The Credit Draper

by J David Simons

  “Be a little late, then.”

  Madame Kahn pulled him into a large curtained room lit only by the glow from a coal fire in the grate, pushed him down into a chair, and swished out of the door.

  From somewhere behind him, the loud grind of a clock measured out the heartbeat of the room. He sat still, staring at the dancing flames until he heard the door open behind him. Mary came into view, dragging a tin bath half-filled with water across the carpet to the centre of the hearth. When the tub was in place, she clamped her hands firmly to her hips, turned towards him. Her young face was flushed, her rolled-up sleeves revealed thin freckled arms, their skin raw and reddened from housework. She swung one foot towards him, then the other, until she could grab the arms of his chair. He stiffened. She drew her face close up to his, her red hair and white face filled his vision. Green eyes peered into his own. He had never seen green eyes so close before. They seemed to reflect his image, not absorb like the brown eyes he was used to. He could feel the heat of her cheeks, hear the excited rasp of her breath in her chest as she scrutinised his face, muttering all the while in sing-song under her breath. He tried to push himself further back into the chair.

  “Ye had to turn up just as I was leavin’,” she half-whispered, her thin lips mean and narrow over yellow teeth. “Like a bad penny.” She snatched his cheek between the knuckles of two of her fingers, twisted the flesh hard. “That’ll teach ye.”

  His eyes teared, but he refused to let out a sound. She ruffled his hair and left the room.

  He waited. His cheek burned but he didn’t dare touch it. The clock beat louder. A coal shifted and crunched in the grate causing a minor avalanche of sparks and cinder. Voices chattered past the curtained window, followed by a woman’s laugh, then silence. He shuddered to the sound of the door opening. Mary. This time with a large pitcher of boiling water which she poured into the tub. Again on her way out, she stopped, drew herself close to him. Again she grabbed the same stinging cheek with her knuckles, twisted the flesh. This time the pain was worse and he struggled not to cry out. She stepped back, humming to herself, rocking her head from side to side. She moved closer and he felt her hands on his abdomen, her fingers crawling under his jumper to lift the shirt from inside his waistband. He flinched from the coarse cold touch of her fingers on the flesh of his belly as they struggled with his buttons.

  “Mary,” Madame Kahn shouted.

  He kicked out, sending the girl tumbling to the floor. But quick, she was on her feet again, smoothing down the front of her apron, curtsying before her mistress. Madame Kahn snapped a few words at her servant before sending her out of the room. She then told him to get undressed and take a bath.

  Avram was still shaking when Madame Kahn left, but he somehow managed the unwieldy buttons of his shirt. He stripped off the rest of his clothes, eased himself down into the scalding relief of the water in the tub. A gritty soap had been left for him and he rubbed hard at the grime of the last few days wishing his mother was there to wash his back, to soothe and comfort him from these new terrors.

  As the water cooled he laid back to soak, surprised to recall that it was only early this same morning that his steamship had docked in this foreign land. He remembered clinging to the deck railings, peering into the fog as the ship had stumbled up-river with thin-bellied seagulls squawking at the stern. He realised he had no idea what kind of country this Scotland was. Only that he had emerged here, into this room, out of a river of mist and a tunnel of tenements. He nipped his nose closed and let himself sink down slowly into the tub, feeling the water test his lips for entrance, massage his eyelids, block his ears. In the black silence, he saw his weeping mother disentangle herself from his arms then push him away. His fingers had tried to claw at her jacket but Dmitry’s strong arm had swept him on board. When he had been released on deck, he ran back to the gangplank but his mother had already disappeared into the darkness. This darkness.

  He pushed himself up from under the water, kneaded his eyes open to witness a young girl about his age tapping a finger on the side of the tub. She wore a blue cotton smock, her hair tucked up in a headscarf except for a few dark curls escaped around her temples. With a tilt of her head to her shoulder, she stared unabashed at his nakedness.

  “Celia,” she said, pointing at her chest. She then swivelled her finger menacingly at him.

  He told her his name.

  She placed the finger into the gap of her open mouth. “Avram. English?”

