Solomon's Song (21 page)

The rabbi clasped his hands together and brought them to his chest. ‘After the Jews, the best,’ Abrahams assured him. ‘He is a good God-fearing man who, it so happens, needs a new roof on the baptistery of St Mark’s. On the other hand, the Catholics have a brand-new cathedral and God would maybe not be so willing to listen to their needs at the present moment.’

‘Fifty per cent now, fifty per cent when the child is born, no commission on the goy roof, but a thousand pounds bonus to you if it is a boy,’ David said, extending his hand to the rabbi.

‘We will pray for the boy through both ears,’ the Chief Rabbi promised, accepting David’s outstretched hand. It had been a rewarding day. At the very worst half the cost of the new infant school was paid. Furthermore, with half the price of his new baptistery roof on St Mark’s guaranteed and, in the process, a firm relationship established with the powerful bishop, it could do the increasingly prosperous Jewish community in the city no harm. Even if the collective prayers were to fall on deaf ears, the ledger for God’s work in the city was suddenly in excellent shape.

Precisely eleven months after David’s visit to the rabbi Joshua was born. Rabbi Abrahams, clearly not a man to lose an opportunity to capitalise on this wonderful act of nature, accepted David’s cheques together with his bonus.

Carefully folding the two bank drafts into his purse, he addressed his source of pennies from heaven. ‘Mr Solomon, God has provided you with a fine, healthy boy, but there has been no bris, he has not been circumcised.’ He sighed. ‘There is even some talk about, a rumour no doubt, that he is to be raised as a gentile?’

David shrugged. ‘It’s your law,’ he replied with a dismissive shrug. ‘His mother Elizabeth is a gentile, my grandson is born a goy.’

Rabbi Abrahams had flinched at the vulgar expression. ‘Our law, certainly, Mr Solomon. It is true, your grandson is technically a gentile.’ He paused. ‘On the other hand, if your son’s wife, Elizabeth, is willing to turn, to convert to Judaism,’ the Chief Rabbi spread his hands and smiled, ‘then it would give me great pleasure to personally instruct her in the Jewish faith. Believe me, it would be a happy occasion for the Jews of Melbourne if I could tell the members of the synagogue that the Lord God has provided Abraham Solomon with a fine Jewish son and a grandson to the illustrious Mr David Solomon.’

David was unimpressed with the praise and he thought for a moment then announced, ‘No, Rabbi, we will leave things as they are, that is the best thing to do.’

The rabbi was somewhat taken aback, in fact, barely able to conceal his dismay, for he had fully expected David to comply with his request. ‘But why, Mr Solomon? Your father Ikey Solomon was a Jew, a member of the first synagogue in Hobart, your mother Hannah was a Jew, also your dear departed wife? You are a Jew, your son Abraham is a Jew? God has answered our prayers, you have a grandson. Why?’

David looked sternly at the rabbi. ‘Rabbi Abrahams, I am a plain-speaking man and you have cost me a great deal of money. Not only have the Jews of Melbourne benefited, but I have also allowed you to kiss the arse of a bishop of the Church of England. Mind you, I am not complaining, we made a deal, as you say, I have a grandson and you now have your school and the goy bishop has a new roof over the heads of his Sunday Christians.’ He paused for a moment and then said, ‘Now, answer me this, please, Mister Rabbi of Melbourne. How do I know it wasn’t the gentile ear of God that answered my prayers for a grandson?’

That, with his son, Joshua, the outcome, was the very first time Abraham had gone against his father’s wishes. Now, with Hawk waiting for David’s answer to his business proposition he has once again defied him. Abraham reasons that if his father, coming to the end of his life, isn’t able to accept Hawk’s generous rescue plan for Solomon & Co. he, with the remainder of his life ahead of him, has no reason to reject it. On the contrary, he knows himself quite capable of running Solomon & Co. on his own and, without the constant harassment and interference of the old man, he relishes the opportunity.

Abraham can feel his ambivalence growing, but nevertheless feels duty bound to ask once more for his father’s co-operation. ‘Father, I have accepted Mr Solomon’s offer, I shall not relent. Will you not do the same?’ It is the last time he will ask and, for the remainder of his life, he will bitterly resent having done so.

Ignoring Hawk’s presence David looks up at his son and bellows, ‘Yes! Damn you! Count me in!’ The task his mind has set him at this moment is to leap from his chair, cross the room and leave it, slamming the door behind him. But he is an old man and rising from the deep leather chair is an onerous business, though he does so with as much vigour as he can muster and crosses the room to the door, forcing his old legs to hurry. He turns at the door, ‘S’truth! A nigger chairman!’ then exercising his bad temper he exits, slamming the door behind him as hard as he may.

