their chips.’
Mr Dorfman saw Joss and I were watching him for a reply. ‘If you believe that …’ he said. ‘Next thing Disney will be here looking for Mickey Mouse. What do you think, hey kids?’
We looked at Mr Dorfman, not sure what kind of joke he was making. NASA was no joke, the Space Shuttle was no joke.
‘It’s exactly the kind of thing that gives Jews a bad name in town,’ said Mrs Dorfman. ‘It’s all we need them to say – “They don’t care about anything but money. Don’t care about their family, not even their own religion or traditions when you dangle money in front of them.” They already think this, and what is this man doing? Playing right into their hands.’
‘Right into their hands,’ said Carol.
‘I don’t think we know the full story here,’ said Mr Dorfman with raised palm, a self-deputised traffic warden against what he saw as runaway hysteria. ‘Leo operates on a different level. NASA? Maybe. Multinationals, politicians, influential people – without a doubt. He’s connected beyond our little world, and good luck to him. He’s got a brain for it.’
‘Well, a brain’s not enough,’ said Mrs Dorfman.
I didn’t see the same faults in Leo Fein that Gail Dorfman and Carol Richler saw. He’d risen from the dead, reconstituted from the ashes, as if death were nothing, a joke the others refused to get. If anything, this latest exploit augmented his legend for Joss and me.
Michael had his father back and what in the world was wrong with that? I’d often imagined my own father ringing the doorbell one day after all those years. I was a spy, Ben. I couldn’t say anything. Secret mission. But have I got stories for you!
What a lucky packet that would’ve made.
* * *
Elliot heard that the boys of his year were to be locked into the school auditorium and made to sign their Defence Force registration papers for National Service, with the teachers standing sentry.
He ducked out of school for the rest of the day, and the next day he evaded the male teachers for as long as he could.
Many of the teachers were fresh returnees from the Angolan border, and they had a craving to blood their young wards in battle. For them it was more than just fulfilling an official requirement; it seemed to give them personal satisfaction to put the sixteen-year-olds in their care on the military’s register.
Elliot couldn’t escape them forever, though, and he told me how it happened. Mr Verwey, the Guidance teacher (who guided Mrs Verwey, our Religious Instruction teacher, with a hand across her face almost nightly, it was said), pulled Elliot out of History, brought him to Cullinan’s office and, with his fingers clamping the back of Elliot’s neck, made him sign the form.
Two weeks later, Elliot was expelled. It disappointed him that the expulsion was for prosaic instead of political reasons: he’d been caught smoking a joint behind the squash courts. Not the sort of high-minded achievement he’d hoped for.
Officially, he was ‘asked to leave’, not expelled, but it amounted to the same thing, except that Cullinan, in between his gloating, was willing to write a reference letter for Elliot’s next stop, the art school in Johannesburg.
It should come as no surprise that Elliot had real talent. He’d applied it in the shul grounds quite skilfully, after all. Whether or not the schoolteachers supported his politics, they couldn’t deny his technique. With the headmaster’s letter and a hurriedly assembled portfolio, he was easily accepted into the Johannesburg Art, Ballet, Drama and Music School.
It happened so quickly, Ma hardly had time to be angry or disappointed. She fell into pragmatic mode, even meeting with Cullinan to discuss the transfer.
Will came home from Joburg to take Elliot back with him. ‘Well, you really fucked up this time,’ he said.
‘You had to wait till you finished school to get out of this dump. Way I see it, I’ve been released early. Sentence reduced for good behaviour.’
‘Ja, well, fuck up again and it’ll be the army for you, loser.’
‘Ag, what do you know? At art school, it’s the teachers who smoke joints in class.’
When I was younger, Elliot refused to hold my hand crossing roads if his friends were anywhere near, and I had to grip onto his shirt. The toughest guy I knew was leaving town; I hung close while he packed.
‘So you’ll probably want my room now,’ he said.
‘Maybe.’
‘You can keep my posters. You gonna bring girls back here?’
‘No.’
‘Have you got a girlfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Who do you like, then?’
I wanted to let fly Georgina Melck’s name, but knowing that I ran the real risk of somehow being humiliated for it, I held on to it.
‘Okay, don’t tell me, then. Do you have protection, though?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘Condoms?’
‘Oh. Then, no.’
‘So, no girls?’
‘No.’
‘Well, come visit in Joburg. I hear those art girls are easy.’
‘Are you sad you’re leaving?’
‘Fuck, no,’ he said straight away. Then after a while, ‘You’ll get out of here, too, soon.’
‘Maybe I’ll also spray-paint the shul wall.’
‘That was a mistake.’
‘You did it twice.’
‘There’s shit going on right here in this country we should be thinking about. Not fucking Israel. That was my real fuck-up.’
When my brothers had left for Joburg, I went back to Elliot’s room. Shadrack was stripping the linen already. I wasn’t there long before Ma came in, too.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose we can talk about you taking Elliot’s room if you want it.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. The room was forlorn without his jeans and stud belts and rolled cardboard lying around. Shadrack balled up the linen and the motion floated a sheet of rough paper to the ground from Elliot’s desk.
Ma picked up the sketch. It was a heavily shaded picture of a Hasid at the Wailing Wall. The rugged stones must have crumbled from the charcoal stick as he drew it, and the figure’s hat and coat sat thick on the page. Somehow Elliot had captured the candy-floss wispiness of the beard, but also the sheen of a double lightning bolt SS insignia on the Lubavitcher’s lapel, and a skull and crossbones on the crown of his hat.
‘Thank God he didn’t put this one on the shul wall,’ said Ma.
In the time after Elliot’s expulsion, I felt that much more vulnerable. Elliot, I suppose, gave me a sense of the possible. Even if you got kicked in the teeth for it, you could still do something out of bounds – that was what he represented for me. Just being his brother gave me a sense of power, however small. He seemed, if not dangerous, then at least ungovernable and unquantifiable. Without him, we were somehow weaker.
More than ever, I kept a lookout for Leo Fein around town.
The congregation wasn’t as pleased as I’d been at the news of his resurrection. Too New Testament for their tastes, perhaps. Maybe Leo Fein had tangled with something too sacred to Jews – death. It wasn’t to be fooled with. There were deserving souls awaiting the pleas of Kaddish. Decent members of the community had wasted their petitions to God to absolve and receive him.
I saw Leo Fein sitting in