Lucky Packet Read online

  LUCKY

  PACKET

  Trevor Sacks

  Kwela Books

  For Sylvia

  I’m five or six years old and for twenty minutes I’ve been trawling the three short aisles of the Acropolis in my pyjamas. While Ma waits at the counter, her patience ebbing, I pick up and put down one chocolate bar after another.

  ‘Can’t I have a lucky packet?’ I ask. From behind his counter Mr Georgiou offers my mother a light.

  ‘I told you,’ says Ma, ‘anything except a lucky packet.’

  Lucky packets are against the law. At least, they are on Sundays in 1979, since they’re considered a form of gambling, and un-Christian. It’s hardly a hanging offence, but my mother would not want Mr Georgiou held responsible.

  My hand hovers over the bars of Tex, Chocolate Log and Chomp, then drifts to a pack of tomato-sauce-flavour chips. The choice is like an incubus, the consequences weigh heavy upon me: if I choose badly I’ll spend the rest of the evening – the last before an entire week of school – regretting it.

  Sweets don’t interest me. I’ve never developed more than an incidental craving for sugar. Indecision takes root easily in me, but a sweet tooth, no.

  A lucky packet offers not only the most reward, with its surprise gift, but a release from the burden of choice, from the consequences of a bad choice. Pick a bad lucky packet and you have a throwaway knickknack, but still the sweets; pick a good one and you have a toy to play with for the rest of the week.

  There’s the fake plastic watch, the stickers, the dice, the vampire teeth, the spider or the small puzzles, all nestled in a bed of doctor-and-nurse pills: the powdery pink musk sweets inside the thick paper bag.

  Most prized of all, though, is the black plastic Lone Ranger mask. It’s so rare some of us doubt it’s a lucky packet prize at all. When a kid brings one in to school, boasting how he picked out his lucky packet with a secret technique, he wears it all week.

  ‘But I want a lucky packet,’ I say to the row of sweets. I take up a Tex with a sigh and walk to the front of the shop. Smoke blows sideways from the cigarette between Mr Georgiou’s lips, driven by the fan. The mechanical gusts flick the edges of the newspaper pinned under his elbows. But it’s not Mr Georgiou who makes this night different from all the others in the Acropolis.

  Where this other man in the memory comes from, I can’t say. I’m too short to see over the counter, but he must have come from there – I mean, he probably placed the chip packets, Coke bottles and milk on the counter next to Mr Georgiou and went around to help himself to something.

  Whoever he is, Mr Georgiou knows him because he ignores him while he reads his paper. The man rises like Poseidon from behind the counter, holding in his hand a lucky packet. The packet – the dangerous enemy of the state, agent of subversion, cornucopia and saviour – fills my vision, so I miss the man’s features. The lucky packet drops into my hands and ripples wash away the Acropolis Café.

  The memory runs out there; it loops and repeats from a different starting point, like a needle kicking back from the end of the record’s groove, but it goes no further. I’m ignorant of my mother’s reaction, or of Mr Georgiou’s, of the man’s next move and whether the prize inside the lucky packet was the Lone Ranger mask or some other trinket.

  Forty years later, I still toy with slotting first my father’s then Leo Fein’s form into the scene: Eddie Aronbach / Leo Fein / Eddie Aronbach / Leo Fein on a ceaseless carousel. Neither fits perfectly; memories reject transplanted tissue.

  I was five or six in the Acropolis Café, but which, I can’t say. If I knew, I’d know which side of the dividing edge between a living father and a dead one the memory lay. Stare as I might, nothing will un-smudge the actor in the Acropolis Café, nothing can ossify the facts, and the harder I look, the smaller the face becomes.

  Perhaps I try to hold on to these images in an attempt to claim a greater part for my late father in shaping who I am; or to avoid giving Leo Fein that role.

  Ma has been dead for some time now, and my brothers don’t like to talk about these things any more. And so it falls to me alone to untangle what passed between my family and Leo Fein – the betrayals and guilt and, I’ll admit, some measure of adventure.

  1986

  1

  SPANDAU BALLET

  When I was twelve, I stole for the first time in my life. Surprisingly – because, of course, your mother and school and TV shows tell you stealing is wrong – I didn’t have any trouble with it at all.

  I’d probably seen Leo Fein in shul in the run-up to my bar mitzvah, but it was only at Meyer Levinson’s sixtieth that I met him. I’d come to Meyer’s afternoon braai with my only Jewish friend, Joss Dorfman, and his parents.

  All around Meyer’s sweating green lawn were wives arranged in carefully casual outfits and husbands in slacks and pomade, some of them wearing those boxes they called safari suits. They’d been there long enough for the sexes to separate like curds and whey.

  Besides the Dorfmans, I knew very few of the guests in Meyer’s garden. I don’t know if my mother had been invited and, if she had, she almost certainly would not have gone. It’s not that we had anything against Meyer Levinson or the thirty or so other Jewish families in town: we just weren’t interested in the religion, and the Jews weren’t interested in us.

