He was still working away at the offending image. The arms of the symbol clung to the wall, but the colour spread itself like the cancerous animation I’d seen on maps in The World at War, the Sunday-night documentary series that fascinated Uncle Victor. It showed always the advancing Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in a spreading puddle over Europe, when the Third Reich was still winning.
Possibilities leapfrogged through my mind: Jesus, first Jews try to sell Zionist raffle tickets to Muslims; next, Muslims are being blamed for anti-Semitic vandalism. I’ve stoked a war.
4
KADDISH FOR LEO FEIN
When I first learnt of Leo Fein’s death, I assumed it was at the hands of some enemy. He was a man who had generals for friends, who busted through steel gates and stole lucky packets for kids. What could stop a man like that?
It was Carol who told us, me and Ma, after dropping me at home from cheder. As much as possible, Ma tried to avoid all contact with Carol, though she felt grateful and guilty for her shul-shuttling. I could see the slight nauseating effect Carol had on Ma. It got right into her, Carol’s misery, attacking like jaundice, but today Ma stayed to talk to her.
‘Hang on, Carol,’ she said. ‘Forget the Chevra Kadisha stuff. Leo Fein is dead?’
‘Yesterday. Heart attack, I heard.’
Heart attack! The same brutal phenomenon that took my father.
‘You know, I’ve been trying to get hold of him,’ said Ma. ‘He won the generator.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t bother about that, Margot. He’s not even having a funeral. Didn’t want the Chevra Kadisha – too good for the Chevra Kadisha! And what about his son?’
Leo Fein with a son! I felt disappointed. The knowledge of this grieved and confused me as much as Leo Fein’s death. Where did this leave me? I would never rob another shop with the man, and he’d never tell me anything about my father now. He already had a son with whom he’d probably robbed and busted down doors in every town in the Far Northern Transvaal.
‘At least the boy’s sitting shiva. I’m going over this afternoon with some things. Phyllis and I usually bring the food but we didn’t know what to do if there’s no funeral. She’s mad as a snake. I said to Phyllis, “Phyllis, we have to be the bigger person here.” And she agreed. “You’re right, Carol,” she said. “It can’t be helped what that man has done but he’s left his son like a useless piece of flesh to schlump around the house, and no mother to take care of him.”’
‘I have to do something with the generator,’ said Ma.
‘No funeral, Margot,’ said Carol, trying to instil the same outrage in my mother.
I felt a little lost inside my own house. I took out Birds of Prey of Southern Africa in tribute to Leo Fein. The first moments of grief are often spent groping for something concrete to hang on to, however insignificant in the towering shadow that death casts. I wondered about the stuffed birds – would his son take them? Could I have them?
I put the bird book aside and went to the Encyclopedia Americana. Whatever life didn’t prepare me for, I hoped the encyclopaedias would. The black-and-blue bound-leather volumes held the whole world, it had always seemed to me. Their references to the world to come, however, left me none the wiser and I began to cry. I couldn’t go to Ma for consolation without explaining why I was so upset about a man she thought I hardly knew. I would never betray Leo Fein over the raid at Roy’s – in the wake of that conspiracy, and of his death, I considered it an honour thing, our thing. And I would never betray, to Ma or myself, just why the death of a man I connected to my father, who might have begun to fill that hole in my imaginings, upset me so.
I wandered back to the passage where Ma was on the phone to Will, and overheard enough of the conversation to know Will was delighted at the news of Leo Fein.
‘Don’t say, “What a relief!”’ said Ma. ‘The man’s dead, Will. And left a son behind.’
‘We’re off on a technicality, Margot!’ he kept repeating, but she stuck firm and ended the conversation.
She told me afterwards that Will’s idea of drumming up business using the raffle prize wasn’t panning out and he was eager to save face in front of Morgan. ‘I’m going to give the generator to the son,’ she said. ‘It’s only right. Once everything’s settled down.’
Ma decided the right thing to do was to go to the shiva home to show face, as she put it.
‘Can I come?’ I asked. What the Encyclopedia Americana couldn’t give me, I hoped religion could. Perhaps it could give a shape to the sadness and confusion I felt. Jews would know how to deal with tribulations, I thought.
‘You don’t have to, my boy. You didn’t know him.’
‘I did,’ I said, and had to scramble a little to think how to explain. ‘From the Dorfmans.’
‘Well, if you want.’
‘Did Daddy know him?’
‘I don’t know. Probably. Everyone knew your father.’
But on the way there I grew apprehensive. I’d be meeting the son of Leo Fein. Was he my competition, in some way? Just who was good enough to be Leo Fein’s son?
Michael Fein was sitting on a turquoise leather couch when we arrived, even though Ma had told me the bereaved sit on low chairs during shiva. It was late afternoon and, while everyone spoke quietly, they more or less ignored Michael. Michael, whose face I may have seen in shul, but never with Leo Fein, sat alone and forlorn.
I tried to see Leo Fein in the son. He had the start of a good, heavy body going, and although he was maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, he seemed like a boy. Perhaps it was how his arms hung flaccid at his sides, and his hair, also limp, was arranged in a middle parting. Who wore middle partings but milksops whose mothers brushed their hair? None of the steel shavings of Leo Fein’s curls had fallen to this boy.
Even the house seemed more demure now without the General and the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black. This was a quiet cocktail party without the cocktails but with the same formations of people standing and sitting in the tiled room, with the high ceiling and the silver ornaments. Vases, platters, spoons; etchings of Prague or a street in some other dark European place; a bland watercolour landscape of cherry blossoms, local; a gloopy wildlife oil painting, even more local.
The double doors to the study with the birds were closed. Would that room, which already encased so much death, contain Leo Fein’s body? I pictured his pale corpse laid flat on a gurney, beneath the suspended talons of those other dead bodies.
My mother and I approached Michael.
‘Long life,’ I said to him. I’d been coached by Ma that this was what Jews say to one another when one of us dies. I found it a comfort to recite the formula for it gave me something to say at a time when I might have been bewildered for a lack of platitudes in my quiver. But besides that, I liked the sentiment, how it swung the lens back among the living with a caring wish for one another. And it didn’t hurt that it smacked of Star Trek, which only added to its dignity in my twelve-year-old eyes.
Michael Fein placed his large hand in mine without gripping and mumbled the same words back to me.
‘It’s a terrible thing to lose a father,’ said Ma. I was glad she could think of something else to say – a talent of adults, I thought: they build up enough of these moments and collect answers and questions and fillings for silences. ‘We’re very sorry for your loss. Was it very sudden?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘You weren’t with him, then?’
‘The lawyers: they told me.’
‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know. Your father actually won something—’