  When he shook his head, she folded her arms in annoyance. Then, as if contemplating all the wonderful possibilities his lack of understanding could present, she giggled.

  He ducked under the water and when he re-emerged, he pointed at her.

  “Celia. Russki?” She shook her head and it was now his turn to mock her. She strutted around the tub, trailing a finger along its rim, causing him to twist his head in pursuit. She began to go faster, dragging her hand in the tub, then dipping in deeper to scoop water into his face. He splashed back. Shrieking, she ran faster, slipping and sliding around the bath. He ducked under the water again, but when he brought his head back to the surface she had gone.

  Three

  AVRAM LIKED THE WAY Celia held his hand. No girl had ever done that before. Just taken his hand in hers, easy as you like, suddenly a feeling of connection to another human being in this strange and alien world. So comforting, those tiny white fingers clasped warmly around his own as he followed her to the top landing of their close. There, he managed to grasp through her poor Yiddish and her gestures that when she was in position, she would call out his name from the landing below. He was to run down after her, try to catch her.

  “You must shout the game’s special words,” she instructed, so close he could smell her breath. He wondered if it was the bicarbonate of soda that gave her such a sweet fragrance.

  “What are they?”

  Her eyes darted at him in excitement. “I. Did. It.”

  “I. Did. It.”

  “Good. Again. But faster.”

  “I did it.”

  “Perfect. Now, stay.”

  He clambered on to the bannister, watched her skip down the stairway. She rang the doorbell of one flat, then the other.

  “Avram,” she screamed up the stairwell. “Who did it?”

  “I did it, I did it,” he screamed. He flew down the stairs after her, ignoring the angry neighbours roused to their doorways until an old woman on the ground floor blocked his flight with the snap of a broom handle across his path. She grabbed him hard with a wizened hand, twisted his ear until he cried out. Then she led him to the Kahn’s flat across the passage.

  “Not only did he do it,” she complained. “He even shouts out he did it. “I did it, I did it.” This is what he says. What kind of meshugge child do you have here?”

  “But Mrs Carnovsky,” Papa Kahn protested. “The boy can’t speak a word of English.”

  “You see,” Madame Kahn said, stepping out from behind her husband. “Tzores. That boy will only be trouble.” Her hands were stained purple from peeling beetroot, the earthy-sweet aroma of borsht drifting into the stairwell from the kitchen. Avram knew that smell. It was the smell of der heim.

  Mrs Carnovsky let go of his ear.

  “Feh, feh,” she grumbled, as she shuffled back across the corridor into her flat. Avram waited for the punishment that surely must come. But instead Papa Kahn took him gently by the arm.

  “Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  The shop was only two streets away. Avram couldn’t read the name on the sign but the size of the lettering for such a small store-front impressed him. Through the grainy window, he could see bolts of cloth set out against a curtain. To one side, a crude dummy of a male torso displayed a jacket, a dead rose in the lapel.

  “Back in Russia I was to study mathematics,” Papa Kahn told him. “You see, Avram, I was very good with numbers.”

  “I am good with numbers too.”

  “Yo
u are?”

  “Yes, I like arithmetic.”

  “Be careful of numbers. They have the power of truth. But in Russia they can betray you.”

  “How can numbers betray you?”

  “Quotas.”

  “Quotas, sir?”

  “Quotas restricted the number of Jews in Russia entering institutions of higher learning. Quotas demanded their numbers of Jews for the army. Then more and more numbers. Until they wanted me. Then more again. Year after year after year. Younger and younger numbers. Until now it seems they want even a young number like you.” Papa Kahn stopped talking, stared at the ground. “Let us go inside,” he sighed.

  The dim air of the workshop hung thick with the fluff and fuzz of fabric, prickling the skin on Avram’s forehead, bringing him out in a sweat. Myriad shapes of discarded cloth, like tiny flags after a parade, began to attach themselves to his shoes as he walked in Papa Kahn’s wake across the room. A young girl stood at a large workbench building up the canvas of a jacket with padding. She greeted her employer with a slight curtsy. At another bench, an older woman pressed out a pair of trousers with a flat iron, her mouth bristling with pins. Papa Kahn introduced him first to the young girl, Sadie, then to Mrs Wallace.

