by Bruno Noble
Kevin and Liam, their confidence shaken and swagger diminished, made big eyes at the young woman who glared at them in return, shoulders hunched in self-importance, when the old woman rounded on her. ‘You shut up!’ she scolded. ‘You stop it! Don’t you tell them to stop talking to me! At least they talk to me. No one else does. It’s no good the likes of you pretending I don’t exist. You mind your own business.’ She then turned her head back and up to Kevin and Liam and said, coquettishly almost, outrageously, flirtatiously from below heavily lidded eyes, ‘You were saying?’
Kevin and Liam were as delighted as the rest of us were dumbfounded. ‘Yeah!’ they roared in unison, rounding on the young woman. ‘You mind your own business!’
‘Here we were,’ continued Kevin, ‘having a little chat with our friend and you butt in.’
‘Don’t you want her to have friends? Is that it?’ queried Liam. ‘She’s not good enough. Condemn her to a life of solitude?’
Perplexed, betrayed, indignant and close to tears, the young woman turned to her partner who had slipped down his seat and whose face had disappeared behind his book. ‘Go on. Say something,’ she commanded. ‘Stick up for me for once, will you?’
‘What?’ he said sheepishly, lowering his open book only slightly, as though quite unaware of the exchange that had taken place. ‘Sorry?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she exclaimed, snatching the book from him, ‘You’re so weak!’
‘But what exactly would you like me to do?’ he complained meekly.
Lightheaded with laughter and drink, Gavina and I and half the carriage spilled out at Earls Court, where we waved our goodbyes to our friends and waited for our train south.
The young woman and her partner were still arguing as they climbed the stairs to the exit. Gavina yawned and said, ‘You liked her, didn’t you, that batty old woman? I wonder what was in her bag.’ She rested her head on my shoulder and fell asleep on her feet.
Mie
To my surprise and slight horror, Keiko, Michi and I were asked, when shopping for our school graduation party, if we were sisters. Keiko had stopped growing when she was relatively young. Michi was no longer the fat weevil my father jokingly used to refer to her as (in a nod to the insects my mother occasionally found in the flour she bought from Michi’s parents) but, to use Takumi-san’s phrase, a Bambi doe. I gazed at our many shop window reflections on our walk home and had to concede that we had grown more alike than not over the years, at least as far as external appearances were concerned. Keiko had stopped growing up and Michi had actually grown in; our bodies had unconsciously obeyed the national imperative to conform. Internally, however, I believed strongly that we had remained as different as the kimonos in our carrier bags.
We had been fitted for our kimonos four months ago. We all three carried furisode kimonos, but Keiko and I had chosen a ko-furisode each with sleeves that were as short as an unmarried woman’s kimono could be, and shorter than Michi’s chu-furisode, the sleeves of which were as long as an unmarried woman’s kimono could be outside extremely formal occasions. It was ironic that the pupils whose parents I considered better off than mine thought nothing of hiring the graduation kimonos they would need for only one day and that my parents, who while not poor were not particularly rich, had wanted me to own my own, to leave this chrysalis’s shell for them to remember their daughter by.
I had put my foot down, however, and declined a hakama, the full-length apron one traditionally wears over the kimono on graduation day, and was pleasantly surprised when Keiko declined one too. For me, refusal was a major step in the process of separation and withdrawal from my native country. As far as rebellions go, it was minor, I admit, but a hakama would have been one more tie to home, one more ritual to bind me, one more item to leave in a trunk for my mother to pull out and feel from time to time once I had fled.
Sharon
‘Are we Jewish?’ I asked Aunt Wanda.
‘Ha. In this family it’s best you don’t ask such a question.’
She was right. Mum’s and Aunt Wanda’s family history was a no-go area for us. We sensed, as children, the invisible boundaries that adults erected around certain topics and so had asked our parents and grandparents few questions.
‘Anyway, it is a particularly silly question coming from someone who has had their Holy Communion and who attends a Catholic church.’
