The Liberation of Celia Kahn

by J David Simons

  “What do you mean? And, and, and?”

  Her mother actually looked quite bashful. Her face, already hot from all the rubbing, glowed even more as she put her hands behind her head, untied and re-tied her headscarf. “A woman has ways to make a man change his mind. That is all I say. Genug. Finished.” She slapped her palms, stood up quickly, returned to the brasses on the mantelpiece. “Anyway, this America. Better to be here, a big stone in a small pond. Than over there, a nothing. A nobody. Even with all the golden pavements. Now finish your work.”

  She resumed her scrubbing, quick glances to her mother who was smiling to herself, sluiced out the sink with water from the bucket Jonny had bought at the gypsy encampment. “I’m going upstairs to see Uncle Mendel.”

  “You will not say to him what I just told you.”

  “He invited me for supper.”

  “Is that him with the baking fish again? I can smell the stink from down here. Baked fish. A baked head is more like it.”

  Celia hung up her pinny on the kitchen door, went out to the hallway, ran her fingers across the base of the telephone as she passed, checked the earpiece was sitting proper on its cradle-hook. Such a strange contraption, she thought. With its ability to make the possibility of contact ever-present. So unlike the arrival of a letter just twice a day. Her father was talking about buying a radio next. If he could afford the licence.

  Her uncle stood in his doorway, a black yarmulke perched on his head, his beard longer than it had ever been. He wore a grey woollen cardigan so stretched at the pockets that the hem came down past his knees. On his feet a pair of old slippers she knew would be stuffed with newspapers to replace the worn-out soles. If she opened up his wardrobe, there would be several new pairs stacked at the bottom, given as presents, still in their wrapping.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. She remembered a time when he would have taken her in his arms or at the very least given her a sloppy kiss on the forehead. Now he observed the religious rules that forbade him from touching her. Or any woman. “You are hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “A little hungry is good. Speciality of the house I have. Komm, komm.”

  She could smell the charred paper, the fish cooking inside their damp parcel on the coals. She sat down in a large battered armchair, close to the fire.

  “This reminds me of Avram,” she said. “Waiting for the food to bake.”

  “Ya, ya. I remember not so many years ago you two kinder squeezed together in that one chair. Like those twins who came to England with the circus. In all the papers, they were.”

  “Siamese twins.”

  “Yes, that’s it. You and Avram sitting there. Siamese twins.”

  “It is so sad.”

  “It breaks my heart. He was a good boy.”

  “Do you have any more news?”

  “Tomorrow I return to Oban. I will find out then from the constables.”

  “What will happen to the shop?”

  “For the time being, the business I will try to manage. But everything will be complicated. There was no will, no direct family. In the end, I believe to your mother and father his estate will pass.”

  “I would like some money to go to this Megan. Avram wanted to take responsibility for her child.”

  “This you must speak to your parents about directly. Your mother, I am sure, will not approve. Her heart was always set hard against the boy. Your father, as we say in the business, is a softer touch.”

  “I worry about Papa so much. He doesn’t talk about Avram’s death. He just takes himself to bed, hides in the darkness.”

  “As the Torah says.”

  “What does the Torah say?”

  “The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue it has.” He prodded the bundle of fish with a poker. “Dinner is ready.”

  He gave her a towel to spread on her lap, then laid down one of the parcels of wrapped-up fish. She wetted her fingers, gingerly pulled back the paper to reveal the steaming pink flesh.

  “Salmon,” Uncle Mendel said. “I bring back two pieces in my ice-box. For this special occasion. Sitting here together with my niece. A glass of sweet wine I can offer you. It makes the fish go down very well. And lifts the sad heart.”

  She agreed and he poured out a glass, placed it on the brass coal-box by her side. He pulled up a seat opposite, placed his own parcel of fish on his lap, bowed his head, muttered the blessing before meals.

  “Aha!” he exclaimed, his eyes popping open. “Now you are ready to dine like a mensch.”

