Russell’s first instinct was to walk away. How likely was this? It would almost certainly turn out to be a worthless old book, just as the wife had said. He had encountered this type before—Holocaust survivors who unfortunately had long ago lost all sense of proportion in the never-ending nightmare of their memory.
On the other hand, if this man was telling the truth, if he really did possess an undiscovered medieval manuscript—well, might that not make for a truly original piece of television that program controllers would die for? An unworthy thought; but once conjured up, it sat in his brain and refused to budge.
He remembered how his father had refused to trust anyone, how that had shut off any opportunities he may have had, even his ability to live his daily life free of fear. Yes, the similarity with his father was striking.
What would it cost him, after all, just to take a look?
“Of course I’ll help,” he heard himself say, as if from afar. “If I can.”
What on earth was he getting into here? More to the point, how would he get out of it? He wanted to get involved with a Holocaust survivor like he wanted a hole in the head. But one visit surely wouldn’t be too onerous. One visit, just to see what this was all about. If it was, as he fully expected, a book of no value at all he would just walk away. At least this fellow might then get some peace of mind.
Now the old man gripped him by both arms. His grip was surprisingly strong.
“I vont you to make solemn promise, that you tell no one abaht this. No one.”
“I understand.”
He gave Russell his hand. It was clammy to the touch. Russell recoiled.
“It vos beshert that I should meet you. I am Kuchinsky, by the way. You can call me Joe.”
4
WHEN RUSSELL TURNED up at Kuchinsky’s house—somehow Russell could never bring himself to call him Joe—his resolve nearly failed. It was an anonymous-looking semi-detached with bay windows in Cockfosters.
Did anyone actually live in Cockfosters? It was just the blob on the far end of the Piccadilly line at the top of the Tube map. Russell always imagined anyone who did live there was just about to fall off the edge of London, and therefore civilized life, altogether.
This feeling got stronger as Russell had to hike a tedious distance from the station to get to the house, down one long, featureless road after another with identical 1930s housing and a total deficit of originality, imagination or charm. All the roads looked the same. Russell got lost twice, but there wasn’t a soul around to ask the way. Ah, suburbia. How could any fully functioning human being live here, so far from any signs of life? Not so much as a newsagent in sight, let alone a coffee shop.
By the time Russell finally got to the house he was depressed and irritated, a mood that only deepened when he noted both the shabbiness of the exterior and the fact that the bell didn’t work. He knew he had been spotted because a grimy net curtain had twitched in the bay window as he pushed open the broken front gate. Kuchinsky had clearly been watching out for him, a fact that made him nervous; he didn’t like being watched.
Anyway, Kuchinsky seemed pleased enough to see him when he opened the front door—a little too hearty for his taste, frankly, from the way he clapped him on the back. “I am honored that you should come in my house, mister director,” he said, smiling broadly. He ushered him into the front room. There was a sickly smell of air freshener. “You must excuse,” he said, gesturing around him with a slight shrug. “I am modest man. I do not have fine house, big car, expensive this and that. I am ordinary, vorking man. Not intellectual like yourself.”
‘“It’s fine,” Russell said in his most sensitive tone, his toes immediately curling inside his desert boots. “Very cozy.”
He sat down gingerly on the small sofa, which was covered in brown uncut moquette. There was a hole in the fabric and the stuffing was poking out. Kuchinsky grabbed a cushion and covered the offending spot.
“Please forgive…senior citizens don’t have it easy, know vot I mean? This neighborhood…” He waved at the window. “Not ideal, not ideal at all. Wery mixed, wery mixed. Lot of children running up and down street all day, shouting. Always on skateboard. Vot happened to parents these days?”
“Nowhere for the kids to play. All the playgrounds have gone because of government cutbacks.”
