“Harry, I do not understand. Ernesto only has to leave the country for ten days in order to escort his President, and his staff immediately sanction the appointment of no fewer than five attractive Panamanian women as public relations officers on full American scale, when their sole qualifications are that they are young, white, drive BMWs, wear designer dresses, have large breasts and rich fathers, and refuse to speak to the permanent employees.”
“Shocking,” Pendel decided.
Then back to the shop, where Marta needed to go through overdue bills and uncollected orders with him so that they could decide who to chase and who to leave another month.
“How are the headaches?” he asked her tenderly, noticing she was even paler than usual.
“It’s nothing,” Marta replied from behind her hair.
“Has the lift stopped again?”
“The lift is now permanently stopped”—granting him a lopsided smile—“the lift is officially declared stopped.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, please don’t be. You are not responsible for the lift. Who is Osnard?”
Pendel was at first appalled. Osnard? Osnard? He’s a customer, woman. Stop shouting his name around!
“Why?” he said, sobering completely.
“He’s evil.”
“Aren’t all my customers?” he said, harping playfully upon her preference for the people the other side of the bridge.
“Yes, but they don’t know it,” she replied, not smiling anymore.
“And Osnard knows it?”
“Yes. Osnard is evil. Don’t do what he is asking you to do.”
“But what’s he asking me to do?”
“I don’t know. If I did I would prevent him. Please.”
She would have added “Harry”; he could feel his name forming on her frayed lips. But in the shop it was her pride never to prey upon his indulgence, never to show by word or sign that they were joined to each other in eternity, that each time they saw each other, they saw the same thing through different windows:
Marta in her ripped white shirt and jeans lying like uncollected refuse in the gutter while three members of Noriega’s Dignity Battalions, known affectionately as Dingbats, take turns to win her heart and mind with the aid of a bloodied baseball bat, starting with her face. Pendel staring down at her with his arms twisted up his back by two more of them, yelling his heart out first in fear, then in anger, then in supplication, begging them to let her be.
But they don’t. They force him to watch. Because what is the point of making an example of a rebellious woman if there’s nobody around to take the point?
It’s all a mistake, Captain. It’s sheer coincidence that this lady is wearing the white shirt of protest.
Compose yourself, señor. It won’t be white much longer.
Marta on the bed in the makeshift clinic, to which Mickie Abraxas has bravely taken them; Marta naked and covered in blood and bruises while Pendel desperately plies the petrified doctor with dollars and assurances, and Mickie stands at the window keeping guard.
“We are better than this,” Marta whispers through bloodied lips and smashed teeth.
She means: there is a better Panama. She is talking about the people from the other side of the bridge. The next day, Mickie is arrested.
“I’m thinking of turning the Sportsman’s Corner into a bit of a clubroom,” Pendel told Louisa, still in his quest for a Decision. “I see a bar.”
“Harry, I do not understand why you need a bar. Your Thursdayevening gatherings are riotous enough as it is.”
“It’s about pulling people in, Lou. Whipping up more custom. Friends bring friends, the friends get their knees under the table, feel at ease, start looking at a few materials, full order books result.”
“Where will the fitting room go?” she objected.
Good question, Pendel thought. Even Andy couldn’t tell me the answer to that one. Decision deferred.
“For the customers, Marta,” Pendel explained patiently. “For all the people who come to eat your sandwiches. So that they increase and multiply and order up more suits.”
“I wish my sandwiches would poison them.”
“And then who would I dress? All those hotheaded student friends of yours, I suppose. The world’s first tailor-made revolution, courtesy of P & B. Thank you very much.”
“Since Lenin used Rolls-Royces, why not?” she retorted with equal spirit.
I never asked him about his pockets, he thought, working late in the shop cutting a dinner jacket to the strains of Bach. Or his turn-ups or his preferred width of trouser. I never lectured him on the advantage of braces over belts in a humid climate, specially for gentlemen whose waistline is what I call a moveable feast. Equipped with this excuse, he was on the point of reaching for the telephone, when it rang for him, and who should be there but Osnard, saying how about a nightcap?
