The boys packed themselves through the narrow doorway, chattering, chancing little blows and pinches. Thomas was ahead of him in the throng of boys. There was a little space around Emil as they moved along the hall towards the door. No one touched him though all around him there was jostling and pushing. When he reached the yard he continued walking towards the gate. No one spoke to him or stopped him. He could not see Thomas anymore. Outside the gate the streets were almost empty. The sun was burning through the clouds and his shirt stuck to his back beneath his pullover. He fixed his eyes on the street, walking quickly. When he reached his apartment building he glanced up and went on down the street, towards the bridge and across the river. Turning away from town, he continued past the half-built factory to the den.
It felt different somehow to yesterday, when Thomas was here, though he could not have said what had changed. The factory was tall, the frame for the roof was on and the towering eyeless face of the wall was forbidding. He curled up in a corner on the ground. A hare startled him, scurrying past the entrance. He settled down again and fell asleep instantly. Then woke to the sound of a bell, coming from the factory, pulled himself up, moist grass peeling from his face, and looked through his spy hole. The huge shadow of the factory spread across the field behind it. Men poured from the structure, beginning the walk along the towpath, past the other factories, back into town. He and Thomas always took that as a sign to go home for supper, though they could not resist first sneaking into the factory after the foreman had locked up his cabin at the front and left for the day. There were still no doors on the main building. Emil wandered over now, out of habit: along the path to the pier, up the bank past the foreman’s office, into an empty doorway and inside the immense, chaotic space of the half-built factory.
It was dizzying to be in a space so large and yet be indoors. But then you looked up past the steel girders high above and there was the sky. There were piles of bricks, wood and steel beams and crates of machinery stacked everywhere, their innards spilling out onto the floor. He looked at the machines as though they were creatures. He knew from Papa about electricity, and about the work of the blood, and they seemed the same, a force that moved through things, bringing them to life.
In spite of the mass of equipment piled about the place there was space to run about until you fell over. He and Thomas would race up and down the hall, dodging the scaffolding that was going up at one side, where a platform for offices was beginning to take form, way up the wall, a sort of stage from which one could view what was happening on the floor. Today he walked up and down the length of the building, breathing in the smells of brick dust and steel. He saw after a while that in the dust on the stone floor were small, bare footprints among the large booted ones. He wondered what children had been here, that he had not seen.
His feet took him outside again. The factory was a little frightening now that he did not have a friend with him to fill it with noise and movement. He saw how large it was in comparison to himself. It would take fifty boys standing on each other’s shoulders to reach the top.
Mother was outside the apartment building when he got home. ‘Thomas brought your bag,’ she said, pulling him into her chest. ‘Where have you been? What will Papa say? On your first day of school.’
He pulled sharply from her grasp and climbed the stairs to the apartment. His sister Greta slept on the sofa. She looked fat and warm beneath the blanket. Her cheeks were soft and pink. He crawled in next to her, breathed in her skin, closed his eyes. His mother moved about the kitchen. He smelled the cooking smells. It was true, she had bought ham. The smell was unbelievable. Juices ran in his mouth, he had not eaten all day. He heard the door open, and voices, quiet, in the corridor; his father’s voice: ‘No!’ in surprise. Eventually they came back in, the door closed. He could not open his eyes, would not look at Papa’s face.
‘Emil,’ his father said quietly, next to his ear. ‘Tell me what the teacher said to you.’
Emil shook his head. Greta had gone. His pillow was wet where his eyes had been. Papa stroked his short hair, his hand running over Emil’s soft bristles, the skin of his fingers lumpy and calloused.
‘Why do I have to go to school?’ Emil whimpered. He wished his voice were stronger, deeper.
‘Because your education is the most important thing in the world. It is worth more than gold. That teacher, he’s an idiot, but he has something you need. He has learning. You need to get it from him. You show him. You are poor, but you are strong and clever. Any boy might be the one to change the world. I would give anything to go back, to be your age again, to have this chance. You will be a good, clever boy. I know you will.’ Emil remained still, eyes closed. ‘Can you smell that ham?’ He nodded. Father kissed him. ‘Mama will have it on the table in a minute. We’ll have a feast. And luckily, I know this Walter fellow. His apartment is not far. We shall go round after dinner and throw horse manure at his window. What do you say?’
