The Lion Seeker (22 page)

Isaac waits. You know what I came for.

I know. Make your move.

Isaac advances his king pawn. Blumenthal mirrors the attack. A kettle is murmuring on the stove. Around the fourth move, Blumenthal starts to talk. When the kettle boils he gets up and fetches tea in glasses with lumps of Cape apricot jam, actions that do not interfere with his narrative. He talks simply, without emotion. But there are long groping pauses as he tries to find the words, the right sequence of sounds to unlock that blotted day.

 

This was ten years before the war. A fire had chewed at the village of Dusat around Easter time and the Jews knew it was the Christians who had done it to put the blame on them and the Christians knew it was the Jews who were the devil's spawn (after all) and one and the same as the tormenting killers of their Lord in Jerusalem most high, spitting and howling as the nails sunk through the flesh of his holy palms.

Pay attention: The brothers Felder had been building a new brick house, one of the only brick structures in that wooden village, an emblem of new wealth. Baruch, Tuvya, Feivish. They were smugglers and forest wardens, legal owners of a shotgun.

Now on the day a brave girl Hanna Seft who had goyisher looks under blond hair went like a spy into the cathedral and came back with a report that sent the Jews running and hiding, away from the shops with the houses above, all around Maskevitcher Gass, the market square. But the brothers Felder resolved to defend their brick house, the labour of years in that time before such things as insurance policies.

Blumenthal hid in the woods called Silvitzke's Grove down the path that passed Rabbi Kapelushnik's house. He climbed a tall pine and huddled there for hours and saw the Christians coming along Unter-Dem-Brik Gass, down from the church that rose before the bridge over the ŝventoji River. The men were in front and
they had hoes and flays and rakes and scythes and rifles and they were drinking from bottles and their women came behind with the children and they had flowers in their hair and were holding hands and singing. When they came into the market square and found no one there, there was anger: the men broke windows and smashed in doors and dragged the goods out and threw them into dust and the women carried them away and the men went into the shops with their axes and climbed to the deserted apartments above and smashed and broke all the insides and then there were flames and smoke. They came to the brick house at the corner of the square opposite the well and the brothers Felder were standing on the roof and Blumenthal could see it all as clearly as if he was down almost with the crowd at the base. He saw Baruch yelling down, warning them off, saw him fire the shotgun over their heads, saw a shot from below clip his side, the shotgun tumbling first as he spun and then fell into the crowd. They caught him and held him spreadeagled while an old woman took a scissors and stabbed his eyes one at a time and twisted the scissors in them and dug the jellied orbs out, then she cut off his clothes and Blumenthal saw her cut off his penis with the scissors, Baruch Felder still alive and fighting and shrieking all through, and she cut open the scrotum and took out his balls and held them to her breast like snatched jewels, muttering warding curses. They used the axes on his fingers then, and his feet, then his limbs, taking their time, passing the implements around so that all who wished might have their turn, their bottles marked with bloodfinger smears. Above, his brothers smashed the chimney with kicks and dug out bricks with broken fingernails and threw them down to try to drive them off Baruch but others brought up straw and they packed the bottom floor and set fire to it. By then all that was left of Baruch was a torso-thing that yet writhed and squelched in the red mud of its own making. Flames rushed up and first Tuvya Felder jumped and then Feivish Felder. He saw Tuvya landing on a leg that snapped and the jagged white bone flashed and jutted from his torn thigh and they dragged him clear and stood on his arms and stuffed severed parts of his brother into his mouth until he choked to death and meanwhile Feivish who lay broken was picked up and thrown alive into the flames where his screams were the loudest of any so far and his shape somehow rose again then warped as the heat melted him and he crumpled and was silent. Children mimicked the zigzag slump of his melting collapse. Men were drinking and men were pissing and men were vomiting and men had their arms over each other's shoulders and some children picked up pieces of Jew and ran away with them. Women were carrying flapping chickens upside down and bolts of cloth on their shoulders and sides of beef and inverted chairs and dragging tables behind them. Young ones threw down barrels from top floors from the shops not yet burning and the barrels bounced or they burst into showers of nails or horseshoes or erupted great spurts of dark molasses and everywhere goose feathers wafted on the smoky air from all the gutted pillows.

