Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  Despite his misgivings he put his mind to his studies. A born scholar could not do otherwise and the academic work proved no problem. He did not allow himself to think about the practical aspect until the day they were due in the dissecting room for the first time.

  “I can’t do it,” he told Lou desperately.

  “D’you think I’m looking forward to it? Nobody is.” Lou gestured towards some of their fellow students who were also in the café to which he had brought Nathan, hoping a cup of strong tea would calm him down. “Look at that lot! Stuffing themselves with buns because they know they won’t be able to face their dinner!”

  “I couldn’t even eat in advance, Lou. I didn’t have breakfast. The mere thought of it knocks me over.”

  “What’s the difference between what we’ve got to do and being a butcher who sees carcases hanging up dripping blood all the time?” Lou asked trying logic where sympathy had failed.

  “If you want me to be sick before we even start, you’re going the right way about it,” Nathan groaned. “And for your information, I can’t even bear to see my mother drawing the Shabbos chicken.” He slammed his cup onto the saucer and strode out of the café.

  Lou shrugged to a student who was sitting next to him. “What can you do with him, Reuben?”

  Reuben grinned and spread his hands. They walked back to college together and could see Nathan slouching along with his hands in his pockets ahead of them.

  “Listen, not everyone can be like me with a strong stomach,” Reuben said.

  Most of the students managed to put up a nonchalant front as they filed into the dissecting room. Nathan looked as if he was going to his doom.

  “I’ve seen a dead body before, when my grandma died,” someone remarked casually.

  “But I don’t suppose she was naked and you didn’t have to cut her up, did you?” Nathan reminded him.

  The Professor of Anatomy was awaiting them with an expressionless face. He knew what to expect and was rarely surprised. The ones who appeared the most squeamish often coped better than those with confident smiles. But not always.

  The sickly-sweet odour of formaldehyde, with which the cadavers were preserved, met Nathan’s nostrils immediately he stepped through the doorway. He did not allow his gaze to fall upon the long tables, or what lay upon them.

  Lou was gripping his elbow and brought him to a halt when they reached an end table around which several other pale-faced students were already grouped. “This one’s ours, Nat,” he whispered. The atmosphere was conducive to lowering one’s voice. He dug Nathan in the ribs. “It’s a man.”

  Why does death reduce a person to an “it”? Nathan thought with one half of his mind. The other half was telling him to look at the body and remember it was now no more than that, the soul which had once animated it was present no more. He lowered his eyes and clung to the table. Then he retched.

  “For God’s sake!” Lou hissed. "You haven’t even got a knife in your hand yet!”

  Nathan averted his eyes from the cadaver and tried to get a grip on himself.

  “I wonder who he was?” Lou mused.

  “I’m trying to forget he was ever anybody,” the lad next to him muttered.

  Before commencing his introductory lecture the professor waited to see if anyone would actually faint. Fainting, if it did occur, did not generally do so until the students had each been allocated a section of the anatomy and made the first incision. But occasionally the odour affected them and he had noted some extremely grey faces this morning.

  Nathan and the over-confident Reuben slumped to the floor simultaneously. Paul Latimer, the son of a leading surgeon, followed suit two minutes later.

  Nathan found himself vomiting in a lavatory and could not recall how he had got there.

  “Holy Mother of God,” he heard Paul moan from an adjoining cubicle.

  “How could I be such a shlemiel?" Reuben exclaimed disgustedly from the one on the other side.

  They all staggered out to the washbasins together to put their heads under the cold tap.

  “I wasn’t actually sick,” Reuben informed Nathan and Paul clinically. “I just felt as if I was going to be.” He dried himself off and threw down the towel. “But I’m going back in there if it kills me!”

  “Good for you, Reuben,” Paul said as the tubby youth clamped his spectacles back onto his nose and charged out of the cloakroom. “I intend to do the same. Coming, Nat?”

  Nathan was leaning limply against the wall, drying his hands and did not reply.

  “You know what they say when you fall off a horse, Nat. Get back on and ride it again immediately, or maybe you never will.”

  Paul had not been particularly friendly toward the Jewish students until now. Probably because he had been to a public school and the only Jew he had encountered was Shylock, they had surmised. There’s nothing like vomiting side by side to bring people together, Nathan thought dryly. Even if one of them had never ridden a horse. He managed to smile, though he still felt queasy. “I need some air, Paul. I’m going for a walk.”

  Paul slapped him on the back encouragingly. “Don’t tell anyone else this, but what happened to us happened to my old man. He spent the rest of the morning sitting on a park bench, if it’s any consolation to you.” His rugged features creased into a grin. “It’s a good thing he told me, or I don’t think I could force myself to go back inside.”

  Nathan got his coat and scarf and wandered along Oxford Road. If David had witnessed his debacle in the dissecting room, would he still say he must be a doctor? Was carving up a cadaver any more of an ordeal than the filthy sweatshop had been for his brother?

  David had never mentioned the degrading conditions in which he had spent his youth, but Lou’s father had also worked in a factory at that time and often recalled what it had been like. The boys today didn’t know how lucky they were, he said repeatedly and Nathan’s parents had said the same. Lucky by comparison with something worse, he thought mutinously as he trudged along the main road. His lot was never compared with something better.

