The Lion Seeker (8 page)

Rodney Epstein nudges. —Howzit, Rabies. You check the good news hey. They come in last night like Father Christmas. Sweet of them hey? How many Greyshirts does it take to paint one swastika? A hundred. One to draw it wrong and the other ninety-nine to blame the Jews.

—That who it was, Greyshirts?

—Well it wasn't Rabbi Kramer or my uncle Yitz. The shammos reckons they drove right up on here by the tire marks. Old Mrs. Holberg reckons she saw lights four in the morning. Check it: forget Shabbos, the shammos he's awready went to the cop shop. Know what they tuned him? Said it's pro'lly
our kids
who did it for a laugh. Told him, Don't take it so serious.

Shimmy Kahn snorts. —So serious. Ja, watch how serious they take it if we slap some kuk upside one a their churches. Pull down pants and take a few nice Yiddish shits all over their bimah.

—I don't reckon they got bimahs in church, shmock.

—Bimah-shmimah. Whatever the eff it is in there.

Big Benny taps his palm with his fist. —What we need, set a trap. Wait round here for a Greyshirt. Make him a dead shirt.

Still half in his numb mood, Isaac says: —But why they doing it? I mean like
why
. They don't even know us.

Rodney Epstein squawks laughter. —The boy asks why. Listen, Rabies, you ever open a newspaper your whole life?

Isaac steps close. —You ever eat one?

—Oright, don't have triplets, mate. Don't catch a harry. I'm only saying.

Noam Levinson has had his spectacles off, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Now he settles them back on, says: —They got them everywhere, right. They love Hitler, ole Adolph's their god. It's like this club is spreading over the world. They got their Brownshirts in Germany, the Blackshirts in Italy and in England. Different-coloured shirts for different kinds of mumzors. Who knows what else, Blueshirts, Pinkshirts. Now we got them over here. But our chutus is so thick he can't even pick a real colour. So they just gave em grey.

Rodney Epstein: —It's getting big hey, everywhere.

—They should all stick with brown for their shirts, ay, the colour of shit. Brown
shits
, Black
shits
, Grey
shits
.

—I think just plain
shits
about covers it, Shimmy.

—These shirt kinds are all the same, Noam Levinson tells Isaac. Pure race this, pure race that. Only one blood per country. Anyone else, chuck em out. And any problems blame on the Jews.

—Hell, they getting big man, says Rodney Epstein. I heard they had like a thousand in town. They go by City Hall there.

—It's not a thousand.

—S'what I heard.

—Your ears is full of idiot wax.

Noam Levinson: —Ja, well. My old man reckons half the guvmint is in with them!

This pricks at Isaac; he turns from the fallen lion. —No, no, he tells them all. Not Jannie Smuts.

A pocket of curious silence accrues around him.

—Listen a Rabies, says Big Benny Dulut. What a you, a doctor in politics now?

The others watch him while heat fills his face. Benny's big, ja, but Rabies is Rabies, even standing right outside shul.

Noam Levinson breaks the moment: —I don't reckon Smuts can help much. All the cops and army is in with the other lot, what my old man says. Plus opposition is bladey Malan and the Nats—I mean they kissing cousins with these Greyshirts! Can turn like Germany here!

There's another silence of a different kind. Isaac looks at the wall, feels the others doing the same. He shakes his head. —Jannie Smuts won't never let it happen, he says.

Noam Levinson's tongue clicks. —Jannie Smuts, Jannie Smuts. He's not even Prime Minister, mate. He's deputy and Hertzog's in charge and Hertzog used to be a Nat, don't forget. And Jannie's not so great anyway, like he did nothing when they stuck Quota on us hey.

Big Benny: —Slice their necks. Bleed em like chickens, turn em proper grey. Slice their bladey necks open.

Isaac's squinting. —What you talking Quota?

Noam Levinson's arms wave; he has to push at his glasses to keep them from sliding. —Quota Act, Quota Act man. The law they put for no more Jews to come. Cut us right off. Don't you even know?

Blood blooms fully in Isaac's cheeks then; he shouts out, hotfaced in his lie: —Course I know! Course I do! Then, thinking furiously: —Smuts didn't put that Quota! It was . . . Wait, when was it? . . . Smuts didn't put that!

—Was years and years ago, says Rodney Epstein.

—Exactly
, says Isaac. Was before Smuts, was Nats in charge then, isn't it? Isn't it hey?

