by Linda Grant
Before he left Sheerness he had bought a sketch pad which he kept in his locked suitcase. I was not allowed to see it, nor did I wish to, for I loathed tattoos, hated the idea of his body disfigured with coloured inks, pictures needled into his flesh. What was wrong with a tattoo? he said. I thought they were common but I couldn’t tell him that, so I asked whether it would hurt. He thought it might and admitted that he was curious and anxious about the pain and whether he could live with it. It mattered to him that he would be prepared and not let himself down by yelping out loud, or even breaking down and crying (especially in front of the tattooist, who he assumed would be a tough character). He began to conduct cautious experiments to test his pain threshold, stubbing a cigarette out on the back of his hand to see how long he could go without screaming. I had to go out of the room and stand in the corridor when he did this. When I came back the coal had singed his flesh and left a circle of blackened, charred skin, and he held it out and laughed at it, a laugh that sounded like a dog with its paw caught in a trap.
He moaned in his sleep that night, reached out for my breast and laid the back of the burnt hand on it, as if it had healing powers.
Only because he set fire to the suitcase did I finally see what was inside. He was going through an arsonist phase, finding dead birds and cremating them on pyres of leaves. He would talk of setting fire to London’s landmarks. I told him about the Great Fire of London, the city razed to ashes. I sometimes think he would have enjoyed a sudden incendiary episode, like the firestorm after Dresden, and wandering along across the scorched and blackened surface of an empty city. He was a little weird, I suppose, but I had grown up amongst weird, it was nothing new to me. I was only a few weeks away myself from biting down on drinking glasses.
He took the suitcase out into the garden to make an altar on which he placed a small pile of sacrifices: his guard’s hat, which he would have to pay to replace, a pair of underpants, one of Mrs Prescott’s satin blouses.
The clothes did not burst into flames as he had hoped but set up a low smoulder and a chemical stink, mainly from the hat. Eventually the blouse transformed itself to ashes but the hat stubbornly held its shape, browned and singed; sparks glittered briefly at the peak. Claude got bored, closed his eyes and fell asleep. I continued to watch the burnt offerings. After a few minutes the suitcase caught fire.
I shook him awake. ‘Did you mean to burn your suitcase?’ I asked him, laughing.
‘Holy fuck,’ he said, and picked it up to shake off the little bonfire, but the handle was metal covered with leather and had heated up. He screamed and dropped it. We were nowhere near any water to put out the fire.
We had to wait nearly an hour before the suitcase was cool enough to carry indoors. The lock was twisted in the heat and he had to use his penknife to prise it open. He was desperate to know whether its contents were safe. But what have you got in there? I asked him. What’s so important? It’s my stuff, he said.
Inside, the case was filled with small baffling treasures: a paperback of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, well worn on the spine, which he said he had read many times, containing, he implied, all of life’s significant lessons. But I had never read it, and all I knew was that it concerned Red Indians. A girl’s bracelet made of those coloured plastic beads that plug together. A postcard showing Edinburgh Castle. Blackbird feathers, held together by a rubber band. Letters postmarked Sheerness. And a bag of sweets.
But it was not the letters, the postcard, the book, the bracelet or the sweets that he anxiously removed from the suitcase. The sketch pad, spiral bound, was taken out and each page checked to make sure that it had not been damaged. Here were the designs for his tattoo, from the first, crude efforts at seaman’s anchors, or ruby hearts with a name inscribed inside them (HELEN–his mother, he said, though he wasn’t that sentimental about the old bat, but you had to put something) all the way to the increasingly ambitious and sophisticated schemes, quite well executed, involving schools of fish swimming around an upper arm, some of which I recognised from the tank. Until finally he turned the page, and there it was, his final design. The finished version.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it, however much I wanted to turn them away, to his face. I was trying to see if there was some error, that if you looked at it from another angle the form would reassemble itself and become something more innocuous but even though my eyes swam on the page, it stayed the way it was, anchored to the sheet of paper by its four points.
‘It’s a swastika.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Don’t you understand what it is?’
‘Yes, it’s a shape.’
‘Not just a shape. Do you know what a symbol is?’
‘Of course I know, don’t fucking talk down to me.’
‘It’s a symbol of Fascism.’
‘They can be a symbol of anything you like, but I agree they’re sort of heavy. They’ve got a lot of power in them, that’s why they’ve been around for thousands of years before the Nazzies got hold of them. The Indians the ones in India, not the Americans, they had them first. I think they’re amazing, I love them.’
‘Don’t be so naïve. In this day and age they have only one meaning, and you know it.’
‘Who cares?’
‘I do.’
‘Why? Why should you care?’
We argued for a long time. He jumped out of the window into the garden and stood under the newly planted flowering cherry and smoked. I saw him through the open pane, sitting on the hard ground, his hands round his thin knees, with that frail toughness that attracted me, that mouth I had to kiss. He was a shape in the garden, full of blood and hormones.
