SIX

Mitzi Strauss nervously extended her hand. Perhaps she half-expected to find a coin in it. “I am Frau Strauss,” she started to say, then with a little shrug she beamed at Siddy, “Ach, what does it matter, here in Australia? I am Mitzi — please to call me Mitzi.”

The sun came out from behind the tree-tops. Even the magpies’ harsh call seemed softened at that moment. Solly and Manfred watched the two adults closely. Sensing there would be no clash, they ran off, richer by a shilling each and whatever else might flow from the meeting.

Siddy said, “Pleased to meetcha Mitzi. That nipper of yours, whatsisname, Manfred is it? He’s good mates with Solly, isn’t he?” He turned to me, nudging me with his elbow. “And what about you, Jake? A grown-up fella like you must be lookin’ for girls now, eh?”

I felt a shiver of dislike for Uncle Siddy. In the distance I could see Ruti still closeted with her parents. With all the judgemental brutality of my age, I compared their self-sustaining gentle warmth with the extroverted, will to survive, rough-and-tumble attitude to life of Mitzi Strauss and Sidney Kaiser. I longed to be the man in Ruti’s family, to take the place of her sickly father and thereby achieve a status that I could never have if I lived in the shadow of Uncle Siddy and, who knows, the effervescent Mitzi Strauss.

The two of them were getting on like a house on fire. Questions flew back and forth interspersed with gales of laughter. It was obvious that Mitzi Strauss had quickly informed Siddy that there was no likelihood of Mr Strauss ever coming to Australia. From that disclosure onward, they strolled around the grounds, arms linked, occasionally looking back when Uncle Siddy would call out to me to verify a point in whatever tale he was pitching Mitzi Strauss.

As we neared the veranda I detached myself from them and leaned disconsolately against the wall a few feet away from the Kahns. There was no laughter from them, no outward sign of joyful reunion and yet something reached out to me (or was it something in me reaching out to them?) that drew me into their group while I yet remained apart. Mrs Kahn, grey from her tightly drawn-back hair to her dusty flat-heeled shoes, reminded me of one of the convent order of the Grey Sisters whom I had often seen picking up the winos as they lay in the sand at dusk on Bondi Beach. Her shoulders seemed perpetually bent, ever ready to minister to the needy. As she stooped over her husband I wondered if she had the same courage as those nuns.

Suddenly she straightened up and said something sharply to Ruti. They were helping Henry Kahn to his feet. Ruti beckoned me to join them. Without bothering to introduce me to her parents, she said in an urgent, commanding voice, “Jacob, my father is not well. He needs to go to the toilet. Will you please accompany him.” And as an afterthought, “He speaks quite good English, you know.”

Henry Kahn, a dried twig of a man, laid a feathery arm on mine. I steered him down the corridor in silence, popped him into a cubicle and turned a tap on over the basin full-force to disguise the sick man’s retching. I did not inquire how he was. If he had died that instant behind the half-door of the toilet I would have been glad. I would then apply for the vacancy in the Kahn household for a man to look after Ruti and, grudgingly, her mother also. I flushed at the thought, splashed water over my face, turned the tap off and took a leak. There was now silence from Mr Kahn’s cubicle. I dried my hands on the roller-towel, taking far longer than needed. Still they felt clammy and my heart seemed as though it was being squeezed into a small corner of my chest. Breathing deeply, I called out in a voice not wanting to be heard or indeed answered, “You okay in there, Mr Kahn?”

There was a faint trickling sound from the cistern — and that was all.

There was no point in my looking. I had no wish to see Mr Henry Kahn dead on a dunny seat in the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home. I had wished him dead and it had happened. My immediate problem was to tell Ruti and her mother and be able to look convincingly upset. I was amazed at my calmness, at the callousness of my reasoning and, most surprising of all, at how my thoughts were racing ahead, planning our future life together, Ruti’s and mine.

I walked steadily towards the swinging double doors of the bathroom. I could hear whistling coming from the other side. I stopped. Nobody in the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home whistled Lily of Laguna. Uncle Siddy, hands in pockets, pushed the door opened with his boot.