  She broke off a piece of flesh, still hot in her fingers. “Is it true that salmon leap upstream to spawn?”

  “Absolutely true. I have seen with my own eyes. When the river is full and rushing, out of the water they jump. With a net you can catch them. If you are clever and quick, quick, quick.” He made a flashing movement with his hand to imitate his fishing skills. “But, of course, your Uncle Mendel buys them fresh from the fishmonger like everyone else.” He raised his glass. “To Avram. L’chaim.”

  She reached over for her own glass, matched his gesture. “To life,” she said.

  They ate in silence after that, except for her uncle’s noisy munching and slurping which somehow had a comforting effect on her. It was good to see him eat, he had lost weight recently, perhaps the double impact of the Yom Kippur fast and Avram’s death.

  “So,” he said, plucking the last of the fish bones from his mouth, flicking it into the fire. “What are the feminists up to these days? When racecourses they are not burning down.” He leaned towards her, his eyes always so full of interest.

  “To be honest, uncle, I find it difficult to talk to you these days about such things.”

  “What? What do you say?” He drew back in mock offence. “Celia, this is me, your Uncle Mendel. That other Uncle Mendel, the drinker and the gambler, long gone away he is. Avek, avek, avek. Far away.”

  She laid aside her parcel with its own set of fleshless bones, sat herself straight. “It is not that other Uncle Mendel I am worried out. It is this Uncle Mendel, the one sitting here in front of me. You. Suddenly you have become so religious.”

  “As a man grows older, closer to God he wants to become.”

  “But what about all your talk of socialism and revolution?”

  “Bah! We had our chance,” he said sadly. “That one chance we had. After that riot in George Square. Before the army and the tanks they send in. That was the opportunity. Twenty-four hours to make a revolution. That was all the time we had. But no leaders we had to take control. Twenty-four hours. On the other hand, God is here all the time. For eternity. But what difference does it make? About issues close to our hearts we can still talk.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Celia. You can tell your uncle.”

  “All right then. If you insist, I will tell you.” She sucked in a breath, then on the exhale: “Birth control.”

  “What do you say?”

  “Birth control. We are trying to promote female contraception.”

  “It does not embarrass you to talk about such matters?”

  “No, I am fine with it.”

  “Aha! Of course, we can talk about such things. We are all human beings together. The stuff of life we can discuss. Why not?” He stood up quickly, the parcel of fishbones falling off his lap onto the floor. As he paced about the room, she had to stoop down, scrunch up the greasy paper, throw it into the fire. A few of the burnt embers floated back at her from the grate.

  “My tobacco, where is it?” her uncle cried. “My pouch? Do you see? One minute I have it, the next gone. My tobacco.”

  “Here it is. On the mantelpiece.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  But he didn’t take it. Instead, he sank back down into his armchair, hands clasped around his bowed head, pressing down with his thick fingers onto his yarmulke.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He looked up at her. “What can I do? What can I do? This ki
nd of talk it tears me apart.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “No, no, Celia. It is not your fault. It is this struggle going round and round inside my head. Round and round. A tempest in my brain. It splits me apart. Like an axe.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know what the Torah says about such matters? About making birth. It says the Jews must be fruitful and multiply on this earth. To have children is a duty. A commandment even. A blessing. To prevent it is forbidden. Farboten. But I know also too large families are the curse of the poorer classes. A curse. Poverty, overcrowding, disease it brings. With my own eyes I see it. Mit meine eigenene oign.”

  “It is all right, uncle. I won’t say any more about it.”

  He leaned forward, took her hands, looked at her with his watery eyes. She felt his palms hot and damp. “What you do is a good thing, Celia. A good thing birth control is. Even if the Torah says otherwise. But trouble there will be. Many people will hate you for it. From all sides, they will hate you. Mark my words. Trouble there will be.”

