by Linda Grant
‘A book!’ cried my mother, aghast.
‘Yes, I don’t have a daughter like you. I got nothing to go forward into the future, I want to set the record straight.’
‘You could have done that at the trial.’
‘No, back to the beginning, the very beginning.’
‘What beginning?’ said my father, finding his tongue at last.
‘You know she asks me things I don’t even know I remember, like the village. You remember the village, Ervin? You remember the day our father had the fight with our grandfather? Do you remember the beautiful shul? The stone lions? Oh, what a time it has been for me, going back to those days when we were children.’
Fear crossed my father’s face. ‘What right have you to tell her such things? Who gave you permission?’
‘Why? There is no secret. I enjoyed remembering and I enjoyed telling.’
‘What’s the harm in telling me about the village?’ I said. ‘It was interesting.’
My father turned to me. ‘We bore you, we brought you up, we protected you from all the monsters, all the filth that’s in the world–his filth.’
‘What filth?’
‘Did he tell you what he does for a living?’
‘Of course.’
‘So you,’ my father said to Eunice, ‘are you one of his girls? No, no, you’re a bit too long in the tooth for that. Maybe you retired.’
I saw Eunice’s face turn to ash, as if she had been consumed by fire and nothing remained but the cold, dead coals.
‘You little klipe,’ said my uncle, his own face suddenly suffused with blackish blood.
‘You with your names,’ my father said.
The two men faced off. They circled each other like wrestlers. I saw my uncle summoning all his energy–the scars on his back, the ruined lungs, everything made an effort to form themselves back into a body that could do combat with a mortal enemy. And my father rising fast, like mercury shooting up in a thermometer and spouting out the top in a silver fountain, unable to be contained by the glass tube.
I don’t think my father had ever touched another person who was not his wife and daughter since he kissed his mamma goodbye at the railway station at Budapest. Even shaking hands was a torment to him, he hated it. Sándor got thugs to do his dirty work for him, but he was a soft man, a ladies’ man. So these two lifelong enemies now reached for the main means they each had to inflict punishing damage on the other.
‘I’m going to kill you. I’ll bury you in the ground like a treasure no one ever finds because there’s no map,’ was my uncle’s first assault.
‘Yes, yes, and while you’re digging may you shit green worms,’ my father hit back.
‘I hope your troubles are so bad they bleed from their own wounds.’
‘May you burn down your business and forget to insure it first.’
‘May you have a thunderbolt in your sides.’
‘You should have a lament in your belly.’
‘And pepper in your nose…’
‘Please,’ I said, terrified by this cataract of curses. ‘Stop. I just wanted you to be friends, brothers. My grandmother wanted the two of you to be reunited.’
‘What do you know about your grandmother?’ my father said, grabbing me by the wrist which was already bruised by Eunice’s grip. ‘What’s he told you?’
‘He said she was a—’
‘If anyone tells you about your grandmother it’s me.’
‘But you didn’t tell me.’
‘So you could have asked.’
‘And what would you have said?’
‘Nothing! What’s she got to do with you?’
‘You see, Ervin–this is what drives her into the arms of her uncle. Because she is a clever girl, with curiosity, she wants to know everything.’
My mother was bent over her brown stick, undoing the white satin ribbon. ‘Please,’ she said to Eunice, who was standing silently, still grey in the face. ‘Take it.’
Eunice took the ribbon and twisted it in her hands.
‘What do you give her that for?’ said my father.
‘It’s a pretty thing and this is clearly an elegant lady who likes pretty things. What’s a pretty thing got to do with me?’
‘Berta, are you mad? What you talking about?’
But my mother turned her face away and looked down the garden where the guests, oblivious, were continuing to enjoy themselves. The throne was being removed from the raised platform and Fabian had climbed up the three steps with a young woman. He held up his hand as he did in class. Some music began to play, that dark, night-time sound of the tango.
‘Look,’ said my uncle, ‘the exhibition tango starts.’ My mother’s face was stone, like the Sphinx at Giza.
‘What is this party for,’ my father said. ‘To rub your sex life in my face?’
‘Get out,’ said my uncle. He turned to me. ‘Your father has no human feeling. He never did. You can’t bring us together. Nice that you try.’
‘Yes, we’re going. Come on, Vivien. And you, a curse upon you, Sándor, may your wedding be an evil hour.’
My mother took my father’s arm and pointed her stick towards the door. She reached up and picked the yellow rose from his lapel and threw it on the ground. My uncle bent down and picked it up and put it in his pocket.
‘Next time we meet will be in the yane velt, that place, the other world. Goodbye,’ he said to my father. ‘And you, Berta…what a ball and chain I gave you, that you have to drag behind you all your life when you already have your own burden to bear. I apologise. If I only knew.’
I looked around the garden at all the people laughing, drinking wine, eating salmon, tapping their toes, the two figures on the little stage bent in each other’s arms. The scarlet glow fell deeper and deeper on everyone’s faces and the red rippling sky moved above us. Paper lanterns were being carried out, and candles lit inside them. The older dead, back in Hungary, were watching, they paid careful attention to this important scene with me at its centre, the damage I’d done.