They met in the panelled modern bar of the Executive Hotel, a clean white tower a stone’s throw from Pendel’s shop. A huge television set was showing basketball to two attractive girls in short skirts. Pendel and Osnard sat apart from them and heads together, in cane chairs that wanted them to sit back instead of forward.
“Made up your mind yet?” Osnard asked.
“Not as such, Andy. Working on it, you might say. Deliberating.”
“London likes everything it’s heard. They want to clinch the deal.”
“Well, that’s nice, Andy. You must have given me quite a write-up, then.”
“They want you up and running soonest. Fascinated by the Silent Opposition. Want the names o’ the players. Finances. Links with the students. Have they got a manifesto? Methods and intent.”
“Oh well, good. Yes. Right, then,” said Pendel, who among his many worries had rather lost sight of Mickie Abraxas the great freedom fighter, and Rafi Domingo his egregious paymaster. “I’m glad they liked it,” he added politely.
“Thought you might pump Marta: sidelights on student activism. Bomb factories in the classroom.”
“Oh. Good. Right.”
“Want to get the relationship on a formal basis, Harry. So do I. Sign you up, brief you, pay you, show you a couple o’ the tricks. Don’t like the trail getting cold.”
“It’s any day now, Andy. It’s like I said. I’m not the rash sort. I reflect.”
“They’re upping the terms by ten percent. Help you concentrate your mind. Want me to run ’em by you?”
Osnard ran ’em by him anyway, mumbling through his cupped hand like someone working on his teeth with a toothpick, this much down, this much set against your loan each month, cash bonuses payable depending on the quality o’ the product, London’s sole discretion, gratuity o’ so much.
“Should be out o’ the woods in three years max,” he said.
“Or less if I’m lucky, Andy.”
“Or smart,” said Osnard.
“Harry.”
It is an hour later, but Pendel is too estranged to go home, so he is back in his cutting room with his dinner jacket and Bach.
“Harry.”
The voice that is addressing him is Louisa’s from the first time they went to bed together, really went, not just fingers and tongues and listening for her parents’ car coming back from the movie, but completely naked in Harry’s bed in his grotty attic flat in Calidonia, where he’s tailoring at night after selling ready-mades all day for a clever Syrian haberdasher called Alto. Their first effort has not been blessed by success. Both are shy, both late developers, held back by too many household ghosts.
“Harry.”
“Yes, darling.” Darling never came naturally to either of them.
Not at the beginning, not today.
“If Mr. Braithwaite gave you your first break, and took you into his house, and put you through night school, and won you away from that wicked Uncle Benny of yours, he has my vote alive or dead.”
“I’m very glad you feel that, darling.”
“You should honour a
nd revere him and tell our children about him as they grow up, so that they know how a Good Samaritan can save a young orphan’s life.”
“Arthur Braithwaite was the only moral man I knew until I met your father, Lou,” Pendel assures her devoutly in return.
And I meant it, Lou! Pendel implores her frantically in his mind as he closes the shears on the shoulder of the left sleeve. Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it’s for!
“I’ll tell her,” Pendel announces aloud as Bach elevates him to a plane of perfect truthfulness. And for a dreadful moment of selfindulgence he seriously contemplates throwing aside every wise precept he has lived by and making a full confession of his sins to his life’s partner. Or nearly full. A quorum.
Louisa, I’ve got to tell you something which is frankly a bit of a facer. What you know about me is not strictly kosher as regards all the details. It’s more in the line of what I’d like to have been, if all things had been a bit more equal than they were.
I haven’t got the vocabulary, he thinks. I’ve never confessed anything in my life, except the once for Uncle Benny. Where would I stop? And when would she ever believe me again, about anything? In horror he paints the war party in his imagination, one of Louisa’s Trust in Jesus sessions but full dress, with the servants banished from the house and the family nucleus gathered round the table with its hands together and Louisa with her back stiff and her mouth shrunk with fear because deep down the truth scares her more than it does me. Last time it was Mark, who had to own up to spraying Bollocks on the gatepost of his school. The time before it was Hannah, who had poured a can of quick-drying paint down the sink as an act of vengeance against one of the maids.
