Illywhacker

"So," said Le

"The story is that all young people dream they will control their parents. They wait, like crows, while they get weaker."

"But you are not my parents, Rosa."

"Then I will not have this on my conscience. We did not ask you to." She looked up and caught Le

"Yes?" Rosa said belligerently. "What is it?"

But Le

"And it affects nothing," Rosa said to Leah. "Don't you understand? It is so naive. It is too naive to bear. The world stays just the same as it was before."

"I wasn't trying to alter the world. Rosa, Rosa, don't cry. The Kaletskys are the ones who alter the world. We Goldsteins are more humble."

"Humble. Listen to her, Le

"Too late to think now," said Le

"I sent him a list", said Leah, whose father still knew nothing of the Kaletskys, "with two columns. In one column I put all the pros and in another I put all the cons."

"You left some out."

"How do you know, Rosa, you haven't seen the list?"

"You have left out all the things you are too young to know, because you have never been a dancer. All you have listened to is my silly stories. I'm sorry I ever told you."

"Rosa, Rosa, don't cry."

"I'm not crying. It is such a waste of life, for nothing. You will lie in bed in some dump, some rat-hole in 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, Le

"You do," Le

"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."

Le

"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 ca

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.