I don’t like the marrowbones resting at the bottom. Jude and Simon love them. They let them cool on the side plate, and when their soup is finished, they blow out the marrow onto slices of challah and sprinkle salt over it. To me, marrow looks like snot. I say this out loud, and Jude retorts, “So what? Don’t you like swallowing your own?”
He reaches across the table to break off a hunk of braided bread. Archie notices it, drunk as he is. His mood is usually bad on Friday nights, especially when his father visits. Archie is annoyed, every week, knowing that Jude intends to dip bread into the soup. It is bad manners.
“Jeez, Dad, why not?” asks Jude. “It’s so delicious – why on earth not?”
“Because I told you not to do it,” he replies, emphasising each word.
Jude shakes his head, smiling sardonically. “Dad, you can be so bourgeois sometimes.”
A silent rage envelops our father. There are two fathers in the room. Wolf sits quietly, listening. At least, I think he is listening. It is hard to tell what thoughts stir behind his blindness, inside his thick and difficult accent. Perhaps he feels that our father drinks too much. Wolf Machabeus is a religious man, a good man. He founded the first synagogue in Port Elizabeth when he was young.
“Just do it!” snaps Archie.
Jude grudgingly leaves the bread on his side plate.
Granny Edie raises an eyebrow. “The children are very headstrong these days,” she remarks, her clear voice falling into the clinking of spoons and plates. “It must be difficult to manage sometimes.”
“Truer a word,” replies my mother.
“What do you mean, ‘truer a word’?” asks Simon. “That doesn’t make sense.”
She lifts her voice, lilting into intonation: “Truer a word was never spoken.”
That is all the explanation she gives.
After supper my brothers sing a song for Wolf which we call “Malacha Ha’yam”, because that is how it starts. They stand together in front of his armchair, their hands clasped in front of their flies. They are still wearing their khaki cadet uniforms with knee-length shorts, white puttees and boots. They look ridiculous. I don’t sing it because this tradition started when I was too young to sing, and it carried on without me. No one has ever thought of asking me to join them. Maybe they believe I can’t sing very well, which is not untrue. The song repeats every phrase, the first one rising, the repetition deeper. It is obviously a song for two voices, or for a leader and chorus. Simon and Jude don’t sing it that way. They sing together, and sing everything twice. It is the only time in their lives they are ever in harmony.
Wolf Machabeus sits in his chair looking pleased and blind and old, flexing his swollen hands, not quite in time to the music.
Simon
Lunch on Sunday is chicken and roast potatoes, as usual. The family members bicker, as always. The southeaster howls in the afternoon, which is unexceptional. After lunch, the Machabeus family sit in the study drinking filter coffee, as they so often do.
Filter coffee is Archie’s latest preoccupation. He came home one day with a porcelain Melitta cone, a box of filter papers, and a paper bag of freshly ground coffee from Harrison’s. It has to be prepared with a pinch of salt, to bring out the flavour. According to Jude, it is the best way to drink filter coffee, though it never occurs to anyone to try it without a pinch of salt, in case the flavour might vanish. After two cups, Simon is high and slightly shaky, a condition he values.
The phone rings, disrupting the stupefied Sunday air. Eli picks it up, hands it over to Simon without answering, and takes up The Catcher in the Rye again.
“It’s for you,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“It’s for you.”
“How do you know?”
“Put the thing on your face and talk, for God’s sake,” says Jude.
Simon obeys. It is David Goldberg:
“Are you still reading Youngblood Hawke?”
“Yes, why?”
“So am I. Come over to my place, we can do a cheese and wine, and read Youngblood Hawke. My mom’s out.”
“Sure, I’ll come over.”
“I’m going to David,” Simon announces, putting down the phone.
“Make sure you’re home by five-thirty,” says Rose, looking up from the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. It isn’t necessary for her to say so. Five-thirty is when things end; it is indecent to stay away longer than that.
Simon walks through the warm and blustering wind to David’s house, slightly more than a ten-minute walk. It often takes him longer, because the Parkers three doors down from the Goldbergs have a grumpy boxer dog that always sits outside their gate. It has never bitten Simon – as far as he knows, it has never bitten anyone at all – but it is the bane of his life. It is aggressive, and growls at him even if he walks past on the other side of the road. He is scared of the dog, but it is unthinkable to say so. He would be mocked mercilessly if he told anyone. Knowledge of his fear worms through his body, filling him with shame.
From the corner of Tenth Avenue and Brighton Drive he can see if the dog is at its station some three hundred metres away. If it isn’t there, he might continue along Brighton Drive, straight to David’s house. But that will entail a frightening risk: the dog might be just inside the gate, which is always open, or just below the low wall, which it can easily jump.
This Sunday it is hunkered down on the warm pavement, snout resting on its paws. Simon curses. He will have to go down Tenth Avenue, take the crescent that curves into Marine Drive, come all the way up Eleventh Avenue, and approach the Goldbergs’ house from the other side. It will add at least ten minutes to the journey.
He does it, steaming with shame and resignation. When he reaches Marine Drive, he pauses and stares across the field at the choppy sea. Its surface is churned by the offshore wind to a mess of brown, aquamarine, white foam. He knows from the look of it that there will be bluebottles all over the place, and if it keeps up for a day or two more, jellyfish, their flaccid bells a full metre in diameter, their poisonous streamers hanging down the same distance.
He approaches the Goldbergs’ house cautiously from the other side, watching the boxer. It ignores him. He is too far outside its territory.
The Goldbergs’ gate is worn, and creaks open. He rings the bell. David lets him in. They pass through the lounge, where David’s father always sits, not only on Sundays, but every day.
“Hi, Uncle Rafe,” says Simon.
“Hullo, Simon.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you,” replies Rafe Goldberg, looking down at his cigarette. Simon knows that this is all he will say. He has a lean, saturnine face and crushed eyes. He suffered a nervous breakdown several years ago and is unable to work. He spends his days sitting on that green chintz armchair, smoking, always dressed in a grey suit and a carmine tie. When he has adult visitors, he rouses himself to conversation, an effort that always leaves him visibly exhausted.
They go into the kitchen.
“Check here,” says David, taking a decanter of Sabbath wine from the grocery cupboard. “I got it out of the lounge when my old man went to the toilet.” He takes a block of processed cheddar out of the fridge and cuts about half of it into little cubes. He sticks toothpicks into these