Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  I walked with Woolf through the body of the synagogue. Potted histories, simplifications, and reproduced photographs were tacked to the walls – maps of the Diaspora – nailing us to a censored version of the past. The names of the dead, and the amounts of their family donations, were painted on panels beneath the Ladies’ Gallery.

  ‘Lovely bit of lettering, that,’ Woolf offered his approval, turning away from me towards the place where the Ark would have been kept, bending his head. ‘The fire was first,’ he said, ‘before the tape, before I could trap and hold it. Fire against water. It was close behind me, scorching my heels, burning the shadows. Fire is the essence of voices. It is what you cannot reduce to ash. It’s all that’s left. Last night I saw nothing. I have never seen anything.’

  ‘But there was no fire.’ I couldn’t resist playing the pedant. ‘It was a false alarm. Someone imagined the smell of gas, someone else freaked out and screamed. Claustrophobia, a mass hallucination. Skulduggery by rival anarchists. A premature panic reaction, anticipating the…’

  ‘No cellar fire,’ Woolf grunted, chin on chest, making a confession. ‘It was our fire, transmitted: the fear I can never see. We lifted it last night, gave it entrance. And the skins of those poor people blistered, came away in flaps and patches. The shock singed their coats, blackened their hair. They were like limbs of timber, raked from the ashes. Our self-inflicted terror gained access to that Princes Street Club and caused the first shriek from some exhausted working woman.’

  Joblard, who had wandered upstairs for another look at Rodinsky’s room, now rejoined us. He wanted to know what it was that Woolf had seen in the night.

  Woolf shook his head, shuffled back towards his faked windows. He had seen nothing. Neither had Joblard anything to report from the golem’s attic. Bottles of rare dust, books, an unmade bed, the calendar with Millet’s ‘Angelus’. He was moving across the room to tear off the leaf for January 1963 (which for some reason caused him irrational annoyance), when an unexpected light from across the street caught his eye: flames breaking from the ground, a basement transformed into a clay oven. He smelt gas, a solution of bitter almonds. He had taken up the key from the wardrobe and – pressing it to his forehead – had drunk all the coldness of the metal, calmed himself. His skin was marked, flushed with the jagged, angry imprint. He replaced the key, with enormous care – his hand trembling – so that it lay once more, precisely, within its own outline in the dust of the shelf. Nothing in the room had been disturbed by his presence.

  V

  Still high, and not yet ready to come down, I thought I’d drop in at Fredrik’s house on my way home, and feed him a selection of these latest picaresque retrievals; sound him out, see if we could work them into the Spitalfields film – which was, I suspected, a dead duck, well on its way towards the proverbial ‘spike’. ‘Look here, no problem,’ Fredrik reassured. ‘We’ve got a production number, so we’re OK. Yes?’ I’d read these entrails before. When a property’s ‘hot’, you get a phonecall every day, in the late afternoon, as soon as the producer comes in from lunch. Then it cools to once a fortnight – in the morning: from the production secretary. Then silence. Alarmed for the fate of your loving months of research, you crack, lose your cool, ring in. The office has been given over to a think-tank of graduate juveniles who are working up the fillers for the new culture season. Our bossman, we learn, is taking a well-deserved sabbatical at Oxford, recharging the batteries, browsing in libraries (who knows where that could lead?), locking horns with some radical frontline thinkers, and punishing the claret. He was – so the word went – ‘lunched out’, and had taken to snapping, ‘But where’s your justification?’ And: ‘I’ll have to take that one upstairs.’ His wife couldn’t get a decision out of him on next year’s holiday plans, and his boyfriend did not know who was kosher for the dinner-at-home list.

  The ‘oral history’ scan was now, apparently, considered slightly – very very slightly – passé, out of kilter, a little bit… earnest. There was no directive, as such, but the whisper from on high indicated that the technique led to whingeing from ‘certain quarters’, complaints about ‘lack of spunk’. The concept was distinctly on the damp side. No; what the revamped programme had to target was the ‘One Pair of Eyes’, side-of-the-mouth, back-of-the-hand, word-to-the-wise humour (Alan Bennett, right?): a flavour perhaps of gay, but loyal, cynicism. ‘Go for those nutty characters you write about; off-the-wall eccentrics, headbangers with chutzpah. Leave the think-stuff to the professionals, love. Dig them out and we’ll shoot them. That’s a promise. You wait, we’ll share a table for the BAFTAs yet. Give me that surreal, subhuman cartoon feel you’re so good at.’

