The Lion Seeker (17 page)

—He's not my da, Isaac says. We
partners
.

Shapiro's one showing eyeball rolls. —Partners. Listen to this pisher here.

—Show him the consignment book, Hugo says. He wants to try and argue us, show him the book. Then to Shapiro: —We got a receipt, gunif! Right here! Don't even try think you can rook us.

—Now look hey, Shapiro tells them. This's the second time I heard you call me a gunif to my face, my own house. I dunno what's going on here but you try tell me I'm a crook and call me gunif again and I have to open this door—man, I was Eastern Transvaal wrestling champion and I'll snap the bladey necks on the both of you.

—So if you not a gunif, Hugo smoothly says, then give us our money. We seen how much tape you already used up on your shop sign there alone.

— . . . Awww so that's what it's about. The shop. Oright, I will give you your boodle, ukay. Look, it's nice stuff what you got, this miracle watchmacallit. But that doesn't mean you can come banging on a man's house calling him gunif . . . 

Hugo for once says nothing. Hugo is looking to the sky. Raindrops are hitting the lawn, getting faster. Hugo makes that wheezing constipated noise from deep in his throat. Shapiro closes the door and they hear the chain coming off. Hugo shifts feet. Door opens. Hugo rushes, Isaac follows. Shapiro is to one side, bathrobed, wild-haired. —Tell your da he's too hitzik hey. Give himself a coronary heart attack just now.

—He's not my da.

The rain drums the roof, taps the windows. Hugo paces in the kitchen where Shapiro leaves them. Mrs. Shapiro comes in, blue curlers under a creamed face. She makes tea. Then Shapiro comes with the chequebook, shaking his head. Hugo says,—No, it's cash. Cash latkes only.

Shapiro's thick neck trembles. —The chutzpah on this bladey oke!

His wife starts to hum over the tea things.

—You dincum are meshuga, says Shapiro. You genuine are.

—That's how we want it, Hugo says, so unlike himself, closed off and insistent and unsmiling and jittery. No sign of any shining up. Isaac is inclined to side with Shapiro in his snap evaluation of Hugo's sanity. Where is the melting beam of an easy smile, the cobra charm in the blue eyes? Something seems connected with the rain. The drumming on the roof seems to have invaded the brain under that great dome. A rain-a-phobic, Isaac thinks. He always suspected there must be something big time wrong.

—Bladey insult, Shapiro says. My cheques are gold!

The two of them lock stares. Hugo wheezes softly; one eye twitches. Slowly, Shapiro shakes his head. —Oright, oright, meshugena . . . I haven't sold the whole lot, but it's starting to move. I think you got something here. How can I reorder?

—No problem. Here's my card.

Mrs. Shapiro hums, pours the tea looking out the window, remarking to no one that it is really coming down outside.

—It's supposed to be a drought!
Hugo tells them, his voice hurting eardrums. Everyone stares at him. A dog in another room begins to bark. Mrs. Shapiro has spilled. Hugo snaps at Isaac: —Nu, make out the invoice already.

He hands him a carbon paper cashbook that Isaac's never seen before. A blank book. Isaac fills in the top invoice, tears it off, gives it to Shapiro. Shapiro goes out and comes back with cash which Hugo snatches. —Bye.

—So fast? Not even a cup?

—We got things to do.

—It's nearly bladey midnight.

—Let's go, Isaac.

Hugo is out of the room when Shapiro touches Isaac's arm. —Tell your old man he should slow down, he says, not unadmiringly. I tell you, he's heading for a coronary heart attack.

—Thanks, Isaac says. Bye.

Outside, he runs with Hugo bent over against the drumming rain. Once they are driving off, Isaac strokes the rainwater from his eyes, says,—Hugo, I think you better listen to me hey. I reckon those dead pigs gave you a shock in your brain or summin hey. Cos—

—This would never happen in the motor game!

Isaac blinks. —Hey?

—Supposed to be a drought! A bladey stuffing drought! It's the flippen bladey
dry season!

Isaac shuts his mouth. Turns his attention to the side window. Main street splashing past as they hurl out of town. The hard rain has turned it into a shallow brown river. He regrets he didn't snag a finger biscuit from that tray Mrs. Shapiro had, at least. Finger biscuits are so lekker, he likes them so much better than Marie biscuits or those ginger things. He watches Shapiro's shop coming up ahead.