  A flicker of shame assailed him. His family had never known anything better, but were making sure he would. He glanced at his watch with the second hand, which David had bought for him because a doctor needed one to take the patient’s pulse; it was too late to get back onto the horse this morning, the session would be almost over.

  The watch had not been on the list of essential requirements, but David thought of everything. He was the kind of person who got things done while other people were still thinking about doing them. He had even rearranged Nathan’s newly equipped room the way he thought it ought to be, with the desk facing the wall, under the gaslight. Nathan had wanted it by the window, so he could look out on the back garden, but had not argued with him.

  Why didn’t people argue with David? Because he was unselfish and wanted the best for everyone in the family. But it was not just that. There was something indefinable about him which told you not to bother, you couldn’t win. Nathan had only tried once and had not expected to win. It struck him now that none of them ever referred to his brother as “our” David, the way they did when they mentioned each other. Nathan was “our” Nat to the family, but David was just David whose name needed no qualifying.

  A tram clanked by heading in the opposite direction and he wanted to leap aboard it, be carried homewards away from his problem. But when he got there he’d be faced with another; his mother would tell David, who would chastise him and send him back. He reached Whitworth Park and wandered inside to find a bench where he could rest and think. As Paul’s father had done under the same circumstances, he thought wryly. Could he summon the willpower that eminent gentleman had found himself capable of? He sat down and tried to do so, but stress had wearied him and he fell asleep. When he opened his eyes he felt refreshed, but the problem was still with him.

  “I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” a cheerful female voice said from the other end of the bench.
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  Nathan looked at his watch before he looked at her. He had slept for fifteen minutes. He turned to smile at the girl, whose expression was as perky as her voice. She was fair, with rosy cheeks. And not Jewish, a warning voice said inside his head. Why did he always think of people as Jews or Gentiles? Well how could he not when they did the same with him? She’d probably had him weighed up as a Jew-boy from Cheetham Hill even before he opened his eyes, his olive skin and black hair were enough to go on. But with girls there was an extra reason for the way he had reacted. Gentile girls were forbidden fruit and Jewish boys must never forget it.

  “My name’s Mary Dennis. What’s yours?” she said with an engaging grin.

  Nathan noticed that her mouth was too wide for the size of her face and her nose had a little bump near the bridge, but put together her features were pert and pleasing. “Nathan Sandberg. And do you usually talk to strange men on park benches?” he quipped. Why had he said men? He still thought of himself as a boy, though he was now nineteen.

  “I do when they’re one of ours,” she laughed. “I know you’re a medic by your scarf. I’m a nurse at the Infirmary, so we’ve something in common, haven’t we?”

  Nathan slid along the bench to sit beside her. “I wondered why you were wearing black stockings,” he said surveying her neat ankles.

  “Well now you know! I’ve just come off duty and I’m having a breath of air.”

  He saw the stiff white collar of her uniform peeping above her coat. His glance strayed to her small hands, which had a well-scrubbed look about them, then returned to her face. She did not smell of disinfectant, the way he had imagined a nurse would, instead the scent of lavender hung about her. “How d’you like emptying bedpans?” he inquired.

  She laughed again and Nathan sensed she was the kind of girl who enjoyed life.

  “And sticking thermometers in people’s mouths?” he added.

  “Make up your mind which end you want to talk about!”

  “Neither, actually.”

  Mary studied him silently for a moment. “What’s up, Nathan?”

  “Everyone calls me Nat,” he said without answering her question.

  “I’d rather call you Nathan.”

  The warning voice sounded in his head again. Why was he always hearing inner bells and voices? And feeling things? Like now, with this Gentile girl who was behaving as if they were friends, when they had just met. He either liked a person instinctively and they became important to him, or dismissed them immediately as not his kind. Occasionally his instinct proved wrong, as had happened with Paul Latimer of whom he’d seen a different side this morning. But it seldom proved wrong when he took to someone at once as he had to Mary. “Call me anything,” he said stupidly, averting his gaze from her deep blue eyes.

  “So long as I don’t call you late for dinner!” she pealed giggling at her own joke, which he had heard before. “Why’ve you got a face like a wet week?” she asked and giggled again when he looked affronted. “I don’t mean it that way, you’re very good looking. But it’s hard to see what you look like through the pall of gloom.”

  He told her what had happened to him in the dissecting room.

  “Is that all?” she grinned. “Well don’t let it worry you, I know some very good doctors who went to pieces the first time they came face to face with a cadaver.”

  “I only know of one.”

  “Wait till you’re on the wards, you’ll hear all sorts of stories about what happened to people when they were students.”

  “If I ever get that far.”

  “Now don’t be daft, Nathan!” Mary’s voice was soft-toned, but she could sound firm when necessary. “How d’you think I was my first time in theatre? Out for the count with my pal lying beside me. But the next time we both stayed on our feet and after a while it didn’t bother us. You get so you’re standing outside it, if you know what I mean. Or how could anyone do the things doctors and nurses have to do? And someone has to, or sick folk’d just die for lack of treatment.” She smiled reminiscently. “I’ll never forget being sent to the lab for something when I was a probationer and seeing a pickled penis in a jar.”

