Lucky Packet

By Trevor Sacks

Twelve-year-old Ben Aronbach doesn’t fit in anywhere. In his small town in mid-80s South Africa, he’s an English-speaking Jew among Afrikaans Christians; in the small congregation of Jews in town, he’s the latest grudging bar mitzvah boy from a family with little interest in religion. Then Ben meets Leo Fein, a man who says he knew Ben’s late father. After a daring escapade, the pair make their getaway in Leo’s car, and Ben thinks he’s finally found his place. Until, that is, the man moves in on Ben’s mother. As Ben enters his teens, it’s clear the Aronbach family will never be the same again. Ben is thrust among political fugitives, right-wing extremists, church leaders, and renegade military men. And as the town readies itself for the referendum to end apartheid, Ben must not only face Leo Fein, but try to find redemption for his part in his family’s downfall. “One of the best novels of recent years, and likely the most readable.” – Imraan Coovadia

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kwela
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780795708916

Trevor Sacks

Trevor Sacks was born in Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg) and now lives in Cape Town. He’s written non-fiction pieces for the New York Times and n+1, as well as music and lyrics for bands he’s performed in. He began Lucky Packet, his first novel, while enrolled in UCT’s Master's programme in Creative Writing.

Book preview

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.

1986

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.

You had to be. In a town like ours, the old prejudices still sprang up if we weren’t careful. Plugging the holes was something we didn’t have enough fingers for, with a high-school teacher making fun of a Jewish kid’s nose one day, a bowling club member telling anti-Semitic jokes in a speech the next, and the ever-present goad ‘don’t be Jewish’ whenever a child (of any religious persuasion) showed reluctance to share his sweets. Here in Meyer’s garden, though, among the cheeks and handshakes of fellows, it was safe enough for joking.

The Dorfmans said their hellos to other guests and I tagged along in their wake. Joss was greeted with lipstick, backslaps, and questions about tennis and schoolwork. Predictably, my identity required a moment of stilted explanation.

‘Ben,’ I would say, and wait. ‘Aronbach.’

‘Oh, Aronbach,’ they’d say. ‘That’s nice.’

The Dorfmans greeted Carol Richler and her daughter, the girl I thought of as shaped very much like a potato latke. Carol had recently begun to give me lifts to cheder in preparation for my bar mitzvah.

‘How’s your mother?’ she asked.

‘Fine, thanks,’ I said, though I could’ve said she had a broken leg and Carol would have continued with the follow-up.

‘That’s nice. And how’s William? Coming back to visit soon?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. She always asked about Will, my eldest brother, who was at university in Johannesburg. Besides the excruciating trip to cheder twice a week with Carol and Potato Latke, I had to suffer with the notion that Will had had sex with Carol. It’s likely it was our uncle Victor who seeded the tale, Carol being Victor’s neighbour over the road and Will, who helped Carol with odd jobs around the house, the target of Victor’s taunts. Whether the story was true, I can’t say, but once a thought like that is planted it’s impossible to weed out.

While the adult Dorfmans joined the other adults coalescing in clumps, Joss and I walked over to a group of kids I recognised from shul. A skinny boy of about sixteen with embarrassing wire glasses was talking louder than necessary to another boy who was slightly overweight and carried the stink of cigarettes and peppermint gum.

I knew the skinny one, Gershon, had once teased Elliot, my other brother, about his braces, and Elliot had taken revenge by throwing the boy’s satchel into the swimming pool.

‘They’re anti-Semites,’ said Gershon now, ‘and I heard if you go to one of their concerts and they find out you’re a Jew, they fuck you up.’

‘Spandau Ballet are not anti-Semites,’ said the other boy.

‘Spandau was a concentration camp, man.’

‘I know – but they don’t sing about anything Nazi.’

‘Ja, well, you don’t know what they say to the crowd at their concerts. And the fans – if they know you’re a Jew …’

‘Come on, how’re they gonna know you’re a Jew? I mean, for sure.’

‘They come up to you and ask you. What? You’re gonna deny you’re a Jew just so you can watch Spandau Ballet?’

I knew about Spandau Ballet from Elliot and about Nazis from Uncle Victor, who’d been too young for the war but spoke as if he’d suffered it nevertheless. But I knew very little about being a Jew.

Would I have denied being a Jew at a Spandau Ballet concert? I feared the question was coming, but in the meantime Joss spoke.

‘I didn’t know you were into ballet, Gershon. Show us some moves.’

