by Tobias Hill
Salman arranged their passage to Basra. Daniel and Rachel waited for him on the steps of All Angels’, the church doors locked since the last plague, the portmanteau at their feet heavy as a step itself. They held hands and talked little. Keeping their thoughts to themselves. Faces in the cast shadows of their heads. They looked similar, cut from the same stone: tall, quiet, aquiline. Variations on a theme of strength.
‘We will write.’
‘You must do as you please.’
‘Then perhaps Salman will write for the both of us.’
A boatman hallooed from the river. Traffic navigating the islands in midstream.
‘Your eye hurts today.’
‘No more than always.’
‘In England there may be medicine we can send.’
‘No doubt.’
On the islands two young men were mooring an old tarada canoe, carrying their women over the shallows. Daniel watched them unpack blankets for a picnic. They had done the same, he and Salman and Rachel. Years ago, so long he could no longer remember for sure who had done the carrying. He went on talking, surprising himself by it. Making conversation. The watch in his pocket gaining time. ‘I wandered the banks of the river. And as I watched it disappear into the cavern I struck upon a plan. “By Allah,” I thought, “this river must have both a beginning and an end–”’
‘You recite it badly.’
‘I have not inherited your talent for that.’
‘You’re too old for stories.’
‘Sindbad. He always came home richer and happier. We could come back too.’ He said it quietly, knowing she wouldn’t answer him, not expecting her to. ‘Rachel.’
‘Too old,’ A fisherman passed them, forearms dotted with scales and gutting blood, half-fish himself. ‘Sometimes I think you should be more like your brother. Practical.’
‘That is what you call it?’
‘I do. And busy.’
‘As a fly in shit.’
‘This morning he says you’ll be goldsmiths.’
Then this morning things are simpler. Last week it was steamboat proprietors. We have stones and gold, he can work them, I can sell them.’
He thought of the jewels without desire. Rachel had shared them unequally, accepting only the opal and the broken emerald for herself. Daniel had offered to sell them and she had refused that also. He wondered, now, if she meant to keep them. The last gifts of her last family. Something by which to remember something. I have nothing of yours, he thought of saying; but it was not true, and already she was talking again.
‘So, now. Don’t hold yourself so carefully. People will notice you’re carrying something.’
‘I feel like King Midas in disguise.’
‘And tell Salman the same. The fool looks like he’s trying to hide a pregnancy.’
‘He has the belly for it.’
‘He has nothing of the kind. You’ll do all right, whatever you do. But you’ll need broad shoulders. Where you’re going, you’ll be outsiders.’
We are already outsiders, he wanted to say, and did not. ‘Salman has the shoulders of a vulture. Enough for both of us.’
‘Salman is a boy in the body of a man and he always will be. You look after him.’
He nodded. ‘And who will look after you?’
‘There are only three of us. If we leave one another, one of us will be alone. And I can look after myself.’
She was wearing her earrings, Daniel saw. He reached out to touch them, to make her smile, and as he did so his knuckles grazed the long bones of her cheeks. The Nag’s Head bones. He thought of Midas again. The hand reaching out to make something precious. In the distance he could hear Salman calling and he lowered his hand and stood up to go.
The river journey came cheap. It was not that Salman bargained hard. The boatswain was a Levantine, two decades on the river, but the young Jew he found distracting. He watched everything, charmless and uncharmed. It was the unblinking way a child looked at the world, or a seabird. There was a hunger in it which the riverman disliked. Only after the deal was struck did he wonder about the evil eye. For the sake of business he kept his thoughts to himself.
He was still young, Salman. Nineteen, trusting his eyes. Watching Rachel as they left her behind on the river quays of Baghdad, he saw how the crowd jostled her and that her loneliness there, among unfamiliar people, was what they took away from one another – that and the jewels from the jar. Salman saw how they could come to share alienation like a familial trait. Basic as stubbornness or the lines of cheekbones.