‘Attended,’ I corrected her. ‘I only ask because Sherah used to say we were. You know, her curly hair and her nose. She says I got away lucky, that she was teased at school but that she never told anyone about it. Where do you want your coffee?’
Wanda rose gracefully from her knees and joined me at a wrought iron garden table. She held her secateurs in one hand, lifted the mug of coffee to her lips with the other and blew. Her garden faced north, so we sat at the end of it where a small patio accommodated the table and four chairs in whatever sunlight it received. I liked this intimate place of flowers, potted ferns and confidences and suspected that Wanda looked forward to our weekend chats there as much as I did.
Wanda said, ‘Fair enough. That was not a silly question. It’s just that it’s not something we talk about.’
‘You’re telling me!’ I said.
Wanda sipped her coffee. ‘What would you like to know?’
‘I don’t know! I mean, I know so little, I don’t even know what questions to ask!’
I considered Wanda’s outstretched bejeaned legs and mine, bare in the morning light, their fine hairs catching the sun. We were so similar, I reflected, that we could be taken for sisters. I pressed home my advantage.
‘Tell me about Nonno and Nonna,’ I said, referring to her and Mum’s parents. ‘I know that Nonna was born in Emilia-Romagna and emigrated to South Wales after the war. And I know that Nonno is Polish even though we call him Nonno but – I don’t even know how and where they met.’
‘As you said,’ said Wanda carefully, ‘Nonna came to South Wales after the war. There had been many Italians who had left and gone before her, economic migrants, leaving Italy because they could barely scratch a living there and going, well, all over the world. Nonna took a ship from Genoa to Port Talbot, where ships would refuel before making the transatlantic voyage to New York. She had a job waiting for her in Porthcawl, waitressing in some relative’s restaurant. The Italians, you see, had spotted an opportunity for cafés, fish and chip shops and ice-cream parlours in a country of family-unfriendly pubs with limited opening hours.’
‘And Nonno? How did he and Nonna meet?’
‘You know he’s called Nonno to spare you having two dziadeks, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Not that he minded. He was delighted to deny the Pole that he is and to assume the identity of an Italian.’ Wanda looked down at her lap. ‘Poor old Nonno.’
‘Why poor, Aunt Wanda?’
‘In the space of one year, 1939, Poland was invaded by Germany and by the Soviet Union and divided between the two of them. Many Poles were sent to forced labour camps, some in Germany and some in the Soviet Union. Nonno and Dziadek were among the lucky ones because they were sent to the Soviet Union, to Siberia; lucky because they were sent to work on a farm and because after two years the Soviets thought better of it and released the deported Poles so that they could form a new Polish army that would join the British Army in the Middle East for training, and then fight Germany. Conditions were awful at the camp, at least I assume they were because Nonno never talked about it and neither did Dziadek, apparently.’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Are you saying that my grandfathers were in the same camp? That they knew each other before Mum and Dad met and married?’
‘Yes.’
‘I never knew!’
‘They and I don’t know how many other Poles, thousands initially, walked from Siberia to Persia, to Iran – can you believe it? They begged lifts or walked when they were capable of it. It took them a year. They were freezing and starving and had to forage as they
walked. Many, many died on the way. Your mother once showed me some papers that mentioned that Nonno had joined the Polish 2nd Corps that fought alongside the British 8th Army in Monte Cassino, but when we tried to find those papers again we couldn’t. Nonno must have hidden them somewhere or destroyed them.’ Aunt Wanda was silent for a while. ‘After the war, Nonno boarded a ship bound for New York.’
‘The same one as Nonna?’ I interrupted.
‘Well,’ said Wanda, ‘that depends on who you believe. When the ship docked at Port Talbot, Nonno went for a walk and by the time he returned the ship had sailed.’
‘So he missed the boat?’