But today it’s our own Harry in the hot seat, explaining to his beloved children that Daddy, for the entire length of his marriage to Mummy and for all the time the children have been old enough to listen to him, has been telling some highly ornamented porky-pies about our great family hero and role model, the nonexistent Mr. Braithwaite, rest his soul. And that, far from being Braithwaite’s favoured son, your father and husband devoted nine hundred and twelve formative days and nights to an in-depth study of the brickwork of Her Majesty’s houses of correction.
Decision taken. Tell you later. Much later. Like in another life entirely. A life without fluence.
Pendel brought his four-track to a halt just a foot from the car in front and waited for the car behind him to smash into him, but for some reason it refused. How did I get here? he wondered. Maybe it hit me and I’m dead. I must have locked up the shop without noticing. Then he remembered cutting the dinner jacket and laying the finished pieces flat on his workbench to consider them, a thing he always did: took a creator’s farewell of them until they came back to him, basted into semi-human form.
Black rain was hurtling onto the bonnet. A lorry was slewed across the road fifty yards ahead of him, its wheels shed like cow pats in its path. Nothing else was visible through the waterfall except lines and lines of clogged traffic going to the war or trying to get away from it. He switched on his radio but couldn’t hear it over the thunder of artillery. Rain on a Hot Tin Roof. I’m here forever. Banged up. In the womb. Doing time. Turn off engine, turn off air-con. Wait. Cook. Sweat. Another salvo coming. Hide under the seat.
Sweat pouring off him, heavy as the rain. Running water gurgling under his feet. Pendel floating, upriver or down. The entire past that he has buried six feet deep, crashing in upon him: the unexpurgated, unsanitised, un-Braithwaited version of his life, starting with the miracle of his birth as related to him in prison by his Uncle Benny and ending with the Day of Absolutely No Atonement thirteen years ago when he invented himself to Louisa on an immaculate all-American lawn in the officially abolished Canal Zone with the Stars and Stripes flapping in the smoke of her daddy’s barbecue and the band playing hope-and-glory and the black men watching through the wire.
He sees the orphanage he refused to remember and his Uncle Benny, resplendent in his homburg hat, leading him away from it by the hand. He had never seen a homburg before and wondered whether Uncle Benny was God. He sees the wet grey paving stones of Whitechapel jolting beneath his feet as he trundles trolleyloads of swaying garments through the honking traffic on his way to Uncle Benny’s warehouse. He sees himself twelve years later, the same child exactly, just larger, standing spellbound among pillars of orange smoke in the same warehouse, and the rows of ladies’ summer frocks like convent martyrs, and the flames licking at their feet.
He sees Uncle Benny with his hands cupped to his mouth, yelling, “Run, Harry boy, you stupid tart, where’s your imagination?” to the accompaniment of ringing bells and the clatter of Benny’s hastily departing footsteps. And himself locked in quicksand, can’t move hand or limb. He sees blue uniforms wading towards him, seizing him, dragging him to the van, and the kindly sergeant holding up the empty paraffin can, smiling like any decent father. “Is this yours, by any chance, Mr. Hymie, sir, or did you just happen to have it in your hand?”
“I can’t move my legs,” Pendel explains to the kindly sergeant. “They’re stuck. It’s like a cramp or something. I ought to run away but I can’t.”
“Don’t worry, son. We’ll soon put that right,” the kindly sergeant says.
He sees himself standing bone-thin and naked against the brick wall of the police cell. And the long slow nighttime while the blue uniforms take it in turns to hit him, the way they hit Marta but with more deliberation, and more pints of beer under their belts. And the kindly sergeant, who is such a decent father, urging them on. Until the water covers him over and he drowns.
The rain ends. It never happened. Cars sparkling, everybody happy to go home. Pendel tired to death. Starts the engine and the slow crawl forward, propping both forearms on the wheel. Watches out for dangerous debris. Starts to smile, hearing Uncle Benny.
