Трепет. Сергей Малицкий
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boy' or 'son', my given name was rarely heard from the lips around me. Perhaps in childish revenge, I hardly ever uttered the title 'daddy'. I am sure I was never much more than a rent subsidy to the Cohens, good people though they were. It was an unhealthy life for a small boy. What did I learn, by osmosis, in the four years I spent under their roof ? To memorise and identify the pictures on playing cards, to construct card houses to the limit of my childish dexterity, to be able to hum passably accurately the main theme of Beethoven's Emperor piano concerto. I never progressed beyond the first eight letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The food was bland, repetitious and predictable. Cissy begrudged time away from her cards and Harry's assorted debilities controlled what he ate - and I had the same! Yet I grew well enough never theless: not roly-poly as over-cosseted Jewish children were supposed to be but thin and wiry with a big head (and nose) atop a matchstick body. Epidemics raged of whooping cough, measles and the dreaded infantile paralysis - they all passed me by. Now I realise it was due to my isolation; I never played with another child and, if I did, the fug of Craven 'A' cigarette smoke would have overwhelmed any disease they carried.
.... ....
I must have started school at around five years of age. I have absolutely no memory of it, where it was, how I got there or back 'home' again to the Cohens' Bondi Junction flat. There is nobody to ask, no crayon drawings or clagstuck cutouts, not even the usual class photo of three rows of little boys and girls sitting crosslegged with the one in the middle holding a slate with -1st Class Waverley Primary School, 1934'. Yes, yes, I remember now, I had a slate and slate pencil in a leather schoolbag with buckles and contents that smelt not of crisp paper or MillyMollyMandy storybooks but of decaying banana. And standing in a corridor for 30 minutes with four other Jewish children and a Chinese girl with an immobile face while from inside a classroom other voices averred that Jesus loved them. But not us, the Bible told them so.
The most exciting thing that happened to me in my time at this school was being menaced on my way home by an Alsatian dog which sprang out from a doorway and was restrained on a rope only inches from my face. I shat myself; the slime streamed down my leg over my sock and seeped through my thin sandshoe. Crying from shame and fear, I ran all the way to the Bondi Junction flat, burst in on the bridge players, grabbing the nearest one, dear Sadie, who skilfully kept her hand up out of view of the other players while she detached me from her leg. Harry Cohen, in his chair in the furthest corner of the room, allowed himself a smile. 'You'd better be dummy next rubber, Sadie dear.' As nobody else had moved, he levered himself out of the chair and prised me away from Sadie. Cissy's eyes had not left the table. Harry took me into the bathroom and cleaned me up. He put my pants in the washtub but, before doing so, extracted two highlycoloured Christian religious pictures that the RI teacher had forced on us corridor-dwellers as she left the classroom. I remember turning them over and being surprised that they did not carry anything from the deck of fifty-two. As cards they were therefore worthless to me. I asked Uncle Harry if the lady with the baby was the same as the Queen of Hearts.
'It's a fair question, my boy,' the old man answered. He helped me into clean clothes and looked at me thoughtfully. 'No, she has nothing to do with the cards in the packs you play with. But it does remind me that it is high time somebody told you who you are.' He stared hard at me. 'Do you know who you are?'
'Yes,' I said all in a rush, 'I'm poor Alva's boy.' I put my hand in his. 'I am, aren't I?'Harry Cohen nodded solemnly. I felt a tremor through his hand. He reached inside his vest pocket and took out his tiny pillbox. Freeing his hand from mine he slipped a TNT tablet under his tongue. 'We shall walk together and I shall tell you about the lady with the baby and why you have to stay out in the passage and . . .'
Uncle Harry took up his walking stick, steered us around the card players and out into the late afternoon sunshine. He made no concession to my age; he spoke to me as he would to an intellectual equal, only occasionally restating a proposition to be sure I understood - which I did most of the time for he had a talent for marshalling his thoughts and expressing them clearly.