‘I apologise, for my father,’ a red-faced Abraham says. ‘It has all come as a great shock to him.’

Hawk looks up at David’s son. ‘I sense you would have preferred him to stay out eh? Well, never mind, it’s settled then.’ Abraham will later recall how Hawk had clasped his fingers together and brought his chin to rest upon his hands. Then looking down into his lap he had given a deep sigh. ‘Thank God, after thirty-eight years,’ he’d heard Hawk whisper.

Hawk loses no time drawing up the documents and in a month they are signed by David and Abraham and notarised. He plans to stay another month so that he might learn all he can about the new brewery, though he has learned that Abraham is more than competent to see to its completion and seems anxious to be allowed to do so. Hawk feels they will get on well enough and intends to be home soon with Hinetitama, Ben and Victoria. He does not think of Teekleman as family, but simply as an obese presence to be tolerated. He has since learned that the Dutchman has left his employ, but thinks little of it. Hinetitama is well provided for and her husband does not need to work to keep his household going. Hawk will sort out any other details upon his return.

However, two days after the completion of the contracts Hawk receives a telegram from Hobart.

TEEKLEMAN DEAD HINETITAMA IN TROUBLE

ANN

THE RETURN OF HINETITAMA

Melbourne 1914

September 25th 1914, the day of the big military march past, is typical of that time of the year in Victoria. It commences with a thin pre-dawn drizzle, clears up a little just as the paperboys hurry in the six o’clock dark to their allotted street corners then persists foul all morning, with flurries of rain and sudden gusts of bone-chilling wind that invert umbrellas and send hats skidding along the mirror-wet pavements.

It is miserable weather even for ducks, and the folk making their way from Flinders Street Station to Parliament House lower their heads into the wind and the rain, with one hand placed upon their sodden hats, the other clasping raised coat lapels tightly about their chests, their children, all except the infants, fending for themselves.

If spring is just around the corner as all the newspapers proclaim, then, on a day such as this, it seems in no great hurry to arrive. However, an ever hopeful nature has already set the sap to rising in the plane trees on Bourke Street and, while they still stand naked like up-ended witches’ brooms, a more careful examination will show that the ends of the most slender branches are tipped with tender green shoots.

Where other cities might bemoan a rotten rainy day, Melbourne folk take a perverse pride in its weather, fondly imagining they share a climate with England, a place which, in the current nomenclature, they refer to as ‘home’.

It is as if in their minds Australia is considered their temporal abode while England remains the destination of the heart and the true home of the spirit.

Because it is claimed Melbourne has four more days of rain a year than does London, its citizens think of themselves as somehow more English than the other cities with Adelaide, home of the free settlers, perhaps the single exception. So ingrained is this premise, that on a February day when the temperature is as likely to soar to over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, the better folk of Melbourne feign surprise. It is as though they feel it unfair that the weather should turn on them so.

In the middle of a heatwave a stout Melbourne grande dame, taking afternoon tea in the new Myers shop in Bourke Street and dressed up to the nines in a gown she has sent to Paris to obtain and wearing a fur appropriate to a London winter, may bat the air with a cheap Chinese paper fan and exclaim in a superior tone, ‘Whatever has become of the weather, it was never this hot when I was a gal?’

But even the rising temperature is accommodated to the myth of an antipodean England. The top people in Melbourne compare the sweltering heat with their notion of an endless English summer, where larks fly in a high blue sky and brass bands play in rotundas on Sunday afternoon in a park redolent with crocuses, bluebells, lilacs and daffodils, an England of quiet country pubs, cricket matches on the village green and small boys fishing for sticklebacks in the local pond.

This sense of Englishness has been carried even further, for unlike the impetuous higgledy-piggledy, stumble and tumble of Sydney, nothing has been left to chance. It is a city meticulously laid out in neat squares, the streets and avenues straight and wide with earnest, clanking trams rattling self-importantly down the centre and generously wide pavements which boast of the city’s prosperity and sophisticated demeanour. This is a change brought about by the new wealth from Ballarat and Bendigo gold, which has turned the city John Batman founded into the financial capital of Australia.

