THREE

Abe Lewis left the house every week morning about seven. He knew that the sight and sound of his khaki coloured ex-army truck was an affront to his neighbours. The wagon was a brutal piece of machinery, all sharp edges, festooned still with the hooks, straps and chains of its military life. The body sat atop enormous springs that lifted it high off the ground. The truck still had a winch and cable at the front and a gigantic coupling at the rear. The canopied tray was as big as an army tent. Except for civilian number plates and the roughly painted sign on the cabin door — A. LEWIS, TEXTILE WASTE MERCHANT — the truck could have gone to war again at a moment’s notice.

Abe steered it around the narrow streets of East Sydney, occasionally ripping off the side mirrors of parked cars as he made his calls on the sweatshops that sold him their offcuts. He saw the migrant women bent over their machines, jammed into what were formerly the parlours and bedrooms of tenements. Although Irma had never spoken in any detail about her working life, he knew she had sewn army shirts in conditions not much different to these.

But these migrants were not Jewish women. They were called, contemptuously ‘‘Balts’’. They came from the Baltic States of Estonia and Latvia. For the most part, they were heavily built with wide, peasant faces and would have been much happier on Australian farms than cooped up in dingy workrooms. Their husbands worked on the assembly lines of factories now reverting to peace-time production, making cars they themselves could not afford, or lawn mowers for the quarter-acre block with the fibro-cement house on it they aspired one day to own.

As Abe emptied the waste-bins from beside the women’s machines he saw beneath the benches their sturdy legs and wondered what it would be like to make love to one of them compared to the thin, disinterested but unresisting Irma. But it was never more than a thought. ‘‘Don’t buy your meat where you buy your bread’’, as the old saying had it. The textile waste went into a hessian bale which he sewed up tightly with a packing needle. Stocky, nuggety Abe Lewis liked to show off to the women how easily he could hoist the bale onto his shoulders and then heave it into the back of the truck. He told himself that later, when he could afford it, he would buy a simple gantry hoist that would take the hard labour out of the job. In the meantime, he was proud of his firm, compact body, so different to the other Jewish men he met in the course of his business, whose flabbiness he scorned.

Abe Lewis sold the waste to large engineering firms and to printers, trades where oily machinery and grimy hands prevailed. Pieces of pretty printed flannelette, once destined for a night dress, ended up wiping grease off the hard hands of engineers. It was a good living. A simple buy-and-sell operation with a reasonable profit along the way — Abe didn’t expect more from it and was not concerned with its lowly commercial status. It grew steadily alongside the country’s need for household goods.

For his new house, which was not yet a home, Abe was able to buy direct from the factory a refrigerator and a massive console wireless with a record player. Once again Irma was not consulted about these purchases. Abe brought them to the house himself on the truck; the first she knew of them was his call to her to open the front door as he struggled up the steep drive with a rickety hand trolley. It took him two trips, while the lace curtains of the adjoining houses twitched with curiosity. Impatient, he rang his own front door bell. Irma appeared, dressed, as she nearly always was, as though she had either just arrived home or was about to leave.

The refrigerator and the wireless stood side by side on the tiled veranda. Abe stood between them, glowing as though they were his favourite nephews come to visit.

‘‘Silent Knight.’’ He slapped the refrigerator. ‘‘Stromberg Carlson.’’ He gave the wireless a more respectful greeting. ‘‘Whaddya think, eh, Irma old girl?’’ He flung open the refrigerator door, twiddled the knobs on the wireless and taking Irma’s impassiveness as a sign of approval, actually kissed her on the cheek. He was about to follow this up with a playful slap on the bottom when Ruti appeared.

Abe Lewis eyed her warily. She had so often, in this delicately balanced relationship, discouraged him from sharing his exuberance with her, and he was not about to be snubbed again in full view of her mother and who knows how many stickybeaks watching. He attempted to deprecate what he had done.

‘‘Well Ruth, you can kiss the iceman goodbye now, luv, he won’t be coming round the back door any more.’’

