The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  I would hurry past the painting, down the moth-eaten, carpeted stairs, as fast as possible. At the bottom, I would execute a U-turn by swinging around the bannister’s angular knob, and head down the hallway toward the kitchen. There, I knew, my grandmother would be standing by the stove, a pan full of eggy pancakes waiting for me, a cup of hot tea ready to be gulped down, a pot of warmed honey, for dripping on the pancakes, on the table near my seat.

  ‘Hello, love’, she would say. ‘I made you some breakfast.’

  ***

  Thirty-five years after I had been stranded in my grandparents’ strange bedroom by fog, I lay in another room, thousands of miles away, dreaming about the House of Books. The first anniversary of Chimen’s death was approaching, and I couldn’t stop thinking about his terrible final months. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was on holiday with my family, and that Chimen was with us. He was very old, as frail as the most antiquated of his books, but he was intellectually vigorous. We were talking about his books.

  Suddenly, I realised that we had buried him a year earlier. I couldn’t understand it. I took my mum aside to ask her for an explanation, and she started to tell me, in a low whisper, how everyone had thought he was dying, and so they planned the funeral, and then somehow he had lived. (In reality Chimen had, twice in his last year, beaten the odds and survived sicknesses the hospital doctors judged to be fatal.) My conversation with my mother was interrupted. But, later, I managed to take my dad aside and ask him the same question. ‘It’s alright’, he answered. ‘We were convinced that he was dying, so we arranged the funeral, and we couldn’t disinvite everybody, so we held it anyway. We hid Chimen away in the attic and held the funeral’. ‘But the coffin I mourned at?’ I asked in disbelief. ‘Empty.’

  And then I had an utterly devastating realisation. ‘But the books are all gone. The shelves are empty. Chimen’s living like a ghost in a house with no books.’ The idea of it was intolerable, the sheer agony my grandfather must be suffering in the empty house unendurable.

  I woke up screaming.

  The Hallway:

  An Extraordinary Portal

  I did not write half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed.

  Marco Polo, reputed deathbed statement, 1324.

  EVEN YEARS AFTER most of the central characters from Hillway had died, I still regularly dreamed about them.

  Hillway is part of a small community just off of Hampstead Heath, known as the Holly Lodge Estate. The estate had originally been owned by a Victorian banking family, and when it had subsequently been sold off and developed as housing the streets had remained in private ownership, largely outside of the purview of the local council. That a large number of Communists chose to buy property in this private little enclave was something of an irony. On a day-to-day basis, however, by the time I was a child the only visible signs that it remained an ‘estate’ were the never-closed gate at the bottom of the hill, through which one turned onto the street from Swain’s Lane, and the propensity of the traffic wardens to issue tickets to any car whose owner had the temerity to park on the street without either a residents’ sticker or a guest permit. Every so often, someone from the estate board of management would send Chimen a sniffy letter, addressed curtly to ‘Abramsky’, alerting him to the fact that he was grievously under-paying the ‘voluntary’ dues levelled on residents each year. As they were voluntary, however, Chimen did not feel compelled to part with more cash.

  On one of the streets just off the estate is the overgrown cemetery in which Karl Marx was buried, as were the theorist of electro-magnetism Michael Faraday and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Playing on the name of the retail chain, wags would regularly joke about the proximity of Marx and Spencer in their final resting place. Several times during my childhood, Chimen took me up the hill to that cemetery, there to ponder the massive monument atop Marx’s corporeal remains, commissioned by the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1955. He never told me whether he had played a role in the monument’s genesis, but given that he was still an active Party member at the time it is certainly possible. On another street, higher up, above the Heath, is the Spaniards Inn, an ancient pub in which, so legend had it, Dick Turpin, the eighteenth-century highwayman, had drunk his fill.

