The Street by Mordecai Richler Page A

size?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You see how they’re all very heavy?”
    “Yeah. So?”
    “You wait,” Segal said, rocking in his chair. “You wait, Sam.”
    The next night there was a distinct and persistent rumbling downstairs and every Wednesday a panel truck came to pick up small boxes.
    “They’ve got a printing press,” my father would brag to visitors. “An underground newspaper.
Right downstairs from us.”
    There were no self-confessed communists with me at parochial school, but once I graduated to Fletcher’s Field High there were plenty of them. Take Danny Feldman, for instance. Wiry, scornful Danny, who sat only two seats behind me in Room 41, was a paid-up, card-holding member of the Young Communist League, and so came in for lots of heckling from the rest of us. Danny retaliated by ridiculing our enthusiasm for the achievements of Maurice “Rocket” Richard, Johnny Greco, and even Jackie Robinson.
    “He’s a nigger, but. I thought you stuck up for them?”
    “The word is Negro. How would you like it if I called you a kike?”
    “Eat shit.”
    Sports was an idiotic distraction, Danny argued, a trick to take our minds off the exploitation of our working-class parents. Whether they were aware of it or not, Buddy O’Connor, Jerry Heffernan, and Pete Morin, the incomparable razzle-dazzle line, were capitalist lackeys.
    Danny was adroit at bringing our teachers to the boil too. He wanted to know why our history text books made no mention of Spartacus and neglected to comment on the Allied attempt to overthrow the Russian revolution in 1919.
    “You read the wrong books, Feldman,” our history teacher said.
    “Yeah. Siddown you dirty red.”
    “Let’s chip in and send him to Russia. Waddiya say, guys?”
    Danny shouldered his martyrdom with pride. Softly, softly, he infiltrated the F.F.H.S. Cadets Corps and Students’ Council. One day Danny was a civilian and the next he was a cadet major, with access to our sub-basement arsenal; and the Students’ Council had got up a petition to demand free milk at lunch hours and a ban on the strap. All this came about whilst our interests, as we began to encourage beards and passed from grade nine to ten, shifted from Rocket Richard’s scoring ability to Lili St. Cyr’s thrilling striptease act at the Gaiety Theatre. Our latest obsession, Miss St. Cyr’s unrivalled interpretation of Leda and the Swan, did not satisfy Danny, either. “I’ve never met such a bunch of decadent jerks in my life,” he said.
    “Have you seen her, but?”
    “Jeez.”
    “She shaves her pussy.”
    “It’s art, you know. She does it to classical music.”
    Danny subjected us to a scathing lecture on women’s rights. He said the striptease was merely another form of capitalist degradation and, turning on Shubiner, he asked, “How would you like to see your mother strip on stage?”
    Which, considering Mrs. Shubiner’s dimensions, had the rest of us quaking with laughter.
    “You’re looking for a punch in the nose,” Shubiner hissed. “I’m warning you.”
    Danny and I, it developed, had something in common. Neither of us joined in when they sang
God Save the King
at school assemblies. Danny abhorred all kings and didn’t believe in God. I wouldn’t sing
God Save the King
because I was opposed to British policy in Palestine. We had something else in common too – or so I hoped. Only the other night Segal, playing gin rummy with my father, had said, “You know those communist youth clubs?”
    “Yeah,” my father said eagerly.
    “You know they have parties every Friday night?”
    “Yeah. So?”
    “Boy. Oh, boy.”
    “What?”
    Segal jerked his White Owl Cigar discreetly in my direction.
    “Go and do your homework,” my father said.
    Now when the rest of the boys in class heckled Danny, I instantly charged to his defense. “Let Danny speak his piece. This is a free country.”
    “Sez who?”
    “Danny never did you any harm.”
    “I don’t like his dumb kisser,