Illywhacker (37 page)

He examined it slowly, carefully, looking over it in every detail.

He was so overcome he could not look at Sid, or even talk to him. He spoke instead to Leah.

“A copy,” he said in a choked voice. “A perfect copy.”

“She is going to be a doctor,” Sid said behind him, smiling at Leah, nodding encouragement.

“Are you?” Wysbraum said, his eyes brimming. “Is this true?”

“Yes,” said Leah, pleased but also alarmed.

“Oh Leah,” Wysbraum said and embraced her. She felt his tears in her hair and smelt his lard and onions. Her nose was pressed into his stale shirt. It was a long long time before Leah even guessed that
the body Wysbraum had held had not been hers, and that his tears had nothing to do with either her ambitions or her kindness.

It was because of this misunderstanding that she wrote, in that letter to her father that caused her so much difficulty, “Please apologize to Poor Wysbraum—I know I have let him down and although I feel I have disappointed you I feel that I have betrayed him.”

Sid Goldstein did not know what his daughter was talking about.

If Melbourne University would not accept his daughter, then that was bad luck for Melbourne. Sid Goldstein put on his twelve-ounce grey-wool suit and gold-rimmed spectacles and enlisted Poor Wysbraum. The pair of them went on the train to Sydney and made a nuisance of themselves from Rose Bay to Macquarie Street.

They had no shame. There was no one they would not enlist in their cause, no old friend, no new acquaintance, no total stranger who might appear to have some influence in the matter. Poor Wysbraum did not hesitate, at dinner at the Finks’, to produce Leah’s report cards. They were circulated around the table while their object sat squirming in her uncomfortable chair trying to eat soup with a spoon too big for her mouth while reeling from the waste of all the words that gushed, without modesty or restraint, from the ten mouths gathered, surely, for eating and not talking.

Sid Goldstein and Poor Wysbraum pushed and shoved and elbowed on her behalf until, in the end, they made a gap in Sydney University just big enough to accommodate her.

The acceptance came on a steamy overcast February day exactly three hours before Sid Goldstein must return to Melbourne. Sid did not like to rush, and was already flustered at the thought of what he must do in three hours. Walking across the quadrangle he started pushing wads of banknotes at Leah and giving her instructions on her future conduct. Wysbraum was twenty yards ahead, showing no respect for the neatly trimmed grass, clomping on echoing boots down the flagstoned quadrangle, his trousers too short, his white handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, sweat streaming from his pale forehead. Sid, following after, punctuated his normal amble with an impatient skip.

They followed Wysbraum out of the university and across Parramatta Road. They followed him up steps cut into a steep rockface, then on to another street lined with old terrace houses.

“Wysbraum,” Sid shouted, “Wysbraum, what are we doing?”

“Digs,” said Wysbraum, opening the gate at the bottom of a steep flight of stone steps.

“Digs?” shouted Sid Goldstein. “Wysbraum, we must pack. We must catch our train.”

“Yes, yes,” said Wysbraum. “Wait, wait,” and ran up the steps to the house which displayed a “Room to Let” sign in its front window.

Leah waited with her father amidst the smell of leaking gas and dying nasturtiums while Wysbraum conducted his mysterious business at the top of the crumbling concrete steps.

He was back in five minutes.

“It is taken,” he said.

“What is taken, Wysbraum?”

“The room for your daughter, to sleep in, to live.”

“Oh no,” said Sid Goldstein, loosening his tie. “Oh no, I forgot.”

“Don’t worry.” Wysbraum’s ugly face dripped with sweat. “I have discovered she has a front parlour, upstairs. She is a widow. Her husband was Commissioner of Police in Cairo. A big man. She has a nasty case of psoriasis. I have written her a prescription. Her name is Heller,” Wysbraum said breathlessly, “and she has three boarders. I have persuaded her she can have four if she permits us to purchase a bed. She wishes only to be sure,” Wysbraum giggled, “that we are not Catholics. I have assured her. She asks two pounds for full board. What do you say?”

Sid Goldstein looked at his daughter in alarm.

Leah smiled.

“All right,” said Wysbraum, “you will go with Leah and inspect the house. I will buy the bed.”

“Maybe,” Sid said, “there is a better place.”