‘Ha-ha, Dorfman,’ said Gershon, although he only said it and wasn’t laughing with the others. He tried to look tough and punched Joss on the arm, a skew, glancing blow.

Joss was one of those kids who never got into fights because everyone liked him. I’m not saying he was perfect (those are exactly the kids who are preyed on by bullies, after all), but even the bullies liked Joss, and I counted him as a friend.

He wasn’t one of the snivelling types of Jewish kids that gave Jews a bad name – the kids I’d look at with shame, I confess, and a fear that their reputation would stick to me too. They came with their sick notes and kept to their own, cutting themselves from the herd; I was forced to be among them when we were excused from Religious Instruction.

Sure, I came with sick notes of my own, and that was one source of the aversion I felt: if I was wimping out and they were wimping out, pretty soon we’d be lumped together. Where we lived, it didn’t take much to be marked out – hell, it was a national pastime.

So, Joss was acceptable to me. He played tennis, mixed with non-Jewish kids at breaktime, and possessed the ability to laugh at just about anything. It made my debut into the Jewish community in the year before my bar mitzvah easier.

‘Anyway,’ said Joss, ‘Duran Duran is much cooler.’ Everyone agreed.

‘Who do you like?’ asked Gershon, turning to me.

‘A lot of stuff,’ I said, and it was true. I had the benefit of two elder brothers with tastes in music so opposed they wanted to rough each other up. They had the kind of loyalty to their bands some people have for sports teams. Music, at least, was something I could talk about.

‘Like who?’ asked Gershon.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The Rolling Stones. Bruce Springsteen. Joy Division. Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Southern Death Cult.’

‘Who?’ said Gershon.

‘David Bowie,’ I offered.

‘Nazi,’ said Lee, the other kid. ‘Fucking good, though.’

‘But Nazi,’ said Gershon. ‘And a homo. He admitted it.’

I didn’t know what to say to that and feared there’d be consequences for my answer. My mother knew homosexuals.

Joss started talking about a boy he’d met on Habonim, the Jewish summer camp, who’d been born without a foreskin. Gershon said that that was bullshit and impossible and so what – did he think that made him Moshiach or Jesus or something? They talked about their last camps and I knew it was a conversation I’d never find a way into.

‘I’m getting some juice,’ I said to Joss. On one side of the garden, three braais had been set up and the fires already lit. On the other, by a steel folding table stacked with liquor, the only black man and maybe the only Gentile in the garden stood with his arms behind his back.

Circles of chatter had gathered and I skirted between them, magnetised against them. I went to where the braais lay, each one an oil drum cut lengthways down the middle, laid on its side and filled with coals. Two friends stood over the meat, clipping braai tongs and discussing the State of Emergency.

I fetched my drink and began to walk back to Joss. A man walking towards the table raised his hand in greeting. He looked youthful, although the folds in his face gave it away that he was in his early fifties.

His most striking feature was his hair, with a grey streak an inch wide shooting back from the hairline. This, I’d learn, was Leo Fein.

‘You must be an Aronbach, hey?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Your father – he was a good man.’ Without stopping, Leo Fein pressed on towards the bar.

My memories of my father were meagre and incidental: the clinking of change in a pocket from down the passage, flashes of holidays, suggested quite possibly from photo albums. But this man had actually known him. You can count on family to say nice things about the departed but here was a stranger, unprompted, doing just that.

It was a small thing, but that he knew who I was made me feel more myself in that garden of strangers. I took my cola tonic past the little groups, neutralised to their magnetic fields, walking so close to some it was through an aura of perfume and pomade.

After a while someone’s mother called us to collect our food. We approached the half-barrel braais and took up their meat: skewered, minced in casing, marinated, and bare to the flame. We skirted the table with the schmaltz, rolls, green salad, bean salad, potato salad, and the pink pâté in the fish mould that accompanied every Jewish function, and returned to our place on the lawn.

When we’d done with lunch, someone found an old ball and we began to play ‘one bounce’ on Meyer Levinson’s tennis court. Lee was talking about pornography and Gershon was about to say something when he clammed up suddenly, and everyone turned to see Leo Fein at the fence.

‘Does one of you want to help me with something?’ he asked through the cage. He’d said ‘one of you’ but he was looking at me. No one else said a word.

‘Me,’ said I.

‘Perfect,’ said he.

‘Just me?’ I asked, jogging slowly to the court gate.

‘Should be enough. We just need to help Uncle Meyer with something, okay?’