However, Melbourne in the old century was not a city to make its better-class citizens proud of their rapidly expanding metropolis, the stench of urine from the back lanes being one of the more ubiquitous characteristics of street life. The Bourke Street East theatre district was used every night by hundreds of theatre-goers and citizens of the night as a common urinal. After sunset the stench and extent of the urine running into it and overflowing its gutters made the footpath almost impassable. The smell of horse dung in every street worthy of a name was omnipresent while the generous dumpings of large herds of cattle and sheep regularly driven through the city added to the ordure.

All said and done, it was a dirty but interesting place, with a street population of German brass bands, Italian organ grinders, French hurdy-gurdy performers and Hungarian musicians, hitching posts and horse troughs and hundreds of street stalls selling every manner of wares. As the sun set there was a migration of coffee stalls into the centre of the city, their owners trundling the strange square boxes with funnels sticking out of the roofs and pitching them in a favourite spot where, with charcoal fires blazing, they appeared transformed into a welcoming and well-lit coffee stall. Hawkers were everywhere, loud and declamatory, selling the latest ballads printed on long narrow pieces of paper clipped to a stick they held above their heads. There were cockatoo hawkers selling caged birds, hawkers selling boiled sheep’s trotters, small children selling flowers late into the night and fruit and veggie men and women. Barrowloads of crayfish were sold at sixpence a pound raw weight or for threepence more they came ready to eat.

From December to March, the fish season and the hottest time of the year, when the dusty streets were filled with peel and debris, human urine and horse and cattle shit, the city stench reached a malodorous crescendo with the invasion by fish hawkers. These merchants of the sea used the horse troughs to clean their fish, dumping the fish guts into the gutter and after the plugs were removed from their barrows, oyster shells, fish scales, fish heads and slimy water flowed over footpaths and clogged city gutters in a slushy, effluvium tide that damn near brought its citizens to their knees.

But the Melbourne of 1914 has sobered up and dressed its city fathers in dark broadcloth, top hat and spats and the women from the better classes now dress in unseasonable furs and ill-chosen Parisian finery and, with pinkies pointed outwards, hold bone-china cups of tea and mouth the vowels of England.

Neat cast-iron urinals, exact copies of their Paris counterparts, dot the clean pavements and the city council has erected five underground conveniences with closet accommodation at one penny a time should the requirement be to sit down and an extra penny for a wash and brush. Males in a standing position facing the porcelain are not required to pay.

Perhaps the best example of the now repentant Melbourne is its botanical gardens, designed to be precise and orderly by the German botanist, Baron von Mueller. It adorns the south side of the river and is pruned, mowed and dressed in oak and elm and festooned with the shrubs and blossoms to be found in England and Europe with a token display of the parochial flora.

Only the lazy, mustard-coloured Yarra sidling unpretentiously by is Australian, a laconic country cousin of a river come to visit a rich, patronising and wealthy urban relative.

Despite the cold and the wet, the crowd attending the military parade and now standing three deep in Spring Street remain cheerful. Waving little Union Jacks fixed to lolly sticks, their hearts beat collectively for England and the Empire. Someone with a half-respectable baritone voice and accompanied by a lone mouth organ starts to sing the words to the popular refrain, ‘Sons of Australia’, and when it comes to the chorus the crowd immediately in the vicinity of Parliament House join in.

For Britain! Good old Britain!

Where our fathers first drew breath,

We’ll fight like true Australians,

Facing danger, wounds or death.

With Britain’s other gallant sons

We’re going hand in hand;

Our War-cry ‘Good old Britain’ boys,

Our own dear motherland.

They have come to cheer on their troops who are marching off to war to fight in a quarrel Mother England helped to start, but one which their colonial sons neither bother to understand nor stop to think about. ‘England calls and we answer’ are the proud words on most lips. Young lads, barely out of knee britches, fake their age and grow unconvincing post-pubescent moustaches, hoping to disguise their callow youth and pink unshaven cheeks in their eagerness to join the fray. They carry a collective sense of anxiety that they may miss the so-called ‘Grand Picnic in Europe’. The Age, the Truth and the Argus all agree it will be over by Christmas with the German troublemakers taught a damned good lesson by the British Empire.

Not only do the youth answer to the bugle call of the Motherland. Boer War veterans, who should know better, blacken the greying roots of their hair with a diluted solution of boot black. A wag in the letters column of the Age notes that never has ‘Bluey’ been so numerous on Melbourne’s streets and in the queues outside the recruitment depots as older men rinse their hair with henna. They all want to join in the mad scramble to fight for a cause more stupid, pointless, morally reprehensible than any in the long quarrelsome history of mankind.

This is a war instigated by pompous German generals with waxed and curled mustachios and their British and French counterparts, who, but for the colour and insignia on their uniforms, can barely be told apart.

