Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Thus, at the very moment the proud and pompous defenders of the realm were parading through the city, smugly declaring a new age of prosperity, Rosenbloom and Lipski had been thrown out of their jobs. In a certain way they were brothers under the skin, thought Z. Both were recent immigrants from Poland. Both were victims … but victims of what? Of the Jubilee or of the weather? Whatever it was, it was the same. Under the skin, they were definitely brothers, but brothers who could hardly have been more different.

  The prosecuting attorney, the man named Poland, did not like Rosenbloom, thought Z. Neither did he hate him. But having decided that Israel Lipski’s story was the desperate fantasy of a guilty man, Rosenbloom had become a vital cog in the engine of conviction. Poland, therefore, was methodical, drawing out each piece of information, bit by bit, like nails to build a coffin.

  Had he met the prisoner on the Saturday of Jubilee week? Yes, he had met him and, yes, they had conversed. Z tried to picture it in his head. The diffident young man, Lipski, slight of build and the bigger, rougher, older Rosenbloom, with the pencil moustache and the slick-back hair. Lipski is building a workshop in his attic and wants Rosenbloom to work for him. Rosenbloom studies the waif of a figure before him, small, slight, boyish in looks. Why should he work for such a man – a boy who knows less than he does, himself? But both are out of work. Both need to eat. Does Lipski have any money? He has raised a little. How much? A little. Enough to make a start. Rosenbloom, what does he think? He thinks, of course, that there’s nothing else on offer so something is better than nothing and who knows? Maybe there’s an opportunity. Because opportunity, no matter how infinitesimally small, is everything when you are poor and are struggling for survival.

  Had he been to Lipski’s place before he had started work on that Tuesday? Yes, he had been there on the Sunday before the Tuesday. He went there to help set up the workshop and to start making samples. So he had been there before, thought Z. And he found that very interesting. Rosenbloom had been to Batty Street on the Sunday before the murder. He helped to get the workshop in order and had stayed there long enough to make some samples. So he was familiar with the house and with the layout. He, too, had climbed the stairs. He, too, could have looked through that tiny window and peered through the muslin gauze into Miriam Angel’s room. But not having lived there, he didn’t know something that Lipski must have been aware of – he didn’t know that the Angels were poorer than church mice, that they lived from hand to mouth and spent all their meagre earnings on rent and a bit of food to put on their table. Of course most of the Whitechapel immigrants were poor. But ‘poor’ is always a word that’s relative to the one who uses it. So many people in the ghetto appeared like the Angels and lived like them but had a few sovereigns stashed away – sovereigns that were acquired farthing by farthing in a process that was painful slow and disciplined. It was all a matter of time. The longer they were there, the longer they were able to sweat out their labour, the more chance they would have saved a few precious sovereigns. It was all a matter of time. And what Rosenbloom didn’t know was that the people in the room beyond the little window were still greeners, they had only been in England for little more than half a year. He couldn’t have known that. But Lipski did.

  So when Rosenbloom came that fateful Tuesday morning at 7 o’clock he already knew the house since he had been there before. He knocked at the door and waited. Who answered? It was Lipski. Lipski was the one who had answered the door. He was working upstairs in the attic but he heard the knock at the door and came down to answer it. Of course he was waiting for his worker to come but he heard the knock all the way up in the attic. Noise travelled easily through the paper-thin walls; there was no barrier for sound – you could hear everything everywhere. (Z used his pencil to underline this fact.)

  Lipski came downstairs in his trousers and his shirt. He was barefoot, Rosenbloom said. The house seemed to be empty and quiet as he followed Lipski up the stairs. Did they chat? Were there any pleasantries exchanged? What did they say to each other? The prosecutor didn’t ask. Rosenbloom didn’t say. When they reached the attic Lipski set the stronger man to work bending the metal points that would eventually go on the tips of the walking sticks they were making. The sticks, themselves, were still in a raw state. They would have to be finished and then the metal tips would be fixed at the end and filed smooth while clamped in a vice. But there was only one vice, so only one man could work. And Lipski told him that another man would come, a ‘filer’, he said, therefore he would need another vice.

