The Liberation of Celia Kahn

by J David Simons

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Celia said. “Let’s get him on to a chair.”

  “That’s what I was trying to do.”

  “Well, let’s do it then.”

  She let Solly drape her uncle’s arm around her neck while he knelt down on the floor to get underneath the other arm. As she waited, she could smell Uncle Mendel’s sweat, the alcohol seeping from his every pore. She could also hear herself whimpering. “Oh no,” she thought. “Oh no. This can’t be you. This can’t be you, uncle.”

  Solly heaved the body upwards and she felt her uncle’s thick fingers tighten on her shoulder as he was pushed to his feet, she doing nothing but helping him to balance. Then looking up to see her mother standing in the doorway, a poker in her hand.

  “Mein Gott!” Madame Kahn screamed. “They killed my brother.”

  “He’s drunk, Mama. Not dead. But drunk.”

  “Vas? Vas?”

  “Not dead, mother. Drunk. Shikker.”

  “Shikker? Gott sei danke.” Then her mother wagged the poker at Solly. “It’s you. It’s you, Solly Green. It’s all your fault. A good for nothing. Always were. Just like your father.”

  “But, but …” Solly stammered.

  “Martha,” Uncle Mendel exclaimed. “Alles ist gut. Everything is fine.” Then he vomited down the front of his jacket.

  Celia cleaned up her uncle as best she could, dry-retching in the stench as she washed down his clothes, dabbed the crud from off his lips and his beard. Then together with Solly she managed to half-drag, half-walk him into the bedroom where her mother took over, getting him out of the rest of his clothes, putting him to bed. Celia mopped up the mess on the kitchen floor while Solly told her how Uncle Mendel had raked in his money betting on the football, not just the senior games but junior ones and school matches too.

  “You’d better take this,” he said, handing over a biscuit tin with a picture of Queen Victoria on the lid. “For safe keeping.”

  “What is it?”

  “Take a look.”

  She opened the lid a crack. The tin was full of sterling notes and silver coins.

  “Take your mother downstairs,” he said. “I’ll stay with your uncle until I’m sure he’s well asleep.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She liked that about Solly, his kindness and consideration for others. He had always been like that, even at school, looking out for Avram when he had arrived from Russia without parents, without language, without friends. It was so easy to overlook, she thought, a person’s capacity for kindness when so much else was grabbing for attention. She told Solly she would come back up in a few hours to check on her uncle.

  She returned with a pot of chicken soup. She expected the flat to be dark and cold but instead she found her uncle sitting on a stool in the kitchen, building up a fire in the grate.

  “My favourite niece,” he declared, looking round at her. His face was scrubbed ruddy, his beard neatly combed. He was wearing a freshly-laundered shirt.

  “Your only niece,” she said. “Here. Mother sent you up some chicken soup. But I see you are better already.”

  “Fit as a violin I am.” The coal crackled and spat as he prodded and twisted with his poker. “Fit as a violin.”

  “You weren’t a few hours ago.”

  Her uncle put a finger to his lips. “Hushshhh. This other Uncle Mendel you do not know. He is an impostor. A devil. A dybbuk. You must forget about him. Away with this man. Avek, avek, avek.” He flapped his hands in the direction he wished this alter ego to disappear. “But this Uncle Mendel you see now,” he said, poking hard with a finger to his chest. “This is the real Uncle Mendel. Not a sinner. But a good Jew.” He reached down and picked up a package wrapped up in damp newspaper. “An extra piece of fish I have in the ice box. All the way from the Highland rivers it comes. You want?”

  “Yes, I want.”

  “Well, take off your coat and sit,” he said, gleefully rubbing his hands together. “On the range put the soup pot. The fish I prepare. And a meal for kings we have.”

  She loved the way her uncle baked fish on the fire, the flavours steaming away on a bed of butter and herbs inside the wet paper. Just the smell of it could take her back to a time in her childhood when her uncle was her hero.

  “Your mother’s chicken soup is the best in the world,” Uncle Mendel said as he slurped from a bowl he had raised to his chest, just below his beard.

  “You only say that because she is your sister.”

