We are sucked, by a vortex of expectation, into the synagogue, and up the unlit stairs: we are returning, approaching something that has always been there. The movement is inevitable. But we also sensed immediately that we were trespassing on a space that could soon be neutralized as a ‘Museum of Immigration’: as if immigration could be anything other than an active response to untenable circumstances – a brave, mad, greedy charge at some vision of the future; a thrusting forward of the unborn into a region they could neither claim nor desire. Immigration is a blowtorch held against an anthill. It can always be sentimentalized, but never re-created. It is as persistent and irreversible as the passage of glaciers and cannot – without diminishing its courage – be codified, and trapped in cases of nostalgia. But we ourselves were ethical Luddites, forcibly entering the reality of David Rodinsky’s territorial self: the apparent squalor and the imposed mystery.
There was no mystery, except the one we manufactured in our quest for the unknowable: shocking ourselves into a sense of our own human vulnerability. We were a future race of barbarians, too tall for the room in which we were standing. We fell gratefully upon the accumulation of detail: debased agents, resurrectionists with cheap Japanese cameras.
We dug, we competed, we whispered our discoveries. There was the hard evidence of a weighing-machine ticket, wedged into a Hebrew grammar, that presented Rodinsky at twelve stone twelve pounds (what numerological perfection!) on 2 August 1957. We estimated his height by holding up an ugly charity jacket from his wardrobe. We felt a footstep-on-your-grave tremor as we read his handwritten name in an empty spectacle case. We sniffed at the boxed bed in its corner, and the rugs that had coagulated into planks. We fondled pokers, gasmasks, kettles. We scraped at the mould in the saucepans. We would have interrogated the rats in the skirting boards, or depth-profiled the vagrants who had skippered in this deserted set. We knew the names of the films that Rodinsky had attended, and the records he had played. We snorted dust from the heaps of morbid newspapers; sifted foreign wars, forgotten crimes, spasms of violence, royalty, incest, boot polish, dentures and haemorrhoids.
Books were everywhere, covering the tables, spilling out of drawers and boxes: dictionaries, primers, code-breakers, histories, explanations of anti-Semitism. Inversion, agglutination, fusion, analogical extension were Rodinsky’s familiars. He took a Letts Schoolgirls’ Diary – ‘begun Tuesday 20 December 1961’ – and converted it into a system of universal time. Julian, Gregorian and cabalistic versions tumbling into the Highway Code, and out again into Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin or Greek. There was a desperation to crack the crust, to get beyond language. ‘KÍ-BI-MA… SPEAK!’
‘It’s a lock,’ as the TV boys say. The Carnival Season would soon be over, and Sonny Jaques would be shuttling back from the Caribbean, refreshed and ready for another round of discussions, rewrites, revisions, lunching drafts. But we’d deny him even a cheese dip until he agreed to see this room for himself. It is the prize exhibit, a sealed environment; even the light breaks hesitantly through cracks in the boards that cover the windows.
Rodinsky’s diary-script reveals one last frenzied charge at the cuneiform tablets, the king-lists. We are shaking out locusts and cinders. The final entry is almost illegible. ‘By he she / aren’t so not take.’ ‘Not take.’ The command is ignored, Fredrik slips into his pocket the scarlet document the curators have ignored. In failing to feature the Letts Diaries, they missed the chance to turn the Princelet Street synagogue into as big a commercial attraction as the Anne Frank House. They removed everything else: the books with colour plates, the ziggurat snapshots, all the significant bric-a-brac. Urchins and sneak-thieves completed the job, cargoculting the swag to the fences of Cheshire Street and Cutler Street.
Now I began to understand the nature of the trap. I was like the fox who philosophically accepts that he has made a bad decision – only when he has to chew off his own leg to escape. There was nothing astonishing in the disappearance of this man. He could not be more available. It was all still here: the wrappings, the culture, the work he had attempted, his breath on the glass – and even, if we carried it away, his story. We could provide the missing element, fiction, using only the clues that Rodinsky had so blatantly planted. Fredrik’s fateful choice in picking up the diary made it certain that the unfinished work of this chamber would be taken to its inevitable, though still unresolved, conclusion.
