PATRICK ROSENGOLDZ was fat. Not a bit fat. Too fat.
 He was constantly hitching up his pants due to the impossibility of securing anything on the equator of his stomach.
 He denied he was Jewish, serving pork to his guests and eating ham and bacon openly at pavement cafes and cocktail parties.
 You could always hear Rosengoldz at a party ... the barrel of air behind his voice sent it forth with timbre and his rolled rrs were like a motor bike starting up.
 He ate with gutso gusto, drinking soup like a noisy vacuum cleaner, eating lumps of meat with little chewing. He could eat an entire plate of spaghetti without breaking the thread -  a pasta machine in reverse.
 ‘You can tell if anyone’s lived in a concentration camp by the way they eat,’ he said, not excusing, just explaining.
 When he came to Australia with his mother and sister after the second world war he was twelve, relieved, ambitious and optimistic. After primary school, he studied silversmithing at the technical college for two years, enduring life with his mother and sister. He was not fond of his mother and he hated his sister.
At seventeen he started work in an antique shop in St Kilda and moved in to a flat nearby. It was a very small flat in a street leading to the beach.  It was his alone and he felt some contentment for the first time in his life.
He bought a leather jacket, a black shirt and black drill pants which he tucked in to leather boots.   He knotted a small red scarf around his neck and grew a beard. People began to notice this hefty fellow in the all-black get-up and believed him to be a painter or an actor.
As he passed windows, Rosengoldz turned his head to catch his reflection, pleased with  the image.  It was about this time that he began to act pompously and believe in his newly created self.
The antique shop brought him in touch with the sort of people he wanted to cultivate: artistic, avant-garde, well off. He was invited to gallery openings and got himself on to the invitation lists of the ones that drew the people he wanted to mix with. On these occasions he stationed himself where waiters appeared with loaded trays on the first leg from the kitchens. If the food was on a table in the gallery he’d stand next to it - that way you could get plenty and meet just about everyone as they came for food.
At a St Kilda gallery one night he met Judith Reilly: dark, vivacious, intelligent, warm. He knew at once she was right for him. And she was impressed with this confident, leather-bound character.
Within a year they had married, Rosengoldz and Reilly. Between them they had enough to buy a cottage in Middle Park with deposit and mortgage.
His mother and sister didn’t come to the wedding. They didn’t approve and anyway they weren’t invited. The Reillys weren’t keen on the match either. They’d expected their daughter to marry a Catholic, at the altar. Two of her sisters came to be bridesmaids at the garden ceremony.
All the same it was a happy wedding with a feast for thirty or so friends at a little restaurant in Acland Street. Plenty of champagne and wine and a thundering speech from the groom.
They stepped out in to the night air, Rosengoldz and Reilly, Patrick and Judith, man and wife, to begin their honeymoon. The bombastic silversmith and the jolly librarian, both of them virgins.
‘Let’s walk home,’ Patrick said. ‘Home. Our home. Mrs Rosengoldz.’
‘Good idea Mr Rosengoldz. We could do with a little sobering before ... before ... um.’  She giggled and squeezed his hand. ‘Your hand’s sweating Patrick. Are you a bit nervous?’
He didn’t return the squeeze and looked, instead of at her, to the city lights. They’d crossed several roads and were walking along the beach. Judith had slipped off her high strappy sandals.
‘Aren’t we lucky to live right here, almost in the heart of the city, a beach at the door, next to the most cosmopolitan village in Melbourne?’
He strode ahead, flung out his arms and turned full circle.
‘I am marrrrvellously happy,’ he shouted to the sky, and rushed back to kiss his wife.
They stood at their cottage gate, loving their home. The moment they saw it they decided on it.   Judith had said ‘Look, pink and golden roses in the garden ... rosengoldz.’
 And Patrick had spotted the lead light around the door. ‘Look, green shamrocks ... Reilly of Ireland.’
He tried to pick her up and carry her across the threshold, tottering before he could lift  her properly and they both fell in to the hall laughing. All due more to the difficulty of lifting someone as comely as Judith up and over his tummy than to the excitement and wine.
‘Let’s have a nightcap,’ he said.
‘No let’s go to bed ... bed.’  She ran her finger around his face and down his open shirt, ruffling the hair on his chest.
She sat on the crinoline chair he’d given her for a wedding present. A curvaceous chair, she thought, with its bosomly back and narrow waist with covered buttons studding the back.
She was about to take off her stockings and changed her mind. She stood up and peeled off her dress with a sexy wriggle,  knowing he was watching her. Then off with the bra. He gasped at the sight of her full breasts.
Now she was standing in just French knickers and suspenders and stockings, still in her heeled sandals, which gave length and shape to her legs.