  From the top of Hillway, all London, right the way down to the Thames, could be seen. Emerging from the huge bomb shelters under Hampstead Heath during the war, from that hill my grandparents would have witnessed the vast conflagrations that demolished so much of London. When the V1 flying bombs and the V2 rockets fell randomly over the city from June 1944 to the end of the war, they would have seen their own new neighbourhood pocked by debris-filled lots where once houses, shops and businesses had stood. A direct hit by a V2 could level an entire block. Londoners attempted to hide from the carnage below ground: the nearby underground stations of Hampstead, Highgate and Belsize Park, all deep below street level, were used as shelters by many thousands of bomb-dazed inhabitants. (The future American talk show host, Jerry Springer, was born in Highgate Station during one bombing raid, in 1944.) Usually the underground stations provided a safe haven; on occasion, though, a direct hit resulted in terrible loss of life. On 14 October 1940, for example, a huge bomb penetrated the earth above Balham Station in south London, exploding just above two platforms used by shelterers. Sixty-six people died as a result of the explosion, some killed by the blast itself, some apparently drowned by water released from burst pipes and others suffocated by gas from damaged gas pipelines.

  When I passed my driving test at the age of seventeen, I drove to Hillway so many times that the route became permanently etched into my memory. And even though my grandparents’ house was only three doors up from the foot of the hill, I almost always made a detour to the top to take in the view. It was spectacular. As I descended Hillway, the vistas changed. The dome of Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, St. Paul’s cathedral – just north of the sprawling riverfront private school that I attended from the age of eleven to eighteen, which was opposite the abandoned power station that was to become the Tate Modern gallery – could be seen from one spot, the British Telecom tower from another. From right at the top, as I spun my parents’ car around the little roundabout and headed back down, I could glimpse the river itself; later on, when the London Eye ferris wheel was built to celebrate the millennium, that, too, entered the picture. It was like a moving diorama of all that was best in London architecture (along with a lot that was not), viewable in miniature, as the car slowly rolled down Hillway, back towards Swains Lane and the bottom of the hill. My grandparents’ house was just around the corner from a little supermarket, a couple of cafes, Cavour’s delicatessen, and a small hardware store, all on Swain’s Lane, and a few steps away from a little mechanic’s garage that occupied one of the spaces left empty by a bomb blast during the war.

  Mimi and Chimen seemed to know half the residents of these streets. Several members of the family lived within walking distance: Jenny, her husband Al, and their children Rob and Maia; Mimi’s cousin Phyllis Hillel, who moved into the area when she was widowed in the 1980s; her son Peter, his wife Vavi, and their children Emma and Nick; and Sara’s daughter Julia, who lived in the house that had, decades earlier, been owned and lived in by Mimi’s mother. Then there was Fred Barber, an elegant, exceptionally bald, old doctor who had fled Prague after the Munich Agreement in effect handed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Almost daily – until he was well into his nineties and debilitated by old age – he would walk over to Hillway for a cup of tea and a chat, always perfectly attired in suit and tie, his few thin wisps of white hair trailing off the back of an otherwise denuded, liver-spotted and shiny pate. For some reason, while Mimi always called him ‘Fred’, Chimen never called him anything but ‘Barber’ or ‘Doctor Barber’. There was an elderly academic and former Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union, Krishnarao Shelvankar, and his very proper wife, Mary. No matter what the weather, he always wore sandals – as a result of which, while I ca
nnot at all these years’ remove conjure up an image of his face, I can, quite clearly, see his toes. They were long, the nails slightly browned. Mary Shelvankar, without fail, encouraged me to play the piano and, sipping tea in the kitchen with Mimi, complimented my half-hearted efforts – Beethoven sonatas, Chopin études, some Gershwin, a bit of Scott Joplin – when I did. Listening to the pair of them talk about my musical abilities, one would have thought I was destined to win the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. In reality, I was lucky if I could play three or four bars without hitting a clunker. For half the year, an Israeli couple, Mike and Ora Ardon, long-time friends of Mimi and Chimen, lived a one-minute walk from Hillway. Old ex-Communist Party comrades, as well as academic colleagues including the noted anthropologist Mary Douglas, dotted the Holly Lodge Estate or visited from nearby. An easy car or bus ride away lived a host of other regular visitors: Mimi’s sister Sara, and her husband Steve Corrin; their daughter Eve – Julia’s sister – and her son Tom; Chimen’s cousin Golda Zimmerman; Mimi’s cousins Lily and Martin Mitchell (Lily was the younger sister of Phyllis; their father and several siblings had been killed on the very first night of the London Blitz), and numerous others.

