Ibrahim craned his head back and sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s just, it’s difficult. Even getting here. Even thinking about getting here. And with me in Cardiff…’
‘I know, Ib. And I know why you had to go to Cardiff.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Yeah. Dad told me. After the bombings. Not long after your accident. We were watching the news, and they were talking about extremists, and he said you once got yourself mixed up with those nutters at the mosque that got raided. Is that true?’
His inability to answer her was all the answer she needed.
‘Ha!’ She laughed. ‘My brother the terrorist.’
‘Aish. It’s not funny.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, look at you! It all makes sense now. Remember that time you tried getting us to wear the niqab, and me and my friends just laughed at you? Remember that?’
‘Aish…’
‘We were thirteen. And you and your mates thought we should go around dressed like ninjas?’
‘Aish, please. It’s not funny.’
‘Yes. It is.’ She gave him a sideways glance, smiling, expecting him to smile back, but he didn’t. ‘Someone’s had a sense-of-humour bypass, I see.’
Little more was said for the remainder of their journey, though it took almost an hour and a half to reach the hospital. It was midday, and from Holborn to Limehouse the traffic moved at a listless, grinding pace. When Aisha spoke, it was to the traffic lights or the drivers of other cars, yelling insults and curses at the top of her voice.
Ibrahim, meanwhile, kept his hands on his knees and took slow, deep breaths. He had left his Valium behind some place, perhaps in Reenie’s tent – wherever it was, it was in neither his bag nor his wallet when he left the police station – and though only a Sunday afternoon central London was still busy. So many cars, so many people. Cyclists weaving in and out of lanes. Motorbikes tearing between cars and buses and trucks. Armies of pedestrians pouring out into the road at every crossing. Thudding, almost industrial-sounding music blaring out of every souped-up, two-door cabriolet that passed them. This was London at its worst; a vortex of people and noise, the traffic smells of exhaust fumes and hot tarmac, the warm, damp air and stern sky promising rainstorms.
At the hospital in Newham they walked through vanishing-point corridors and the cloying stench of bleach and illness until they came to their father’s ward. The man lying in a bed that looked more like a machine was small, but more than that he was old. His hairline had receded further in the years since Ibrahim last saw him, and what hair remained was streaked through with white. The colour had drained from his skin, leaving him a bloodless grey, like something carved from stone. Ibrahim wondered, for a moment, if they had entered the wrong ward, if Aisha had made some mistake. The man in the bed was barely recognisable as his father.
Aisha walked around the bed, taking up the chair at its side, and gestured to Ibrahim that he should do the same, but he could only stand and look down at the shrunken, grey old man beneath the blanket. His father was sleeping, and silent, and Ibrahim felt a jarring moment of resentment for him, an emotion he’d never give voice to.
He wanted to grab his father by the shoulders, shake him until he woke, and say, ‘I came all this way, and you’re asleep? Do you even care that I’m here?’
Ibrahim thought of all the wasted hours without words that had passed between them, in all their journeys from London to Cardiff and back again; journeys that seemed long at the time but that were now dwarfed by the last week. He thought of all the bristling silences they had endured in the weeks and months after his friends were arrested: the accusatory glances and his father’s frequent looks of disappointment and dejection. He thought of the years that had passed since they last spoke to – let alone saw – one another. He thought of all the things he would repair, if only he could go back; the choices he’d make and the words he’d place in those silences.
Aisha was on her feet again and at his side, holding his hand and taking him to the blue plastic chair, one arm reaching up to cradle his broad shoulders. She helped him into the chair beside their father’s bed, and stroked the top of his head, leaving her hand there. He leaned in to her, his head against her side, and she held him close.
‘It’s okay,’ she sighed. ‘He’s gonna be okay.’
Ibrahim nodded, though he didn’t believe her, and he cried without sobbing, crying for the time and the people he’d lost and for the things he would never say.
