‘I should’ve had that drink!’ Berka looked regretfully up First Avenue then back again to the veranda where Yenta, her ample bosom resting on its polished ledge, was waiting for him. Her hair was combed and she was wearing her best brown dress. That could mean one of two things: that she wanted a favour from him in which case she would have overlooked his beery breath, or that she had unpleasant news, in which case he would need a drink.
‘Benjamin’s in for the week-end,’ she greeted him apologetically. ‘He’s come to see a doctor. Please be patient with him, Berrala. He’s a sick man.’
Berrala. A man had as many names as his wife had moods. He was Berka when she talked about him to others; Berra when she was annoyed with him which was most of the time; Bernard when he had been to the bar with his non-Jewish friends, and Berrala when she wanted something from him. In her fantasies she undoubtedly saw him sitting in a plush office with ‘Bernard K.Feldman’ gilded on his door. If he did not have a middle name, she’d provide one.
‘That’s not all.’ She put a restraining hand on his sleeve as he brushed past impatiently. ‘Ruthie’s in the lounge with that scabby dog of hers, Zutzke.’
Berka stopped. His gruffness could not hide his concern.
‘What now?’ he asked.
‘This afternoon,’ Yenta said replacing her bosom on the ledge, assured of his attention, ‘when Gittel went out to feed the chickens, she noticed a piece of roof missing from the chicken run. And the chicken she’d been fattening for Purim had flown.’
‘So?’
‘So poor Gittel chased all over First Avenue looking for the silly chicken. She finally found it on Reb Hershl’s kitchen table, pecking at the farfel which Faigel had put out to dry.’
‘So now we’ve completed the saga of the chicken. What about Ruth?’
‘Wait. Sheinka at the same time noticed that Ruth and Zutzke were missing. She went to the veld where Ruth had run away last time and saw her, followed by the dog, climbing up the mine dump. She was dragging that piece of corrugated iron behind her, like a sled. When she saw Sheinka, she fled into the plantation as though a horde of Cossacks were after her. Pregnant as she is, Sheinka dragged herself across the wet veld and found Ruth lying under the trees, crying her heart out. She wouldn’t say why. You know a mother’s heart: Sheinka feared she’d been raped by those wild mine kaffirs…’
‘Stop talking like a stupid yiddine. So what happened then?’
‘So what happened then he asks. Nothing.’ Yenta hated interruptions. She liked to tell a story in her own time, with suitable digressions. But she remembered that Benjamin was in from the Free State and controlled her temper. ‘So what happened? Ruth ranted like a meshugene about pogroms, blood and snow. The piece of iron, she said, was her sled and she was running away from the Cossacks. Then she ran away from Sheinka. She’s been in the lounge for the last hour, waiting for you.’
Yenta looked grave. Berka hated the gravity, the muted tones in which they spoke about Ruth. As though the child were an idiot, a cripple.
He walked into the dark airless passage from which all the rooms in the house led off. It had pockets of smells which evoked the week’s meals: pickled brisket, sauerkraut, cauliflower, gefilte fish, not to mention the all-pervading smell of pickling cucumbers and fermenting wine. He screwed up his nose and lit his pipe. In the far corner of the lounge Ruth lay sprawled out in a large armchair, her ginger head against Zutke’s spotted one. They were both asleep.
Berka sat down on a chair near the door. He really needed a drink but he’d wait for Raizel. When she came home she would pour him a schnapps and amuse him with tales about Nathan’s. A perceptive girl, his Raizel. Perhaps he should have let her become a teacher. In the five years that Dovid had gone to night school he had not learned as much English as in the last year when Raizel had begun to teach him. But Berka had been afraid; so many teachers remain old maids.
With boys it was different. They needed a trade, a profession. Yenta had wanted their son Joel to be a doctor. When he had apprenticed himself to a pharmacist, Yenta consoled herself: They understand more than doctors, these chemists, she said. When I’ve got a pain, a cold, anything, I go to Brown the chemist, he gives me a mixture and in a few days I’m as strong as a horse again. What’s so marvellous about doctors? In the old country the sick died of their diseases and the doctor died of starvation. Please God when Joel finishes, I’ll give him with what to start his own little chemist shop.
Towards this end Yenta had been pickling cucumbers and fermenting wine in the cellar for years. Her products were snapped up by the neighbours and by Sharp’s Delicatessen as soon as they matured. How’s Joel’s little chemist shop coming along, Berka would ask with heavy sarcasm. His earnings had kept them in relative comfort during all the years of their married life but he did not have a penny in the bank. Laugh, laugh, Yenta would reply. One day you’ll see.