My parents left, the guests remained and so did I. I apologised to Eunice for what my father had said to her. ‘It’s unforgivable,’ I said.
But she had her own scores to settle.
‘Why do you lie to Sándor? Why didn’t you come out with who you was straight away? Were you spying on him?’
I did not know how to tell her what it was like to be unemployed, lonely, feeling your life was a failure before it began. I thought that she would sneer at these little woes, pointing out my life of privilege, with the degree from York University and the incomplete thesis, unfinished because of my own lack of backbone. So I just told her about the library, the book, the photograph.
‘And do you think he’s evil, now?’ she said. ‘What’s your opinion?’
‘No, I don’t think he’s evil.’
‘Good. Because you don’t know what evil is.’
The party was still in full swing. People were eating, drinking, dancing, in the lanterns the candles were burnishing their way through coloured paper. Fairy lights came on in the corners of the marquee. The tango set were taking it in turns to sit on the throne and soon the anti-Fascists ran out of slogans and started to join them. The rain did not come until midnight, the first drops unheard, then beginning to beat down on the canvas roof. We danced on, oblivious. The rain came down harder and harder and now the canvas sagged under the weight of pools of water but still no one left. My uncle ascended the steps and sat on the throne and took Eunice on his knee and began to kiss her. Someone started to throw food about. Meringues flew through the air like cloudy angels.
Finally the guests began to leave, drunk, shouting, happy. Apart from the meeting between the two brothers, it had been a huge success. Claude arrived, sweating and wet on his bicycle, his hair flat and plastered to his face. ‘How did it go?’ he said. ‘Did you enjoy yourself, birthday girl?’ It was time to tell him who I was, my real name, Vivien Kovacs and my relationship with �
�the special Mr K’.
‘I knew who you was,’ he said. ‘I guessed you was some kind of relation and then I saw your library card with your real name on it in your wallet. There was a different letter but it sounds the same, so it must be the same.’
‘Is that why you’re sleeping with me?’
‘No. I only sleep with girls who get me going. I wouldn’t screw some rich old slag if she didn’t look the business. Anyway, I got you a present. Here. I hope you like it, it’s better than the one I’ve got, better quality.’
A leather jacket.
‘Put it on, I want to see you in it. I don’t know if I got the right size.’ The leather creaked as I put my arms tentatively into the sleeves. ‘Go on, zip it up. Yeah, fantastic.’ The short laugh. He touched my breasts under it. ‘Now let’s get it off again.’
The long night should not have ended the way it did: me, slippery with sweat, my body bruised, my hands clinging to his forearms, digging in my nails, his mouth all over me. I should have remembered the bloody dead, I should have sat and thought about what I’d done, this catastrophe I had caused, a final rupture between the brothers and the insult to Eunice. I did not deserve this piercing pleasure. And yet I took it.
I still have that jacket. It’s folded in a drawer somewhere in my house. It doesn’t fit me any more, I forget how thin I was. I don’t know what to do with it, how can I throw it out? I put it on occasionally, with the red lizard shoes Alexander bought me, and think about how it can be that it is these clothes that have survived when everyone who had anything to do with them is gone or their whereabouts unknown.
When my father walked out of Sándor’s garden with my mother, blackened in the face with rage as if he had been scorched by the fires of hell, the crimson glow of the marquee reflected in the panes of his spectacles, I knew that I would never spend another night in my childhood bedroom. I went back to Benson Court to pick up my things.
My mother came to the door when she heard my key in the lock. It was early afternoon, the time I would have returned after a session with Sándor, interviewing.
‘What happens to you now?’ she said.
‘I can’t live here any more.’
‘I see.’
‘The painting is coming along well,’ I said, looking at the stool and the three kitchen chairs which had broken tumultuously out of their brownness and resembled grasshoppers standing upright on their jointed legs.
‘Yes, you were quite right about green being a lively colour.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘About what?’
‘Being so thoughtless. I should have known it wouldn’t work.’
‘You had your reasons, I suppose.’
‘He told me my grandmother wanted the two brothers to be reunited, I just thought…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Your father never stopped seeing Sándor, he tried to help him, he met him off the train when he arrived here, did you know that? He had a job all arranged for him.’
‘What kind of a job?’
‘In a factory. It made venetian blinds, I think. He didn’t want it, he preferred to continue in his old ways, to be a criminal.’
‘He’s not the kind to work with his hands.’
‘Exactly, too good for him. He always preferred to go the flashy road, whatever the cost.’
‘But a factory.’
‘What? You think he should walk into a job behind the counter at the Bank of England? Or your father should fix him up running an introduction agency for married ladies? It was a good factory with good wages, near Hackney marshes, I believe. It was applying the paint.’
‘I thought his lungs were damaged. Wouldn’t the chemicals be bad for him?’
‘Maybe Ervin didn’t think of that, but Sándor could have put it a bit nicer, instead of the things he said.’
‘What things?’
‘Why do you pry into other people’s conversations? When did we ever bring you up to do this? All I’m telling you is that your father was never a bad brother, never. He went to visit the prison. Not often, but he went.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘It was only you we tried to protect from him. We wanted you to have a start, to be a respectable person. This is all we wished for you. We got you a certificate from the church so you were a proper person from the word go.’
