Raisins and Almonds

Phryne, who disliked dust as much as the cat Ember— neither appreciated having their sleek black fur ruffled— pulled her cloche firmly down and wished she had not chosen to wear a looseish, buttonless crepe de Chine coat and carry a pouchy handbag, as it was difficult to keep her ensemble together in a manner which was both decent and fashionable.

After five minutes of walking, she would have settled for just decent, or even partially effective.

Lygon Street, however, was always fascinating, even on a Sunday when all the shops were shut. Phryne noticed the Kosher Butcher's sign, and the strange angular black writing on the window. She turned the corner past the hardware shop into a street of little houses, dominated by the huge red brick wall of the Nurses' Home. Yossi Liebermann, it seemed, lived in Faraday Street in a boarding house, and Faraday Street was entirely lined with resting vans and horseless drays. This had meant that Phryne had to park her own car in Lygon Street and walk directly into the gale. She wished for a huge safety pin to secure her coat. She was confident of her ability to make this fashionable, if necessary The hot wind grabbed at her hair and pulled at her garments. She lost her grip on the edge of the coat and it bellied and flapped like a sail. Phryne Fisher was about to lose her temper with her garments, and her young man watched with some interest as she dragged the coat off and rolled it into a loose, crease-forming bundle.

'There are times when I swear I consider that all fashion designers hate women,' she snarled. 'Give me a man who designs clothes that can be worn in weather! What's the number of the house, Simon?'

'Here, I believe.' Simon opened the front door of a small single-fronted house. Simultaneously he put his fingers to his lips, reaching up and touching a little tube, like a metal casemoth, nailed aslant inside the doorway 'What's that?' she asked, coming in gladly out of the dust into a dim hallway and a very strong smell of soup. Someone was making stock. Phryne smelt an odd addition to this domestic scent: something like glue?

'It's a mezuzah. It's a bit of the Torah, the Book of Laws, the part of the bible which tells us to love God,' he said. 'Shalom, Yossi! How are you, old fellow? This is my friend, Miss Fisher.'

A thin young man, already balding, stooped down and took Phryne's hand very gingerly, as though she might bite. 'Delighted,' he said in a thick accent which was not quite German or Russian but had elements of both. 'Simon, I have no fitting place to entertain a lady, you know that, and it's Sunday, only Kadimah will be open ...'

'Never mind, Yossi, Miss Fisher is investigating a mystery, the death of Michaels in the bookshop in the Eastern Market. My father has retained her.'

Yossi's dark doe-like eyes had been examining Phryne closely, though without offence; a strangely dispassionate gaze which took account of her youth and undoubted sexual allure without being personally affected in the least. Now he exclaimed, 'Well, then, if your father knows about this, Simon, it is all right. Of course, please, lady, come in. There is only the kitchen to sit in, or perhaps the yard, would you care for some tea? It is a hot day,' he continued, leading the way down the hall, which was long enough to play cricket, and down an unexpected step into a large kitchen which was full of light, people and the mixed scents.

A plump woman in an apron turned from the stove, where she was adding an onion to her stock. Two young women looked up from the big table, where they were assembling sequin-covered buttons next to a boy who sat in the corner, draped in a prayer shawl, reading a thick book. A young man in his shirtsleeves stopped in mid-pour of a glass of tea from a silver samovar and stared. Three young men stood up in the yard outside, dropping newspapers and hats at the sight of Phryne, bare-armed and dusty.

'Yossi, Yossi, you schlemiel, how could you bring me Mr Abrahams without any warning?' exclaimed the woman furiously, bustling forward to take Simon's hands. 'Come in, come in, sit down— girls, put away the sequins and help me, find the good tablecloth, the good glasses, quickly, quickly!'

'Don't trouble yourself, Mrs Grossman, we just came by on the off chance that Yossi was at home. This is Miss Fisher, she's working for my father, trying to find out who killed Michaels in the Eastern Market.'

'Miss Fisher,' said Mrs Grossman, raking Phryne with a hard glare, then relaxing. Phryne wondered what Mrs Grossman had found in her face which reassured her. 'Sit down, sit down, please. This is an honour. Don't trouble yourself, he says,' she grumbled, flinging a snowy tablecloth over the wooden table, freshly wiped by one of the silent girls. 'Here is Mr Abrahams' son and a distinguished lady visitor and my house looks like a cattle market and he tells me not to trouble myself! Oy, vey, men!' She dusted the crockery as her daughter put down the tray.

