Peter Carey - Illywhacker

Also, as she lay beside him on the bed in awkward intimacy, separated from his body by a tugging blanket, she was shocked, once again, to feel that shudder at the prospect of his skin. In memory she had blanched it and smoothed it, but there was no denying it here and she was overcome by guilt and confusion by her feelings for she thought it wrong to be repelled by his skin. She had liked his skin well enough as a friend. There was noreason why she should not like it now, as a wife. And the skin, more than the coarse blanket, continued to keep them apart and bring the conversation to matters that seemed safe. It was then that she learned of the whole ordeal he had gone through with the Party. She did not ask him why he had kept it secret from her, but as she watched him and saw the hard gleam in his eyes as he talked about his vindication she thought, not of the unsympathetic nature of his triumph, but of the extent of his shame during the period of his expulsion and she remembered the way – the day in Tamarama – he had curled up in hurt in the hollow of a rock above the sea.

He held her hand as he talked and began to stroke her arm. She was ashamed to not welcome this intimacy. She distracted him by quizzing him about the mechanics of his vindication. They were, the two of them, alike in many respects and she smiled to listen to his approach to the problem. There had to be areason. There was a reason for everything. The comrades in Sussex Street knew nothing about it, therefore the reason for his dismissal must exist outside of Australia. He had hypothesized another Isadore Kaletsky and begun a search of leftist papers and periodicals from 1911 to the present day. In this he had been helped by old friends of Joseph's, political academics but not Party members. Finally, when he found the article he had known, from theory, must exist, he felt, he said, like an astronomer who posits the presence of a star by mathematics before locating it with his telescope. The article, written in 1923 for a little English Marxist periodical(New Times) was most critical of Lenin and very warm towards Comrade Trotsky. The article concerned issues in Australia. He then wrote directly to the Comintern pointing out that he had been only twelve years old at the time and had never been to London. In short, he was not the I. Kaletsky they thought he was.

"But who", Leah asked, "dobbed you in?"

But he would not see the issue as dobbing in, but as a quite correct approach for a party that did not wish to fall into error. Leah, hearing his confident use of "correct" and "incorrect", felt uneasy.

"Who", she asked, "is this I. Kaletsky and what will happen to him?"

"He'll be expelled."

"And if he lives in Russia?"

"The same."

"Put on trial!"

"Goldstein, Goldstein, you've been reading the capitalist press."

"Look at your face. You know it's true."

"Perhaps there have been trials of anti-revolutionaries. What else should they do?"

"Izzie, look at me."

"I am looking at you, damn it."

Leah held her husband's hands and looked into his eyes. She nodded her head slowly as she saw that it was true: that it was J. (Joseph) Kaletsky who had written the article, who had lived in London in 1923, who Moscow now knew about, who would be, she assumed, dealt with. She felt such a confusion of pity and revulsion that the two opposing tides made her whole body tremble.

"Poor Izzie," she said. "Poor, poor little Izzie."

From this they proceeded, misunderstanding on misunderstanding, until, finally making clammy love, Leah wept while Izzie asked her why.

When he came outside for a piss, I was so close to him I could have tripped him over.

It was an odd, bright, windy sort of morning. The gums tossed above our camp and showed the silver undersides of their leaves like a million dazzling knives. The grasses were mirrors and even the pebbles we kicked aimlessly beneath our boots were peppered full of glittering mica. We sat beneath a contradictory sky (a soft, chalky blue) and pretended everything was normal.

Leah sat on the petrol drum I had used in the installation of her guttering. She leaned her back against the doorpost of her hut. The October 1923 issue of New Times flapped its pages in the wind, fluttering like a captive dove or fortune-telling chook. She soothed the pages and held them against her thigh.

She now rested her forefinger on her bottom row of small white teeth and watched us, and only the dark rings around her sunken eyes told anything of the sort of night she had had.

As she sat on the petrol drum she was trying to write a letter, not a real letter to a real person, but some imaginary construction, flawless in its logic and clear as ice, a letter where one fact attaches seamlessly to the next, wherejust conclusions are sensibly reached. There was no one to whom she could bear to send this letter to and, in any case, she was so agitated she could not get the disparate elements to stay still: "If he has betrayed his brother from fear and weakness, should I then abandon (betray) him? Is this not to double the crime? Why should I reject him because he is weak? What is wrong withme that I do not like his skin? Is my skin flawless? Have I been a liar to write to him as I have and then to wish to undo my words because of his skin? Is it skin I am rejecting? Is it something else? Am I merely asking the skin to represent something else for me? How long has this skin been a problem? When I met him in Mrs Heller's I thought him fine-looking and witty. If he is my husband and he murders a man (which seems likely) I should stand by him. If his victim is his own brother, what then? I do not ask perfection of him, only the right intention."

The article Joseph Kaletsky had written in 1922 flapped on her lap and she pretended to read it while Isadore Kaletsky stood beneath a gum tree talking to Herbert Badgery who, I assure you, had in no way been prepared for his rival, either in appearance or personality.

At night, as a spy, I had judged him physically my inferior, but now I could not keep my eyes off his face which was so foreign and so fine, girl-like with its long lashes, limpid eyes, dark ringlets, archer's bow lips; not a soft face. Its nose, chin, cheeks all shaped by the handsome curves of good Semitic bone, the curves of scimitars but also those of harps. His skin, I assure you, seemed quite normal.

He shook my hand, a small hand, but hard, and his speech was staccato, enthusiastic, quiet, light. He charmed me, disarmed me; and while Leah – who I would have understood better had she held a judge's black cap in her pretty hands -stared vacantly, her husband inquired about my experience as an aviator, was knowledgeable about the Australian motor industry, and expressed the opinion that it was a bad thing that the Holden Body Works had fallen into the hands of General Motors.

I once heard Melba sing and knew, from the first note, that I was in the presence of extraordinary gifts. Izzie had that quality, without me even knowing quite what that talent was. If you had given it to me, I would have sold cars with it, one a day.

I cannot even pretend to understand all the resonances that were alive on that bright, tossed day. I cannot imagine that Izzie knew what was going on in Leah's mind; but then I also find it difficult to imagine that he was ignorant of her turmoil.

He did an odd thing. Let me tell it.

Charles was sitting on the bonnet of the truck. The cockatoo was tied with dunny chain to the outside rear-vision mirror from which perch it shrieked and wailed and attacked its own reflection. (If you are, from habit, seeing a white cockatoo in your mind, I must beg you to change it for the correct one, three foot long, funereal black, its yellow fan of feathers at present clasped shut beneath its tail.)