The engrossed but watchful North Britons saw their chance and, punting the crutch under a bench, left the Offaly sciolist grounded and cursing, while they dragged the honourably-discharged potman – whom they correctly assessed as the weaker vessel – out into the yard; where they proceeded to kick what remained of the living daylights out of him.
The potman’s fury was unabated; he was unusually blessed in still having a few functional grinders left in his mouth – which he clamped, with commendable pluck, in the green calf of the nearest Scotsman, whose howls brought the children in from the streets, and gathered quite a crowd of disengaged ladies of the night. Murder, cannibalism – or the first dentally-performed amputation – was narrowly avoided by the swift action of Joblard, who summoned the Count. Annoyed at being diverted by this puny affray from the imminent sacrifice of a non-Aryan fowl, Jerzy produced a baroque service revolver from behind the bar, and began to pistol-whip the Caledonian raiding party. They were put to ignominious flight, leapfrogging each other, through the liquid mush of an upturned bin, to reach the safety of the Doss House. It was Culloden Moor revisited.
So this was the curious social sketch with which Joblard lured me into a meet: at the modest cost of a couple of rounds of beer, and a probable tandoori luncheon. There was already a dotted ‘tear here’ track running down my spine. I was ready to split wide open. I trembled in that state of mingled inspiration and paranoid-dementia, in which the strangest characters I could capture on paper, after many sleepless nights, would interrupt my agonized efforts at composition with a brisk knock on the door. They only wanted to introduce themselves, to put a few simple questions about ‘the geometry of time and transformation’. They begged to confess, dragging sacks of documents into the hallway. They recited, with perfect recall, the legends I had not yet nerved myself to complete. Once, as I passed a cinema, on my way home from the bank (in the usual catatonic depression), a man I had only that morning ‘killed’ in the most hideous way, stepped out and touched me on the shoulder. Would I care to inspect the building’s haunted attic?
Unfortunately, there was no way I could resist the pre-fictional content of Joblard’s expertly pitched outline. A pub that seemed to have been christened by Rudolf Steiner? A Polish Count, with a potentially renegade past, who never left the safety of his protected enclave? What was the true history of this Billy Bones of Fieldgate Street: the door watcher, hugging his revolver to his chest, and having his food delivered in a basket on the end of a rope? Was it significant that he bore a remarkable resemblance to his fellow countryman, Karol Wojtyla, the Supreme Pontiff? Who was this bruiser in silks, this man of secrets? I could not wait to be initiated into these latest mysteries – even though I knew that my own fears had whistled them from the woodwork, like a bacterial culture from sweating gorgonzola.
II
There are mornings when the iron clouds do not press, when it all lifts, and your stride across the cobblestones is light and turf-sprung. You are accompanied by a sense of wellbeing: the world moves through an ease of recognition, and Fieldgate Street opens into a discreet metaphor of itself. The present stain – bricks, dirty windows, furnaces, generators – is accepted, but does nothing to damage the older sense, still vital; the unassumed joy of entering into the original field. White Chappell spreads out before us, muscular and calm, without fences or limits, expanding as far as we let the sight of it run. The great minatory blocks of the Monster Doss House and the London Hospital sink beneath their own folly; are absorbed in dunes of marram grass. That boundary, or edge of what is known, visited only in sleep, and towards the end of the night, is now gently insistent. Beyond the dry river of New Road, ruffled and buffeted by a false wind from vehicles attending only to the irrational need to be elsewhere, is the unachieved and unachievable meadow: the imagined shrine, solace to pilgrim and vagrant. The healing shadow of this resurrected earth mound, a clay Silbury, is set outside the severe concentration of the city.
Looking – a wild hunch – for something worth reading on the subject of runes, I turned to J. H. Prynne’s Pedantic Note in Two Parts, and found myself, at once, linked, or inspired by this text, to demand that the black sentences be made manifest in these streets: I would see the words take a physical form, painted on floating sheets of glass. ‘The runic concentration,’ Prynne writes, ‘is in each case the power of longing to include its desired end, to traverse the field without moral debate or transcendent abstraction; joy as the complete ground underfoot.’