Emil nodded into his father’s chest. Something eased and shifted. He imagined bringing back his arm, flinging the clod against the window, the teacher in his nightgown opening it to investigate, peering out onto the street. Emil was a clever boy, Papa had told him. When he heard the window drawn up in its frame, he would have another handful ready.
Hannah
LONDON, 1915
My earliest clear memory, and it is so very clear. Childhood is around me, before my eyes, happening now. I live in that room again. My brothers are with me, and Mother and Father. We shall all live forever.
It was a year into the war. I was eight. In my father’s desk drawer, in the box room where he kept his bolts of fabric, my brother Geoffrey found a revolver. I took it from him, felt its cold weight in my hand. Geoffrey grabbed it back and pointed it at me. ‘Die, marauding Hun,’ he whispered coolly.
‘You are the Hun,’ I replied. ‘Give it to me.’ And he did. I was the elder and could be frightening, if I wished. I pointed it at his head and moved it around a little, as though he were a German I had spied over the lip of a trench, and I must find my mark. It was a thrilling, heavy thing to hold, as though potential and power had heft. ‘Bang.’
He threw himself against the propped-up bolts of cloth, clutching his chest. Lolled his head and stuck his tongue out on one side.
I heard the creak of the floorboards in the hall and then the little one was calling for me: ‘Hannah, Hannah! Where are you hiding?’ I laid the gun back in the empty drawer and put a finger to my lips. Geoffrey opened the door and Benjamin looked from one to the other of us, small and glowering, excluded.
The gun was not the only reminder of the war across the water. A parade marched past Father’s shop door on Tottenham Court Road, dressed in khaki. There were redcoats before the war: smart though less impressive. I could imagine the mud of the trenches on the khaki jackets passing endlessly outside, as though they had marched all the way from France into London, their vast number somehow overcoming the obstacle of the Channel.
When a soldier broke off from the mass in the street and came alone into the shade of the shop where I sat on the high stool behind the counter, I lifted my gaze from the pennies I was piling up on the wooden bench and looked him over slowly from his boots to his strange hat, pinned up on one side. I was prone to staring as a child. It is possible I never quite lost the habit. People are so very interesting. Besides, I wanted to be a writer. You had to be sure what people’s faces looked like if you were to go away and describe them in your notebook afterwards. That took staring. The soldier did not smile. It seemed he was a starer too. Outside, the band was passing right by the shop with its brass and drums, and the crowds were cheering. But it was muffled in here, as I studied the man’s hands for signs that they might have strangled a Hun. If the silence lasted much longer, I determined I would ask.
‘Well, love,’ he said eventually, his accent strange, almost English but foreign too. His skin was dark, but he was not an Indian. They were darker, and spoke up and down, a
s though they were half singing. An Indian officer had stood right here where this man did a few months before and Father had struck up a conversation. It had been mesmerising. This man here said, ‘Got a couple of ounces for us, then, have you?’
I jumped down from my stool, the shock travelling through my feet, and turned my back to him, reaching up to the high shelf for the tobacco jar. Having placed it on the counter I climbed back onto the stool, unstoppered the jar and measured the cool moist tobacco onto a square of paper, careful not to spill any, breathing in the smell. It was like Father’s clothes, but more concentrated, unsullied by shaving soap and coffee.
He leaned forward as he tipped the tobacco into his tin, his face so close that I caught cologne, brilliantine, saw where the tiny bristles of blond hair ruptured the weathered skin. ‘Smells like heaven,’ he said, eyes closed. It was as though he had considerately placed his soldier’s face there for me to take a good long look. There were beads of sweat at his temple, white bushy eyebrows with the little hairs bursting straight out in every direction, purple threads in an old man’s swollen nose, deep lines at the corner of his eyes, furrows at his brow. Yet his head was a grown-up boy’s, somehow.