  In town I was a Jew among Christians, but among Jews I was something else, a boy from a family who resisted other Jews. I was aware of concentric circles all around me. I spoke English in a place where Afrikaans ruled. Worse, I was white – I mean untanned, a great sin among the white people of the Far Northern Transvaal. It said I didn’t play enough outdoors.

  And of course, I was white in a town of white people enclosed by the double-ox-horn homeland of a million black people; the laager leaked our maids, gardeners and labourers into town when we needed them but for the most part it held them at bay, even from our thoughts.

  Joss’s mother gave Meyer his wrapped present and we all wished him a happy birthday. Gail Dorfman’s calves filled the hems of her pedal-pushers as she leaned in to give Meyer a kiss on the cheek; Stephen Dorfman shook Meyer’s hand and his halo of blonde curls nodded their good wishes.

  Meyer Levinson said thank you and how happy he was to see us, with a voice that vibrated calm. He kept that same tone no matter what he said. It would make no difference if he walked in on his wife with another man (‘I’ll kill you’), crushed a pinkie in a car door (‘fuck’) or quadrupled his money on the horses (‘yes’); it would always be the same delivery. It was, in its own way, soothing and I imagined that instead of vocal cords he had in his larynx the kind of pebbles you find in rivers.

  ‘Oh, I’m very excited,’ said Meyer Levinson in his steady manner. The ice blocks knocked inside his glass as he moved to scan the scene in the garden. ‘Who knew anyone would come at all?’

  ‘With all this free food?’ said Joss’s mom. ‘Who’re you kidding, Meyer?’

  Jews were allowed to joke about Jews, but others were forbidden. Every Jew in town was vigilant against anti-Semitism, even my mother, in her capacity as Jewess only to the degree of progenitor of bar mitzvah boys.

  You had to be. In a town like ours, the old prejudices still sprang up if we weren’t careful. Plugging the holes was something we didn’t have enough fingers for, with a high-school teacher making fun of a Jewish kid’s nose one day, a bowling club member telling anti-Semitic jokes in a speech the next, and the ever-present goad ‘don’t be Jewish’ whenever a child (of any religious persuasion) showed reluctance to share his sweets. Here in Meyer’s garden, though, among the cheeks and handshakes of fellows, it was safe enough for joking.

  The Dorfmans said their hellos to other guests and I tagged along in their wake. Joss was
greeted with lipstick, backslaps, and questions about tennis and schoolwork. Predictably, my identity required a moment of stilted explanation.

  ‘Ben,’ I would say, and wait. ‘Aronbach.’

  ‘Oh, Aronbach,’ they’d say. ‘That’s nice.’

  The Dorfmans greeted Carol 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,’ said he.

  ‘Just me?’ I asked, jogging slowly to the court gate.

  ‘Should be enough. We just need to help Uncle Meyer with something, okay?’

  I f
elt the others trying to pick up a conversation again, rolling the ball on the ground between one another while Leo Fein and I climbed the grass bank.

  ‘Thanks, my boy. You’re a big help, hey,’ said Leo Fein without looking back at me. ‘Meyer’s running short of booze. A party should never run out of booze, hey, boy? That’s rule number one.’

  We walked along the driveway to his car, a silver Mercedes coupé with a long nose and cream leather seats. Soon we were rolling through the streets, keeping a steady pace.

  ‘So you’re an Aronbach, hey?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Hey! Your father was a good man, let me tell you.’

  But he didn’t tell me. He just kept driving, his shoulders pressing comfortably against the cream leather seatback, while I shuffled questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  My father died when I was six, if you choose to believe me, or five, if you prefer my mother’s version. I’d always correct her when we talked about it. There was no reason for me to know better than her but I pressed for the extension anyway.

  It was a heart attack that killed Eddie Aronbach. I don’t remember anyone telling me he’d died. I saw Elliot, who was eleven at the time, thrash on the bed and cry rare tears. Even then I didn’t know the cause of his distress. How could I? No one was talking to me. They were too busy pouring whisky down Elliot’s neck and getting him our father’s gold watch to grip on to.

  And where was Will during all this? In a pattern he’d never shake, he was working. He worked at phoning our relatives, he worked at arranging the funeral and, although still only sixteen, he worked at understanding the finances. As I grew older, carrying the knowledge of my father’s death, I sensed that I’d missed a defining trauma.

  The Mercedes drifted through town and I began to wonder where we were going. We passed Dungeon Park and turned into Grobler Street, driving in the direction of the town’s great landmark, the red-and-white radio tower.

  At the intersection with Schoeman Street was the place I always thought of as the centre of town. Great North Diesel and Auto Electric, the business my father had started, sat on one corner. Diagonally opposite the family business was the library with the monument of molten rifles from the Makgoba War; the other two corners were taken up by the sixteen-storey Nedbank building (our only skyscraper) and the OK Bazaars supermarket.