and very warm towards Comrade Trotsky. The article concerned issues in Australia. He then wrote directly to the Comintern pointing out that he had been only twelve years old at the time and had never been to London. In short, he was not the I. Kaletsky they thought he was.
'But who', Leah asked, 'dobbed you in?'
But he would not see the issue as dobbing in, but as a quite correct approach for a party that did not wish to fall into error. Leah, hearing his confident use of 'correct' and 'incorrect', felt uneasy.
'Who', she asked, 'is this I. Kaletsky and what will happen to him?'
'He'll be expelled.'
'And if he lives in Russia?'
'The same.'
'Put on trial!'
'Goldstein, Goldstein, you've been reading the capitalist press.'
'Look at your face. You know it's true.'
'Perhaps there have been trials of anti-revolutionaries. What else should they do?'
'Izzie, look at me.'
'I am looking at you, damn it.'
Leah held her husband's hands and looked into his eyes. She nodded her head slowly as she saw that it was true: that it was J. (Joseph) Kaletsky who had written the article, who had lived in London in 1923, who Moscow now knew about, who would be, she assumed, dealt with. She felt such a confusion of pity and revulsion that the two opposing tides made her whole body tremble.
'Poor Izzie,' she said. 'Poor, poor little Izzie.'
From this they proceeded, misunderstanding on misunderstanding, until, finally making clammy love, Leah wept while Izzie asked her why.
When he came outside for a piss, I was so close to him I could have tripped him over.
41
It was an odd, bright, windy sort of morning. The gums tossed above our camp and showed the silver undersides of their leaves like a million dazzling knives. The grasses were mirrors and even the pebbles we kicked aimlessly beneath our boots were peppered full of glittering mica. We sat beneath a contradictory sky (a soft, chalky blue) and pretended everything was normal.
Leah sat on the petrol drum I had used in the installation of her guttering. She leaned her back against the doorpost of her hut. The October 1923 issue of New Times flapped its pages in the wind, fluttering like a captive dove or fortune-telling chook. She soothed the pages and held them against her thigh.
She now rested her forefinger on her bottom row of small white teeth and watched us, and only the dark rings around her sunken eyes told anything of the sort of night she had had.
As she sat on the petrol drum she was trying to write a letter, not a real letter to a real person, but some imaginary construction, flawless in its logic and clear as ice, a letter where one fact attaches seamlessly to the next, wherejust conclusions are sensibly reached. There was no one to whom she could bear to send this letter to and, in any case, she was so agitated she could not get the disparate elements to stay still: 'If he has betrayed his brother from fear and weakness, should I then abandon (betray) him? Is this not to double the crime? Why should I reject him because he is weak? What is wrong withme that I do not like his skin? Is my skin flawless? Have I been a liar to write to him as I have and then to wish to undo my words because of his skin? Is it skin I am rejecting? Is it something else? Am I merely asking the skin to represent something else for me? How long has this skin been a problem? When I met him in Mrs Heller's I thought him fine-looking and witty. If he is my husband and he murders a man (which seems likely) I should stand by him. If his victim is his own brother, what then? I do not ask perfection of him, only the right intention.'
The article Joseph Kaletsky had written in 1922 flapped on her lap and she pretended to read it while Isadore Kaletsky stood beneath a gum tree talking to Herbert Badgery who, I assure you, had in no way been prepared for his rival, either in appearance or personality.
At night, as a spy, I had judged him physically my inferior, but now I could not keep my eyes off his face which was so foreign and so fine, girl-like with its long lashes, limpid eyes, dark ringlets, archer's bow lips; not a soft face. Its nose, chin, cheeks all shaped by the handsome curves of good Semitic bone, the curves of scimitars but also those of harps. His skin, I assure you, seemed quite normal.
He shook my hand, a small hand, but hard, and his speech was staccato, enthusiastic, quiet, light. He charmed me, disarmed me; and while Leah – who I would have understood better had she held a judge's black cap in her pretty hands -stared vacantly, her husband inquired about my experience as an aviator, was knowledgeable about the Australian motor industry, and expressed the opinion that it was a bad thing that the Holden Body Works had fallen into the hands of General Motors.
I once heard Melba sing and knew, from the first note, that I was in the presence of extraordinary gifts. Izzie had that quality, without me even knowing quite what that talent was. If you had given it to me, I would have sold cars with it, one a day.
I cannot even pretend to understand all the resonances that were alive on that bright, tossed day. I cannot imagine that Izzie knew what was going on in Leah's mind; but then I also find it difficult to imagine that he was ignorant of her turmoil.
He did an odd thing. Let me tell it.
Charles was sitting on the bonnet of the truck. The cockatoo was tied with dunny chain to the outside rear- vision mirror from which perch it shrieked and wailed and attacked its own reflection. (If you are, from habit, seeing a white cockatoo in your mind, I must beg you to change it for the correct one, three foot long, funereal black, its yellow fan of feathers at present clasped shut beneath its tail.)
Izzie, his hands in his pockets, his suit jacket bulging with books, came to stand in front of Charles who had disliked him the moment he knew the man existed. And just as, years later, Charles would not be able to pass by an aggressive or frightened animal without attempting to befriend it, so, it seems to me, Izzie approached my suspicious hostile son.
Izzie held out his dainty hand towards the cockie which tilted its ferocious head to one side and examined the approaching meal. Izzie began to spill out an immense amount of information about cockatoos including such historical titbits as the fact that its close relation Calyptorhynchus magnificus (the red-tailed black cockatoo) was the first Australian parrot to be illustrated. This little sketch was executed not by Joseph Banks, but by his draughtsman, a chap called Parkers or Parkinson, in 1770. The information, however, was not merely historical (that would have lost Charles's attention very quickly) but covered breeding, questions of diet and inclination to travel. My son hoarded away everything he heard. The result, however, was that he felt obliged to give something in return. 'It bites,' he admitted.
'Yes,' said Izzie. 'Yes,' he added, offering his fingers as if they were egg sandwiches. He was not a fool. He not only knew the bird was female (Charles had not), he knew that its beak must be powerful enough to crush a pine nut or hakea pod. So for what did he offer this sacrifice? For Charles's admiration? For silent Sonia's? Or for Leah, who remained with the white wings of the article for which Joseph Kaletsky was later tried? Did he reduce the value of his courage to that of a gimmick?
Leah watched him calmly. She passed her hand across her eyes a second and yawned. The eucalypts tossed above her head and the casuarinas shed needles with a sigh that meant nothing more than windy weather.
And the cockatoo, at last, took what was offered and Izzie gave an odd, high hoot. Charles slapped the bird across the head. The finger was released. Blood streamed.
We all, I think, looked at Leah. This is why I am sure we understood more than we knew. We looked, all together, towards her and she, hearing the hoot of agony, looked up, saw the blood flowing from the finger, and looked down again.
This is one of the few moments of childhood that Charles can accurately recall (for the rest it is imaginary slights, fictitious hardships) and on this day in Bendigo he too saw the blood flowing down the lacerated finger and I am indebted to him for the recollection of a dirty fingernail atop it all.
