“Nothing serious,” replies David. “We were just going to Simon’s house to listen to music. What are you guys doing?”
“You’ll see – want to join us?”
“Sure we’ll join you,” replies David, all democracy forgotten.
“We’re going to do a tug-of-war across the road,” says Gary Steinberg. He is dark, an astonishingly handsome boy.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll see. You can be in my team.” He laughs, his teeth flashing, and adds, “But not the other two you’re schlepping along. Lawrence, they’re in your team.”
David glances at Simon, mystified. Ricky follows after, his face roiling with anger, unseen behind the group. Simon drifts along somewhere in the middle, silently pleased to be there, resting in the group mind that propels eight boys towards an unnamed, unlit road following exactly the curve of the littoral. This little road diverges from Marine Drive and serves as a boundary between the field and the beach itself, finally meandering into the Pollock Beach parking lot.
“This is what we’re going to do,” explains Lawrence as they reach the road. “You’ll see what I’m going to do.” He crosses the road to the sand dune opposite and returns with a handful of sand. He pours it carefully down onto the neglected tarmac, forming the beginnings of a cable of sand nearly an inch wide that will stretch across the road.
“This is what we’re going to do,” he continues. “We’re going to finish this line. Then we’re going to make two teams of four, one team on each side, one guy behind the other.”
He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, as if the effort of collecting the first handful of sand and of explaining his plan makes him sweat.
“Like a tug-of-war team. We pretend we’re holding on to a rope. And when a car comes, we wait till just before it reaches us. Then I’m going to shout, ‘Now!’ Then we all straighten up, like a tug-of-war fight – you get it?”
“Then what?” asks David.
“Then what? The driver will think we’re pulling a real rope.”
“And then?”
“He’ll get a hell of a fright and slam on his brakes.”
“And then?”
“We run like hell.”
There is a brief silence as the group contemplates this device.
“It will never work,” concludes Gary Steinberg. “You should rather pull your wire.”
“I do anyway,” says Lawrence. “It will work, because it’s dark. It’s an optical illusion.”
“It can’t work,” says Simon. “There isn’t a real rope.”
“That’s the point, dummy. We’d get killed if we had a real rope.”
“Well, stop arguing, you dorks,” interjects Paul Abelson, “because there’s a car coming.”
They turn as one and see a car turn into the road at the junction, about half a kilometre away.
“So what?” objects Jonathan Kessel caustically. “We haven’t put down the rest of the sand yet.”
They straighten up and stand, some with their hands in their pockets, an innocent group of boys on the side of an unlit road on the edge of a beach at night doing nothing in particular. The car goes by. Its coming and going ends the debate and turns into an unspoken decision. The cable of sand is rapidly completed, and the group splits into two squabbling teams, one on either side of the road. Lawrence makes them practise until they can react to his signal with a semblance of teamwork.
The car comes at last. It is a red Ford Corsair with a plastic orange on the tip of its radio aerial. The night densifies, warmed, focuses on this spot, this place in the great world. “Now!” shouts Lawrence, as the car is right on them. The two teams straighten up as one, heaving on their rope of fantasy. It shoots up into the beam of the headlights, straightens out, quivering with strain. Tyres lock, the car screeches to a halt, snaking from left to right with such violence that it would strike into the left-hand team if the boys weren’t already scattering onto the beach.
“You fucking little bastards!” roars the driver into the dark, shaking his fist at his pimpled tormentors.
But they are gone, melted into the past.
Eli
This is a history of butter, of margarine and the Law. On Friday nights we do not have butter on the table whenever my grandparents come for Shabbes dinner. It is not kosher to eat meat with milk, or as we say, to mix milchig and fleishig. Our father pretends that he keeps kosher. They know it isn’t true. They know that he eats prawns and oysters, that he loves Indian and Chinese food, Portuguese food, any damn food that comes from somewhere else. Yet Archie is thorough in his pretence. At least on Fridays, even those Fridays with no grandparents.
When the world discovers cholesterol and turns to margarine, on Friday nights there is no margarine. My brothers and I argue endlessly with Archie. We insist that margarine is not a dairy product. But to him it looks like butter and tastes like butter, therefore it must be milchig. It is difficult to understand his religious views. Maybe he doesn’t understand them either. He admits it, and explains that he’s been brainwashed and so cannot help himself.
This very Friday evening, my grandparents come for dinner. Wolf Machabeus is blind, despite the thick spectacles he wears. I don’t know why he keeps on wearing them. It is just stubbornness. My grandmother and father stand on either side and help him up the pair of steps before the entrance. He comes up one at a time, pausing, resting on his thick walking cane. He wears a grey serge suit and a red tie.
Edie Machabeus has thin lips. She uses lipstick to magnify her lips, painting two exact points, like the upper half of an M in italics. It looks strange.
Simon holds the wine goblet in his right hand. I don’t know why, because he is left-handed. His right hand is shaky, and always has been. He intones the prayer tunelessly, not because he has no musical ear, but because the prayer is always chanted in this style.
My grandfather’s lenses reflect the chandelier, all five lights glinting off their twin smudges. Wolf’s skin is wrinkled and sags. It is like the parchment of the Torah, frail but intact.
My grandmother looks down at the table, listening shrewdly. Her mind is sharp, she calculates where people are and when they moved there. Her memory is a family tree, rooted in the old country and stretching its branches throughout South Africa, Australia, Israel, New York. Some are still here, of course, living in the sharp light of Port Elizabeth. As I write this, I picture her standing at the table and imagine what passed through her mind: in the old country milk was delivered in buckets, and in winter it froze outside the doorway even as it stood there. There was a rooster on the roof, crying out warnings about the milk and the ice. She remembers nothing before then, because that is where she began.
Jude eyes the goblet, grinning wickedly. Simon’s shaking hand is tilted, in danger of tipping out wine. The red of the drink is deep and violent. When it does spill, it seems to swell like gore, stretching from the goblet’s lip to where it splashes down, and only then letting go. It splashes over the Sabbath Evening Service, staining the yellow pages even more. Later it will dry out the colour of raisins. The pages will become rippled, like sand in the Sinai Desert. But for now, my mother shouts at Simon.
“It was just an accident!” he protests, whining, indignant. But she doesn’t like accidents. They disturb her and so make her angry.
“Schweig,” says Archie, resting his hand on hers. “It was just an accident.”
Wolf and Edie have nothing to say. They don’t pay that much attention to their grandchildren, not in any detail. Jude cackles like a witch, a dibbuk. I think he made Simon spill the wine by staring at his hand. Rose presses a serviette down on