Presently, they were joined by a doctor who greeted Ibrahim with surprise, as if he hadn’t known there were a son as well as a daughter, and he talked Ibrahim through each detail of his father’s condition. In a way, their father was lucky, the doctor said. If he had suffered such a stroke just ten years later he would almost certainly have died instantly. Even so, it might be months before Nazir Siddique would have any kind of mobility, and longer still for him to recover basic speech. He’d need round-the-clock care. Being the age that he was, it was unlikely he’d ever work again.
Through all this Ibrahim looked at his father and with each new detail watched him disappear, replaced by a helpless sketch of the man he once was. The man who had an opinion on everything was gone. The man who, if not working, became restless and agitated, who was always working, always busy: gone. The man who hated relying on others, who would happily struggle alone rather than ask for help, gone. When this doctor, with his cool, impassive voice – neither unsympathetic nor comforting – had finished tearing each facet of his father away, Ibrahim wondered if there was anything left except the grey husk now asleep in the bed.
The doctor left them, and Ibrahim reached out and held his father by the hand, something he hadn’t done since childhood. Then, his father had insisted on holding his hand each time they crossed the road, and it was embarrassing (what if a school friend should see them?) and his father’s grip was vice-like, almost painful, his skin rough and calloused, but beneath all that it made Ibrahim feel safe, as if nothing bad could ever happen to him while his father held his hand. Now his father’s hand was limp – there was no grip in it, no strength – and even his skin felt softer, as if it wasn’t the calluses that had given them their texture, but rather the life and the irascibility of the man himself that roughened and coarsened them.
And how irascible he’d been. When angry, Nazir Siddique’s silences were keen, his words thunderous and terrifying. Though he’d lived his whole life in London, and spoke with an accent that was more East End than Punjab, his command of the language always felt stilted, unpolished. He spoke directly, never mincing his words. Five years ago they’d been in a situation much like this, Nazir and his son, only then their places were switched, with Ibrahim in the bed and his father at the bedside. It was only the second time Ibrahim had ever seen his father cry.
‘Why these things?’ he had asked, mopping the tears from his face with a handkerchief. ‘Why do these things happen to us? What did we do that was so terrible?’ He looked at his son and shook his head. ‘Perhaps this is a sign. Those other boys, they faced justice. And at the time, I said to your mother, I said we should have called the police. It didn’t seem fair, those other boys, and their mothers crying at the court, and you still at home, then going to university. Perhaps I should have called the police, told them what I knew, but I didn’t, because you’re my son. And so you went away, and we thought you were safe, but no. You find yourself a girlfriend. A kafir. If your mother was here… Do you think this is what she’d want? Because we didn’t want you going to that mosque, with those people, you think this? You think we want you to marry a kafir, to have kuffar children. And then this happens. And it happens for a reason. Ittaqullah, Ibrahim. Justice will find you. Always.’
It started with those words, the fissure that opened up between them. The weeks, months and years when they didn’t speak. Amanda’s leaving him did nothing to remedy this, if anything making it worse. Suddenly he could blame his father for not only say
ing something so vile, but for causing the very process by which he stopped loving her, stopped loving anyone. But now, sitting at his father’s bedside, holding his hand, Ibrahim wanted to tell him that if his accident was a part of some divine plan, that plan was more crafted and more brilliant in scale than anything Nazir Siddique ever imagined; a vast mechanism of meaningful coincidences, crossing paths, and lives brought together with precision timing. He would tell his father that life, when viewed in close-up, is chaos and noise. He would tell him that only when you draw back, retreat from the world, step outside it, do the patterns become visible, their meanings apparent. He would tell his father that he had never forgotten the name on the headstone he attacked with a hammer and chisel, that he remembered it even now, and that there must be a reason for this, because if there were no reason what was the point in anything?
Ibrahim and Aisha were in the ward almost two hours before their father woke. His eyes opened, and there was a moment’s hesitation when he peered at his son as if trying to remember him. Then came the glint of recognition, and he tried to form a word, his mouth opening and closing silently on just a fragment of the nickname he had given his new born son, and Ibrahim shook his head. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have to say a thing.
‘It’s Prakash, Dad,’ said Ibrahim. ‘I’m right here.’
And he held his father’s hand a little tighter than before.