—Ja, Professor Rabies. But now your great Smuts he
is
there and he hasn't gotten rid of Quota has he? Has he? Nooo—nothing. Ach, he's just the same. Go and look it up man, I got no time, Rabies.

Big Benny: —We make an ambush. Catch a few. Skiet them in the balls. Right in the balls.

Shimmy Kahn: —Hey Rabies, how is it in Bez Valley there, that yokish school? They make you eat a pork chop or what?

—It's oright, says Isaac.

—We shoot their kneecaps, says Big Benny. Go for the kneecaps.

—Hey Rabies, there's your old man hey.

Isaac looks up to see his father in the doorway, waving at him with the whole of his arm. Isaac goes in, his father limping off ahead of him, leading the way, anger in the stiffness of his back. Inside they find their seats in front, his father's cane hung on the pew. The women sitting in the galleries with their hats overlook all. On the bimah, the chuzen's face turns pink under his black cap, twisting out the high notes that to Isaac are a kind of wailing, a tormented wailing, as if a suffering infant is trapped inside the man's chest. This shul with its old men with hairy ears sitting in rows and muttering and watching, people whispering and holding in their farts, the shrewd widows in their black hats noting every move from above, the endless droning through hours—it's just like a schoolroom, oppressive to his jittering spirit as it always has been. Except that now he also sees the black paint, the broken lion outside, and it dawns in him what a weak place this is, a monument to victimhood, helpless.

He thinks of Kaplan, of Mame. That dark bandage on her face all through his early life, tied in his mind to Dusat. Dusat was the cause. He tries to remember back, really for the first time, to glimpses he had of her face uncovered? Something else he was told about it? . . . But of Dusat he can find only vestigial memories, as if the blinds are being drawn in that part of himself. Inside that dimming chamber he summons the houses built with wooden sides, some yellow, some dark green, and with steep-slanted roofs of tin sheets or wooden shingles or sometimes thatched straw. He breathes again the cramped human smells in the little rooms. And cow manure and woodsmoke. Muddy yards with woodpiles as tall as the houses. A stove made of large bricks inside called a pripachik, with a round hole in front and a door in the side and another door in the brick back, facing into the room behind, that opened as a heater in winter. Everything revolved around that pripachik, purveyor of hot meals and life heat. On very bad nights they blocked the chimney to a trickle to let the orange warmth of the coals throb to the walls; the best place to sleep was on the pripachik's flat top. He remembers: Stay off the lake! Its whiteness looked solid but it could swallow you. And the cathedral on the rise, that fearsome overlooking cross. An arrowhead of ducks against a white sky. A field of painted crucifixes. Playing in the bright twinkling shallows in the summer, copper pots and pans scrubbed there by the kerchiefed women, scoured with handfuls of coarse river sand white as flour. The streets in spring turning to mud glittering with melt ice, and the village inspector hanging bags of disinfectant and sprinkling powder on the turds the melting unveiled, left by those too cold in winter to make it to the outhouses, and the neighbours pointing and laughing, calling the frozen stools
treasures
. Winter: the way of that brittle sky, how the line of the snow rose smooth as a dune to the roof edge, white billows of it sweeping the rigid lake in waves of tumbling powder. Branka the Tatar woman stooping to light the pripachik for them on a cold Shabbos morning, the flame playing shadows in the wrinkled crevices of her wide kind face. Bloodhot milk squirting from the udder gripped in his tiny fist. Market days on Wednesdays filling the square with carts, and a goy peasant passed out drunk on the vegetable patch, snoring with his mouth open and he and Rively squatting fascinated, putting sticks and sand on the pale cracked tongue till Mame pulled them inside.

But of the veil that hid the bottom of his mother's face there is nothing, nothing except that it was always there, token of some sickness never spoken, a part of her.

They have entered the part of the service called the Amidah, the Standing, where everyone rises in silence to face toward holy Jerusalem, to address God in the silent chambers of their skulls, their hearts. Isaac feels like he's suffocating. Feels as if the embroidered cloth on the Holy Ark and the thick ruby carpets underfoot are being pushed down his throat. Mame, Mame—where is Mame, why is she not here? It's such an obvious question, but he's never really asked it. Suddenly he wants to ask
her
, more than anything, wants to understand. It's a question that can't wait. He turns and starts saying excuse me, edging past the seats, not looking back, knowing his father must be staring at him but also that he won't break the holy silence to call him back.