“Better, no,” Wysbraum said. “There is no better place, and besides the train leaves in three hours.”

Sid looked at the house. He wondered if this was how Wysbraum had chosen his surgery. He did not approve of buying the first thing. He looked at the rusted guttering, the thistles amongst the nasturtiums, the desolation of Parramatta Road with its lorries, carts, horses.

“I will buy the bed,” said Wysbraum trotting sweatily down the steps.

“How much is the bed?” asked Sid helplessly.

“Cheap,” Wysbraum said. “I will buy her a double bed and she can sleep in it forever.”

Sid frowned. Leah blushed. “Poor Wysbraum,” her father said, but more from habit than conviction. They walked upstairs to meet Mrs Heller and assure her they were not Catholic.

It was cold at Crab Apple Creek and Leah Goldstein tugged at her long black woollen socks, pulled so hard that the perfect round white hole that had occupied a spot at the very centre of her left shin now suddenly became long and thin, almost invisible, as it darted up towards her lovely knee. She wrapped her blue-dyed greatcoat tight around herself. She found a half-burnt stick on the ground and threw it back into the flames of the fire. She shivered.

“Well,” she said.

Charles moved closer to her and she felt his warty hand come creeping towards her, like a lost crab wandering in the dark. The hand was so hungry and cold she held it in both of hers. Its back was hard and rough, its underbelly soft.

“Where’s your father hiding?” She rubbed the rough-textured skin, trying to warm it. “If he thinks he’s entertaining us, he’s upter.”

She looked across at the little girl who sat exactly where she had been before the con—man had done his trick. All Leah could see of her emotions was the camp fire reflected in her eyes.

“Timing, Mr Badgery,” the dancer said sarcastically to the night. But she spoilt the effect by the way she jerked her head to look, bird-fast and nervous, over her shoulder.

“He disappeared,” Sonia said and Leah did not know her well enough to realize that the tone was not quite normal.

“An illywhacker,” Leah Goldstein said loudly like someone fearful of burglars who descends the stairs, flashlight in hand, in the middle of the night.

“What’s an illywhacker?” said Charles.

“Spieler,” explained Leah, who was not used to children. “Eelerspee. It’s like pig Latin. Spieler is ieler-spe and then iely-whacker. Illywhacker. See?”

“I think so,” Charles said.

“A spieler,” Leah gently loosened the painful crab hold of the boy’s hand. “Your nails are sharp. A trickster. A quandong. A ripperty man. A con-man.”

Sonia pulled her cardigan down over her knees and stared into the fire where solid matter was reappearing in thin blue cloaks of turbulent gas.

“When will he come back?” asked the dancer.

In later life Charles would recall only the brilliance of his father’s magic, but now, hearing the nervousness in the adult’s voice, he was suddenly very frightened. He began to cry. Sonia immediately moved to comfort her brother.

So they sat, the three of them, side by side on one log, huddled against each other, waiting for Herbert Badgery to reappear. And you, dear reader, will do me the kind favour of emulating my patient daughter and neither make sarcastic comments like the ill-informed Goldstein (who thinks me engaged in some simple trick) nor snivel like my fearful son who is so easily convinced that I am gone for good. Thus you will not waste time staring out into the night but will, alone with Sonia, appreciate the thin green tower of flame which rises from the wattle log to meet—like a comet on a chance collision—the blue penumbra of the yellow flower made by the dancer’s broken stick.

When Edith Goldstein questioned her husband about their eldest daughter’s accommodation in Sydney he realized he did not even know the name of the street it stood in. It was this, not weariness, that gave him flu symptoms. It was panic that his carelessness would be uncovered. His normally sallow face coloured and he opened the taxi window to get air. Edith watched her husband with alarm as he began to talk. She held his hand and, without making any comment about what she was doing, felt his pulse.

The room, Sid told her breathlessly, had a good bed. It was a double bed. He considered this quite appropriate. She could keep this bed forever. It was good enough to marry with, of first quality, made in America. The room had an excellent view (“You see the university, right out the window”). He could also describe (he could not stop himself) the tapestries on the wall and he saw (now he thought about it) that these depicted not only camels,
men in red fezzes, pyramids and dancing girls but also, in the bottom right-hand corner, a small shrub that looked very like an Australian Bottlebrush. The landlady was a widow. Her husband had been a Commissioner of Police in Cairo. This is where the tapestries in their daughter’s bedroom had come from.