“Ah there Jake, just waterin’ the horse, was ya?”

“See that dunny there, Uncle Siddy. There’s a dead man in there.”

“Go on, you don’t say?”

‘‘Dinkum, Uncle Siddy. Have a look for yourself if you don’t believe me.’’

“Look!” I screamed at him. I pushed the cubicle door open. It caught on Henry Kahn’s legs and stuck fast. The body fell off the seat in a crumpled heap on the tiles. There was vomit and blood down the front of his suit.

Siddy looked quizzically at poor Mr Kahn. “Well, that’s one for the books, I must say, young Jake. It don’t say much for the tucker around here, does it!” He looked at me long and hard. “You don’t seem too worried by finding a dead’un in your dunny, son. You didn’t do ’im in, didja?”

I watched him slide the body out of the cubicle; I was frozen with fright at the implication of his jokey remark. No, Uncle Siddy, I didn’t kill him but I certainly wished him dead. Oh yes, that would go down really well with Ruti. Somehow I could not imagine Irma Kahn grieving for her skeletal husband. Perhaps she would change from grey to a paler shade of grey and then fade out like the images on a film screen. Ruti, now, that was a different matter altogether. We would leave the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home hand-in-hand and somewhere along the shores of Bondi we would live as husband and wife in a …

Siddy’s voice cut in on me. “Who is he, Jake?”

“It’s Ruti’s — it’s Mrs Kahn’s husband. One of the reffo parents that came here to visit today. They came in Mrs Pearlman’s car.”

Siddy put his arm around my shoulders and led me out of the bathroom. I was surprised to see that it was still daylight, that all the normal sounds of people and children still went on. Mrs Goetz was obviously impatient at the day’s interruption to her routine. She was rounding up the parents like a sheepdog, edging them towards Mrs Pearlman’s car. Willi and Clara Schlesinger had clearly said all they had to say to Bill and stood waiting impassively for the moment of departure. Mitzi Strauss, looking a trifle dishevelled, wagged her finger at the approach of Uncle Siddy who, ignoring her, strode straight past to where Ruti and her mother sat together like two travellers waiting for the last train to God knows where.

They stood up and eyed Siddy suspiciously. He scratched his head, stuck one foot up on the bench and said, “Now, ladies, which of youse speaks English?”

Ruti ignored him. She grabbed my arm. “Jacob, please, where is my father? You have been gone such a long time. I would have looked for you but that silly Mrs Strauss …

“Steady on there, Miss,” Siddy interrupted.

Mrs Kahn eyed him nervously. “Whom is this man?” she asked.

With little pride now, I replied miserably that he was my uncle.

Siddy, suddenly aware that he had lost an ally and smarting at Ruti’s reference to Mitzi Strauss, said in a matter-of-face tone, “I think the old chap’s passed in his chips, Missus.”

The two of them looked blankly to me for an explanation. Ruti let go of my arm, picked up her father’s walking-stick and gripped it until her knuckles were white.

“I know what he means, Mutti,” she said softly. “He is telling us that Papa is dead.” She repeated the word for dead in German, three or four times. They sat down and Ruti waved Siddy away and at the same time pulled me down beside her. The wave of sorrow that flowed through Ruti and her mother reached me like a tide that washed around and over the three of us. If ever I was going to be a member of that family, this would be the moment. Ruti and her mother were grieving but I felt reborn.

Towards the end of 1940, The Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home for Jewish Children was requisitioned by the government for use as a training centre for army nurses. The committee of the Home, led by the resourceful and indefatigable Rosie Pearlman, persuaded one of the Jewish community’s leading citizens to vacate his North Shore mansion to provide alternative accommodation for the growing number of children that arrived at Circular Quay, some with parents, some forlornly hoping that the remnants of their scattered families would eventually follow them to Australia, a country they could not have pointed to on a map some months earlier.

The enormous Spanish-mission style house, set in a leafy street in a suburb where even Catholics were discreet about their faith, became home to twenty-four children speaking half-a-dozen European languages and as varied in racial characteristics as Norwegians were from Italians.

