'The rabbi says it's all romance,' offered Saul. Both young men looked at him. Phryne was expecting them to squash him, as one does with little brothers, but both of them, instead, listened.
'What else does the rabbi say?' asked Yossi.
Without closing the book, Saul blinked, took a gulp of Simon's tea, and recited: 'It is called Sephirot because it states that there are ten palaces—that is the Hebrew word for ten,' he added kindly, for Phryne's sake. 'But the top three cannot be contemplated by men. The lower seven are populated by angels praising God always, and through the palaces, from the lowest to the highest, the soul rises until it is at last one with En Soph the mystical and transcendent.' At the mention of this name, Yossi drew in a sharp breath. 'Rabbi Moses de Leon in Spain wrote a lot about it, but my rabbi says that a life of contemplation is better spent on the Torah.'
'There go your secrets, Yossi,' said Simon. 'Truly the little brother is a master of learning, nu?'
'But ... please excuse me, Mr Abrahams,' said Saul, 'I have seen a diagram like this before, and I don't think it was Christian. The name was the same as on that picture.'
'What name, Saul?'
'Adam Kadmon,' said Saul, and returned to his text.
'Primeval man,' said Simon. But the effect on Yossi of this statement was notable: he paled to the colour of junket and snatched his hands away from the parchment as though it had been especially prepared by the Borgias for one of their favourite enemies.
Without a word, he ran down the hall and into the street. Simon Abrahams and Phryne watched the door clap to behind him with astonishment. Even Saul looked up in mild surprise, all the emotion of which this scholarly child seemed capable.
Mrs Grossman came back into the room, attended by her daughters, in time to hear the door slam. 'That Yossi,' said Mrs Grossman. 'Poor boy, he works all day and then sits up talking all night at the Kadimah, enough to turn his brains. Excuse him, Mr Abrahams. Have some more tea. Then Saul will read for us.'
'And you sing,' insisted Phillip.
'No, no, I only know old songs,' protested Mrs Grossman, delighted but making a ritual objection.
'We insist,' said Simon, and Saul leaned forward to the book.
His voice was a boy's voice, cracking with manhood, and the tones and cadences of the language were utterly foreign to Phryne's ear. But the image of the boy, tucked in the corner of the workaday kitchen, his curly hair topped with a white and gold yarmulke, the striped tallis around his shoulders, his ink-stained boy's finger running the wrong way along the black letter text, stayed with Phryne as an epitome of the experience of all of Australia's Jews: a people who treasured learning, and who never forgot their past or relinquished hold of their future.
Saul accepted the boiled lolly he was given with royal condescension. Learning, to him, was sweet. Mrs Grossman sat down and without preamble began to sing, a quavering lullaby in a strange tongue, and Simon whispered the translation to Phryne as she listened.
In dem bishe micdosh ...
Beneath my little one's cradle
Stands a clear white goat ...
There will come a time, my child
When you will wander Jar and wide.
Remember the song I sing today ...
Schluf-sie, mein kind, schluj,she concluded. Then she sighed, seized her son Phillip and hugged him hard, and summoned a smile.
'You will give my greetings to your father,' she said to Simon. Phryne shook hands all round, and Mrs Grossman accompanied them to the door. As she was leaving, the older woman pressed a packet into her hand.
'Just a little tea,' she protested. 'A few biscuits. Nothing.'
Phryne was touched. 'Thank you,' she said, and went out into the dusty street feeling warmed and a little dislocated, as though she had been away in another country and had come back with unexpected swiftness to somewhere which ought to have been familiar but which looked odd and alien.
'That's a nice song,' she said, wrestling her coat over her shoulders. Simon caught the edges and bodily wrapped it around Phryne.
'It's the one lullaby which everyone knows,' he said. 'There isn't a Yiddish child in the world who wasn't sung to sleep with Raisins and Almonds. My own mother sang it to me. Now, Madame,' he bowed, 'are you coming to my father's house to dine?'
'Yes, I am.'
'Then perhaps you could drop me in the city, where I can get a taxi, so that I can prepare myself fittingly.'
'Certainly. Is this white tie—what should I wear?'
'Just ordinary evening clothes. Mother likes to dress. I don't think Father could care, but he's a merchant at heart, bless him.'
'Thank you, and what do you make of Yossi racing off like that?'
'I don't know what to think, Phryne.'
They had found the big car again, and Phryne tore off the offending coat and flung it into the back before she climbed into the driver's seat. It was such a hot day and the car had not been parked long so she tried the self-starter, and it worked. The engine turned over with a muted roar like an annoyed tiger. Simon, realizing that he was not going to be needed as a wielder of starting handles, climbed up into the seat next to Phryne.
'Is he usually that jumpy?'
'Well, no, I would have said that he was calm, like Saul. A lot of study does tend to disconnect one from the real world.'
'He must know something, Simon, you need to find him again and extract it. Was there anything odd about the words Saul used?'
'No, it's just the word for primeval, "of earth". Kadmon. Adam as the first man. I never studied the Kabala, so I really can't tell you any more. Are you going to collect that truck?'
'No,' said Phryne, giving the wheel a deft twiddle. The truck passed, the driver yelling opprobrious epithets. It would not have been fitting for a lady to reply, so she only raised a finger or two in the appropriate gesture.
'One thing I will say, Miss Fisher,' yelled Simon Abrahams, holding onto his hat as the Hispano-Suiza belted down Swanston Street past the brewery in a cloud of dust. 'Life with you is always very interesting!'
'Thank you,' said Miss Fisher. 'Here's the station. See you at eight.'
And because she was both hot and dirty, Phryne beguiled the rest of the afternoon by taking her maid, her adopted daughters and their pestilential new puppy to the beach, where she contemplated the difficulties of the Kabala from one of her favourite thinking positions, neck deep in sea water.
Six
The mating of sol and luna is conjunctio.
Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum 1689
Dinner, Phryne thought, might well be sticky in more than just temperature. As she allowed herself to be dressed in a Greek-inspired floor-length gown, she observed, 'Dot, I need you to make me a list.'
A list, Miss?' Dot fastened the heavy gold necklace. It was made of old French coins, and it had matching long earrings.
'Yes. Miss Lee said that she sold "some novels" and then had a discussion with a woman about an atlas that morning—call it "the fateful morning"—and then there were a couple of young men buying a book about statistics. We need to find Miss Lee's customers. I want you to go through her order book—Jack left it on the downstairs table—and make a list of what she sold. How many people do we need to find, and how do we do that?'
'They should have come forward already, Miss,' observed Dot, flinging the filmy dress over Phryne's head so skilfully that not a hair was disturbed on the Dutch-doll head. 'There's been enough about the murder in the paper.'