Mr Rosenblum's List

by Natasha Solomons

  Jack couldn’t understand how this had happened. He’d obeyed the rules to the letter and they’d still taken him – clearly the points in Helpful Information weren’t enough to make a chap blend in. He fished out the pamphlet and began to make his very first addendum:

  Regard the following as duties to which you are in honour bound:

  SPEND YOUR TIME IMMEDIATELY IN LEARNING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ITS CORRECT PRONUNCIATION. Have done so but it is not so easy. Even English lessons do not assist. Cursed German accent IMPOSSIBLE to lose.

  Refrain from speaking German in the streets and in public conveyances and in public places such as restaurants. Talk halting English rather than fluent German – and do not talk in a loud voice. (Unless talking to foreigners when it is the done thing to shout). Do not read German newspapers in public. Do not read them AT ALL or you will be considered a ‘class A threat’ and a spy.

  Do not criticise any government regulation, nor the way things are done over here. Very hard to manage at times like this. The freedom and liberty of England are now given to you. Never forget this point.

  Jack snorted. Loyal as he was, he couldn’t help but notice that his was a funny sort of freedom. With a sigh, he realised that this very thought was perilously close to criticism, and turned to the next point.

  Do not join any political organisations.

  It was points five and six that Jack pondered the most. While useful for the newly arrived refugee, Jack now realised that they were in serious need of clarification.

  Do not make yourself conspicuous by speaking loudly, or by your manner or dress. Don’t gesture with your hands when talking. Keep them stuck to your sides or the English will think you strange and over-emotional. The Englishman greatly dislikes ostentation or unconventionality of dress. Remember, ‘bland is best’. The Englishman attaches very great importance to modesty, understatement in speech rather than overstatement. He values good manners. (You will find that he says ‘Thank you’ for the smallest service – even for a penny bus ticket for which he has paid.) Always apologise, even when something is plainly not your fault – if a man walks into you on the street, apologise profusely.

  Try to observe and follow the manners and customs and habits of this country, in social and business relations. Yes – but what ARE the manners and customs? This point requires some significant expansion.

  Do not expect to be received immediately into English homes, because the Englishman takes some time before he opens his home wide to strangers.

  Do not spread the poison of ‘It’s bound to come in your country.’ The British greatly object to the planting of this craven thought.

  A policeman banging on the bars of the cell interrupted Jack’s scribbling. He looked up with a start to see his wife and small daughter standing outside, and flushed with humiliation. He didn’t want them to see him caged and stinking. The first week he’d been here, they had met in the visitor’s room, but now thanks to Mr Churchill’s exhortation to ‘collar the lot’ every room in the police station was full with refugees waiting for transfer to internment camps.

  Sadie reached through the bars and stroked his unshaven cheek.

  ‘Meine Liebe …’

  ‘In English, darling,’ murmured Jack with an anxious glance at the guard.

  ‘The little one misses her papa.’

  Elizabeth peeked out from behind her mother, pulling faces at one of the old men sitting at the back of the cell, who was plaiting his long beard into spikes to make her laugh. Jack planted a kiss on the back of Sadie’s hand and did his best to seem cheerful.

  ‘It’s not so bad. I’ll sausage through. Moishe here has been teaching me backgammon tricks. Did you speak to Edgar?’

  ‘Ja. I visit him at his office, just like you say. And Frieda, she tell me he visits police every day and he goes to see magistrate and he shout. Then he drink whisky.’

  Jack tried to smile, knowing his friend was doing all he could. If anyone could help him, it was Edgar Herzfeld. Edgar was a gentle, sedentary fellow, until something roused him.

  ‘And Freida, she tells me give you this,’ Sadie leant forward and kissed him tenderly on the mouth. ‘You see? More exciting when kisses are not from your wife,’ she said, doing her best to seem light-hearted.