The stairs behind me creaked and the soldier stood up straight. Father came through the doorway, his round stomach brushing my back as he passed. ‘Sir! We have whatever you need. Just ask the question. Whatever you are looking for. Whatever at all. Is my Hannah helpful?’
‘She’s a good girl you’ve got there, sir. No doubt about it.’ I listened to the vowels. They were stretched, flat, long, the consonants soft. I watched his lips and tongue as he formed the sounds.
‘Ah!’ said Father, studying the soldier. ‘You are Australian! Welcome! Welcome to London! Very cold for you, I expect.’
‘No colder than a muddy ditch.’ He eyed me for a moment, and then Father. More, I thought, say more! It was one of those moments in which a window into adulthood gusts open and is quickly slammed shut. ‘Sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Forget where I am.’
‘Oh, that’s quite all right. You must relax. Enjoy your stay in London. We are happy to have you here with us.’
Later, in the bathroom, Geoffrey banging on the door, I practised the sounds in the mirror, shaping my mouth in ways I had not shaped them before, stretching my lips around the words, making my whispering voice undulate with the phrases. ‘Smells like heaven. No colder than a muddy ditch.’
‘HANNAH!’ Geoffrey was almost screaming. ‘I’m about to go on the floor!’
I opened the door, mimicked his agonised face, and after a moment let him by.
I slept with Mother in those days. When the zeppelin-raid siren sounded, which I could sleep through if left alone, I was always the first to be pushed out of bed. Mother did not sleep at all, it seemed to me. Mothers did not need sleep like other people. They lay awake, listening to you dream, so that they might shove you out from under the warm covers the instant the siren came. In the quieter moments when the siren faded, before it built up again, Father’s snoring throbbed through the wall and the floor. My brothers would try to wake him. ‘Papa. Papa!’
I bundled up the quilt and pillows into a shape that I could carry and after Mother had intervened in the bedroom we were all stumbling down the narrow twisting staircase to the shop, trying not to knock jars of sweets from the shelves with our loads on our way through, scurrying down Tottenham Court Road with all the other dark figures and their fat bundles of bedding, past the shopfronts to Goodge Street tube on the corner. The streetlights were out and the padded creatures bumped and jostled their way to the entrance by instinct, muttering Excuse me, After you, Mind my foot in a number of languages. It was cold outside at night, even with a coat pulled over my nightclothes, but the air between the shuffling people was thick and warm and one could tell from its odour that it had been cycled through living bodies. What I loved best were the searchlights tracing paths in the sky. I walked looking up, hoping for a glimpse of a zeppelin, while Mother hurried me into the station entrance, pressing my head into the scratchy woollen coat covering her soft hip.
In the dim light in the endless stairwell I saw Boris from my class with his parents and his sisters just below us. I recognised him by the silhouette of his glasses and his unruly hair. He was Russian but that was not the language we spoke together. Father had taught me only a little of his language—much of what I knew I had gleaned from inside the curtain around my bed during his late-night conversations with Mother, when he spoke of relatives at home and how they fared: shortages, strikes, the cost of food. And English was unspeakably dull, the language of school, not for down here in the tunnels at night. We might have spoken Yiddish, but never in front of Father. He called it the dead language of the old world. He hated anything old-fashioned, anything he connected with superstition. Mother would not have minded so much. She often made up affectionate names in Yiddish, though not when Father was about. She had an endless store, so many that I often had to ask her what I had just been called. Little bird. Flower of spring. Sweet morsel.
We spoke when we were playing in a language we felt we had invented. Or if we knew we hadn’t quite invented it, that we were close to its beginnings. Someone at our school, St John’s, used it on us, called us little Jews. It was clear what the boys were saying. They called everyone little Jews. We listened to these and other snippets of tattle and invective in the playground and saw quickly enough that it was a simple trick. One worked out how the word would be spelled backwards, with the odd variation where needed for pronunciation. Yobs for boys and so on. Mother hated it, said we sounded like barrow boys and fishmongers.
