Richler and her daughter, the girl I thought of as shaped very much like a potato latke. Carol had recently begun to give me lifts to cheder in preparation for my bar mitzvah.
‘How’s your mother?’ she asked.
‘Fine, thanks,’ I said, though I could’ve said she had a broken leg and Carol would have continued with the follow-up.
‘That’s nice. And how’s William? Coming back to visit soon?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. She always asked about Will, my eldest brother, who was at university in Johannesburg. Besides the excruciating trip to cheder twice a week with Carol and Potato Latke, I had to suffer with the notion that Will had had sex with Carol. It’s likely it was our uncle Victor who seeded the tale, Carol being Victor’s neighbour over the road and Will, who helped Carol with odd jobs around the house, the target of Victor’s taunts. Whether the story was true, I can’t say, but once a thought like that is planted it’s impossible to weed out.
While the adult Dorfmans joined the other adults coalescing in clumps, Joss and I walked over to a group of kids I recognised from shul. A skinny boy of about sixteen with embarrassing wire glasses was talking louder than necessary to another boy who was slightly overweight and carried the stink of cigarettes and peppermint gum.
I knew the skinny one, Gershon, had once teased Elliot, my other brother, about his braces, and Elliot had taken revenge by throwing the boy’s satchel into the swimming pool.
‘They’re anti-Semites,’ said Gershon now, ‘and I heard if you go to one of their concerts and they find out you’re a Jew, they fuck you up.’
‘Spandau Ballet are not anti-Semites,’ said the other boy.
‘Spandau was a concentration camp, man.’
‘I know – but they don’t sing about anything Nazi.’
‘Ja, well, you don’t know what they say to the crowd at their concerts. And the fans – if they know you’re a Jew …’
‘Come on, how’re they gonna know you’re a Jew? I mean, for sure.’
‘They come up to you and ask you. What? You’re gonna deny you’re a Jew just so you can watch Spandau Ballet?’
I knew about Spandau Ballet from Elliot and about Nazis from Uncle Victor, who’d been too young for the war but spoke as if he’d suffered it nevertheless. But I knew very little about being a Jew.
Would I have denied being a Jew at a Spandau Ballet concert? I feared the question was coming, but in the meantime Joss spoke.
‘I didn’t know you were into ballet, Gershon. Show us some moves.’
‘Ha-ha, Dorfman,’ said Gershon, although he only said it and wasn’t laughing with the others. He tried to look tough and punched Joss on the arm, a skew, glancing blow.
Joss was one of those kids who never got into fights because everyone liked him. I’m not saying he was perfect (those are exactly the kids who are preyed on by bullies, after all), but even the bullies liked Joss, and I counted him as a friend.
He wasn’t one of the snivelling types of Jewish kids that gave Jews a bad name – the kids I’d look at with shame, I confess, and a fear that their reputation would stick to me too. They came with their sick notes and kept to their own, cutting themselves from the herd; I was forced to be among them when we were excused from Religious Instruction.
Sure, I came with sick notes of my own, and that was one source of the aversion I felt: if I was wimping out and they were wimping out, pretty soon we’d be lumped together. Where we lived, it didn’t take much to be marked out – hell, it was a national pastime.
So, Joss was acceptable to me. He played tennis, mixed with non-Jewish kids at breaktime, and possessed the ability to laugh at just about anything. It made my debut into the Jewish community in the year before my bar mitzvah easier.
‘Anyway,’ said Joss, ‘Duran Duran is much cooler.’ Everyone agreed.
‘Who do you like?’ asked Gershon, turning to me.
‘A lot of stuff,’ I said, and it was true. I had the benefit of two elder brothers with tastes in music so opposed they wanted to rough each other up. They had the kind of loyalty to their bands some people have for sports teams. Music, at least, was something I could talk about.
‘Like who?’ asked Gershon.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The Rolling Stones. Bruce Springsteen. Joy Division. Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Southern Death Cult.’
‘Who?’ said Gershon.
‘David Bowie,’ I offered.
‘Nazi,’ said Lee, the other kid. ‘Fucking good, though.’
‘But Nazi,’ said Gershon. ‘And a homo. He admitted it.’
I didn’t know what to say to that and feared there’d be consequences for my answer. My mother knew homosexuals.
Joss started talking about a boy he’d met on Habonim, the Jewish summer camp, who’d been born without a foreskin. Gershon said that that was bullshit and impossible and so what – did he think that made him Moshiach or Jesus or something? They talked about their last camps and I knew it was a conversation I’d never find a way into.
‘I’m getting some juice,’ I said to Joss. On one side of the garden, three braais had been set up and the fires already lit. On the other, by a steel folding table stacked with liquor, the only black man and maybe the only Gentile in the garden stood with his arms behind his back.
Circles of chatter had gathered and I skirted between them, magnetised against them. I went to where the braais lay, each one an oil drum cut lengthways down the middle, laid on its side and filled with coals. Two friends stood over the meat, clipping braai tongs and discussing the State of Emergency.
I fetched my drink and began to walk back to Joss. A man walking towards the table raised his hand in greeting. He looked youthful, although the folds in his face gave it away that he was in his early fifties.
His most striking feature was his hair, with a grey streak an inch wide shooting back from the hairline. This, I’d learn, was Leo Fein.
‘You must be an Aronbach, hey?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Your father – he was a good man.’ Without stopping, Leo Fein pressed on towards the bar.
My memories of my father were meagre and incidental: the clinking of change in a pocket from down the passage, flashes of holidays, suggested quite possibly from photo albums. But this man had actually known him. You can count on family to say nice things about the departed but here was a stranger, unprompted, doing just that.
It was a small thing, but that he knew who I was made me feel more myself in that garden of strangers. I took my cola tonic past the little groups, neutralised to their magnetic fields, walking so close to some it was through an aura of perfume and pomade.
After a while someone’s mother called us to collect our food. We approached the half-barrel braais and took up their meat: skewered, minced in casing, marinated, and bare to the flame. We skirted the table with the schmaltz, rolls, green salad, bean salad, potato salad, and the pink pâté in the fish mould that accompanied every Jewish function, and returned to our place on the lawn.
When we’d done with lunch, someone found an old ball and we began to play ‘one bounce’ on Meyer Levinson’s tennis court. Lee was talking about pornography and Gershon was about to say something when he clammed up suddenly, and everyone turned to see Leo Fein at the fence.
‘Does one of you want to help me with something?’ he asked through the cage. He’d said ‘one of you’ but he was looking at me. No one else said a word.
‘Me,’ said I.
‘Perfect,’