And so it was: the inn sign of The Spear of Destiny was revealed as a barrier, or challenge, dropped across my track; visible to all deranged souls fleeing from their destiny with enough resolution to discover gehenna in this dusty warren: to go no further.
A familiar figure, puffing out his cheeks with the effort, clung precariously to the tilting signboard, while completing the last dramatic flourishes of a bogus calligraphy. What he had conjured, in a hailstorm of tachist enamel, was some solvent-abusing Siegfried’s vision of a bolt of lightning shattering an anvil of blue ice: more of a lager video than a primal race-memory. The lettering was a chaos of pastiched runes, based on a vague pictorial resemblance between the letters of the alphabet and the rune-marks on a Novelty Shop chart that the artist was consulting with great deliberation, by rubbing his nose against the plastic card. The steroid-pumped ‘S’ of Spear was represented by the rune of ‘wholeness’, sowelu; and the ‘p’ by the axelike purisaz. The system was a sham, mere decoration, artfully faked so that the letters seemed to have been cut into the wood. The covert occultism of this attempt was dispersed, made futile – and yet the cunning of the artisan, his painful snail-knuckled precision, created a shield of defence that, as it faded and took dirt, would achieve a significance unintended by its perpetrator. This benevolent dwarf honoured Prynne’s demand that ‘formulae of power’ should be ‘compact and anonymous’.
I held the ladder while Woolf Haince descended. They didn’t come more compact, or more anonymous than Woolf. He was a man of infinite, but astigmatic, courtesy. He recognized only those things that he could touch. As we shook hands he stared and sniffed until the connection was made. In another existence, Woolf had painted signboards for the smaller antique shops around Camden Passage; most of them changed hands every quarter, when the rents were ‘reviewed’ and the Italians and Americans were still staying at home. It was, for a time, a good business to be occupied with: he survived, earning enough change to pose, cash in hand, as a bona fide customer for the bookstalls. That’s how I met him, hopping from foot to foot, wiping his nose with his sleeve in an agony of indecision. I supplied him with the reassurance that the mantle of mysteries was intact: he fondled promiscuous paperback fables of Atlantis, Borley Rectory, UFOs, pyramid power, Spring-heeled Jack, talking stones, spontaneous combustions. He nodded over them, a woodpecker with the shakes – twitching, stroking, muttering incantations – before he ended my suspense, dropped a couple of icy coins into my hand, and slid the chosen volume swiftly from sight, into the deep pockets of a Petersburgh Hay Market overcoat. He never needed to extract or consult these books: he absorbed their essence directly into his bloodstream. They kept him warm in winter, padding him – from neck to ankle – in a protective armour of reference. Woolf Haince was a walking library.
Sadly, the sign-painting dwarf, martyred by the exactions of his calling, was now half-blind, capped in a horn of comforting darkness. I led him by the elbow into the depths of the pub. Joblard was waiting, chatting to Eleanor: the introductions were made. Woolf was so diminutive that as we talked, his chin resting on the edge of the table, he turned with anguished deference, a rotating gargoyle, from face to face, in quest of the meaning of these sounds he could not quite bring himself to capture. He weighed each syllable so carefully that he was left far behind in the mad rush of our fragmented and competing narratives.
The matter Joblard wanted to nail was far ahead of him; he could only circumnavigate it, making raids by means of a notebook and a fine b
lack pen. He identified a sequence of abrupt pictographs, cancelled suggestions, hints, flickbook mappings that ran over several nervously turned pages.
‘Seated winged figure with gold hands waits in boredom?’ He searches for the image that might confirm this risky quotation. ‘Plaster of Paris map and four white African moths?’ Too late, they have fluttered out from between the imprisoning pages: he has obliterated them with a gesturing paw.
Eleanor, with enormous tact, had turned herself into a stuffed and lacquered bird. Her smile is fixed and the drinks are jerked into her tight mouth, like coins swallowed by a chocolatecoloured toy. Woolf is also adrift. His life was solitary. He had barely acquired the habit of speech. The sound of his own voice terrified him. He sunk into his coat, tugging down a curtain of uncombed hair. He calmed himself by picking a louse from his celluloid collar and snapping it between horny fingernails.