‘Yes! Literally. The funny thing about your nonno is that if you tease him for having been so silly as to have missed the boat, he’ll claim it was because he’d seen your nonna and fallen in love with her, but if you call him a sly one who left his boat to chase a woman, he’ll deny it and say that the boat sailed without him after he had gone to stretch his legs. That’s his first line of defence, see – get us stuck on his start in Wales and we don’t dig any further back.’
‘I like the thought that he left the boat to pursue Nonna best,’ I said.
‘You’d rather think of my father as a romantic than as an idiot – thank you!’
‘But what is it with the whole religious thing then? I mean, I kind of knew that story – Mum had told us that much – but what’s the religious mystery in the background?’
Wanda reflected. I waited. A District Line train went clacketing by. Wanda looked at me through narrow eyes that were brown but flecked with green.
‘In 1939, your dear nonno,’ said my dear aunt, ‘was away from home, either studying or working, I don’t know. At around the time he was sent to the gulag his parents were sent to Piotrków Trybunalski, a newly established ghetto for Jews in Poland. They were deported from there in 1942, but where to I don’t know, and I don’t know if he ever learned what happened to them after that. Certainly, he hasn’t said.’
‘So Nonno is Jewish?’
Aunt Wanda held a finger up. ‘I would say he was Jewish. Somewhere along or sometime during his long walk south he saw or did awful things that made him lose his faith. Actually, that’s not quite right: he lost his ‘Jewish’ faith; he converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He’ll tell you he did that in order to marry your nonna but she says he could have married her anyway. Nonna once said that Nonno had loved his faith but was so ashamed of what he had had to do to survive the winter of 1941 that he had felt unworthy of it.’
‘What kind of things? Kill people?’
‘No! The people were already dead.’ Wanda shook her head. ‘You didn’t have to kill them. They died of hunger, disease and cold. Nonno and, I presume, your dziadek did what they had to do to survive.’
I didn’t understand and I didn’t know that I wanted to. What Wanda was talking about was so alien to our sunny patch of garden in south-west London that it required a tremendous effort of imagination to arrive there. Around us, the bushes in Wanda’s garden were coming into bud and I saw in the shoots the incipient flower, the potential that each contained. Wanda sat with her elbows on her knees, her long fair hair hanging down. I couldn’t see her face.
‘There was something else, too,’ she said. ‘In the farms, in the Soviet Union, Poles were made to guard Poles.’
‘Guard?’
‘Maybe that’s what turned your nonno away from his faith.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he loved his faith and saw Jews and fellow countrymen behave abominably? I don’t know.’ Aunt Wanda looked directly at me and said with an odd mix of relish and regret, ‘Which leads us to your father’s side of the family. Aren’t you hungry?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘To Dziadek and Babcia?’
‘Yes, to your dziadek and babcia. Well, to Dziadek first. We think he was one of the guards.’ Wanda inhaled deeply. ‘Not only that, Nonno claimed that Dziadek only converted to Judaism to give himself a new identity, to throw people off the scent, to discourage questions. Your dziadek, of course, says he converted in order to marry your babcia. And even when your nonno grudgingly concedes that that might be the case, he argues that your dziadek did so out of love not for your babcia but for her money, her dowry. Which, as far as your father is concerned, is ridiculous; his mother never had any wealth.’ Wanda stood and paced the small patio, abstractedly feeling the leaves of the bush that separated her garden from her neighbour’s.
‘Aunt Wanda, stop for a minute. I can’t take all this in.’ I had so many questions. What kind of a guard had Dziadek been to Nonno? What had they done to survive the long walk south? What had they seen each other do? Instead I asked, ‘So Babcia is the only one of my grandparents who is really Jewish?’
Wanda shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose Dziadek is if he converted. What a crazy mixed-up family! You have one grandfather who converted from Judaism to Catholicism and one who went the other way. But traditional Jewish law has it that once a Jew, always a Jew. And that Judaism is passed down from the mother.’ She looked at me.
‘So Dad is Jewish, then? But,’ I said, ‘he claims to be Church of England. And he doesn’t consider himself Welsh or Polish, just English.’