Joel’s boss was complimentary about him. So charming with the clients, he told Berka. Clients yet; he, Berka, had customers. And so charming. For that he got an education? He wished Joel would shed a little more charm at home. Since he was asked out to his rich clients’ homes he had grown so high and mighty. Bring your friends here one Friday night, Yenta had offered in her innocence. You must reciprocate. I’ll make noodle soup, tzimmes, a stuffed duck.
Berka had watched Joel take in her untidy hair, her ill-fitting false teeth which clattered loosely as she spoke, her nails which were blackened from the coal stove and from her wine making. He followed Joel’s eyes down to Berka’s slippers which she always wore. I can’t ma, he told her turning away. We’re not geared for visitors. Bring them, bring them, I can manage. Last Pesach I had twenty people here for the seder. I can… She had broken off abruptly, rubbed her nose vigorously and ended lamely: Oh, I understand. Well, perhaps we do need new curtains. And the sofa is a little worn…
That was education for you.
Their house did look shabby. The lace curtains were yellow with dust, the floral linoleum needed a good scrubbing and the heavy rust-coloured settee and armchairs threw up clouds of dust when one sat down. Phthisis one could get. But Yenta would not spring-clean until Passover. This vestigial behaviour stemmed from the old country where the housewives waited for the long cold winter to pass and for the snows to melt before they took down their curtains, polished the windows and scrubbed the floors. The fact that Passover occurred in autumn in South Africa, not in the spring, did not deflect Yenta from her girlhood rituals.
It was hard to keep the mine dust out of the house. In the dry winter months the wind whipped up the loose sand from the dumps, covering everything and everyone with a fine layer of dust. Yet Sheinka and Gittel, Yenta’s sister, managed to keep their house clean. Like a chemist shop—Yenta herself said. But it was to Yenta’s house that the visitors flocked, not to Gittel’s. They dropped in for a chat, for a game of klabberjas; they sat on the veranda in summer and around the kitchen stove in winter. There was always enough to eat for those who were tardy in leaving at mealtimes. Everyone responded to Yenta’s warmth and kindness, and ignored the smells, the dust and the general untidiness of the house. They visited Gittel and Sheinka only by invitation.
But she could keep the place cleaner, Berka brooded. The only pretty thing in the lounge was a vase of marigolds which Raizel had put on the little glass table. When he suggested to Yenta that she take in a native servant she said: I don’t want blacks in the house; they stink.
Her cucumbers and her wine didn’t stink. Berka struck a match. Ruth stirred. She’s emotionally exhausted, Berka thought as she moaned quietly and fell asleep again. Since her tonsilectomy she suffered badly from nightmares. They’re choking me, they’re choking me! she’d cry leaping out of bed. They said they’d take out my tonsils with a teaspoon, she told Berka reproachfully when she came out of hospital. A big light shone on me. They put a black smelly thing over my nose and I couldn’t breathe. Afterwards I knew I wasn’t dead because my throat was so sore. They didn’t take them out with a spoon. And they didn’t give me ice cream and jelly afterwards like mamma said.
Like an orphan they treated her. To have left a sensitive seven-year-old all alone in the hospital; Berka still couldn’t get over it. Yenta had taken Ruth into hospital by tram and Raizel had brought her home next day in a taxi. Dovid was working, Sheinka was pregnant and Gittel couldn’t speak English.
Berka’s pipe went out again. He did not risk lighting another match. He put the pipe into the ashtray and looked at the pictures on the wall. Yenta’s sepia-tinted mother and father hung above the settee in matching oval frames. Their features had been blurred by time and enlargement and they could have been anybody’s mother and father. The mother, a dark round-faced woman, wore a wig. The father’s face was covered with a long beard, a thick moustache and a forelock which was combed low over his forehead. Only his large brown eyes— like Raizel’s—were visible above an aquiline nose. He wore a yarmulka.
The other walls were covered with haughty uncles and smug aunts under whose noses Berka longed to draw big black moustaches. Yenta was proud of her family. They certainly had had the time and money to make frequent visits to the photographer.
Berka marvelled at the speed with which his feelings of universal love and tolerance dissipated when he stepped into his house. He smiled, however, when he looked at the picture of Raizel and Joel as children. Even Joel looked lovable.