I wasn’t going to tell him the truth about my uncle, about who he was and where he had come from, about the slave labourer years. It was none of Claude’s business. Nor was I going to talk to him about being Jewish, because I didn’t feel Jewish inside. The village in the Zémplen, the great-grandfather with the curls in front of his ears, the synagogue my uncle and father both remembered (despite my father’s denials) were like folk stories of another century.
My parents thought this island, this Britain, was an oasis of tolerance and fair play, but across the Channel a howling wilderness of big ideas could inflate into an ideology, and once a man had an ideology, he was always on the lookout for enemies. When you are the enemy of a person with an ideology, you’re in serious trouble. But I knew different, from the evenings handing out the leaflets. I knew that quite ordinary people, who had no thoughts at all, just feelings, could be equally dangerous.
Of course, I knew Claude was no Nazi, but what upset and frightened me was the discovery that I had no power to change his mind, that he was resistant to logic, indeed to understanding. He was his own planet, and on it he made his own rules. In Claude-land, a swastika could mean whatever you liked, it was up to you to assign your own meanings, he said, though not in those words, but that’s what he meant. His tattoo had symbolic significance for him alone. He was solipsistic and nihilistic, I told him, and he laughed longer than I had ever heard him laugh before, to hear that such big hard words applied to him. He made me write them down in his sketch pad and then practised copying them, in a variety of artistic scripts.
But I would not sleep with him and he was surprised and angry that some drawings in a book should deny him what he needed every night.
After the triumph of the birthday party, my uncle and his future bride began to plan their own wedding. She had ordered for him a silk suit from Italy, and for herself a dress, the details of which were a close secret but which was thought to have come from one of the great French houses. All my uncle had to do was write the cheque, and he was overjoyed about that. The marquee and the caterers had been re-booked for late September. There was a date. The wedding was a reality.
And even before that, Eunice would be moving in with uncle; they would be living together, as she said, ‘as
man and wife’. They already slept together three nights a week, and it was during those nights my uncle had thought deeply that this was what it must be like to be a married man, to go to bed with the face of a woman next to you on the pillow, to kiss her while she slept. How could a man who did not have it in his blood to say yes to a boss surrender to another human being, even if she had lovely breasts and smelt of flowers and spices? Still, her body warmed him while he slept.
And then there was the business of the skinheads in Wood Green who were terrorising everyone with their marches and their ugly shaved heads and their horrible laced-up boots with the trousers rolled up to the calves to show off the brown leather and the eyelets. If he married her she would leave behind for ever all that, he would make some different arrangements, such as knocking though to the next flat to make it bigger–he could afford to lose £6 a week rent.
‘And what does she think?’ I had asked him when he first told me of his plan to marry her.
‘Well, you see, Eunice does not have a favourable view of marriage. She tried it once, it was a disaster. She’s an independent woman so if you are going to pin her down you have to have something to offer her that she don’t have already. And money is not enough, because she can earn her own living.’
But he had eventually prevailed, had overcome his own anxieties about the loss of his freedom. It was a huge step for him, this would be the rest of his life–a married man–but he was going to do it for he could not leave her unprotected in Wood Green and he did not even dare consider suggesting the idea that they should live together as a common-law couple. Without the wedding, even if it was in a registry office, without an engagement ring and a dress and a cake and a speech, Eunice would not budge. And the ring was the declaration that he was absolutely serious and not pulling the wool over her eyes.
I don’t see no ring, she had said, when he proposed, over lunch at an Italian restaurant on the day of my birthday party, an ostentatious lunch with silver service and a trolley with the desserts and the option of having a waiter standing next to you flambéing a piece of veal over a live flame in front of your eyes. He knew what impressed women. Nothing about my uncle was ever mean.
And in order to rescue Eunice from the skinheads in Wood Green, he needed to buy an engagement ring, since there was now no chance that my father would make it.
Sándor had a keen eye for jewellery but he wanted a woman’s opinion so he asked me to accompany him to Harrods to make the selection. The purchase was not actually going to be made there, he no longer had the kind of money that could afford a ten or twenty thousand pound ring; the rents from the two houses in Camden kept him comfortably with some room for extravagances like my party, but there was a limit to his liquid assets.
His plan was to pick out a few suitable rings and then give a description of them to Mickey, who would look around for a week or two and come up with something similar, or even exactly the same thing, not a fake, absolutely out of the question, but it didn’t need to be. For Mickey’s London, which radiated out from his Dalston lock-up miles and miles in all directions to the suburbs north and south (but no further than the orbital motorways, beyond which were things he didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand, like cows, sheep, birds) had all kinds of individuals inside it who could get you pretty much anything you wanted, such as a piece of moon rock or, later, chunks of the Berlin Wall.
It was true: my uncle had wanted my father to make the ring. He saw himself generously paying his brother for his time and his labour, praising his exquisite workmanship, but Ervin had nixed that one. ‘I tell you again,’ Sándor said, as we were on the bus to Knightsbridge. ‘I see him next in the other place. Then we’ll talk.’
‘What is that other place?’ I asked him.
