Mr Rosenblum's List

by Natasha Solomons

  In the box, Sadie also had a tattered Hebrew prayer book that once belonged to her grandpa, Mutti’s recipe book and a neatly folded white linen towel. Their families had been in Germany for five hundred years and that box was the sum total of their combined histories. Jack’s great-grandfather had been a famous cantor in the synagogue, his honey voice echoing the ancient prayers each Shabbas. No one remembered that but Sadie – she thought of it sometimes when she listened to Jack tunefully crooning Caruso in the bath. There was no memento of the tortoises she kept as a girl, or the click of their claws as she and Emil raced them along the quarry tiles in the hall. Only she remembered how Emil used to cheat at chess, and the bishop-shaped dent in the wooden wainscot – caused when he hurled it at her when she objected. Under a loose floorboard in the maid’s room, they used to hoard their treasures as children: a shiny Pfennig, a piece of green glass, a lump of elephant dung stolen from the zoo, carefully dried and wrapped in a napkin. Sadie wondered if they were still there. Did Emil look at them again before they took him?

  Unless she looked at the photograph, Sadie could no longer quite recall her brother’s face – it was like he was staring back at her through a bowl of water. She couldn’t remember whether his eyes were blue or grey. The only thing worse than remembering, she decided, was starting to forget.

  Sadie liked the Jewish calendar because it was all about memory. She had a list of her own: remember to keep the Sabbath, remember to keep the dietary laws as they remind you that you are a Jew; at Yom Kippur atone for your sins and, most importantly, do not forget the dead. During life there is the birthday and afterwards Yahrzeit, the day of death, and she knew as she celebrated her birthday each year that there was this other anniversary waiting, like an invisible bookend. She liked the ritual of the Jewish year – it was a tightly strung washing line for her to hang her remembrances along.

  Jack was humming under his breath beside her, and she pulled her scarf closer over her ears in an attempt to block out the sound. She could ask him to be quiet but then she would know he was still singing in his head, which was just as cross-making. The narrow lanes frothed with cow parsley that brushed the side of the convertible. Sadie glowered and muttered, ‘We’re lost and I hate the countryside. Du Dumpfbeutel. No one will come and see us, not even Elizabeth.’

  Jack winced at the mention of Elizabeth. She was soon to start her studies at Cambridge University and the thought that she would not visit them in their self-imposed exile was terrible. ‘She will come,’ he insisted, ‘we will sip champagne and eat strawberries on the lawn and then I’ll drive her to Cambridge.’

  Elizabeth had gone to Scotland with a girlfriend for the summer but had promised to come and see them before term started. It was now three weeks, ten days and seven hours since she had gone and Jack experienced a pain in his gut whenever he thought about her absence.

  ‘My girl will come. Of course she will.’

  Sadie said nothing, satisfied that she had needled him successfully but Jack, momentarily distressed, did not notice. ‘This will be her home until she gets married and has a family of her own.’

  He could not admit out loud the obvious fact that his beloved daughter had left and was now busy with her own life, preferring instead to pretend that she was merely on holiday and would return home to him soon.

  ‘You’re joking yourself. She’s gone,’ said his wife with a sigh.

  Jack took his hands off the steering wheel and covered his ears. ‘Hush!’ A moment later he tried a conciliatory tone, ‘Sadie, doll, try to be happy.’

  She frowned – after all these years, he still did not understand. ‘I don’t want to be happy.’

  They reached a ramshackle set of crossroads and a blank signpost.

  ‘You see, silly old man, this place doesn’t even have a name.’

  Jack winced with the effort of trying to remain patient.

  ‘Of course it does. The signs were simply painted out during the war and no one’s replaced them. Everyone in the village knows where they are. Probably aren’t enough strangers passing to warrant the effort of replacing them.’

  Blue smoke from a nearby bonfire hovered, making strange patterns as the sunlight tried to penetrate. Jack felt Sadie shiver beside him and he tried to make casual conversation. ‘I read that the corpses of highwaymen were buried under crossroads.’