Patrick was still fully dressed. He came to her and held her breasts, nuzzled his head between them and kissed the nipples one after the other.
‘You really are a virgin, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I wondered if you were fibbing about that.’
‘And you?  You weren’t lying about that were you?’
 ‘No. A good Catholic girl. A bit of petting, but nothing more. I’m not sure whether my virginity is due to fear of religion or of pregnancy.’
She sat on the chair and gave him a coquettish glance ... he knelt and unbuttoned the suspenders and rolled the stockings to her calves and slid his hands up the insides of her parted thighs.
‘Hurry up and get undressed,’ she said, leaping in to bed.
He went to the bathroom across the hall and returned in his dressing gown. Poor Patrick, she thought, so shy. She laughed when the bed creaked and lowered under him and put her arm around his chest. They kissed and held each other full length, her body bending to take in his stomach.
Making love was not going to be easy but she was determined to dispense with her virginity and took over.  It was not a success. Despite her fervour and manipulation his response was, alas, limp;  though she managed to guide him inside her to her moderate satisfaction, he clearly had not enjoyed it.
He fell away from her and sighed ...  deep, dark sigh with a long tail.
‘I’m sorry. Rrreally sorry. I’m not going to be good at this.’
‘I’ll make you good at it,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Don’t worry. We’re new at it, that’s all.’
But it wasn’t all.

Patrick’s joy in life was holding dinner parties. With his guests a captive audience, he was able to preside, proclaim and perform. 
‘This is a little recipe I found in a French Provincial book.’  He shouted above his chattering guests.   ‘It’s rrrrreally a simple stew, but let’s call it a ragout.  Pork and veal;  onions fried in butter, butter my friends, until they just begin to color, very important. Turn the meat in it, add crushed garlic, a glass of vin blanc, salt, ground pepper, half a cup of stock and ‘erbs tied in a bunch. Oh, almost forgot, a secret ... a heaped tablespoon of tomato paste.’
He had a pepper mill long before they became common in Australia and used herbs and spices hardly known to the locals. Food was his obsession and cooking his favorite activity.  His spirits rose when he was having guests for dinner. He was a good host, embracing all with enthusiasm, flourishing bottles of good red wine and passing bowls of chocolate truffles with strong brewed coffee.
What he lacked in demonstration of warmth in everyday life, he made up for in generosity and heartiness as a host.
Around his table this night were what he liked to call ‘guests reflecting my eclectic taste in friends’.
Next to him sat one of his favorites, Barbie Fox, who, apart from being blonde and sensual, engaged in conversation with spirit, a fearless boat-rocker who’d pit her views against the entire table.
Next to Barbie, Barry Donovan, a drama producer with the Australian Broadcasting Commission.   A popular bloke for his dry humor, he brooked no nonsense and could cut you down to size with an observation that landed like a nudge and felt like a hammer. Donovan was tall and wore double breasted jackets which helped disguise his beer gut;  but he had a round, smiling face that easily charmed.
Vis-a-vis Donovan was Jack Hall, investigative journalist with The Age Newspaper. Hall had a very sharp mind and a tongue to match, the tenacity of a hound dog; very sure of himself and one of the highest paid journos in town with an open cheque expense account. Around mid-height, he had cool brown eyes, olive skin, dark curly hair and a wicked smile. He was altogether attractive. Women liked him. Men didn’t. Around the traps Jack Hall was known as The Jackal.
Fay Marshall sat between Jack Hall and Rosengoldz, at the head, and her husband Keith sat between Barry Donovan and Judith at her end of the table. The Marshalls ran a small art gallery in St Kilda. She was small and intense; he was soft and slow and preferred listening to venturing opinions. Fay had thick mahogany coloured hair, short and cut in layers that held perfectly.
On Judith’s left, Harvey Watson, who was studying European History and Politics at Melbourne University. Corded velvet trousers and tweedy jacket and glasses were his uni-form; Watson was congenial and pliable, better on facts than opinions.
‘Patrick must have a woman on either side,’ Judith said to Harvey. ‘That means I get a man either side, but with two extra men, they’re caught in the middle.’
‘Eight’s difficult if you have host one end and hostess the  other. This is jolly good stew or whatever. He’s a good cook of hearty food.’
‘I think you have to like food to be a good cook. Patrick tastes as he goes along. Sometimes I wish he wasn’t so keen on food. I’ve put on so much weight since we married.’
Jack Hall drained his glass. ‘That’s a fairly mediocre drop Rosengoldz.  I trust you’re going to open the very decent claret I brought.  Cost me ten quid and I didn’t spend that for you to put it in your cellar.’
