Benalla and the fleas will feed off you and you will stop yourself going to sleep because when you are asleep you will scratch yourself, and if you scratch your belly or your legs – you tell her, Lenny – then the customers see it. So you go to sleep anyway, you are so tired. You drove a hundred miles. You had a flat tyre. You did a show. You are so tired. You are so tired you stop listening to the drunks in the street calling out your name. You are too tired to be frightened when they break their beer bottles in the gutter and call out filthy things about the body you showed to them. So you go to sleep and you wake up at four in the morning because it is market day and the cattle are bellowing outside and you have scratched yourself all over and you will have to do the show with make-up all over your body and who will pay for the make-up? Lenny, you tell her.'
'You do,' Lenny said.
'So you wake up and you look at your face and it is getting a line, just here.' She put a fingernail, light and sharp as a surgeon's scalpel, against the edge of Leah's mouth. 'And you think how much nicer it would be to be a doctor and what a fool you were to ever listen to a bored old woman telling her sentimental stories.'
'Oh, Rosa, you won't listen to me. I don't want to be a doctor. I want to be a dancer.'
'A dancer, yes. The Tivoli. Her Majesty's. Even Romano's. But not Mervyn Sullivan on the road. He is such a wolf and poor little Izzie in Sydney half mad with jealousy. I thought you would marry him.'
'Oh, Rosa.'
'Marry him,' Rosa said, hugging her fiercely. 'Marry him. Stay here with us, Leah.'
Lenny stretched out his hand across the table. He knocked the ashtray and broke the careful line of calculated butts. He took Leah's hand and held it hard.
'Stay, Leah.'
Leah wept. She felt such a rush, such a huge upsurge of both happiness and misery that she was overwhelmed by something close to ecstasy. At that moment, in that rocking caravan, she would feel, she imagined, all the pain and happiness in the world, and she wept, nearly drowning. It was the last time she was so young.
26
The ructions in her own family were predictable but abated after the first flurry of telegrams (too upset too unwell to WRITE LIFE IS A BARREN FIELD LOVE FATHER).
Leah wrote a long and detailed letter in which she introduced the Kaletskys, one by one, and explained her motives for both of her seemingly precipitous actions. With this careful testament to his daughter's seriousness in his hands, Sid Goldstein ceased his melodramatic telegrams and wrote a long letter.
Leah treasured this letter for years, and not merely because the flowery copperplate hand seemed more considered than usual, but for the whole list of good advice it contained, i. e., Read if you can. Keep your mind alert. To describe the towns you visit will be a good exercise and train you in much more than English composition. It will encourage a critical frame of mind – to describe an object is to ask why the object is shaped the way it is. Likewise a horse, a building or a nose. All this will be good for you, whatever you do. I will not insult you by offering money, but if trouble strikes please be assured that your parents are always here and here to help you. I send my kindest regards and best wishes to your husband and hope some time we shall have the pleasure of meeting this young man.
The whole of this letter, by the by, was a masterful piece of deception. Sid Goldstein was depressed, miserable and unhappy but considered, wisely, that venting spleen on his daughter would merely drive her from him. One gets a whiff of the real state of his emotions in the irritable PS: 'I cannot see', he wrote in broader, fatter strokes, 'how you can possibly have betrayed Wysbraum. Are you thinking of the rooming house he rushed you into?'
27
The eccentrically spelt letters are all, I suppose, gone now -stranded in drawers with perished rubber bands and verdigrised door keys as companions, or have – worse – become the accumulated capital of fastidious great- nieces who marvel at the time you could send a letter for tuppence and regret – having consulted a stamp dealer on the subject – that their great-aunt did not treat the perforations of her stamps with more respect. She was not like Rosa who tore corners off and stood the King on his head, but she did not treat the perforations with the care her crabbed handwriting led one to expect.
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.