“Stop, stop,” cried Edith Goldstein. “I will write to her. She will tell me. Poke out your tongue.”

But to write she would need the address. She did not have an address. He could not put out his tongue. “I will write,” he said, so firmly that his wife—although surprised—did not question him.

“I will write,” he repeated, saying nothing about the concrete steps, the odd smells, the nasturtiums, although these were things that troubled him deeply. “I have written,” he declared, “already. On the train. The porter is posting it for me.”

Thus was invented that rickety thing, the Missing Letter. Edith was too worried about her husband’s health to query him as to why he would give a letter to a porter, and so the Missing Letter was allowed to survive. It is mentioned often in the early correspondence between father and daughter, e.g. “Have you yet received the Missing Letter?”

Had it not been for this imaginary letter there might have been no correspondence between father and daughter at all. “I must first tell you,” Sid would write in his second letter to his daughter, “what was in the letter that the porter did not post.” The letters, at first, are shy and stilted on both sides, and Leah’s are ponderous and dull. There is no indication of the dialogue that would later develop. This was not due, on Leah’s side at least, to a lack of amusing incidents or new sights to describe but rather to the fact that she was just learning to talk.

Leah, at this time, was unaware of the virtues of discussion and had long been in the habit of making her mind up on important matters without any help from anyone. She would come to a conclusion slowly, tortuously, and she would go over and over it (her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the ceiling) until it was smooth and flawless. In this manner she arrived at ideas that were often original, but not easily accepted by others.

She did not, however, consider herself clever. If she was to succeed at the university she would have to work five times as hard as anyone else. She brushed aside any suggestion of joining debating societies or amateur theatricals and when there were pig worms to be dissected she managed to slip an extra one into her
handbag so that she could bring the little pink parasite home to her room and there perform the dissection a second time. The pig worm, being only five inches long, was easily smuggled into the house and escaped Mrs Heller’s attention. However, when she carried home a dogfish, the odours of formaldehyde and fish gave her away, and Mrs Heller, her red scaly skin hidden beneath Wysbraum’s black tar treatment, came to complain about the smell.

Leah politely declined to place the “thing” in the large brown paper bag her landlady held out into the room. Whereupon Mrs Heller—as white-eyed and black-faced as Al Jolson—announced she would send up Mr Kaletsky.

Leah knew nothing of this Mr Kaletsky. She had promised her mother, in answer to a specific question, that there were no men in the house. She had not noticed the small room, tucked away beside the laundry in the concreted backyard, where Izzie Kaletsky slept. He did not pay full board and so did not come to table.

Leah, waiting for the mysterious Mr Kaletsky, sat in front of her dissection board where the dogfish’s nervous system was being untidily exposed. She took out her notebook and began to sketch the pale ganglia, using her eraser too much so that pieces of indiarubber and paper found their way into the dissection.

This is how Izzie found her when she bade him “enter,” a very prim and serious young lady, dressed in black, sketching a dead fish. To Izzie, this was an appealing sight. He did not, however, as Leah mischievously claimed on other occasions, introduce himself by saying: “My name is Kaletsky and my brother is a revolutionary in Moscow.”

Leah had expected an old man with a belly. This did not look like a “Mr” anyone. He was tiny. He had dark ringlets of hair, small hands, and a wide mouth that hovered in the tantalizing androgynous no man’s land between pretty and handsome. His good looks were spoiled only by his skin, and yet even that was interesting, being coarsely textured, a little like a lemon.

Izzie’s pointed feet would not stay still. He grinned, mocking either her or himself—it wasn’t clear. He had thin wrists like a girl.

“Miss Goldstein.”

She was not above a little theatre—she leaned back and sharpened her pencil, squinting all the time at her smudgy drawing. Her cheeks were burning, but who was to know that this was not her normal colour?

“I am Kaletsky.”

“Come in,” she said. “Complain.”

He moved into the room a little but left the door, as was proper, wide open. Leah could hear the voices of the student teachers in the stairwell.