The man remains, it is the room itself that vanishes. You are looking into a facsimile, a cunning fake, as unreal as the mock-up of Thomas Hardy’s study in Dorchester Museum. But the fake was crafted by none other than the apparent victim! The room’s original has shifted to another place, achieved another level of reality. You would have to share Rodinsky’s fate to find it. There is no use in stripping the panels from the walls for your Docklands condo, or reviving the set for a Gothic Tour (designed by Edward Gorey?) taking in New York and Chicago. The heritage is despair and the heritage is the measure by which we fail in visiting this grim module. It can be marketed only as a suicide-kit; a death by aesthetic suffocation, an empathy attack.
The room emerges as a deconsecrated shrine, sucking in the unwary, tying them by their hair to the weighted furniture. No one who crosses the threshold is unmarked. These psychic tourists escape with modest relics, souvenirs that breed and multiply in their pockets like pieces of the true cross. They propagate a dangerous heresy. They are scorched by shadows that do not belong to any three-dimensional object. Rodinsky is assembled, like a golem, in the heat of their attention. He is present in all the curious and seductive fragments left in this cell. And whatever was ferreted away behind all this stimulating rubbish has completely evaporated.
Chastened, I stand with Fredrik in the domestic ruin of the back kitchen, looking north towards the brewery. The true history of Whitechapel is here, unseen, invisible from the public streets. Lost gardens, courtyards whose entrances have been eliminated, shacks buried in vegetation like Mayan temples – so that only a previous intimacy could establish the meaning of these mysterious shapes. The ground is unused and unlisted: it does not age. You could hack a path into the thicket and converse – as a contemporary – with the dead centuries. You could discover the secret of time-travel: nobody ever ‘goes back’; rather, you die into what you see, you slow down, choke, peel layers from the bone until you become aware of the stranger crossing the garden towards you, recklessly parting the damp greenery, picking thorns from his wrist – the man who has your face.
At a distance now, in the safety of my study, I write. My pen moves over the paper, as nervously stimulated as an electrocardiogram tracing. The scarlet leatherette diary is open in my left hand. In August Rodinsky interested himself in the laws governing shechitah (ritual slaughter); the flawless blade, the uninterrupted stroke. He made notes from the Babylonian Talmud, as codified by Joseph Karo (those fated initials again, denoting aggressive victims and reluctant predators!). I can only repeat, edit, copy – ‘Damascus… Ahab the Israelite… I and you gods… so take’ – acknowledge the conflicting impulses, or drift into the diary’s flattened pre-Columbian world map, with its anachronistic ‘shipping lanes and railways’.
Almost unnoticed, at the side of Rodinsky’s room, is a blind passage that leads nowhere, quilted in newspaper bundles, wine bottles, broken slates. A man’s naked shoulders rub against the plaster walls, streaking them with blood. His hearing, sensitized by privation, is pitched to the rush of vital fluids within the bricks; to the telltale creak on the remembered stairs; to the public world of the street that is far beyond the reach of his restricting chain.
A news cutting, disturbed by my agitated shuffling of the pages, floats from the diary on to my desk: a codling moth, or flake of ash. I try to avoid it, but it sticks to my hand. A photograph: hollow cheeks, a dead-eyed man with the shadow-moustache of malignant fate. An involuntary traveller covering his face against a photo-degraded blizzard. ‘And here is Yasha, seen in this Nazi-released picture after his capture.’ Wh
y had Rodinsky preserved this image from among the mounds of unscissored newspapers? I was glad that I did not have to know.
I reseal the diary into its jiffy bag, wrap it in felt, secure the package with string. I drip hot wax over the knots. I can no longer allow that book to draw breath in my room. But – as the power of its dictation subsides – all the annotated ephemera of the Princelet Street attic also pales, and bleaches from sight. What remains, and will not be displaced, is a solitary brass key, lying on the shelf in Rodinsky’s wardrobe. Everything else, I am now certain, is a sorcerer’s smokescreen.
IV
The looped tape ran on with its mesmerizing impersonation of silence. We concentrated on the squeaking and grinding of its untended mechanism. Woolf Haince was alert, cradling his toy like a case of pet locusts; ear cupped, he nodded in recognition. ‘From the fourth corner, six to ten princes,’ he murmured, ‘the fire.’
