I watched Elliot walk out of the hall, but Ma didn’t turn her eyes away from the stage. Meyer drew the winning number for our diesel generator. ‘Leo Fein!’ said Meyer, as the man I’d stolen booze for made his way through the clapping crowd, the faintest twist in his straight mouth, his rendition of a smile. ‘He wins the diesel generator, sponsored by Great North Diesel and Auto Electric.’
‘Leo Fein won,’ I said to Ma, tugging her sleeve. She stared ahead while Leo Fein collected an envelope on stage from Meyer.
‘Thank you, Great North Diesel and Auto Electric,’ said Meyer, ‘for a special prize, for a special cause.’
‘It’s Leo Fein,’ I said to Ma. He’d walked off the stage and directly up to us. Leo Fein took me by the shoulder and smushed me into his side.
‘It’s a wonderful prize,’ he said.
‘I hope it’ll be useful to you,’ said Ma.
‘Very useful, Margot. I’m very eager to have it. Perhaps I could stop by next week and we could discuss delivery and such.’
‘Fine,’ said Ma.
‘Call me Leo.’ A line that must have been well practised, and practised not to seem so. ‘Bye, boy,’ said Leo Fein to me, and he glided into the little crowd.
We stayed a while longer, Ma chatting to acquaintances, faces familiar to me from shul. Now that the prizes had been handed out, and it hadn’t turned out to be the failure Morgan had hinted at, she seemed more relaxed. Until, that is, she asked finally about Elliot’s whereabouts. She pulled me to the door when I told her he’d left.
As Ma combed her bag for the car keys by the kerb, a few men were spread around the low wall that surrounded the Rabbi’s residence, talking in urgent voices. They were looking at something on the wall, and turning their heads up and down the street.
On the wall had been spray-painted two blue horizontal lines and, between the lines, a cocked swastika, in the same blue paint. It was beginning to attract more attention, some of it aghast, some already furious.
Ma didn’t let me gawk too long. She pulled me by the sleeve and guided me to the car. When we arrived home, Elliot had his winkle-pickers up on the little sidetable and was watching TV. ‘Elliot, I saw something outside the shul,’ said Ma. ‘Elliot, did you do it?’
‘What are you talking about?’ he replied. Ma’d been single-minded about confronting Elliot, not speaking in the car. She seemed to have forgotten I was there, and I relished the chance to be in on the clash.
‘I know it was you. A swastika, Elliot? Why would you do that?’ She’d wound herself into that angry, pleading pitch she used whenever one of us (and it was usually Elliot) did something she’d have to fix. ‘On the shul wall? You’re just looking for trouble, aren’t you?’ She threw the keys onto her chair and they jangled her anger while she remained standing.
‘It’s not a swastika,’ said Elliot quietly.
‘Elliot,’ said Ma, speaking more quietly herself now, ‘you painted a swastika on the shul wall.’
‘It’s not a swastika. It’s a modified Israeli flag.’
‘A what?’
‘A modified Israeli flag. The swastika instead of the Star of David between the stripes. It’s symbolic.’
‘Why, Elliot?’
‘You know why. Because the Israelis have become Nazis. They’re persecuting Palestinians.’
‘Elliot, Israel was set up when the whole world, none of them, wanted the Jews. And after what happened in the Holocaust – you know this.’
‘I know. But they should know better. That’s why they should know better. After you’ve been kicked around for two thousand years, you’ve got a responsibility. Don’t kick the next guy. You know what it’s like.’
‘You can’t use the Holocaust like this. Nazis, swastikas – it’s off limits. It’s too painful.’
‘That’s exactly why I used it.’
‘Think of people who survived that, the death camps, the war. Or people who lost family in the Holocaust. You should have found another way.’
Elliot crossed his arms.
‘Elliot – there’s a swastika on a shul wall, for God’s sake.’ Ma went to her room, probably to phone Uncle Victor, leaving me and Elliot together.
‘It’s a modified Israeli flag,’ he said.
‘It just looks like a swastika,’ I said to Elliot.
He made a sound, as if I’d just told him an interesting fact, like the Eiffel Tower has two-and-a-half million rivets holding it up, and he went to his own room, leaving me there.
* * *
No one saw that it was a modified Israeli flag. People called it a swastika on a shul wall, and theories were created to fill in who could have painted it. ‘There are a lot of Nazis in this town,’ said Carol on the way to cheder. ‘Who do you think the Afrikaners supported in the war? There’s even a street named after a Nazi sympathizer. Hans van Rensburg Street.’ She mock-spat after saying the name. ‘I don’t even like driving on it.’
I was afraid that at any moment I would burst with what I knew about the swastika, in an involuntary spasm, like the Rabbi. I kept as quiet as I could.
The Kisch brothers were standing at the shul gate when we arrived. They were both wearing sunglasses, the brothers Joel and Nathan, monstrous from lifting weights. Both had completed national service in the Israeli Defence Force just a couple of years back.
A black man in overalls was scrubbing at the graffiti with a stiff brush and a bucket of soapy water a few meters from the brothers. A blue smudge was growing around the swastika.
I was on a hair-trigger with the anticipation of the subject of Nazis and anti-Zionism coming up in cheder; I even imagined an interrogation from the Rabbi. But the lesson unfolded normally, boringly. Finally, it wasn’t the Rabbi who brought it up.
‘Do you really think it’s safe for us to have our lessons here?’ asked Potato Latke.
‘Shoshana, I don’t want you to worry about that,’ said the Rabbi. ‘That’s my job, to worry about your safety, okay? And if I was worried, we wouldn’t be here.’
‘There could be a bomb,’ she said.
‘There isn’t a bomb. And Joel and Nathan are looking after us.’
‘They can’t do anything about a bomb,’ said Disney Yarmulke. ‘If there’s a bomb, it would blow everyone up, even Joel and Nathan.’ His little sister was sitting behind him, and she shaped her face in preparation to cry.
‘There are no bombs here, David,’ said the Rabbi, with the firmest voice I’d heard him use. It smoothed the wrinkles in the little sister’s face. ‘I think it was just some kids playing a stupid joke, and now everyone’s a little bit tense. We’re just taking precautions, that’s why Joel and Nathan are outside.’
When the lesson ended, we waited for our lifts while Joel Kisch talked to Nathan Kisch and vice versa.
‘I don’t think the Dutchmen are organised enough to be a real threat,’ said Joel or Nathan.
‘Could have been some punk,’ said Nathan or Joel and a pulse shot through my heart at the thought of Elliot.
‘To do something like that while a Zionist event is going on? That’s chutzpah, my friend. No, the Muslims – they’re the danger.’
‘Ja, but a Nazi sign?’
‘Smokescreen – deflect attention