He scraped his chair back, went to the sideboard and collected his bottle, thrust the opener in to the cork and screwed hard, almost with a passion. The women watched him, their lips parted. The men closed their lids as they drained their glasses.  Judith resented the erotic feeling she had to Hall’s action and squeezed down on her seat to push out the feeling.  But it only increased.  Their eyes met as he sat down. Damn, she thought, he knows.
Conversation gave way to sounds of appreciation, several reached across for bread to mop up the gravy.
‘No better compliment to the cook than that,’ said Patrick. ‘Not a skerek left.’
Judith rose to collect the plates and, as she did, Jack got up and collected empties from his end of the table and followed her to the kitchen.
He came up behind her as she rinsed plates; nuzzled her neck and ran kisses to the end of her shoulder, pulling down her gypsy blouse almost to the elbow. She felt his hand, bold and warm, surround her breast; he squeezed the hardening nipple between two fingers.
‘You’re not getting any from your old man are you?  It’s not just that big gut getting in the way ... he can’t, can he?’
‘Jack, really! Stop it. This isn’t fair.’  But she didn’t push him away and admitted to herself a quickening pleasure at the pressure of his full groin in the small of her back.
‘You’re like a grape full of juice with the skin just splitting,’ he said.
Still from behind, he slipped both hands through the waist of her skirt and pressed his palms on the curve of her stomach. Judith pulled her muscles in as though to allow his hand to slide down.
She wanted to turn and face him without losing touch with his body and let him take her, right there at the sink, standing, quickly.
‘Don’t plan anything for your day off next week.’  He kissed her neck. ‘I’ll bring food and wine.’
She let the cold water run over her wrists before following him back to the table, where she saw that he was diving in to a conversation as though nothing had happened.
She looked around her guests and at Patrick and there was no sign, no smirk or raised eyebrow.  Well  of course, who could have known that in a few moments in the kitchen she had taken her first steps in to infidelity and that she was sitting there, rosy with expectancy.

 Patrick was reading the Saturday paper in the garden drinking coffee and eating a Danish pastry filled with custard cream and sour cherries.
He turned the page and saw something that turned his blood to mercury, cold and queer.
Then he screamed.  ‘No, no. The filthy scum. The filthy scum.’  And he punched the page, splitting through the paper.
Then he roared to Heaven. ‘The satanic bastard, fucking bastard. God, You’re a bastard too.’
He cried, bawled, howled, moaned, heaved and shuddered, tears flooding down his face and sogging in his beard. He stamped his feet until they hurt.
Then he fell on his arms, sobbing in to his sleeves like a little boy.
Judith watched without moving. She wanted to go to him, touch him, but it seemed as though he had gone to another time, a terrible time that she could never be part of.
‘What?  What, what, what?’ she said.
‘Pavelic is dead. Viktor Pavelic. The monster.’
‘Who’s Pavelic?  Why does it matter?’
‘My god, why does it matter? He was only the cruelest beast on earth. He killed hundreds of thousands. And look, he’s lived free in Spain.’
‘But he’s dead now, so it’s all over.’
‘It’s not over for us. Death was too good for him. Life was too good for him.’
‘What more could you want than to see him dead.’
He jumped to his feet and threw a fist to the sky. ‘I wanted RRRREVENGE. Revenge. That’s what I wanted.’
In his anger and defeat, his longing for revenge, Patrick dragged inside, out of light of day, into the second bedroom, his bedroom it had become, where the curtains were drawn. He lay down and closed his eyes. No man could have been more wretched.
It was dark, but he could see, as clearly as though it were a film on a dazzling screen. So connected was he to it all that it might have been yesterday.

It is Zagreb 1944. Patrick’s father, Max, Russian ambassador stationed in Zagreb, has been arrested and taken to a labour camp by Croatian authorities under German influence. His mother Milka has asked her childhood friend Viktor Pavelic, Croatian born, like herself, to help get the release of Max. Viktor has come to their home and after a short discussion, in which he appears remote and arrogant, he takes her roughly by the hand and draws her to a room down the hallway.  
Milka doesn’t know what to expect. Why has Viktor drawn her away from the children in to the little writing room, over to the French Regency desk with its gilded carving and leather top?
‘Milka!  How could you have deserted your own beliefs and married him?  You’ve betrayed Croatia.’ His anger increases as he sees her more as deserter than woman, more enemy than childhood friend.
He pushes his body on hers. She falls backwards on the desk.
‘Turn over.’  She is too frightened not to obey and lies, from hips to shoulders, on top of the desk. He grabs her skirt and pushes it up until it holds above her buttocks; she screams, ‘No, Viktor, don’t. Please don’t.’