  Fredrik’s house lay in a zone of deceptive calm, within the ambiance of the old German Hospital, around which he had, doubtless, already gathered a fine clutch of anecdotes (cross-referenced and inserted on floppy disk). It was tucked away from the traffic on a patch of ground still ripe in the memory of its days as a market garden. Orchards of iron, sour apples of anguish, had buried the scrumping enclosures that made the mean dystopia of city life tolerable – by bordering it with neat fields, streams, farms. Fredrik’s bower reminded me: there had once been an outside, a skin, a chimera of beyond.

  A baby tucked under his arm, one telephone pinioned by a raised shoulder, another in his pocket, cats clawing up his corduroys; Fredrik answered my knock. ‘Hey, Iain, very good! Just hang on a moment.’ He was tall enough to scoop the drooling infant on to the top of a cupboard, while he juggled phones – ‘look, let’s have a drink sometime, yes?’ – and dictated the getout of a promised review, for a book that was now going into its third paperback reprint. The tiny child sensed its danger, eyes open, smiling in trust; game to relish the experience.

  ‘Listen listen listen,’ Fredrik prepared to move into a higher gear, ‘this is all very agreeable.’ He varied the pitch of his voice so that his monologue became, in turn, an invitation, a whispered confidence, a lecture, a stand-off. ‘Look here!’ He patted the head of the telephone and shook the baby. Agents were goaded, producers wheedled, editors repulsed, speeches accepted that he would have to prepare in the train to Cambridge: and all the time, with his stockinged foot, he turned the laminated pages of a picture book that a second, larger child was following with some animation, occasionally hammering Fredrik’s knee with a wooden brick to show his appreciation. All three male Hauburys emitted regular bronchial barks and coughs: the price of living in a reclaimed swamp.

  Unfazed by all this commonplace fury, Fredrik contrived to produce a competent pot of coffee, and I was able to edge sideways into the narrative of my latest Whitechapel adventures. I was beginning to see the ‘zone of disappearances’ in a new light – as a focusing lens by which everything that was vague, loose, indistinct, was made clear; given an outline and an identity. Whitechapel created beings who were so much a part of where they were that outsiders – murky in motive, and greedy to do good – could not see what was being put in front of them. They wanted something that simply was not there, and – not finding it – insisted that it must have vanished.

  From the Irongate Stairs (by the Tower) streams of the dispersed, the scattered and unhoused, processed through the Minories, or Mansell Street, into the indifferent grasp of the labyrinth: within its protection their old markings were erased. ‘Disappearance’ is what we wish on them, so that we can expose what they never were. We can dump our ruin in the space that they vacate.

  The ‘newcomers’ fade into frenzy, and emerge in other disguises. Excesses of poverty and privation, outlandish sacrifices, draw the prying eyes of the ‘concerned’ world (Baroness Coutts, Mr Dickens, Dr Barnado, James Hinton): pull down a few tenements, start a soup kitchen, grant exilic status to disgraced politicians (a nice reversal, now they flee to Whitechapel to get away from whores!). Rodinsky’s room is untouched, immune. It is the absolute still centre of the maze; walls of furious wind break around it. It is preserved by the uncaring velocity of the street busi
ness that surrounds and disguises it. It is safe because – until now – it is unmentioned.

  The man himself was out of history, so calm, so unwilling to announce his presence by any sudden movement, that it was safe to cry: he is gone! We were rushing too fast, too much taken with the ‘importance’ of the mystery. If we enter, and publicly expose this chamber of silence, shame will surely follow us, tearing everything apart. The walls of the labyrinth will tumble out like a tract of virgin rain forest.

  Fredrik was amused by the pretensions of my argument; but well able to trump me. He had received that morning a package sent on by the curator at Princelet Street, documents gathered in response to his Spitalfields essay in The London Review of Books.