  “Take off your jacket,” Papa Kahn told him. “Sadie will fix it for you.”

  Avram attempted to show Sadie where the pocket had been sliced open, but she just snatched it from him, laid it out quick and efficient on her work-bench. He followed Papa Kahn into a back office. It was a narrow, tidy space with just enough room for a small desk. A Hebrew calendar hung on the wall with each day passed crossed out in thick black ink.

  “So here I am,” Papa Kahn said, holding out his arms. “Doing one of the few crafts open to a Jew who didn’t want to roll cigarettes, upholster chairs or frame pictures. And who lacked the strength to build ships or go down the mines. I became a simple tailor.”

  Avram felt instinctively that Papa Kahn was seeking a response, but he didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t used to an adult talking to him in this way. So directly. So intimately.

  Papa Kahn sighed again, sat down slowly on the worn leather chair behind his desk. “Don’t judge me too harshly, Avram. Don’t judge me too harshly.”

  Avram looked at the calendar and counted the days to his birthday.

  Avram squashed up beside Celia in the armchair, watched with fascination the glow from the match illuminate Uncle Mendel’s face, further deepening the circles around the man’s eyes as he sucked his pipe alight. Uncle Mendel boasted long side-locks and a thick beard, he wore a yarmulke on his head, but his skin was not the pale skin of the pious – this man’s complexion was ruddy and weather-beaten, a man of the plough rather than the prayer book. Avram had no idea what Uncle Mendel did to make a living, except that his work took him off to the Scottish countryside for most of the week, until he returned for the synagogue service on Friday nights. When the Sabbath was over the following evening, Uncle Mendel would come downstairs from this tiny, barely-furnished flat to accompany his sister’s singing on the piano. The man would hunch his large frame over the keyboard, squeeze his eyes shut and somehow manage to eke out a delicate tune with thick fingers that reminded Avram of the fleshy tubes of vursht hanging outside the butcher shop in his hometown. And as Madame Kahn sang operatic ballads from her German homeland, Avram saw her normally stern face so transformed with a spirit of joy that he too began clapping along to her song.

  “So you are the son of Rachel Escovitz.” Uncle Mendel leaned back in his chair to consider this piece of information before returning his attention to keeping the tobacco burning in his pipe. “And how old are you, this son of Rachel?”

  “I am twelve years old,” Avram said proudly. “Yesterday was my birthday.”

  “Mazeltov, mazeltov, mazeltov. A birthday in your new homeland. We must celebrate.”

  “And how will we do that, Uncle?” Celia asked.

  “With a little schnapps, perhaps, or a little dram of the whisky. And for you children, this wonderful baked fish. This herring. Fresh from the waters of Loch Fyne it comes.”

  Uncle Mendel took a poker and with a skilful flick he turned over a parcel of damp newspapers baking in the white embers of the grate. Celia gleefully clapped her hands together. A curious combination of smells began to fill the room – that of wet paper drying and charring, the tantalising aroma of cooking fish, the essence of sweet, dark tobacco. “And who also was the son of Rachel?” Uncle Mendel asked. “Of Rachel and Jacob? Quick, quick, quick.”

  Avram felt Celia poke him so hard he almost fell off the chair. He managed to steady himself. “Joseph,” he replied. “Joseph was the son of Rachel and Jacob.”

  “So he was.” Uncle Mendel nodded his head around the room as if to some invisible audience. “This is a good Jewish boychik who knows his Pentateuch.”

  Avram waited for another question but none came. Instead Uncle Mendel continued to draw on his pipe, making gentle sucking noises as he did so, his watery, melancholy eyes lost to faraway places. After a while, the man turned his attention to minding the herring baking on the fire, tipping the bundle up here and there as if some special vision enabled him to see past the newspapers to the progress of the cooking flesh within. Avram tried to keep still but Celia wriggled in the chair. Avram had already heard Madame Kahn’s complaints about Uncle Mendel’s lapses into silence. She put it down to loneliness. A man his age should have been married with grown-up children already. Too much time on his own. Travelling around the countryside, schlepping his parcels around. Or stuck up in that miserable flat of his. Or in that broken-down hut in the countryside. What does he do there all the time? Drinking that awful whisky. Or baking his herring. Baking his brains more like it. Too much time to think. Too much thinking is not good for you. He forgets how to talk to other human beings.

