Peter Carey - Illywhacker

"It is disgusting," Rosa said. She was doubly irritable because she did not want to be. "If you say it is beautiful you're not thinking. You would not say it is beautiful if you had to work over it every day."

The girl's grey eyes looked at her with alarm, and then away.

"Ah," Izzie nudged his father, "the Marxist critique."

"A Marxist, perhaps," said Rosa, standing, trying to smile. "A communist, no. Don't you make fun of me." She ruffled her son's head. "You wishy-washy. Look at your clothes. Do you think they make you more appealing? Come and sit with me, Leah. In the sunshine. Leah dresses nicely," she told the men who were standing, as usual, in the shade. "Sit here, the concrete is clean. Have you noticed", she asked the girl, "that the left are always drab? When I was in the Party they thought I was frivolous. They did not trust me because of my dresses."

"Don't listen to her, Leah," Lenny called. "This is her hobby-horse."

"They dressed like they had no hope. It is capitalism, I told them, that is bleak, not socialism. When there is a revolution the people should wear wonderful clothes, streamers, flags, balloons. It should be full of joy and love, not look like a funeral. Do you like picnics?"

Leah Goldstein smiled. "Yes, I do, very much."

"Would you like to come for a picnic with me, one day when you are free?"

"Yes."

"Good," said Rosa smiling, "now I am cheered up," and she laughed. "I apologize for my mood."

The two women sat on the concrete step smiling at each other.

Leah Goldstein would leave the Kaletskys that night with a splitting headache. She had laughed too much, heard too much, eaten too much peculiar food. There had been discord, vulgarity, and such shifts in mood, from sombre to carefree and back again, that she became lost and dizzy. She had drunk a glass of sweet wine on the grass beneath the orange tree, patted the dog, and heard Rosa's life story, how her young mother had run away from her father and walked all the miles from Poland to Vienna, how they had arrived to find her mother's uncle all packed to go to Australia and how they had gone too. Her uncle, a cultured man, had disliked Australia and within a year he was packing all his books again and dragging his family across the seas, this time to Palestine. Rosa's mother had wanted to go, but the uncle would not pay – she had taken a goyim for a lover and was out of favour. Later the goyim left but she had found another, a man who ate fire for a living. The story went on and on, while the men, sitting in the shade with a bottle of beer, called out their teasing comments.

Rosa had left the Communist Party when they turned on Trotsky and talking about this she began, quite inexplicably, to cry and Leah, bewildered, quite out of her depth, could do nothing to comfort her but pat – she felt so inadequate – the back of her hostess's honey-coloured hand while the dog leapt up and licked her face.

Then Lenny announced he would bend a bar of steel between his teeth and Rosa stopped crying and began teasing him, saying he was an old man trying to impress a young girl and Leah blushed and became uncomfortable. She looked at Izzie who was sitting on the laundry steps, and he smiled at her, and raised his eyebrow in the direction of his cock-sparrow father who was, at that moment, fossicking in one of the rusty forty-four-gallon drums, looking for a piece of suitable iron.

"Too thin," said Izzie when his father held up a piece of bolt-studded metal. "Thicker, thicker."

Lenny frowned, hesitated, and went back to the bin. Finally he found a piece of steel rod that Izzie applauded. The dog raced round and round the yard barking and Rosa was again tranquil as she lifted her handsome face to the sun.

"Do you like to dance?" she asked Leah, but Lenny was now standing before them. He insisted Leah pick up the bar, even though it was oily.

He placed the bar between his stained teeth, shut his eyes, positioned his pale legs like a weight-lifter and began to pull down on it with both hands.

The bar began to bend, but then Lenny pulled a face. He took the bar out of his mouth and spat into his hand. He looked at what was in his hand and looked up and grinned. He had broken two teeth.

"You silly man," said Rosa Kaletsky. "Oh, you silly man." But she did not seem upset about her husband's teeth and indeed neither did Lenny, who having rinsed his mouth out with beer, went back to sit by his son.

Rosa began to quiz her about her family and pretended to be shocked that they observed none of the Jewish customs, not even Passover. She had never heard of matzo, never tasted the bitter herb, never waited, impatiently, for the moment when she could eat the charoset.

"Ha," Rosa called out to her son. "So you were bringing home a nice Jewish girl to meet your mother."

Izzie looked uncomfortable but smiled.

"A Presbyterian, a shiksah. Oh dear," she laughed and Leah's face hurt from trying to smile against the current of her embarrassment.

"Shut up, Rosa," Izzie said, suddenly serious.

"Don't you 'shut up' to me, mister," Rosa snapped, fiercely. "You wash out your mouth."

There was silence amongst the combative, confusing Kaletskys for a moment and then Lenny began to explain to Leah that he was not a real Jew either, that his mother had been a shiksah, a dancer in Ballarat who stole Lola Montez's Spider Dance.

"Her name was MacDonald. You never met a woman so kosher. We had two sets of everything, two sinks, two sets of bowls for cooking. By the time she was sixty she looked like a Jew," he giggled. "Her nose grew. She was very pious. When my father died we had to sit on the floor formonths. Poor dear Sheila, oh dear."

"A nasty old woman," said Rosa.

"Not very nice," Lenny admitted, feeling inside his mouth with his finger. "I broke a gold one too."

"Whereze cats?" Rosa said suddenly. "Where are they?" The dog jumped out of her lap, its ears cocked, and began to race around the yard. "We will give him a b-a-t-h," she announced. "Come, Leah."

"It is too late for a bath. It is too cold," Lenny said, standing and carrying two empty beer bottles to the rubbish bin.

But they washed the dog anyway and when it was done all ran around, giggling, trying to keep clear of the showers of water the shaking dog sent in all directions. The dog scratched a bare spot in the lawn and rolled itself in the dirt and Leah watched it sadly, thinking herself a dog who has lost its doggy smell. She envied the Kaletskys their jokes and their tempers, their matzos, their gold mouths, their bookish uncles, their shiksah dancers. In comparison her own life felt white and odourless. She felt herself dull, a person without a history, or even a character. She wished she could roll in the dirt like the dog, roll and roll, and rub her chin along the sandy soil and get her doggy smell back.

When, walking to the tram, Izzie held her hand, she did not, as she had imagined in the morning – anticipating this very event -take it back, but found herself, instead, holding it tightly. They both misunderstood her emotions, and the misunderstanding would continue, would grow greater rather than diminish as that year of 1930 continued and finally reached its zenith in 1931 when she would marry Izzie Kaletsky when it was really Rosa that she loved.

The letters were an agony to her. Sometimes she would sit an hour between sentences. She could not say that she had danced the foxtrot with a young man who did not reach her shoulder, nor that the young man was a socialist, nor that she had, on one sweet balmy evening, walked past crumbling houses whose tiny gardens were heavy with frangipani, to hear this young man speak in an awful hall which echoed with the heavy boots of working men. Her father had no time for socialists, but how could he have not been moved to see Izzie do battle with his shyness? When he had opened his mouth she had heard, quite clearly, the sound of a throat so dry with fear that its membranes might adhere and strangle him. He wrung his dainty hands and shut his eyes. The audience went, suddenly, very quiet. She did not know that this was the way it was, would always be with Izzie, that he would, in these moments of mute terror, move huge gatherings of people to wish him well, to will him success, to sit with their own throats dry, their own hands clenched, wishing him eloquence. And then his foot, like a band leader, hit three times, haltingly, and then (as if he felt the audience sigh and lean towards him) he began to speak, lightly, intensely, personally. When the meeting was over, she stayed in her seat, limp, quite drained. She saw large working men with arms as thick as Izzie's skinny legs come up and shake his hand.