Mrs Goetz, now the wife of an Australian soldier (even if he did shoulder nothing more lethal than a pick) resigned and moved up to Yass where Bertold drank beer, swore like an Aussie and loaded wheat trucks whilst whistling Beethoven. Wielder of immense power as a corporal, he had under his command private Willi Schlesinger who, despite the extremes of heat and cold, wore his complete uniform on all occasions.

A Mrs Ivy Mackay, late of the Dr Barnardo’s Homes of Essex, England and widowed by a German bomb, was appointed as matron of the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home for Jewish Children, or as it quickly became known to the locals, the Jews’ Home. It would be untrue to say that there was harmony and understanding between the Jewish children and their middle-class Protestant neighbours. Left to themselves, the children would quickly have been absorbed into the life of that small suburban community; prejudice on the part of the adult Christians and the Jewish fear of loss of identity made it almost impossible.

The division showed up in many curious ways. The Jews’ Home, for example, would not shop locally. Their need to eat only kosher food meant that the local butcher could not supply them; the meat came twice a week on the train from a shop in Bondi. By the time it reached the pretty North Shore station, it oozed blood and was usually dumped by irate station assistants in the station’s bike shed to be fetched after school by Bill or myself.

The Saturday Sabbath meant that we could not play in the street with the Gentile children. On Sundays, we would watch them either dressed up and walking to church or going on picnics with their families. At school the next day they boasted of seeing goannas as big as crocodiles, snakes that could swallow a dog whole, and all this in a nature reserve a mile or so from the end of our street! Ruti would turn to me for verification of these tales of the indigenous wild life. As an Australian I was torn between rubbishing these outrageous claims and a nationalistic pride in a fauna of which I had no personal knowledge. On one occasion as we sat close together at the edge of the mansion’s empty swimming-pool, I told her of the huge man-eating sharks that swam off Bondi Beach, and of how I had actually once saved Solly from their massive jaws. I remained her hero only until after dinner that night, by which time Solly had told her, “Jake is bull-shitting you, Ruti — it was me that saved him.”

Her mother visited her every Sunday, greyer than ever, worn out from a week’s work in a factory and ready to collapse into a chair after the long walk from the station. She sewed army shirts for ten hours a day and showed Ruti her bank savings book “Soon, you will leave here my darling and we shall have a flat together.” I felt a knot of anxiety when Ruti told me this; any talk of us being parted filled me with morbid loneliness.

Ivy Mackay, who insisted on being addressed as Matron, took this as a sign of ill health and prescribed regular dosing with cod liver oil. It was her universal panacea. Solly got it for failing to do his homework or his kitchen duties. Manfred actually liked the turgid stuff and grew even plumper on it, supplemented by nocturnal pantry raids and his mother’s never-ending supply of chocolates. Mitzi Strauss worked in a coffee-shop in George Street, bustling around the hissing urns and flirting with the customers, almost exclusively Jewish refugees. They would arrive at the cafe shortly after ten in the morning, their briefcases bulging with documentary proof of their former European status, all of which meant less than nothing to potential Australian employers. They bowed and addressed each other as ‘Herr Doktor’ and condemned the Australian legal, medical and dental professions which insisted that they go back to university to obtain an Australian degree. Many of them worked a night shift in a munitions factory and bemoaned their ruined hands. Mitzi Strauss tut-tutted over them but secretly despised them.

Thanks to Uncle Siddy, there was no shortage of coffee, tea and sugar in that cafe. He had taken to the blackmarket like a duck to water. He and Mitzi Strauss were thick as thieves. Love and the need to make a quick quid drew them together, in business and in bed. Siddy could obtain anything that was scarce, from entire ration books to a tank of petrol; he knew which flats were about to become vacant and where American servicemen could trade cigarettes for liquor. Whatever you wanted in wartime Sydney, ‘Siddy the Yid’ as he was widely known to police and public alike, could get it for you.