Ruti replied curtly, ‘‘I never kissed him, in fact I hardly ever saw him.’’

‘‘Well,’’ Abe said winking, ‘‘you’d be one of the few who haven’t.’’

Irma ignored the refrigerator and moved slowly towards the radiogram. She opened the top and spun the record turntable. Then she too twiddled the knobs.

‘‘Can it…will it…oh, do you think, Abe that it might —’’

‘‘That gramophone will play anything from grand opera to the Refrain From Smoking!’’ Abe said, hugging himself with the pleasure of being able to make a joke for Irma.

She managed a laugh, not quite understanding the joke but at least sure that one was made. ‘‘Really, Mr Abe’’ — and she went to him and put her arm through his — ‘‘I was going to ask you if I could listen to the BBC on it.’’

‘‘The what?’’

‘‘The BBC — the wireless broadcasts we heard while we were in the holding camps in England before we came to Australia. We listened every night to hear how the war in Europe was going. One country after another fell to Hitler. Then, one day the English camp commander took the wireless away from us. He said the authorities had realised we were German and that we could be spies!’’

Ruti nodded her head in agreement. She had heard this story before from her mother and also from her father — how he had protested that they were Jews fleeing from Hitler and as such could not possibly be thought of as spies for Germany. Poor Henry Kahn, had he lived a bit longer in Australia, might have experienced the same official insanity that prevailed in England. German Jewish refugees had been interned in Australia, confined to camps in remote country districts until wiser heads realised there was an untapped reservoir of talent behind barbed wire on the western plains of New South Wales.

One of the bonds that both divided and bound Irma and Abe was the war. Yet for all they knew of each other’s experiences, it could have been two different and unrelated wars taking place on two distant planets. Sometimes they talked about it, usually just before Abe fell into a heavy and undisturbed sleep. What Irma and Henry Kahn had suffered, Abe maintained, was no more than the inconvenience of moving from one country to another. Did they hear a shot fired in anger? he asked, not unkindly, thinking of his own experience as a soldier in the Middle East.

‘‘What about so many of my friends who just disappeared?’’ Irma asked him. An honestly earned snore would come from beside her. Irma would nudge him fiercely. ‘‘Where are they now?’’

‘‘Don’t worry, Irma ol’ girl,’’ Abe said sleepily, ‘‘they’ll turn up here, you mark my words.’’

To Abe, Germans were still the enemy he had faced in the Western Desert of North Africa, who had chased the British Army all the way to Benghazi and there and at Tobruk had been beaten back by the Australian Divisions. Desert warfare against Germans and Italians had still managed to retain for the Australians all the seriousness of a football game, unlike the war against the Japanese, tainted by the propagandists with racial loathing. Abe hadn’t hated the German army any more than his commanding officers required him to. It was a long time before Abe Lewis saw newsreels of Buchenwald concentration camp. A long time after his marriage to Irma.

He had not joined the army as a volunteer. He was already thirty-four in 1940, the only son of a long widowed mother who took comfort in Jewish religious orthodoxy on the death of his father and until the day she died, supplementing her pension by working as a body washer and vigil keeper for the Jewish burial society. She had a wide network of first, second and third cousins, most of whom dealt in the accessories that went with the clothing trade. ‘‘Never take a job’’ was the axiom by which they endeavoured to live, ‘‘Don’t work for somebody else’’ their constant catch-cry, as though it was more honourable to live in near-poverty, as a self-employed button maker, pants presser, shoulder pad stuffer or any of the hundred and one dreary operations that made a suit of clothes, than to take employment — if you could get it.