“Government? Vot government? Children need discipline. Six of the best. Is nice phrase. Very polite, like English pipple. My father, he had strap, like this…” He pointed to his leather belt. “I got them often, six of the best. I tell you, after that you didn’t want to do it again. Now they just got everything they vont. Computer. TV in room. iPad. iPhone. And bad vords they use, very bad vords all the time. I am ashamed for myself to listen. My English not so good but these vords I know. So who can be surprised when they knock you down and rob you?”
“You’ve been robbed?”
“Thank God, not yet.”
Typical, Russell thought. Another one just parroting what he had read in the tabloids.
“Me, I don’t cause no trouble. Joe keeps head down. Joe says nothing. Joe don’t trouble neighbors and they don’t trouble Joe. I say hello over fence, and they say hello back. That’s all. English way. Joe like that. Joe like English garden. You have big garden in your house?”
“Actually, I live in a flat.”
“Not house with garden? But you bigshot TV director. Sure you have big house.”
“Look, I’m hardly Steven Spielberg.”
Kuchinsky looked blank.
“I produce TV shows, that’s all. I’m afraid I live from one commission to another.”
He looked astonished. “But you clever man. You important person. You know important pipple, celebrities, politicians. Me, I poor man, uneducated. You have family, children in this flat?’”
“One daughter. But she doesn’t live with me any more. Actually, she hasn’t lived with me for years. I’m divorced.”
He nodded slowly. “And your daughter, she is close to you?”
“Afraid not.”
“Aiee aiee aiee, such tsores we have.” He rocked back and forth on a wooden armchair. “You speak mammaloshen?”
“A few words.”
Of course Russell didn’t speak Yiddish. Not even his father had spoken Yiddish. It was his grandmother’s tongue, the language of illiteracy and dispossession, and the sooner forgotten the better.
“I have garden with fruit trees, roses, everything,” said Kuchinsky. “Now I show you garden and then we have tea.”
Russell followed him as he shuffled down the hall. It was dark and narrow. It also smelled and not of air freshener. Russell happened to be sensitive to smells. There was a sweetish, cloying smell in his father’s flat in the last days of his life. For a while, Russell couldn’t place it, even as it turned his stomach. He had thought it was something the district nurse was using on him, some cream or lotion. But then he realized the smell was coming from inside his father himself. It was his body already beginning to rot.
This was a faint odor of damp carpets and mold. A whiff of neglect. Russell wondered about Kuchinsky. He clearly wasn’t poor; too smartly dressed, too well-fed. But a certain slovenliness in the housekeeping department; yes, there was definitely an element of that. Russell put it down to the effects of age. He felt sorry for him.
The garden was long and narrow. It wasn’t much—just a small strip of grass. But here someone had taken a degree of trouble. In these dreary streets, he thought with a rush of sympathy which surprised himself, a dream of Arcadia. The flower beds were free of weeds and stocked heavily with rose bushes, which had been neatly pruned. Clumps of azaleas flanked a small pergola laden with honeysuckle. There were banks of lupins and hollyhocks. There was a tiny pond with a rock garden, and a couple of hideous gnomes. And along the fence, apple and pear trees were trained in the espalier style, linking arms a
s they sidestepped neatly down the flower beds.
“So who’s the gardener round here?”
Kuchinsky gripped his arm. That steel clamp again. “They say Englishman’s home is castle, yes? Well this is real McCoy. My little bit of paradise. Every day I come out here to see to plants.”
It turned out that, before he retired, he had owned a dry cleaner’s.
“My parents also had a little store. They sold household goods. We lived above the shop.”
“You lived there? You didn’t have house, garden? All English have house!’”
Russell thought of the little flat where they’d lived cooped up, falling over each other. A rented flat, because his father never had any sense about money or property. He wouldn’t entertain the idea of a mortgage because he didn’t like getting into debt. And anyway, he never had enough capital for a deposit. So while other boys climbed trees in their gardens, swung in hammocks or kicked a ball around the lawn, Russell played in the shop in the large cardboard boxes that housed the regular deliveries. He would climb in and pull the flaps closed over his head, and then listen to his mother shouting for him, or Beverley whining, and feel safe.
