bought several between them and were about to see us out the door when Mr Jada noticed the Star of David on the tickets.
‘What is W.Z.L.?’ he asked.
‘The Women’s Zionist League,’ I said, happy to provide a smart answer and hoping to impress the family of Jadas with my talent for abbreviations.
‘For Israel?’ said Mr Jada.
‘Israel?’ said Grandfather, looking at his son-in-law in case he hadn’t heard right.
They all stood there looking at us. ‘And orphans,’ I said, trying to retrieve additional impressive information.
The Jadas wanted their money back and I had to take back their tickets, separated forevermore from the perforated stubs in the booklet.
‘You tried to sell them to Muslim people?’ said Elliot. ‘You moron. You’re lucky they didn’t string you up. I would’ve.’
‘Elliot,’ said Ma.
‘What?’ said Elliot. ‘I mean, if I was Muslim. Ben, come on, don’t you watch TV? Muslims and Jews? The PLO? The war in Lebanon?’
‘Ja, but our Muslims aren’t like their Muslims,’ I said.
‘Our Muslims? See what you’ve done?’ said Elliot to Ma. He was standing up now.
‘What I’ve done?’ said Ma.
‘The political consciousness in this house is at an all-time low. Are you aware of what’s going on even in your own country? Do you know there’s a State of Emergency? People can be arrested for nothing at all, put in jail for as long as the fascists want. They can search you.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ asked Ma.
‘Black people have curfews, like children.’
‘Cool it, Elliot—’
‘What are we doing about it?’ asked Elliot loudly. ‘Selling raffle tickets for fucking Israel. Your son is trying to get Muslims to pay for your filthy war. This is what you get for associating with Zionists.’
He walked out the room.
‘Stop calling them Zionists,’ she shouted after him. ‘It’s Carol and Aunty Phyllis and the rest. You know them.’ Turning to me, she said, ‘Ben – don’t go to the Indian Plaza any more unless you’re with me or Elliot, okay? Now I suppose I’ll have to buy the ones that have already been pulled out and give them away.’
‘Jackie wanted reggae beads and we were there already. I didn’t know.’
‘Okay, we’ll sort it out. I’ll explain. Which shop? Do you remember?’
‘I think it’s the one we went to for Elliot’s bar mitzvah outfit.’
‘Jesus, Ben.’
* * *
Joss and I sat next to each other on the gritty hardwood floor while Mr Groenewald, the headmaster, told a boy to shut the assembly hall doors. I didn’t tell Joss about what had happened at the Indian Plaza. He probably knew it wasn’t a good idea to sell Women’s Zionist League raffle tickets to Muslims. The pinched expression on Mrs Jada’s face still stung. It was embarrassing that I hadn’t taken in Elliot’s views about Zionism, though he’d laid them out often enough. These things just didn’t seem a part of my childhood world.
‘I can’t sell those fucking things,’ I whispered to Joss. ‘Nobody wants them.’
‘I got rid of mine at Friday night dinner. One shot.’
‘Who’m I gonna sell them to?’
‘Hey, you know who you should try? Leo Fein. After the thing at Roy’s he’ll definitely help you.’
‘He’s probably got already. Anyway, I can’t just pitch up and ask him. And I don’t know where he lives.’
‘I know,’ said Joss. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Mr Groenewald commenced his announcement. ‘This is a very serious job. That is why we have chosen you, because it is serious and we think you can be responsible. You might know that there are elements in our land who want to destabilise things, destroy what we’ve built here and cause chaos. They don’t want to talk, they use violence.
‘Boys and girls, there are terrorists who are trying to take away our country. They don’t come out and fight, like soldiers. They use bombs, and they run away. That is why we must be vigilant. Do you all know what “vigilant” means? It means we must use our eyes, we must use our ears, and if there is anything funny, you must always tell a teacher.’
Frequent mention of the words ‘limpet mine’ on TV news, and culminating in two explosions in a bar and restaurant in a coastal city, seemed to agitate a particular paranoia in some of the town’s adults. For twelve-year-olds, though, with shorter timelines to reference, it seemed normal; after all, normal is just what you’re presented with.
Mr Groenewald showed us a kind of chart, which we’d become quite used to seeing in schools and other government buildings. It was a three-dimensional moulded plastic poster that displayed full-colour representations of various explosives: a limpet mine, a hand grenade, a stick grenade, a landmine, an oily letter bomb, a block of plastique.
‘If you see anything strange, tell us immediately. Someone puts down a strange packet: you tell us. You hear people talking about something that could be dangerous to you, your friends, your family or your school: you tell us.’
We were broken into groups and told we’d have to come in to school fifteen minutes early from now on, to patrol the area we were assigned. Barry Jennings and Georgina Melck were in my group, and our area of inspection included a passageway at one end of the school offices and the foyer of the school hall.
I’d always felt drawn to Gina, or at least ever since I’d heard the story of her mother having tried to kill herself. This gave her a darkness, a hidden life, a complexity and a gravity that were rare and appealing.
I don’t know whether this story was true because neither I nor anyone I knew was brave enough to ask her. That she was beautiful was not even something I considered. She was unusual, and that, to me, was more important.
We did know that her parents were divorced and even that seemed unusual in our town. I liked the blackness of her hair, how boldly it had chosen its hue – not in an is-it-black-or-just-dark-brown way, but an extreme, definite, saturated black. You knew where you stood with that hair. And not only that, but Gina had a fine rasp to her voice that scared me but held a promise I couldn’t quite grasp at the time.
* * *
After Mrs Dorfman dropped Joss off at my house that afternoon, we walked up Ireland Street, past the house with the half-built boat that had sat half-built forever in the yard, past the reservoir, and over Potgieter Street, so long and straight it ended nowhere.
On the other side was Bendor, a newer section of town – or at least it seemed so, because the face-brick here was brighter, rougher, redder, and there were thickly painted walls like slabs of plastic. The lawns were spongy and sliced by driveways of interlocking paving stones leading to shaded entrances. Baby palms with brush cuts and fan-tailed cycads were in beds of dark soil and each garden was edged with considerate, sloping kerbs.
We came to one of those face-brick houses, one with a kind of rounded tower that rose out of a flower bed. We could hear voices and laughter from the back – men’s voices. Joss rang the bell and the voices died. I heard a chair scrape and footsteps, and could imagine Leo Fein walking through the house towards us. He opened the door and looked from Joss to me and back again.
My trepidation in approaching Leo Fein was not born merely of shyness, but lay in my dread of his reaction to my arrival at his front door: after our joint escapade, how would he react? Would he be angry? Should I be laying low? Worse, would he even remember me?
‘Boys,’