ONE

Seen from the cliff tops, the ocean looked grey, flabby, flaccid, sloppy. Life had gone out of it. Waves did not rise up as they should, in arabesques that poise, pirouette, curl and crash. Instead, they collapsed with tired thuds to spew sand and seaweed onto the deserted beach.

Jacob was disappointed, even angry with the sea. He stood on the sandstone rotunda his father had helped build. His father had fallen to his death from this place. Far below, the sea slapped against the rocks. Jacob had come with good news and was ready to shout it into the wind that always blew hard on to this headland. But today the wind was paltry, the sea petulant. Not at all what Jacob wanted as an audience.

He had always talked to the sea. Whispered to it, cajoled, conversed, ranted and sworn, and always from the rotunda. The wind blew his words back to him and beyond him and in passing, argued with him. ‘‘I’ve finished my apprenticeship!’’ Jacob shouted into the faltering breeze. ‘‘I’m a qualified bloody tradesman now, a printer, a printer, a printer — a bloody Jewboy printer — what do you think of that? Tell ’em all! Tell Ruti and blow all the way to Bathurst and tell Peg. Blow hard like you do when it’s bad news.’’

Without the wind, Jacob knew his voice sounded importunate; it lacked the strength of the messenger which carried it. When this happened he felt cheated of his rights. Without the ocean, he was disembodied, weak and undirected. Its mood was vital to him, like a parent whose vagaries had to be understood before a course of action could be decided.

He stood on the outermost point of the sandstone retaining wall. Looking down at the oily swell made him feel giddy and light-headed. It was not an unpleasant sensation at all — a bit like the time at Ruti’s flat after Solly’s funeral, when he’d tossed the tumbler of whisky down his throat; it was intended to block out the horror of that day, but in his suddenly heated body it succeeded only in stirring in him a hunger for Ruti that knotted his stomach and spread deliciously through his body.

There had been no graduation ceremony to mark the end of his apprenticeship. No photographer to record him in cap and gown, like the day Ruti got her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sydney University. He had gone that day to the Big Hall with its high, slotted clerestory windows through which the light streamed in shafts, as in religious pictures. He saw Ruti as the Virgin Mother, the light striking the scroll of her degree instead of a halo. He wanted to tell this to Mrs Rothfield, his landlady, who sat next to him. But she was scanning the program through her thick glasses.

‘‘Yakov, look! Look how many Jewish names are here. Even a Rothfield!’’ she exclaimed, then added reluctantly ‘‘so sad, he’s not by me a relative.’’

By that time Ruti was leaving the stage, her mortarboard slightly askew, her academic gown floating from her shoulders. She drifted up the aisle to where her mother sat and Jacob watched them kiss. He had stayed in his seat, a mess of conflicting emotions of jealousy and love.

By contrast, Jacob had received his qualification through the post — a brown envelope with a single sheet of stiff cartridge paper attesting that Jacob Kaiser had completed his apprenticeship as a compositor and had passed the examination of the Technical College.

Mrs Rothfield had not been impressed. ‘‘Such a little bit of paper for all those years, Yakov,’’ she sniffed.

Jacob agreed with her but sought to blunt their mutual disappointment. ‘‘I should have had a letter from the King, don’t you think?’’ His attempt at sarcasm was lost on Mrs Rothfield. She said such a letter would be no more than he deserved.

Now, on the cliff top, Jacob took the letter from his pocket and recited its stilted official language to the wheeling seabirds.

‘‘This is to certify that Jacob Kaiser has completed the prescribed course…’’ A silver gull scavenged at his feet for the apple core he had dropped; Jacob put the letter on the ground between his feet. He nudged the core onto the paper and watched for the gull’s reaction.

‘‘Shit on it,’’ he said angrily, ‘‘what do I care?’’ A breeze ruffled the edges of the paper, tipping off the core. The gull snatched at it, dragging it to a safer spot and leaving spidery claw marks on the certificate like another signature. Jacob picked up the letter, folded it in its original creases and slid it back into its government envelope.