Anyway, he never liked houses. Too bloody bourgeois. And you have to talk to the neighbors over the fence. No, give him the anonymity of flat-dwelling any day. The idea of being neatly stacked, with other tenants above and below you, made him feel as safe as when his mother used to tuck him up in bed so tightly Russell could barely move his arms.
“Things were tough in those days. The business didn’t make much money.” Nor did his father’s taxi-driving.
“For sure, is hard running business. Long hours, vork fingers to bone.”
“Still, people always need their clothes cleaned.” Russell absently fingered a leaf. How much longer was he going to have to put up with this?
“I didn’t do so bad. My shop wery high class. Hanower Square. Lot of important pipple my customers. Pipple from embassies, tings like that. Sometimes they send chauffeurs to collect clothes. I go out myself to hang them up in back of Daimler, Jag. I know how to handle fabrics, when to fold, when not to fold. Their most delicate silks they would send me; animal skins, suede, leather. To me they trusted these precious tings. This attention to detail, it no longer happens. Standards now, ach! And you, you also come from pipple in trade. You know vot it’s like to watch pennies. You not one of these blessed snobs with silver spoon in mouth. But you now TV director.”
“Producer, actually.”
Different, goddammit.
“I was lucky. I went to a good school.”
“Ah, English education system, best in vorld.”
Russell was finding all this English ra-ra tiresome. There was a certain type of British Jews of a certain age who never stopped touching their forelocks at Britain. They were so grateful to have been granted admission, so starstruck by fabled British characteristics like cricket, bus queues and stiff upper lips they never stopped behaving like foreigners frozen in time somewhere around 1957.
The way Kuchinsky himself was dressed! Grey flannel trousers, a red paisley cravat tucked into his white shirt collar and a double-breasted blazer, all in immaculate condition. Savile Row out of the Łódź ghetto.
He was stooping down, filleting the odd leaf or tiny weed from the soil. Russell watched him sieving the earth through his fingers. For some reason, such absorption in his plants and attention to detail touched him. Truth to tell, he had always been fascinated by people who could actually make things grow. No sooner did he stick a geranium in a pot than it folded up its petals and died. The fact that Kuchinsky had an affinity with the natural world made him warm to him a little. It showed that he may have been a prize bore out of synagogue central casting, but at least he had a green soul.
A certain camaraderie settled between them. Russell thought he could have been one of his uncles, pottering about. He knew where he was with this man. He knew the type.
“Look what I grow: beans, tomatoes, cabbage. And these fruit trees—you like how I train them?” His thick hands tenderly cradled the blossoming branches. “See buds that will be fruit, growing again every year, no problem. No matter what happens, it all comes up again. Regular. Nothing can stop it. It was here before us and will be here after us. That gives me comfort. It reminds me of home.”
“Home?”
“I was brought up on farm. In Poland.”
“My grandmother too.” Really, the similarities were striking.
But now his face had suddenly closed up. Something seemed to have snapped shut. Russell realized he had strayed into sensitive territory. An entire way of life had simply been obliterated in Poland in the Final Solution. For those few who survived, the past was often now a forbidden country. Not that Russell personally had any wish to visit it; he had had enough of hysterical survivors to last a lifetime.
“We go in now and have tea.”
Back in the front room, Russell looked at his watch. When was he actually going to get to the point of his visit? Kuchinsky seemed to have forgotten all about it.
Russell found he was shivering. The room was dark and quite cold, despite the sunny spring weather. In the street outside, the cherry blossom trees foamed pink. But the room was gloomy and dull. The furniture was heavy and old-fashioned. The faded, threadbare carpet had a large floral design marching across it in regular lines. A large television set stood in the corner on a stand. A gas fire was set into a surround of greenish tiles, some of which were cracked. Roses and clematis clambered across the wallpaper, which was brown and stained in places, and on which hung two prints in cheap but ornate frames: the Tretchikoff of the woman with the green face, and Constable’s Hay Wain. There were some ornaments on the mantelpiece, but no photographs at all.