Joblard, at the turret window, could see the dim bulb in Arthur’s hutch, a lemurian smear; but ‘The Boy’ himself had sunk from sight, sparked out, without memory. He lived in the eternal present of the vagrant, submerged, primed to mere survival. Arthur was a drowned man, returned. He had been wiped clean by his hours in the water. He was ‘Monty’. His flesh was soft, rotten blue, unmarked by razor: a prebendary pout outlined in shabby down. He was dying slowly into his portrait, exchanging breath with a single captured moment: post-coital sulks daguerreotyped on to florid card. Ruined Arthur was smoking-room bait; a gamy valentine stitched in lemon satin. The lie of his life was lost, inscribed on a sentimental flyleaf, bound in canary vellum, pillaged by bumbailiffs; auctioned, sacked, snatched, scattered. He cannot escape from any of it – rectal damage, sobranie, flushed velvet: he remembers nothing. A lurid afternoon, the clouds spinning his sickness; he lurches towards the river. He has been filed and forgotten; wormed, silver-fished, tanned to powder. Arthur in his pomp: long-necked, a curious centre parting; lavender water, spoiled Bloomsbury. Virginia Stephen dressed for some jape in her brother’s cricket togs! (And, incidentally, there is an extant snapshot of Vanessa batting, c. 1892, while sister Virginia cradles the ball, like a harmonica, to her pursed lips. Vanessa’s forward ‘push’ is hampered by a woefully inadequate, cack-handed grip. Her front leg is nowhere. And her eyes are either firmly shut, or grounded in despair. In other words, she looks every inch the missing England opener.) Arthur Singleton is transfixed by a guilt he has done nothing to earn. In justice, he is doubly punished.
As the weakened vagrant went under, let go, the reels speeded: the machine lurched and spat. The tape was flesh. The Grundig was skinning Arthur alive, peeling his memory. The spools travelled so fast, they did not move at all. Escaping sounds were coarsened in a spindle of autopsy bandages. Sound was light. Woolf made frantic motions, as if lathering his hands with soap. His tongue, still glowing like sodium vapour, lizard-flicked for imaginary flies. This passage of the tape was tidal, impregnated, sweeping over obstacles. There was a shower of static: panicked feet running the cobbles.
A moist darkness muffled the world, wrapped the tower in living felt, sooted the floorboards. Woolf waved us back; so that we formed our own rectangle, as we pressed against the walls of the circular chamber: Joblard, myself, Woolf and the Grundig. Suddenly there was no focus for our attention; we made no attempt to listen. The tape took over our critical functions: it drew our breath, massaged our heart-pumps. We were submerged in our own reveries. We had forgotten if Woolf was recording or playing; transmitting, or forcing us to transmit to other, as yet unidentified, attics.
I drifted into a sort of uninspired lethargy: sounds without images, bands of mute colour, violet-grey lesions, persistent green moulds, puddles of crushed chalk. Joblard’s roll-up had ignited his mouth: it spread in a lycanthropic grin. I became convinced that his lips were on fire, his cheeks were salt and his eyes had rolled into scorched feather-balls. His whole head was a dog of flame. And now – at this moment – the tape began to release gasps of fear; the asthma of sex-seizures, closed throats, trauma. It grated and rattled. The pain was intense, lungs shredding as they drowned in hot sand. I had to close my eyes and cover them. But it was useless. The tape was ‘passing’a worm of clotted black blood. Absurd guitars and hollow Tijuana brass had infiltrated the cupboard walls, the boards clattered and shook with stamping heels. Mad skullhouse laughter, halothane submersion: the words of the chorus stretching into phantom Yiddish. We were helpless, slithering towards extinction; ‘wetbrained’ like a six-day wine school, retching on our own bad air.
The rim of the porthole-window was a spinning disk of heat, in which it was possible to transcribe the cracks and dirt-veins as runic violations, bad will, attempts to seize the power of an ill-directed sacrifice.
The sound of a loose tape-end, repetitively thwacking against the spool, died: the machinery was running down. Nothing was moving. A faint spiral, or fountain of light, lifted in an uncontrolled vortex. It was more a comical irrelevance than any kind of grail or chalice: a trumpet in a sham séance. The voices of which it was composed competed for the dominant roles in a meaningless operetta. We had begun to ‘see’ – or perhaps to be seen – but that was not astonishing, and would not open the path to the field we desired, without daring to approach.
In the morning, over a late breakfast in the Market Café, Woolf asked if we had experienced it. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the terror of being trapped underground by fire, choking on black smoke. I couldn’t breathe.’