Self-important old men, accredited diplomats and posturing politicians, talk of peace and reconciliation while secretly itching to get on with it. In the weeks leading to the assassination in Sarajevo of Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, they make and break alliances almost as regularly as the sounds of popping champagne corks are heard in their embassies whenever they celebrate meaningless diplomatic and political initiatives. Some of these barely last longer than the fizz in the champagne they drink in their toasts to peace.

Eventually, with the arcane dialogue exhausted, the pointless assassination of the Archduke gives them all an excuse to declare war. Citing insults more imagined than real as the reasons for taking up arms against each other, these pompous and vainglorious old men have their tailors fit military tunics to accommodate their paunches. If asked, their collective wives, bringing a little commonsense to bear, could have resolved the shambles in a peaceful afternoon around the kitchen table.

The finest, the very best we have to give of our young blood, our tall, strong, colonial sons, will fight for an England they, nor their parents or their grandparents, have ever visited. For some, the last of their forebears to see England had left its shores on a stinking, rat-infested convict ship to arrive in Australia, cowed and beaten.

Now, on this cold and windy September day, to a rousing march played by the bands of the 1st Australian Division together with the 3rd Light Horse Regiment, their fourth-generation descendants wave to their precious sons and brothers who in this passing-out parade each receive the imprimatur of trained fighting man.

David Solomon and his son Sir Abraham sit among the dignitaries on the apron directly above the first set of steps of Parliament House some eight feet above the crowd. David, ninety-four years old, is almost blind and somewhat deaf, a frail old man who must be transported in a wheelchair. Nevertheless, he enjoys the full use of his mental faculties which are mostly employed in voluble cussing and being curmudgeonly. It has been a decade or more since he was last heard to say a good word for anyone with the exception of his grandson Joshua. He turns stiff-necked to his son and declares, ‘Is that the band I hear?’

‘Yes, Father, won’t be long now,’ Sir Abraham answers, sensing his growing impatience.

‘What’s the time?’

Abraham withdraws his half-hunter from his weskit pocket and reads the time out loud. ‘Twenty minutes past eleven, give or take thirty seconds of the clock, Father.’

‘They’re late! Should’ve passed by at eleven, it’s too damned cold to be sitting around.’ The old man turns to face in the direction of the Governor-General standing on the pavement below the steps with Major General Bridges and members of the general staff. They wait to take the general salute. ‘Sloppy work! By golly, we won’t win the war this way!’ he shouts down at their backs.

The Governor-General turns towards David. ‘Not you, sir! That fat army chappie in the uniform next to you!’ He points an accusing finger at Major General Bridges, a man with a high colour and a distinctly bellicose look about him. ‘Your troops, aren’t they? Should be on time! Not good enough by half.’

The general is clearly taken aback and turns and points at David Solomon. ‘Who is this man?’ he shouts up at the Governor-General who is also in the front row of the seated dignitaries. Then without waiting for an answer he turns back to David. ‘Sir, you insult me!’

Despite the noise from the street below and the rapidly approaching band, the silence on the podium is palpable. Most of those present know David Solomon is notorious for his plain speaking, an old man who doesn’t give a fig for the good opinions of others and, with the increasing loss of his sight, most are aware of his irascibility.

‘I demand an apology,’ Major General Bridges barks, for the band is now less than fifty yards away and the cheering of the crowd has greatly increased.

David, feigning a deafness of convenience, turns to his son and shouts, ‘Eh? What he say?’

Abraham leans close to the old man’s ear. ‘He wants you to apologise, Father. We must!’ He is visibly embarrassed and now takes it upon himself to rise and face the officer. Attempting an awkward little bow, he shouts, ‘Sir, we apologise most profusely! No insult intended, none at all, I’m sure.’ He smiles weakly. ‘The cold, General, my father is a very old man and is rheumatic’

Major General Bridges, only slightly mollified, turns away. The band is almost upon them and he must take the salute with the Governor-General, who has already risen and taken his place on the steps. ‘Father, you go too far,’ Abraham remonstrates, ‘you will need to apologise officially.’

David casts an angry look at his son. ‘Apologise? Whaffor?’

Abraham sighs. ‘Just don’t say anything more, please, Father!’

‘It’s too bloody cold, I’m freezin’ me knackers off, how much longer must we all sit here because of his damned incompetence?’ David now says, but the band is upon them and only Abraham hears him. He knows David will continue the altercation with the general just as soon as he can make himself heard again.