  Each relative who entered the house, especially the children, merited their own particular greeting from Chimen: there was ‘Meester Rob’; for a while, as he went through a period of teenage indecisiveness, my brother Kolya became ‘Meester Maybe’; my sister Tanya and cousin Maia were Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee – though today, neither can agree on which was which.

  ***

  The person I most associate with the doorway at Hillway, with the ritual of entry, was not, however, a relative. Instead, she was my grandmother’s best friend, a dentist named Rose Uren. At least once a day at Hillway, I would hear a growling, roaring sound coming nearer from the street. That would be my cue; I would run to open the door, and there, standing outside was Rose, her moped driven all the way up the plant-lined pathway to the little concrete-covered patch by the three steps that led up to the red front door. Rose herself would be standing before me, her helmet still on, as often as not with bags of smoked salmon, black bread and other essentials that Mimi had asked her to buy on her way in. She looked like something out of a 1950s B movie. ‘A-lloooh Sasha’, she would say, in an extraordinarily thick French accent. And then, in mock surprise, ‘No-buddie told me you vuhd be here! I vuhdn’t ’ave come eef I’d known’. Then she’d look past me at my grandmother, standing over the stove in the kitchen. ‘Mee-mee! Vye didn’t you tell me ’ee’d be ’ere?!’ And, before I could escape, she would grab me and, her breath smelling of strong cheese, would plunk a kiss on each cheek. It was an awful smell – and I loved it.

  Rose had fled over the Pyrenees into Spain when France fell to the Nazis; she had been interned by Franco’s forces; and then somehow had made her way back to France to join the Resistance. After the war, she had moved to England. There was not a religious bone in Rose’s body; but in some ways she was as old-world as one could get, a perfect shtetl bargainer, always hunting for the best deal, always willing to catapult insults at merchants she felt were not dealing with her fairly. Perhaps that was why Mimi would send her out food shopping for Hillway. ‘Gangs of women crowd around the peasants who have brought their farm produce for sale, jostling each other in the attempt to get first choice’, Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog wrote of Eastern European Jewish markets, in their 1952 book on the mores of the shtetl, Life Is With People. ‘Bargaining is raised to a fine art. The acquisition of a Sabbath fish may take on all the suspense of a pitched battle, with onlookers cheering and participants thoroughly enjoying the mutual barrage of insults and exhortations’. That Rose was shopping at the Cash-‘N’-Carry rather than in a shtetl market did not negate her enthusiasm for such theatrics.

  I adored Rose. She was as over-the-top – as ungeputschke was the Yiddish phrase – as anyone I knew. An ex-Communist, she had firmly joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie, regularly attending the opera at Covent Garden, and counting among her dental clients some of the country’s leading politicians. Even better, she was a tennis fanatic, and enjoyed nothing more than sitting down with me and talking about Wimbledon or the French Open. Like me, she loved John McEnroe and loathed Ivan Lendl. And when she loathed someone, curses flew out of her mouth that could make the blood run cold. It was Rose who polished my teeth twice a year and, her mouth positively jangling with her own silver fillings, berated me for not brushing for longer each day. It was Rose who worked hardest to get me to stop biting my nails and picking my nose when I was a small boy. And it was Rose who, a decade later, put in the most hours teaching me to drive.

  For Rose, whose own granddaughter lived thousands of miles away, Mimi and Chimen’s five grandchildren served as local substitutes. At times, she could be remarkably territorial. When my cousin Rob brought home a girlfriend from college, Rose rang my aunt and uncle’s doorbell with her customary double-ring. Entering the house, she shouted out ‘Let me see zee gurrrl who has stolen my Rob from me!’ She was carrying opera binoculars with her for better viewing. When my cousin’s somewhat surprised friend showed her face, Rose grabbed her and, with faux-solemnity, took out a dentist’s magnifying glass: ‘Leh-t me see your tee-th!’