 

Checkmate, says Blumenthal. Those were the same ones who used to smile at our faces and come to our shops. The very same ones. Never forget what's behind a goyisher smile.

Isaac lifts his eyes. Did you know my mother?

Of course I knew Gitelle.

Where was she when all this was going on?

I don't know. Probably she hid with others.

Where?

Some in the mikveh, some in woods. There were also cellars underground where food was stored in the winter.

My mother's scar, her mouth.

This is between you and me.

Yes.

I never said a thing.

No.

What happened to your mother, yes, it happened that day.

What was it? Didn't she get away?

He shakes his head.

What?

Afterwards she always wore a veil, and she couldn't speak properly.

I know
that
.

He shrugs, leans back. That is what happened on April seventeenth, in Dusat. What I saw.

But not everything.

He shrugs again. Enough, I think. Not every evil needs to be dignified with words.

Isaac nods. And how did it end?

Some of us got word to the Cossacks in Rokishik. They came later that day and the peasants ran away, but some of them were too drunk and got arrested. I think one was killed when he tried to stab a Cossack. I think another one drowned trying to swim away. Later, some did go to jail for the murders.

Isaac waits. Is that all?

Isn't that enough?

Afterwards, at the door on his way out, he looks back. In English: —She musta been different hey?

—Uh vos?

—Meine mame. Before the . . . what happened, she must have been a different person.

Blumenthal pauses, maybe thinking about it. She was always strong, a powerful soul. But I remember the rabbi used to go to your grandfather's house—he was the butcher, yes?—and Rabbi Kapelushnik used to go and go, trying to talk to her, but after that day she wouldn't even see him.

The rabbi?

Yes of course. Wanting to get her back.

Back?

To shul . . . Didn't you know?

He stares at Blumenthal, watching his hesitation, then that shrug: Your mother—she was a frummer, she was
thee
frummer. The most religious girl in Dusat. Morning till night. They used to call her The Saint.

No.

Yes, your mother. She made the pious ones look like sinners did Gitelle Helger. That shul was more her home than your grandfather's house ever was.

EARLY IN THE YEAR
1938, Isaac Helger passes through his nineteenth birthday and into his twentieth year alive with no ripples, no fuss. There are times when he wants to talk to Mame, to tell her about all that he knows now, but he can't. Still, the need is there, to unburden, and that's what he takes with him on the bus at lunch breaks on Wednesday afternoons.

Since the fated day Yvonne Linhurst first let him into her house, it has become their habit: she goes through the gate ahead of him then opens the garage door from the inside. They sit together in the storeroom behind the garage, talking softly, never touching. But now she starts to sneak him upstairs, avoiding the maids. She shows him the upper lounges with their views and soft couches, patterns of paisley and camel. The library with a ladder that slides on a brass rail. The wireless room with a beautifully contoured EKCO set, the newest model in a custom walnut stand. The billiards room downstairs with its ivory balls that shine his face upside down back at him from across the soft carpet while men in red coats hunt foxes on wall prints.

It comes to him that maybe she wants to show him all of this so that the house will not be something over him, another way of saying,
I am not spoiled, it's not my fault I'm from here
. A kind of grand joke in the way she throws open doors for him, in the ironical sweep of her arm. Once or twice she even makes it verbally, exultantly: —It's only a bloody house! What is the meaning under these words that he cradles into himself like tossed eggs? Is she saying the house is not me? But that would be a lie: this is where she is from, this is what she is. And then she wouldn't have to do it at all if he wasn't from Doornfontein, would she; so it's not because he is Isaac, it's because of where he's from, in truth. But he's not complaining.