I felt the others trying to pick up a conversation again, rolling the ball on the ground between one another while Leo Fein and I climbed the grass bank.

‘Thanks, my boy. You’re a big help, hey,’ said Leo Fein without looking back at me. ‘Meyer’s running short of booze. A party should never run out of booze, hey, boy? That’s rule number one.’

We walked along the driveway to his car, a silver Mercedes coupé with a long nose and cream leather seats. Soon we were rolling through the streets, keeping a steady pace.

‘So you’re an Aronbach, hey?’

I nodded.

‘Hey! Your father was a good man, let me tell you.’

But he didn’t tell me. He just kept driving, his shoulders pressing comfortably against the cream leather seatback, while I shuffled questions I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

My father died when I was six, if you choose to believe me, or five, if you prefer my mother’s version. I’d always correct her when we talked about it. There was no reason for me to know better than her but I pressed for the extension anyway.

It was a heart attack that killed Eddie Aronbach. I don’t remember anyone telling me he’d died. I saw Elliot, who was eleven at the time, thrash on the bed and cry rare tears. Even then I didn’t know the cause of his distress. How could I? No one was talking to me. They were too busy pouring whisky down Elliot’s neck and getting him our father’s gold watch to grip on to.

And where was Will during all this? In a pattern he’d never shake, he was working. He worked at phoning our relatives, he worked at arranging the funeral and, although still only sixteen, he worked at understanding the finances. As I grew older, carrying the knowledge of my father’s death, I sensed that I’d missed a defining trauma.

The Mercedes drifted through town and I began to wonder where we were going. We passed Dungeon Park and turned into Grobler Street, driving in the direction of the town’s great landmark, the red-and-white radio tower.

At the intersection with Schoeman Street was the place I always thought of as the centre of town. Great North Diesel and Auto Electric, the business my father had started, sat on one corner. Diagonally opposite the family business was the library with the monument of molten rifles from the Makgoba War; the other two corners were taken up by the sixteen-storey Nedbank building (our only skyscraper) and the OK Bazaars supermarket.

I’d assumed we were going to Leo Fein’s house but we drove slowly down Market Street, past Roy’s Uptown Liquor, craning to see in.

‘Ag, no. Closed,’ he said.

Of course it was closed – it was Sunday. Everyone knew it was illegal to sell alcohol on a Sunday. He must have forgotten, I thought.

We pulled around the back, into General Joubert Street, and reversed the Mercedes so that the rear bumper was close to the steel doors of the delivery entrance. Here we were hidden from what little traffic there was in town on a Sunday afternoon, on a street where the backs of many buildings lay.

‘Listen, this is my friend Roy’s place,’ said Leo Fein. ‘He’s not gonna mind if we borrow a few things. You gonna help me?’

I nodded.

‘You think you can jump over?’ He peered up at the gate through the Mercedes’ window.

‘I get into my mom’s window from the roof sometimes,’ I said. ‘For fun.’

‘Hey, what a bugger you are! Don’t worry about it – Roy’s my old friend. I’ll make it up to him.’

We stepped out of the Mercedes and Leo Fein peeped through a gap in the gate.

‘Look here,’ he said, pulling me to the square hole in the gate where the bolt lay. Our faces were side by side and he held on tight to my shirtsleeve, keeping me at the gap. ‘See that window there? That’s where you get in. If you take those empty crates there, the beer crates, and put them on top of each other, you can stand on them and get up to the window.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘When you’re inside you start bringing the booze to the big door.’ He rumbled the words at me and his instructions were beginning to drive my heart faster. ‘When you’ve got everything, you wait there at the door and then you bang three times, like this.’ He tapped three slow gongs quietly on the steel gate with his knuckle. ‘Then I’ll come in and open up, and we load and go. That’s our plan.’

I nodded and turned to climb the gate.

‘Don’t you want to ask anything?’

I looked into his face. Yes: how did you know my father? Were you friends? Were you in business together? What made my father a good man? Did my father ever do anything like this with you?

I asked none of them and shrugged instead.

‘Don’t you want to know what you must get?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘Okay. You gonna remember this? Three cases of beer – you know, twenty-four cans in a case – one of Lion, one of Ohlsson’s, one Castle. One Campari and one Tia Maria, if you find them.’ He asked for wine, too, then said, ‘Whisky. You must look for Johnnie Walker Black – not the red label. Six bottles.’

