Berka Feldman spat out the nails from between his lips, cleared the table of leather, tacks and thread and left the shoe on the last, to be repaired the following morning. It was only ten to five. He seldom left the workshop before six, but today he felt restive. After an oppressively hot morning the sky had suddenly darkened and distant thunder had rolled like wagon wheels over rocky ground. Ripped by forked lightning the clouds emptied themselves over the suburb then drifted away, leaving a brilliant sunset and steaming streets.
From the doorway he watched the water gurgle down the gutters towards the Dip. He drew a deep breath. His lungs caught sharply on the smell of damp concrete and a sudden yearning for the wet-straw smell of the veld washed over him. He longed to be on his wagon again, enclosed in the silence and emptiness of the veld, with only his voorloper to lead the oxen. In summer he had watched the grass bend and sway like Jews at prayer while he hummed the half-forgotten songs and psalms of his childhood. In winter he listened to the susurrus of the wind through the dry grass, rising to a mournful swell as it swept over the veld. Towards evening a thin spiral of smoke might appear on the horizon. He savoured his solitude, certain that it would end. Soon he would walk into a mud-walled farmhouse filled with the smell of coffee and griddle cakes baking on an open fire. Hanging from the rafters of the reed-and-thatch roof would be cobs of dried mealies, twisted rolls of tobacco and strips of biltong. From the earthen floor into which peach pips had been beaten would rise the faint sweet smell of cowdung…
How free, how lonely that life had been.
He took off his leather apron, washed his hands in the cracked basin at the back of the shop and rinsed out his mouth. The taste of nails persisted. Only a drink would remove that metallic taste, but if he came home on a Friday evening smelling of beer, Yenta would have another weapon in her armoury of abuse. He put his cap over his thick grey hair and walked out of the shop, squinting up at the sun which hung low over Main Street.
From where he stood he could see the eastern part of the suburb; from the top of Main Street he would see the rest. The city lay to the east, its tall grey towers rosy in the dying light, a coppery blaze piercing the eye as the sun reflected off glass and steel.
To think that forty-five years ago it had been little more than a miners’ village with row upon row of tin shanties, rough men, horses, ox wagons. Berka shrugged his shoulders at the miracle of its growth.
His shop was a mile and a half from town, but the Dip brought the buildings nearer and they towered like a fortified city over a village at its gates. Although he might yearn, occasionally, for his carefree days as an itinerant cobbler, he had lived in the shadow of the city for so long that he gladly accepted the boundaries of his world: The sun rose to the east of Main Street, and set over the hill, to the west of it.
Berka recalled clearly his arrival in South Africa, early in 1892.
‘It’s a bad time to have come,’ his uncle reproached him. The pogrom should have coincided with a boom in South Africa. ‘There’s no gold in the streets nor, it seems, in the mines,’ he continued crossly as he led Berka into a small room at the back of the Concession Store. ‘You’ll have to work hard. I pay five pounds a month with free board and lodging. If you want to get rich, save.’
For several years Berka sold blankets and trinkets to black miners. On week-ends he helped in the Kaffir Eating House attached to the store. The smell of burned entrails and cooked meat clung to his clothes and cleaved to his nostrils. His cousins sniffed fastidiously when he came to his uncle’s house for an occasional meal.
In his sparsely furnished room he studied English from a tattered grammar book. The bar was his elocution class. From the English miners he acquired a Midlands accent which, coupled with impeccable Yiddish inflexions, made his teachers roar with good-natured laughter. He read voraciously. This improved his English, widened his knowledge and assuaged the loneliness of his years as a kafferitnik. He worked for long enough to buy the tools of the trade he had learned in the old country, then started on his life of wandering.
His uncle never forgave him his ingratitude.
‘If you’d remained with me instead of running off into the veld like a wild chatas,’ he said to Berka, ‘you’d have been a rich man. Today you don’t even own the house you live in.’
‘Property is theft,’ Berka had replied. ‘I want nothing that I haven’t earned with my own labour.’
They never spoke to one another again.
