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.
14
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.
Nor could she say that the young man made her feel stupid, that almost everything, every day, made her curse the inadequacy of her previous life, the lack of talk, lack of ideas, lack of laughter. There had been few books in Malvern Road, and these were novels, hidden away in the musty big bedroom her mother and father shared, a room she rarely entered and then only secretly, perhaps intent on unearthing the mysteries of marital sex. (She discovered nothing more than a little blue-labelled bottle of vaseline with dust clinging to its greasy lid and two romances by Walter Scott, always the same two, inside which -had she been more curious about books – she would have discovered a rubber contraceptive sheath in a little paper envelope.)
She had walked through the Domain, her high-arched feet blistered from new shoes, and seen men camping in huts made from corrugated cardboard boxes and a little sparrow-limbed girl in George Street dressed in a pitiful fairy costume, begging with a tin in one hand and a silver wand in the other. These things moved her far too much to write about in letters. But this was not the end of the secrets: she had begun to help Izzie in his Labour Party work. She cleaned halls after meetings and ruined her grey silk dress with ink from the Roneo machine. Not only could she not mention this to her father but Izzie had warned her not to tell Rosa who, he said, would scorn her for reformism.
For a person who prided herself on her honesty these burdens were hard to bear.
15
She did not know that she had fallen in love with Rosa, only that her heart lightened when she was called downstairs to the telephone. 'You must not come if I am interfering with your studies,' Rosa would say.
'No, no. I am just finishing.'
She would run upstairs again, run downstairs to iron a blouse, upstairs to clean her shoes and when the taxi tooted outside she would leave her normally neat room in a mess of books and stockings, discarded slips and rejected skirts, and arrive at the taxi out of breath. At this moment, laughing, collapsing into the seat next to Rosa, she would not think of the guilt and anger she would feel when the picnic was over, when she would walk heavily to her room and look with disgust at the evidence of her indolence.
They picnicked everywhere, in Centennial Park, Cooper Park, but most often near the harbour. They took ferries to Manly, to Taronga Park, to Mosman and Cremorne. They sat, always, at the bow, in front of the ferry captain, and held their hats with one hand while their faces pressed against the soft-gloved salt air. Then, when the engine bells rang, they would clatter down the stairs with basket and rug to see the harbour framed like a painting in the wide wooden doorway.
Then they would walk along paths above tangles of morning glory and wild lantana and spread their rug and take off their hats and let the warm March sun bathe their uplifted faces. When she was with Rosa she felt as if the world was about to burst open, like a delicious tropical fruit, and spill its seeds into her cupped hands.
It was her youth that Rosa liked, her youth that she celebrated, and yet it seemed to Leah that it was Rosa who was young, whose pleasure in the world made Leah feel old and wooden. Rosa was filled with passions and enthusiasms, sudden squalls of anger and equally sudden exclamations of childlike (Leah thought) delight. It was Rosa, for instance, who would stop to point out streaky cirrus clouds that Leah had not even noticed: 'Feathers of ice,' she had said as they spread the rug on white-flowered clover. 'Oh Leah, I love this city. It is so beautiful. Whenever I am unhappy I come to the harbour. It is always splendid, but it is so much nicer when I can share it with someone who does not know it.'
Rosa did not show Leah the battle with unhappiness that made these trips so necessary to her, her empty days, all those days, those years of days since she had stopped being Rosalind the dancer. She lived with an almost crippling sense of wasted time and sometimes it seemed that she only lived to read the letters from the son she really loved, the son she had so carelessly thrown into the arms of the revolution.
But Leah saw none of this. She loved the way Rosa sat on the rug, the looseness of her limbs, the way she
