Displaced

by Barbara Nadel

  And yet Eva always made this pilgrimage. When the fair arrived in Croydon, she went to Barking to see Irenka. Bela knew and he hated it. But better that than wait until they arrived at Barking when, in his words, ‘Someone might know who you are if you go to that grave.’ Ridiculous old man. As if anyone would? As if anyone cared?

  Eva picked at some moss on top of the stone in a half-hearted way and then sat down on the grass. The only reason she visited, apart from the fact that no one else did, was because, wicked old witch as she had been, not even Irenka had deserved to die like that. She had been wronged. Oh, she had been badly wronged!

  The Twins, Ping and Pong, had first raised the alarm – in their own unique way. Screaming and waving their arms in the air. They didn’t say what was the matter, they rarely did. But Tom, ‘old Tom’ even back in the late sixties, had seen the smoke and he’d run towards it. She’d been just about to get on the waltzer, a gratis ride before the punters arrived, but Tom, so he’d told her, he had stopped it, picked her up and run towards the smoke.

  Irenka had still been alive when they found her. Bela always said that she wasn’t, but Eva remembered it well. How could she not? Trussed up, her fat mother had rope around her feet, up her back and looped around her neck, she lay on her side in the middle of a cooking fire between their caravan and that of Mario the Tattooed Man. He, it was later established, had been in the freak show wagon at the time, but where had Bela been? He’d been around and he’d been drunk and he’d arrived before anyone – except the Twins. But they, as usual, had just melted out of sight.

  Her hair had been on fire, Eva had recognised the smell from her experiences with her mother’s hot tongs. And her face had blistered. When they took her out of the fire, Eva saw huge, fluid-filled bubbles on her cheeks and under her chin. Luckily, she’d lost consciousness by that time. She never regained it.

  Why had she died like that and how? The story, which originated from who knew where, was that Irenka had been practising an escapologist act. And as a youngster Eva had believed it. After all, everyone said that had been the way it had happened. Nobody, clearly, saw the irony in the notion of an overweight, unfit woman attempting to emulate Houdini. As far as Eva had known, her mother did little except sit in their caravan and eat sweet dumplings.

  It was obvious to Eva, now that she was an adult, that Bela her father had killed her mother. And life had been better once Irenka had died. Which was why she’d never said anything or tried to make her father visit her mother’s grave. Because he never had. And, when they arrived in Barking, where Irenka had died, he wouldn’t even say her name.

  Irving Levy left to make the long journey through the tall Georgian house to the toilets in the basement. Once he’d gone, the old man said, ‘He’s sick, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lee said. So he did know.

  ‘And will make himself sicker with this stupidity. I reckon he goes to that park, you know. Like his father.’

  As far as Lee knew, Irving’s father had had little involvement in the search for his daughter. Although that could be because his son hadn’t talked about it.

  ‘He spent weeks, months in that park over the years,’ Jackie said. ‘He dug.’

  ‘Dug?’

  ‘All over. Got arrested once, although because of Miriam the coppers never pressed charges. And when that fair came once a year …’ He shrugged. ‘Wandering about through the dodgems and the sideshows like a lost soul, crying. She, his wife, she didn’t care. It ate away at him.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ Lee asked.

  ‘Because, son, this is the Garden,’ the old man said. ‘Men make deals so big here they could bring down countries. So you have to trust each other. This means you have to know about each other. I’m not talking about gossip here, just keeping on your toes. You understand?’

  Lee didn’t answer. He wanted the old man to elaborate.

  Eventually, Jackie said, ‘It’s like this: if you work with a bloke you have to know he’s a mensch. Old Isaac, that was Manny’s father, he was so particular about sweeps, he’d have me washing me hands and sieving even when he wasn’t cutting. Just as a matter of course!’

  Lee knew what sweeps were, but sieving?

  The old man explained. ‘When you’re cutting and you have to leave, say, for a call of nature, you wash your hands in running water over a bowl. This, you let settle. Then later you sieve the water through sacking to capture any dust as might have been on ya. Manny was religious about it, Isaac too. These were honest men. But Manny was also a troubled man. When that little girl went, I saw him fade. I watched his judgement cloud, his weight fall.’ He leant in close to Lee’s face. ‘He made mistakes.’

