The Feel of Steel (24 page)

Louis' Barmitzvah

T
he vestibule of the Temple Emanuel in Ocean Street, Woollahra, five minutes before the barmitzvah was due to start, was milling with people, Jewish and otherwise. It is amazing how many non-Jewish men are totally transformed by a yarmulka: a man I'd known years ago in Melbourne came over with his wife and little girl to say hullo, and for a moment I couldn't place him, rummaging in the wrong mental file. Then the barmitzvah boy's auntie rocked up to him and said,

‘Hi! Remember me? We met years ago, in the party.'

Mishearing, he looked perplexed: ‘At a party?'

‘The CPA?' she said patiently. ‘The party we used to be
in
? That we're all so
embarrassed
about now?'

The barmitzvah boy was the son of an old Melbourne Jewish friend of mine and his wife, a grand beauty born in Birmingham of a Jamaican immigrant family, who has recently converted to Judaism. They sat, glowing in
pale clothes, in the front row of the raked synagogue, backed by their families and friends – or, as the New Testament says, ‘compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses . . .'

The boy himself, a famous mimic with bouncing dreadlocks and a slow, wicked smile, was strolling about in a large necktie emblazoned with South Park icons. What a complex spectacle! It was almost scary. Who on earth would be able to draw its many parts together and point it in the right direction, ground its hilarity, and drive it forward for a whole two hours?

In she strode: a woman rabbi. A slip of a lass with a great mass of reddish brown curls flopping down her back, hair that she tossed out of the way whenever she rearranged the corners of her shawl over her slender shoulders. She turned to us a bright face, arched her brows, and set the whole thing rolling.

Though I think of myself as a Christian, though I like to take communion, to pray and to hear the Bible read, this is one of those periods in my life when I feel a revulsion against going to church. I can't hack the strained, dusty theatrics of Melbourne high church Anglicanism. At Catholic mass I am a stranger. But on Saturday in the shul I was swept away by the graceful ease and sweetness that the young rabbi brought to the ritual.

They had a brilliant little choir – five good voices, two men, two women, plus the bloke who conducted them – which sang demurely, bringing gravity and beauty to the prayers. When the cantor got up to sing, his tremendous riffs were as fruity as opera. The whole celebration went
forward with a bounding energy, full of poetry and chant, switching from Hebrew to English and back again in short grabs, always something new happening, constantly changing its mood and refreshing itself. Every moment of it was exhilarating.

What moved me most was the vivid physicality of it, the freedom, the lack of pomposity. Even when the Torah was brought out of its hiding place and carefully unwrapped from its velvet before our eyes, when children, concentrating hard, seized and bore aside its tingling little filigree silver decorations, when the parchment scroll emerged, radiating mystery – even these moments of intense reverence were warmed by something almost affectionate: a mixture of awe and tenderness. When the boy's grandfather, with the boy close on his heels, carried the Torah up and down the aisles, a wave of energy followed it. People surged forward to touch it with their shawl-tips or the spines of their prayerbooks, which then they kissed. It seemed so ancient, and yet so fresh and joyful.

The boy stood up in a creamy tallit with a broad blue stripe, and chanted his way through his portion. This was no shrinking violet. He opened his mouth and his chest and he belted it out. We hung on his every note. People delighted in his triumph, even those of us who had only the vaguest clue what he was singing about. Some old, grand force was sweeping him along, and taking us all with it.

‘Isn't this fabulous,' I whispered to the ex-Communist Party member beside me.

He replied behind his hand, ‘I might convert.'

We laughed. I glanced at him in profile. He was smiling. His hair under the skullcap was grey. I looked down at my hands. The backs of them were speckled and veined. I thought, with a strange happiness, We are not old yet, but our youth has been over for a long, long time.

Golden Sandals

T
hese summer mornings, when the birds wake me at five-thirty, I lie there thinking about sandals. Not just any old pair. The ones I bought in London in August 1978 and wore all that summer, in Paris.