‘But how could he harm me?’
‘It’s not a matter of harm, it’s about a bad influence and people thinking we are not a nice family.’
‘Well, he’s settling down now. What do you think of Eunice?’
‘Oh, her. She’s a lady, anyone can see that.’
‘Apart from Daddy.’
‘Yes, apart from him.’
‘How could he have said that to her? It was appalling. I felt sick, I wanted to hit him, it was such a vile thing to…’
But my mother shrugged. She said, ‘Your father is not like other people. He says what comes into his head. He isn’t like you either, he doesn’t have any experience of company. We never went out into society like the rest. You see how we live, it’s only what is to be expected.’
‘Do you regret marrying him?’
‘Regret? What are you talking about? Of course not, what a crazy idea. I love your father.’
‘What do you mean, you love him? What do you actually mean by that?’
‘It means I know him, Vivien. I know him, with all his weaknesses. This is love.’
‘And what about his strengths? Where are they?’ For to me my father was now a grotesque caricature of a human being, a mean-spirited misanthrope. I hated him.
‘You try going out to work for forty years, doing the same job every day, working until your eyes ache and water, your bones are stiff, your hands are full of spasms and you have to put them in a bowl of hot water in the filthy sink in the back before you leave for the night. Tired you do not know the meaning of.’
She turned away and walked abruptly into her bedroom and shut the door. I stood there looking at the green stool, the window looking out on to the mansion block next door, the closed blind of the opposite window, the taps, the cooker, the pots and pans.
My uncle gave me a flat, rent free (‘You think I charge family?’ he said), the best flat in the whole place, apart from his own. He must have kicked someone out to make way for me: paid them off, or sent round one of Mickey’s ‘contacts’. I know whoever they were, they left in a hurry, with the bed unmade, sheets stained and full of crumbs, as if they had been disturbed at night.
It was in that room that I started to read again. A leaflet says little, a whole book is full of thoughts, ideas and makes you fall prey to complicated feelings; there is no anaesthesia in the pages of a novel. Often you find discomfort, as if you were sleeping like the princess on the mattresses on top of the pea. The books that I read were about faraway lands, places where there were temples, rice paddies, brass gongs, murderers hiding in the mountains, distant coups.
But the history of the Kovacs family, our history in Hungary, continued to crowd in on me, and the many dead and their past lives set themselves up in the darker corners of the room. In a few weeks I had gone from being a girl without a history to a girl whose past was what was meant by teachers when they spoke of it, book history. The various choices made by my uncle and my father: one to survive against all the odds, the other to exist in a half-life, required me to ask myself what I would have done in their place. I did not have, innately, my uncle’s ruthless instincts, his calculating trader’s brain which was prepared to deal in any commodity, including human beings. But nor could I have stood the decades of self-immolation that my father had imposed upon himself; his abject surrender to all authority exasperated me. I wanted to live. I just wanted to live.
And if life took you to the uncertain, strange margins, to the places where people struggled to express their whole being, through dress or sex or whatever form such individuality took, then that’s where I would go.
So I spent my m
ornings with the tape recorder and typewriter, afternoons lying on the bed reading, early evenings outside the pubs with the leaflets, and nights with Claude, if he was on day shift. I didn’t delude myself about what was going on, we didn’t have a relationship, we had sex, that was all, much-needed, hot and hasty sex. Yet he had bought me the leather jacket and it had cost him a lot, he had drawn on the savings for his tattoo. He knew I could afford my own jacket, if I’d wanted one, but having seen me wearing his, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. There was something about me in leather. ‘You’re a different girl in that skin,’ he said. ‘You look like you own the ground you stand on. Which you don’t in your mouldy old dresses.’
‘What’s the matter with my dresses?’
‘They smell.’
‘Of what?’
‘Old ladies. And old ladies’ pee.’
What did he want from me? It was always half in my mind that he thought I was the route to the Special Mr K’s money. I’d got his window fixed, what else could I do for him? Maybe the old geezer would give me a huge cheque, thousands, or he’d just pop off one night and leave me the lot. Or perhaps his ambitions were more modest, that it was just the idea of walking through London with a ‘posh, rich bird’ on his arm that appealed to the boy from Sheerness.
Or simpler still. Claude was the victim of his own hormones. Men like him must expend a great deal of energy each night finding a girl to go home with them, and if they are intelligent they understand that it’s important to come to an arrangement to make it regularly available. I didn’t think of myself as his girlfriend, but I was his girl. His regular girl. There might have been others, I’m not sure. I did not mind, and he would have known that I didn’t. We had a situation, it was suitable for both of us. It met a need, it was its own point.
The feeding of the tropical fish, the hours he spent lying on the bed watching them swim fluorescently about in their tank, absorbed his spare time when he was not working or screwing. Their aimless short existence and extreme colours and patterns were what he liked about them. They ate and circled around behind the glass to no purpose. Watching the fish allowed his imagination to run free while he worked on the design of his tattoo. He was dreaming that tattoo, whether awake or asleep, watching the fish or riding to work on his bike at dawn through north London’s empty streets.