Patrick pushes the door open and pulls up at three steps in to the room. His mother whimpers, ‘Viktor. My boy! Please don’t.’
Pavelic’s expression changes from anger to guile. ‘No, let the boy stay.’
He undoes his fly buttons and his penis springs out like a jack-in-box, shuddering and oddly suspended. The boy is shocked and mesmerized. It looks like Mr Weissman’s Polish sausage, purplish red, with a small bend and a round end.
The boy watches, breathless, as Pavelic drags down his mother’s panties and pushes the purple rod in to her body.
The man rests his hands heavily on her shoulder blades. A sharp pain makes her cry out.
Patrick wants to rush and punch him.  But he doesn’t. He turns and  runs to the pink velvet curtains, burying his face in their softness;  the curtain rod crashes down on him as he heaves up the last decent meal he would have in a long time.
Pavelic, no longer aware of the boy, is a Mongolian horseman riding the plains, savage and dominating, aware of the powerful rhythmic strides of his magnificent horse, exulting his skill in the saddle.
Up, up, up, it leaps, up, up and, ‘Yes,’ he cries, up and over the top of a high peak, where the altitude makes his head almost burst. Then down they float, rider and horse, as though a giant parachute eases their journey to a green valley.
He withdraws, stark, rude awakening to reality. ‘To think I followed a Jew in there,’ he curses.
He wipes his penis on her skirt. Holding his handkerchief under the subsiding beast he pours whisky from the decanter over it and wipes himself clean. Sterilized.  He throws the handkerchief in to the tooled leather waste bin and buttons his fly, inflating his chest and clearing his throat.
‘You are to be out of the embassy in the morning. The Ustashi need it for officers’ quarters.’
And he strides from the room, leaving behind a boy now sliced forever from his mother and carrying a knowledge that will be his shadow for life.
Milka wants to soak through the top of the desk and remain  in the drawers, lost amongst sheets of paper and little diaries. Something died for her too. Her motherhood is gone, her pride, her home.

Patrick’s mother and father first met in Russia where Max Rosengoldz was a diplomat and Milka’s father an official representative from Croatia. Despite protests from their parents, the Croatian Catholic and the Russian Jew married, had a daughter and a son before moving to Zagreb for a new posting. World War II was beginning, German influence strong in Zagreb and Max Rosengoldz, fearing the plight of his wife and children, engaged a surgeon to insert a precious family diamond in Milka’s breast. 
Patrick would never blot out the vision of his father, in a line of prisoners linked by barbed wire around their necks, marched by German guards to a deep crevice, where the first man was pushed over, dragging the others with him.
With the German retreat, the Russians and local Communists took charge, Now it was the Croatians who were to suffer; Milka and the children were arrested and taken to a prison camp. The starving Patrick stole eight cream buns from the officers’ mess and gorged on them until he was sick behind the prisoners’ quarters.
In the confusion after the war, Milka and the children escaped, crossing to the western coast where they were taken by rowing boat to Trieste, from there to Italy and finally to Australia.

Although guilt lurks deep within us all, even the shallowest of souls will know it’s there; that one day it will rise to the consciousness and smite them, perhaps not until those moments when death is known to be near.
Guilt isn’t balanced out by the misfortune we endure; it stands alone, a thing apart, a thing of our own making.
Patrick Rosengoldz had more than his share of it. He felt guilt for being there at the rape of his mother and doing nothing; for stealing the cream buns; for denying his origins; for creating a false image of himself. 
And there was Ernie. Ah, such deception. He stole from Ernie. He lied to Ernie. He justified his greed; he’d told himself it was Ernie’s fault, fair game. 
 Ernie Wise had a problem. From the age of nine he was betting two aniseed balls to Stanley Street’s packet of licorice cigarettes, racing someone to the willow tree for a penny the winner, playing marbles with anyone who’d risk theirs in the ring with him around.
One day he cleaned up the Knight twins’ entire stock of marbles and went to bed with two bags full and dreamed of winning enough marbles to fill his bedroom to the ceiling.
He was placing bets on the dogs and trots as soon as he got his first pay packet and hung around bookmakers until Jock Mackenzie took him on as a clerk.  Mackenzie worked all the tracks in country towns around Ballarat.
‘Don’t bet on ‘em son,’ he’d tell young Ernie. ‘Y’can never win mate. Not in the end. The bookie is always the winner.’
But Ernie couldn’t stop. And although he lost more often than won, he always believed he’d land the big one some day.
His father was killed in World War I and his mother died when he was ten. He went to live with Aunt Dorothea, who enjoyed his chirpy company and he filled that vacancy of the childless woman.