  Who was this man, this other mysterious ‘filer’? Lipski didn’t say. According to Rosenbloom the other man was nameless and this nameless man would come to work, eventually. Then Lipski put on his boots, his jacket and hat, preparing to go out.

  The prosecutor, Poland, handed a jacket to the witness. The jacket he handed him had blotchy stains from some corrosive substance. Then, pointing to the jacket that Rosenbloom now was holding in his hands, he asked him whether Lipski had worn a jacket similar to that. Rosenbloom stared at the jacket he was handed. Yes, Lipski wore a jacket similar to that. Similar but not exact. For the jacket Lipski wore had no stains on it. Not that he could see, anyhow.

  So Lipski left in an unstained jacket and soon he came back as the shop where he went to buy the vice was still closed. What time was it that Lipski returned? Rosenbloom didn’t know. Why was that? Because there was no clock.

  What happened then? Where did Lipski go? According to Rosenbloom he went up and down the stairs, up and down the stairs until the boy returned. What boy? Then Z recalled. Of course, there was a boy who Lipski had hired to do odd jobs. A boy named Pitman. What time did the boy, Pitman, come to work? Around eight by the clock. That is what Rosenbloom said – around eight by the clock.

  Z looked back at his notes. But Rosenbloom had said just moments before that there was no clock so he couldn’t say what time it was that Lipski returned. Rosenbloom’s time-telling capabilities were, at the very least, somewhat inconsistent. But those little details hardly troubled the prosecution, who, in the dogged guise of Poland, continued to plough on.

  So Pitman came and then Lipski went out again. This time to buy a sponge for the boy to varnish with. And that was the last time Rosenbloom saw Lipski until he was found, half dead, under Miriam Angel’s bed. But where was Rosenbloom all this time? He remained up in the attic room, he said. Up in the attic room with Pitman, the lad. And one other person was also there. One other man. A big man. A strong man. The man whose name he didn’t know – Rosenbloom had said – but only found out later. His name, as it turned out, was Schmuss. ‘Schmuss.’ Z wrote it down again. ‘Schmuss.’ It was one of those unfortunate names that innocent people had to bear and sometimes not so innocently. How much do people come to resemble their names, Z wondered?

  But this man, Schmuss, was like a ghost. He came and then he left. How long did he stay? Simply a few minutes. There was no work and so he left. And then there was just Rosenbloom and Pitman. Only Rosenbloom and Pitman in the attic room, alone. And while they waited, just below, a vile murder was enacted. A vile murder, just below them. While they waited.

  Alone? The two of them alone? But Pitman left, didn’t he? Yes, he left. He left sometime after the man, Schmuss had gone. When was that? How long did the boy stay after Schmuss had left? An hour? An hour and a half? Rosenbloom couldn’t say because there was no clock. But, yes, the boy named Pitman did go off. He went to get his breakfast. And after he left Rosenbloom was alone. Alone in the attic workshop. Just by himself. And where was Schmuss? Schmuss had disappeared. He had simply vanished.

  So Rosenbloom had stayed in that attic room from seven in the morning till the alarm was raised in the room downstairs when the body was found. The boy, Pitman, was there as well, except for the time he went to have his breakfast. And when did he return? When did Pitman get back? Rosenbloom could not tell. There wasn’t a clock. But Pitman did return, sometime, and st
ayed in the attic with Rosenbloom filing away, filing away, filing away the handles. Until they heard the sounds, the terrible sounds, from below, from the depths of the house. And then they ran downstairs, together.

  McIntyre now rose to cross-examine. Z watched with interest. Rosenbloom’s speech was well rehearsed and filtered through Karamelli’s translation, it seemed calm and reasoned. The original words, however, were not quite as straightforward. Like the Yiddish language, itself, they hovered in a different realm where certainty is no longer certain. Because what means certainty when you’re always an alien in a world that is constantly shifting? In Yiddish, you can only be certain that today will be different because nothing is ever exactly the same as it was yesterday and tomorrow you might be somewhere else (which is why the Yiddish speaking Jews of Eastern Europe never bothered to paint their houses).