The green glow of the miracle tape shows through the falling water; he leans close to the glass, squinting. As they pass the shop Isaac reads only four letters:
SH O G
. As he watches, the green
S
slowly disintegrates in the rain, running and running, washing away to nothing. Looking backwards, the last he sees of Shapiro's sign is the word
H O G
. This green too begins to run and fade even as he stares, but for the moment it speaks purely to Isaac of that reeking farmstead, that blooded abode of porcine doom.

NINE MONTHS AFTER MIRACLE GLOW
, Isaac is back home working as a salesman in a shoe shop in town. Mame found him this job, through Mr. Altman from down the road whose wife was married to a third cousin of Mr. Gibblers from Troyeville who has the best cabbages and the job connection to the proprietor, a Mr. Pivnik. Here at the shop they are importing Italian shoes and Mame says being a shoe salesman will train him in the footwear business. Footwear is good, even as good as transport. Every time someone takes a step, they are also taking a step towards their next pair of shoes, think about it.

A wonderful business, maybe, but Isaac is battling, barely making his sales quotas. He likes handling the feet of the ladies, though, squeezing the sensitive flesh in his strong hands and three times he takes different ones for private fittings of another kind, in the stockroom. Hugo Bleznik's advice on the female was not all wrong, it seems; but these encounters do little to quench the gilded images of Yvonne Linhurst that continue to twine through his dreams, awake or asleep. Yvonne in The Castle, how is she, what is she doing? That bright and distant mirage.

Certain interested ladies aside, Isaac is not able to establish much rapport with his clients. He tries to copy how Hugo was, but the act never lasts. What is it, is he too ugly, too rough? One day Miss Jacqueline Winterbourne, his old history teacher, walks into the shop and he runs to the stockroom before she can see him. He stands there in the dark smelling the shoe leather and only then does he remember that time when he stood in the closet behind the blackboard with his rigid shlong in his fist, Christ. That Principal Larkin opening the door, shaking his head. Isaac the poor little humper. His scalp shrivels in the dark. He has to have a smoke break after he spies out that she's gone, and his fingers tremble so badly he needs three matches for his light.

When he goes home that night he is low. Turned eighteen already at the beginning of the year—real manhood—and now 1937 is three-quarters over and what's he achieved? How far has he come since getting kicked out of school? He's been fired, been beaten up by a Greyshirt chutus, failed as a travelling rep (he limped home early and with nothing from that disastrous washout of a road trip but his tail between his legs and a rueful admission to Mame that Tutte was right, the tape was useless drek), and now he's still hiding away ashamed in a cupboard, slowly crashing as shoe boy (the same way that Hindenburg airship slowly sank and crumpled and buckled in a cocoon of its own devouring flames over there in the USA as shown on the Universal Pictures newsreel). A shoe boy: he can't even make the grade as an effing
shoe boy
.

At the supper table Mame asks what he's learned about the business today, and when there's no enthusiasm in his one-syllable answer his father starts up about finding a good trade. Mame bangs with the knife and fork, bunts him under the table (with her new shoe, a free perk of the job). Isaac's not going to be any sweating tradesman with dirty hands, not her Isaac. He's going to be a big maker in the footwear industry, he's on his way, he'll be buying a big house for them in no time, isn't so, Isaac?

A beautiful house for us in Orange Grove, in Observatory. Isn't so Isaac?

Isaac says yes. It is so.

With a garden. Quiet. With no more Greenburg.

His father mutters and saws harshly at his kosher lamb chop, as if the meat still needs murdering.

Meanwhile Rively excuses herself early. She has started learning how to be a legal clerk at a tech college in town but most of her spare time she goes to Hashomer Hatzair meetings with Yankel Bernstein. Bernstein, like the shrewdie he is, started calling on her the minute Isaac was away. Since then it's evolved into a habit that Isaac can't do a thing about but be sharply irritated. Politically, it seems Rively has gradually influenced Yankel enough to stop being a universal Communist and start being a Zionist-Communist (or at least pretend); while he's got her to stop being so Orthodox religious and start being more Zionistic. But she shouldn't be associated with those Hashomer girls at all, Isaac reckons; all the neighbourhood okes nowadays call them Hashomer Hatsitskes—Hashomer The Tits—cos so many of them with their progressive ideas don't even wear bras under their uniform shirts and therefore must be loose as anything.