  As she left, Sadie slipped a small package wrapped in a handkerchief through the bars. Jack sniffed at it. Apple strudel. Sadie and Mutti, her mother, always baked strudels on Fridays in Berlin. Today must be Friday. He took a bite and his teeth tingled on the sultanas. Sadie’s younger brother Emil hated sultanas. He always picked them out and lined them up in neat rows along his plate – it drove Sadie crazy. ‘Think of all the currants you’ve wasted!’ she used to say, ‘if you lined up all the currants you’ve not eaten, they’d stretch all the way to the Zoologischer Garten.’ Jack closed his eyes, and saw a row of sultanas end on end – every one that Emil had ever refused to eat – and wondered how long that line would be at the end of the boy’s life. That moment, Jack felt a crushing sadness against his ribs. He swallowed, trying not to cry, but a tear escaped and trickled down onto his strudel, making it taste salty. He worried about Emil and Mutti and the others left behind, but right then, he only had space for his own unhappiness. He was cold, the cell smelled of piss and he was homesick.

  At dawn one morning the prison was emptied and he was herded into a second-class compartment of an extra-long passenger train at Waterloo Station. Sandwiched between a pair of elderly Viennese gentlemen, Jack knew he should be concerned about where they were taking him. Instead, after three weeks sealed into a damp, high-windowed cell, he felt a tingle of excitement in his belly.

  The train rattled through the city, an endless warren of brick streets and grey skies. Plumes of smoke still smouldered from last night’s Heinkel raid. He saw people crawling over the wreckage of crumpled houses and closed his eyes in disgust. The lurching rhythm of the train lulled him to sleep. His head bumping against the glass, he dreamt of strange things, open skies filled with larks, emerald fireflies in the night and chequered flags on the side of a hill.

  Then one of the Viennese gentlemen was shaking him awake, offering him a piece of stale bread that he did not want. Jack turned back to the window and realised he had woken in another England. This one was green. Before they left Berlin, he had imagined that this was what Britain was like. He smiled – so England was meadows and sheep, thatched roofs and silver rivers after all.

  The train pulled into a station and Jack was shoved onto the platform by the throng. The air smelled of salt and he could hear the sea. The afternoon sun was so bright to his prison-accustomed eyes that it made him blink, and it took him a moment to realise that someone was calling his name.

  ‘Jack! Jack Rosenblum!’

  Jack peered into the crowd and saw a figure frantically waving a wad of papers.

  ‘Edgar?’

  A slight man with wild grey hair hurried towards him, pushing aside the unwilling bodies and enfolded Jack in a crushing embrace.

  ‘I’ve done it! You’re safe, Jack. I can take you home to Sadie.’

  Jack swallowed and stared at Edgar, as his legs began to tremble, like a lush before her morning gin.

  ‘I went to a judge and I tell him, “This man, this Rosenblum of Rosenblum Carpets, is a true ally against the Nazis.”’ Edgar spread his arms for emphasis, bumping the men streaming by on either side. Refusing to let his recital be interrupted he continued. ‘I tell the judge in his funny long-haired wig, “On the day war is declared this man turns his profitable factory over to the British war effort. Do not question Jack Rosenblum’s loyalty!”’

  Jack nodded dumbly, unable to speak.

  ‘The judge agreed. You are now “class C” alien and can go home.’

  Jack’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. ‘This place? Where am I?’

  Edgar gave a shrug. ‘Dorsetshire.’

  ‘Pretty,’ said Jack, as a tiny bird with dappled feathers landed on the handle of his
leather bag, and stared at him with round black eyes. It flapped its wings and took off in a gust of song.

  From the moment he arrived home, Jack devoted his spare time to meticulously expanding the bullet points in the Helpful Information pamphlet, until there was no room left and he had to insert supplementary pages at the back. There was nothing he liked more than to make another little note, an observation upon English customs such as ‘the British housewife makes a purchase of haddock on Friday mornings’ and record this titbit of invaluable knowledge. Jack prided himself, that should another booklet be commissioned, the German Jewish Aid Committee could turn to no greater expert than himself.

  The factory continued to grow, the vast looms churning out parachutes and kitbags and coarse canvas tents, so that the Rosenblums were able to move into a small terraced house in Hampstead, with a brass door knocker and a cobbled patio backing onto the heath. As the days seeped into weeks and then into months, Sadie grew tired of her husband’s list. Every evening there he was, hunched in his chair before the gas fire, the wireless blaring, scribbling, scribbling in his little book. The only time he faltered, and his pencil drooped was when Mr Winston Churchill or Mr John Betjeman came over the airwaves. She couldn’t understand this obsession to be English while she could feel that other life drifting further away, like steam from a kettle through an open window. There had been no news from Mutti, Emil or Papa for months. Jack went out every Friday for a copy of the Jewish Chronicle, and together they pored over the news. It was full of sinister rumours. While Elizabeth napped, Sadie would curl up on one of the pre-war Rosenblum rugs and read Mutti’s recipe books, trying to glut her appetite on visions of Sachertorte or puff pastry Windbeutel.