There were photographs of picnics in Lithuanian woods, of the village choir, of the river. There was also a street scene in Ragaza, a broad sandy road with little wooden houses under shingled roofs; a horse and cart in the distance and an occasional tree growing in a garden. Berka had often seen Ruth standing in front of this picture, staring at it, almost fearfully.
On the wall behind him was a wedding photo of Dovid and Sheinka. She looked dark and lovely and he proud and studious. A pair of gold-rimmed glasses rested lightly on his nose. Berka smiled. Dovid’s eyesight was as good as his own. The gold-rimmed glasses and the book under the arm were the emblems of the Lithuanian intellectual. They carried the best literature under their arms.
There were no pictures of Berka’s family. These had been destroyed together with everything else. To look at the walls one would think he had been born from a stone.
To his right were his and Yenta’s wedding pictures. They were separate and had not been taken at their wedding but Berka insisted on calling them his wedding pictures. One was a picture of Yenta and her sister Gittel. Gittel’s round pretty face was in the full light. Her hair was draped back into a soft chignon and she smiled with the assurance of a pretty woman. Yenta’s face receded into the dark background. Her beaked nose was skilfully touched up by the photographer and her intelligent scornful smile acknowledged that she was a foil for her older sister’s good looks. Only her large brown eyes— again like Raizel’s—brightened up her long dark face.
This was the picture with which Benjamin had wooed Berka on her behalf. The other one is prettier, he agreed, but she’s eight years older and she’s married. Yenta may not be the most beautiful woman in the world but what a character she’s got, what a character! And what a character she turned out to have. Berka should have been warned by that all-knowing smile.
Next to it hung the second half of the wedding picture, the one of Berka which Benjamin had sent to Yenta. He stood in front of a mining magnate’s house and his features were sacrificed to background. He leaned possessively against an ornate iron gate, his thumb lightly hooked into the chain of a watch—kindly lent by the photographer. His hair was parted in the centre and his moustache, which he later trimmed down to Yenta’s specifications, stretched from ear to ear, like his smile.
‘I thought the house belonged to you,’ Yenta would throw up at him in later matrimonial disputes.
‘And I thought you had character,’ he countered. ‘Looks I could see you didn’t have.’
‘So, who asked you to bring me out from Ragaza?’
‘Your brother. And I was tired of wandering about. They all said I needed a good Jewish wife, a home. Some home you made me. A bed of nails.’
‘If not for me you wouldn’t have had nails either.’
‘I should have married Maria du Toit. Her father promised me the farm when he died.’
‘You deserve a goya. You’re a peasant. Who else but a poor orphan like me, living with her married sister, would have come out to a strange country to marry an even stranger man?’
‘On your holy brother’s recommendation. For once he showed good judgement, on your behalf. And tell me: Who brought out your sister and her children to South Africa when her husband died? Benjamin or me?’
‘Who said you didn’t? Will you throw that up at me for the rest of my life?’
Berka sighed. He never won an argument with Yenta. She was convinced that he disliked Benjamin because he had been instrumental in their marriage. She could not conceive of the fact that Benjamin was a repulsive human being in his own right.
Berka heard a light shuffle of feet behind him. Yenta stood in the passage with a large cup of coffee in her hand, motioning him towards the veranda. Benjamin was probably staying all week. He got up quietly and followed her. She waited until he had settled himself in the cane chair before she handed him the strong sweet coffee. Then she leaned against the veranda ledge again, looking expectantly up the street.
Raizel was due home, her sabbath dinner was ready and when Benjamin returned from synagogue they would eat. Not that the sabbath dinner differed much from weekday meals. Berka had discouraged her years ago from making a fuss of the sabbath. A white table cloth and her mother’s silver candlesticks were the only concessions to tradition which Berka, after many battles, had allowed her.
The sun had already set behind the plantation and the air was fresh and cool. The smell of warm damp earth and bruised marigolds mingled with that of sabbath cooking which floated down the street. On every block from the top of Main Street to the end of First Avenue, lived at least two Jewish families. On their own block there was their landlady Mrs. Zaidman and her spinster daughter; the Schwartzmans and Dovid’s family. Over the road lived the Pinns and Reb Hershl’s family. They were surrounded by friends. Except, of course, for their new neighbours, the Burgers.