Instead he laughs with her. Just a bloody house! The whole of number fifty-two Buxton, backyard included, could well fit inside The Castle's master bedroom ensuite, an ivory-cool chamber with a hallowed feel like a place of worship that they take their glimpses of from the shelter of the doorway. Her own room has white walls, wooden floorboards, rugs from Persia. Green curtains undulate by glass doors opening onto a tiny balcony that she calls a Juliet, overlooking the terraced gardens, the swimming pool, the tennis court and the neat rose bushes and cacti stands tended by the gardenboys in their overalls.

He washes his hands in the bathroom and his eyes never leave the eyes in the mirror. Tough and pinched, freckled centre and orange bush above. Don't ask yourself what are you doing here. You belong. Life has chosen you and you are here. You could have been one of those poor bastards backhome getting cut up and burned, instead you're here. But the face in the glass is furtive where he would will ease. It looks ready to bite when he tries to smile.

 

In her room he likes to sit on the thickest carpet with his back to the white doors of the closet. She sits on the chair by the rolltop writing desk or sometimes on the bed with her legs straight out in front of her, her back to the wall. He listens so very hard to her. The more he does this, the more she confides. He can feel there is no one—no friend, no teacher, certainly no parent—who listens to her as deeply, totally and acceptingly as he. Sometimes he doesn't believe that he will ever touch her and is not shocked when this doesn't worry him. Just to be here is miracle enough. Once a week she is as close to him as an arm's length, sitting there on her bed with her silk cushions, but there might as well be an electrified fence between them. The more he listens to her with this total craving intensity, the more there is a feeling of trust and the more it seems that to move physically to her would be a kind of betrayal. The strangeness of it is how it doesn't seem to matter to him.

Afterwards he always goes back to work happy and full. As if her voice and presence has added to some essence inside of him, made him denser, older. And he always works better for having seen her, on through those gilded Wednesday afternoons. He is calmer and surer with his tools, more patient and even lighter of touch in his work.

 

So the time accumulates: how he and the world together pass into the cool season towards the mid-year when the Highveld sunlight thins and the sky meanly pales. The unfurling of his young life starts to feel as smooth and sure to him as a long drive on a straight and empty highway. In May there's a general election which Isaac doesn't bother to vote in and which doesn't change anything, except that the Nats get more seats than last time. The fusion government of the United Party is still in charge, Hertzog still Prime Minister, Smuts his deputy.

Yvonne, seventeen, is too young to vote (though women are allowed to now), but that doesn't stop her from bringing up politics in the bright room upstairs. One time they're arguing about the big fuss in the papers over the national anthem: should it be the Afrikaans
Die Stem
or the English
God Save The King
. He makes a joke about why don't they just have a bladey Zulu one ha ha. She goes silent.

—What? he says.

—Where you work. There're African men there.

—Ja, f'course.

—What's it like there, I mean for them?

—Oh, he says, like anywhere. We all do our jobs.

—But not the same ones.

—Hey?

—Africans and Whites don't do the same jobs.

Baffling him. —F'course not. We all got our different ones.

—Yes, but you're an apprentice.

—Class A, ja. Absolutely. And a good one too.

—There's no African class A apprentices are there?

—Hey wachoo mean? He laughs. She's joking. No, watching him, serious. —Na, na, he tells her. F'course not, no.

—What do Africans do?

He shrugs. Why is she so serious?—Well, like, they, you know . . . Suddenly he sees where she is going. So he says,—Well it's like around here hey, in this castle of yours. They do those kinds of jobs. Same as here, ja.

—Don't say that.

—Princess, he says, trying to make her smile.

—No.

—Princess in The Castle.

—I really wish you wouldn't.

— . . . ukay. Sorry.

—I'm just asking a serious question. About this.

—What do you mean serious?

—It is serious, she says, folding her arms.

There she is in the cool room with the green curtains, sitting on her bed, her ankles crossed now. Look at the green and yellow in the eyes over those cheekbones, the perfect prettiness of her doll face, the way a curl of blond arcs up to the chin, the buttery mass of the rest of the hair above raked back by her dancer's headband.