  Then, one Sunday morning in March 1943 it began to rain. Sadie knew Jack was upstairs somewhere with his verdammt list. The sky turned a deep shade of grey and the city was bathed in a false twilight. Water poured from the gutter and rain shattered the shimmering surface of the pond beyond the boundary. After an hour the water gently lapped the fence posts at the bottom of the garden leading to the heath. Staring out of the window, Sadie imagined she was Mrs Noah bobbing along in her house-shaped ark. She went and stood at the sink, gazing out at the pond sleepily. There was a deep-throated quacking from above, and then a cloud of ducks descended from the sky and landed on the pond. She smiled to see them; she liked the irritable sound they made when they quacked – they were like housewives bickering over bread. Then, she noticed something odd: a grey-haired woman was feeding them in the rain.

  The kitchen was filling with a peculiar smell, sweet and singed; it was poppy-seed cake, slightly overdone so that the seeds on the top were beginning to burn. Sadie never made poppy-seed cake and had not eaten it since they had come to England; nor could she recall even having seen poppy-seeds for sale. It was Mutti’s favourite cake, better than Baumtorte, vanilla crescent or even toasted marzipan squares. She would eat slice after slice, getting the tiny seeds stuck in between her teeth so that she looked like a gap-toothed witch from the pages of the Brothers Grimm.

  Sadie opened the door to the terrace and went out into the rain. She walked across the wet ground in her flimsy carpet slippers. The air was brimming with the aroma, as though the rain carried the fragrance of toasting seeds and sweet dough. As puddles formed in the soil, they too gave off the scent of a bakery amongst the terracotta flowerpots. Sadie walked to the fence and pushed aside two broken panels. Holding in her tummy, she slipped through the gap and stood on the bank of the pond. There, on the other side, stood her mother. She was wearing her long black skirt, a white apron and a neat blue scarf over her hair, while she fed scraps of burnt cake to the quacking ducks. Sadie stepped straight into the stagnant water. It was shallow and lapped the edge of her dressing gown, turning the bright fuchsia into dirty brown. The robe fanned out behind her like a train, her curlers forming a crown upon her head.

  Closing her eyes, Sadie took a breath, drawing the sweet scent inside her. She mustn’t open them. She must not. Must not. If she did, Mutti would be gone and there would never be poppy-seed cake again.

  Sadie walked home the long way, oblivious to the curious glances of passers-by. She knew there would be no more letters from Berlin. Yet she felt nothing, only silence.

  ‘What is wrong with you? Are you a crazy?’

  Jack stood on the pavement, thin lipped. He stared at her for a second, then thrust a horsehair blanket over her shoulders and hurried her into the house, tense with disapproval.

  ‘I saw you. You were in the pond.’

  Sadie said nothing.

  ‘What if someone else saw you?’

  Sadie ignored him and marched into the kitchen, the dangling hem of her dressing gown smearing mud along the polished hall tiles. She could feel Jack trailing after her, stuttering in confusion. She didn’t care. She grabbed Mutti’s recipe book and wrenched it open, snatching at the pages. With a cry she tore out a leaf and crumpled it into a ball, crushing it so that the ink began to run from the sweat on her hands.

  ‘Scheiße! Scheiße! It’s all for nothing. I am lost.’

  She hurled the book at the stove where it crashed into the cooker hood and slid onto the floor. Jack grabbed hold of his wife, hugging her to his chest, smoothing the hair from her eyes.

  ‘Hush. Hush, what has happened little one?’

  Sadie could not speak, and from the back bedroom Elizabeth began to wail, woken by the noise.

  ‘Poppy-seeds,’ she choked, breath coming in rasps, ‘there were poppy-seeds. And there will be no more letters.’

  Jack stared at her and for the first time since his brief internment he was frightened. He reached out and stroked her hand.