  ‘Cutting?’

  ‘The Bourse wasn’t happy. As his sweeps man I had an obligation – to Manny as well as the Bourse. I followed him. It was pitiful.’

  The London Diamond Bourse, where men in heavy hats and coats, sporting traditional Hasidic side-locks, traded stones from across the world, was a powerful institution. If the traders lost confidence in a cutter, his whole business could collapse.

  ‘He pulled himself together,’ the old man said. ‘But it wasn’t down to me. I left that to her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His wife,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t confront Manny! He was my guv’nor! But I went to that posh house they had, and I told her that if he carried on the way he was going, they’d lose everything. She didn’t like what I said or who I was, but she said she’d sort it and she must’ve.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Lee asked. He’d seen photographs, but he still had little idea about who Rachel Levy had been.

  Although, as he himself usually put it, ‘as old as God’s pisspot’, Jackie Berman’s hearing was still sharp. He heard Irving panting his way up the stairs from the khazi and so he lowered his voice.

  ‘She was as cold and as flat as a witch’s tit,’ he said. ‘She didn’t give a toss about Manny. She only perked up when I said they might lose money. Even thinking about her all these years on gives me the shudders.’

  FIVE

  ‘You coming Barking Fair this year?’

  Grace swung backwards and forwards on the rusty old swing that had once belonged to her amma and her uncles.

  Shazia said, ‘I’ll be at uni.’

  ‘No, it’s early this year. On the 19th. You’ll still be here.’

  ‘Dunno. Maybe.’

  Grace was the closest friend Shazia had made at sixth-form college. A tall, lively, funny girl, she came from a very straight-laced Nigerian family with whom she had nothing in common.

  ‘I’m going with Tom,’ Grace said. ‘But you can come too. Tom ain’t got that stupid jealous of everyone thing that Mamba had.’

  Benjamin ‘Mamba’ Nwogu had been Grace’s previous boyfriend. A professional bad boy gangsta, Mamba had fascinated Grace for all of six months. Then the gang behaviour had started to grate. Interested in little beyond weed, he’d wanted Grace around, but didn’t want to pay her any attention. She’d met Tom Campbell at Green Street Library of all places. That wasn’t cool and neither was Tom, who was one of those super smart, super straight, and religious (shock horror!) boys whose parents came from Trinidad. But he was into her like no other boy Grace had ever met. She just had to say she wanted something for him to make sure she got it.

  ‘I suppose it’d be a laugh,’ Shazia said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Grace swung. ‘Here, you know when you come home from uni for the holidays, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You gonna come back here or to your mum’s?’

  Shazia hadn’t even thought about it. Since her falling-out with Mumtaz she’d stayed with her amma’s parents, Sumita and Baharat Huq, and only visited the flat in Forest Gate when she needed something.

  ‘’Cause Brick Lane ain’t round the corner,’ Grace said. ‘And if I see another hipster with a purple beard on a fixed wheelie I’m gonna lose my shit, innit.’

  Shazia smiled. Although
stiff with funky vintage and designer shops, Brick Lane and its environs wasn’t a place for East Enders like Grace and herself. Those places were for incomers, be they the artists who lived in the Huguenot houses around Christ Church or the trust fund kids whose daddies had bought them warehouse conversions in Hoxton.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Shazia said. She sat on the grass in front of the old swing, leaning back against a mossy stone birdbath.

  ‘I dunno what shit you have with your mum, but make it up, yeah?’ Grace said. ‘You love each other, and also getting up here to see you uses up my Oyster.’

  Clearly ‘German efficiency’ wasn’t a myth. Mumtaz opened the e-mail and began to read it out loud to Lee.

  He said, ‘This is from …’

  ‘Frau Metzler at the Neue Synagogue in Berlin,’ she said. She read the effusive greetings to herself.