  But for McIntyre, the commercial attorney, who dealt in contracts and bill of lading, both God and the Devil lay in the detail. When he rose to cross-examine, therefore, he was only interested in getting Rosenbloom to say what he had to say with more precision, even though, with Karamelli as the intermediary, that was like pulling teeth from a toothless donkey.

  McIntyre, however, persisted. Did Rosenbloom know Schmuss before? No, he didn’t. Did he ever see him before? How could he see him before if he didn’t know him? Did he tell the boy, Pitman, that he knew him? How could he tell the boy, Pitman, that he knew him if he didn’t know him? Besides, he didn’t speak English and the boy, Pitman, didn’t know Yiddish. So Rosenbloom didn’t speak English? Not a word? No, not a word. Was he sure? Yes, he was sure. And he didn’t say to the boy that he knew the strange man who came to work in Lipski’s attic? No, he didn’t say that to the boy at all because he didn’t know Schmuss and he didn’t know English.

  Then McIntyre led Rosenbloom, step by step, through Lipski’s statement: Wasn’t it true that he, Rosenbloom, and the strange man was standing at the door of Miriam Angel’s room when Lipski returned? No, he was not. And wasn’t the door of Miriam Angel’s room partly pulled open at that time? No, he didn’t see. Would he swear that he was not there when the door was partly open? Yes, he would swear it. He would swear it in Temple, if need be.

  The judge, impatient at this verbal imprecision, now intervened: Did Rosenbloom at any time that morning stand before Angel’s door? No. Except, yes, he was there when the alarm took place.

  McIntyre took charge again: Was Rosenbloom not standing just outside the door and the strange man just inside the door of Miriam Angel’s room? No, he was not out and he had not seen the strange man before he came up to the attic room. Did he not catch hold of Lipski by his hands or wrists? No, he did not catch hold of him at all. That was lies, all lies. Did he and the mysterious man not throw him down?

  Here the judge intervened once again. What purpose was being served by going though all this, he wanted to know. Isn’t it all quite useless?

  Useless? Z wondered what he meant by that. Was it useless to have Rosenbloom respond to Lipski’s accusation? Perhaps it was, if you believed that Lipski was guilty and all this was simply taking up precious time that would be better served by having lunch.

  However, McIntyre, to his credit, doggedly went on: Did Rosenbloom force open Lipski’s mouth? No, he wasn’t strong enough to do that. Didn’t the other man hold Lipski down? The other one was not there. Lies, all lies!

  Then McIntyre stopped. The courtroom was quiet. Nothing could be heard, not a sound. And then: What part of Poland was he from? From Plotz. Was that near Warsaw? Seventeen or eighteen Polish miles.

  And that was that. The witness stepped down and McIntyre returned to his bench.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE TRIAL BROKE for lunch. Lipski was taken away to a tiny holding cell below the courthouse, hardly bigger than a coffin stood on end, where he would patiently wait while up above the Judge and the Lord Mayor sat down to an opulent feast catered by the Sheriff, Sir Henry Isaacs, in the Judge’s private dining room.

  Z wished he could have been a fly on the wall, first in Lipski’s cellar cage where the prisoner sat alone, eating, if he had any appetite at all, a piece of stale bread, some watery soup, served to him in a metal cup slimy from second-hand drool and then flitting up to the finery of the Judge’s private chambers where the three high ranking servants of the Crown were tucking into their meaty fare after popping the cork of some decent claret in order to toast the long and profitable reign of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.

  What would they be talking about? What was going on inside their heads? Upstairs where they were toasting the Queen, they would be praising their good fortune and marvelling at the weather. But down in the cellar, behind the bars of frigid steel, Lipski would have no one to talk with except himself. It was a time, a quiet space, perchance to dream. To dream within a dream within a nightmare. His body might have been confined inside that cell, but Z suspected that his mind had drifted elsewhere – across the water, across the choppy sea, hovering over the filthy docks of Hamburg infested with its rats and rabid dogs, before floating on through vapid memories of Prussia, Pomerania, of wooden benches, midnight trains, nostrils filled with soot and dung, the barking, guttural sounds of black booted bureaucrats, and then soaring beyond the River Oder, into the Polish heartlands, across the planes, the never-ending fields of rich, golden wheat, ripening in the summer sun, the mind’s train rolls on and on and on… Hush little baby, hush… The chicken’s in the pot, the Shabbat candles are lit, your father has made you a basket of straw. And I will rock you fast asleep in the safety of my arms.

