by Linda Grant
‘After tomorrow we’ll be neighbours,’ I said.
‘Yes, we will.’
‘And I want to apologise, again, for what my father said to you.’ But I realised I had uttered the wrong thing for that insult was now in the category of events that were unmentionable and which she suspected were only raised in order to provoke embarrassment. She nodded curtly, and opened the door.
I said I would be around the next day at the house in Camden to help her unpack, but she said it wouldn’t be necessary, ‘because Sándor will be there, I don’t need any more help than that’.
Still, I tried to reach forward to kiss her on the cheek, and she stood, stiffly, accepting the touch of my lips, but not offering her own.
As I turned the corner at the end of Eunice’s road, opposite a noisy dirty traffic junction near the tube station, a gang of boys came along, four abreast, in the other direction. To an outsider who was unfamiliar with the clothing of that period, the late 1970s, we were dressed in the same way, but not quite, for I had adopted Claude’s off-duty punk style, which had certain significant coded differences to the clothes of the skinheads. For example, they wore laced leather boots, we wore canvas boots; they wore their jeans rolled up to the calf, we wore tight, drainpipe jeans; they wore braces to hold up theirs, we didn’t; our hair stood up in spikes which were, that summer, growing higher and higher into Mohawks, dyed pink and blue, and they shaved their heads to a close stubble; our jewellery was safety pins and they had none at all. So there were all these differences that you could see at once and they knew, and I knew, that we were enemies.
I had never seen skinheads so close up before. I could smell the leather of their boots and see the pink skin of their scalps.
They grabbed my bag, yanked it from my hand and began to throw its contents out on to the ground. Perhaps there was something else cut into the hash, apart from the suspected opium, because instead of curling into a ball and dying, quietly, there on the street corner, or running back to Eunice’s, I began to shout at them, calling them dirty low-lives and Fascists. I snatched the bag from their hands and began hitting one of them about the head with it. The metal clasp caught the side of his face and gashed his cheek. I’m bleeding, he cried, and began to dab at the blood with a handkerchief. The others started laughing at him, calling him a crybaby for being upset about a little cut from a girl’s handbag. They knelt down and began to tighten the laces on their boots. I gathered my things that were strewn around the pavement and put them back in my bag.
As I bent over, I felt a boot go into the small of my back and I fell face down on to the concrete. The road grazed the skin from my hands, and beads of blood began to spread along them.
The skinheads stood and laughed, then they picked up my handbag and stuffed the wallet in my mouth, because I was a filthy Jewess bitch who loved money, they said. But it didn’t matter what they called me because as soon as I freed my jaw I went on screaming at them, all the names under the sun, until they got bored and walked off and then I ran after them and they turned back and beat me again. But in my rage I barely felt the blows and I went on running my mouth at them in revenge for what their forebears had done to my uncle. The more I talked the more they kicked, but my legs were iron and felt nothing. My mouth spewed fiery wrath like God bringing down plagues on the enemies of his people.
When he heard me come in my uncle knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer. I really didn’t want to see anyone, I was dog-tired, aching, dumb. I came home shamefully, shaking along the railings like a beaten animal. He called out, ‘Vivien?’ You there?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m here.’ My voice a cracked tin plate. ‘You OK?’ ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ ‘What’s the matter, did someone hurt you?’ ‘No.’ ‘You sure?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ ‘OK, OK, I see you in the morning.’
The front door opened and closed all evening. I heard Claude come in, the creak of his leather jacket, a cough, a slight pause as he passed the door of my flat. I heard him open the door of his room and close it. An hour or two later, it opened again, I heard him go upstairs and knock on Sándor’s door. There was a conversation but I couldn’t make out what either of them said, then Claude came back. The bed sagged as he lay down in it. I thought about him lying there, looking at his fish, their simple little lives.
