The Lion Seeker (55 page)

What happened?

She's all right. Only she fainted.

Fainted?

But she's all right now. In bed.

And you? Why the bag? What's this on your head?

It's nothing . . . Tutte.

What?

Tutte.

What is it my boy? What's wrong?

Tutte, can you do something for me?

Of course.

Give me your blessing.

My what?

Like in the Torah.

What are you saying now?

I remember that. In the Torah, they are always asking for a blessing from the father. Isn't it? Can't you give me yours?

Isaac, what's wrong?

Will you bless me, Tutte?

Of course I will my boy.

I'm going away, Tutte.

What are you talking, Isaac?

I've joined the army.

Ai ai ai.

Don't, Tutte.

Isaacluh, Isaacluh, Isaacluh, what have you done?

I've already done it, Tutte. I signed. I have to go, today, now.

Why? Why? Why?

Will you bless me Tutte?

You can't just go!

I'm not going home Tutte. I can't go home. I'm leaving from here, I won't be back. Tell Mame that I am so sorry I couldn't tell her goodbye, I couldn't because she isn't well, I didn't want to upset her.

For a long time his father grips him. His body rocks and Isaac can feel the way the pain must be hitting in racking waves, coming up from deep within him. He keeps saying the word
no
, and Isaac keeps saying
I have to, I have to, Tutte
.

You don't know what it is, an army, he says. Not the army, Isaac, never. Not the war.

I've already joined, Tutte.

How a lie can feel more solid than the truth when it makes its own. The rightness of it calms him right through. It's how it should be, Tutte, he says.

And your work?

I left my work.

And the business?

I don't care about business. I have to go.

But why, my God, why, out of the blue? It's mad.

Because I deserve it, Isaac says. It's what I deserve.

What does that mean?

I can't undo what's done.

What are you saying?

Will you bless me, Tutte? Will you bless me before I go?

They stand talking closely, his father arguing with him, gripping him, until gradually Isaac can feel him giving up, feel him understanding that the decision is made, his boy is going, there is nothing he can do. Then Isaac sweeps off the balaclava, saying they did this to him at the recruitment place. And when Tutte sees this final evidence of Isaac's utter commitment, he at last consents to bless: he touches his forehead to Isaac's there in the lobby of the synagogue with the faint sounds of the chuzen's braided wailing seeping through the wooden doors to the sanctuary, and he whispers in Hebrew, asking The Name God Almighty to bless this only son of his, to look over him and guard him and protect him, and please please O Lord if it pleases You, bring him back home alive and well to us where we will always be waiting, always.

Thank you Tutte, he whispers. Thank you so much.

 

 

 

 

Part Three

FROM HIS LETTERS
she knew Tobruk was the name of the place; when it fell to the Germans in June her heart shrivelled. Ten thousand South African troops caught up there in the desert at the far end of Africa, the papers said. Was winter frost in Johannesburg when the telegram arrived; her tears hissed on the coal stove in the kitchen, reading the words
missing in action
. Another two months limped by, torturing her, before a second note could confirm him as a prisoner of war. Alive still, blessedly, in this year of death and mayhem, nineteen hundred and forty-two.

Two years later they hired a driver and took the Altmans' Austin sedan out to the Waterkloof airforce base near Pretoria. It was good weather to watch it descend, a converted Lancaster bomber easing from a sky with no clouds. He came through in his uniform, a kit bag over his shoulder. There was no sign of disorientation or surprise: he looked taller, harder. He had always been wiry but now he was gaunt, ground out, his skeletal face the face of a man in that it no longer contained other possibilities as a youth's—ever mobile—always does. This final face of his had set hard, without twinkle or smile, with features that now seemed a little smeared and flattened as if by the sanding pressure of events, the eyes puffed and a little slitted, like the eyes of a fighting terrier taken from the pit. When she hugged him his body felt like a piece of warmed steel. She winced when his arms squeezed back, like pinching cables.

