field.
He should have been happy. He wished to be happy. He looked at these two men and the greying woman whom he had respected and wished to emulate and found they could only meet his eyes with difficulty. It was not because there had been a mistake, but because they did not know what the mistake was. They were decent people who were embarrassed to be found acting contrary to their principles. He tried not to despise them.
His suit was soaked through and he began to shiver. The ink of the sentences in Leah's letter began to run, blurring the outlines of the letters and giving them a soft blue woolly character out of keeping with their meaning.
39
We lay in our truck, us Badgerys. The children kicked at me with their feet, and put their elbows in my eye.
'Do you love Izzie?' Sonia asked me.
'I don't know, Sonny. I haven't met him.'
'Leah loves Izzie.'
'Yes, I know.'
'Izzie is Leah's husband,' said Charles. 'They were married, but not in church. Izzie is a communist. He doesn't believe in God.'
'I know,' Sonia said. 'Do you love Izzie, Charlie?'
'No,' said Charles. 'And I want him to go away.'
I lay on my stomach and looked through a chink in the back door. The hessian hut glowed yellow with the light of a kero lamp. Leah, dressed in white, sat up in bed, writing. The whole hut was her veil. Charles farted. Sonia giggled. I was a fool again, in love.
40
Izzie stood there, for some minutes, just inside the door. His wife was writing, jabbing impatiently at the paper; just so must she have constructed the cloudy outlines of his jealous dreams. His eyes were bloodshot with travel; they took in the dirt floor, the small objects on the packing case beside the bed, a tiny black-and-white photograph pinned to the hessian wall. The photograph reassured him. It had been taken during the party for the Silly Friends.
She looked up and smiled. She looked neither young nor old to him, merely very beautiful.
He was as frail as a sparrow. His face was very white, his lips very red. He wore his shiny dark suit with books protruding from the jacket pockets.
'You found us?'
'A good map, Goldstein,' and although he grinned he was already irritable because he felt so shy. He shoved at one of the bush-poles that supported the roof. He pushed at it angrily.
Leah stopped herself asking him not to shake the pole. She patted the bed and when he sat – reluctantly she thought – took his hand in hers.
'You smell like a dog,' she said, squeezing the hand.
'Sweat. Jumping trains.' He was looking into her eyes, trying to find some reassurance. 'Where is he?'
'In the truck, with his children.'
He nodded. Although he had left Sydney in a rage, he had made himself become strong and positive along the way. He had exorcized his jealousy. He had patiently, mile after stolen mile, rebuilt his life, at least in his imagination. But now all this gave way before a flood of emotion, all these good intentions floating like broken packing cases in swollen waters. He was overcome with a desire to hurt.
'Is this where you do it?'
'Izzie, please.'
He did stop himself, but not before he had sipped the exquisite flavours of his hurt and experienced an intoxicant so potent that it made him slightly faint.
He crushed her against him. It was a rough, demanding embrace, made cold and clammy by his rain-wet jacket, and Leah tried not to resent it.
'Your lips are hard,' he accused.
She shrugged. 'What would you like them to be?' She too tried to smile, but she was now as irritated as he was, irritated that the man she wrote to so tenderly should embrace in so wet and cold a manner.
She looked up and saw him curl that fondly remembered lip. He showed her his teeth right up to the gum.
'Izzie, what has happened?'
'What do you think I am?' he hissed. 'What do you think I can take?'
'I promised…'
'I never asked for it.'
'… to tell the truth, to never lie to you, Izzie.'
'I won't be your confessor.'
'You want me to lie to you?'
'I want you to come home with me.' His hand, on hers, was gentle and not demanding. The voice suggested no recriminations, but Leah felt herself shrinking from him. She did not want to go home. This was too shocking for her to admit to herself: she could not bear to be so selfish. So she made excuses and the excuses contradicted each other and made no sense.
The truth, in comparison, was a simple thing. Leah was enjoying her life. She liked travelling and she enjoyed, even more, the life in the letters she wrote to everyone, to her father in particular. You can see the pleasure in their yellowed pages now: the minute details of life, whole streets of towns peopled with bakers, shoppers and passing stockmen. The life in the letters has a pattern and a shape if not a meaning. Here, in the letters, she can come dangerously close to admitting why she remained on the road and what she got from it. But when Izzie told her, perhaps untruthfully, that the dancing was financially unnecessary, she could not admit to him that she did not want to give up the life.
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