He looked across the cliffs to the sprawling graves of the Bronte cemetery. Solly did not rest in that Christian enclave but in the lonely vastness of Rookwood, far from where their mother lay, but nearer to their father, Felix, whose unkempt grave was hemmed in and surrounded by the monoliths of the well-to-do. It was just one more injustice, Jacob thought, that in death the rich came between father and son. The charity of the community had buried them but it also kept them apart.

As he faced the sea, he could see to his left the white crescent of Bondi beach, with its ugly wartime garland of barbed wire finally removed. It was the spring of 1945. Japan’s soldiers, depicted on propaganda posters as misshapen little men with jaws dripping blood, would now never land at Bondi beach in the dead of night. Australia gave thanks to the aloof American general with the high peaked cap and the corncob pipe.

The rents of the flats at Bondi rose as people returned from the assumed safety of a couple of miles inland. Jacob’s Uncle Siddy now turned his nefarious talents to the rental rackets — in any case, the money had gone out of the liquor and cigarette black market since the American troops had left Australia and fought their way home via Tokyo. Even Mitzi Strauss, Siddy’s refugee lady friend, no longer needed his help in obtaining couponless tea and coffee. With the end of the war in Europe, Mitzi had big plans for her Vienna Wald cafe. Soon another wave of Jewish refugees would arrive in Australia. Maybe already they had heard of the frothing coffee and solid cheesecake of the Vienna Wald. Mitzi Strauss would put the flesh back on those skin-and-bone survivors of the Nazi death camps that she had seen on the newsreel, scarcely able to believe what she saw.

Jacob followed the cliff path down to the beach. He took off his shoes and socks and walked its length, enjoying the abrasive wet sand between his toes. He turned up the ramp to the concrete promenade, washed his feet under the tap and dried them with his socks. On the rise above him, behind the stand of Norfolk pines, a tram threw itself, screeching, around the bend in the tracks. Jacob hurried to the tramstop. Another tram came and he sat in the open end where the sea breeze battled with the odours of the hamburger and fish-and-chip shops.

Mrs Rothfield, who tried hard not to be merely a landlady to Jacob, heard him thrashing around in his room. She knew he wanted her to come in and find him. She had heard him enter the flat: to locate him she needed only to follow the fine trail of sand that spilled from his trouser cuffs. She called to him from the kitchen.

‘‘Is that you already, Yakov?’’

‘‘Who else?’’ he replied, mimicking her.

‘‘Who else would make from my speech a joke?’’ was her tart response. ‘‘Are you staying in now, Mister Beachcomber?’’

Jacob had thrown himself on his bed. His socks hung out of the window, held fast by the sash jammed down on them. Mrs Rothfield had asked him not to do this. ‘Do you want my house to look like the back streets of Cairo?’ she asked repeatedly. Why Cairo, he thought. In Bondi Junction you could see plenty of socks hanging out of windows. If Mrs Rothfield imagined she was just like the other inhabitants of Bondi, she was much mistaken. Her cooking smells! So different from the other tenants in this block of flats. Not bad, not better, only … only … foreign. What was missing, Jacob knew, was the stomach-churning smell of frequently rendered fat. Downstairs at the Ormond’s it began on Sunday with the roast pork and stayed on until almost the end of the week, the fat economically collected and used to fry breakfast and dinner. At first, the smell of bacon frying used to make him retch. After a few weeks, however, he found his gut actually twitching pleasantly enough to dissipate the picture of a pig wallowing in filth — a picture that owed its origins wholly to Mrs Rothfield’s graphic description and was only distantly related to religious relevance. One day, Jacob promised himself, he would taste bacon.

He went to the window. In the gap between the flats he could see a narrow corridor of green beyond the roof tiles. In that comfortable, so different enclave across Old South Head Road, Ruti Kahn now lived in a real house with its own front garden and an Australian backyard. A house, unlike European ones, separated from its neighbours by side passages. Mrs Kahn had married a man who was the antithesis of her first husband. Jacob vividly recalled the day Mr Kahn had died on the cold tiled floor of the toilet block of the Abraham Samuel-son Memorial Home.

Ruti’s mother no longer sewed shirts for the army, as she used to do when she first arrived in Australia. Now she wandered from room to room in her new home, disinterestedly fingering its furnishings and knick-knacks. Each room was decorated with the charmless attention to detail of a furniture store showroom. The architecture of the house owed no allegiance to any identifiable period. It was of a type sometimes referred to in a scathing tone as ‘‘Bellevue Hill baroque’’. Ruti, her mother and her stepfather occupied rather than lived in the house.