  “No, it is true. The same anyone will tell you. Ask any Jew from here. Ask them in Thistle Street or Adelphi Street or Bridgegate. The same they will tell you. The best chicken soup in the whole wide world. And do you know why?”

  She smiled at the old routine. “Tell me, uncle. What is the secret?”

  “With a hen she makes it. Not a chicken. Hen soup she must call it. Not this chicken nonsense. Aha!”

  And as if Uncle Mendel possessed some special sense that could see through wet paper, he announced the fish was ready. With a poker he dragged the singed newspaper parcels from the fire. She had already spread out a dish-towel over her lap to receive her meal. She gingerly pulled the paper off from the fish, letting out the steam, revealing the succulent white flesh. She picked off some of the meat, the hot fat searing her fingers as she popped some of the fish into her mouth. It was delicious.

  “What is going on, uncle?” she asked between mouthfuls. “What is going on with this betting on football matches?”

  “This Solly talks too much.”

  “He cares about you. After all, he brought you home from the pub.”

  “That other Uncle Mendel he brings home. That gambler. That drinker.” He stuffed a large piece of fish into his mouth, stared at her with his watery eyes as he chewed. “A beautiful young woman you are becoming,” he said when he had finished. He wiped the juice from his lips with the back of his hand. “Why don’t we talk about you?”

  “No, I want to talk about you. The real Uncle Mendel.”

  “The real Uncle Mendel?” he said, nodding his head around the room as if to some imaginary audience. “The real Uncle Mendel who smokes a pipe?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “Aha!” Uncle Mendel rose from his stool, crossed over to the mantelpiece for his smoking kit. He teased out a plug of tobacco from a well-worn leather pouch, stuffed it into the pipe bowl, puffed on the saliva-stained stem until the flame took and the sweet aroma filled the room.

  “I am ready.”

  She laid aside the parcel of newspapers, licked the salt and butter from her own lips, her poor fish nothing more now than a heap of stripped-off bone, a tail and a head with its one dead eye staring at her. “Are you a social activist?” she asked.

  “Me? If my job was here in Glasgow, yes. Many social problems there are here. But from the Highlands, it is very difficult. Why do you ask?”

  “Because someone wants me to get involved with the rent strikes.”

  “This someone is who?”

  “A schoolteacher I met. Agnes Calder.”

  “Ah yes, Agnes Calder.”

  “You know her?”

  “Personally, no. But a well-known social reformer she is. Women’s Peace Movement, women’s rights, women’s housing associations, women’s everything. What does she want with you?”

  “I am a woman too.”

  “Of course you are. And a very pretty one. But for a Jewish woman, it is unusual to be involved with such things. Our own battles, it is hard enough to fight. But if you want my opinion, to spread your wings is good. Very unfair these rent increases are. Very unfair.”

  “Do you think I should become a socialist then?”

  Uncle Mendel sucked on his pipe, drifted into some reverie as if the smell and taste of his inhalation had set off some sweet and distant memory. “A socialist is not something you become,” he said eventually. “It is something you are. Here in your heart.” He tapped the end of his pipe against his chest. “As it is
written in the Ethics of the Fathers – if I am only for myself, what am I?”

  “So what am I?”

  “This only you can say. But if in your heart, socialism is what you find, don’t tell your mother. A rich man she wants you to marry. A Kapitalist. A man who puts profit before people. A man who does not bring hunger, rickets or lice into the family. Now if you do not mind, I feel very tired.”

  “Yes, I must go too.”

  Uncle Mendel accompanied her to the door, kissed her on both cheeks.

  “I am glad we talk like this,” he said.

  “Yes, I am too. I miss you when you are away.”

  “That pleases me to hear you say,” he said. “But just one more thing. A biscuit tin did you see? With this Queen Victoria on the front?”

  “Don’t worry, uncle. It is safe with me.”

  Five

  FROM OFF THE TRAM just past Govan Cross, Celia had difficulty keeping up with Agnes, who trotted ahead despite her heavy build. Her no-neck, no-nonsense head turning round, shouting:

  “Come on, lass, come on. There’s no much time.”