Finally, after a few hours of fitful sleep I noticed that my jeans were torn at the knee, my leather jacket was ripped. I got undressed and my legs and arms, covered in short coarse dark hairs, were growing huge bruises, and a fingernail had gone bad. I got into the bath but the hot water made me very sleepy. I dozed for a long time, the water cooling, until someone banged on the door and asked me if I’d drowned in there and, regretfully, I pulled myself out, wrapped the small thin towel round me and dried myself. My naked body looked so frail and damaged that I thought it could be folded down into a matchbox. I wept.
Night fell, at last. I lay down on my bed and began to read a sonnet but after few words, I fell asleep. The warm damp of the towel held me. I was slumbering, deep in dreams. I am a big dreamer, always have been, they come easily to me. I love to dream.
Sándor in the dark. His eyes wide open. He thinks about what he has seen, the sight will not leave him. It glitters with a metal brilliance.
How do you protect the ones you love? He doesn’t know, he never had the opportunity before. His little brother ran from him, his father was distracted in his books, his mother was far away, and when you think about it, safer than he was, even when she was in danger. Now suddenly, everyone is vulnerable–his niece, his sweetheart: what is a man like him to do?
My uncle’s brain is one of calculation. It’s true he had goons to beat up his tenants if they could not pay up, or would not pay up, but he always employs those goons from their own people; for himself, he has a distaste for violence, he will not be there when they are doing the beating. It’s their own business how they get the money, he turns away his head: don’t involve me. I don’t see what you do. That is what he told Mickey, who had the connections.
But now something is winding down in him; that intense drive which had accompanied him all his life to keep his head above water, the life-saving act he had done on himself for forty years–he’s no longer sure it matters. He remembers the December afternoon he first saw Mickey on the street, the lights of the shop windows blazing, full of beautiful things that you could not buy in communist Hungary, and the clockwork bears running around the pavement as if they had business of their own to do. I’d like to see them bears again, he says to me, in his thoughts. I had no bear like that when I was a child growing up in the Zémplen. The toys we had were made of wood and never moved, you moved them yourself, with your hand, soldiers and so forth. Horses, with straw tails. A wind-up clockwork bear, that would have been a miracle.
He misses the village, the quiet streets, the drays, the plums in the orchards and the grapes ripening on the vines, the smell of his mother’s hands on washing day, the lye soap: all these memories that had lain dormant inside him for so many years that had been brought up, struggling to the surface like gasping fish, by that machine with its whirring tapes, the typewriter, the paper.
But what can you do? You see it before your eyes, still metallically gleaming. It won’t leave you alone, this torment. Even a sound mind plays tricks, he learned that in prison, because like everything he knows, lessons have always come to him the hard way.
When I was finally bathed and dried and in bed and sleeping, and the sodium streetlights were burnished through the undrawn curtains, the branches of the flowering cherry in the garden black and mysterious, the traffic lights turning red amber green to no one, and I was dreaming of fairgrounds, wooden bucking horses with gold manes, I heard my name. Like a hot needle, it came.
Vivien help me where are you Vivien.
Had he fallen?
I turned on the time delay switch and stumbled through the hall. His door was open. Help me, he cried.
In the room the light bulb was smashed out: the
time delay switch outside illuminated the scene then put it back down into darkness. I saw a heap by the bed, a hump shape of a body or a bodies. The fish tank was smashed and the fish lay in puddles of water, gasping, dying. My uncle was beside them on the floor and Claude was on top of him but it was Claude who was calling my name. Get the knife, he moaned, and blood gurgled in his windpipe.
I saw a knife on the floor a few inches away from my uncle’s hand. I bent to pick it up and the blade was black and smeared. The last time I held it was to cut my birthday cake.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘He fucking tried to kill me, I was asleep and he came in and stabbed me in the neck, look at what he’s done, help me.’
‘Don’t call the police,’ said my uncle, ‘please, Vivien. No police.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t. What happened here?’
‘Viv, I’m bleeding to death here, for God’s sake get me an ambulance.’