  Z sat there thinking in the emptiness of the courtroom. The people all had left – the reporter from the Times, the artist from London Illustrated, the jurors, the myriad of observers, all had gone to have their meals, to be watered and be fed. And Z stared out at the mahogany walls, staring out into the emptiness, out into the echoes of the past and he wondered – he wondered what on earth he was doing there and what in heaven’s name was going on.

  And then he saw her. She was standing near the back of the chamber, by the door. Alone. And he realised that she was waiting – waiting patiently for him.

  There was a quiet pub around the corner from the courthouse. Maggie knew of it. After they had settled themselves in a wooden booth, she began to speak. It was clear from the beginning that there was something she wanted to tell Z – something she wanted to say.

  What she had to relate was one of those curious coincidences, she told him, very difficult to explain. Quite by chance she had, that very weekend past, been invited to accompany her cousin, Beatrice, to a garden party at the home of a gentleman Beatrice thought might be helpful to her journalistic career for, besides being a scholar of some repute, he edited the Dictionary of National Biography, a job which had given him access to the Great, the Good and the Despicable. His name, Maggie told him, was Stephen – Leslie Stephen. And it was his brother, James Fitzjames, who was presiding over the trial they were witnessing this day.

  And she continued, for this curiosity was not all: once there she had met a child, a little girl with a very long face, enormous bright eyes full of wonder and dark hair that fell impishly down the back of her starched, white frock. Her name was Virginia and Maggie had taken to her at once, seeing, as it were, a kindred soul in the body of a child much more to her liking than all the others who seemed to feel that pretence and formality were required even in a lovely garden on a warm, sunny afternoon.

  The little girl was Leslie Stephen’s youngest daughter and the garden was her own special wonderland. So, it seemed to Maggie, she felt somewhat annoyed that these people – these stiff and sober guests of her father’s (not hers) – had taken over her neat, protected world. But of all the annoyances the little girl felt, one was supreme. It was that of her cousin, the son of her father’s brother, some many years older, whom she detested because he took such delight in tormenting her. Maggie, herself, had wi
tnessed this when she saw the very same mean-spirited lad come over to the child and pointing back toward the thicket where she liked to play, say with a wicked grin, ‘A wolf is going to eat you, Virginia if you go into the woods today!’ To which she replied, defensively, ‘I’m not afraid of wolves! In fact, I’ll marry one some day!’

  And then, grabbing Maggie’s hand, the little girl headed back into the thicket that was her own special patch behind the house. She tugged her along a path, Maggie told him, that led beside a bubbling brook, till they came to a little summer house – a quiet retreat where Virginia stored her fantasies. But as they came close it was clear someone was inside the hut – a fact that quite annoyed the little girl since she imagined the place as her own special hideaway. Though Maggie tried to restrain her, Virginia quietly made her way up to the window that overlooked the rushing stream and through which a shadowy figure could be seen.

  There was something malevolent in the air, Maggie told him. Something she could feel. And sensing the danger, she went closer to the summer house to fetch the child who had placed herself before the open window and was standing on her tiptoes peering in. A gentle wind was stirring up the leaves and the branches of the trees began to sway. Inside, through the gauze-like curtains, a figure could be seen reclining on a sofa, lost, it seemed, in dreams. On the table next to him a clay pipe still burned, noxiously, and the odour, as it wafted though the air, was something Maggie knew from her pharmacy days. And just before she pulled the child away, she managed to get a closer look of the man who was slumbering in that state of great abandon which was the effect, she understood, caused by his indulgence of a substance which took away the pain of worldly cares and transported the users into a trance which opened up to them, they felt, the portals of Valhalla with all its timeless mysteries and took them on a voyage so seductive that they wished only to remain.