Jacob knew it well. Life had begun there for him. It had once been his house — no, his home. Here he had lived with his mother, his father and his brother Solly. (He had almost erased from his memory the few mercifully short months when their stepmother Carmel lived with them there.) It was from this house that they went to live in the loveless misery of a rabbit warren of rooms in The Balconies. It seemed strange to Jacob that this house where Ruti now lived was the starting point from which he traced his life, which in four years had encompassed the deaths of his mother, father and brother.

The distance from the window of Jacob’s room in Mrs Rothfield’s flat to the top of the tree that grew in the front garden of his old home and Ruti’s new one was only a couple of miles. Yet for Jacob, it was a distance that defied estimating. Once he had walked Ruti home after a political rally in the Sydney Domain. She had been hemmed in by her university friends all the afternoon, but to his surprise and pleasure she elected to travel home with him. For his own part, he had detached himself from a Labor Zionist group comprising young Jewish tradesmen much like himself. As they neared the house, Jacob hung back.

‘‘What’s the matter, Jacob, are you frightened of my stepfather?’’ Ruti asked. Jacob ignored her. She went back to him and took his hand. ‘‘Don’t worry,’’ she teased, ‘‘he’s gone to the Randwick races. There’s only Mutti at home.’’

It seemed a lifetime since he had last entered those gates. And there was Ruti urging him on, ignorant of his knowledge of what was once his home. The white painted mortar of the bricks was cleaner than he remembered; the ironwork fence shone with its coat of glossy black and its pretentious gold painted finials. The lawn down which he and Solly had sledded so many times was as neat as a set table. Ruti was already unlatching the heavy iron gate. It swung back without the familiar protesting squeak he knew. Their father used to say, ‘‘Got to get some mouse oil on to that, Jake!’’

Jacob almost repeated the silly joke to Ruti. But would it appeal to her European sense of humour? He stood outside the gate and looked up the grassy slope to the mock grandeur of his former home. Ruti had reached the top of the flight of sandstone steps and was fumbling for her key. After a brief search, she gave up and twirled the doorbell, then called down to Jacob.

‘‘Are you coming, Lumpen?’’ Their finely balanced relationship had progressed to the stage where Ruti had actually bestowed a nickname on Jacob. ‘‘Lumpen’’, he knew from his days in the Communist Eureka Youth League, was short for Lumpenproletariat. Ruti prized Jacob for still being working class and thus of great value to her and her student friends. It enabled her to show off her university-learned egalitarianism. Jacob had not yet decided whether to accept this as an accolade or an insult. He didn’t like the word — it smacked of coal heavers and reminded him of the blue-singleted workmen he suspected had edged his father over the cliff top at Bondi. Yet coupled with ‘‘proletariat’’ it just might be acceptable.

Jacob decided that as a ‘‘Lumpen’’ he would not enter Ruti’s house. Superficially at least, that would be his excuse; in reality, he was afraid of the emotions it would stir within him. His childhood was not so far behind him that he could risk the memories that would surface.

‘‘Lumpen cannot be seen entering the portals of the rich, Ruti. You should know better than to ask,’’ he had said with contrived sarcasm.

‘‘Who’s watching?’’ she had called mockingly. ‘‘I don’t see too many of the working class taking their Sunday stroll in Bellevue Road.’’

Jacob had pulled the iron gate closed and stood back on the footpath. He waved up at Ruti just as the front door opened. He caught a glimpse of the former Mrs Kahn, now the wife of industrial waste dealer Abe Lewis.

Ruti’s mother had raised her arm in shy greeting to Jacob but it was stifled as Ruti pushed her back through the doorway. The door closed with a rich clunking sound that Jacob did not recall.

Jacob acknowledged the none too subtle presence of Mrs Rothfield in the room with him. He turned away from the window and looked into her flat features, tanned from sitting on her little balcony with her face tilted to the afternoon sun. She ignored the tiny pile of sand beside his shoes, made no comment on his socks still jammed under the window-sill.