As his reputation spread, Mrs Pearlman asked him not to visit Solly and me in the Jews’ Home. I think she disapproved of him as much for his liaison with Mitzi Strauss as for his illicit way of life. He compromised to the point where he drove Mitzi to the Home in his flash car, parked it outside and sat in it smoking a cigar. He would send Mitzi in with a ten-shilling note each for Solly and me. Mrs Mackay, cannier with money than any of her employers were presumed to be, opened post-office savings accounts for us. “Many a mickle makes a muckle,” she quoted mysteriously.

I worried about Solly. Our four-year age gap had grown to an unbridgeable chasm. He was nearly eleven, tall, slim, with a mind like quicksilver and a tongue that would and could lash and beguile you in the one breath. He slipped in and out of trouble effortlessly. Teachers wrote warning notes about him and then tore them up as he promised to reform. Ruti hated him. He stole her brassiere from the clothesline, stuffed his socks inside the cups and strutted around the street with it on his chest.

He had completely eradicated all memories of our past life or at least locked them away, so that any attempts I made to remind him of it were met with a shrug. Uncle Siddy was his idol and Manfred his constant co-conspirator. Mitzi Strauss had virtually adopted him; she divided her gifts equally between Solly and Manfred. I was deeply shocked when she fell into the habit of referring to Manfred as her ‘little mannikin’.

“Don’t you remember anything, Solly?” I pleaded. “What about how Carmel used to call us her ‘little mannikins’, then pissed off and left us with nothing but a bloody tin of plum jam?”

“Why do you keep going on with all that old stuff, Jake? Mitzi’s a bonzer sheila not a bit like Carmel.”

“Well, she’d better not call me her ‘little mannikin’, that’s all!”

Solly smiled a secret smile. He pulled back the curtains of the front room and beckoned me over. Down in the street I could see Uncle Siddy slumped behind the wheel of a big black boxy car. Curls of cigar smoke rose in the air. A race guide rested on the steering-wheel.

“Whaddya think about that, Jake?”

“It reminds me of the coppers’ car when they took us away,” I said miserably.

He turned on me angrily. “You’d turn cream sour, wouldn’t you!”

He opened the window and yelled out, “G’day there, Uncle Siddy, got a good thing for the fourth at Randwick?”

Siddy waved back at him; Solly turned to me and smirked. “I’ll let you into a secret, Jake — me and Manfred are going to live with Aunty Mitzi in a big house in Bondi!” He did a little jig for joy. “And that’s not all — Uncle Siddy will be there too!”

I hit him, with the flat of my hand, right across the face.

He didn’t cry out; he bit his lip and blinked back the tears. He walked in carefully controlled steps to the door, turned around and said through clenched teeth, “I’m glad you’re not coming with us.”

The room grew dark as I sat on the edge of the bed. I took the mezuzah out of the bedside locker and unwrapped it. Its little eye stared coldly back at me. ‘And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon your doorposts’, the Bible said. Well, it wouldn’t be our doorpost, that’s for sure, I told myself. Inside, on the scrolled parchment, it commanded us to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’ — I couldn’t even manage that. Or was it still required of us, now that they were dead?

I needed to talk to somebody. I thought of Bill, that exponent of rational argument. No, I did not need his cold, objective solutions, always right like a key that fits only one door. I put the mezuzah back in my locker — it posed more problems than it answered. As the stinging of my hand from hitting Solly waned, so did the turmoil inside of me. Slowly I began to realise that what he had schemed for his future was no more or less than what I had wished as a future for Ruti and myself. He had achieved what I had only dreamed of. I was not angry or even concerned at the kind of life he would lead with Mitzi Strauss, Manfred and Uncle Siddy. Worst of all, it did not distress me as it should have, that he calmly assumed that we would be separated. No, I had hit him because his life now had direction and mine had none.

As though through a lifting fog, I heard Siddy’s car start up; there was a cheeky toot on the horn. I opened the window and leaned out. Mitzi was standing by the car door, alternately hugging Manfred and Solly.

“Next Sunday, little mannikins,’ she said over the revving motor, ” Mitzi will come for you und den ve shall haff such fun altogezzer!” Reluctantly, she let the two boys go and climbed into the car. Siddy tooted again, let in the clutch and the huge car shot off up the hill, leaving a pall of blue smoke hanging in the late afternoon air.