He didn’t like the sea. It was something he felt at first sight, quick as an instinct. In Basra harbour old Turkish three-deckers waited at anchor, their hulls slick with rot. Beyond them the Gulf moved. It wrinkled and shifted like the Sirab, the water mirage of the desert. To Salman it seemed that the two things weren’t much different. The sea was more real but no more solid. He didn’t trust it. It gleamed, Salman thought, like something cut open.
They waited two days for an East India Company ship. There were other ways to travel. North overland, or west by Suez, London was barely two months away. Cornelius Rich had allowed none of that.
‘Sea roads are the engine oil of the Empire,’ he had told them as he wrote them a letter of introduction on Company paper. ‘Salt water keeps the wheels of commerce grinding, Mister Salman. Would you doubt the British Empire? No. And mark you, the land passage is infested with bandits and all kinds of vagabonds.’ Despite the decade he had lived abroad, Cornelius felt and believed what the English still felt and believed: that passage by sea was better than that by land. Not necessarily quicker or even safer, just intrinsically nicer. Foreign vagabonds were so much more complicated than death by water.
The Scaleby Castle arrived loaded with cargo from Bombay. It sat so low against the Company wharves that the brothers had to climb down to it by ladder. Without Cornelius’s letter and the amethyst they wouldn’t have been let on at all. As it was, Mclnnes the purser found them mess space on the orlop deck, their hammocks cramped in with crates of capons that themselves found no room in the hold below.
No one else joined the London ship. There were Jews on the docks waiting for passage eastwards to Rangoon. In their drab black robes they looked like mourners, not people setting out for new lives. Salman wondered if he looked the same. Above him, the wind began to muscle its way into the sails.
He listened to it as the vessel began to move. Behind him was Basra, its yellowed brick buildings, the mouth of the Tigris opening through it. Salman kept his eyes on them, the city and the river, as they diminished. He looked back until the land sank under the waves, Iraq taken away from him by the silent rotation of the earth.
For the three months of transit Daniel lived with the constant sensation of loss. Rachel was not at the heart of it. It felt as if something was always about to be stolen from him. Not the jewels: only twice in his life did Daniel feel any real love of stones. What he missed was a water jar, a pattern of light on a tiled floor, the bloody smell of tomatoes drying in wooden trays.
In the hammocked dark of the ship he would wake and discover himself searching his pockets or the portmanteau, as if his home could be there. The possessiveness felt alien to him. Not the homesickness, but the need for physical things. Not even Rachel so much as Rachel’s tomatoes. He wondered if the jewels had anything to do with that, and if he were changing.
He could feel them, the sea moving their weights against him. Around his thighs were cotton bags of gold scrap, traded for guns from the marshlanders. In the loose cloth under his arms he carried a hundred carats of spinel and amethyst. Inside the brothers’ shirts Rachel had stitched the buttons from their circumcision gowns, a tiny, stony currency of coral and turquoise. Daniel had watched her do it, folding away the gowns when she was finished. Smoothing them flat. The stones swung against him like ballast weights.
The Scaleby was a three-master, green copper flaking from its teak bottom. Near the bow it stank of shit. The rest
smelt of tar. Besides the brothers there were few passengers. No one talked to Daniel and Salman except Mclnnes and a Marist from Lyons, who tried to convert them. They were the foreigners who slept down by cargo. They were practically cargo themselves.
They talked to each other. Softly, as if their language was something that could be stolen. They argued about the greatness of Babylon and London, and whether letters had been made before numbers. Or Salman would leave his brother, climbing upwards through the ship. He liked the machinery of masts and pulleys, the forces of wind and human muscle. The sailors singing the work into rhythms.
The parson had a daughter who was sweet as sugar candy, I said to her, ‘Us sailors do make lovers neat and handy.’
She says to me, ‘You sailors is a bunch of bloody liars, And all of ye is bound to Hell, to feed the flaming fires. And all of ye is bound to Hell–’
Their chorus a mess of accents, West Country, Liverpool, Scots, Irish. The Indian Ocean hissing around them. Salman kept his eyes on the thin green coast of Africa.
The fire down below, me lads, is very hot an’ jolly, But the fire there’s not half so hot–
‘Stay out of the crew’s way,’ Mclnnes told him, ‘and we’ll all get on nicely. Specially in bad weather. This is advice I’m giving you. The big waves are animals, they’ll knock you down if they can get at you. The men also.’