  “Only Joseph?” Uncle Mendel asked eventually, prodding the stem of his pipe at Celia.

  “No, Uncle. There was Benjamin. The youngest of all Jacob’s twelve sons. But only the second he had by Rachel.”

  Uncle Mendel chewed on the white stem, drifting away on some memory.

  “Uncle Mendel?” Celia prompted.

  “Yes,” he sighed.

  “Is Benjamin the right answer?”

  “Of course it is, my dear.”

  Celia folded her arms smugly while Uncle Mendel reverted to bobbing his head in rhythm to the consideration of some other thought. He pulled his pipe out of his mouth, drawing out a thread of spittle.

  “Cossacks, Avram. The Cossacks still hurt our people?”

  Avram nodded.

  “It is a terrible thing. But here you are safe. Here are a good people.”

  “They don’t hate us here?”

  “No, they don’t hate us here. They don’t have time to hate us here. They are too busy hating each other. Or hating the English.”

  “But why do they hate each other?” Avram asked.

  Uncle Mendel didn’t answer, for known only to him some significant cooking threshold had been achieved in the grate. “Aha! Dinner is ready,” he announced.

  Uncle Mendel took up the poker, nudged the bundle of fish out of the fire onto a large plate. With dancing fingers, he unwrapped the package, the skin of the herring peeling away easily with the paper to leave the naked steaming flesh. Uncle Mendel then picked off a piece, passed it to Avram, then another to Celia.

  “Mind the bones,” he warned.

  Avram popped the succulent flesh into his mouth. It was delicious.

  Four

  AVRAM DISCOVERED HE HAD TWO LIVES NOW. Back in his homeland there had only been one integrated narrative, where the world of his senses was the same as the incessant chattering going on inside his head. But here in the Gorbals there existed not only this outer world involving these strangers with their strange language in this strange city: there was this inner world too, quite separate, the world of his dreams.

  “What will happen to you, Mama?” he screamed
across the chasm of water into the wild eyes of his mother. “What will happen to you?”

  “God will look after me, Avram. Don’t worry. God will look after me.”

  He clung on to the mast of a raft that was being lashed in its moorings by towering waves as high as a steeple. The sky was so grey it was impossible to see where the ocean ended and the air began. Water lapped over his feet, slapped at his face, drenched his clothes. Bodies of silvery fish, swept up in the swell, wriggled on the make-shift deck then disappeared over the side with the next sea-burst. There were other figures on the raft, men with vague, bearded faces. Many men, far too many for such a small cramped craft, but miraculously the limited space coped with their presence. Papa Kahn and Uncle Mendel could have been among them or they could have been the prophets he had seen illustrated in biblical textbooks. Elijah, Isiah, Jeremiah, Obadiah, Zehariah. They were engrossed in tasks with winches and thick wet ropes that coiled and snapped among them like wild snakes as the raft slid up and down on the belly of this ocean beast. The men murmured as they worked, creating a deep bass tone that resonated like a synagogue prayer above the roar of the ocean. He reached out towards his mother, towards the harbour jetty which lurched in and out of his view with each heave and suck of swell.

  “What will happen to you, Mama?” he shouted.

  His mother spoke effortlessly, yet her words still reached him clearly over the buffeting wind. “I told you. God will look after me. Why do I have to keep repeating myself? God will look after me.”

  The raft rose high on a wave, dropping him back into the grip of a sailor, Dmitry’s grip, the dark coarse cloth of the man’s naval sleeve blocking his vision. A wave washed over them and he managed to drag the damp serge away from his eyes.

  “What will happen to me?” he screamed into darkness. “What will happen to me?”