.r.a.pe of the chair and, just as the old man began ("This is the bread of affliction ...") she ran from the house. Thank G.o.d the old scoundrel was deaf and never heard Leah spitting and coughing as she ran out the front door. But he was not blind. He saw Rosa run after her. And Rosa, as she went down the front steps, heard his voice squawking in outrage like a caged bird.

She had found Leah weeping, hunched over and hugging herself behind the lavatory and she took the shuddering body in her arms and held her.

"What is it, little Leah? What is it?"

Leah wept and wept. "I am a fraud," she said. "I am a fake, a fake, a fake. I cannot be anything."

"You are the sky," Rosa said, trying to find medicine in words. She held the girl's head to her breast. "You are the sky." She meant that big sky, that vast clear cobalt sky without history, clean, full of light, free of sombre clouds.

But she did not explain herself and neither the sky nor her arms could give Leah Goldstein any comfort.

Now, in that kitchen, her husband came to sit next to her in the vacant chair. He put the back of his dirty hand against her cheek, gently. "She is very young," he said, softly, "and you will damage her."

"All right," she said, but she promised nothing.

"You have plenty of other things to amuse you," he said, looking around the kitchen, the open cupboards, the spilt flour, the stacks of yellowing newspapers.

"Yes," she said. She found some cheese and pickles then and saw him to his truck. She admired the load of roofing lead he had bought from the old Turramurra Seminary and promised him meat and pudding for his dinner while Leah Goldstein, who had heard almost every word, held the head of the gramophone ready. And Rosa, returning to the spare room, found her protegee swaying her hips lasciviously to the accompaniment of Lou Rondano's "Boompsy Daisy".

18.