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.
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.
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