  ‘This will not do, mein Spatz. People will decide you are eccentric. You cannot walk into ponds in carpet slippers on a Sunday morning. It is not safe.’

  Sadie felt like she might puke with anger. ‘This. This is what concerns you? Arschkriecher!’

  Jack took a breath and licked his dry lips, ‘Odd habits are all very well for the English but we must be invisible.’

  Sadie tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and gazed at her husband unblinking.

  ‘Very well. I shall be invisible.’

  As she turned and walked away from him, Jack knew in his belly that something had broken. He almost heard it snap, but he could do nothing but watch her go, the damp fabric of her dressing gown clinging to her bare legs.

  The end of the war was both a challenge and an opportunity. It meant that, no longer limited to wretched utility garments, Jack could now acquire the proper attire of the Englishman and, after careful deliberation, he decided that this meant nothing less than a bespoke suit from Savile Row. In his neat hand he recorded this as item one hundred and six on his list. Jack went to Henry Poole for the first time in October 1946. It cost him a small fortune just to acquire the requisite number of clothing coupons, let alone the cost of the clothes, but had been worth every halfpenny: that suit was the livery of the English gentleman. The store smelled deliciously of cedar wood, and the tailor called him ‘Sir’, measured his small frame without a sneer, and the suit was delivered twelve weeks later, wrapped in crepe paper inside a pearlescent box with the Henry Poole crest emblazoned in gold. His pattern was to be kept in the company vaults alongside those of Churchill, Gladstone and Prince Albert. When he put on the suit, he felt taller than his five feet three inches, his bald head appeared to shine less and his nose felt, well, less pronounced. It was how the Emperor had wished his new suit to be.

  As car production increased once more, Jack was able to complete item number one hundred and seven: An Englishman drives a Jaguar. The summer of 1951, after the factory had shipped a particularly large order of sage velvet plush carpets to New York, Jack took delivery of the Jaguar XK120. He had been on the waiting list for two years, and when the moment arrived he was overwhelmed. The night before he had stayed awake and imagined himself driving along Piccadilly in his Henry Poole suit, at the wheel o
f his racing green Jag, beside his wife with her purple rinse and perfect nails.

  However, item one hundred and eight (An Englishman’s wife has a purple rinse, nice nails and plays tennis and bridge) was problematic. Sadie was devilish at bridge but did not play tennis and refused even to consider the rinse, complaining that it was an unnatural hue to have upon one’s head. Considering she was quite content to have dazzling violet carpets on her floors, he felt it illogical for her to protest, but knowing his wife’s temperament decided not to press the point. He would have to be English enough for the both of them.

  Apart from the deficiencies in his wife, Jack had fulfilled nearly all the items on his list. He had the suit, the car and the house in a leafy part of the city. He procured his hat from Lock of St James and tried his best to adjust the brim to precisely the correct degree. He ate lunch three times a week in the best of the squalid restaurants in town where he was waited upon with grovelling respect. (He mistakenly put this down to the power of his suit, when it was in fact due to his extravagant tipping. The waiters accepted his outlandish, foreign generosity and silently despised him for it.)

  He took his wife to Covent Garden and to Wigmore Hall and made donations to the right charities as well as the wrong ones; giving equally to the fund to restore St Paul’s roof as well as to the fledgling Israeli state.

  There remained one more item on Jack’s list. He knew it to be the quintessential characteristic of the true English gentleman and without it he was nothing. Item one hundred and fifty: An Englishman must be a member of a golf club.

  For Jack membership of a golf course was the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Atlantis and the perfect salt-beef sandwich all at once – but it was proving troublesome. He flicked a catch concealed in the carved Griffin of his Victorian desk and a drawer popped out a few inches. He pulled it the rest of the way to reveal several tidy compartments filled with visiting cards and neatly filed bills. A fourth spilled over with paper. This was where he kept his correspondence with the golf clubs of England. The communication consisted of a copy of each application and a polite, but firm, response from the club secretary declining his admittance. Jack was persistent to the point of stubbornness; he had arrived in London with nothing but his suitcases and twenty pounds in his pocket. Within ten years he had one of the biggest carpet factories in London, so a single rejection from a snide official of a golf club was not going to dissuade a man like Jack Morris Rosenblum.