Berka sipped his coffee loudly then listened. Old man Burger sat just behind the wall which separated their verandas. He was also drinking coffee, noisily. He had moved into the other half of the semi-detached house a few months ago. A balding bull-necked man with a red angry face, he had barely returned Berka’s greetings since he moved in. His wife and six children—goodness only knew where they all slept in their two-bedroomed house—were no friendlier. Only their eldest son Jan whom he often met in the bar, greeted him politely.
Perhaps Hershl was right. He would have to revise his ideas of Boer friendliness and hospitality.
The Burgers were urbanised Afrikaners but the dedication with which the old man tended his garden made Berka suspect that he had once been a farmer. All the other houses had crushed stone from the mines covering their tiny patch of garden. Burger dug and manured the soil, planted sweet-smelling flowers, bushes and creepers, and spent all his free time either in the garden or hammering in the cellar which he had converted into a workshop.
Aaron Blecher and his family had been very different neighbours. Trust his wife to drag him off to a ‘better’ suburb, to provide a good address for their marriageable daughters. When they left, Berka lost an invaluable klabberjas hand and Yenta a close friend. The low backyard wall which divided their houses had hummed with a constant traffic of loaned cups of oil, flour and sugar. Now Yenta was greeted by the implacable pale face of Mrs. Burger. In spite of this Yenta still wanted to buy the house they had lived in for the past twenty years.
‘Mrs. Zaidman was here again today,’ she said as she took away Berka’s empty cup. ‘She only wants a hundred pounds down, the rest to be paid in monthly instalments. She says…’
‘She’s selling cheap because she needs hard cash for her krasavitza’s dowry,’ Berka said irritably.
‘Molly’s not ugly and she’s not unmanageable. She’s only twenty-seven.’
‘Not counting Mondays and Thursdays.’
‘She wouldn’t even sell it, but since her husband died…’
‘Forget it, Yenta. I’m not going into real estate.’
Yenta sighed. Why did she persist? She and Berka had discovered long ago just how far they could push one another. In fact, they understood one another so well that there seemed little point in talking at all. The turbulent days of their marriage when Mrs. Pinn on her veranda could report word for word of an argument taking place in their own kitchen, were over. If they argued now it was simply a matter of form, to acknowledge that the other existed.
‘I had the strangest dream last night,’ Yenta changed the subject. She rarely had ordinary dreams. ‘I dreamed I ordered two baskets of black grapes from Yanka to make wine. His horse ate half of one basket. I was so angry that I went to the Syrian and he delivered two baskets to the house. As I sat down to press them into the wine barrel, I discovered that there were cucumbers in the baskets, not grapes.’
‘And so?’ Berka asked, waiting for the inevitable interpretation of signs and portents which always had a bearing on dog racing.
‘The double for tonight will be two and two,’ she said. ‘I’ve already placed a bet.’
‘Foolish woman. One of the baskets was half empty. The double for tonight will be two and one and a half. Or, if you add the Syrian’s baskets to Yanka’s and subtract…’
‘Another Joseph!’ she said with infinite contempt. ‘Go tell it to Pharaoh.’
She watched Mrs. Pinn’s progress down the street. Yenta had seen her turning into First Avenue when she went into the kitchen to make coffee for Berka. So far she had only covered three quarters of the street, describing a zig-zag course as she crossed from one house to another. To beat a hasty retreat into the house as Mrs. Pinn approached meant you had something to hide. To receive her with equanimity was a sure sign of a clear conscience. Unlike the Angel of Death she passed over all the non-Jewish houses, stopping only at her co-religionists’. The goyim’s gossip, it seemed, was not worth collecting.
Tonight her stops were shorter than usual. Mrs. Pinn observed the sabbath and she wanted to be home in time to light the candles.
‘Have you seen mine Raizel?’ Yenta asked when she finally arrived at her veranda. She always spoke English to Mrs. Pinn although the latter, who was born in South Africa, had learned to speak Yiddish after the first lot of immigrants arrived from Lithuania. In a suburb of immigrants Yiddish was an occupational imperative.
‘Oh yes,’ Mrs. Pinn answered in her gritty voice. She felt slighted by Berka’s curt nod. ‘She was walking slowly along Main Street with Mr. Erlich. They seemed in no great hurry to get home.’
She watched Berka for a reaction. When she got none, she gave Yenta her news: They said the Syrian had rejected Yanka’s offer for his fruit shop. He wanted an extra hundred pounds’ goodwill. They said that Reb Hershl had made a secret offer for Sharp’s Delicatessen. As an old friend she was tipping off Yenta to approach Reb Hershl about selling him her cucumbers. The rebbetzim, they said, had already offered him wine for the Passover. They also said that Schumacher, the German refugee who had opened an ice-cream shop next to the police station, was only half-Jewish and that his wife was a full-blooded German, a terrible anti-semite. She for one would not buy his ice-cream. Who knew what they put into it?