“It was an explosion, Harry boy,” Uncle Benny whispered through his tears. “An explosion of the flesh.”
Without the weekly prison visits, Uncle Benny would never have been so forthcoming about Pendel’s origins. But the sight of his nephew seated at attention before him in his box-pleated denims with his name on the pocket is more than Benny’s good guilty heart can bear, never mind how many cheesecakes and books on keeping fit Auntie Ruth sends along with him, or how many times Benny chokes out his thanks that Pendel has kept faith through all the circumstances. He means kept shtum.
It was my own idea, Sergeant. . . . I did it because I hated the warehouse, Sergeant. . . . I was highly angry with my Uncle Benny for all the hours he made me work and didn’t pay me for, Sergeant. . . . Your Honour, I have nothing to say except I greatly regret my wicked actions and the grief I have caused to all who loved me and have brought me up, my Uncle Benny specially. . . .
Benny is very old—to a child, as ancient as a willow tree. He comes from Lvov, and Pendel by the time he is ten knows Lvov as if it were his own home town. Benny’s relations were humble peasants and artisans and little tradesmen and cobblers. For many of them, the trains that took them to the camps provided them with their first and last sight of the world beyond the shtetl and the ghetto. But not for Benny. The Benny of those days is a smart young tailor with dreams of the big time, and somehow he talks himself out of the camps and all the way to Berlin to make uniforms for German officers, though his real ambition is to train as a tenor under Gigli and buy a villa on the hills of Umbria.
“That Wehrmacht shmatte was number one, Harry boy,” says the democrat Benny, for whom all cloth is shmatte, never mind the quality. “You can have your best Ascot suit, your finest-quality hunting breeches and the boots. They were never a patch on our Wehrmacht, not till after Stalingrad, when it all went downhill.”
From Germany Benny graduates to Leman Street in the east of London, to set up a sweatshop with his family, four to a room, and take the garment industry by storm so that he can go to Vienna and sing opera. Benny is already an anachronism. By the lat
e forties most of the tailoring Jews have risen to Stoke Newington and Edgware and are plying less humble trades. Their places have been taken by Indians, Chinese and Pakistanis. Benny is not deterred. Soon the East End is his Lvov and Leman Street the finest street in Europe. And it is in Leman Street a couple of years later—so much Pendel has been allowed to know—that Benny’s elder brother Leon joins them with his wife, Rachel, and their several children, the same Leon who, due to the said explosion, impregnates an eighteen-year-old Irish housemaid, who calls the bastard Harry.
Pendel driving to eternity. Following with exhausted eyes the smudged red stars ahead of him, tailgating his own past. Nearly laughing in his sleep. Decision consigned to oblivion while every syllable and cadence of Uncle Benny’s anguished monologue is jealously remembered.
“Why Rachel ever let your mother across the threshold I’ll never know,” says Benny, with a shake of the homburg. “You didn’t have to be trained in the Scriptures to see she was dynamite. Innocent or virtuous was not the issue. She was a highly nubile, very stupid shiksa on the brink of womanhood. The slightest shove, she’d be over. It was all written down in advance.”
“What was her name?” Pendel asks.
“Cherry,” sighs his uncle, like a dying man parting with his last secret. “Short for Cherida, I believe, though I never saw the certificate. She ought to have been Teresa or Bernadette or Carmel, but she had to be Cherida. Her dad was a brickie from County Mayo. The Irish were even poorer than we were, so we had Irish maids. Us Yids don’t like to grow old, Harry boy. Your father was no different. It’s the not believing in heaven that gets us. A lot of time standing in God’s long corridor, but for God’s main room with all the furbishments we’re still waiting, and there’s a good few of us doubt it will ever come.” He leans across the iron table and clutches Pendel’s hand. “Harry, listen to me, son. Jews ask forgiveness of man, not God, which is rough on us because man is a harder con than God any day. Harry, I’m looking at you for that forgiveness. Redemption, I can get it on my deathbed. Forgiveness, Harry, it’s you who signs the cheque.”
The Tailor of Panama Page 10