Moishe, however, never failed to visit Jessica once a week to bring her books and talk to her and often one of the books might have a white feather stuck in it.
When Jessica first asked him about the feathers, thinking it was simply a bookmark made from one of Solly Goldberg’s kosher chook feathers, Moishe laughed. ‘Women come up to me in the street or on the tram and hand them to me,’ he’d said. ‘But why?’ Jessica asked, curious.
‘It’s to tell me I’m a coward for not joining up to fight in the war.’ He’d smiled quietly. ‘I’m keeping myself for the revolution. When the workers rise up, Jessie,’ he paused and looked up over the summer trees, ‘now that will be a battle worth fighting in.’
‘But you told me they wouldn’t take you because you had flat feet, Moishe Goldberg!’ Jessica laughingly accused him.
‘Yeah, that too,’ Moishe laughed, embarrassed at being exposed, ‘and the bottom of lemonade bottles for specs. But that was before I became a Communist, before I’d read Marx and Engels. I wouldn’t join up now, not blinkin’ likely.’
Jessica hadn’t told Moishe about Jack, the man she loved with all her heart, who had joined up the moment he could with just as much fervour and belief in the British Empire and all that it stood for as Moishe felt about his silly Communist revolution.
Jessica thought about these two young men who, together with Billy Simple, had so affected and influenced her life.
Moishe Goldberg, the Semite, pale as first light with a blueish tinge to his chin no matter how closely he shaved, his dark obsidian eyes made large as a possum’s by the lenses of impossibly thick spectacles. Moishe, thin as a rake with bones which seemed to rattle about in his clothes, too timid even to touch her, his fine mind filled with theory, revolution and failure, determined to save a working class with whom he had nothing in common.
Jack Thomas, solid, muscle-hard, blue-eyed and tanned by a merciless sun, his hair the colour of ripened wheat, the sum of a hundred generations of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon blood. His mind always on the soil, unimaginative, except perhaps for his precious irrigation canals. Fascinated by the internal combustion engine and the role of mechanicals on the sheep station, yet the finest of horsemen. But he too was vulnerable, as she’d seen often enough when his father had a go at him. Jack, who would come home and take up where he’d left off, never questioning his entitlement. ‘A real good bloke for an owner, fair dinkum,’ folk would be bound to say about him. ‘Married the Bergman girl, the pretty one.’
Both were men with dreams of a world that was a fair and honest place, though each had a vastly different image of what this should be. Both decent men, down to their bootlaces, except that Moishe’s were usually undone and Jack wore riding boots with elastic sides. It was Jewish and gentile chickens all over again, Jessica thought wryly.
She greatly enjoyed Moishe’s weekly visits, but if the truth be known, they were not anticipated as enthusiastically as Solly’s monthly picnics, which had become known as ‘Compliments Mrs Goldberg’. Solly would leave her at four o’clock in the afternoon when the gates closed. ‘I see you next month, my dear,’ he’d say, ‘same time, same place, compliments Mrs Goldberg.’ The visits of Solly, with his big basket filled with his wife’s culinary love for him, with his stories of the doings in his kosher butcher shop and his life as a child in Poland, became the high point in every long, tedious and always frightening month.
Solly was not only an entertainer, he had the rare ability to be a good listener as well and he grew to love Jessica’s stories of the bush. At first she’d been too shy, thinking he was only trying to be polite. But Solly persisted and one day Jessica said, ‘I’m no good at stories, Mr Goldberg, but I could do you a poem me father taught me when I was a young ‘un.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘It’s a bit rude, though.’ ‘A poem? I like that, Miss Bergman.’
The Black Soil Plains
‘The herring clouds are stretching Across the black soil plains.
It’s more than folk dare hope for As they pray for summer rains.
‘Six years of drought and hardship, The dams and rivers dry.
The bank owns a second mortgage And our sheep and cattle die.
‘“Lord, fill our creeks and rivers, Let pastures green our lands,
Squeeze the moisture from the heavens With Your ever loving hands.”
‘God looked down and saw our suffering And a miracle came to pass.
His tears dropped down from heaven Just enough to wipe my arse.’
Jessica ended the poem and Solly clapped and chortled. ‘I always thought that was the end of the poem until one day a shearer told it to me proper,’ Jessica then said. ‘Would you like to hear how the rest of it goes?’
‘More? I got more? Certainly, with pleasure, my dear.’ Jessica repeated the last verse and corrected the final line, then added another verse.
‘God looked down and saw our suffering
And a miracle came to pass.
His tears dropped down from heaven
Just enough to rinse my glass.
‘So, let’s drink to pluck and courage
To the folk on the black soil plains
Who bury their dead on the highest ground