They slept between looming crates of mail and spices, vats of saltpetre and indigo. A foot from their heads, the ocean whispered and ticked in its separate darkness. Daniel lay with his own thoughts. Of his grand uncle, Elazar, drowned at sea. The imprinted patterns of his sticky toes. Of Rachel, alone. Of Midas, the king cursed with dreams come true. Desire manifested in an epidemic of gold.
He remembered the things Salman had said they would find, now they had jewels. Horses and houses, happiness and new lives. Nine days out to sea Daniel watched rain smarter against the porthole glass and wondered how far they would have to go to find so much.
There is a quality to long transit which is not unlike dream. The days and nights have a sameness, turning back on themselves. It felt to Daniel as if time had come loose and the order of things were repeating, and when this ended it seemed as if he was waking twice. Out of sleep and out of himself. He opened his eyes and heard, beyond the creak of hammocks, the creak of ice. It was the last hours of night. Salman still slept beside him. Daniel went up alone into the white air of London.
Mist hung around him. Daniel’s face ached with the cold of it. He breathed tentatively. The air was no longer exactly light or dark, only pale. The Scaleby moved through it under low sail. From the bow came the dull beat of the fog drums.
His eyes adjusted. Now Daniel could see shapes. A mass of masts and chimneys, the bulks of stone warehouses and outbuildings. Ship lights. The smog stank of sewage and vinegar. The sweet, rank smell of an industrial city.
‘Good morning, there. One of the Mesopotamians, is it not?’
Mclnnes had come up beside him, sure-footed in the gloom. Daniel could make out other people beyond him. The Marist raised a hand, bulked out in an old astrakhan coat. Ready for the cold. Daniel shivered. ‘Daniel Levy, sir.’
‘So it is, the tall one. Well. Doubtless this is quite a sight for you, the East India Docks. Quite a sight. The greatest city in the world. Are you not already glad you came?’
Glad. Daniel attempted to feel it. ‘I cannot see the sky.’
‘Sky? This isn’t Paradise, Mister Levy. The sky is not the point.’ The purser grinned, without warmth. ‘I was asking, sir, what you make of my city’
‘It is beautiful.’
‘It is.’ He clasped his hands over the rail. ‘I’m right glad you think so. Smells like the shit of old fishwives, but glorious still. This end there’s not much but marshes. Slums. You’ll take the Commercial Road west, if you want the city. Leastways there’ll be cabs waiting for you.’ Mclnnes leant beside him. His hands, Daniel saw, were raw with saltwater gurry sores. ‘By the by, Mister Levy. I meant to raise the question of your fare.’
‘We have paid in full–’
‘Beg pardon, no. My interest was in the method. The stone. The amethyst is good, so my mates tell me. Would there be more where that came from?’
‘I–’ There was a shout from the boatswain and Mclnnes excused himself before Daniel could reply. His breath condensed into silence.
Sounds came to him, distorted by smog. The rattle of chains loosened on a quayside crane. The concatenation of casks rolled along wharves. The shout of one voice, the bleat of one goat. He turned and, seeing Salman through a break in the air, called out, made room for him at the rail.
‘Tigris. We have made it.’
‘This is London?’
‘Mclnnes says so.’
‘And you believed him.’ Salman peered over the side. From below came the exclamations of ice, shelving away into the deep-water basin. ‘He could put us off anywhere. Keep the profit.’
‘What did you expect to come to? Jewelled gates? Houris on horseback making eyes at every arrival? You are too suspicious.’ Daniel watched his brother begin to smile and was glad of it.
‘New lives, ‘Phrates. I can hardly believe it.’
He didn’t answer. They stood together, looking out at the import docks. Something loomed up beyond the rail, a cliff of stone moving past them. Involuntarily, both men stepped back. It was a moment before Daniel recognised the shape as a quayside. The loaded ship still sat far down in the water.