‘Exactly. He reinvented himself. Like both of your grandfathers, in a way.’
‘In fact, if anyone asks, he says he’s a Londoner.’ I paused to think. ‘So, by blood, I’m three quarters Polish and a quarter Italian. But really, I’m English, born in England to British nationals. By religion, I’m one half Catholic and one half Jewish. It’s really confusing.’
Wanda looked at me closely. ‘What are you?’ she asked. ‘What do you feel you are? In here?’ She placed a hand on my chest. ‘In your heart of hearts? If you listen to yourself and to no one else?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I feel nothing. I feel that there’s nobody home.’
Wanda picked up some cuttings from the garden table and held them together. ‘See these?’ she asked. ‘This is what I want to learn to do. Graft. Make my own plants. Create new plants out of old ones. Hardy plants that have the strengths of two species and none of their weaknesses. That’s us, you see. Immigration, it makes all populations stronger. You are healthy, beautiful, smart – never let me hear you say you feel nothing again. Come. Enough for one day!’
Cuttings still in hand, Wanda took me by the arm and steered me along her narrow garden path to meet our reflections in the French patio doors. We looked like bridesmaids walking down a church aisle.
Mie
I saw more of Taka in the summer holidays; he had taken to hanging out with Keiko so that, whenever I went to visit her, I would find him there, sorting through a collection of 45 rpm singles that were strewn around her portable record player and across the tatami mats on her family’s sitting-room floor. Keiko could always welcome Michi and me to her bedroom but not Taka, who took to going around with such frequency that Keiko’s record player took up permanent residency in the living room. It gave onto the stairs down to Keiko’s parents’ shop so that, in quiet moments certainly, Keiko’s parents were able to hear everything their daughter said or did.
I first heard punk rock at Keiko’s and enjoyed the spirit of individualism and defiance that the music carried with it, but I disliked the lack of clarity in the vocals.
‘Unlike our friends, who know the words of English hits by heart without knowing their meaning, at least you and I know or want to know what the words mean,’ I said to Taka. It occurred to me that he might well have been the only pupil in our year to have parents who listened to popular English language music to the extent that mine did. I had no way of proving this but thought it likely, such had my appetite for the language been whetted on my parents’ spinning record player.
‘Thanks, Mie, leave me out of it, why don’t you?’ said Keiko defensively from just below her diagonally-cut fringe. ‘Just because my parents happen to be’ – she struggled to find the word – ‘patriotic, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be
any worse than you.’
When we weren’t talking about music, we’d be discussing the foreign language films that showed in our local art-house cinema, which we preferred to the mainstream cinemas that showed monster and disaster movies. While Taka argued for musicals, French film noir, Ealing comedies and worthy English cinéma vérité, I preferred Westerns, in which the rugged individual would eventually triumph. Essentially, though, it was the moving image that I loved: film, any film, film that spooled past the fixed stationary point of me, that, moving, defined me in contrast to it. Films began and ended, faded under a strong light, were subject to interpretation and points of view whereas I, essentially, was there, unchanging, persisting, the rooted reference for every passing frame.
Keiko waved Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols at us one afternoon. ‘So, who’s going to translate the title of this LP for me?’
To my relief, Taka struggled to make sense of it too, principally because he was preoccupied with extolling the virtues of an English film we had been to see. Accepting the record from Keiko with one hand while sliding the door closed behind him with the other, in anticipation of our playing the record loudly, he said, ‘Come on, you must have both liked the film. Mie, Colin is an individualist, like you. Keiko, he is a rebel against authority, like you.’
Immediately, Keiko’s mother entered, sumimasening profusely as she looked for something she didn’t find, before exiting, leaving the door open behind her.
‘And you?’ replied Keiko languidly, flattered by the rebel label in the knowledge that her rebellion, such as it was, was even less than skin deep. Pulling a black leather mini skirt down as far as she could over the tops of her thighs, she asked, ‘Who were you?’