Abe Lewis could have had a job as a plumber, as a bricklayer. Next door to them lived Bert Woodward, one of those Australian tradesmen, skilled but uncertified by a trade board, proficient by experience in all aspects of building. Left without labour when the war started, he eyed Abe’s rugged frame and offered to teach him the building game. For a year they worked happily together. ‘‘Shit and cement — who needs?’’ chided his mother’s cousins, their bodies twisted from twelve-hour days on the tailoring workbench and sewing machine. Abe didn’t mind. The girls who walked past the building sites straightened their stocking seams and gave him sidelong glances. Bert Woodward had pleaded with the Manpower authorities to leave Abe in his ‘‘protected occupation’’, but the day arrived when he sank his pick in the earth for the last time and went as a conscript into the army.

Now Abe Lewis looked at the iron wheels of his trolley and remembered the richly patterned carpet square of the lounge room. He took a piece of rope from the trolley and made a sling of it. He put one loop over his shoulder and one around the veneered radio cabinet.

‘‘Reckon I can lift it, Irma ol’ girl?’’

Irma looked for support from Ruti. Should they show this simple man love or contempt for his efforts?

Ruti paused for the merest moment then said, ‘‘Of course you can…Daddy.’’

Abe glowed, not with the suffused blood of his exertion but with this rare and unsolicited acknowledgment of his position in the household. He bent his knees, took the strain and lifted the wireless cabinet clear off the tiled veranda. ‘‘Okay, then, Ruth, hold the door open and in we go. Get this bugger in then I’ll come back for the fridge!’’

In a warehouse in Redfern where Abe collected the occasional bale of waste paper (a side of business he was slowly expanding) they sold items for a woman’s dressing-table — cut-glass, squirty perfume bottles with gold tassels, powder-puff bowls in pink china with lids that had ballerinas with toes pointing to the sky. But what caught Abe’s eye was the ivory backed hairbrush set with a silver edged comb. (Except that it wasn’t ivory but Xylonite, not silver but chrome.) It came with all the pieces nestling in a case lined with red velvet. He would buy it for Ruth…Ruthy? How did that sound? Would she permit him to call her Ruthy? He could not bring himself to call her Ruti. But such a gift for a stepdaughter who had finally called him ‘‘Daddy’’ — surely this would be the beginning of the thaw in their relationship. It was not the saccharine diminutive for father he liked, but the recognition it implied. Perhaps now he could get to talk to her about that young bloke Jake, whose parents used to own the house.

Abe had seen Jacob and Ruti many times as he eased the ex-army truck up the steep side drive at the end of the day. He had seen Jacob watch as he struggled single-handedly to unload a bale from the truck and wondered if he would come across the road and offer a helping hand. Jacob never did. He never crossed the road; he left Ruti to cross and enter the gate by herself. And somehow, Abe felt some curious affinity with the boy. Ruti had not spoken to Abe about Jacob, but then she rarely told him anything but the most inconsequential news.

Abe would have liked to know more about the previous owner. Not the Yankee showman who had built it nor the Negro boxer, but Felix Kaiser, who had lived here and lost the house in the Depression. In the garage he had found a fruit box with rusting and mouldy toys in it. He had not thrown it out then and would not do so now; maybe he might eventually learn at first-hand from Jacob something of his life in this house.

Abe understood. Abe too was on the threshold of building a life for himself.

Irma’s voice broke into his thoughts. ‘‘We haven’t got any gramophone records.’’

‘‘Bloody hell, Irma ol’ girl, I’ve forgotten ’em.’’

‘‘Oh, you didn’t — did you?’’

‘‘Go on, look in the cupboard underneath. Go on, you look, Ruthy.’’

‘‘What’s this, wrapped in white paper? It certainly is not a record.’’

‘‘I’ll bet a bale of waste it is a bloody record! Now you tell me where I can get two pound o’ rump steak, no coupons. That’s what I call a record!’’

Abe kneels down beside Ruti and reaches deep into the cupboard.

‘‘What about this, then? Something for your mother. Die Fledermaus. The bloke in Chappels recommended it. ‘It’s all about a bat,’ he says. ‘I’m not takin’ that,’ I says, ‘no bloody fear.’ But he says it’s lovely Viennese romantic stuff, so — well, Irma ol’ girl, I hope you like it.’’