He went over it again, making me repeat it back to him. Trying to keep the order straight made me more nervous than the thought of the task ahead, driving out one kind of anxiety with another.

‘Clever boy,’ he said when I had the order right. ‘You get the whisky first, okay?’ Leo Fein stooped a little and locked his fingers so that his hands formed a stirrup. ‘Come,’ he said. It was a familiar pose to me but one I’d never seen an adult assume. I put my foot in his hands and he boosted me up.

‘Be quick,’ said Leo Fein in a low voice once I was over. ‘They’re waiting for us at Uncle Meyer’s.’ I carried the plastic crates up a ramp that led to the raised loading bay where the steel roller doors hung shut, and stacked them against the wall. Here, I staggered them like steps up to the window.

I hauled my body up and knelt on the top crate, then raised myself to open the window, which was hinged at the top. The tower teetered but held as my foot came off it, and I wormed myself through the fanlight.

Now half of me was outside and half inside where things were much darker and the sounds of my efforts struck hard surfaces. Only here, at this halfway point, did I feel the clanging of the risks involved.

It was too painful to remain there like that for too long, and I couldn’t turn back and face Leo Fein as a failure, so I swung over inside, hanging off the frame from my fingers. I had no idea how far the drop was from the window or what lay beneath me in the dark. It’s an odd feeling, giving yourself up to fall an uncertain distance. Even a suicide jumper must have an idea of just when he’ll hit the ground, but the raised delivery bay and the darkness confused my sense of depth.

I inhaled unsteadily and unhooked my hands. My bare arms slid against the cold enamel paint of the wall and my feet touched down with a shock, earlier than anticipated.

When my eyes adjusted, I got busy shopping. Well, what choice did I have now? I knew which were the brandies, which the whiskies, liqueurs and wines, since I’d studied closely the bottles in the bar at home. I found the Johnnie Walker without too much trouble.

Soon enough I had our consignment arranged neatly before the roller door. The three bangs came as a shock, even though it was my own fist on the steel. I strained to hear outside.

Silence.

I considered that I’d been left there – they’d only find me in the morning and I’d have to try to sneak out or lie about why I was there. If I didn’t get back to Meyer Levinson’s house, there were the Dorfmans to consider, the whole party might be concerned; my mother.

I was about to bang on the steel again when I heard the whine of an engine and a crash and a shudder. The car was near; I heard footsteps approaching, then violence at the base of the steel door. It made me think about running behind the boxes but all I did was freeze.

‘The chain!’ said Leo Fein on the other side. ‘Pull the chain!’

I groped along the wall and found it and pulled. The roller doors began to rise. Leo Fein slid underneath and started to carry the liquor out. The silver Mercedes stood vibrating serenely in the loading bay; the gates to the yard seemed to have imploded and a rear corner of the car had been crushed slightly under the impact.

Leo Fein already had some of the beer at the car and fought to open the boot lid so much that the rear bounced on the shock absorbers. He finally had it open and, while I stood frozen, the man moved with more speed than I’d anticipated from someone his age and shape.

‘The whisky? You get it?’ he asked, sprinting up the steps. He answered his own question by scooping up four bottles.

I ran after him, helping him load the last few bottles into the boot and sliding the rest onto the back seats. It took several thrusts to slam the boot lid down before it finally clung shut.

Once we were in the car, we sped through the gates. For three or four blocks my head was pushed against the leather seat and the engine emitted an alarmed howl. We said nothing. Thereafter we slowed to the same cruising velocity with which we’d left the party.

I stole a look at the man. The straight line of his lips was presided over by a proud and not unattractive nose through which he did virtually all of his breathing. Only the very ends of the mouth curved one way or the other and the lips appeared tucked in. This straight line set off, by contrast, the curves and folds of his cheek, chin, neck and belly.

He finally loosened a little. Calmly he said, ‘Well done, my boy. You were like a cat, hey?’

I was still reeling, riding high on the caper. ‘Is your car okay? What happened?’

‘The car? A little scratch, my friend,’ he said coolly. Then without holding back, he said, ‘Smashed those gates in like they weren’t even there, my china! Bam!’

The Mercedes approached a red light and slowed to a stop and, with the last catch of the brakes on the wheels, the boot popped open, revealing our haul. We both quietened down as a high-riding Hilux bakkie rumbled up the street behind us. The elevated cab’s occupants would have had an easy view of the shining bottles between the loosened jaws of the car boot as they gently turned to the lane alongside ours and came to a stop.

