Peter Carey - Illywhacker

The great-nieces would do well to examine the dates on the stamps: the badly torn perforations are from winter in Victoria -their dancing great-aunt had chilblains on her pretty hands.

Following her father's instructions, Leah managed to forget who it was she was writing to. She lost sight of his mournful eyes, his prim mouth, his watery silence, his fear of discord. She wrote things in her letters she would never have dreamed of saying to his face and, as a result, he also wrote things that he would have considered previously unthinkable. He began to use words with a recklessness quite foreign to his speech. I do not mean that he used words incorrectly or inaccurately – he remained, to his death, a pedant – but that he did not stint himself in the quantity of words and this is attested by the increasing value of the stamps on his long manila envelopes and the rare black one- shilling Kookaburra is directly attributable to this new garrulousness.

Sid Goldstein filled page after page with an often disjointed but touchingly vulnerable inquisition into the nature of his life, his business, the depressed economy and, at last, his Jewish-ness. "It is not enough for you to say that it might be 'useful' or 'comforting' or that you feel a fool not knowing the simplest Yiddish word or are an outsider when you sit at Passover. Technically speaking you are not a Jew anyway because your mother is not a Jew. You do not show concern for the important issue, which is whether there is a god or not, and if there is a god if he is likely to behave as the God of the Jews is reported to. Obviously I have made my decision as best I can." They discussed the secular state. Leah spoke favourably of Marx, Sid unfavourably of communists he had known, saying that they were men who appeared to have left no room in their lives for kindness. Leah replied with a passion. Her father wrote of Russian anti-Semitism revealed in the indignities of life in Minsk. All the while they described for each other's eyes the more ordinary stuff of life: thistles by a roadside, a man playing a saxophone on a crowded bus.

The postmarks of Leah's letters show the progress of Mervyn Sullivan's Chevrolet. They dip down towards Bateman's Bay, halt, lose courage, and the next day they have crossed the mountains and materialized in Yass. Albury must have been successful for there are many letters to and from Albury Post Office, even a rare letter from Izzie in his distinctive loopy hand: vast tails to the "y"s and "g"s that tangle with words two lines beneath, long crosses to the "t"s that fling themselves emphatically beneath the line above, appearing to underline, to add emphasis where none was intended, with the result that to read his short letters is a stuttering process, a series of misunderstandings, halts, clarifications.

But it is not this that makes Izzie's letters so frustrating to read. It is because he never once talks about the things that are on his mind. He forgives his wife for something we will come to in a minute but which he does not dwell on, will not even touch. The words are plain, short, hurried: a man cooking without benefit of a pot holder, and they become more understandable when you realize what he is replying to.

Here, in this note from Shepparton: "I have done it again," she confesses. "I would not be your wife if I could not tell you. I would be a cheat and a liar, not merely unfaithful."

The longer she is away from him, the more her idealization of him continues. She thinks of him as "a good person, absolutely good; it is for this reason that I love you and will never love anyone else. I am proud of you, my darling Izzie. When I see men humping their swags along these dusty roads I know that at least one of us is doing something useful. I love you."

Four times he jumped the rattler, his knuckles bleeding from punching walls. Twice he found her, once in Benalla, as the truck pulled out, and, again, in Shepparton where they spent a night as tearful as their wedding night, taunted by the watery ghost of Mervyn Sullivan who winked at Izzie lewdly at breakfast and asked him how old he was.

He could not tell her. He was not brave enough to tell her. She put such weight on his goodness and usefulness, that he could not tell her what had happened to him, that he, like his mother before him, had been expelled by the Communist Party of Australia.

The committee of the NSW branch of the Communist Party were, with a single exception, decent men and women. They were embarrassed that they could not yet produce evidence to back up their charges, but they had no doubt that the evidence existed. They been advised of its existence by none other than the Comintern.

To understand the effect of this upon them, you must realize that they often imagined that the Comintern had forgotten that the Party ever existed in Australia. Certainly it was not in the habit of displaying an interest in individual comrades. So when they were advised that the Australian I. Kaletsky had indulged in activities against the revolution, they not only believed it, but were sure that the activities must be particularly serious.

It was a misunderstanding and it came to play an important part in Izzie's life, to be, for months, the business of his life. And in this he was supported by his mother.

"Fight them," she said. "If you accept it, you will always be sorry. What have you done? What have you said? Don't shake your head. There is always something."

He became like a fellow who has been sold an unsatisfactory Vauxhall who will stand in front of the town hall with his whole sad story written on a blackboard. He attacked, buttonholed, angered and confused any comrade who would listen to him. There was a stage, in August 1931, when the CPA headquarters in Sussex Street had its door locked for weeks on end and it was necessary to knock out a code to gain entrance. This was not as a precaution against fascists or Australian Intelligence but against Izzie Kaletsky who would not give up.

He wrote letters to the Tribune which were never published and to the Comintern which were opened by Intelligence and copied by hand before they were sent on their slow way by ship across the world.

Izzie changed that year, like a man who has been tortured and who, walking down the street amidst his fellows, shows no crude scars or telling limp – merely a weariness in his smile which sometimes gave the impression that his lip had curled.

He tried to live off the money Leah sent him. But just the same, when de Groot cut the ribbon on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Izzie and Lenny were there selling bright balloons.

"Buy a balloon," Leah's husband said, "buy a balloon."

Both Leah Goldstein and my son seemed to have interpreted my disappearing as a clever stunt which might be useful. They did not tremble on the edge of an abyss, or question the substantiality of matter. Leah began to sew spangles on my suit and Charles tried, belligerently, to disappear in class before the incredulous eyes of Mr Barry Edwards and twenty-eight children who suddenly erupted into wild hooting and cat-calling when Charles Badgery stood in such a queer way.

Mr Barry Edwards giggled, even while he strapped my son's winter-white legs.

The red weals of pain were still there later as my son continued his obsessive game with his sister, near the camp. He tugged at his odd socks (one bright blue, the other overchecked with brown diamonds) but the socks would not stay up. They fell, and revealed the marks of Mr Edwards's handiwork.

"I need garters," he announced.

"What are garters?"

"Hold your socks up."

My son is stubborn. He has always been stubborn. If the milky poison – that curdling creamy stuff in the whisky bottle that the actress procured in Carlton – could not budge him from his mother's womb, then neither could Barry Edwards's strap change his mind. He decided on garters, firstly to hide his marks from me, to stop me discovering that he had been playing the game he was forbidden; but also because it seemed to him -quite suddenly, but very clearly – that they were the ingredient he lacked. As a grown man he would have the same attitude towards electronic equipment, hi-fi, ham radio, things in black boxes with dainty buttons, glowing dials, esoteric wiring diagrams and languages of their own, as if these products and their associated rituals would somehow bring about the changes he wanted in his life.