  Celia scampered after her, running awkward with the large fishmonger’s bell carried in both hands, one of her fingers jamming the clapper, but she managed to reach the top of the rise almost in tandem. The two of them breathless now, Agnes sweating, unbuttoning her coat collar, gulping in air. She was just grateful to put down the bell.

  “Govan,” Agnes muttered respectfully as she surveyed the grim urban landscape. “Aye. Govan.”

  She followed Agnes’s gaze. Off to the north beyond the rows of tenements stood the shipyard cranes, the docks, the foundries, the munitions factories, the smoking stacks of the Scottish Co-op works. Closer at hand, the sheet draped outside one of the tenement buildings, scrawled with the blood-red, hand-painted threat: “God Help The Sheriff Officer Who Enters Here.” Yes, this was Govan all right. Grey and defiant. A stronghold of resistance. She liked that phrase. It was one of Agnes’. But then again, Agnes boasted a whole lexicon of socialist rallying cries. She had heard enough of them on the tram over.

  A window dragged open on a first floor. A poster was tacked to one of the panes. ‘Rent Strikes Against the Increase’ it declared. ‘We Are Not Removing’.

  “Trouble, Aggie?” a woman shouted above the crying of her cradled child.

  “Aye, Lizzie. It’s Jean Dunlop. Number twenty-six.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake. It disnae stop.”

  Agnes snorted in agreement. “What hour you got?”

  Lizzie leaned her head back out of sight, bowing her baby’s head dangerously over the sill as she did so. The crying stopped immediately. Lizzie came back into view. “Barely half-past nine.”

  “Good. There’s time to call a meeting. Out the back-court at Jean’s.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  “Tell the other women on the way.”

  “Aye.” And the window slammed shut.

  “That’s one good thing about these sheriff officers,” Agnes told her as they headed off down the street. “They only work between ten and four. Bless them. Just like my bowels. Regular as clockwork.”

  At the entrance to close number twenty-six, Agnes said she’d go up the stairs to speak to Jean, tell the poor woman the bad news. “You go out back, ring the bell.”

  In the rear courtyard, Celia saw a couple of children hanging around. Barefoot girls, they must have been aged about eight or nine, faces smudged with ash from playing in the midden. She guessed they had been looking for luckies. She used to do the same at that age, scavenge about in the ashes searching for some lost treasure. She came up with an earring once. Made of paste. But a dead cat was the more likely discovery. She could see the girls scheming away as they observed her approach, but they held back when they saw the bell. She took up position dead-centre in the drying green, drew herself up straight, gripped the handle in both hands, started to ring towards each of the winds. One of the wee girls put her hands over her ears. A window shot up straight away. Then another. And another.

  “Is the sherrie coming?” a voice asked.

  “It’s not ten yet,” she called back.

  “What the hell’s going on then?”

  “It’s a meeting, madam. Agnes Calder is calling a meeting.”

  “Oh, listen to you. Madam this, madam that.”

  She blushed at the teasing and the voice softened. “I’ll just put the bairn down.”

  By the time Agnes had joined her, there was quite a crowd of women gathered, either leaning against the walls of the courtyard in their pinnies or hanging out the windows. Jean Dunlop came down too, pale and shivering, a baby in her arms, two urchins whining and twirling in her skirts.

  Agnes had left her coat up at Jean’s. But she was still red-faced and all swollen bosom in her blouse as she addressed her audience. “My spies at the Sheriff Court tell me Jean here is on the list for today.”

  “Forty-eight hours to get out,” Jean Dunlop cried. “Forty-eight hours. That’s what that fat bastard of a judge said. And me with a soldier-husband away fighting.”

  “Shame, shame, shame,” the women cried in a chorus well rehearsed from previous evictions.

  “The sheriff officer will be here some time before four,” Agnes continued, now with a hand on Jean’s shoulder. “And we’d like to give him a right good Govan welcome. Isn’t that right, sisters?”

  “I’ve got my wee bags of peasemeal,” a woman cackled from her upstairs window.

  “Mine’s got flour in it,” another shouted.

  “I’ve got a chantie full of piss needs emptying.”