We had been drinking for two or three hours (during which time Woolf toyed with a half-pint of orange cordial; dipping a lurid tongue into his glass and spreading the stain, as he licked compulsively at his blistered lips, into a rictal deformity) when the little man suddenly darted a hand into a bottomless pocket and pulled out something white and tightly folded. He ironed the scrap with the heel of his hand, indicating by the rapid movements of his head that we were free to examine it.
The design meant nothing to me: a narrow rectangle, small circles at the four corners, dotted lines to cut the diagonals. Our benign but uncomprehending stares seemed to excite Woolf, like burning tapers applied to the soles of his feet. He ran a paint-stained finger along the base of the rectangle. ‘See?’ he choked, ‘Fieldgate Doss House, the twin towers.’ We nodded, returned empty smiles; waited. He jerked his thumb to the head of the map. ‘Princelet.’ Then, with greater emphasis, ‘Princelet again!’ This still provided us with only the loosest sense of a scheme that was evidently of critical importance to the dwarf. Snorting, he leapt to his feet, and – snatching at my sleeve – dragged me out of the twilight bar and on to the street. Joblard, pausing only to throw back his chaser, and to make a snatch at mine, followed us.
Drawing a length of rough twine from around his neck, Woolf fished out an enormous key. He stood before us, posed against the bars of afternoon sunlight, like some blasphemous parody of a boy-bishop by Mantegna: hands outstretched, he inched his way up the steps, leading us into the belly of the Monster Doss House. Woolf, it seems, had claimed – by default – the temporary status of caretaker, and lived in the topmost room of the east tower.
The view to the south, obviously of no interest to Woolf, judging by the state of his windows, was breathtaking: and would be featured in all the developer’s brochures. Beyond the litter of roads and railways, the cranes and the scaffolds, we caught a glimpse of the white extravagance of St-George-in-the-East. Closer at hand was a furtive peek into Joblard’s flat, where his young friend was evidently enjoying a post-prandial nap: a vision the other denizens of the Doss House would have killed for.
The world at large did not concern Woolf. What interested him stood on the table: an ancient Grundig tape-recorder, a spectral deed box. We waited expectantly, but it was not yet the right moment. Joblard took the only seat in the room and interested himself in rolling a cigarette. Idly, I picked up one of the books I had sold Woolf, long ago, never having got beyond the first page, on which my staggeringly modest price was still inscribed: Men of Wisdom, Lavishly Illustrated: Master Eckhart and the Rhineland Mystics. The pictorial wrapper was now grey with a sticky film of dust, but – beneath it – I could just recover the image of a monk and his Bible. I played an old game that never lost its charm, and flipped the book open, to read a couple of lines at random. ‘I answer: One work remains to a man truly and properly, that is the annihilation of himself.’
Woolf’s monastic self-neglect spread chokingly through the confines of this cabin. It was as if he excreted dust with every movement; it sweated from him, dandruff and mercury, crumbling over everything. Even the sour corner of an abandoned loaf was grey as pumice stone. The bed was unmade. His books were heaped over the floor, collapsed columns, a millennial ruin; pages were folded back and covers torn. Woolf made his own dim light; he scratched it, in miserly quantities, from an irritated skin – enough to locate the tape spools in their box, or to hack open another tin of mortuary beef. He had accepted a consignment, in lieu of payment, from a Tooley Street dealer who had gone into receivership.
We sat in silence. Woolf’s cold-blood calm was beginning to spook me. He seemed to exist on the far shore of some unspeakable trauma, doomed to pick through the rags of a past he had never legitimately inhabited. One of his arms disappeared into the folds of his library coat and emerged with a roll of masking tape that he used in his work. He placed his sketch of the occult rectangle on top of one of the spools of the Grundig, and stuck it down. I knew from our earlier market conversations that Woolf experimented: he was intent upon locating the voices of the dead, using blank tape as a medium: he concentrated on nothing, emptied himself, gave access to the unobliterated residues of past and future events.