28
It was the first time she had been there – Upton Park, not London – in almost sixty years, and Reenie climbed familiar steps with much less vigour than she had the last time, and passed through the well-remembered, low, dark station before stepping out onto Green Street.
Across from the station, where there had once been a chemists, there was now a shabby currency exchange with too many brightly coloured notices in its windows. Next to that a former café, now boarded up and the wooden boards plastered with tattered posters. The chip shop was still there, but now nestled between a shop selling saris and another offering ‘CASH FOR GOLD’. She stepped back against the station’s brown-brick façade to make way for the crowd – Asian women in headscarves; colourfully dressed Africans; statuesque, track-suited Slavs – and her ears struggled against so many dialects to pick out a single word in English.
Bracing herself against all this movement and noise she considered turning left and left again, down onto Harold Road. From here it was just a short walk to the house where she and her father had lived, an even shorter one to the house where she had lived with Mr and Mrs Ostroff. She could walk the pavements where she and her friends carved their hopscotch grids with chalk, find the low brick walls where they would congregate before an elderly neighbour moved them on, or the crooked side streets where they smoked their first, clandestine cigarettes, but this would achieve nothing. Reenie wasn’t nostalgic. Leaving this place had been almost too easy. By the time she ran away she felt she had little attachment to it. Perhaps it would have been more difficult if she’d thought she had roots, a real past here; if she could feel history’s pulse beneath her feet.
From the moment her father arrived, and told her how impermanent and unsafe Vienna had been, she could no longer think of Harold Road, or Upton Park, or even London as anything but temporary. All places, she came to believe, and carried on believing, are temporary. There was no such place as home, at least not in the past tense. Walk down Harold Road and all she would see were houses she hardly recognised, lived in by strangers. Different coloured front doors, different curtains in the windows. Different kids playing in the street. Best to ignore Harold Road altogether, turn right, and keep going along Green Street.
She passed through the almost chewably thick smells of the market, where crates of iced fish sat between barrows of bright fruit and intricately patterned rugs. Reggae music strolled beneath the banter and haggling of the stallholders, a polyglot cacophony of East End, Urdu, Slavic and sub-Saharan. This part of London was always noisy, and had been just as noisy – if not more so – in her childhood, when there were still factories nearby, but she was out of practice, no longer used to the bustle and the pace of it, to the clash of it happening all around her. She scanned the face of every white person she passed, looking for a trace of something – anything – Jewish, and she came up short. Even in the ’50s there were few Orthodox Jews in this part of town, but she could still look at other people, other kids, and know they were like her. Where had they all gone?
She knew the answer. They had moved elsewhere. Some, like the Ostroffs, took the age-old sentiment – ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ – as an order. Others drifted out into the suburbs and the counties, and it occurred to Reenie that the city’s eastern reaches had always been the home of new arrivals. Chapels and churches became synagogues; synagogues became mosques.
Further along Green Street she saw nothing but posters and signs. Takeaways, letting agents, minicabs and Western Union. These were houses once. All these shops and takeaways had been people’s living rooms. And opposite the shops-that-were-once-houses, West Ham’s stadium; bigger and uglier than it ever was when she lived here, like a fortress, its fake turrets glowering down at the street.
That was London. Everything built on top of something else. Turrets on a stadium. Terraced houses all dressed up with pebble dashing, mock Tudor, stone cladding. Dormer windows jutting like afterthoughts from rooftops. Everyone trying to find a little more space in all the nooks and crannies; just a bit more room to breathe.
The end result was a city that was different every time she saw it. Always shifting, always changing. On the train here, as soon as they were above ground she had looked for places she knew, but her only real moment of recognition came when she saw the rusting, drum-shaped skeletons of the gasworks near Bow Creek. Everything else was new or changed.
To her father the city had been forever foreign. He arrived months after the war’s end looking hungry, but with a kind of hunger that could never be sated, and he’d never lose that lost and distant look, even after he remarried, as if he was forever in a different season to those around him.