They were the best sandals I've ever had: flat, pretty, with fine rubber soles, suitable straps about a centimetre wide that buckled snugly just forward of the ankle-bone, and a broad, discreetly punched and serrated vamp-strap that held the foot firmly in place without cramping it. They were gold. Not a lairy gold that had to be beaten into submission, but a subtle, pale, dusty, almost silvery gold, like dawn light on clean Australian sand.

Forget Elvis Costello's red shoes: the angels in heaven wore my sandals. I used to wake up in the morning and watch them resting on the floor by the open window: I expected them to sprout wings. Yet they were the sort of
sandals I could wear in comfort all day long, as I went about my ordinary motherly business. They looked elegant with anything – cotton pants, jeans, a flowery skirt. They were beyond fashion. They were perfect. They were the Platonic ideal of the sandal. And most astonishing of all, they only cost the equivalent of about forty bucks.

Forty bucks! At this point I always begin to rage and tear my hair. Why didn't I buy ten pairs? Is it a rule of life that you never know a thing is perfect till it's too late?

Like all sandals, they died. I don't remember where or when. But I do recall the blue ones I bought in Cannes to replace them, just before I came home to Australia. By now it was the cusp of the eighties. We're talking stiff net vamps, peep-toes, mean-spirited ankle straps, and low, angled heels that wobbled slightly under pressure but were perversely flattering: one day I wore them to the city and, as the 96 tram keeled round the corner into Bourke Street, a young man got up for his stop and whispered to me in passing, ‘Excuse me – you have beautiful feet.'

Caramba!
That was a happy moment. Nobody would pay me that compliment now. Feet cop life's thrashing and start to wear out. Arches fall, joints get grindy, veins become visible. The day comes when the only thing that can relieve the pain is an orthosis. Then what sandals does one wear?

One of my husbands once gave me a birthday voucher for the services of a fashionable shoemaker. He thought I didn't know he was having an affair at the time with a
chickabomba who tottered about in the towering, painful-looking heels that he had failed to persuade me to wear. ‘A
real
woman,' he used to say, ‘doesn't mind a bit of pain to please a man.'

Be that as it may, off I went to the shoemaker and showed her a foolproof design that recalled my golden sandals, but with filled-in backs to accommodate the orthotic. I thought she had understood me, but the two large, stiff objects she presented me with, a month later, were so clonking, so darkly orthopedic in conception and execution, that I lost the power of speech. Weakened by dread as another marriage faltered, I lacked the stamina for a fight. I took them home and hid them in a cupboard.

Now on my hurt feet I wear, all summer long, a certain plain white lace-up canvas runner made in China. They remind me of the light tennis shoes my mother used to wear in the forties. The minute I realised they were perfect, I rushed back to David Jones and cleaned out their entire stock: four pairs. I would have bought ten, and I will, if I can find them.

Since I became a nanna, I've been hanging out in babywear stores. Now that is where you see great sandals, made in soft leather for toddlers. Foot-shaped and endearing, in a variety of appealing colours, they have firm rubber soles, closed-in backs, straps of exactly the right width, and neat curved buckles. And they come
from Spain
.

Tell me why, in our country which
abounds in nature's gifts
, doesn't some enterprising citizen start to make
wonderful sandals for middle-aged women whose feet hurt, but who haven't yet dropped their aesthetic bundle? They don't have to be made of gold: I've been humbled. I would settle for something simple, pretty and practical. I earn good money. I'll pay. In this land of glorious summer, where, where are my sandals?

The Feel of Steel 2

A
ll winter our modest fencing lessons continued. Once in a while I'd blast through an opponent's defence and bend my blade against her target. I was vain about the little bruises, like snake bites, that appeared in the flesh of my upper arms. The day came when I could attack and score
without apologising
.

But then, a fortnight before the Sydney Games began, Olympic fencers from all over the world turned up to train at our Brunswick factory. We crept in to watch.

They were springy-legged, slender, tightly clad – and
fast
. While we beginners, in class, carefully struck the correct pose, left arm bent and hand held loose at ear level, they carried their free arm flowing easily behind them, at waist height. They moved like pale streaks. I crouched against a wall, in awe of their speed and power. And the young women! They shrieked as they attacked,
like wild beasts at the kill. It was unbearably thrilling.