His new room was Rively's old, with her married to Yankel Bernstein and settled in Palestine now. The teddy bears were packed away, the walls whitened by a new coat of paint; Gitelle had sewed a duvet cover and spent on real goose feather pillows. But that night when he woke them with his screams she found he had gone to sleep on the floor with an old blanket, the bed untouched.

For months he slept late and bathed little. His hair grew shaggy, his face always prickled. She would clip out job notices and ask him questions and cook him good meals; he ignored the clippings, mumbled his answers, vomited often after eating. In the afternoons he would go out and when he came back at night he bore the rank whiff of liquor in his pores. She went to the army for help; they sent a Captain Lewis—nice youngster—who went into his room for an hour. Afterwards Isaac had a shave at a barber, a haircut, bought himself a nice new jersey to wear. But in the night was the screaming and the next day he lay in bed till noon and went again to the liquor when the sun fell.

Captain Lewis had said to her that Isaac escaped twice from that prisoner camp there in Sicily. Once for sixteen days: he'd eaten grass, ruining his gut. They sent him to a facility run by the SS; it took the Red Cross a month to get him transferred back. Lucky. Captain Lewis repeated the letters
SS
and gave her a look from the tops of his eyes that she pretended to understand.

When the German surrender came in June it made no effect on Isaac's slide. His body stank; his beard grew rife, oily. There were purple eyes and scratched knuckles. She tried intercepting his army cheque in the mail. He told her if she did it again he'd move to the pub.
The
pub. Next day she followed after him like a spy. Through Joubert Park into town, to the Regent Hotel by the corner of Plein and Loveday streets, three storeys in need of fresh paint. Through the lettered window she saw drinkers on stools who looked up with dead grins for her son, Isaac slotting himself into the line of them as if machined to fit. Came a hitch in her heart and breath, an ice ripple. Who these men are, it's the same as it was. Parasites.

HE'S THERE WITH JOHNNY NO-TEETH
and Serge the gimp, stuttering Manny and cross-eyed Rolph, Stevie Pimples. His third one of the day is in front of him for he has only just arrived and he's saving it, making himself wait for the square cool feel of the glass in his hand, then the cold burning trail down into the belly and the flare of pain in his weak stomach before the banked heat can trickle into his blood and throb up behind the eyes. Making himself wait, ja, knowing it is there, the saliva loose under his tongue with the anticipation of it. But also starting to feel the other two (whiskies knocked back like always as soon as he sat) working in him, that early groping feeling behind his eyes, and in a few minutes he knows the smoky heat will find its way into the chambers of his heart and his heart will open up and his mouth will smile: the day will turn easy as the sunlight pooling on the sawdusted floorboards over there by the window where Barney's cat lies on its side and he can just sit and be and breathe and drink. All the bleary chatter will meld into one long afternoon song and the shadows will get long and he won't care about anything but the sweet warmth cradling his soul, numbing his thoughts. He reaches slowly for the glass; the door jingles. Behind the bar Barney looks up from his paper: —No ladies, madam.

But Mame is already walking in. It is Mame, right? There's a second where Isaac thinks truly he is making her up but she keeps coming, none other. She has a burlap sack in one hand and her handbag in the other. She walks to the bar beside Isaac and when she puts the sack down on it, it makes a clunking sound.

Farther down the bar some of the jollyboys are singing that old sad Afrikaner war song in their hoarse cigarette voices, full of longing and lostlove:
My Sarie Marais is so ver van my haart. / Maa'k hoop om haar weer te sien. / Sy het in die wyk van die Mooirivier gewoon. / Nog voor die oorlog het begin
.

 

My Sari Marais is so far from my heart

But I long to see her again
.

She lived near the Mooi River

Back then before the war began
.

 

Then the sadsweet chorus:

 

Oh bring me back to the old Transvaal
,

There where my Sarie lives
,

There under in the corn fields by the green thorn tree
,

There lives my Sarie Marais

 

—Hello Ma, Isaac says.

Barney says,—Ladies out please. Ize, you know.

—Ja ja ja, she's going, Isaac says.

She speaks in Jewish: Look at me, your mother.