My uncle looked up at me: the lower lip was shaking uncontrollably and the jacket of his pyjamas was pulled up round his shoulders. I could see the famous scars on his back, white lines crossing and crossing again, buried under the mottled grey skin.
‘What did you do?’ I cried in horror, for Claude was passing out, he was making a bloody gurgle in his throat.
‘I struck back,’ my uncle said. ‘I saw what he really is. How can he live? I saw, Vivien, I saw.’
‘I don’t know what you saw. I’m going to ring for an ambulance.’
‘No police!’
I went into the hall where the payphone was and I rang the emergency services.
‘I need an ambulance,’ I said. I heard laughter in the background, I think someone had just told a joke before I came on the line.
‘What’s the nature of the injury?’
‘A person has cut himself.’
‘Where?’
‘In the back and the neck, I think.’
‘Has he been stabbed?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you want me to send the police?’
‘Exactly.’
I still held the knife. I went to the front door and opened it and sat on the step. After a while the sirens started from far away and got closer and eventually they all came, running up the steps of the house and through the door, all those uniformed men and women, who saw me with the knife in my hand and the fear came back, the dark terror I remembered from my childhood, of the world outside my little room.
My uncle was in a cell and as soon as I saw him, I knew he was finished. I could tell that he would not survive and he didn’t. The spasm of rage which took hold of him, that took him down the stairs with the knife in his hand to kill the beast–the beast that was under his own roof and put its hand on the skin of his own flesh of blood–this senseless, irrational clot of anger, overcame not just Claude’s body, but his own: three strokes in twenty-four hours.
Elsewhere in the hospital, Claude was being patched up. His family arrived from Sheerness, the mother, the father, and a young girl his own age who was carrying a little baby which she held up to him and Claude kissed him on the cheek. The girl sat and held Claude’s hand and asked him if he was coming back home now, and they’d manage, wouldn’t they?
Don’t run away, she said to him, don’t run away again. He’s our lad, we’ll find a way to get wages, I know you were dead scared but it’s all going to be all right. Look at him, our lad, he wants you back, he needs his father.
I only saw him for a few minutes. The girl stood outside, smoking a cigarette, glaring at me. She was very pretty.
‘I don’t know what I did,’ Claude said. ‘I only went up to hand in my notice. I took a load of pills after you went and I was fed up with the lot of you. I wanted to piss off down to south London or somewhere, get a job in a different depot. But we didn’t have an unpleasant word.’
‘I don’t know what happened either,’ I said. ‘I only told him we’d had a row. That’s not enough to try to kill you.’
‘Claude don’t want to see you no more,’ the girl said, returning to the room. ‘He’s coming back home with me, aren’t you, babe?’
‘I dunno,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to think.’ But the girl held up the little child.
‘Look at him,’ she said. ‘Look what you’ve been missing. See his little toothie?’
He stared up at me helplessly from the pillow, and I knew I could no more save him than I could my uncle. He would never have his tattoo, it would remain unseen in the pages of the sketchpad, and one day she would find it, and quietly, when he was out at work, it would be thrown out with the rubbish. He would remember it for many years to come, until at last it had faded from his memory. What was disturbed in him would give way, I supposed to drinking, or depression. Which was not hard on the Isle of Sheppey.
When I went back the next day they were all gone. I never saw him again, or I only see him in my dreams, running along the train in his guard’s cap and jacket, opening and closing the doors, shooting up and down, through London, beneath the river in that long soot-blackened metal tube. Or on the river that night, on the slow dredger as the bodies were pulled from the water, and his hands were on my breasts.
‘I’ll warm you,’ he had said.
My father was Sándor’s only next of kin, unless you count myself, so he had to take responsibility. My parents came to the house and looked round his flat, at the mural, the peacock throne, the wicker furniture. ‘So this is how he lived,’ said my mother. My father said nothing.