‘They say,’ Berka mumbled angrily, walking into the house. ‘They say. Who the hell is They?’
‘They say,’ Mrs. Pinn continued, disconcerted by Berka’s abrupt withdrawal but refusing to be silenced, ‘that Yaakov Koren has stopped sending money to his wife and child and that they’re living on charity from the shtetl. He’s sending her a divorce instead and he’s going to marry the widow Kagan before Rosh Hashana.’
When Berka came into the lounge he found Ruth sitting upright in the chair, a dazed sleepy expression on her face. Zutzke was stretching himself luxuriously at her feet. She smiled happily as Berka picked her up and she put her thin arms around his neck. The smell of bluegums and acidic dump sand clung to her curly ginger hair. He hugged her warmly then sat on the armchair, holding her in his lap.
‘Ruthie’s had a hard day. Tell me about it,’ he said softly in Yiddish.
She leaned contentedly against his chest, saying nothing.
‘Tell Zeide Berka what you did today, Ruthie.’
‘I, I don’t know if I dreamed it or if it really happened,’ she said with a frown.
‘Tell me the dream then. Bobbe Yenta always tells me her dreams. Maybe if I know what you dreamed we’ll be able to work out the double for tonight’s dog racing.’
Ruth smiled. Everybody knew about Yenta’s dreams.
‘It was like last time,’ she began, hiding her head on Berka’s shoulder. ‘I dreamed, I think I dreamed, that I heard horses and I knew that I must run away. In the snow it’s hard without a sled, so I took the iron from Bobbe Gittel’s chicken run. And I ran to the, dumps, to the snow mountain. With the lake and the forest, like Daddy told me.’
She dug her face into his shoulder again and was quiet for a while.
‘And it happened again, like last time. It didn’t look like Mayfontein. It looked like that picture on the wall, that one,’ she pointed without looking at the street scene of Ragaza. ‘All the houses were on fire and those men with the big swords came on horses and, and…’ She burst into tears.
‘Finish, my child. Then it will be over and out.’
‘And they killed everybody who was running out of the houses. And the snow in the street was red,’ she blurted out, ‘and I ran into the forest.’
Berka sat, silent with guilt, holding her tightly against his chest.
‘And I didn’t know if I dreamed it or thought it or if it really happened,’ Ruth said. ‘And Mamma shouted and hit me and said I was a liar.’
‘Shah, shah. It did happen, my poor child, but not to you. To someone else and a very long time ago. It is all over now and it will never happen again, so you mustn’t worry. It will never never happen again.’
He sat very still until he felt all the tension leave her thin body. Then he heard a loud voice on the veranda. Within seconds Sheinka had rushed into the lounge, preceded by a strong smell of Vicks.
‘I knew she’d be here, the little liar! Steals the iron off the roof to play dangerous games on the dumps, then tells silly stories about pogroms. She’s either crazy and doesn’t know what she’s talking about or she’s an out and out liar. Come home immediately!’
Ruth clung to Berka.
‘Quietly, quietly,’ Berka told Sheinka sternly. ‘I’ve just managed to calm her.’
‘It’s you and Dovid who fill her head with nonsense!’ Sheinka cried. ‘Stories, stories, stories! No wonder the child’s an idiot. She doesn’t know what or where she is half the time.’
‘Sit down, Sheinkala, and don’t excite yourself. Remember your health,’ Berka said quietly.
At the mention of her health Sheinka collapsed into a chair with one hand over her heart and the other over her stomach.
‘The baby will be born dead, I know it!’ she wailed. ‘How can any living thing survive such upsets? And it will be her fault.’
Ruth tensed up against Berka and looked at him in mute appeal. He tightened his hold on her.
‘Yenta, bring Sheinkala a cup of that delicious hot coffee,’ he said.
‘No. I’m going home. Come,’ she said to Ruth as she wriggled out of the chair.
Ruth turned around slowly to face her mother and said haltingly, in English.
‘I don’t want to go home mit you.’
Sheinka fell back into the chair. Her face crumbled as she cried: ‘In English! Did you hear? She spoke to me in English! What am I, a stranger? Gott in Himmel! What sin have I committed to deserve such a strange child?’