—Hello, my mother. Go home hey please. Far away to the old Transvaal.

Will you come with?

His attention is on the full drink on the bar before him and he licks his lip and scratches his chin through the beard. Mame, he says. Please go home will you?

Will you come with?

—Ja sure, he says. I'll be right along. You go ahead.

She shifts the sack on the bar and again he hears something heavy clunk and scrape. You think I never had before drunkards in my life?

He looks at Barney who's shaking his head. —Sorry hey Barns.

—What sorry, he says. She just has to go, Ize.

Manny with his veinous mushroom nose on the other stool starts to say something to Mame and Isaac backhands him a medium one across the collarbone. —About-face, Isaac says. Manny complies.

They were on your father like leeches, Mame is saying. And now it's the same with you.

Isaac picks up the glass and tilts it to the light, angling the molten gold. Funny she would say leeches. Probably she's never smelled a burn ward. Used to stick leeches on them there to try to get the blood working. The rotting smell and the screams when they came to take them to surgery to cut another piece off. Lying there under leeches in their stink. They were sad bastards, ja, but even they had it easy, compared to certain other ones. Certain others. —Cheers. L'chaim.

He tilts his head back with closed eyes, feels the cold of the glass on the bottom lip then grunts as it spins out of his hand.

—Hey hey! says Barney. That's it! You get out madam! I don't care who you are. Out. Out.

—No Ma, Isaac says gently. No Ma, you shouldn't do a thing like that. That's a big sin. The glass rocks unbroken on the bar; Isaac rights it then wipes his fingertips in the puddle on the wood and puts them in his mouth. This time when Mame slaps at his mouth he leans back and catches only a wee whiff of air. She reaches into the sack.

—Oh boy, he says.

—Hey missus, says Barney. I'm ganna have to come round and show you out if you don't go right now. I'm serious.

Isaac says,—I wouldn't if I were you, Barn.

Ma brings out a hatchet. New. Sharp.

—Here we go, says Isaac. He has been dabbing a napkin in the spilled Scotch and water, now he tilts his head and squeezes the good juices out onto his tongue.

—Yitzchok!

—Ja Ma?

Look at me.

Isaac looks at Barney instead: Barney seems a trifle pale. —What is this? he says.

—It's how my mame deals with drunks, Isaac tells him. Turns them into firewood. I hope you got insurance, Barn.

—Put that thing down, missus, says Barney. For serious now.

Mame is not, it seems, overly interested in what Barney bartender has to say or not to say. The hatchet she has taken out of the burlap sack is a smaller tool than the wood axe that Isaac remembers still so clearly even after, what was it, eighteen, nineteen years? In one part of his mind Mame will always be standing with that thing behind her skirt and talking so coyly to the couchers in the cluttered workshop, telling them it's time to leave and them laughing up at her, trying to send her back to the kitchen for another plate of schmaltz herring or sliced polony. That axe had needed two hands and was half as tall as her; this one has a handle and is only maybe a foot long but the steel blade looks very bright and fine. She has it in her strong right hand, held at the base of the handle, and she is shaking it at him like a protest sign and her soft but strong upper arm is jiggling a little in the shirt sleeve of her dress.

Isaac says,—What you tryna do with that, hey Ma? You'll get yourself arrested. Send me another one there, Barn, a double.

—Let her leave first. Get her out. Or you can go with her.

Isaac sighs. —Mame, Mame. Vos toost du?

Mother, mother, what are you doing? An old question in his life. Then he says, This place isn't your couch, Mame. If you break things they'll take you to jail.

I won't cut what isn't mine.

Cut?

Mame places her left hand on the bar, palm flat and fingers spread wide. Look at me, Isaac.

—Oh jeez, he says. Whatzit now?

Yes indeed he is not seeing things as he does in the night and yes indeed the hatchet still looks sharp as a new knife edge and, indeed yes, she has lifted it higher and is aiming that cutting edge down at her own flesh, her brown wrist with a plump hand affixed, a few freckles on the back, five stocky splayed fingers on the solid wood of the bar underneath.