  ‘So, here it says … “The family Austerlitz ran the Austerlitz Apotheke, which was on Rosenthaler Strasse in what is now Spandau district. The building survived World War II and was in the Russian sector of the city, which then became part of the German Democratic Republic. It is still an apothecary, but has no connection to the family. Dieter Austerlitz, his wife and children lived in Niederschönhausen at a large house on Grabbeallee which was number 67. Dieter and his wife died in Auschwitz in 1943 and their son, Kurt, in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in 1942. There is no record of anyone with the name Rachel Austerlitz dying in either Auschwitz or Sachsenhausen. This may mean that she died en route to Sachsenhausen, which is probable, as both Rachel and her brother suffered from tuberculosis.”’

  Mumtaz looked up.

  Lee said, ‘Nope. Irving’s never mentioned it to me.’

  ‘TB was a death sentence in those days,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘No, but still …’ She read on, ‘“Dieter Austerlitz was one of two sons of Avram Austerlitz, also an apothecary, who died in 1920. He is buried with his wife, Izabella, in the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery here in Berlin. The brother of Dieter Austerlitz was called Wilhelm and he, his wife, Regina, and their three children all perished in Auschwitz in 1943. None of our members are old enough to remember this family, but if you do come to Berlin, I will be able to put you in contact with the wider Jewish community who may know more than I. I have yet to investigate Frau Austerlitz’s family in Munich. But I must tell you that the name you gave as someone related to the Suskind family via a family called Reichman did make me nervous.”’

  ‘Nervous?’ Lee said. ‘That’s a weird word to use.’

  Mumtaz said, ‘English isn’t her first language. Give her a break. Neither of us can speak a foreign language with such fluency. My written Bengali is beyond awful. Anyway … “Augustin Maria Baum was a German nationalist. He was born in 1867 and died in 1938. He was a member of the National Socialist Party and a great admirer of Hitler. And so any connection to Jewish families has to be wrong.”’

  ‘Maybe it was a different Augustin Maria Baum,’ Lee said.

  Mumtaz looked back at her screen. Then she said, ‘Frau Metzler says she will get in touch when she knows more.’

  Lee shrugged. ‘Irving may want us to prioritise his search for his sister, but I have to admit to a fascination with his mother.’

  He told her what Jackie Berman had said about Rachel Levy.

  ‘Makes me wonder whether old Irving’s parents was the love match he likes to think,’ Lee said. ‘I mean, it’s a romantic story, isn’t it? Brave British squaddie finds hidden Jewish girl in great big ruined house in Berlin, saves her from the Russians and marries her.’

  ‘Well, assuming that did happen, it is romantic,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Maybe by the 1960s, when this old man met her, Rachel was disillusioned. And she’d lost her daughter …’

  She couldn’t and wouldn’t say any more and she knew Lee would know why. Shazia was off to university soon and Mumtaz desperately wanted to see her before she left.

  Lee said, ‘So it looks like we’re off to the fair when it arrives.’

  She was dreading it. They’d had such fun last year. But this time was different. This time it was work and she had to remember that.

  ‘Jackie Berman reckons Irving’s going to Barking Park,’ Lee continued. ‘I just hope he’s not digging holes like his father. But I do want him to come with us so he can walk us through what he remembers.’

  It made sense. And, although Levy claimed to be frail, he obviously had enough energy to go to work and do whatever he had been doing in Barking Park. If he was doing anything.

  ‘I imagine he’ll not want to,’ Lee said, ‘but it’s important we try and walk him through what happened back in ’62. He might remember nothing, but he might not.’

  ‘Do you know if he’s been to the fair since Miriam disappeared?’

  Lee shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. I do think we’re not getting all the facts from Irving for some reason. I dunno why,’ he said. ‘He wants his sister back and I believe that’s genuine. But there’s something ain’t right and I don’t know what it is. As soon as you hear back from Germany we’ll put all what you’ve found out to him and ask when he wants us to go to Berlin.’

  ‘Before the fair?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’ve a few weeks and maybe if we can find out more about Irving’s mother it’ll help us in the search for Miriam.’

  His phone rang and, when he looked at the screen, he smiled.

  ‘If you’re going to fly then you need to be lean.’

