To protect them from the rains!’
Solly Goldberg clapped again. ‘But not so good as the first, I think your father has got it better, eh?’
Solly constantly tried to encourage Jessica to speak about her life and soon she too could tell a story or two to entertain him. Solly would urge her on when she lost her confidence, digging out the facts and the colour of an idea or experience by constant questioning. His interest was always apparent, never wavering, so that Jessica was encouraged to continue, knowing that what she had to say was genuinely interesting to him. Under his skilful guidance she began to understand the way a good tale is constructed and how to bring the characters within it to life.
‘Jessica,’ he would say, ‘listen for the voices. When you hear their voices then also you know the story.’ Over a period of three ‘Compliments Mrs Goldberg’ picnics, Jessica told Solly the story of Billy Simple, ending it where she left him in front of the Narrandera courthouse, though without mentioning Jack Thomas’s presence in the story at its very end, how he’d picked her up and carried her into the courthouse. Her love for Jack was a secret she would never share. It was as though his memory was fixed in time and that even by talking of him she might disturb the very core of her love.
When Jessica came to the end of the final episode of Billy Simple’s journey into captivity, Solly remained silent for a long time, while tears ran down his huge, round face. He’d taken his large bandanna from his trouser pocket and wiped his eyes, then used it to blow his rubbery nose several times, furiously pushing it about within the folds of the large handkerchief, buying time so that he might control his emotion.
Finally he’d looked up at Jessica. ‘Miss Bergman, you could have been a wonderful Jew,’ he sighed, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘So who cares? Already you a wonderful human being.’
Solly demanded ever more stories from her and so Jessica told him about Billy Simple’s trial. Between his visits she thought about what she’d tell Solly on his next trip, and she began to realise the true value of what Joe had taught her.
All the years of Joe’s silences, when they would be working together and he would be quiet, thinking and observing, sometimes leaving her to complete a task while he followed a bird call or a trail of migrating ants, now came back to Jessica. They provided the colour she needed to satisfy Solly Goldberg’s stringent demands for a good yarn. Those occasions with Joe were quite different from his darknesses, his moods of terrible despair. These were the silences where he watched and took time to enchant Jessica with what he’d seen and what he supposed it might mean.
Joe, she realised, translated for Jessica over their years together what he thought was the nature of things on the land and elsewhere. The habits built into a fox’s behaviour, the manner in which a bird builds its nest to defeat a predatory snake that can twist and curl from the end of a branch to enter a nest at any angle. The different calls of a bird and what they might signal and the various gestures of a kangaroo looking out for the safety of his females. The way of an emu with its chicks, the peculiar way a rabbit twitches its nose when it senses danger, and how the leaves of the eucalypt constantly change their angle to the sun’s rays so that they maintain a constant temperature and survive the drought. Joe would kick at a cow pat and announce that summer would bring a plague of black flies (mind you, Jessica never thought this was much of a prophecy, the summer always brought a plague of black flies). He’d point to the sort of rock most likely to conceal a scorpion beneath it, and he knew why a snake could move up the surface of a seemingly vertical rock.
Now, as she recalled the images of her childhood and Joe’s careful tuition, Jessica realised that she too had developed an acute sense of observation and a detailed recollection of events. She began to understand that Solly Goldberg was mining what was already within her and that in his own way, he was trying to restore her hope and renew her self-confidence.
Solly would encourage Jessica to hear the voices in her stories, but she now understood that Joe had taught her to see the pictures as well, to recall movement and colour, to note gesture as well as intonation, to see what differed from the commonplace and to seek the meaning within everything. ‘Girlie, everything means something in nature. Everything has a purpose in the bush. While people waste time and energy feeling sorry for themselves, the rest are out there trying to find a feed.’
Joe had not been educated by book-learning like Moishe, nor was he a gregarious storyteller and man of the world like Solly Goldberg, but her father had used his eyes and his patience to seek the truth in things. And in this respect he was more than a match for both Solly and Moishe. But what Solly added was that he gave Jessica back a sense of her own worth.
Jessica would later understand that Moishe, with his books and his earnest talk which she only half understood at the time, taught her to question authority and to beware of those restricting notions that passed for conventional wisdom in society. But it was Solly Goldberg, the custodian of merriment, who taught her to laugh again, and who gave her the courage to fight and not to give up hope. He encouraged her to speak out and not to be afraid of making a fool of herself. The big bear of a butcher who waddled like a penguin and sweated like a working dog was the only one who kept Jessica sane while she fought to survive the horrors of the mental asylum.
It was while telling Solly the story of Billy Simple’s trial that Jessica had a truly inspired idea. She was recounting the incident when she had gone to see ‘Liquid Lunch’, the barrister who was appointed by the Crown to defend Billy Simple. She was explaining to Solly how she’d confronted him at breakfast in his hotel to beg him to help Billy, when it suddenly struck her that she should write to him — write a letter to Richard Runche KC and beg him to help her! The more Jessica thought about this idea the more appealing it seemed. At the end of Billy’s trial Richard Runche had presented his case with great eloquence, so why couldn’t he do the same for her? Her hope was that in the period since Billy Simple’s trial the lawyer hadn’t gone down for the count to the claret bottle — while her fear was that he might have forgotten her.
At the conclusion of the story of Billy Simple’s trial, Solly Goldberg looked at Jessica and said, ‘So Moishe tells me you have asked him to go to Long Bay Prison, to find where is the grave of Mr Simple?’
‘Oh, Mr Goldberg, I’d like so much to see it!’ Jessica exclaimed, then she announced, ‘When I get out I’m gunna get him a gravestone.’
Solly remained silent, not looking at Jessica. ‘What’s the matter?’ Jessica asked, thinking she must have said something to upset him. ‘Don’t Jews have gravestones? ‘
Solly looked up slowly. ‘My dear, there is no grave.’
‘But there must be! They must have buried him somewhere!’
‘You know what is a no-person, Miss Bergman?’
‘No.’
‘When a man is a murderer he is made a no-person, he got no coffin, he got no grave.’ ‘That’s silly — he must have.’
‘They make for him a shroud and they take up the paving-stone in the jail and dig a hole.’ He paused. ‘You know what is quicklime?’ Jessica nodded. ‘They put in this hole the body and pour over quicklime, then they put back the paving-stone.’ Solly looked at her, forcing himself to continue. ‘There is no more Billy Simple. They don’t put a name by his grave, they don’t tell where is his grave, not even his family, he is a no-person — gone, finish, kaput.’
Jessica remained for some time with her head bowed, quietly sobbing. ‘I am so sorry. I am so sorry,’ Solly kept saying. ‘Moishe, he don’t want to tell you.’
Finally Jessica looked up. ‘I’ll make him a gravestone anyway, a cross, by the creek back home, under the big river gum. Yellow-belly swim there and it’s quiet, it don’t have to have his body underneath. Billy will know it’s there for him — that we done it for him, Jack and me.’
Solly looked pleased at this notion. ‘So why not?
I got a Mr Gravestone Chicken Shopper, a good man don’t poke the chickens, don’t look down the tukis, I ask him nice to make for you this gravestone.’ Then he grinned. ‘Mind, I don’t know how he goes mit Jesus crosses.’
‘Would you? Would you really?’ Jessica cried. ‘When I get out I’ll save up the money.’ ‘So we make an arrangement.’
‘An arrangement?’ Jessica looked doubtful. ‘You mean you’ll lend me the money?’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘Nah, I couldn’t. What if something happened and I couldn’t pay yiz back?’
Solly Goldberg smiled. ‘An arrangement is not a lend, Miss Bergman. We make an arrangement to give back what we owe you.’