  The women were laughing and laughing and Celia smiled with them. Until Agnes put up both her hands to quieten the crowd. “What about the factory girls?”

  There was silence now. Celia stiffened, eager for the response. Not knowing the answer herself, thinking her mind too young and muddled on the subject to know what was right, wanting some older, wiser woman like Agnes to say what must be done. It was probably what the audience wanted too. To hear what should be expected from those women in the munitions factory just down the road, packing cartridges, filling grenades, most of them fretting about their husbands off in France. Was it treasonous to down tools, to leave their workplace and stand in solidarity with these poor women fighting off the rent increases and the evictions?

  “I’ll go down to the gate,” said Lizzie from up the street. “I’ll pass a note through. Tell them what’s going on. Let them decide for themselves what to do.”

  “Aye, that’s a good idea,” said Agnes. “Just give them the information and they’ll make up their own minds. They’ll know what’s right. And not to be criticised either for getting it wrong.”

  “Maybe we can get the sherrie to come during the dinner hour,” another woman suggested, her lips clamping on a cigarette as she spoke. “That way the factory girls could join us on their own time. Can you do that for us, Aggie?”

  All the women laughed until again Agnes calmed them. “Well, you ken what to do, sisters,” she said. “Celia here will ring the bell. Then it’s battle-stations all round.”

  “Where do you want me to go?” Celia asked once the women had gone back inside.

  “Go back up the rise to where Lizzie lives,” Agnes said. “You’ll get a good look-out from there.”

  “But how will I know it’s him?”

  “Well, he won’t have a kitbag on his shoulder. And he’ll be the only man wearing a bowler round these parts.”

  She took up her observation post on a low wall outside Lizzie’s tenement, the bell resting across her lap, her gaze on the road coming up from the tram-stop. A trail of fresh horse-dung lay stinking on the tarmac, no-one coming out to scrape it up for the rose-bushes, gardening not being a priority for the Govan housewife in these troubled times. She turned her nose away from the stench, so full of fear and excitement she was she could hardly keep herself still, her foot tapping nineteen-to-the-dozen against the brickwork, her fi
ngers playing a quick flute against the brass casing of the bell. She had prayed to God in heaven that the man would come early, that he would look down his list for the day and think to himself – ‘I’ll just start with Govan then’. For she had sworn to her mother she’d be back by noon to look after Nathan, complete the rest of the household chores. But it was getting close to midday now. That’s if her eyes were seeing right and she could make out proper the hands on the clock tower of the Co-op building down in the town. She felt a droplet of sweat tickle down her spine, not knowing if it was from her anxiety or the heat.

  “You must be hungry, lass?” It was Lizzie back with her bairn at her upstairs window.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” she called back across the front garden – no more than a patch of flattened weeds that could have done with a good hoe and some of that horse dung.

  “Dinnae be daft. You’ll need a full stomach to go whirling that heavy bell on a warm day like this. I’ll make you up a piece. Meantime, why don’t you get yourself a bottle of milk out of the cool of the close. Elspeth won’t mind. She’s no back from her shift yet. I’ll sort it out with her later.”

  She shouted back her thanks, entered the darkness of the close, saw the whites of the two bottles standing on the doorstep. She chose the one not so deep in shade, picked off the cardboard top, sipped at the liquid, creamy and warm. By the time she was out in the open again, Lizzie was calling to her.

  “Are you ready, lass?”

  She put down the bell and the bottle, gave a little yelp and a curtsy as she caught the tight-wrapped wax-paper bag Lizzie dropped down to her. She opened up the parcel. Thick slabs of bread smeared with gobs of raspberry jam.

  She was munching away at her piece, thinking about the time racing away, mulling over her loyalties to her sick family on the one hand and the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association on the other, when she saw the bowlers. Not one, but two. That’s what put her off at first. And the sun she was staring into. But there was no doubting it now, these were the sheriff officers. These two men in their dark suits and hats standing out against the light like burnt-out matchsticks, striding up the dusty road full of determination and legal authority. She threw away the rest of her sandwich, wheeled round, ran down the hill, swinging the bell to and fro in front of her like some mad priest with his thurible.