  The first item, given in evidence, was a paper-clipped pair of photographs of Rodinsky’s room, taken from almost identical positions: one, just after the vanishing act – and the second, within the last year, to illustrate Fredrik’s article. The contrast was astonishing. The abandoned room of the 1960s is neat and sparely furnished: no sign of the books, and romantic clutter. On the wall, where there is now an empty wooden frame, was once a large-scale reproduction of the ‘Angelus’. The calendar, repeating the image, hung closer to the bed. The tide of time, with the passing decades, has washed all the gash – the diaries, bottles, pans, suits – back from the void. The uninhabited set has been deluged with artefacts that attempt to reconstruct a deleted personality. What has happened, inexplicably, is that each visitor has been compelled to leave something behind. The room, as we are now presented with it, is entirely staged: it is as unreal as the shadowland Hermann Warm painted for Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari.

  Next, there was a letter, headed ‘A Mystery Solved’, photocopied from the Jewish Chronicle of 24 June 1988.

  As a boy in the late 1930s David Rodinsky was ‘boarded out’ with my mother and father, who were Jewish Board of Guardians foster parents.

  Many years later, around 1967, I came across him again in the course of my work as a JWB social worker, and by then he was living at the synagogue.

  More recently the room was ‘discovered’ with his books and personal effects left untouched, as though he had just walked out. Rabbi Hugo Gryn asked me if I could shed some light on his background, and I searched for the JWB file which I knew went back to about 1930, but unfortunately it had been destroyed.

  Incidentally, he did not disappear; he died of a stroke when he was in his mid-forties.

  Michael Jimack,

  Research and Information Officer,

  Federation of Jewish Family Services.

  ‘Unfortunately it had been destroyed!’ Fredrik snorted, and caressed his wart, ‘exactly what they told me about the Princelet Street collection, “lost in transit, can’t be located at this time”. Do you imagine that Simon Wiesenthal ever “destroyed” a file? It’s unheard of, yes? These people will hunt a rogue spoor through the centuries, through any wilderness of shredded documents: there is no place on earth to hide from them. They’re still hot on the trail of the descendants of the pogrom-initiators, and the blood-crazed racist fanatics from the time of the crusades.’

  Fredrik was so excited that he began to juggle a cat and a child, switching them – to the delight of the infant and the horror of the animal – from hand to hand, in a manic version of ‘find-the-lady’. ‘No, listen, it won’t wash: something is seriously out of synch. The affair takes on the gristle-plasma texture of Kennedy Assassination paranoia: the shift where, suddenly, everything is true. And worse. These genealogical “dicks” are deliberately keeping the lid on, burying Rodinsky as an atypical incident. They’ve stamped the trunk: “Do Not Open Until the Millennium.” They don’t want any Second Coming.’

  Now, with a flourish, Fredrik passed me the final item, another letter, written by hand, to Michael Jimack, responding to his note in the Jewish Chronicle. These sheets of lined paper remain the only surviving human report on Rodinsky and his family. As I read them I felt the temperature change: the natural and immediate tone of voice dropped me into a tale that Dostoevsky never got around to completing.

  4.7.88

  Stoke Newington

  Dear Mr Jimack

  Having read your letter about David Rodinsky, I am prompted to write to you, which is now a matter of history.

  I am the last surviving son-in-law of the late Myer Reback, who was shamash of the Princelet Synagogue, & I married his daughter (now deceased) in 1937.

  I was no stranger to the Rodinsky family & knew them well. They occupied a two-roomed flat above the living rooms of the late Mr and Mrs Myer Reback, & I made a few visits to them.

  There was the mother a widow, & she had two children, a girl named Bessie, who unfortunately was mentally backward, spending most of her life at Clayberry Mental hospital. Her visits were very rare to Princelet Street & there was David, the son, who always looked pasty-faced & the flat was always like a ‘hagdesh’. The mother was not over-bright, she was toothless, & always walked about with a blanket over her shoulders. Please forgive me, but I gave her the name of‘Ghandi’, & by that name she is still mentioned by the Reback family to this day. Her life was full of worry for the future, & the Reback family helped her in various ways, under her poor circumstances; all in all, the mother & son lived like hermits on the top-floor flat above the synagogue. Now about David: he was not bright in his youth, his complexion was very sallow, something about him in his speech was rather hesitant in conversation. My daughter Lorna (who is 49) knew him quite well & remembers him, as she spent many hours at her grandfather & grandmother’s flat when she was quite young.