Once reunited, there was no chance of them returning to Austria. Reenie was to all intents and purposes English, and what could Vienna offer them but disruption for her, and bitter remembrance for him? Besides, so much of the old city was gone now. It hadn’t suffered the same obliteration as other cities – Hamburg, Dresden – but it had changed. And its people would have changed also. If they could have walked Vienna’s streets, would others know their story just by looking at them? Would they feel shame for their complicity, or the unspoken consent their apathy had given to such crimes? If Albert Lieberman’s old neighbours still lived there, could they have faced him, knowing how they’d watched impassively or even cheered as doctors and lawyers and schoolteachers were dragged from their homes and made to scrub the pavements on hand and knee, or as Albert and his wife were evicted and made to walk the streets, carrying a bare fraction of everything they owned?
‘They made a bonfire of our belongings,’ he once told her.
Vienna had nothing for them, and so they stayed in London. There, Albert Lieberman and his daughter tried to undo and repair seven years of damage and loss, and eventually they failed. Or rather, as Reenie saw it now, she had failed. Her father had witnessed things she could scarcely imagine, even when she had seen monochrome images of men and women rendered sexless by hunger, their corpses heaped up like so much refuse. A little maturity might have allowed her to forgive him for his quiet, insular moments, his occasional ill-tempered outbursts, his second marriage, or even his half-hearted move from shul to church, but she was just a girl, and a girl who didn’t understand the depth and texture of real grief. She understood death, and the finality of death. What she couldn’t understand, what took her years to understand, was loss and the vacuum it creates in a life. Her first glimpse of that kind of grief – immediate and raw – came when, thirteen years old, she attended her first funeral.
A neighbour of theirs, Eli Lipma
nn, was run over and killed in the street. He was a year younger than Reenie, but she knew him from school, knew his sister and the family well. It rained on the day of his funeral, she still remembered that. Though it was summer the sky was bruised, and as Eli’s father recited Kaddish at his graveside, the rain began to fall. She wondered then if it rains at every funeral, no matter what the season, as if the sky was paying its respects, but more than that she remembered Mr Lipmann’s expression; tired, no colour to him, as if he’d aged a decade in just three days. Staring at his son’s too-small coffin in disbelief.
Eli was buried here, somewhere in this graveyard; a sprawling cemetery, well-hidden behind surrounding streets, its entrance tucked away in a gap between the terraces on Sandford Road.
What struck her there, more than at any other cemetery she had visited, was the density of the graves – so packed together, side by side, barely room to stand between so many of them – and the vastness of the sky. So much grey and so much stone, as if the place was camouflaging itself against the clouds. There could be few places in London this flat and open.
Above the cemetery, aeroplanes descended with agonising slowness, emerging from the clouds with all the urgency of gondolas, and beyond the graves and the synagogue the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf were hazy silhouettes on the horizon. Closer to the cemetery’s edge, Reenie saw blocks of flats and the rooftops of houses; balconies garlanded with laundry, satellite dishes and aerials tilting at the sky.
She wondered if many people attended her father’s funeral. She wondered if he had many friends when he died. Even in marriage Albert Lieberman had been a solitary man, preferring his own company, or the company of a book, to that of a large group. Could he have changed much in the years after she left? She doubted it. The box Lauren gave her, filled with forgotten trinkets and the framed photograph of Reenie’s mother, suggested he hadn’t. Other than the photograph, the items in it weren’t so much things precious to Reenie – she’d taken anything with sentimental value with her when she left – as they were things that must have reminded him of her; the last remaining evidence that she’d been there, that they’d been together, however briefly. And now she saw her leaving him in another light again; this time as her denying him a victory that was already pyrrhic. He’d survived for her, after his home was taken from him, after every other member of his family, even his wife, was butchered, he’d survived, and had done so in the hope that he would see his daughter again. But reunited in East London she hadn’t recognised him. She’d never seen a photograph of him, and Mr and Mrs Ostroff were strangers, volunteer foster parents. They’d never met the man official documents named as Avram Lieberman, knew nothing about him, and so could never describe him to his daughter.
Ibrahim & Reenie Page 25