It floats out over the street, over the cicadas and crickets, over the front fences and seeps into lounge rooms that have only heard Gladys Moncrieff and Peter Dawson. What a shame it cannot reach across the treetops and down the hill to where Mrs Rothfield and Jacob wait for something to happen in their lives, not knowing that it already has.

Jacob knew that Abe Lewis had been a soldier. Apart from the familiarity he showed in his handling of the old army truck, Abe usually wore as his working garb remnants of his army uniform. In the summer, he wore baggy khaki shorts and a shirt with the sleeves torn out of it — the better, Jacob knew, to show off his short powerful arms; his legs, too, were like hand-adzed jarrah fence posts. Abe’s only concession to winter was a woollen battle jacket or, in extreme cold, an army greatcoat. Sometimes, as Abe swung down from the truck’s cabin, Jacob thought he saw one arm go up in a suspicion of a wave, but he could never be sure. On those occasions, Ruti would edge Jacob around so that his back was to Abe Lewis.

Jacob yearned to talk to Abe Lewis about the fact that he had once lived in the house in Bellevue Hill. It was one of the secrets he had clung to since leaving the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home. He kept it with all the other secrets of his short life which (as is proper with secrets) only a few shared with him. Mrs Rothfield knew, and of course so did Uncle Siddy. Jacob felt pretty sure Abe must know it had belonged to his father — it would be written in the title deeds — yet he was quite certain that neither Ruti nor her mother knew. This gave him a tiny edge of power over them. Still, in his small world that lay between the printery in the city and the beach at Bondi, between the clifftop cemetery at Bronte and the Palladian splendour of Bellevue Hill, the fact remained that he had once lived in that house — even belonged there — among the Jewish-Australian establishment.

Now he was linked to the house by two emotional threads. He had known but not enjoyed his first sexual experience with a girl who now probably slept in the room he had once shared with his brother Solly. The way in which she had given herself to him made him feel proud, humiliated and resentful. Perhaps his relationship with Ruti would always be like that, veering up and down like the sensitive gold scales his father had once used.

Jacob also envied Ruti her access to Abe Lewis, for he admired the man without ever having spoken to him. He tried to suppress the disloyalty that arose in him when he compared Abe with Felix. His father, all his life, had ingratiated himself with his customers and built up his considerable business by cultivating a contrived fellowship that masked a barely concealed contempt by both parties.

Abe Lewis would not be like that. He imagined him shouldering his way into a factory with a ‘‘G’day, sport’’ to the owner, not begging him to buy or sell but assuming as a matter of course that a deal would be done among equals. Money, in an uncounted roll, would change hands because they trusted each other. Abe Lewis would whistle his way into and out of the factory and the truck would groan off to the next call.

Certainly Abe’s was a different life to his own as a journeyman printer. A five-year apprenticeship completed and still he was the Jewboy around the place. He didn’t drink, didn’t bet SP, didn’t even follow Easts, the rugby league team from the suburbs where most of the Jewish community lived. He read books and played gin rummy with his landlady. And he was no longer without sexual experience, an event which had far less effect on his life than he had been led to believe it would. For Jacob, its value lay in binding him closer than ever to Ruti. If the lunch-time talk among the apprentices at the printery was the yardstick for measuring sexual activity, Jacob had no need to boast; he now knew that some of the loudest talkers were still dependent on magazines and masturbation.

There were other pressures building up inside him, directions that needed to be explored. Soon he would be twenty-one, eligible to vote. He read the political pages of the paper as avidly as the men in the printery read the sports pages. It seemed as though the post-war Labor government would go on for ever. Ben Chifley, the Prime Minister, had seen the country through to a victorious conclusion. Chifley embodied all that Australia held dear: an egalitarianism based on mateship. It held good so long as jobs were not under threat from outsiders; and change was brought about slowly in a society that was, in reality, still a bastion of nineteenth century British imperialism.