Two

Being Jewish was one thing. Having something to do with Israel was quite another: Israel was always in my vicinity, or not altogether, like a person who hadn't yet rung the doorbell, or had rung it but was somewhere else when you opened the door. Israel was a country unlike any of the others because it wasn't only on the map, nor in the end was it just outside the house. It had mysteriously already come in and was right in the middle of people's lives.

For a start, there were the Keren Kayemet boxes, especially in the neighbourhood, some distance from our own, where my father's parents, Granny Lily and Grandpa Joe, lived.

The boxes were blue and white, made of tin, about the size of a fat book, with a sort of spring (I thought) around the inside of the slot at the top so as (I supposed) to prevent anyone from trying to get the money out (I never tried). They were often placed at the entrance to houses, next to the black Bakelite telephone, or propping up a set of dog-eared thrillers on a shelf. If you put some money into the slot then it would go to Israel and trees would be able to grow there.

How exactly this happened I could not work out. In the first place I had never seen anyone actually come to take the boxes away, or, for that matter, bring them back again. Nonetheless, I checked that they were sometimes filled and sometimes empty, which meant that there were mysterious hands reaching into people's houses to get them because of the trees.

Why trees, I wondered? Why not spend at least some of the money on a cake mixer for Granny Lily, for example, since she could really do with a new one?

I supposed that there weren't any trees in Israel, or hardly any. Maybe the whole country was bald, and people had to stand at the side of the sea waiting for ships to bring in the trees they so badly needed.

Could a shilling or even half a crown really help to buy one?

Granny Lily's Keren Kayemet box was on a low, almost marble, veined beige mantelpiece above the electric heater in the living room; a troop of ebony elephants with ivory tusks went marching all the way up to it, the biggest elephant in front and a baby one with tiny tusks bringing up the rear. Mr and Mrs Goodman next door also had a box and so did Mr Harrison a few gates down, but that was before his wife died and he left and his house had to be fumigated.

Mr Goodman was a bar mitzvah teacher and he had a piano that occupied a whole room. A few of the keys were a bit brown at the edges like smokers' fingers.

Sometimes, I would be near the tall brick wall that separated my grandmother's yard from the Goodmans' house, spending a long time listening to what was going on in there. Sunlight sharpened the bits of broken bottle stuck in the cement at the top of the wall, while from the other side came the sound of a boy's voice diligently following Mr Goodman's instructions, up and down the piano notes on the way to his bar mitzvah.

Mr Goodman's son Hershey had already had one. Afterwards, he started wearing a leather jacket to go with his ducktail hairstyle, but now everything was all right because he was in Israel, which was where you went.

Granny Lily and I walked across to Mr and Mrs Goodman's at tea-time and were invited into the kitchen to see the wonder of neon tubes against the ceiling: they went plink, plink, plink while they were switching on, letting out a pale, pinkish-orange mist of light. Over tea, Mr Goodman asked me if I was going to have a bar mitzvah and when I said nothing because I didn't know what to say, Mr Goodman glanced at Granny Lily. She glanced back at him sharply from under her perm and changed the subject.

But the question hovered over me, just out of reach. Nor did Granny Lily bring it any closer by talking about it when we were alone. She surely had other things on her mind, such as what to make her husband for supper, or when she could take the tram into town and buy a pattern with which to sew a new dress for herself. And anyway, the bar mitzvah question was linked not only to me but to my parents, and she studiously avoided talking about them except once, when we were walking alongside the park on the way back to her place from the shops.

I don't remember how the conversation began, but I do remember that just for once Granny Lily became extremely angry. I also remember how it ended, because she said they were a pair of well-educated donkeys. Then she changed the subject.

When both my parents were busy, which was often enough, I spent days and nights staying over at Granny Lily's home, having meals with her and Grandpa Joe, wandering across to the park to play soccer or fly a kite.

Sometimes people came over to visit Granny Lily, or she occasionally visited them and took me with her. They were mainly family members and a few neighbours, with blue-rinsed perms and dress patterns in special packets, cigarette holders, talcum-powdered cheeks and bones that shrank, which was what Granny Lily said happened when you grew old.

They had a great many things to speak about in English and also in Yiddish, especially when I came too close, and they drank their tea black with grape jam swirling in it. Purl one slip one, they repeated like a private prayer, knitting and crocheting and talking away.

I hung around for a while, but soon went off to start reading through the comics I had brought with me, following the adventures of Archie and Veronica and Jughead, Richie Rich the Poor Little Rich Boy, Bugs Bunny, Beetle Bailey, Popeye and Olive, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Lotta and Felix the Cat.

I read till my mind was thin as a page and all the quirky doings blurred into each other; I read till the words were pressed out of their bubbles and went on speaking in my mind. I closed the last comic and still Elmer Fudd would be tiptoeing around muttering Be vewy, vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits, while Tweety Bird repeated I tawt I taw a puddy tat.

So I went to revive myself with a cold strawberry milkshake and a plateful of pastries: crisp, airy waves of sweetness, balls sticky with black molasses, tender diamonds of carrot and ginger, soft, rolled mouthfuls of cinnamon, even their names were waiting to be eaten: kichel, teiglach, imberlach, rugelach.

Granny Lily spoke Yiddish and her pastries had tasty names, that was how things were. Comic books were where you went when there was nowhere else to go. And trees didn't have to stay in one place. They would be planted thanks to all the coins in those blue and white boxes in Johannesburg, miles and miles of trees floating for a great distance till they could take root in the land of Israel, which was out of sight yet so close you could almost see it.

I don't remember seeing any Keren Kayemet boxes in our part of Johannesburg, though there must have been some. Nor did I notice many women with perms, though there must have been more. The people who lived in our neighbourhood were generally much younger, they swam in pools before sipping sundowners and held tennis parties on Sundays.

As for our family, I remember my pale-skinned mother doggy-paddling with some effort across the width of someone else's pool (my swimming skills no doubt come from her). My father had severe gout and his form of exercise was walking, usually in deep discussion with another man.

There were also meetings at our house, behind closed doors because of the bug in the Bakelite telephone at the far end of the passage. Everyone smoked till the windows clouded over, but they did not drink. All we had in the way of alcohol was half a cheap bottle of cooking wine in the kitchen.

Nonetheless, there we were, perched on a corner of a block on the smart side of the city, in a house different from my friends' houses. In a suburb unlike the one where my grandparents lived.

In fact, for me the whole of Johannesburg was split in two.

There were no jaded blocks of flats very near us as there were across the road from Granny Lily and Grandpa Joe's. The houses were bigger and did not look like each other. None that I knew of had meagre lines of daisies and foxgloves standing in a little strip of garden out in front.

There weren't mezuzahs on all the doorposts in our part of Johannesburg.

There wasn't an ordinary house that had been turned into a shul.

Shops didn't display rows of tongue that was grey and almost blue; pimply, juicy pickled cucumbers and gefilte fish and kneaded, honey-coloured kitke and hamantaschen with their hidden, tender nests of poppy seeds.

There was no Mr Squire standing at the doorway of Squire's Outfitters with a smile under his luxuriant moustache and row upon row of suits hanging flat as shadows behind him, waiting for men to come in with their wives and fill them out. They would remove their hats, lift their jackets like sea-birds about to take off and have their waists tape-measured by the ever-ready Mr Squire. If there was someone like him on our side of the city, I never had the opportunity to find out.

Mr Squire would have been one of the people in favour of my having a bar...