‘Olleh Sirob.’ I fell into step beside him, clutching my bundle as we descended into the crowded gloom, whispers echoing up from deep, deep below us. I loved raid nights.
He had not known it was me behind the pile of bedding. I was just a small girl, even for eight. Boris was not required to carry bedding. His mother did everything. We spoke as quickly as possible, partly to show off, partly to obscure further what we were saying. I was not one to waste a chance to irritate my brothers, who were one step behind, and stuck behind our bulkily laden forms until we reached the platform. We exchanged nonsense until our brains tired and we were forced to whisper in English.
‘Do you think there is really a bomb?’ Boris said. ‘Mama says this is a waste of time.’
‘I’ve never seen one. But imagine if we went back up and the streets were missing, and we had to live in the tube forever, like rats . . .’
On the platform my parents manoeuvred themselves into a space where they could wedge their pillows against the curved tiled walls of the tunnel. ‘Hannah, come,’ Father instructed. ‘Boys, come. You want the hoi polloi to crush your skulls?’ As we burrowed into position, the ground trembled and the whispering ceased for a moment. Everyone looked at the ceiling. Was that a bomb at last? Or merely a rumbling in some ancient water pipe?
I was forced to share bedding with Mother, but made sure that I could lie next to Boris as well. Mother had brought an extra quilt to lay beneath us, but it was thin, the stone beneath it cold and hard. I had to shift constantly to ease the soreness in my bones. I whispered nonsense to Boris and he murmured back in Yiddish, sleepy, forgetting to use our secret language. The bodies on the ground were quiet. A few latecomers straggled onto our platform, excusing themselves as they stepped on hands and feet, drawing forth some juicy swearwords and then a harsh shhh, from someone’s mother probably. Children all along the platform giggled. Boris trembled against my own shaking body.
Where is Boris? Sometimes I fancy I see him in the face of some Homburg-hatted relic tottering out onto the heath and I peer into the face beneath the brim, heart racing, but it is never him. One doesn’t expect people to survive all the things we did. For all I know the Spanish flu got him before he finished school. Imagine, though, if he were still alive and living in London. Imagine what we would say to one another. Heavens, but you are old.
Anyway,
the tube, in that war at the other end of the century. The lights were always on, so I had to pull the covers over my head to sleep. Mother lay quietly beside me on her back, with her eyes open, no doubt. Father snored, like the other fathers. The boys slapped each other on the other side of him, saying nothing, as though that were enough for them to remain blameless.
‘Boris,’ I whispered, my corner of the quilt tented above our heads.
He smelled of lavender soap; its aroma filled the little shelter. His father owned a chemist’s. ‘What if they bombed the water pipes,’ I said, speaking English now that I had something close to my true thoughts that I wanted to convey, ‘and we were flooded to death?’
‘I’d save you.’ But he wouldn’t. He was almost asleep, crossing the border, leaving me behind.
‘What if there was so much water that it filled to the ceiling, and all our bodies spouted up the stairs and onto the road. What then, Boris?’
Silence.
At weekends I was free to do as I pleased. Father had proclaimed the Sabbath archaic before my birth and the shop had been open every Saturday since we moved from Wales. No one passed comment because in London Saturday was the day to do business. When the well-to-do were up west in their traps and motor cars for a new set of shirts, or furniture for their townhouses, or sent the maids out for linen, you would be a fool to lock your door, Father said. They liked to take treats home with them too, and he was happy to take their money any day of the week. I remembered distantly the endlessness of Saturdays in the village we had come from, in the Rhondda Valley, where Mother’s family had gathered. I would look at my picture books in a corner of the kitchen while Mother cooked all day. The endless meals, sitting up straight, listening to elderly ladies who were hard of hearing speaking too loudly. Sometimes I would be asked to show my books to Grandmother, Mother’s mother, a crow in widow’s weeds who smelled of medicine. She was dead now and had disappeared from our lives before that. Something to do with Father, of whom Mother’s family had never approved. London was the last straw.
Hannah & Emil Page 3