  Twenty-five

  JONNY’S VOICE SOUNDED QUITE DIFFERENT on the telephone. All tinny and shivery as if he were talking from some corrugated shed in the snow. Her own voice too must have sounded strange, given she was quite breathless in her rush to answer the contraption before anyone else in the household.

  “That’ll be Jonny Levy then,” Nathan shouted from the kitchen where the rest of the family were having dinner.

  She placed her hand over the mouthpiece, called back to the open door. “It’s Charlotte.”

  “Why does that woman always ring at mealtimes?” her mother grumbled.

  “Yes?” she whispered into the mouthpiece.

  “Can you meet me tomorrow?”

  She heard the hiss on the other end of the line, felt herself redden to the request, convinced the operator was listening in, could imagine the girl with nothing better to do than smooth her nails with an emery board, eavesdrop on conversations. She leaned in closer to the telephone. “I think I can.”

  “Do you know Miss Cranston’s in Sauchiehall Street?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  She arranged to meet him outside the tearooms at two o’clock. “Yes, of course, Charlotte,” she said into the mouthpiece after Jonny had clicked off. “Tomorrow at two.”

  “You must invite this girl over for tea,” her father suggested on her return to the kitchen. This was the first time he had attended table since Avram’s funeral. He looked as pale as death itself, hand trembling so much that her mother had stuffed his napkin into his collar like a bib against the spillage from his shaking cup. “It would be nice to meet your friends.” The cup rattled as it was replaced on the saucer. The sound made her want to cry.

  The wind was doing what it was supposed to do at this time of year. Strip the leaves off the trees. Strip the skin off her face as well, an Arctic gust ripping through her in her walk up Sauchiehall Street, people shivering in their shoes in the queue for the matinee outside the Empire. Jonny was waiting for her, wrapped up in a bulky overcoat, cloth cap pulled down over his ears, his Glasgow University scarf whipping about madly.

  “I’d forgotten how cold it was here.” He picked up one of the loose ends of his long scarf, wrapped it round his neck thick like a horse’s halter.

  “This is just autumn,” she said. “Wait until winter blows in.”

  “At least it will be warm inside.”

  He held open the door, and she recalled herself as a young girl crossing this very threshold, how fearful she had been of her entry into this elegant tea-room.

  “I remember the first time I came here,” she said, as she let Jonny help her off with her coat. She rubbed her hands together, noticed her ruddy complexion in the window’s reflection as she sat down. “I was with my friend, Agnes Calder. We sat at this exact table.”

  “Red Aggie? Red Aggie was your friend?”

  “The very one.”

  “I hope she wasn’t intending to burn the place down.”

  “Oh Agnes wouldn’t have struck a match against this tearoom.”

  “I still can’t imagine this was her style.”

  “At the time I couldn’t either. I was only a young girl but I had the cheek to ask how a great socialist like herself could frequent such a high-class place as this. And do you know what she said? Come the revolution… and we’ll all be having tea at Miss Cranston’s.”

  Jonny laughed at that. Then the waitress came over and still chuckling, he ordered a full afternoon tea for them both. None of your post-wartime austerity or kibbutz economy for Jonny Levy. Just a pot of India’s finest along with a three-tier plate-stand for sandwiches, biscuits and the most expensive gateaux.

  “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “Not surprising. I wasn’t long out of a war the last time you saw me. I would have been a scrawny runt back then.”

  “It’s not just that. You seem more comfortable in yourself.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps you’re right. What about you? What are you feminists up to since you won the vote?”

  She leaned in to answer him in a way she would consider intimate. She could feel her skin glowing, and she had that wonderful sense of knowing she was being silly and charming at the same time. What was happening to her? All her senses seemed more acute. She could smell his pomade, even her own French scent, those few stolen drops from her mother’s dresser. The cacophony of overheard words from a nearby table, a high-pitched voice “…should have seen the way he…”, the sound of a teaspoon replaced on its saucer, the taste of lipstick on her tongue. She noticed the tanned skin of his hand as he held his head on a tilt to look at her, this sun-dark mark of the common labourer looking quite attractive against the whiteness of his cuff.

