nine

At the end of the year, Peg went home to Bathurst. Jacob wanted to go with her but she would not hear of it. ‘‘You don’t want to sit around stuffing yourself with roast pork and turkey, do you,’’ she told rather than asked Jacob. She tried to paint an unflattering picture of her family at Christmas dinner but only succeeded in heightening Jacob’s curiosity. But Peg was quite firm. She did not want Jacob with her. (It was a long time before she told him that she was scared that some of her family might poke fun at him because he was a Jew, or worse, ridicule their plan to go to Palestine.)

Now it was mid-January, 1948. Peg threw a copy of that day’s newspaper on the small table in her little bedsitter in Bondi. She had given up living in at the hospital so that she and Jacob could study together. Jacob pretended not to notice her action so she read it out to him:

‘‘DEATH TOLL RISES AS JEWS AND ARABS CLASH
A massive explosion near the Wailing Wall shook Jerusalem. Casualties are not yet known but are expected to be extensive. A reprisal raid against the Arabs by the Jewish defence force, the Haganah, has escalated the fighting since the United Nations decided to partition Palestine to allow for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.’’

She rolled up the paper and playfully hit Jacob over the head with it. ‘‘Getting a bit serious, wouldn’t you say?’’ she said mockingly. ‘‘Dunno about you, chaver, but my brother taught me how to shoot with his .22 rabbit gun.’’ She made a rifle with the rolled-up paper. Jacob knocked it away angrily. ‘‘It won’t be like that for us, Peg. We are going to be kibbutzniks on a farm. You won’t be anywhere near where there’s shooting going on.’’

Peg said, ‘‘What about that picture in Mrs Rothfield’s flat with the bloke on the horse standing guard?’’

‘‘Oh, that’s nearly forty years ago. Things have changed.’’

‘‘Okay, chaver, back to the books.’’

Peg loved to throw in the odd Jewish word here and there. She had taken enthusiastically to the studies. She was not terribly interested in the ideology of Zionism. ‘‘All that stuff,’’ as she put it, ‘‘doesn’t make the crops grow.’’ She started calling Jacob ‘‘Yakov’’, especially in the small hours of the night as they snuggled in each other’s arms. ‘‘Why can’t I have a Jewish name too?’’ she asked.

Jacob could think of no good reason why not. ‘‘Peggy, Peg — why not ‘Pnina’? It means ‘pearl’, or ‘like coral’. Do you like that?’’ But she had fallen sound asleep in the time it took for him to think of it.

Jacob was surprised to discover that Peg had saved quite a lot of money from her wages. It came out when the question of the boat fares arose. They needed nearly £100 each for a single passage on a Greek ship that went from Sydney to Piraeus. From there they would take a small boat to Haifa — providing the British let them land. Jacob could not raise the entire fare, but the shipping company wanted the full fares paid the following week if they were to sail in mid-February. Mrs Rothfield, always attuned to his mood swings, wheedled the problem out of him. The next day she gave him a wad of bank notes. She was unaccustomedly sad as she stuffed it into his coat pocket. “Go in good health, the pair of you,’’ she snuffled through her tears. ‘‘Through you, Shulamit and Yosef Rothfield will have a new life.’’

A week before the boat was due to sail, Jacob sat in the cabin of Abe’s truck. It was parked in front of the house. Abe had the form guide on his knee, a stub of pencil behind his ear. It was a typical humid Sydney day; Jacob felt the sweat trickling down his neck. It robbed him of the natural warmth he wanted to show to Abe, to thank him for his rough kindness and support when he had confronted Ruth and her mother with the news of his decision to go with Peg Piper to Palestine. Stories had reached the two women with remarkable speed, coloured and emphasised by the highly unusual circumstance of a Jewish boy emigrating to a Jewish ‘‘homeland’’ with a Christian girl. This was what was said — even though they had no evidence of Peg’s Christianity, or whether she was religious at all. The only piece of dogma she ever quoted was the Marxist saying ‘‘Religion is the opiate of the masses’’.

Ruth and her mother showed what seemed to Jacob a rehearsed unanimity. Its object was to release Jacob from his earlier naive and enthusiastic invitation to Ruth, while expressing their doubt as to the suitability of Peggy to cope with Zionism, Judaism and what could develop into full-scale war. As the discussion continued, one thing was becoming mercifully clear to Jacob — Ruth was not at all distressed at the turn of events and Mrs Kahn was obviously quite relieved. Jacob said defensively, ‘‘Peg’s a country girl, she’s not one for all the theories.’’ He took a mild shot at Ruth. ‘‘All those ‘isms’ don’t make the land more fertile, do they Ruth?’’

She looked at him as though through fresh eyes. If she was about to say something cutting, she suppressed it. Abe had been silent up till now, but the very power of his presence had softened the meeting. As Jacob rose to go, Ruth, blinking furiously, took his hand and pressed it.

‘‘Do be careful, dear Jacob,’’ she said in a low voice. ‘‘We have shared a lot, you and I.’’ Mrs Kahn did not speak. She put her arms around him in the lighest of embraces and then propelled him slowly toward Abe. As he went through the door, he heard her thin accented voice: ‘‘We love you, Jacob. Come back to us.’’