After a while, Mickey Elf turned up with a dishevelled wig and red-rimmed eyes. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m no relation, it’s none of my business, but if you ask me—’
‘So who asked you?’ said my father.
But Mickey wasn’t afraid of my father, he pressed on, insistent, holding his hand up to straighten his hair. ‘I know what he would have wanted. I know exactly what he was after. Trust me, I know.’
‘Well,’ said my father, ‘we can’t begrudge a man his last wishes.’ But only because he didn’t have a better suggestion
He had gone very quiet when I told him the news. He turned his head away. A few minutes later I saw him polishing his glasses on the frayed end of his tie. ‘So, he’s dead,’ he said. ‘It was always going to end up like this, a murderer in the family.’
It was a large funeral. Mickey and his associates took care of everything down to the last detail. They had him buried in the Jewish cemetery in Bushey. I had only been to one funeral, Alexander’s, the Anglican service in the same chapel where we had got married, the handsome mahogany coffin with brass handles, carried by six churchmen and laid on the altar while we sang hymns and his father delivered the eulogy, full of grace, and quotations from the life and sayings of Jesus. In Bushey, we all gathered in a small building designed for the purpose, neither a chapel nor anything else I could understand, and my father was offered a prayer book to say the particular prayer that was said by the chief mourner for the dead but he didn’t know how to read it.
The pine coffin with rope handles came down to the grave. There were many underworld types there, and of course the press, they came, and wrote short paragraphs the next day, reprinting the old picture of him, that face of evil.
Eunice was alone, dressed in black with a black hat and a small black veil, looking, for the first time, frail.
‘That good man,’ she said. ‘That lovely man, and all he suffered, in the grave.’
Who is being buried there? asked mourners at other graves. A slum landlord, and a pimp, said a reporter, snickering.
Eunice lashed out at his legs with her umbrella. ‘No one knew the man like I did,’ she said from beneath her veil.
‘I knew him longer than anyone, apart from your dad, over there,’ Mickey Elf said to me. ‘I knew him when he was just off the train from the old country, and I knew him through the high times and the low, through thick and thin.’
‘I washed the wounds on his back,’ said Eunice. ‘I saw what was don
e to the poor fellow, the terrible things he suffered, I heard what he cried out in his sleep. I saw this man, a big strong man, in tears, crying like a little baby in his pram.’
‘I knew him when he was king, King Kovacs, when he had the house in Bishops Avenue and all the toffs came to his parties. He had a swimming pool and a ballroom, all the quality came to that place, the film stars and nobles, he had the lot.’
‘You don’t know a man until he’s seen trouble,’ Eunice said, pointing her brown finger at him.
People took turns with the shovel and threw a handful of earth on to the coffin. Mickey took something from his pocket and threw it in. People murmured, ‘What’s that he’s chucking at him?’ I saw the brown ear of a bear fly past me. Some of the gangsters had clubbed together and bought the biggest wreath they could find but Mickey made them leave it at the gate. ‘No flowers at a Jewish funeral,’ he told them. ‘That’s not the way we do things.’ Later, they came back and laid it down on the hump of earth where it stayed, withering and rotting in the early autumn sun and rain, until several months later when we returned to erect the stone and found the metal frame. Years later I went back to Bushey, and the grave still stood, marked, as is the custom, with pebbles, and a withered bunch of irises.
There was nowhere to go afterwards, so we all went our separate ways. I returned to Benson Court with my parents. We went up in the lift, and I entered once more that flat with its smells and its dingy wallpaper and its old-fashioned pre-war kitchen fittings but in my absence my mother had been hard at work with the tin of green paint. She had covered everything she could find that the paint would adhere to. Green stabbed you in the eye wherever you looked.
I opened the door to my bedroom. There, the paint pot had not dared to penetrate. ‘You see I left everything as it was,’ she said. ‘I wanted that if you came back, you would see that nothing had changed.’
