eyes. ‘What are we talking – national security?’
A meaningful look passed between Meyer Levinson and Mr Dorfman.
‘Oh, please. Don’t believe everything he tells you, Meyer.’
‘Gail, the man’s got connections,’ said Mr Dorfman. ‘Important ones.’
‘You two are too easily impressed.’ Mrs Dorfman kissed Meyer on the cheek. ‘I hope they don’t ruin your sixtieth.’
The Dorfmans thanked Meyer and wished him a happy birthday once more, and I said to Meyer, a man to whom I’d only ever said Gut Shabbes, ‘Thank you for a marvellous party.’
‘Marvellous!’ said Joss.
In the car, Joss’s father studied us both in the rear-view mirror, while he and his wife spoke quietly in the front. ‘Important connections,’ said Mrs Dorfman in a tone I knew adults used when they meant other than what they said.
‘He moves in different circles, Gail.’
‘And all that booze! We aren’t Afrikaners, or Irish, starting to drink at ten in the morning and never stopping. Jews prefer eating to drinking,’ she said. ‘A nice dessert – that he could’ve brought.’
In the darkness of Joss’s room that night I went over the details. I told Joss about climbing the gate and dropping onto the storeroom floor. I said I was scared, ja, scared that we’d be caught, even if Leo Fein did know Roy, because how would it look? And with me alone in that room, and all the risks.
I told him it had been easy, actually, in a way, and that we could probably break into any number of places in town if we wanted to. And about the Mercedes. ‘We must have been doing a hundred-and-fifty k’s at the least.’
‘I didn’t know it could go that fast,’ said Joss. ‘I mean, it looks fast.’
‘And it’s strong.’
‘Jeez, and doesn’t he even care about his car?’
‘He doesn’t give a shit!’
‘How did he know that thing about picking your nose?’
‘I don’t know, but it worked.’
We both agreed that Leo Fein was as cool as someone on TV.
2
SHADRACK’S BADGE
The pierced brick wall that separated the courtyard from our driveway was whitewashed, and the holes offered easy grips to the top where it ran under the eaves of the garage. It was the same wall government men had climbed late one night to inspect whether any black people were on the property without the necessary pass.
Ma had spotted the men from our kitchen by pure chance and chased them off, refusing to unlock the gate: they’d had to climb the same wall back out. Shadrack had been in his room, which stood across the wide courtyard bordered by the house and the whitewashed brick wall.
Having reached the top of the wall, I dropped back down and walked into the sun where the rough cement baked the soles of my feet. I drifted across the yard and in the middle found a ragged seam. As I dragged a big toe along it, tiny bits crumbled off the crack, and I followed that little canyon to the wall of the outbuildings.
At the base my elder brothers had etched their names into the cement when the house was being built. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been born yet, and that there was clearly no fraternal accord between Elliot and Will, I felt annoyed at having been left out.
The last great fight between Elliot and Will had broken out over a remark about the orthodontic headgear Elliot had to wear for a year. It had set him chasing Will around the dining-room table, a carving fork in his hand like a cartoon devil, and ended with a blood lip for Will, and with Elliot nearly unconscious in a chokehold. Shadrack, the only adult at home, had separated them.
Will and Elliot fought often, mostly wrestling and grappling and pushing, but since Will had left for university the fights had lessened. This one had come as a shock to me, and maybe to Ma too, and I thought there was no going back after it.
It always seemed to me that Will and Elliot were two extremes of ways of being, with me somewhere in the middle, trying to calculate whom to veer towards. Back then I imitated my brothers and, since the balance of power seemed to be in Will’s favour whenever he was home, I often sided with him. It was easy to be swept up by Will. His purpose was to persuade. He’d do his utmost to impose his firm ideas on the family business, and on the family, during his weekend inspections.
He had the idea in his head that we’d once controlled a vast family empire (or at least punched above our weight in town) and that it was his calling to rebuild and extend it, as the Bonapartes of the Far Northern Transvaal. Will conducted variously Great North Diesel and Auto Electric, my school subject choices, Ma’s budget, and family holidays. While he had little success with Elliot, after a few precious hours with Will I always felt like a shining recruit for his empire.
I traced my name with my big toe on the cement next to my brothers’ then followed another crack running along the wall to Shadrack’s door. It was open a little, enough to show the bar heater on the thin green carpet. I called for him softly; no one was inside.
The concrete in Shadrack’s room was smoother and cooler than outside, so my feet throbbed from the heat of the courtyard. There was the old springy bed covered with the crocheted blanket; a riempie chair; a square battery hanging outside the carcass of a black radio, which sat on a plastic tablecloth with a print of colourful fruit; a black-and-white TV set on a wooden chair; and a wardrobe with fragile panels.
It was an ordinary backroom, ‘the servants’ quarters’, like so many in town. As close as Shadrack was to us, through my father’s death, my brothers’ fights, the nannying, the feeding, it was here in the backroom, not in our house, and not with his own family, that he lived. Which is to say, his living circumstances were normal for the day, however appalling they seem to me now; but the past is another country (or so it seems, some days).
Under the riempie chair I could see the miniature yellow tins of shoe glue as well as the tricorn cobbler’s iron, which always stood with a leg in the air, and the ladylike hammer with the slender neck.
Shadrack would have a steady stream of visitors to his backroom from the occupiers of other backrooms around town. Inside the dark quarters, he’d repair their shoes while they sat against the wall on his sprung bed, creaking it as they shifted and spoke, their shoeless feet hovering.
Since Shadrack didn’t mind me visiting, or never let on that he did, the smell of glue, camphor and eucalyptus was familiar to me. I knew the objects that lay around the room, too, from these visits, but since he wasn’t in I was freed from modesty and could inspect them more intently.
My inspection uncovered something I’d never seen before. Behind the radio, next to the large battery with the red and black wires, lay something I had no idea Shadrack possessed.
It was a simple name badge, the kind salespeople wear. It was made from steel and had a mangled, wavy pin at the back and in black capital letters on the front, my father’s name: Eddie Aronbach.
Seeing my father’s name there among objects so familiar to me in Shadrack’s room gave me a small shock. I picked up the badge and squeezed it in my palm, making sure the edges didn’t protrude.
Having just ridden the victorious two-man crime wave of the robbery on Roy’s Uptown Liquor, I had the momentum of a bandit. But this was no ordinary booty; it was my father’s name. It was an heirloom and I – so I reasoned – surely the rightful heir. This is what prompted me to leave the room with the badge in my hand, walking fast enough to remove myself but not so fast as to arouse suspicion.
In my bedroom I opened the drawer that contained my collection of keyrings, stickers and patches and dropped it inside. I scrambled the collection and arranged a patch over my father’s name. I wasn’t sure what to do with the buried treasure, but suspected