  Amber finished her ice cream anyway and then said, ‘I don’t put on weight, Nagyapa.’

  ‘You do. You mustn’t,’ the old man said. ‘You’re beautiful, but your tits are big. You must watch that.’

  Luckily, Amber was used to her grandfather’s ‘Hungarian ways’ – as her mother described his characteristic bluntness.

  ‘Instead of going shopping with those girls with empty heads’ – he meant Lulu and Misty – ‘you should be practising. Practising, practising, practising. I know that where there is a horizontal you can throw a rope around – you should do that. The Twins know where they are. We have them all over the site. A fairground is a gift for a flier. But you must do this all the time!’

  ‘And if Mum and Dad catch me, or Nanny Eva? They don’t want me to fly, none of them! Only you want me to fly!’

  ‘Because it is what you want, my little pigeon,’ he said. ‘I deny you nothing. But if you want me to say I am fine so that your mother or Eva can take you to Camden to just waste money, I can’t.’ He shook his head. ‘I am not fine.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ Amber said. ‘I’ve seen you get up and make tea for yourself. And when we were outside Margate and Mum was sick, Ping and Pong looked after you.’

  He shook his head. ‘Only the freaks in the last resort,’ he said. ‘And that was. Your mother was sick and she needed her mother. How could I refuse? But you? You just want to go shopping. Why I should get those silent creeps to look after me again, I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought they were your friends,’ Amber said.

  He glared at her. ‘No friends of mine.’

  And yet it was only, apart from Nanny Eva, Ping and Pong that her grandfather spoke Hungarian with. They rarely answered, but they obviously understood him. And they had, according to her grandmother, lived around the old man most of his life.

  ‘So I can’t go shopping in Camden, then?’ Amber said once the silence in that caravan got too much for her.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow the fair will open and I do not want to be in this caravan on my own. I don’t want these dirty London people looking in through my windows and seeing me. I know what they’re like. They will rob you. And when we move on to Barking it will be even worse. Those East End people are the lowest of the low. I will give you money for Camden later, but only if you practise, you hear me?’

  Gilda was getting on his nerves.

  Remember Cousin Violet is coming and she’s bringing people to speak to you,
Dad, she’d yelled in his ear as if he was deaf or stupid. He was neither. Now his daughter was in the kitchen; as far as Bill was concerned, she could stay there.

  His niece, Vi, was another matter. She was a right laugh, always had been.

  Smoked like a trooper, drank like a fish and swore like a sailor. Pity she’d joined the coppers, but there it went. Bringing a couple of private detectives to see him, so she couldn’t be all bad. That lot were as dodgy as a wagon-load of monkeys.

  The doorbell rang and Gilda made some weird nervous sorts of noises and then let them in. Since her and her husband had moved them all out to Gidea Park, Gilda had turned into Mrs Middle-Class, complete with that annoying put-on accent she’d developed. Soon she’d come out with the china cups and saucers and he’d end up slopping his tea on the laminate flooring.

  Vi entered in a cloud of smoke followed by a tall bloke, who looked a bit foreign, and some very pretty Paki woman.

  ‘Uncle Bill,’ Vi said. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘I’m old, it’s fucking shit.’

  She kissed him. Gilda said she’d go and make tea.

  ‘This is Lee Arnold, he runs the PI agency, and this is Mumtaz, who’s his assistant.’

  They all shook hands, and then Vi and the others sat down. Bill was tempted to ask Vi for a fag, but he knew that Gilda’d have a fit. So he looked at Lee Arnold and he said, ‘Vi tells me you wanna know about the Levy baby.’

  ‘The family want to try and find out what happened,’ Arnold said.

  He was a good-looking geezer, even if he did have black suitcases underneath his eyes. A bloke with a past if ever Bill had seen one.

  ‘Left it a while, didn’t they?’ Bill said. ‘But I don’t judge. How can I? Yeah, I was working Barking Funfair when it happened. I was muscle, back then, setting up the rigs. Lot of casual work on the fairs back in them days. When I wasn’t on fairs, I done circuses and if I wasn’t on circuses I worked with Vi’s dad on the doors.’