The Last Mentsch By Peter Bayer Peter Bayer Postal address: 7 Andre Street, Victory Park Gauteng, South Africa 2195 Landline: +27+11+ 782-4314 Mobile: 27+11+02-559-6359 E-mail: [email protected] 1 Prologue – Yitzhak’s room, the last of days, April 30, 1985 Towards the end of the very last chapter, I visited Yitzhak in his room behind the shop in Hunter Street, Yeoville. He was shrouded in the smell of Old Man farts, listening to the sound of the labouring Dora Lipschitz, painfully nurdling down the pavement supported by her aluminium walking frame. Sheet-Pok-Sheet-Pok-Sheet-Pok. Yitzhak, now well into his eighties, was cocooned in the off–pink wingback chair Leah loved to sit in until she slipped away all those years ago. He had the appearance of an embarrassed, sallow gnome clad in an ancient jersey whose front displayed the carnage of a thousand breakfasts. It was, for Yitzhak a badge of honour – an emblem of the honestly simple life of a scrawny, limping alte kokeh. His joints were totally shot. The gimbals and wires and servo systems and hydraulics which keep young people smoothing their carefree paths through life were long past their warranty and Yitzhak now required a stick to prop himself up, propel him forward, prevent him from stumbling and collapsing in an untidy clump in the corner. The walking stick was a chunk of wood with a carved ram’s horn as the handle, and it leaned against the faded pink chair as an exhausted bicycle leans against a wall. The shaft was ornately etched and completed by a rubber tip, which promised debatable traction and safety to crumbling old bones. ‘Imagine the embarrassment of falling down and having to wait for someone to arrive to pick me up?’ he said when he first acquired the stick. ‘You know old age is upon you when you have to plan a strategy for getting out of a bath,’ he had added. Then, being Yitzhak, and therefore an occasional philosopher and fulltime pragmatist, he shrugged, knowing not too many people were likely to arrive and rescue him. Not anymore. Not now that the last of the family was gone. On this the last day of his story, his slippered feet barely scraped over the musty rug that lay on the floor of his room. The right foot slipper’s toe had perished long, long ago. The entire picture was quintessential Yitzhak (a tsimble fun fassen, as he would say in his quaint accent) the ensemble completed by the grungy old jersey, which, Yitzhak explained, Theodore had bought around the turn of the century. 2 More than eighty years later, Yitzhak used the stick to plock and plod to Leah’s old wooden kist on which he kept his bottle of Shabbat wine. He poured us each a precise tot – one eye squinched as he ensured neither of us would be short-changed by a single drop of the sweet wine. The kist was Yitzhak’s Ark. It contained documents, journals, old bits and pieces of newspapers long gone – information which, revealed piecemeal over the past year, allowed me to make sense of Yitzhak’s life, and that of his father, Theodore. As we sipped our wine, the walking stick tapped in tune to a Harry James medley playing on an ancient 78RPM gramophone: Harry James as the backing orchestra to a young, up-and-comer called Frank Sinatra. Before today’s chapter of the story, ritual pleasantries had to be exchanged. ‘Nu, Yitzhak? Azoy gait es?’ ‘Feh,’ he rasped. ‘Always the hips! A farshlepte krenk … but I have good days and bad. Anyway, that’s life.’ He cocked his bald head ever so slightly. ‘Can you hear what Sinatra is singing? A coincidence! That’s life …A beautiful piece of writing. By Kay and Gordon. Two nice Yiddische boys – and such beautiful singing.’ Yitzhak briefly conducted Harry James with a forefinger. ‘Listen to the phrasing. Like a goyische cantor in a Hollywood synagogue, Frank Sinatra was,’ Yitzhak said. ‘Such a voice for a gentile, but you can’t blame him for that. Sinatra was real music. Not that modern jazz from Felonious Monk or that blind schvartzer pianist – what’s his name? Charles Ray? Yes, him.’ In his quavering vibrato, Yitzhak warbled: ‘That’s life, that’s what people say You’re riding high in April, shot down in May...’ Yitzhak’s strong accent made the song almost a parody: ‘Dot’s life, dot’s vot pipples tsay …’ He nodded towards the gramophone. ‘So – about my life, the highlight of which is a prostrate the size of an overcooked kneidl. Oy, the tsores from one single organ.’ Yitzhak briefly eyed me, trying (and failing) to detect undisguised sympathy, before leaning back and humming the last few bars of the song. 3 He had told me during an earlier visit when he recalled the final days of his father’s life that when the last of the family died – when his brother passed away – that his life was effectively over as well. ‘This is not melodrama. I’m a worn-out farschimmelteh old man. Besides, apart from you and Dora Lipschitz next door, who else do I have in my life? Who else visits? I have no wife, no children. Only my memories, which I told your late father, God bless his wonderful soul and which I’m now telling you.’ He shrugged again. There was a briefly awkward pause as we found ourselves for once struggling to avoid banal chitchat. Neither of us was a banal chit-chatterer. We were both story tellers in our own way, although while mine found eventual internment in the paper’s morgue, Yitzhak’s story, told to me over the year since I first met him, swept across generations and contained characters who sometimes teetered on the edge of burlesque parody and who, in his telling, occasionally fell over. ‘When you tell my story,’ Yitzhak made me promise a year ago, ‘it should not just be what I tell you, but also the way you interpret it.’ Of course, I agreed. I always agreed with Yitzhak. In a foolishly exciting life in which I habitually accommodated no one, Yitzhak had become the exception to my rule. When Yitzhak unfolded a history of one of the characters who populated his canvas, it was impossible to hold up my hand and ask him, how can you possibly know that? If Yitzhak said that’s what happened, then why the hell should I argue? Yitzhak, you see, felt it was necessary to elaborate his Baron Munchausenesque characters because, as he kept stressing, these were people who didn’t exist any longer. ‘So who’s going to sue me?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘I make no apology for inventing bobbeh meissers about dead people. ‘Anyway, we all have our own versions of the truth. Yes?’ Those who peopled his life had, like the dying language that was Yiddish, drifted into distant memory in the rampaging face of fast cars and faster food, television and vampire movies. ‘What kind of world is this?’ he once asked. ‘There isn’t even a single cafe-bioscope left anymore.’ My father, Yitzhak’s friend, had as a young man worked as a waiter at a cafe- bioscope (which was a cinema where you could order food and fress it as you watched Astaire and Rogers dance in improbable locations). After serving hamburgers and toasted chicken sandwiches to cinema-fressers, he would dash across town to a roadhouse called the Doll’s House, where he served steak and chips (presented in a small basket) and Coke Floats to young people in gigantic Fords and Chevrolets. 4 On Saturdays he visited municipal tennis clubs and bought second hand tennis balls, which he resold on Sundays to people who lived in the suburbs and despite being wealthy enough to have their own tennis courts, were too cheap to buy new balls. This was apart from his day job, which was as a sales representative – a schmattes salesman. He was an immigrant who had escaped Nazi Germany with nothing. He now had something: a wife and two daughters to feed in the immediate post-war years of the Forties, so he did what he had to so that he could house and feed his family. That’s what family men did back then. He had been a Captain in the army during the Second World War, and the server of hamburgers and Coke Floats just a few years later. I had not been born yet. In Yitzhak’s words, I was inconceivable. My first contact with Yitzhak was the result of a gebrenteh tsores – a time of utter misery. Yitzhak had, in a cracked voice faltering on the edge of a sob, telephoned to wish me a traditional Long Life after the death of my father. He apologised for missing the funeral and prayers, but explained that he hadn’t left the shop and adjacent house for more than half a century. He begged my pardon for not visiting the graveside or attending the interminable post-death prayers my father so loathed in life, which antipathy he had successfully bequeathed to me. Of course I forgave the old man, and in that cloying aftermath of the false camaraderie of death, I arranged to meet Yitzhak, after he confided on the telephone that he had a story to tell. He had decided that if ever anyone were to record his story (and that of his father) it would have to be the son of his best and oldest friend.