In the street, a car went by with its radio blaring. Russell fancied he heard raised voices from within the house, but when the car had gone all was quiet, and he decided he must have imagined it.
Russell prowled round the room, staring at the hideous Tretchikoff and the equally hideous china figurines and plastic flowers on the mantelpiece. The contrast between the care bestowed on the garden and the dreary, worn interior was striking. Russell paused before a large, walnut cabinet with glass panels. Inside was a collection of silver objects. Russell looked more closely. There was a pair of tall candlesticks, quite ornate. There was a set of wine goblets, and what looked like a Passover plate. There was a tall, conical-shaped object hung with silver bells and flags, which Russell recognized as a container for the spices which are handed round in the ritual ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath. And there was something Russell had never seen before: a kind of silver upright panel from which protruded a row of narrow scoops.
“You vont to see these as well?”
Kuchinsky’s voice behind him made him jump. Russell hadn’t heard him come in. He was carrying a large cardboard box, which he put down on a chair. His voice was a bit sharp, Russell thought.
“They look like fine pieces.”
“These all wery precious. To me, you understand? Precious to me. Many memories. Some sad, some happy.”
Anyone would think Russell was sizing up the stuff in order to steal it. Kuchinsky laboriously unlocked the cabinet with a key attached to his belt. He was wheezing slightly. He took out one goblet, then another. They were thickly encrusted with bunches of grapes, leaves and flowers, all picked out in relief.
“This craftsmanship, you never see now.” He turned one over admiringly in his large hand.
“What’s that?”
He took out the upright panel, and Russell realized that the scoops were receptacles for burning wicks in oil. It was a Hanukkah menorah, in a style Russell had never previously seen. At home, they’d just had a standard eight-branched candlestick in tarnished silver, which had been stuck in a cupboard and then dutifully brought out every year when they had all tunelessl
y and self-consciously sung songs round it in a cursory fashion.
But Russell had never seen one as beautiful and ornate as this. Behind the scoops were arranged tiny silver tableaux of flamingos and palm trees, monkeys and parrots, while on the upright panel supporting them were carved elaborate crowns, trumpets, flowers and rampant lions of Judah. What must it have taken, Russell wondered, to make just one of these sumptuous objects, to hammer the silver into these delicate figures and shapes? For what these objects spoke of was love, a passionate feeling poured into every grape and branch and feather of these molds, an emotion felt for a people and a faith which had been passed down through generations of silent witnesses in a faraway country—an emotion which Russell had never known.
He thought back to the rituals enacted in his own family. For them, there had been no objects of beauty crafted with love. What had been used had been as anonymous and perfunctory as the family’s observance itself. And yet these fabulous pieces spoke of a spiritual life of richness and depth that had once been lived on an impoverished Polish farm.
Of course Russell wasn’t jealous, or anything like that. Religion was bunk. He was just interested.
“And these objects weren’t just for show, but they were really used in your family all the time?”
Kuchinsky fingered the menorah. He seemed to be far away.
“At night during Hanukkah in our village, every Jewish house had one of these flickering in vindow. Through it, you would see faces in candlelight, and as you walked home there would be faint sound of chanting from house to house to house. No street lights, just black sky full of stars and these vindows glowing. As I walked down street, I thought I heard angels singing. Those were magical times.”
He faltered, and swallowed hard. “These sacred treasure. If they could speak…they have witnessed too much terror, too much sorrow.”
To Russell’s horror, Kuchinsky’s face crumpled and he let out a gasping sob. At almost the same instant, the door opened and a woman came in carrying a tray set with a teapot and cups. For a moment, she was framed in the doorway as she paused fractionally to take in the scene: Kuchinsky holding the menorah in one hand and shielding his eyes with the other as he wept, while Russell was rooted to the spot in a rigor of embarrassment, clutching the Passover plate.
The Legacy Page 4
