Travels with my Daughter. Niema Ash

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      Three

      The Finjan and Bob Dylan: Travel Substitutes

      When Ronit was four years old her life changed dramatically. Invaded by an unorthodox segment of society, her nuclear family was suddenly extended, requiring radical adjustments. Shimon opened a folk music club called The Finjan, the word for an Arabic coffee pot, around which people traditionally gathered to sing, tell stories and drink coffee. Each week a different performer was hired as the main act, while Shimon, the house musician, was the warm-up act. It was an immediate success.

      In the early sixties performers like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Kris Kristofferson, not yet popular, were eager to gain experience and exposure by performing in small clubs. Even seasoned performers like the Blues musicians Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the Black Blues guitarist, John Lee Hooker, were readily available. Shimon and I, both devoted to Folk Music and Blues, found it thrilling to have musicians we had listened to on record, right there in the flesh. It was especially thrilling for Shimon who had never seen live performers in isolated South Africa, and who was, by now, a competent musician himself.

      One of his idols was Josh White, the great Blues musician. Even in South Africa, Shimon had every one of his recordings. He could hardly believe his good fortune when one day Josh White came to our house.

      Shimon had recently been learning to play some of Josh White’s chords and blues sequences. There was one elusive chord he had found impossible to duplicate, the stretch was too great, and he was sure some ruse must be employed to play it. Knowing this might be his only chance, he took the plunge. With the humility of an initiate crossexamining the master, he asked Josh White if he would demonstrate the chord. Josh White drew his guitar to him like a lover and, spreading the fingers of his large black hand over its body, struck the impossible chord. The sound swelled, filling the room like the sound of the great amen. Shimon looked as though he had just seen God.

      The Finjan was located in a part of Montreal where hotels were expensive. Since we couldn’t afford hotel costs, the financial arrangement included rent-free accommodation with us. We put an extra bed in Ronit’s room. She slept in one bed and every week a different performer slept in the other. Her room was small and sharing it necessitated removing her toy chest. Together we selected her favourite toys and squeezed them on to her bookshelf, banishing the rest to the locker. We also emptied one of her drawers and made space in her closet. Although she was not enthusiastic about the new arrangements, she adapted to them without protest.

      At first she reacted to the succession of musicians sharing her room, passing through her life, with indifference. Somewhat shy of strangers, she kept a cautious distance, yet made allowances for their presence in small ways like tip-toeing in her bedroom — they had probably gone to sleep not much before she awoke. Essentially she carried on with her life out of their way, while at the same time quietly observing theirs. She was good at entertaining herself. Not especially fond of dolls, she busied herself with painting, drawing, looking at books, or playing with her building toys.

      Later, after they had returned several times, she became friendly with some of the performers, even developing an affection for a rare few. She accepted the fact that there was always someone living with us, that a constant stream of people came and went. She learned to live her life around that fact, gradually incorporating it into her existence, just as she learned to live with the constant strumming of guitars, and the acceptance of people she found strange, sometimes frightening.

      Ronit was three before she saw a black person — there were hardly any in our neighbourhood, few in Montreal. She was astounded. “Mummy why does that lady have a rubber face?” she asked, bewildered. When black musicians started appearing in her room she reacted with suspicion, convinced they hadn’t washed, asking why the palms of their hands were clean and the rest of them dirty. But by the time Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee performed at the club she had grown accustomed to black skin.

      Because Sonny was blind and Brownie lame, and because they were well-known performers, no longer young, who deserved extra consideration, we had arranged rooms for them in a hotel. However, they liked spending time in our flat. I cooked special dinners for them — Sonny’s favourite was baked ham and pineapple pie — and on their nights off musician friends would come by for wonderful jamming sessions.

      From the very beginning Ronit was more friendly with Sonny and Brownie than with the other performers. They were accustomed to relating to children. Brownie had several of his own including a daughter Ronit’s age, his youngest. Identifying Ronit with his daughter, he always referred to her as “the baby.” Even years later when she was a teenager, he would ask, “how’s the baby?” Sonny treated Ronit to special harmonica effects, making his harmonica talk for her. Her favourite utterance was “I want my mamma.” She would sit on the floor, looking up at him, small and white, her eyes wide, her legs tucked under, waiting for “I want my mama” with the avid expectation she’d wait for sleeping beauty to spring to life. And he, large and black, his big boot thumping beside her, his gold rings flashing, his eyes smiling down on her, coaxed whoops and hoots and howls from his harmonica until it finally wailed, “I want my mamma.” Each time he played it, her face lit up in wonder and he laughed his great belly laugh, slapping his thighs in delight. Although she could hardly understand his thick Southern accent, I could sense a connection between them, the unlikely connection of polarities, they communicated through “I want my mama.”

      Whereas Ronit accepted the new life style with detachment and neutrality, warming to it only gradually, I embraced it. I worked at The Finjan right from the beginning, leaving Ronit at home with a babysitter on week nights and with my parents, who lavished affection upon her, at weekends, accepting their indulgences for the sake of my freedom. I loved everything about The Finjan; the atmosphere of the room, intimate with fishnet, brass lanterns and candlelit tables; the late nights; the all-night restaurants; the music; and especially the musicians. Every night was a Saturday night. I never knew the mornings.

      By now Ronit was able to get her own breakfast and dress herself for school. She woke me only to braid her long plait and to hear me say, “have a good day at school, and don’t forget your lunch.” Then she waited for my father to take her to school and I slept until noon.

      Plaiting her hair was the one thing I didn’t resent being woken up for. I did it lovingly. Ronit’s hair was my indulged darling, the fulfilment of my childhood fantasy. No sacrifice was too great for it. It fell like a cascade streaming over her bum, thick and rippling and long, long, long. I would never let it be cut. When I was a child I yearned for long hair. But my mother viewed long hair as an enemy against which she waged a relentless battle. Then one holiday at my aunt’s farm, when my mother was preoccupied, it slipped by her watchful eye and grew to my shoulders. For one sweet summer I felt like Rapunzel. Then suddenly, alarmed by her terrible lapse, she summoned a hair cutter. I remember screeching in agony as the scissors descended. The poor woman thought she had pierced my skull. My first act of independence was growing my hair long. I never cut it again. Ronit’s first act of independence was cutting hers short. It was many years before she allowed it to pass her ears.

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