  In 1939, I was called up to serve in the RAMC through the military hospital reserve, & having seen service in the Middle East, India & Burma, I returned to England (a trained nurse) in 1946, & my connection with the synagogue was history. It was in 1948, while working at the German Hospital in Dalston as a male nurse, I attended a bar mitzvah at the Heneage Street Synagogue, & to my surprise I met David, he was there for the Kiddush!

  He recognized me immediately, in the few years of my absence he had grown taller, more manly, & very coherent. He still lived at No 19 Princelet Street, & to my surprise he was quite fluent speaking Arabic. This came about when I told him of the many places I had visited, & could converse to him in Arabic, as I had seen service at the Suez Canal & Cairo. This was my last meeting with him, & this ends my story.

  Princelet Street has a history of well-known personages. Next door the synagogue, Miriam Moses’ father had his sweatshop for tailors; the story is that he obtained his employees from the immigrants of 1890, by going to the London docks, & getting men who spoke no English & paying them 1 gold sovereign for 6 days’ work, the hours were 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. at which time he turned off the gas light! ‘Jewey Cook’, the boxer, lived in a tenement next door, & he would sit on the doorstep displaying his Lonsdale Belt with pride. His real name was Cohen, his father was a retired Polish tailor, who was well known to the Polish tailors of the West End, where he could be found begging in his old age. ‘Jewey Cook’s’ cousin is married to Vera Lynn, he is a trumpeter & bandleader, original name of Cohen, but has anglicized it. The last I knew of ‘Jewey Cook’ was 1936, he told me he worked as a labourer in a travelling circus. There is a large house, no doubt having belonged a Huguenot silk weaver, immediately opposite the synagogue. Here lived the Rev. Yellin, the mohel; there may be circumcision certificates still around.

  To close, with best regards, from

  (Mr) Ian Shames

  PS Would like to hear from you!

  VI

  ‘Died of a stroke.’ Stroked to death. A word of such fascinating ambivalence; it is brushed with shock. Apoplexy: out of the blue, a sudden attack, without anger; an interruption in the flow of blood to the brain. And suffered, we have been told, by the masonic Magus, William Gull, before the Whitechapel Murders – removing him from guilt? A blessing then; freeing other impulses, opening locked doors. A way out. An excuse.

  Arthur Singleto
n shared a bed one night with a ‘wet brain’ who told – eyes open and blazing, without thought or hesitation, the same mad loop of rhetoric – how he had gone down into the country, the marshlands, with a troop of gypos. Romany-Jewish, he said, been in Whitechapel since the place was named.

  All day the gang directed him, with kicks and blows, to load turnip sacks on to a barge; they kept him chained beneath their lorry at night. But he had never seen things more clearly; leashed like a dog to this tight circumference, free, within the limits of his chain, crawling from behind the wheels to piss himself, or hold his mouth open under the water tap. The cold stars! Pleasure had never been so acute: the sensation that bliss was measured in each slow drip, each pearl that fell – if he could only calm himself to wait – from the cruel metal spout. This hard-won knowledge that moments of release from pain are divided among us, and that we will all achieve our portion, however mean and brief. The edge of things shone and grew bright! He saw the clapboard sheds float, like lions, above the mud. He was not staked – but freed from movement, and from choice. The flame of panic was doused. He lay down and, gratefully, pressed his cheek to the ground.

  And he wept, Arthur said that he wept; lids rolled back, staring fixedly at the ceiling’s flaws – the snorts and coughs of the other men. It was all over now; he had escaped, broken away, run through the sedge and soaking fields, dogs at his heels, curses, shotguns, threats. All finished, done.

  Without a pause, tears rolling from his unblinking eyes, he was forced to begin again; always the same tale, how the gypos had untied him from these streets and he had gone down with them, freely, into the marshlands.

  VI

  Eisenbahnangst (into the Fourth Square)