Berka stood at the corner of Main Street and Lovers’ Lane. Wherever he looked he saw Uncle Feldman’s possessions. He had become a man of property over the years. But Uncle Feldman was not a happy man; he had little joy from his sons. They had not gone beyond Standard Seven in school and proved equally inept in business. He would be lucky if they said a decent kaddish for him when he died—at a hundred and twenty years, please God. Berka chuckled. He could think of no greater punishment for his sons.
Uncle Feldman had moved out of Mayfontein twenty years ago but he retained his Concession Store, the source of all his wealth. He hired a manager and although he was almost eighty, he still went to the business. At irregular hours, Berka thought grimly, so that he could catch the manager stealing. Uncle Feldman was certain that everyone stole from him.
Berka spat into the gutter.
Uncle Feldman was one of the few people towards whom Berka could not extend tolerance, an attribute which he valued above most others. Yenta, who had never really understood him, claimed that his tolerance stopped at his own front door.
He began walking up Main Street, aware that his tall bulky figure was as much an institution in Mayfontein as the headgear of the mine, the white dumps on its outskirts or the bar. As he walked to and from work every day he was hailed from all sides. His heart swelled with emotion: He was the friend of Jew and Gentile, the arbiter in disputes, the consoler in sorrow. In short, he was loved.
‘Feldman!’ came a deep voice from the smithy across the road. ‘Why do you stand there in the middle of the street, smiting yourself on the chest, smiling, spitting, shaking your fist?’
Leib Schwartzman emerged from the smithy. He was a stocky man whose powerful shoulders gleamed with sweat under his grease-stained vest.
‘Are you sick that you’re shutting shop so early, or has your uncle written you into his will?’ he asked with a grin.
‘Neither. I calculated that if I worked an hour less today, I’d become a millionaire that much later. How’s business?’
‘Bad, bad.’ Leib wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Cars, trams, bicycles. Where have all the horses gone?’
‘To the Free State, to become rabbis like that ass Benjamin,’ Berka said.
‘Don’t blaspheme against the servants of the Lord. What will happen when you have to account to Him one day?’
‘If God is just, as you claim he is, he’ll distinguish between those with kosher stomachs and unkosher souls. I may not get to heaven but neither will my reverend brother-in-law Benjamin. The only trouble is that I’ll probably meet him in the Other Place.’
Leib laughed. He had studied Law in Kovno but influenced by the workers’ movement he had given up Torah for a trade. The future of society, after all, lay in the hands of the proletariat. But he had retained his love for Jewish tradition and went to shul, to synagogue, regularly. Opiate of the masses, he’d exclaim angrily when Berka defined religion for him. What’s a worse opiate? Going to shul or going to the bar? Meet my learned friend Bernard, he would mock. He’s so thirsty for Justice that he’s been called to the Bar.
‘When I saw you packing up early I thought perhaps you wanted to get to shul in time,’ Leib smiled.
‘Don’t joke,’ Berka said gloomily. ‘I’ll probably land up doing that to please Ruth. It’s not easy being an honorary grandfather. Ruth’s afraid I’ll land up in Hell because she once heard me say that there was no God. She wants me to look for Him in shul.’
‘Strange child,’ Leib said rubbing a grease spot off his arm. ‘Last week your sister-in-law sent Ruth to borrow a pot from us. “Mrs. Blackman,” says Ruth to the wife because she’s speaking English now so the name’s Blackman not Schwartzman, “mine grenny vants to lend your big bleck pot.” Why doesn’t she speak Yiddish to my Chaya? They’re both a pair of English scholars, Ruth and Chaya.’
‘Because she doesn’t know Chaya well and to strangers she speaks only English.’ Berka looked angry, upset. ‘I must be getting along. I’ll stop off at the bar to chat with our local proletarians.’
Leib put his hand on Berka’s shoulder.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Berka, I know how fond you are of the child. But to whom can one speak? To her father the dreamer? Or her mother who’s always wrapped up in Vicks and cottonwool?’
‘Ruth’s not strange, Leib. She’s got too much imagination and too few friends. The kids tease her because she doesn’t speak English properly. She’ll learn. She begins school on Monday where she’ll mix with other children. Have a good sabbath. See you at the poker game on Sunday night.’
The sun had almost disappeared behind the Main Street hill and Berka stepped up his pace. He wanted to see it set behind the mine dumps. There were few sights he loved more.
