Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Leah, at this time, was unaware of the virtues of discussion and had long been in the habit of making her mind up on important matters without any help from anyone. She would come to a conclusion slowly, tortuously, and she would go over and over it (her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the ceiling) until it was smooth and flawless. In this manner she arrived at ideas that were often original, but not easily accepted by others.

She did not, however, consider herself clever. If she was to succeed at the university she would have to work five times as hard as anyone else. She brushed aside any suggestion of joining debating societies or amateur theatricals and when there were pig worms to be dissected she managed to slip an extra one into her handbag so that she could bring the little pink parasite home to her room and there perform the dissection a second time. The pig worm, being only five inches long, was easily smuggled into the house and escaped Mrs Heller's attention. However, when she carried home a dogfish, the odours of formaldehyde and fish gave her away, and Mrs Heller, her red scaly skin hidden beneath Wysbraum's black tar treatment, came to complain about the smell.

Leah politely declined to place the "thing" in the large brown paper bag her landlady held out into the room. Whereupon Mrs Heller – as white-eyed and black-faced as Al Jolson – announced she would send up Mr Kaletsky.

Leah knew nothing of this Mr Kaletsky. She had promised her mother, in answer to a specific question, that there were no men in the house. She had not noticed the small room, tucked away beside the laundry in the concreted backyard, where Izzie Kaletsky slept. He did not pay full board and so did not come to table.

Leah, waiting for the mysterious Mr Kaletsky, sat in front of her dissection board where the dogfish's nervous system was being untidily exposed. She took out her notebook and began to sketch the pale ganglia, using her eraser too much so that pieces of indiarubber and paper found their way into the dissection.

This is how Izzie found her when she bade him "enter", a very prim and serious young lady, dressed in black, sketching a dead fish. To Izzie, this was an appealing sight. He did not, however, as Leah mischievously claimed on other occasions, introduce himself by saying: "My name is Kaletsky and my brother is a revolutionary in Moscow."

Leah had expected an old man with a belly. This did not look like a "Mr" anyone. He was tiny. He had dark ringlets of hair, small hands, and a wide mouth that hovered in the tantalizing androgynous no man's land between pretty and handsome. His good looks were spoiled only by his skin, and yet even that was interesting, being coarsely textured, a little like a lemon.

Izzie's pointed feet would not stay still. He grinned, mocking either her or himself – it wasn't clear. He had thin wrists like a girl.

"Miss Goldstein."

She was not above a little theatre – she leaned back and sharpened her pencil, squinting all the time at her smudgy drawing. Her cheeks were burning, but who was to know that this was not her normal colour?

"I am Kaletsky."

"Come in," she said. "Complain."

He moved into the room a little but left the door, as was proper, wide open. Leah could hear the voices of the student teachers in the stairwell.

"You are famous," he said. "First they talk about nothing else but how little you talk. Then it is all about how much you work. Now you have given them a smell. They love you."

Leah heard a clatter on the stairs, fast whispers, and then heavy brogues marching across the linoleum in the front hall.

Izzie grinned. "See what excitements you produce. They never talked to each other before you came. Mrs Heller only wanted to remember her husband the Police Commissioner and tell everyone how nice it is to have servants – 'When I had servants my skin was beautiful.' And the students were dull and made toast because they had nothing to say."

He talked on and on. Leah had never heard, she thought, somebody use so many words in all her life, not even Wysbraum, nor seen anyone who made such a confusing, contradictory impression of confidence and shyness. For while his words were so confident (so interesting, so light, with a rhythm like soft erratic rain) his body looked as if it feared rejection – the small feet moved to and fro, the hands clasped each other and the dark eyes could not hold hers for more than an instant. The effect was puzzling but, on the whole, pleasing.

He came to look over her shoulder at the dogfish.

"We are having a meeting about Germany" he said, "tonight. Would you like to come?"

Leah imagined castles on the Rhine.

Rosa Kaletsky opened her eyes and surveyed her backyard. It was an untidy place, graceless, with concrete paths. A rusting caravan occupied the centre of the lawn. A clothes-line ran across one corner, above some roses which the sheets now tangled with. Forty-four-gallon drums containing scrap metal stood on either side of the high gate in the paling fence, and Leah Goldstein, when she entered this world fifteen minutes later, would be shocked at its untidiness, the weeds amongst the cabbage bed, the rusting tricycle tangled amongst the passion-fruit. But Rosa, sitting on the cracked concrete step, smelt the salt from Bondi Beach, the lovely perfume of her drying sheets, and when she opened her eyes she saw green oranges and the splendid glow of copper appearing in the verdigrised cauldron her husband was now polishing with Brasso.

Izzie was bringing a girl to meet them and Rosa was at once curious, impatient and also irritable that she would have to surface from her pleasant reverie in the sun. She was a well-preserved woman in her early fifties, large-boned and well proportioned. And although her frock was an old one and her hair was tangled and needed a brush, she could still be said to be a beauty.

"I'm going to give Bo a bath," she said, but did not move. She was looking at the sky between the leaves of the orange tree and imagined she could see the light of the shining copper bathing the green fruit.

"I should get changed," she said a moment later. "And so should you," she told her husband. "Those shorts." But she smiled. "If you must wear shorts you should get your legs brown."

Lenny Kaletsky didn't answer her. He was immersed in the great copper cauldron which stood on a heavy cast-iron base. What sort of scrap-metal dealer, she thought, brings home a bit of junk to polish because it is beautiful? "Mark must have laughed at you," she said.

Lenny looked up and grinned. He had a mass of grey hair and owl-like eyebrows the colour of nicotine. His face was crumpled, like a paper bag. He was broad-shouldered and chested, but his legs were thin, like a cocky little sparrow, Rosa thought. He was shorter than Rosa by a good two inches and looked older. In their early days together, when they were both show people, travelling the tent shows in the country towns, when she had been Rosalind and he Leonard, he had never shown this interest in beautiful things. She had had to teach him how to dress.

Rosa yawned. "I must get changed." Then (was it so late?) she heard the squeak of the front gate. She suddenly felt irritated and not interested in having to talk to anyone and so watched the girl – the first girl this son had brought home -silently, a little critically. She admired the austerity of her beauty, the simple grey silk dress which, she thought, would scandalize her son if he knew how much such simplicity cost. She offered her cheek to Izzie and told him he was too pale. Did he bring this girl home, she wondered, because she was a Jew? They gathered around the cauldron while Bo jumped up on Izzie and then sniffed the girl's shoes.

Izzie was teasing his father.

"Melt it?" said Lenny, smiling at the girl. "Melt a thing like this? An heirloom?" He said nothing of the other thirty cauldrons they would have already melted. Before the day was over he would be showing off, eating fire or bending an iron bar.