Now he moved for the first time towards the window; and I noticed that a light came on in the uncurtained west tower – as if triggered by the removal of Woolf’s spectacles. The energy of this remote orange cell was being stolen directly from Woolf. He knew what was revealed; he did not need to see it. A man in a pink cricket cap was staring at us, back across the chilled void. Woolf was satisfied: he felt a primary connection had been established, the second man could not break away. He would be eviscerated into our machine, wound out like linen. Gasping for breath, sweating heavily, Woolf pressed down the square grey button. There was a click. And the creaking spools began to revolve.
III
Fredrik Hanbury was on the phone early. A being of marvellous enthusiasm, he drove directly at whatever was out there to be grasped, with all the centrifugal desperation of a man who has somewhere lost time and is determined to recover it – whatever the cost. He had turned up a tale that might prove to be the kernel of our Spitalfields film: the myth of the disappearance of David Rodinsky.
Rodinsky, a Polish Jew from Plotsk or Lublin or wherever, was the caretaker and resident poltergeist of the Princelet Street synagogue: an undistinguished chevra without the funds to support a scholar in residence. He perched under the eaves, a night-crow, unremarked and unremarkable – until that day in the early 1960s when he achieved the Great Work, and became invisible.
It is uncertain how many weeks, or years, passed before anyone noticed Rodinsky’s absence. He had evaporated, and would survive as municipal pulverulence, his name unspoken, to be resurrected only as ‘a feature’, an italicized selling point, in the occult fabulation of the zone that the estate agents demanded to justify a vertiginous increase in property values. The legend had escaped and the double doors were padlocked behind it; the windows were sealed in plasterboard versions of themselves. Rodinsky’s room was left as he had abandoned it: books on the table, grease-caked pyjamas, cheap calendar with the reproduction of Millet’s ‘Angelus’, fixed for ever at January 1963.
The Newcomers, salivating over an excavated frigacy of chicken, followed by smoked collops and green flummery, had discovered a quaint fairy tale of their own – without blood and entrails, a Vanishing Jew! They fell upon it like a fluted entablature, or a weaver’s bobbin. The synagogue, complete with dark secret, passed rapidly into the hands of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre; under whose sponsorship, with the aid of a good torch, it is possible to climb the damaged stairs and – by confronting the room – recover the man. ‘He’s all about us,’ whisper the shrine-hoppers, with a delicious shiver.
Fredrik’s forefinger jabbed against my chest in uncontained excitement; an aboriginal pointing stick, a magnetized bone. It was his cudgel and his compass. We charged south along Queensbridge Road, over the humpback bridge and into bounty-hunting territory. Over his shoulder, Fredrik tossed a scarf of wild cultural references. His method
was to heap idea on idea, layer after layer, until the edifice either commanded attention or collapsed into rubble. Leaving him, if he was lucky, holding one serviceable catchphrase: ‘a post-hoc fable of the immigrant quarter’. The things Fredrik noticed were the things that mattered. He had about a yard’s advantage over me in height. He could stare, without stretching, into bedroom windows. Today he was magnificently Cromwellian, fanning his moral fervour under a bouncing helmet of Saxon hair.
‘This is Poland,’ he shouted, ‘old Kraków. The attics, the cobbles; rag-pickers scavenging a living out of nothing. Unbelievable! The landscape of the Blitz. Brandt’s photographs. Any day now we’ll have acorn coffee and shoes made from tyres.’
We bounded down the Lane – I was jogging steadily to keep up with him – shunned the hot bagels, passed under the railway bridge. I noticed the old woman who always stands smiling against the wall, not begging, nor soliciting charity, but ‘available’ to collect her tithe from the uneasy consciences of social explorers.
‘Chequebook modernism,’ Fredrik spat at the Brewery’s glasshouse façade. ‘By reflecting nothing but its own image, this structure hopes to repel the shadows of past crimes. Listen, I’ve been reading the journals of the Quaker Brewmasters – fascinating – did you know families actually starved to death on this spot, had their fingers chewed off by their own dogs?’
The turn into Princelet Street, from Brick Lane’s fetishist gulch of competing credit-card caves, is stunning. One of those welcome moments of cardiac arrest, when you know that you have been absorbed into the scene you are looking at: for a single heartbeat, time freezes.
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