Poor Ruthie. She’d have to learn to live in the present. A child of six burdened with a consciousness of tragedy and persecution, with memories that weren’t even hers. He himself was guilty of telling the story of his family’s massacre in her presence. He had broken down that time and shouted:
‘There is no God!’
Berka coughed to clear the heaviness on his chest. He hummed tunelessly for a while then remembered the song about the drunkard:
When they write my epitaph
It’ll read ‘Here lies a drunk’,
And I’ll answer with a laugh,
‘There’s no brandy here, I’m sunk!’
He must sing that for Yenta. She said that real Jews didn’t booze. Yet here, immortalised in a Yiddish folk song, was the lament of a Jewish drunkard. Let her explain that one away. Berka walked on, humming the jaunty tune.
There were few people in Main Street. The Jewish housewives were at home preparing the sabbath meal and the miners’ wives shopped on Saturday morning. Haggard, often toothless, their hair perpetually in curlers, they trudged across the veld in their slippers from the mine’s Married Quarters to do their weekly shopping. There was little enough in their purses after their men had stopped off at the bar and at the bucket shop on Friday evenings. Their children, thin and snot-nosed, ran wild through the suburb.
Harsh men, these miners, yet who could judge them? Here he was, walking in the clear rain-washed air while they were thousands of feet below surface, drilling into stubborn rock, breathing in poisonous fumes, stumbling through the tunnels that honeycombed the earth beneath his feet. Underground was Hell. Dark tunnels of damp rock, slippery passages, unbearable heat, pressure bursts, rock falls. Could these conditions produce gentle compassionate men? And what was it all for anyway? They wrested a few grains of gold from tons of rock, then buried it again in underground vaults.
He had watched the men come off shift, their faces pale with dust and fatigue, tin hats in one hand, carbide lamps in the other, blinking in the unaccustomed light of day. They washed down the mine dust with drink and beat up their wives, their children and the hapless mine kaffirs. To them, the blacks were barely human.
Every year Berka watched the black recruits arriving at Mayfontein Railway Station clad in loin cloths and blankets. They were tall sturdy men, selected for their strength and good health. For two shillings a day, a pot of mealie meal and kaffir beer, they travelled hundreds of miles from their kraals and their families to live in crowded mine compounds and to do the hardest work underground. When their nine months’ contract ended, they might be a few pounds richer, wear trousers and a shirt, and carry away with them, under their gay blankets, a lung disease.
And the white miners organised unions to protect themselves from the blacks’ cheap labour, but left them to be slaves to the mine bosses.
‘Berka! You look as though you’re carrying the world on your shoulders,’ a gentle voice said at his side. ‘And all the way uphill too.’
‘Reb Hershl! Just the man I need to see.’ Berka stopped at the bakery door and sniffed. ‘Ah, you perfume the suburb. There’s such comfort in the smell of fresh bread. Little wonder I’ve got such a big nose. All my emotions are filtered through it.’ He put his arm around Hershl’s shoulders and walked into the bakery with him. He had time. There would be another sunset tomorrow evening. Such a pessimist he wasn’t. A few words with Hershl would remove the metallic taste from his mouth and the ash from his soul.
Hershl took off his floury apron and hung it on a nail behind the counter. The bakery was small. The front portion had been divided off from the wall ovens at the back by a thin wooden partition. There was a glass-fronted counter which displayed iced cakes, buns and several kinds of bread: rye with aniseed, special sabbath kitkes and sandwich loaves. Through the opening in the partition came a surge of hot air as the iron doors of the wall ovens swung open to receive another load of bread. A loud crash of metal trays and bread tins drowned the first part of Hershl’s sentence:
‘…the last lot of loaves for the night,’ he said as the noise died down. ‘Dirk will lock up. Since I took him on I can go to the synagogue on Friday evenings.’
‘How’s business?’ Berka asked.
‘Excellent, improving all the time. It paid to take on a trained baker. Faigel works up front now and only does the confectionery for special occasions. I bought a horse and cart this week. The deliveries were getting too big for my bicycle.’
‘Leib will be pleased to hear there’s another horse in town,’ Berka said. ‘He thought they’d all gone to the Free State.’
