Illywhacker

There was a silence then. The gramophone clicked noisily. Lenny fumbled for a cigarette in his blue overalls, but even while he discarded wet matches, one by one, his eyes took in the scene -the electric radiator glowing in the corner, the wind-up gramophone in the empty fireplace, the girl's shapely legs, the sweat on her upper lip, the old scrapbooks spread across the little table beneath the cobweb-covered windows and – last of all – his wife's pleading eyes as she stood and smiled.

"Show me", he said to his wife, "where you keep dry matches."

"You know where," she said, not wishing to be alone with him.

"Show me," he said.

Rosa laughed, a high scratchy laugh, and followed him out of the room. Leah lifted the arm from the gramophone and wound it up again.

She could hear Lenny's angry voice. She removed the needle from the arm and searched through a tiny tin box looking for a sharper one.

17

Rosa gave him his matches, holding the box at arm's length, and watched him light his cigarette. He looked around for an ashtray and, obedient as any wife in a woman's magazine, she found one amongst the unwashed dishes in the sink, rinsed it beneath the tap and dried it. Ash smeared the tea-towel, and she thought, defensively, so what?

"Why?" he said. He did not sit at the table when she sat down. He leaned against the kitchen door and folded his arms across his chest. She took a dirty casserole off the chair so there would be somewhere he could sit, but he watched her silently and did not move.

"Why?" he repeated.

"Why what?"

"Why? For what use? A dancing doctor?"

Rosa shrugged.

"What would her people say to you, filling her head with rubbish?"

She would have liked to say that it was not rubbish, that it was wrong to call her new happiness rubbish.

"What would her mother and father say? She is meant to be studying. What will you feel if she fails her studies?"

"She wanted to…" Rosa began, but she could not meet her husband's eyes. She wished she had the kitchen tidier. She stacked two plates inside the greasy frying pan.

"Is that what you want?" Lenny said. "You want her to fail? You want that on your head?"

Rosa shrugged again.

"You force her to do things. She doesn't know how to say no. It is like the Passover."

"It is not like the Passover," Rosa said. "The Passover was not my idea." She was beginning to feel guilty and it was wrong. It was a trick he had. "She wanted," she whispered, worrying that Leah would hear them.

"She wanted, she wanted."

"She did want."

"She wanted so much, she ran away. That's how much she wanted."

Of course the Passover had been a mistake, but who was to know it? None of them. Not until it was done. The girl had been so alight, so eager. On the eve they had swept the house together and thrown out all the bread. Leah had been full of questions. Why this? Why that? They had made the charoset together. They had boiled the eggs. Rosa had shown her how the tray was set. They had starched the white tablecloth and set the table.

On Passover she had arrived in a new dress. It was almost a real Passover. Lenny's father and brother were there. The old man was frail and doddery but when he began to read from the book his voice, though high, was strong and clear. She did not like the old man and he did not like her, but out of his corrupt old mouth the words came – so clear and clean that she stopped hating him and was pleased he had come.

It had happened at the very beginning, when the karpas was taken. She had not known the girl well then and had not understood her. She had looked at the girl as she took the karpas and when her face changed she thought it must be the bitterness. But then Leah had stood, suddenly, with an awful scrape of the chair and, just as the old man Thank God the old scoundrel was deaf and never heard Leah spitting and coughing as she ran out the front door. But he was not blind. He saw Rosa run after her. And Rosa, as she went down the front steps, heard his voice squawking in outrage like a caged bird.

She had found Leah weeping, hunched over and hugging herself behind the lavatory and she took the shuddering body in her arms and held her.

"What is it, little Leah? What is it?"

Leah wept and wept. "I am a fraud," she said. "I am a fake, a fake, a fake. I cannot be anything."

"You are the sky," Rosa said, trying to find medicine in words. She held the girl's head to her breast. "You are the sky." She meant that big sky, that vast clear cobalt sky without history, clean, full of light, free of sombre clouds.

But she did not explain herself and neither the sky nor her arms could give Leah Goldstein any comfort.

Now, in that kitchen, her husband came to sit next to her in the vacant chair. He put the back of his dirty hand against her cheek, gently. "She is very young," he said, softly, "and you will damage her."

"All right," she said, but she promised nothing.