Rosa laughed, a high scratchy laugh, and followed him out of the room. Leah lifted the arm from the gramophone and wound it up again.
She could hear Lenny's angry voice. She removed the needle from the arm and searched through a tiny tin box looking for a sharper one.
17
Rosa gave him his matches, holding the box at arm's length, and watched him light his cigarette. He looked around for an ashtray and, obedient as any wife in a woman's magazine, she found one amongst the unwashed dishes in the sink, rinsed it beneath the tap and dried it. Ash smeared the tea-towel, and she thought, defensively, so what?
'Why?' he said. He did not sit at the table when she sat down. He leaned against the kitchen door and folded his arms across his chest. She took a dirty casserole off the chair so there would be somewhere he could sit, but he watched her silently and did not move.
'Why?' he repeated.
'Why what?'
'Why? For what use? A dancing doctor?'
Rosa shrugged.
'What would her people say to you, filling her head with rubbish?'
She would have liked to say that it was not rubbish, that it was wrong to call her new happiness rubbish.
'What would her mother and father say? She is meant to be studying. What will you feel if she fails her studies?'
'She wanted to…' Rosa began, but she could not meet her husband's eyes. She wished she had the kitchen tidier. She stacked two plates inside the greasy frying pan.
'Is that what you want?' Lenny said. 'You want her to fail? You want that on your head?'
Rosa shrugged again.
'You force her to do things. She doesn't know how to say no. It is like the Passover.'
'It is not like the Passover,' Rosa said. 'The Passover was not my idea.' She was beginning to feel guilty and it was wrong. It was a trick he had. 'She wanted,' she whispered, worrying that Leah would hear them.
'She wanted, she wanted.'
'She did want.'
'She wanted so much, she ran away. That's how much she wanted.'
Of course the Passover had been a mistake, but who was to know it? None of them. Not until it was done. The girl had been so alight, so eager. On the eve they had swept the house together and thrown out all the bread. Leah had been full of questions. Why this? Why that? They had made the charoset together. They had boiled the eggs. Rosa had shown her how the tray was set. They had starched the white tablecloth and set the table.
On Passover she had arrived in a new dress. It was almost a real Passover. Lenny's father and brother were there. The old man was frail and doddery but when he began to read from the book his voice, though high, was strong and clear. She did not like the old man and he did not like her, but out of his corrupt old mouth the words came – so clear and clean that she stopped hating him and was pleased he had come.
It had happened at the very beginning, when the karpas was taken. She had not known the girl well then and had not understood her. She had looked at the girl as she took the karpas and when her face changed she thought it must be the bitterness. But then Leah had stood, suddenly, with an awful scrape of the chair and, just as the old man Thank God the old scoundrel was deaf and never heard Leah spitting and coughing as she ran out the front door. But he was not blind. He saw Rosa run after her. And Rosa, as she went down the front steps, heard his voice squawking in outrage like a caged bird.
She had found Leah weeping, hunched over and hugging herself behind the lavatory and she took the shuddering body in her arms and held her.
'What is it, little Leah? What is it?'
Leah wept and wept. 'I am a fraud,' she said. 'I am a fake, a fake, a fake. I cannot be anything.'
'You are the sky,' Rosa said, trying to find medicine in words. She held the girl's head to her breast. 'You are the sky.' She meant that big sky, that vast clear cobalt sky without history, clean, full of light, free of sombre clouds.
But she did not explain herself and neither the sky nor her arms could give Leah Goldstein any comfort.
Now, in that kitchen, her husband came to sit next to her in the vacant chair. He put the back of his dirty hand against her cheek, gently. 'She is very young,' he said, softly, 'and you will damage her.'
'All right,' she said, but she promised nothing.
'You have plenty of other things to amuse you,' he said, looking around the kitchen, the open cupboards, the spilt flour, the stacks of yellowing newspapers.
'Yes,' she said. She found some cheese and pickles then and saw him to his truck. She admired the load of roofing lead he had bought from the old Turramurra Seminary and promised him meat and pudding for his dinner while Leah Goldstein, who had heard almost every word, held the head of the gramophone ready. And Rosa, returning to the spare room, found her protegee swaying her hips lasciviously to the accompaniment of Lou Rondano's 'Boompsy Daisy'.
18
In October, Leah Goldstein had to give up her dancing. Her final exams were approaching. She was also working late into the night, Roneoing pamphlets, addressing envelopes and moving from dreary street to dreary street stuffing election material in letter boxes. She felt herself engaged in a fight between good and evil. It was no longer a theory to her. In the final hectic weeks Izzie had been badly beaten by the New Guard, dragged down from the platform outside Colgate Palmolive and kicked and pummelled as he lay on the ground. He had screamed like a child, a high piercing terrible sound, and although he was ashamed of this it made Leah admire him all the more. She developed a passionate hatred of large men, New Guardsmen, policemen, bailiffs with moustaches and returned soldier's badges. When Jack Lang was finally elected and she met him, at last, face to face, she was made uncomfortable by his size, the harshness of his voice, the width of his shoulders: the Socialist Saviour looked like a bailiff.
There were parties, of course, when Lang was finally elected, but the party she chose to remember was the one Rosa and Lenny threw for Rosa's birthday during the first week of her exams.
'My silly friends,' Rosa had told her with an odd grimace that at once celebrated her theatrical colleagues and denied them totally.
Rosa's silly friends had red mouths and huge hats. They were walking scrapbooks. There were dancers of every type, bit actors, second-rate cabaret performers, and short men with wide lapels who could tell jokes for three hours without repeating themselves. They filled the house, surrounded the caravan, and spilled out into the street. They chucked Izzie under the chin as if he were still a little boy and told each other different stories at the same time. Leah was entranced by them and did not notice that Rosa was bored and dissatisfied with all this vapid talk which reminded her only of the days before her expulsion when her friends had been serious people.
Mervyn Sullivan arrived in a giant black Buick, bringing two beautiful actresses and a huge bottle of champagne with a silver ribbon around its neck, and Rosa, surprising herself by the dazzling quality of her own hypocrisy, pretended to be flattered that he had come.
In the later afternoon they all walked along Bondi Beach and strolled along the sand in colourful defiance of the rude realities of life. This was the day when Mervyn Sullivan, hearing that Leah had learned dancing from Rosa, grandly presented her with his card, a deckled masterpiece like a wedding invitation. 'There is always work for talent,' he said and made her put the card in her handbag.
Jennifer Valamay sang a rude song about a dicky bird and Leah, emboldened by a single glass of sweet