  She was not reassured. They passed the village hall where a small group of men were hammering wooden tent pegs into the sun-baked ground. Several of the younger men had removed their shirts as they worked, the muscles beneath their skin coiling like rope. They all stared narrowly as the Jaguar passed. Jack was perturbed – it was part of his grand scheme of assimilation that they would simply seep unnoticed into village life, like rain into damp earth, and he did not like their scrutiny.

  He steered the car round to the left, turned by a steep hill and then noticed a broken gate leading along a roughly hewn dirt track. ‘This is it!’ he cried, recognising this to be a great moment in their lives – in years to come when he stood at the front of the driveway and ushered in the chauffeured cars to his golf club for the Wessex Cup or the qualifying match for the British Open, he would remember the moment when he saw the place for the first time.

  He steered the car up a potholed driveway lined with beech trees, which shaded them coolly as the Jaguar bounced along from one hole to the next. ‘Need to get this fixed,’ he said resolutely – a course such as his would need a proper road.

  The trees grew thicker and the light through the leaves played weird patterns over the car bonnet and upon their skin. Jack noticed two black eyes watching them through the gloom, then a shape disappeared into the thicket. He remembered a green painting of a wood in the book of fairy tales he’d had as a child.

  And then they were back in the daylight. He pulled the car up beside the front door of the house. It looked rather different to the picture that was sitting snugly in Jack’s breast pocket. The thatch was still there, but even with scant knowledge of thatches, he felt that they shouldn’t have bald patches. A blackbird darted out of a large hole and another picked at a loose bit of straw. The limewashed exterior was grimy in the sunlight; the roses grew feral and obscured the boarded-up windows. The walls were made of wattle and the house gave the impression that it wished for nothing more than to slump back into the earth. Jack furrowed his brow, climbed out of the car and ripped away the rotten wood nailed to the window frames. There was a tinkle of broken glass as a pane fell out. ‘Need to fix that,’ he muttered, less resolutely than before.

  Sadie hadn’t moved; she sat fixed in her seat and stared at the house curiously, breathing in deeply – there was a familiar scent, something she knew well but had not smelled for a long time. Jack plucked a rose from the wild tangle round the door and presented it to her. She ignored him, so he stuck it in her headscarf.

  ‘Ouch!’

  The stem of the rose was covered in sharp green thorns, and she pushed him away. Unperturbed, he opened the car door for her and offered his arm, which she rejected, brushing past him to stalk across the drive to the front door.

  ‘The house looks sad now but with a lick of paint it will be perfect,’ he called producing a bunch of old-fashioned cast iron keys, each the size of a giant’s finger. ‘Ready?’

  He slipped one into the big keyhole on the studded door and as he turned it there was a satisfying click. He heaved open the door and entered the dark hallway, Sadie close behind him. She gave a little scream. ‘Scheiße! Something touched me!’

  Jack wedged the door so that a shaft of light illuminated wisps of a torn cobweb. ‘See, it’s nothing, doll. Nothing but us.’

  Glancing up, Sadie saw the low ceiling was criss-crossed with hulking beams, stained black with soot and age. On the walls the lime plaster was beginning to flake and where the sun fell it shone upon spots of mould and creeping damp. She ducked under a low archway leading into a rudimentary kitchen – it certainly wasn’t Sadie’s idea of a kitch
en. There was a filthy stove, a heap of wood to drive it, a worn oaken table with a few broken, upended chairs, and as she looked about her, she saw there was no sink. In fact, not only was there no sink, there was no tap. She tried not to dwell on the significance of this unsavoury fact nor think of her porcelain bidet abandoned to its fate in Hampstead.

  Jack had followed her and, having given up trying to peer through the dirt-caked windows, was heaving against the stable-style door that lead to the back garden.

  ‘Just a minute. Nearly got him. Oh …’

  His voice trailed away, as he saw the land stretched out before him. Wordless, he seized Sadie’s hand and oblivious to her protests, led her outside. The fields lay under a shimmering heat haze and the bees hummed in every bush. The lawn sloped gently into fields full of waving grass tinged with buttercups, and high above their heads a kestrel hovered, its wings not appearing to beat.