‘Free State?’ Hershl looked puzzled. He did not always understand Berka’s jokes. ‘Did I tell you I’d made an offer for Sharp’s delicatessen? It’s much bigger than my shop and I can build in extra ovens. Now that I’ve got contracts with a few Concession stores I shall need it. I saw Uncle Feldman the other day,’ Hershl added. ‘For two reasons. To get an order for the bakery and to ask for a donation for the Refugees’ Fund.’
‘Let me guess,’ Berka said drily. ‘The order you got at cut prices. And if you did get a donation, you had to sweat blood first.’
‘You know the man. He denied he was stingy. All rumours, he said. People thought he was mean because he didn’t advertise his charitable deeds as others did. He gave anonymously.’
‘So anonymously that he doesn’t even sign his cheques.’ Berka retorted. ‘Let’s talk of cheerful things.’
‘Cheerful things?’ Hershl’s face dropped. ‘There’s nothing cheerful in 1937. Look at Germany: Jews thrown out of jobs, property confiscated, schools closed, people shut up in ghettos. That’s cheerful? And suddenly the world’s too overcrowded to take in a few Jewish refugees.’
‘They let some Jews into South Africa from Germany.’
‘And are drafting the Aliens Act to keep the others out. They hate the Jews as much as the Nazis do.’
‘But what’s happening in Germany couldn’t happen here,’ Berka persisted.
‘You’ve been saying that for years, Berka. This isn’t the same South Africa you knew in the old days. All those stories you tell of Boer hospitality and respect for the people of the Book. When they’re in the Book they’re all right, but when the farmer’s crops fail and he comes to borrow from the Jewish storekeeper at interest, it’s a different matter. When the Jew was a smous, a pedlar, they tolerated him. When he holds the purse strings or he’s in competition, they fear him. And where there’s fear, there’ll be persecution.’
‘Nonsense. There may be hotheads among them but has there ever been a pogrom here?’
‘What do you think the Greyshirts are planning, a Purim party?’
‘So, where’s it better?’
‘Where’s it better he asks,’ Hershl appealed to the ceiling. ‘Berka, we need a home of our own, without Aliens Acts and without anyone’s kind permission to exist.’
‘Spare me the Zionism. Bought any good stands in the sea lately?’
Hershl laughed, not without embarrassment. I shall die in Jerusalem, he predicted when he argued about Zionism with Berka. That I can believe, Berka would reply. To live there is another matter. Emissaries from Palestine had an easy time with Hershl. Two years earlier an imposing man with a dark flowing beard and side curls had sold Hershl a stand in Palestine. A few months later he discovered it was situated a mile off the coast of Jaffa, in the sea.
‘Nu, in Lithuania I was a Hebrew teacher,’ Hershl said. ‘Here I am a baker. In Palestine I’ll become a fisherman. Remember how furious Faigel was? She doesn’t understand how I feel about Palestine. Buying trees, making an annual contribution to Zionist funds, sending other people, that she doesn’t mind. But the idea of settling there is beyond her comprehension.’
‘And mine. It’s too remote and strange to me. How’s the family?’
‘Fine. Daniel starts school on Monday.’
‘So does Ruthie. It’s a pity they don’t play together. It’d help if Ruth had friends her own age.’
‘Daniel’s also shy. Children of immigrant parents have a hard time. Torn between different ways of life. If we lived in Palestine…’
‘There he goes again,’ Berka said walking towards the door. ‘I live in the present and you live in an impossible dream of the future. It’s better, I suppose, than living in the past like our Dovidke. Come here, Hershl. Look at him standing there at his window, dreaming of the old country no doubt, where the fields were greener and the fruit sweeter.’
‘He often stands like that,’ Hershl said looking up at Dovid Erlich at his workshop window over the road, gazing sightlessly into the distance. ‘He’s got problems. Not much work coming in, mostly alterations. And Sheinka is a nagging wife.’
‘Is there another kind?’ Berka asked.
‘Poor Ruthie. She’s caught in the middle. They can’t be easy parents to live with. I wonder what went wrong? Sheinka was a lovely woman when they came out from Lithuania eight years ago. A little melancholic perhaps, but charming. She’s grown bitter over the last few years.’