I watched Leo Fein face front as if for an austere presidential photograph, or a mugshot. In the neighbouring bakkie an upright couple in Sunday best gawked at the slightly tattered Mercedes, then at Leo Fein with the white streak and the twelve-year-old in the passenger seat next to him.

Leo Fein kept staring ahead and did the most peculiar thing. He began to pick his nose in earnest. How he dug and scraped in that fleshy pit. From my ringside seat I had a view of both Leo Fein and, across him through two sets of windows, the couple in the next car.

It happened before anyone had a chance to examine the situation in any detail and, as if to deny or excuse this private act of a fellow human being, by some compulsion the couple turned their heads and faced front. We in the silver Mercedes turned left.

‘Works every time,’ said Leo Fein. ‘Don’t know why, but it works.’

‘What if we get stopped?’ I asked.

‘Ag, nobody cares. It’s like a practical joke. That’s what it is. You know – like when you pretend there’s a string across the doorway in class and climb over it. Or you put drawing pins on the teacher’s seat, hey?’

‘Ja,’ I said, as if I did those things.

‘So it’s no big deal. But that doesn’t mean you go blabbing to everyone about where we got this stuff, okay?’

‘I know.’

‘I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea. Some people do that.’

We arrived back in the garden of Meyer Levinson when the braai barrels had been cleared of their meat and the afternoon was sinking into night. I called Joss and the two older boys to help carry the liquor from the Mercedes.

‘It really wasn’t necessary, Leo,’ said Meyer Levinson. ‘All this drink. People will be leaving.’

‘Don’t mention it, Meyer. You only have one sixtieth.’

‘The other thing, Leo—’

‘Ah,’ said Leo Fein, ‘I see my friends have arrived.’

While I placed the beers in the icy water of the galvanised tub on the grass, I watched Leo Fein approach two men, one wearing Aviator glasses and the other tidying his hair with a steel comb. Leo Fein cradled the bottles of Johnnie Walker Black in his arms and greeted the men in Afrikaans. They moved inside Meyer Levinson’s house.

The boys and I smuggled a few beers around the side of the house. We popped the cans and let the aroma fizz out of the tops. The smell was always better than the taste, not as bitter, and in our haste to drink it down Joss and I let rip several burps from our throats. I began to feel the lightness rise up in me even before the end of one can.

‘So where did you go?’ asked Gershon, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘Just for a little cruise,’ I said, mysteriously.

‘This is good stuff,’ said Lee, savouring a lengthy sip of Lion Lager. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and blackened the end lighting it.

‘What the hell happened to his car?’ asked Joss.

‘A scratch, my friend. Nothing more.’

Joss crushed the empty can in his hand. ‘Oops! Just a scratch, old sport.’

Someone came around the corner and we all hid our cans. ‘Fuck off, Shoshana,’ said Lee.

‘I know what you’re doing,’ said the girl shaped like a potato latke.

‘So?’ said Lee.

‘So you better give me some or I’ll tell your mom,’ she said.

Lee gave her his can and she took a sip so small it barely wet her lips.

‘So where did you get it from?’ Gershon asked me again.

‘Let’s just say, a friend’s place,’ I said. ‘No big deal.’ How much could I inflate the mystery before it collapsed, I wondered.

‘Oh, a friend,’ said Lee, blinking through the smoke.

When no one tried to pry it out of me, I said, ‘Yip, an old friend called Roy’s Uptown.’

‘They’re not open on a Sunday,’ said Potato Latke scornfully.

‘No, they’re not,’ I said and walked around the corner again. I wasn’t one of them, but I’d found a kind of position among them.

Really I sought to share the feeling of victory with my accomplice, a feeling amplified by the beer, but he was inside with the new men and the whisky. Already many guests were leaving Meyer Levinson’s garden.

Mrs Dorfman was walking towards me. ‘Where’s Joss, Ben?’ she asked. ‘We’re leaving now.’

‘He’s coming. I just wanted to say goodbye inside.’

‘To Leo Fein? Oh, I think he’s having some kind of business meeting. I’m sure it’s fine if you don’t say goodbye. It’s getting late.’

The others came out from around the side of the house and Joss joined me next to his mother. ‘Come on, boys,’ she said, scanning us with her eyes.

Meyer Levinson and Mr Dorfman were standing together, whispering to each other in between goodbyes to the guests.

‘I don’t see why he has to meet in your home, Meyer,’ said Mrs Dorfman as we approached,