  Here was his golf course. Jack narrowed his eyes and, whether it was the effect of the sunlight or sheer excitement, he could hear a wireless commentary. – ‘Well, this is the first British Open to be held at the new course at Pursebury Ash. It is a fine day for it. Looking to the seventh you can see Sam Snead taking a practice shot. Ah, yes, here comes Bobby Jones with the owner of the course, that well-known English Gentleman, Mr Jack Rosenblum. Ah yes, it’s going to be a great competition.’

  Jack saw the little flags waving amongst the tightly mowed grass and the yellow of the bunkers. He beamed, closing his eyes for a moment, as he listened to the cheering of the crowd.

  Realising that Jack was lost in a daydream, Sadie turned to go inside. A voice from inside the hedge made her start.

  ‘Mornin’.’

  An old man was squatting in the shadows behind her, camouflaged by leaves and sprouting cow parsley. His face was the colour of wood stain, and he looked as if he was growing out of the hazel boughs. Sadie took a step back.

  ‘Ja, hello, may I help you Mr …’

  ‘Curtis. Jist Curtis. You can help if yer likes. I is huntin’ for pignuts, Mrs Rose-in-Bloom.’

  Sadie stared at him. ‘You know my name?’

  ‘Aye.’

  He offered no more explanation, and Sadie continued to gaze at him, her mouth slightly open.

  ‘Them last ones flew away,’ he added conspiratorially.

  He plucked two leaves off the hedge and made flapping motions.

  ‘I am sorry? I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Them last ones what lived in your house. They flew away.’

  Sadie did not understand. ‘They took an aeroplane?’

  ‘Nope. Beds a-made of pijin feathers. ’S bad luck to sleep arn pijin feathers. They’s wings grow back in the night and then they flies away. With you in bed or not.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yoos heard of them legends about gins, right?’

  ‘Djinns?’

  ‘Aye. Well they ent gins or Djinns but pi-jins. They is very dangerous things, pi-jins.’

  ‘Pigeons?’

  The man tapped his nose.

  ‘What about goose feathers? I have an eiderdown of goose, will they fly away too?’

  The man screwed up his face in concentration. ‘Nope. Don’t think so. Jist pi-jins. But I will make a sure.’

  He stood, clambered out of the hedge, gave Sadie a little tip of his hat and wandered away down the hill. Aching with tiredness, all Sadie wanted was to lie down and sleep and determined to find a bed. Attempting to ignore the fustiness of the house, she climbed the wooden stairs and tried the nearest room. A cast-iron bed covered with a moth-eaten quilt rested in the middle of the room. She leant against the rough plastered wall and wondered aloud, ‘How did I get here?’

  A robin landed on a branch and cocked its head, as though the question were addressed to it. Sadie knelt to open the low window but the catch was stiff and splinters of rotting wood broke away as she forced it ajar. The air was full of dust that swirled in the spotlights of sun, and above the glass a fat cobweb wobbled in the breeze. She stared out at the shining fields, listening to the ribald song of the robin and found herself thinking of her grandparents, who had come from the shetetls. They had lived as peasants in villages in the east and sowed corn and potatoes, reared sheep and goats. A wind blew into the bedroom carrying tiny seed cases and the same odd scent; it was not the sickly ammonia scent of mice, nor the honeysuckle, but something familiar from her childhood. She walked to the window and slammed it shut. There was a tinkle of glass as another ancient pane shattered and fell to the ground in a cascade of sharp rain. She sighed, drew the curtain and lay on the bed, scrutinising the thick oak beams in the sloped ceiling above her head. The curtain was faded chintz and it fluttered in the breeze like a giant butterfly. On the floor lay a pile of faded books and she reached out to grab a volume from the top. The spine had come away, the cover was damp stained and it smelled vaguely of mould, but she opened it anyway and idly read the contents page. It was a collection of folklore: ‘The Dorset Oozeer’, ‘Apple Bobbin’ at Midnight’, ‘The Drowners’, and she skimmed through the titles, searching for any reference to pigeons. There was none. The rest of the books were novels by Thomas Hardy and once must have been a smartly bound nineteenth-century set, but now they were scarred by brown water marks. She shoved all the books in the corner of the room so that their dank stench could not reach the bed, lay back down and closed her eyes.