‘I have plans for you Ernie. This enormous house is packed with very valuable antiques brought out in the middle of last century. There’s enough here to start an antique shop. As you sell a piece, you can buy more.  I think we should open a shop in Melbourne. Property will never be as low as it is now and the Depression is riding out.’
So it was that Wise Antiques opened in Fitzroy Street St Kilda just before World War II. Aunt Dorothea sold her big Victorian house in Ballarat and bought a pleasant villa in Elwood, close enough to the shop to keep an eye on young Ernie.
When she died in 1959 she left everything to Ernie. He sold the villa and lived above the shop. All along he’d been gambling and the money from the house only just covered his debts spread around  the bookies.
Patrick Rosengoldz had been working for him for four years when Aunt Dorothea died; he’d set up a work bench where he mended and polished the antique silver. Like most Europeans, Rosengoldz appreciated antiques and soon took over the buying with far greater wisdom than Ernie. 
The more money Ernie got, the more he gambled. He was drinking, not eating properly and at fifty looked nearer seventy. Patrick persuaded him to live in a nearby boarding house where the rent would cover decent food.
By the mid-sixties Ernie’s debts were biting in to the business and he was short of Patrick’s wages. 
‘Look here Ernie. I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll forgo wages in return for shares in this business.  I’ll get papers drawn up to make it legal ... not a partnership, just part ownership of the building and stock. That’ll cover my wages for the next couple of years.’  Wages were of no account to Patrick, who was selling stock on the side and pocketing large sums, cheating Ernie of far more than his wages.
Ernie signed. Two years later, with the bank balance at nil and Ernie degenerated dramatically, Patrick made his move.
‘Ernie my friend.  We face the future with no money.  I can’t go on working forever without money.   I think the time has come to sign the balance over to me, get it off your shoulders.  I’ll work the business up again, keep you on a retainer and you’ll be free of the worry of it all.’
Ernie signed the final papers and Patrick Rosengoldz rubbed the palms of his hands and rested his chin on the tips of his fingers and felt very relaxed.

Milka had the diamond removed from her breast a month after settling in Australia and kept it locked away. She had no need to sell it to survive. Australia was generous to migrants. No, Max would have liked the family diamond to pass to his son. She was a free-thinker, but old customs were deep. She gave the diamond to Patrick a month before she died.
Patrick, with love he couldn’t show in the usual way, expressed it through the gift of the diamond. He had it made in to a ring for Judith and on a joyous sunny day he was ready to present it. She was the other side of the road when he saw her. He called her name and held the diamond high in his hand where it glinted in the sunlight.
‘For you, darling wife,’ he called. 
Judith, dazzled by the sun and the gleaming diamond, rushed towards him, crossing the road without thinking. A car struck her down before she reached the other side. 
She died. Right there. At once.   

Patrick poured the last of the wine in to his glass and took it with him to the courtyard.  He sat at the big timber table where they’d had so many happy meals with friends.  He looked small, sitting there alone.
‘Oh God, what’s the point of it all.   What’s it matter if You exist or not?
‘If Jews are Your chosen people why did You choose such a life for me?
‘Why all the misery?  Why did You make me see all that vileness in Yugoslavia?
‘Why did You let those Levitical priests write laws that bind us with a noose?  Why did they tell us You said to conquer our enemies and kill every living thing? Why must we hate so much?
‘Why must we stand apart from the rest no matter where we live?  Is that why they persecute us?   Because we are bound to each other and can’t be bound to them?
  ‘Why did You let me steal the food in the camp. And I’m not proud of taking Ernie down for his shop or getting the diamond from my mother ... when she was dying for god’s sake.
‘Why did You  take the only one I care about? Are You her God too?
‘If the wages of sin are death, why am I still here?’
He dropped his head on the table and muffled his ears with his arms and sobbed. ‘And above all God, why did You make me a coward?’
This seemed to him to be the worst of his sins.
Then he heard a voice say ‘I didn’t do it. You did.’
He jerked upright. God has spoken to him.
He felt just as he had when he’d ridden the ferris wheel at Luna Park:  alight, terrified and ecstatic, the whirling force sending his stomach down to press on his groin arousing him sexually.
Then he heard another voice. A woman’s. ‘You’re always shifting the blame,’ she said.
He heard them walking down the old cobbled service lane behind his fence, and sat until their footsteps were beyond hearing.
He pushed himself up with his palms on the table and sighed, deeply, mournfully.
‘Well, that settles it. I’ve always said I didn’t believe in God.’
He went inside and slammed the door.
‘It’s all bull shit.’  He whispered that ... just in case.