‘It’s where they do the final balance sheet. The counting up of days.’
‘How do you think you’ll come out? Are you afraid?’
‘Not at all. The Expert isn’t concerned with the things they worry about here in this life. He sees things in a different way. I’m not worried. He wants to know not how a man lived but did he live? Did he waste the gift the Expert gave him, or did he make the best use of it he can?’
‘So you believe in God?’
‘Who said anything about God?’
‘Isn’t that what we’re talking about?’
‘No.’
But this riddle of my uncle’s beliefs remains unsolved, for the bus swung round into Sloane Street and we got off and walked down to Harrods, him stopping at the windows of the shops all along Brompton Road and exclaiming at the luxury goods.
The rings lay on velvet and satin beds; they held their heads up to the light and sank their gold and platinum shanks deep into the blue and white luxury of their opulent pillows.
I could name all the stones, I grew up in this business. There were diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and then the lesser gems–garnets, opals, amethysts, topaz–but it was only the sapphires my uncle was interested in. ‘Blue is an aristocratic colour, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘It says quality to me, but maybe I’m wrong. What is the stones that the Queen has in her crown?’
The salesman was delighted to be asked this question and began a scholarly speech on the matter, because there was more than one crown. We looked carefully at the rings and my uncle enquired about the prices, a nominal question so as to establish our credentials as bona fide purchasers, not time-wasters. We discussed whether she would prefer a solitaire or a cluster, a square-cut stone or a lozenge shape. And what would be the setting, of what material?
For my uncle cried out, ‘You see my curse and my blessing? To fall in love with a woman of elegance and style, and everything has to be exactly right or she turns up her nose. I want it to be perfect, you understand, Vivien? I want her to open the box and she gasps because this is what she has been waiting for her whole life, ever since she was a little girl in school in Tiger Bay and she reads stories about princesses.’
‘Look,’ he whispered. ‘This one.’
An ice-blue square-cut solitaire on a platinum band.
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘Elegant?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘We’ll think about it,’ he said to the salesman. ‘Thank you, you have been a big help.’
‘How are you going to find something like that?’ I asked him, as we walked through the aisles.
‘Well, Mickey will have to do his best. He’ll manage, he never let me down so far. You want to go for coffee?’
‘Are you going to take a picture of it or something?’
‘Why? No need. I remember it exactly. The picture is inside my head already. I got it.’
We ascended in the lift to the tea rooms. The little tables sat like débutantes, waiting to be asked to dance.
‘This is a very nice one,’ my uncle said. ‘It’s important in a café to know which table will get you the best service, and I know this because I used to be a waiter. How you treat a waiter is very significant too, if you want to be offered the best pastry.’
The cakes, stiff cream fabrications looking exhausted already under the over-brilliant light of the chandeliers, were offered to us on a silver tray.
‘You got anything special today?’ my uncle asked the waitress, and he gave her a smile; it was mainly in his eyes rather than his lips, and they seemed to address her with a whole speech composed of warmth and sympathy and humour, a smile that knows everything about swollen feet and swallowed-back responses to insults.
‘I’ll go and see if we do, sir,’ she said, and she winked. She returned with a second, smaller tray bearing fresher gâteaux. ‘I recommend the raspberry and chocolate roulade.’
‘Then this we will have,’ said my uncle. ‘I always accept a recommendation from staff. Because you know, don’t you? You are experts, and lovely experts, every one. Thank you, my dear. May your day be a happy one. You see?’ he said, turning back to me. ‘It
doesn’t take more than few words to get the best service.’
‘Have you set a date for the wedding?’ I asked him. I don’t say I was under my uncle’s spell, but I was drawn to a person who made their own rules and was scared of no one. Such individuals, who do not care what society thinks or what it says about them, are full of energy and they make the world go round. My husband was this way.
‘Soon. But Eunice wants time for preparations, that’s what women are like, you have to accept it. Oh, this pastry! This is a good one. You didn’t see this on the tray, did you? The main tray. Vivien, in life there is always the main tray which is for the ordinary people who don’t know that waiting in the back there is something special. Always. I learned this a long time ago. Wait for the special tray.’
‘But life isn’t cakes.’
‘No, it isn’t, of course not, but the principle is the same. You have to know that there is something else, something better, that is hidden from you, that they don’t want you to find out about, that you have to ask for, and sometimes you just have to go and take it. Your father never knew this, that’s his great failing; don’t let it be yours.’
‘My mother told me quite recently that she met you before my father.’
‘That’s right. I’m happy she remembered. A poor girl with her stick, a pretty girl who had no idea she was pretty, the stick beat her itself if ever she told herself she was. And intelligent, too. I knew she was just right for Ervin.’
‘You introduced them on purpose?’
‘Of course. It was all arranged. Ervin didn’t know he was going to meet a girl, I just told him to join me for coffee on the banks of the Danube, but this was my plan, to bring them together. He needed a girl and he was too cantankerous to meet one himself.’
I felt that everything had happened already, that we living ones were just shadows of the real events, weak outlines cast down the decades.