‘Fire?’ replied Joblard. ‘You mean drowning, going under. I saw black trails of river-slurry sliding from your nostrils. You were going down for the third time in the corner of that room. Then mud packed close around my skeleton. I couldn’t raise my hands from the floor. I was a living fossil; lying beneath the Thames, watching my own past float over my head, exhibitionist and unforgiving.’
Woolf Haince, post-human, nodded; mumbled; picked up and set down his canvas satchel of paints and brushes. He refused to adjudicate between our competing visions. Or to tell us what we ‘should’ have seen. Nothing surprised him: he lived at such a pitch of nerve that every moment was his first. He was not implicated in his own destiny. He had seen the worst, and passed through it. He was stamped and registered in a book that was marked for the furnace. He made no claim for this place, above any other.
We walked with him, and we walked alone – Woolf had withdrawn into an impenetrable cocoon of melancholy – up Wilkes Street towards the Heritage Centre. A little, pigtailed girl with polished black shoes and tailored overcoat was standing in the doorway of a refurbished Georgian residence, plucking at the handle of her new travelling bag; while her father, impatiently stretching his cuffs, rotated on his heels, staring up and down for the taxi he had ordered. The perfect proportions of his Doric doorcase with the regional rustication, so little used outside Spitalfields, gave him no comfort. ‘Do stop that, darling,’ he scolded. And ‘darling’, recognizing the danger signal, obeyed. The desired cab was, in fact, stalled within thirty yards of its goal; the cabbie cursing and mouthing, leaning on his horn, trapped behind a double-parked van, into which a sharply cased pair of Bengali disco-dancers were waltzing a herd of heavy-odour leather coats, for the traildrive ‘Up West’. They could have given the girl a lift to Knightsbridge, and lowered Daddy’s blood pressure which was beginning to pump the mercury, gathering itself for the big bolt, as he heard the crash of markets, screen-glitch, the runaway numbers, the futures that were all used up.
Cornering into Princelet Street, we paused to admire Woolf’s handiwork, the trompe-l’oeil versions he had painted over the plasterboard windows of the synagogue. But, before we could advance on Brick Lane, Woolf plucked at my shirt-tail and dragged me into the building. In the hallway was a table, on which had been spread a rack of sponsored booklets, produced for the Museum of the Jewish East End: everything you never realized you needed to know about ‘East End Synagogues’ or ‘Yiddish Theatre’.
‘The fourth corner! Six to Ten, Princes,�
�� Woolf insisted, stamping his plimsolls, ‘the address! Here, this street, last century, used to be called “Princes”, not “Princelet”. Got changed, didn’t it, 1893? Too many, they said, princes in the East End. January 18, 1887, remember, the Hebrew Dramatic Club? Lenin spoke there once, they’re trying to get the money.’ He held the red guidebook up against his face, pretending to read, turning the pages, backwards and forwards, until he found the passage he wanted. Then pointed across the road to the Club’s exact location. He closed the book, recited by rote, at speed; a frantic, unpunctuated single rush of breath.
‘William Cohen, a weaver of Brick Lane, Spitalfields, described what happened to a reporter from Reynolds Newspaper:
“The piece played was the ‘Spanish Gypsy Girl’ and it being a favourite in this quarter the club room in Princes Street was literally packed… Everything went smoothly up to the last act, and five minutes after that had commenced I heard the sounds of a disturbance in the gallery. I thought at first it was only a fight, but presently I heard a cry that the gas was escaping, followed by a shout of fire. A fearful panic was created: everyone rushed towards the doors. Simultaneously someone turned out the gas; the building was then enveloped in darkness… the screams of the women and children were deafening and heartrending… presently some candle lights were brought on to the stage, and then I saw a fearful sight. Round about the doors bodies were piled up to the height of several feet… the stream coming down from the gallery had met the stream from the body of the hall and every minute some one was falling, only to be trampled upon. Presently a policeman appeared on the scene…”
‘Seventeen people lost their lives in the tragedy. In fact there had been no fire, and the inquest failed to establish whether there had indeed been a gas leak, or whether, as Abraham Smith the manager suggested, the accident might have been deliberately caused by the jealousy of a rival clubowner, Mr Rubinstein of the Russian National Club in Lambeth Street…’
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