is boring to sing the same line over and over again. It is boring to sing the same verse over and over again. Tears of boredom prick my eyes. I am the only child in the class wearing glasses. In fact, I am the youngest boy in Summerstrand, maybe in the world, to wear glasses. Many people stop me and say how cute I look, which makes me uncomfortable. I have a lazy eye. For six weeks last year I had to wear a patch on the eye that isn’t lazy. But now we are singing “Hatikvah”. The second line is “Nefesh Yehudi homiyah”. Waves of boredom creep up my body. They start at my feet and creep up through my legs and my stomach and my chest and into my head.
“Eli! For goodness’ sake!”
Geveret has snatched up my hand in hers, which is dry and scaly. She shakes my hand, as if she doesn’t know what to do with it. She raises her other hand over mine, as if she is going to smack me. She makes three or four pretend smacks, shakes my hand again, and shouts at me for not paying attention. She shoves her face close to mine, leaning down. I look right up into hers, frightened. I try not to breathe, because of the rotten smell of her breath. Her face is pale, cream and grey, smudged with pale colours. She looks like an old photograph that has been tinted by a clumsy hand.
She manages not to smack me and lets my hand go, and leaves me alone.
We are practising “Hatikvah”. I like the music of the fifth line, “Od lo avdah tikvatenu”. The tune rises there, and a hopeful feeling rises in my chest too, at least the first few times. After that, I like it less. I start to worry about going to the toilet. I need to go quite badly, so when it is break, I will have to go at the beginning, not the end, and what will I do if girls come in?
There are pictures on the wall that we painted ourselves, and some posters about Israel. There is a large photograph of a soldier with a patch over one eye. He must have had a lazy eye like mine. That is worrying – I wonder why they couldn’t fix it. He is old, bald but quite handsome, and his mouth is open wider on one side than the other. Perhaps half his mouth is lazy, and he probably speaks Hebrew, so I wouldn’t understand him anyway.
My feet are getting sore from all this standing and singing. In fact, they are bored. To relieve the boredom in my feet, I try pressing down onto their balls, rocking forward slightly. “Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim,” we sing. We have to sing it again, and again, till it comes out in one piece. I rock back and put my weight on my heels. That feels slightly better than the weight on the balls of my feet, because it is more unusual. It is less boring to have the weight on a different part of your feet. Then I try resting my weight on the inside of my feet, but that doesn’t work very well. It makes my legs feel wrong, and it is quite difficult. At last I rest the weight on the outside edges of my soles. That is interesting and satisfying, and I can stand like that for a long time.
I go into a circle: stand normally, then on the balls of my feet, my toes, my heels, and finally the outside edges. I hold the outside edges for a long time. I bounce up and down slightly on the outside edges of my feet. They pack down into the edges of my shoes, which squeeze the flesh, which is also interesting. Behind my back I begin wringing my fingers hard, to squeeze myself until it almost hurts.
“Eli Machabeus!” screams Geveret Schechter. “We are singing ‘Hatikvah’, and you are yawning and standing like this – like this – on your feet!”
She gestures wildly at my feet, her eyes and face filled with pain. She tries to imitate my posture, but her legs are too thin and look as if they might break. I stop yawning suddenly. My feet are flat on the ground now as she continues to shout at me. She is so upset!
“It is the national anthem of Eretz Yisrael, and your hands are behind your back!”
The other children go very quiet as Geveret winds herself up more and more. We are terrified that she is going to cry. Right in front of us, as we watch, she gets thinner and thinner and her stomach gets even smaller, shrinking away until her body is almost in two pieces, like a wasp.
Simon
Jude and Simon have a job on Saturday mornings, manual labour at W. Machabeus & Sons. Their job is to load boxes of detergent or canned goods or sacks of grain onto a flat-bed truck. Archie pays them five rand a week, which is good money.
They leave at eight in the morning in Archie’s Wolseley 6/110. Less than twenty minutes later they are in North End, pulling up against the quay that fronts the huge sliding doors of the warehouse. The boys first go up to Uncle Saul’s office to greet him. Saul and Archie are the Sons in W. Machabeus & Sons, established before the war by their father Wolf. It was a thriving business when he retired, but now it is said to be in trouble. Saul has expensive tastes, and neither brother has any real business sense.
Jude presses the buzzer on Saul’s office door. A frosted glass pane lights up with the word ENTER, and the door clicks open. Saul is as fascinated by gadgets as his brother Archie, though his generally work. They also look more expensive, and more interesting.
“Morning, boys,” says Uncle Saul as they enter the wood-panelled office, his voice even deeper than Archie’s, and more bold. He has a small cup of coffee beside him, which Simon knows to be expresso. Saul is fanatical, and has a machine that produces this impossibly bitter drink. It is rumoured in Port Elizabeth that he is sophisticated. He is an excellent cook, and once used wild mushrooms in his cooking, whereas everyone else uses tinned mushrooms. Even worse, he is considered a pseudo-intellectual, a polemicist. Everyone knows that before dinner parties he bones up on the Oxford Dictionary, or Shakespeare, or the Commentaries on the Talmud, these being the three centres of learning, in order to stupefy guests with his erudition.
“I want to give you something,” he says to Jude. “You might find it interesting. I’ve nearly finished The Spectator, there’s quite a good article in it on Ben-Gurion. Not uncritical, but interesting. I’ll send it home with your father.”
That is exactly the thing about Saul Machabeus: other men read Time or Newsweek, or the Sunday Times.
“Thanks, I’d like that,” replies Jude, responding to his uncle with frank admiration.
Saul turns to Simon, and grins suddenly, as if he doesn’t believe what he is about to say and means it light-heartedly: “You might find it interesting too, boy, have a look at it. Tell me what you think.”
“Sure, Uncle Saul, thanks.”
Simon feels light-hearted himself, elevated by his uncle’s regard.
“Well, you chaps have to get on with your work, and I have to get on with mine. I’ve nearly finished this,” he says, raising his rumpled copy of The Spectator and dropping it on the desk. “See what you think.”
The brothers leave the office and go down to the dispatch warehouse. The directors’ offices are built into a mezzanine floor that overlooks the central warehouse, a dusty, echoing cavern filled with great rectangular islands of wholesale goods. This marketplace of smells includes cardboard and dust, curry powder and pipe tobacco, the grease on the floor, which has grown its patina over many decades of trading, and a tangy residue of the gas range which Archie keeps below the mezzanine. He sometimes sears rump steak for lunch or breakfast on a griddle pan, and flavoured smoke rises up through the dark trusses and curls down from asbestos roof sheeting to become atmosphere. “Best steak you can get in town,” he usually proclaims, and in Simon’s opinion it is.
They take a short cut through the truck garage to get to dispatch. The smell is different in this garage, because there is no toilet for the boys. All the Xhosa workers at W. Machabeus & Sons are boys. The back wall is lined with coal sacks, against which the boys urinate when they need to. Jude and Simon walk through this section as quickly