‘‘You think I don’t know what troubles you, Yakov? That you stand at the window and stare out at the big house beyond the trees? It is the house from your parents, yes?’’

‘‘I will never enter it again.’’

‘‘Ach, at your age, it is not wise ever to say never!’’ She took his socks from under the window-sill almost without thinking. ‘‘It hurts you to think that Ruti lives there now, does it not? What do you want of her life and of her mother’s? That she stays poor? That she sews shirts all her life? This is a country for making good — but when you do, they think you are a goneff, if you don’t, they say you’re a nudnik with not enough kopf to make a go of it.’’ She took Jacob’s head in her hands. ‘‘Don’t envy the rich, Yakov. They have problems too.’’ Under her breath, he heard her sigh: ‘‘I should have their problems!’’

She left the room abruptly. A few minutes later Jacob heard the wireless being tuned. Finally, through the static, there came a squeaky tenor singing in German and Mrs Rothfield’s cracked voice accompanying it. ‘‘Roseline, Roseline, Ich liebe dich,’’ they sang in disembodied harmony. When the song ended, Mrs Rothfield put her head around his door.

‘‘They killed him, you know.’’

‘‘Who killed who, Mrs Rothfield?’’

‘‘Joseph Schmidt, that ach so beeutiful singer. The Germans killed him.’’

‘‘Well, I’m glad it wasn’t Perry Como. He’s a real ripper singer. One of the blokes at the printery’s got a record of his.’’

Mrs Rothfield had left his socks in a tight ball on his bed. Jacob tossed them from one hand to the other. If his mother had lived, would she have done these things for him, he wondered. He went to the chest-of-drawers and saw the neatly folded clothes in it, folding that Mrs Rothfield did unasked after he had carelessly stuffed them in. Would his mother have also sat like Mrs Rothfield in front of the wireless in the gathering darkness, her eyes focussed on the little yellow dial light, waiting in comfortable anticipation for the Sunday night serial to begin?

He knew what his father would have been doing on a Sunday night. Felix Kaiser would have been packing his case with samples of hotel crockery, cutlery and glassware ready for his early-morning start to call on the hotels west of the Blue Mountains. The Chevrolet, with its huge chrome and black headlights, its leather seats, would have been at the kerbside, a spare tin of petrol strapped to the running board. In a shed up the back, curled up on straw in a pineapple case with chicken wire across the front of it was Rastus, the five foot long carpet snake. Moments before Felix was due to leave, he would fetch Rastus from his cage and nonchalantly drop him onto the Chevy’s back seat alongside the sample cases. ‘‘Best damn watchdog I ever had, boys,’’ he’d boast to Jacob and Solly. ‘‘Nobody’d dare lift anything with that snake sitting there.’’

A cheeky toot on the horn and he’d be gone, not to return until Friday afternoon. Jacob still started involuntarily whenever he saw an old-fashioned car with canvas hood and openings for windows. His Uncle Siddy had a canvas-topped car, but he called it a convertible, Yankee style. In the summer he drove with the top down, some tarty woman beside him with a scarf over her hair, the wind shimmering his silk shirt and whisking his tie over his shoulder. Only last weekend he had parked the car outside Mrs Rothfield’s flat and tooted for Jacob to come down. Siddy hadn’t set foot inside the flat since the day before Solly’s funeral.

‘‘Well, how y’ goin’ Jake,’’ he drawled, ‘‘gettin’ any?’’ and he winked lugubriously for the benefit of the woman sprawled on the car seat. Jacob had entered into the spirit of the moment to earn the pound reward he knew would follow. He hated himself for it.

‘‘Yeah,’’ he said with matching world-weariness, ‘‘I’ve ’ad to put another fella on the job.’’

The woman in the car giggled. ‘‘A real chip off your uncle Siddy, aren’t you?’’

Siddy whispered to Jacob. “Reckon y’ could handle her, sport?’’

Jacob smirked, as expected of him, and made a hard fist with his hand. Siddy roared with laughter and flicked a pound note out of his fob pocket. ‘‘Stick this in yer kick, son. Yer might need to buy a bit one day.’’ He clapped him on the back, leapt behind the wheel and took off with such violence the woman was thrown back hard, squealing in mock fear.

