tried to stop the tide of desolation that always overcame him when the meetings were over and he was left alone with his wife. He fidgeted, balanced his ashtray, bit his lip and tried to feel sympathy for his unwanted guest.
'So,' he said, 'what are your plans for Sydney?'
Charles missed half of the sentence but he understood more from Izzie's face than he would, anyway, have gathered from the words.
'I'm a bit hard of hearing,' he said belligerently.
Izzie did not repeat himself. Now he was reinstated as a teacher his days were long ones. He nodded, wearily. Charles interpreted the weariness as hostility.
'I suppose you think I'm a bit of a mug,' he said.
Izzie shook his head. 'No,' he said, and smiled.
They sat and looked at each other. Charles was soon in a panic. If he was not an idiot he should be able to say something. He did not know what to say or how to say it.
'I remember you,' he begged. 'We met before. My cockie bit your finger.'
Izzie would have preferred to be kind to the fidgeting boy, but Charles chose to remind him of the day he would prefer to forget.
There was another silence.
'I came down to find my mum.'
Izzie said something but Charles missed it. He started fiddling with his hearing aid. He banged the metal box on his knee.
'Do you remember me?' he demanded. 'I remember you. I was only a young fellow.'
'I'm sorry. I'm tired.'
'What were you talking about when I came in?'
Izzie explained but Charles gave up understanding almost as soon as he started and when he spoke again it was on another subject entirely.
'I owe Leah a lot.'
'Everybody seems to.' Izzie just wanted to go to bed and sleep. He did not wish to hear talk about his saintly wife, but he did wish her to come and rescue him. He looked expectantly towards the door.
'I'm going to take her to the theatre.'
In fact Charles had been going to take them both to the theatre. He did not even know that he'd changed his mind until the words came out of his mouth and he had excluded Izzie from it. 'And to a rest-er-raunt.'
'Good for you,' said Izzie Kaletsky, now thoroughly impatient with his bumptious guest. He leaned over and started to pick up the typed pages that were spread on the surface of the bed.
'Yes. I'm going to take her to the Chinese acrobats.'
'That's nice.' Izzie placed the pages in a dun-coloured folder.
'It will be nice. There are twelve boy acrobats, from China. I've got the money.'
'You're very fortunate.'
'I worked for it, every zac and deener. I was going to take her to a pub, but I met a bloke on the train who said a resteraunt would be better.'
'Then you should take her to Prunier's.'
'What's that?'
'Prunier's. Here, I'll write it down for you,' said Izzie Kaletsky with a malice that was no longer new to him. 'It's the very best restaurant in Sydney.'
'That's what I want.'
Charles took the piece of paper Izzie gave him and painstakingly copied the name and address into a small marbled notebook.
But he was to cross out the address the following morning when Leah, declining his invitation, laughed. It was then he knew Izzie had made a fool of him and he never tried to like him again.
6
It was Leah Goldstein who wrote to me to say my missing son was found at last. She described for me his half-grown-up face, his smell, his clothes, his croaking voice, his snake, his bankbooks. On the first morning she cooked him a big breakfast with grilled sausages, steak, kidney, onions, eggs, chops, buttered toast, cups of tea. She served this monstrous meal on a plate with a blue rim. This is what she told me, and I am not saying it wasn't kind of her, or even typical of her, only that you can't rely on it being true – by 1938 my puritanical friend was as addicted to telling lies as another woman, equally unhappy with her life, might be to a sherry bottle.
Yes, yes, I am asking you to believe that Honest Leah had become Lying Leah. I am not saying that it happened overnight. These things don't happen like that. Lies were not on her mind at all. She had sought to do no more than deliver some happiness to me, each day, for every day I lived in gaol. She wrote me letters.
She did not tell me that this enraged her husband. Neither did she describe the weather when it was unpleasant. If she was ill she would not trouble me with it; she would write as if she were well. This, of course, is not quite lying.
She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant. It was Leah who calmed down Rosa's husband and her son. It was Leah who cared for and nursed her angry friend, washed the sheets and nighties she was so ashamed of, sat with her, watched her sleep until she felt herself to be soaked in the gassy odours of death itself. Later she would think of these months, when she helped her friend die, as one of the most important times in her life.
But she wrote not a word about it to me. Instead she described long walks with Rosa along the cliff tops to Tamarama. She did not date these walks, but the impression given was that they had happened an hour or a minute before, that Rosa sat across from her at the kitchen table, drinking fragrant tea. They were beautiful letters, bulging with powerful skies and rimmed with intense yellow light. Every blade of grass seemed sharply painted, every word of conversation exact and true. Perhaps these things had once taken place. Perhaps she invented them. In any case they gave me that electric, unnatural mixture of emotions that every prisoner knows, where even the best things in the world outside come slashed with our own bitterness or jealousy. This confusion of love and hurt is very powerful. I came to crave it even while I dreaded it. It is a more potent drug than simple happiness.
Rosa died and was buried. Leah eliminated her presence from the house, threw away stubs of pencils and old ball gowns, yellowed letters, scraps of lace. No one tried to stop her. Lenny and Izzie mourned like Jews. While they sat on floors, Leah sat at the table and brought Rosa back to life. Now that, God damn it, is no longer mere politeness. She sent me descriptions of Rosa swinging her arms, Rosa burping, Rosa raising her lovely face to the sun. When it gets to this point she is no longer doing it for me alone. She is doing it for herself. And before a year is out she has the whole thing out of control and she has presented imaginary Rosa with imaginary grandchildren, made curtains, planted passionfruit and worried herself about the whooping cough in a world that exists between nine and eleven o'clock in the morning.
There was a time, when I finally learned the truth, that I could have killed her for her deception, to have made me feel so much about what revealed itself as nothing. I will tell you, later, how I got on the train with my bottle and my blade. But when I think about her now I cannot even imagine my own anger. I see only the empty air around her, the coldness of the surfaces, the gloss on the linoleum, the yellow stare of the shining cupboard doors, the brown hard glaze on the cracked bread crock, the rusty drip mark on the empty porcelain sink, and my Leah sitting alone writing these letters to me, manufacturing a happy family.
It was dangerous work and it is hardly surprising that she got herself addicted.
And although she could put up with Lenny's whingeing about his husband's tongue, she would permit nothing to prevent her letter-writing and even Izzie had learned to leave her alone when she was occupied with what they both now chose to call 'bookkeeping'.
Do not imagine that she was lazy in regard to her other duties. Leah, at twenty-five, worked as hard and unrelentingly as any widow who does not wish to think. She rose at five thirty every morning, washed and dressed