'Let's all say hello, shall we?' asked Simon a little uneasily 'Phryne, this is Fanny and this is Helen.' The two girls shook hands. They were dark, with curly hair tied up with red ribbons. Helen, the younger, gave Phryne a mischievous smile which flashed across her face for a second and lit it like a shooting star. 'This is David Kaplan, his brother Abe, and their cousin Solly, they are all newly arrived here from Poland.' The three young men, who had squeezed into the kitchen, all bowed and squeezed out again as Mrs Grossman flapped her apron at them, as though she was chasing chickens. 'Out, out, you've been introduced, what's the matter, never seen a beautiful lady before, eh?' They returned reluctantly to their newspapers, but Phryne could feel their attention.

'This is Phillip Grossman,' said Simon, and the young man in shirtsleeves, who had looked round frantically for his coat and not found it, offered Phryne the hand with the glass of tea in it, blushed, and was only saved from destruction at the hands of his mother, who would not have been happy if he had spilled it on her hand-embroidered tea-cloth, by Helen, who took the glass, patted his shoulder and abjured him in a whisper not to be a schlimazl.

'What's the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazl?' asked Phryne, sitting down on a hard wooden kitchen chair and noticing that of all the clean kitchens she had been in this was undoubtedly the cleanest, and probably the poorest.

'Ah, well, a schlemiel means well but he is clumsy and foolish and things don't work out the way he expects. A schlimazl is just unlucky. If he made umbrellas it would stop raining. If he winds a clock, it stops. If he inherited a coffin business people would stop dying. To him it all happens badly,' said Simon. 'Eh, Mrs Grossman?'

'Easier if you give the lady an example. Picture the scene,' said Mrs Grossman, spreading her arms. 'A cafe. A customer. A waiter. The customer is wearing his best suit, hoping to impress maybe a young lady, eh? The one who spills the soup into his lap, that is a schlemiel. The one on whom the soup is spilled— a schlimazl.'

'Abraham ibn Ezra,' announced the boy in the prayer shawl and yarmulke unexpectedly His siblings looked at him with slightly exasperated affection and his mother with whole-hearted adoration. There was no doubt who was Mrs Grossman's favourite son.

'My son, Saul.' Mrs Grossman was bursting with pride. 'He is studying Torah, all the time Torah and Talmud, we are all so proud of him! What do you want to say to us, bubelah?'

'Rabbi Ezra,' said the boy, lowering thick lashes over bright eyes modestly. 'He said about the schlimazl, 'If I sold lamps/the sun/in spite/Would shine at night.' He was a poet in the twelfth century.' With this bit of information, Saul dried up and went back to his text. Phryne was impressed.

'He is preparing for his bar mitzvah. Mr Abrahams is his friend, his father not being here to see him, Yossel, God rest his soul in peace, alav ha-sholom, he would have been so proud! Rabbi Cohen says Saul has a real gift.' Mrs Grossman wiped her eyes and poured out tea from the samovar—thin, straw-coloured and flavoured with lemon—into thick glasses in silver holders wrought in Europe with delicate artistry. Like the tea- cloth, these were clearly treasured possessions and perhaps all that Mrs Grossman had been able to bring from her old life in a city or a village or a shtetl, and perhaps she had left her own house in flames as she fled with one suitcase and several children from city to port until she finally fetched up, so improbably, in Australia, which was after all the end of the world. Phryne asked.

'We called it the Goldene Medina,' said Mrs Grossman, arranging little almond biscuits on a silver plate. 'Have a biscuit, please, Mr Abrahams, Miss Fisher. The golden land, Australia, where you could pick up nuggets in the streets. We saved for years, Yossel and me, working, working, always picking up anything we could do—my Yossel was a carpenter, I could embroider, but also paint and gild and carve, he taught me, what my father would have said I didn't like to think, but he said, Yossel said, we must leave Russia, the new laws are killing us, and when the war comes the revolution will follow and maybe then they will be glad to see the back of us, they hate Jews, but they hate Christians too, and unless you want to see our Philo a soldier and our little Helen a whore, we must leave ... ai, ai, what a time, we worked all the hours God gave, but he was right, my Yossel alav ha-sholom, the revolution did come and they did let us