Jacob would be twenty next week. Soon the printery would have to pay him adult wages. It worried him that others had been sacked when reaching the end of their apprenticeship. Now he would be a journeyman, a fully qualified tradesman, a compositor, an inheritor of the traditions of Gutenberg and Caxton. Would the old tradesmen he had worked alongside for the past five years still call him ‘‘Inky Ikey’’? They had, to his dismay, tried to pass this soubriquet on to the returning soldiers who were now re-employed after the war. But most of them ignored it; they had had enough of years of official indoctrination of hatred. They told the xenophobic foreman Frank Williams to lay off him. Williams struck back by warning Jacob, ‘‘Now the boys are back from the war, you’d better not make any mistakes, Mister Jacob Inky Ikey Kaiser, ’cause there’s plenty o’ blokes need work and the gov’ment says we gotta give ’em jobs.’’

Mrs Rothfield had framed his trade certificate. She used an old frame that had held a picture of a languid girl in a diaphanous white dress leaning against a fluted pedestal. The picture had hung in the hallway of the flat where the light never reached. Mrs Rothfield denied it was a picture of herself, but never with enough vehemence to convince Jacob entirely.

Jacob’s relationship with Mrs Rothfield was the one constant in his life. This stolid old former kibbutznik was cynical of all officialdom, both secular and religious, contemptuous of all politicians and a mocker of philanthropists as self-seekers. She never gave up the self-appointed task of persuading Jacob to adopt her iconoclasm. Her late husband (may he rest in peace), she told Jacob over and over again, had been a believer in these things. At this point, Jacob would join in her chorus: ‘‘And where did it get him I ask you? It got him dead in a wadi in the Sinai desert, shot accidentally sure, the poor nebish, by Australian soldiers in 1917.’’

Their kibbutz failed in spite of — or because of — her husband and other well intentioned city dwellers like him. Shulamit Rothfield, widowed, reverted to her Polish birth name of Sarah and showed mild curiosity about the country of the men who had inadvertently shot her husband. They told her they owned kangaroo farms and gold mines and grew sheep as big as bulls. ‘‘And never leave home without your waterbag,’’ she was told.

‘‘Such liars,’’ she laughed as she told the story for the umpteenth time. ‘‘Well, Yakov, I came here, not much older than you are now. You ask me why?’’ (He had not.) ‘‘I’ll tell you, Yakov. To go back to Poland and the anti-Semites? To admit failure on the kibbutz? To stay in Palestine without my Yosef? Sure, I’m a bit ashamed. Maybe today if I had stayed I could be somebody — like Golda Meir.’’

Sunday evening in Bondi, in her small flat with only Jacob to talk to before settling down by the wireless for that night’s play, Mrs Rothfield believed she was a second mother to Jacob. After all, she fed him, scolded him, washed his clothes and tried to teach him Yiddish. She would have liked to give him the occasional cuddle too.

‘‘Anywhere in the world you can go, Yakov and you can speak with Jews. With Yiddish you are never a stranger.’’

Now, as Jacob looked out over the balcony, he heard Mrs Rothfield call from the lounge room.

‘‘Come listen Yakov, tonight, a play by Noel Coward, ach, an anti-Semite but what a way with words. From him I should have learned English!’’

He felt like a helmsman who had to pick a safe course through a shallow channel. The navigation lights were the small glow from Mrs Rothfield’s wireless and the distant windows of Ruti Kahn’s house. There was a roll of summer thunder with its counterpoint of static in Mrs Rothfield’s wireless. A heavy rainspot hit his cheek. The wind moved the branches across the lights of the Lewis’s house so that they blinked a signal. Mrs Rothfield’s light was tiny but constant, offering him no direction except where he had come from. Ruti’s signal, intermittent and intriguing, confusing and yet comforting, beckoned him on.

‘‘Listen, Yakov,’’ Mrs Rothfield was calling, ‘‘if you want to stay out on the balcony at night, at least it should be with a young lady, like in this play. You know a girl called Amanda?’’

Jacob went back into his room. He put on his shoes and socks and a waterproof jacket. He had to cross the lounge room to reach the front door of the flat. Mrs Rothfield said automatically as he passed her chair, ‘‘Don’t be late, tomorrow is work.’’

Jacob did not hear her.