  “I take much offence at such a remark,” she said with a breathiness that sounded not unlike her friend Charlotte. “As you know, women can only vote at the age of thirty. Are you suggesting I am of such an age?”

  He shook his head at her. “I do believe you are trying to wheedle a compliment out of me.”

  “Oh, I do no such thing. Compliments are not worth tuppence unless they are freely come by.”

  “So what are you doing these days?”

  “The usual. Scrubbing floors and sewing buttons on shirts.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “What else does a Jewish spinster do?”

  She leaned back to allow the waitress to lay out their tea things, watching on as Jonny carefully monitored the young girl in her task, directing the teapot here, the cake tray there. She had to remind herself he would soon be back in Palestine with a pickaxe over his shoulder, some Russian Jewess on his arm, discussing Marxism and where to plant the next olive grove. She selected a sandwich from the bottom tier, examined its contents. “What do you think this is? Meat paste?”

  He had a closer look himself. “Yes, it probably is.”

  “Oh, I can’t eat that. What about you? Do you keep kosher?”

  “I was a soldier,” he said as if this explained everything she needed to know about his dietary habits.

  “You have the meat paste then if you want. And I’ll have the cucumber ones.”

  She picked up another sandwich from the plate, marvelled at how the crusts had been cut off. Such a luxury. Such a waste. “I would rather hear about your exploits. I am sure stories of Palestine are far more interesting than life in the Gorbals.”

  He spoke to her of the desert, the coastal plains, the hill country of Galilee and Judea. Of the date palms as tall as cathedrals, of olives that flowed from their branches like milk from an udder, the Jordanian hills that changed colour spectacularly throughout the day – the glorious pinks of sunrise, the burning red of the morning, the yellow of mid-afternoon, the purples of dusk.

  “Stand at the top of Mount Tabor,” he said, replacing his cup from which he had yet to drink. “Look down on the Jordan Valley and I do not believe ther
e is a more beautiful place on earth. They say it was where the Garden of Eden was situated and it is hard to think otherwise. The Sea of Galilee gleams back at you in the sunshine, dotted with its little fishing boats. It is a paradise.” He clapped his hands together with all the enthusiasm of a Zionist recruitment officer. “And you should see the light. There is something quite magical about it. It makes everything look cleaner, clearer.” He gazed out of the window on to the heads of the shoppers in Sauchiehall Street. How gloomy this city must appear to him, she thought. The wind whipping up again, pedestrians holding on to their hats. Here there were belching chimney stacks instead of date palms, the dark alleys of the Gallowgate rather than the white light of the Galilee.

  “And what do you do all day in this paradise?” she asked, moving the attention of her appetite to the pastry tier. “I doubt you are lounging in a deckchair reading the Palestine Post.”

  “The life is hard, I will give you that. The heat in the summer is almost unbearable. But I love the fact the work is so physical. And that we live as a community. There are about thirty of us. We’re not like those Jews from the shtetl poring over each letter of the Torah. We ride horses and drive wagons. We live in tents, just like in the army. A lot of the land is marshland and we’re trying to drain that, reclaim it for agriculture, hopefully get rid of the mosquitoes and the risk of malaria with it. Then there are the weeds, the thistles and the field mice to clear. Where we can, we’ve planted vineyards, banana plantations, orchards of lemons and grapefruits. And of course, there are date palms and olive trees that have been there for centuries.”

  “But where does all this land come from?”

  “From the little blue pushke.”

  “The pushke? The Jewish National Fund collection box?” There was one on the mantelpiece at home. Her father used to give her a farthing, a half-penny or even a threepenny bit to stuff into its slot until it was so full she could hardly lift it. Then there would be a knock on the door, some mysterious figure would empty the contents, a receipt would be given, the contributions would start all over again. “I always thought that was for Jewish charities.”