  She woke with a jolt to find that it was dark and, for a moment, she was back in Bethnal Green underground station in the midst of an air raid. She reached out automatically for Elizabeth – the child always slept curled against her hip, oblivious to the booms overhead – but Sadie’s fingers brushed the wiry hair on Jack’s leg, and she remembered where she was. She kept her mouth tight shut, worried that if she opened it the darkness would pour inside and choke her, sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the gentle rasp of Jack’s breathing. There was another sound: a soft thudding and flapping. She tried to shake Jack awake but he would not stir. The scrabbling grew louder and screeching cries came from the wall. She dug her nails into her palms – she was a middle-aged woman and would not be tyrannised by night-time noises.

  She slid out of bed and followed the sound to a door built into the wattle wall in one corner of the bedroom. As she fumbled with a bolt, the door burst open and a cascade of creatures flew at her, their panicked fluttering filling the air as she screamed out, terrified that they would get tangled in her hair. Looming grey shadows poured out from the cupboard and flapped across the ceiling; she could not tell if they were outsized bats or birds. There was only the thud, thud as they flew into the walls or collided with the window glass. She ran to the window, flung it as wide as she could and then escaped from the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

  She raced downstairs in the darkness until she reached the hall, where the flagstones felt icy cold on her bare feet. She didn’t like to think of Jack asleep in the room with all those creatures – supposing they flew away with him? Then she would be left alone. She laughed at her silliness but her voice echoed in the empty house and, as she padded into the sitting room, she gave a slight shudder. Their furniture had been delivered but was still covered in white sheets, and she wished that she had a torch or even a candle. She could make out the shape of their sofa, an old high-backed Knole. Jack had bought it after reading that the Knole sofa was the oldest of all English designs and boasted a proud aristocratic lineage. Ladies had to be careful whom they sat next to on a Knole sofa as, with a flick of the wrist and a pull on the cord, the sides and back came tumbling down to form a makeshift bed – it was a dangerous and licentious sofa. Right now, it proved very useful and Sadie gladly removed the sheet, tugged on the cords and lay down. She wrapped herself up in the dustsheet, screwed her eyes tight shut and waited for sleep.

  Jack woke the next morning feeling disorientated. He was lying in a neat, low bed in an unfamiliar room, with his hair sticking up around his ears like meadow grass. Light grey-blue feathers
lay scattered across the floor and a dead bird rested next to the window. Throwing off the covers he jumped out of bed, landed on bare wooden boards and bounded across to the window – unhelpfully positioned at the height of his knees – and bent down to look out. Rolling down to the foot of the hill were the fields for his golf course; the grass was thick with dew and clumps of cloud floated lazily across the sky like tufts of duckling down. Early morning sunshine streamed in through the filthy window, and he gave a contented huff as he saw the pond glitter in the distance. There was no sign of Sadie – this was a good house; it was big enough for them to lose one another in.

  Jack yawned, stretched and went downstairs to the small back parlour that he decided would be his study. It was dingy, the walls smoke-stained and the thick layers of dust made him cough. A pile of dead leaves had blown in from outside and a half-burned fire mouldered in the broken grate. Underneath a bookcase lurked a sprung mousetrap, with a tiny shrivelled form pinned to the base. He looked away quickly – really must get a cat, much more pleasant than a trap. He disliked the paraphernalia of death, even bestial ones and, while he knew deep down that hunting or shooting was as English as golf, he couldn’t stomach death being part of the game. Even if it was an un-British sign of weakness, he never added any kind of blood sports to his list. He had hated the rabbits in the butchers’ shops during the war – strung up in their blood-smeared fur, eyes filmy, humming with flies – and he couldn’t bear Sadie to buy them, not even when the only alternative was a tin of ‘potted meat in natural juices’. It was not only dead animals that repulsed him, a wriggling fish with a line in its lip, suffocating in air, distressed him too. He liked that the English language separated animal and food: cow and beef, sheep and mutton. It was more civilised than German: das Rindfleisch, bull-flesh. It was too literal. Perhaps that was why he hated rabbit – rabbit was rabbit whether it was hopping in a meadow or skinned and ready for the pot.