  ***

  Over the years, I met thousands of people at Hillway, and, in my imagination decades later, I situate different people in different rooms. Some people, like my grandmother’s gossipy Liverpudlian friend Rachel, who always arrived with thick pancake makeup on her cheeks; or her cousin Phyllis – a wonderful cockney character who, for the main part of her meals, ate nothing more adventurous than bread or potatoes, but who routinely made and brought over the best apple strudel I have ever tasted – I imagine as denizens of the kitchen. Perched on uncomfortable wooden chairs, they sat there with Mimi, drinking cup after cup of tea, and exchanging titbits of community news and family tidings. As they got older, they all grew deafer, and, year by year, the volume of these conversations grew louder. Others have established themselves in my daydreams as dining room acquaintances. For some reason, however, many of my fondest memories are of hallway people. Of course, they were not really hallway people; like all the others who visited, they simply walked through the book-lined entrance hall on the way to the rest of the house, but my recollections of them are of their entrance, their announcement that they were present, and the way in which they were greeted.

  I think of my great aunt Sara and her husband Steve Corrin as hallway people. They spent decades collecting children’s stories from all over the world and editing them into a wonderful series of volumes titled Stories for Five Year Olds, Stories for Six Year Olds and so on. Every time she came to the house, Sara, who, like her older sister Mimi, believed that all social situations demanded the bringing of food, was laden down with cakes and other goodies that she had cooked in her dimly lit house before coming over to Hillway. Steve always came equipped with new jokes, pithy comments – almost aphorisms – on world affairs, and news clippings neatly folded and carefully secreted away in one or another of his brown tweed or grey sports jacket pockets, which he would ceremoniously pull out of his pockets to share with me or with Chimen almost before he had stepped through the door. Tubercular in his youth, Steve remained rake-thin for the rest of his life, his presence a bundle of nervous energy, his sharp eyes watching and interpreting everything and everyone around him. They came frequently, but, when Steve was with Sara, often only for a few minutes. Steve seemed to tire easily. He would head into the dining room to perch on the edge of an armchair while quickly, nervously, nipping at a small brandy. Once his jokes had been told and his news clippings shared, he frequently sank into a morose silence, his darting eyes silently doing most of his communicating. They would leave a few minutes later.

  ***

  When the daily caravan of visitors climbed the dulled red brick steps leading up to the front door, their hands resting on the rickety wooden railing alongside, and came into the
house at Hillway, it was the books in the hallway that first would catch their attention. The thin paperback biographies of Great Men. The specialist, weighty socialist encyclopaedias. The miscellaneous early edition histories and novels. If they had stopped in the hallway long enough to take books off of the shelves, they would have discovered an entire second row of books hidden behind those visible in front. On those shelves were many books on the failed European revolutions of 1848 – the year that Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto – including one by Ledrou Rollin, one of the leaders of the uprising in France; there were also volumes about the 1871 Paris Commune; some rare first editions on Austrian social democracy; and books by the German socialist leader Karl Kautsky, who had been widely regarded before the First World War as one of the leading Marxist theoreticians of his age, but who had spoken out passionately against the Bolshevik revolution after 1917. He had died an old, broken exile in Amsterdam in 1938; his wife perished a few years later in Auschwitz.

  Also in the hallway was a complete set of the proceedings of the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; too big to stand up on the shelves, they were placed horizontally. There were first editions, in Russian, of works by Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov, the founder of Russia’s first overtly Marxist political party, the original translator of Marx’s works into Russian, and a man who later, in the final years of his life, bitterly criticised Lenin’s bloodthirsty methods of achieving revolution. The final part of the Marxist collection in this room was a modern version of the complete works of Marx and Engels in English, four dozen large hardback volumes covering several yards of shelf space. In addition, there were many mass-produced paperbacks, including little biographies of famous philosophers and politicians; histories by friends of Chimen’s such as James Joll; and writings on the American Communist Party.