Even with both windows down and the old gunnery hatch in the roof wide open, it was still muggy in the truck cabin. Abe pointed to the hatch. ‘‘We used to mount a Bren gun up there. When the Stukas swept down, we’d try to shoot the buggers. Fat chance though.’’ He stuck the form guide on the bulldog clip and reached down under the truck seat.

‘‘You’d better read these, Jake,’’ he said, looking very earnest. ‘‘Here, how about this: Mk 2 Grenade Usage; Assembly, Maintenance and Operation for Lee Enfield .303 Rifle.’’ He threw them on the truck seat. ‘‘And you’ll need this too: Survival Techniques for Desert Warfare.’’ Finally, he reached into the glove box. ‘‘Take this mate, and wear it all the time.’’ It was a small compass in a lovely brass case. He handed it to Jacob. ‘‘Hang it around your neck.’’ To break the tension he joked, ‘‘Of course, y’know that north is different up there to here in Australia, don’t ya!’’

Then Abe put a thick, hairy arm around Jacob’s shoulders. ‘‘I’d give me left clanger to be going’ with yer,’’ he said. ‘‘But I can’t so there’s no good wishin’. All I’m sayin’, Jake, is keep yer bloody head down and don’t be a hero. If they give yer a choice of milkin’ the cow or goin’ on manoeuvres, don’t volunteer — and that goes for the young lady too.’’

The sound of a high-powered sports car engine came closer. Jacob actually welcomed the diversion it gave from the tension of the past hour or so.

‘‘Bet that’s Daryl Aarons, Abe. You remember the bloke you nearly skittled with the truck door that time?’’ Abe laughed and his belly shook. He waited until the little open tourer drew level then gave a tremendous burst on the old truck’s massive air horns. Jacob swore he saw Daryl Aarons rise a foot out of his seat and the small car swerve across the road. The two of them fell back on the broken springs of the truck’s seat and rolled about with laughter. It was just what they needed.

On their last night in Sydney, Jacob and Peg lay close together on Peg’s narrow bed. By raising himself on one elbow he could see Peg’s haversack at the foot of the bed. He felt a momentary sadness that all Peg owned was jammed into that one pathetically small bundle. He put his arm around her and kissed her. For the next few weeks they would not be able to find courage in the shelter of each other’s arms. The shipping company would not allow them to have a double cabin unless they were married. When they had looked at the ship’s plan, Jacob was two decks down, sharing a cabin with three men at what seemed miles away from Peg.

They rarely talked about marriage. Jacob had never told Peg he loved her, nor did she declare herself to him. Yet they made love with the enthusiasm of children and the tenderness of the elderly. Marriage seemed like a burden that adults put upon themselves. If asked, which they often were, why they were not married, Peg’s forthrightness declared them to be lovers — ‘‘And that’s bloody well that!’’

Mrs Rothfield now looked upon Jacob in a new light. She no longer scolded him for untidiness nor any other shortcoming. She was, if anything, quite respectful towards him deferring to his views on the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Palestine. On shopping trips she never failed to bring back some item ‘‘to make life easier for you and — and — Pnina’’. Jacob returned to her flat at night at what she called ‘‘naughty’’ times but she never questioned him.

Jacob had delayed packing until he could put it off no longer. Abe had given him his army kitbag, made of strong, tightly woven cotton. On its khaki sides was stencilled: ABRAHAM LEWIS, NX5315189. Brass eyelets at the neck were drawn together by a steel ‘‘D’’ lock. Now he laid out his needs on the bed, shuffling them around, rejecting, substituting, until the choices seemed right. He put the mezuzah from his father’s house and Abe’s compass in a handkerchief and tucked them down the toe of a sandshoe. Mrs Rothfield had unearthed from her treasures an Arabic-Hebrew phrase book, yellowing but with a strange smell that intrigued him. He took it to please her. ‘‘Whatever else they may be,’’ she told Jacob, ‘‘Arabs have very good manners, so better not to offend.’’ In a short time, the kitbag filled out. Despite Palestine being a desert country, he had read that as in Central Australia, the nights could be very cold. He poked an extra jumper in and hoped that Peg had thought of this too. The kitbag now looked like a well-stuffed saveloy. Jacob laid it down and with pen and ink laboriously wrote his name on the other side to Abe’s.

He looked around the room he had occupied for so long. It was, he worked out, the fourth room he had slept in for any length of time. The first was in his old home, a room he shared with Solly; then he had lived at The Balconies, after that at the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home. Finally (was it finally? he asked himself), he had come here, to Mrs Roth-field’s flat. He gave a slight shudder and walked out on to the small balcony. He looked across the treetops to his old home. He could see, yet not see, Ruti in the room he once shared with Solly and Abe and Irma Lewis in the bedroom where Alice and Felix Kaiser once slept. A wave of fear of the unknown turned Jacob’s skin clammy in the night air. He did not want to lose the images in his mind, yet they disturbed him deeply. Back inside his room, he scrabbled through the kitbag and took out the mezuzah. He would keep it on him all the time. What if it was foolish? He put it in his trouser pocket. Then, for good measure, he threaded a cord through the ring on the top of the compass, and put it around his neck, feeling its metallic coldness on his chest. After this he repacked the kitbag and fell into a troubled sleep.