He walks home quickly, agitated. The shop has its
Closed / Gesluit
sign on the door. His hand on the door handle hesitates, he leans to the window glass to look inside. It's like that time when he was free and little, running barefoot with Skots and them. Remember Skots? What's become of that lot? He imagines Coloured faces under flat caps, workingmen now, or else loitering gangsters waiting to go to jail, sipping methylated spirits they first siphon through a loaf of bread to filter out the poison.
Auntie
Peaches probably dead of TB by now. How he came back from the Yards with that little dog, that poor little animal. She should have let me keep it, what's the bladey harm? And here he is again nervous as hell to go in, this time not with a dog but with the guilty sense of having left shul. She'll try to make me go back like she made me give that dog away. But I didn't want to give it away, and I don't have to now. I can tell her no.

He's surprised to see her seated at the front desk with her back to the door. He's never thought about what Mame does when they're all away. He expected cleaning, fixing; but here she's motionless, bent over in a posture not so far removed from that of Abel over the guts of a watch. He shifts around, gains a better angle on what she's doing. The cashbox is on the desk and it's open and the top level of it has been lifted out and set down, opening a bottom space he never knew was there. He squints at it: empty, looks like. She must be doing accounts except that the cashbook is closed and she's not writing.

He watches her for fully a quarter of an hour before she shifts and he sees her hands are folding sheets of paper, a stack of other documents beneath; she pulls another sheet, curls forward again. The way she starts to rock slightly over these papers is familiar, it's how the oldsters pray in the synagogue, as if they're on a ship riding swells. Praying: this is what she does while we are in shul. But if she prays then why must she do it alone, why doesn't she come to shul with us? And again the question so obvious, so massive he's never put it to himself till this very day: why
does
she never go to shul, not even on Yom Kippur? Why?

At that moment she lifts her right hand to her face. Paws at her eyes. Her shoulders quiver. God. He has never seen her weep before, never. The sight of it socks him under the heart. He wants to turn away then, to run; but he is also held.

He thinks of Kaplan the coucher, touching his cheek at the place, saying of Mame,
You can forgive anything
.

Mame, Mame, Isaac thinks, what is happening to you?

 

He walks off, a blank wildness in his mind. When he gets back, Mame is sweeping out the workshop. He opens the door and stands there with his pulses throbbing. She looks up. Big eyes, her voice tight: What's happened?

—Don't worry, everything's ukay. Everything's fine.

Where are they?

—At shul.

Then what are you doing here?

He shrugs at her, shakes his head. The questions drumming in him are impossible to release, not in front of her, this live and watching presence, this mother of his who was just weeping so that her eyes are still a little pink-rimmed and to ask her might break into her heart again and make it bleed more tears. No, he cannot. Still, he tries to force it but his mouth only opens very slightly and only silence comes. He closes it, closes his eyes. Not now, he thinks. Another time, any other time, anytime but now.

TRANSPORT IS RELATED TO CARS
, a good business and easy to get into since all you need to start are some wheels. Think how Mr. Jackman began with one cart, not even a horse cart, a pushcart. Yes, trenshport is good: so Mame says, flexing him into a job with Morris Brothers Packers & Movers, Pty. Ltd.

The Morrises have a compact warehouse on Jeppe Street in town and three battered Chev trucks. One brother, Sol—tall, thin, mellow—runs the warehouse. The oldest, Errol—short, wide, aggressive—rides with the biggest closed truck. The last brother, Dave, is both tall and wide and veers from aggression to calm and back; he goes with the other closed truck. What the Morris brothers are in need of when they hire Isaac is a White for the third Chev, an open flatbed, to deal with the customers and make sure, as Sol puts it, that the bladey coons don't steal us dry.

So Isaac rides with four Blacks. He is the boss and they are the boys. Silas, the driver, is a Zulu from Natal with stretched earlobes that dangle and sway like strands of overcooked spaghetti. Morgan, a different kind of Zulu, from Rhodesia, is chubby and rubs some kind of grease into his skin to make it gleam and is always smiling or reading his bible. Hosea is a Shangaan and has welts and dots on his face, clan markings. Fisu is the tallest, the quietest, and is from the mountain kingdom of Basutoland. He always comes to work with a cone-shaped woven hat, and if it's cold he drapes a bright blue blanket of silken wool over his shoulders. All four wear overalls and long duster jackets stencilled in purple on the back with the words
MORRIS BROS
. Isaac can wear whatever he wants: no more school uniforms.