Berka was looking up at Dovid. From his first floor workshop, he thought enviously, he can see over the ridge of the hill where the sun will soon set. And he’s not even aware of what he’s seeing. Berka turned to leave the bakery.
‘Have a good sabbath, Hershl. Come over and kibbitz on Sunday night. Leib and I have arranged a game of bloff. Low stakes.’
He shook Hershl’s floury hand warmly. He loved the man; he renewed Berka’s faith in humanity.
Main Street was shining after the rain. A tram car clambered heavily up the hill, packed with people returning from work. Their faces looked soft and warm in the golden light. Berka loved them all. Even that thief Steinberg who gave short weight in his butchery; and Chidrawi, the swarthy Syrian who was arranging a pyramid of yellow peaches in his window; and Levin the outfitter who stood in his doorway, a tape measure around his neck. And all those children outside the fish and chips shop watching wistfully as Ronnie Davis sprinkled vinegar over someone else’s chips. He even felt a fleeting affection for the miser Pinn who owned the second-hand shop. His wife stood in the doorway, fluffing her hair this way and that, before embarking on what must be a two-hour journey home. She stopped off all along Main Street, garnering the news of the day, which she then embellished and disseminated among the housewives of First Avenue. She often knew better than they what was happening in the house next door. Some people were entirely unlovable.
Berka looked into the dark interior of Nathan’s Drapery Store where his daughter Raizel worked. She was probably cashing up now. She had worked for the Nathans for four years, since she matriculated. At first she was a counter hand, measuring out elastic, hair ribbons and dress material. Today she practically ran the business. Mrs. Nathan spent most of her time in the city, drinking tea at the Corner Lounge, or walking about from shop to shop. Getting ideas for the trade, she called it. Mr. Nathan was almost blind. My eyes, he called Raizel. My heart, Berka murmured as he passed the shop.
The barbershop next to Nathan’s was crowded with miners. Not, God forbid, having haircuts, but placing bets for the dog races.
Friday Night is Wanderers Night,
Night for Greyhound Racing.
read a poster on the wall. Next to it hung a framed picture of water-waved ladies. And Wednesday night was Wembley Night, yet another night for dog racing.
Berka walked resolutely past the hotel bar. The Siren-sounds of clinking glasses and loud laughter would not tempt him tonight.
From the bar onwards Main Street ran a flat course for half a mile towards the large bluegum plantation which flanked the suburb on the west. The plantation stretched from the end of Main Street southwards towards the mine dumps. Below the dumps was a small dam into which water was pumped from underground. If Berka had seen snow-capped mountains, pine forests and an inland lake as he turned the corner from Main Street into First Avenue, he would not have been happier. He remembered when the first saplings had been planted. He had watched the mine dump grow as the coco-pans crawled up its sandy slopes depositing yet another load of finely crushed rock onto the chalky hill. And next to it the yellow slimes dam also grew slowly, hardening towards its final shape as a truncated pyramid.
He never tired of this constant yet ever-changing scene. On rainy days the dump stained deep yellow, the trees washed a lighter green and the leaden skies reflected dully in the cyanic dam. Under the clear winter skies the dam sparkled like a jewel, and the whiteness of the dump was blinding. He loved it most at sunset, however, when the dump became a mountain of gold dust and the dam liquid amber.
They could keep their gold bars in their vaults. He was satisfied with the refuse. From the top of First Avenue he surveyed his kingdom. King of the Rubbish Heaps, he thought with a smile. Beyond the veld which separated Mayfontein from the mine, the wheels of the headgear turned ceaselessly and the stentorian voice of the crushers echoed throughout the suburb, day and night, week after week, year after year, until it seemed to be the very breath of the suburb. He breathed in unison with it.
At this time of the day the rows of the red-bricked semi-detached houses glowed like live coals and the whole suburb caught fire. Only the plane trees cast a cooling shadow across the hot sandy roads. Yanka the fruit vendor came into view, driving his horses hard in his effort to reach home before the sabbath. Billowing clouds of red dust rose in his wake. Like the cumulus clouds which hung over the dump, like the dust raised by Boers on commando.
‘This is my world,’ Berka sighed as he walked down First Avenue towards his house, ‘and I’m glad of it.’