New lives. Under his breath, Salman repeated it to himself as he climbed the ladder to the North Quay. He could feel the stones on him. The jewels from the jar, which were his, given to him in repayment. Around his neck hung the clear stone. Still cool, distinct against his own blood heat.
And Daniel climbed after him. The water below him smelled of human faeces. He had never expected that of London. He tried to recall the city as Cornelius had described it. Piccadilly by gaslight, and a city bright and cold as a diamond.
He pictured it in his mind. The jewels chafed against his skin. Somewhere in the white distance, church bells.
It was 2 December 1833. The first Monday after Advent. A cold year for the brothers to arrive in, and a cold time. In their first weeks the Thames froze over and the docklands sat empty, cut off from the sea. The roads to the north were impassable, and London waited for thaw under its accretions of ice.
They stayed at the Sabloniere Hotel on Leicester Square. The room was narrow with white mouldings. The gas lamp hissed and murmured in human voices. On the first night Daniel woke in the dark, Salman snoring fitfully beside him. He got up and went to the window, dazed but sleepless with transit. Outside, the Square lay empty. The moon, in its first quarter, hung faint over the rooftops.
London. It didn’t seem beautiful to Daniel, only permanent. The smog washed over it and only darkened its brick and ashlar stone. He thought of the old cities of Iraq. Babylon under its tors of sand, deserted by the rivers. London didn’t feel like it would ever be left behind.
He made himself comfortable on the window seat and waited for morning. There were already cabs parked opposite, post-boys dozing above the warmth of their horses. Sunrise came slowly, imperceptible as the motion of a clock face, the fog lifting to meet it.
The clatter of goods carts echoed upwards. A landau passed, southwards towards the river. At its window, a flash of bright colour. A young woman’s clothes, Daniel thought. They were as rare on the streets of London, he saw, as they were in Baghdad. He began to watch for them more intently, in a phaeton, in a rookery doorway. Silks and jewels and skin.
At ten o’clock he fell asleep, his forehead pressing gently against the glass. No one looked up to see him. Beside the Gun Repository the old women went on selling hot wine until noon, their hands and forearms stained with lees. And across from Daniel’s window, light fell across the lowered blinds of rented rooms, a sign of sickness or prostitution. But then in London Daniel knew no signs. He had left that underst
anding behind with everything else, except the jewels.
December 6. The morning before sabbath. The hotelier, a man with hands smooth as calfskin gloves, gave them directions to Bevis Marks. Their hair and clothes were impregnated with the smells of tar and cardamum, the black linen still stiff with salt. Salman unpicked the stone pockets himself before he would allow the robes to be laundered, stitched them back when the washing was done.
The synagogue was empty when they arrived. They waited for it to fill. Two turbaned foreigners in the shadow of the balconies. The Sephardim with their foreign clothes and service, their muttered Spanish and whiff of imported cigars, the galleries of lantern-jawed women looking down at the outsiders – they had nothing to do with the brothers. Daniel and Salman never attended again. It was as if they themselves were not Jews at all, but something less particular, Semites only in the broadest sense. Blood without religion.
They walked back together. Not talking of the Sephardim. For days London would make them speechless. It was like a different century. Not a future or a better one, Salman didn’t see it that way. Only an alternative. It was different from the landscape Cornelius had described to Daniel and Daniel to Salman: more human, less perfect. Cobbles turning to asphalt turning to waste ground. The pace of it dazzled Salman, the hectic sprawl of commerce, from the prostitutes calling after them to the great hoardings for Potter’s Wonderful Worm Lozenges and Dubbins’s Curry Pastes, and the streets of ostrich feather importers, incorrodible teeth inventors, oyster dealers, muffin bakers, ever-pointed pencil makers, ginger beer manufacturers, scum boilers, and the silver and goldsmiths, the brokers of diamonds and pearls.
He discovered Clerkenwell alone, two days later. A dark figure, built like a wrestler, loitering in the streets of goldsmiths and Jewish dairies, the missions where foreigners would be paid a halfpenny to hear a Christian minister, the houses of Western Jews. Salman observed them from a distance, talking to no one. Keeping the crowds around him, a moving human camouflage.