But when I heard I was expected to fence in the Inaugural Veterans' section of the state competition, I panicked. Years ago I'd promised myself I would never, as long as I lived, sit another exam. I did my level best to wimp out.

‘I've been sick,' I whined to Ernie, our teacher. ‘I've missed three lessons.'

He shamed me into a catch-up lesson. ‘You may be swift,' he said sternly, as I stood masked, gloved and panting in his garage at Meadow Heights, ‘but you've got to learn to
retreat
. Retire! Retreat! Retreat! And eat carbohydrates!'

By noon on the day the air was muggy, the mercury sat on thirty. As I climbed the factory fire escape, I could hear the scampering and the thuds, the cries of protest and triumph, the raised voices of the referees, the soft rhythmic beeping of the electronic scorers. The young fencers, some of them Olympians and all of them as far above us so-called veterans as the famous Mount itself, sorted each other out, received their medals and went home, trundling great buggies of equipment behind them.

Now it was the veterans' turn, a handful of us, mostly well over fifty. Tactical Joan, sturdy Ivor, wiry Maria, whippy Sandy – I knew them from the class above me, where in practice bouts they all routinely beat me. The wild card was an unknown forty-five-year-old man from the Dandenongs, tall, heavy-limbed and determined.

I was called. Already dripping in layer after layer of
cotton, synthetic, plastic, metal and leather, I stepped up and plugged the scoring lead into my foil. I pulled on the mask. It was heavier than the practice one, its wire darker, its holes smaller, its bib more spongily padded. Oh God. How would I breathe in here? Sweat began to trickle through my hair. I wasn't scare of getting hurt, but I was expecting to be soundly thrashed.

In the first bout I was. My ears muffled by the mask, I couldn't understand what the curly-haired young referee was saying, why he kept gesturing at me. I thought he was ticking me off for something I was doing wrong.

I tore off my mask. ‘I don't understand what you're telling me.'

He looked at me with a crooked smile.

‘I'm telling you,' he said, in the clear, slow voice one uses to a simpleton, ‘
who
won each
point
, and
why
.'

I uttered a crazed laugh and yanked the mask back on.
‘En garde. Prêts? Allez!'

I was beaten. I won a bout. I was beaten again. I faced the big guy from the Dandenongs. He was like a Sherman tank. He came at me with his blade down low and his left hand dangling loosely near his shoulder. I couldn't deal with the bulk of him, his steady, relentless advance. I forgot about ‘Retreat! Retire!' and brandished my feeble blade in his face. He swatted me off like a mosquito. He wiped me out. I shook his hand in bliss.

The longer we fenced in the awful heat, the cooler my head became. I felt
daring
. I didn't care if I lost but I went all out to win. My mind, normally so scattered and
fleeting, tuned itself to my body. I grasped for the first time in my life what tactical thinking might be, how I could vary my attacks, feint and wait and spring a surprise. I saw in a series of bright flashes what was required, what I might one day be capable of, if I stuck at this.

I was panting, laughing, gasping, sweating. I felt like a million dollars. I could have kept going all day and all night. Between bouts I guzzled water but I was too excited to sit down. I paced around with the mask under my arm. I leaned against the fire escape door to get a breath of air. I was streaming with joy.

And I won a medal. A bronze medal on a long blue ribbon. Typing this, I've still got it on. The
maître d'armes
(it thrills me that we have the same first name) gave us each a bottle of champagne and some yellow roses. The coach made me eat a muesli bar. We all, even the victorious hulk from the mountains, kissed each other and shook hands. It was a radiant companionship.

I'm different, since that day. My body feels taller, stronger, freer. At this late age I suddenly understand why people on winter Saturdays scramble and strain in mud. The devotion and patience of coaches, their severe heartening – all this is clear to me now. At last, at last, I
get
it. I yelled and sang with gratitude all the way home.