'Tell me about the man on the other card, Uncle. Why has his face got blood all over it? Why has he got that wire thing on his head? Why is his heart so red and it's outside his shirt?'
'Don't you want to know first about the lady with the baby?'
'No, tell me about the bloody man.' Uncle Harry headed for a park bench but I was so happy to be outside and walking, even though it was at an old man's pace, that I tugged him along. 'Did the Jews do it?'
'Now we will have to talk seriously, Alan. Never mind who told you that. It's not important. I'm simply going to tell you that it is not so and if it's said to you again, say the Romans did it.'
My mouth framed a question, 'What are Romans?' but he cut in. 'Let us talk instead about Jews.' He found another park bench. He was very clever, Uncle Harry. He knew just how much talking I could handle at one go. No good compressing five thousand years of Jewish existence into one walk in a park with one small boy. He would speak in paragraphs, leaving a connecting thread for the next instalment while releasing me to run and jump and then call me back as one would when teaching a pup. In this way, on this afternoon and many others, we travelled from Ur to Egypt via the Flood, to Canaan via Jericho and to Moses who never quite made it. As Uncle Harry described it, 'Alan, see the water tower on the hill above the cricket oval? Well, Moses went to the top of the water tower and from there he could see the cricket match but no matter how hard he cheered, the players, like the Jews, could not hear him.'
I can still hear Uncle Harry's measured phrases more than seventy years later. Being a Jew was not going to be easy, he seemed to be telling me in his kindly avuncular way. Use your mind, not your fists; if the worst comes . . . run. If you get caught, roll yourself up into a tight little ball like the echidna. He showed it to me on one of our few city outings when he took me to the Natural History Museum in College Street. Another was when I accompanied him to the Great Synagogue. My father bought me a white shirt, a jumper with the maker's label snipped off and likewise a pair of navy serge pants - all metsiehs from Morry's Paddy's Market stall.
What a day that was! Not a whole day, really - it began at 9 o'clock with a ride on the tram sitting next to MY UNCLE who wore his pin-stripe suit, his bowler hat and held a silver- mounted walking stick. I carried his rubyred velvet bag with his tallit and prayer book. It was embroidered with Hebrew lettering in gold thread and seemed to me rich enough to contain the crown jewels. We alighted at the corner of College Street and walked across Hyde Park where the destitute were just rousing themselves from their newspaper-covered sleep. Once inside the synagogue, Uncle Harry nodded greetings with some and with others exchanged Gut Shabbes as we proceeded down the aisle to his seat. There, he wrapped himself in his prayer shawl, opened his prayer book and was soon oblivious to my company.
Which was just fine. First the vaulted ceiling transfixed me with its myriad painted stars. I stood up and sat down as the service required me to, but otherwise took no part in it. At the reading table on its raised dais before the richly curtained ark, the two rabbis bent over their praying until the high point, which from a seven-year-old's perspective was when the curtains parted and the scrolls of the Torah were taken out. Oh, the drama! Then began a parade of the scrolls led by the rabbis holding the Torahs and followed with aldermanic dignity by the president and treasurer, replete with top hats and striped pants. The ceremonial party walked a path which took them through the body of the synagogue, and the male congregants moved to the ends of their pews to greet the scrolls of the Law. Uncle Harry brushed the scrolls with the corner of his tallit then pressed it to his lips. I had never seen theatre or, for that matter, any staged entertainment, but I could not imagine that anything could be as wonderful as this procession which reached its apogee later when an open scroll was held high above the rabbi's head for all to see the sacred text. And to be sure, for me, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion.
Uncle Harry and I were silent on the tram ride home. He kept his hand inside his suit coat; he was gently massaging his heart, his head bent low as though he was listening for its tick. He walked at an undertaker's pace with me skipping ahead and doubling back to him. There were many questions milling about in my head but I stored them up. Uncle Harry climbed the few short steps to the flat and pushed open the unlatched door.
My father's hail-fellow-well-met voice boomed