He looks up then and advises her to go wait for Yankel outside.

Rively: —What's your problem hey?

—I don't wanna see that bladey Red in here. Bad enough he comes for my sister like a vulture.

Isaac, says Abel.

—Sorry hey Da, but it's true.

He goes into the backyard and bounces a rotting cricket ball on the outhouse door. The real reason he doesn't want to see Yankel is because Yankel reminds him of what maybe happened to Mame on April seventeenth in that faraway country of his birth. If he sees Yankel he has to think about such things and that makes him irritated with unease, so better not to see him at all. Rively tells him that Yankel always asks after him. —Tell him I went to Russia, Isaac has answered. Tell him I changed my name to Hotshki-Shotski or summin, I got a moustache and a private shithouse in the Kremlin now.

His father steps out. Isaac, come here, I want to talk.

They go into his mother's sewing room, the shiksa's hut: all these years and they've never had a shiksa girl at all. It strikes Isaac that this fact makes his mame less of a capitalist-whatever than any commie that he knows, especially the Bernsteins who keep a Black in the back of Gordon Court same as the rest of the residents, the bladey hypocrites.

Abel puts his hand on Isaac's shoulder. I arranged for you with Ginzburg.

Isaac thinks about this, blinking. —What, a mechanic?

No, says his father. Some other kind, an apprentice to work on cars. Cars you love.

Isaac folds his arms, watching the toe edge of his shoe as it starts to chip at the ground.

I have eyes, Isaacluh. You look unhappy. Never mind your mother, you don't have to say to her. Here.

He takes a card from his apron and pokes it across. Go and see the man. Say that Ginzburg sent you.

 

The next day, a Friday, Isaac gets a surprise—shock—phone call at the shoe shop. Hugo Bleznik. Hugo sniffed out his work number from Mame at home; he had to pretend to be someone else but he got it (since the Miracle debacle, Hugo's name has been more or less unmentionable to Mame, categorized with bladerfools and couch parasites). There's old Hugo, ever resourceful. Right now, for Isaac's information, he is calling from the Hotel Polana in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique. Lourenço Marques, where the rich and the big shots, the movie and radio stars, go to jol on holidays. Hugo starts painting word pictures for Isaac. How beautiful the white facade of the Hotel Polana is, with the palm trees and the swimming pool in front, the view of the Indian Ocean. Charcoal-grilled prawns big as your hand dipped in piri piri sauce and dewy bottles of Laurentina beer a foot tall.

—And you never seen the females with the skin and the eyes like this hey, Tiger. Loverly smooth brown skin and bright green eyes they got. Never seen such hoors.

For some reason (green eyes?) these words open a seam of yearning in Isaac: thoughts of Yvonne Linhurst slip wavering through him, it's a sadness to do with the feeling that no hoor could ever switch on that cold bright light inside his chest the way she did. He's had some other women now, but never that, never even close. That was only from The Princess. Even now it's still the first thing there when he opens his eyes on his cot, in that oil-reeking workshop that is his home and the trap that has secured his father the way fences keep pigs penned in for their slaughter. This is why he has resisted Abel all this time: to follow Abel's advice means to become
like
him. He'll only grow into the shape of a stooped-over man, a blue-collar, a rent-payer, just another one of the world's many Stupids.

Meanwhile in his ear Hugo Bleznik, talking, talking, is coming back to the word
contacts
. — . . . rounding up these
contacts
hey, like you won't
believe
, these heavy
connections
, these motor-game boys. Getting numbers down and all. I am telling you, when you work it out on paper . . . 

Isaac thinks of working on cars with his hands. He looks at the card his father gave him. Maybe what scares him the most is how he knows his father senses the strength of it in him, knows it's there, the call of the automobiles—

—Hey! You listening here hey boyki? Hey?

—What, sorry?

—Hey Tiger. Shine yourself up man. Shine up! I am talking pounds not pennies here man. I am talking your life.

—What is it?

—I'm working on these boys. I am getting the capital up, man, it's a finished deal, almost. This plan is gold. I wanna know, are you in?