  She’s as casual about it as if she was talking about a pickled cucumber, Nathan thought and was not sure which shocked him most, hearing her say that word or her callous attitude. “A minute ago, I thought you were a compassionate person,” he said stiffly.

  “Part of me is, but the rest’s cool and objective,” she told him. “And that’s how you’ll be sooner or later. The penis didn’t belong to anyone anymore, did it? And I had to smile seeing it floating about in the solution, even though I felt sick and sorry at the same time. I only mentioned it because that was the day I began laughing my squeamishness off and nothing’s made me feel sick since.”

  “It’s strange hearing a word like that bandied about by a girl, all the same.”

  “But you’ll get used to it, Nathan, like you will to everything else. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Mark my word.”

  “I’ll let you know,” he said as if he took it for granted, as she seemed to, that they would meet again. He glanced at his watch and rose, conscious that he was reluctant to leave her. “I must get a move on, Mary, or I’ll miss a lecture.”

  Mary rose, too. “Come on then. I’ll walk you to the door,” she grinned.

  Chapter 5

  On Yom Kippur silence would lie thick as a blanket on Cheetham Hill. Only the rumble of the trams on the two main roads which flanked the district disturbed the solemn quietude.

  The previous week, during Rosh Hashanah, a joyousness pervaded the air, friends and neighbours pausing in the streets to wish each other a happy New Year and chuckling tolerantly at small boys kneeling on the pavement to flip festive hazelnuts into their upturned caps, as they did with marbles on ordinary days. But the Day of Atonement was different. Even the children felt its awesome quality and walked to shul docile as lambs beside their parents, to make their peace with God.

  The Sandbergs and Moritzes attended the new Central Synagogue which now graced the top end of Heywood Street, its presence there a testament not just to the Jews’ desire to erect a house of worship worthy of their Maker, but also to how far they had advanced, both materially and as secure British citizens. It was not the first such testament and would not be the last, as freedom of religious expression and fading remembrance of past oppressions allowed the community to spread deeper into the city.

  A thriving community of Sephardi Jews existed in South Manchester, but their Spanish and Portuguese culture was vastly different from the East European Judaism of their Ashkenazi brethren who had settled on the North side and the two lived separate lives.

  On the North side, some of the original congregations still remained, rich reminders of the early immigrant days, and Abraham Sandberg preferred to worship at the Chevrah Habimah, where his boys had been Bar Mitzvah and his friend Rabbi Lensky was still the minister in a shul which had been rehoused, but did not yet have a bimah. He enjoyed the nostalgia evoked by the Hassids’ old-style wool prayer shawls, edged with black and grey with use like his own, a world away from the sleek white-and-blue silk ones which Anglicised Jews had taken to wearing, his sons among them. The atmosphere was redolent of snuff and Russia; old bearded men, silk-hatted and swaying back and forth devoutly, incongruously shod in white canvas slippers as Yom Kippur piety demanded; remarks addressed in Yiddish when someone paused from prayer to speak to his neighbour. Sentiment mingled with gratitude in Abraham’s heart as he gave thanks and atoned for his sins among them.

  His children were humorously tolerant of his attachment to the traditions of his youth, which they themselves had gradually adapted to their modus vivendi. But his grandchildren were fascinated by the old ways and loved to go with him to the place where religion was so much more colourful and exciting.

  On Yom Kippur, when there was never a seat to spare, they would cluster tensely around him, conscious of the invisible Almighty hovering
above with a pen in His hand writing in the Book of Life whether or not they would live for another year, which the prayer books declared He decided on that day. But the Harvest and Tabernacles Festivals were their favourites and nowhere were these more thrillingly observed than in “Zaidie’s” shul.

  “Who’s Zaidie?” Marianne Klein’s little schoolfriend asked when Marianne was telling her about it.

  “Well you know how you have your Saturday on a Sunday, Marjorie?”

  “It’s you who has your Sunday on a Saturday.”

  “Well anyway, we call our grandparents by a different name than what you do, like we do a lot of things different, it’s because we’re Jewish. So Zaidie’s my granddad and my grandma’s my Bobbie.”

  Marjorie giggled. “Don’t Jews do funny things?”

  “They do on Simches Torah!” Marianne replied thinking of what went on at Zaidie’s shul when Tabernacles time came around. Frock-coated old gentlemen paraded the aisles chanting joyfully as they held aloft the Scrolls and the symbolic fruits. All the children present received oranges, apples and sweets and were given wooden rattles with which to make as much noise as they liked. They could even play “catchers” with the oranges if they wanted to and nobody told them to stop it.

  Simches Torah was similarly celebrated elsewhere, but not with the same verve and abandonment. This included the ancients bending their creaking knees to dance a triumphant Kazatsky before the hold Ark and Abraham’s heart would fill with regret because this generation of immigrants would soon be gone and with them the special something they had preserved from the old country. But at least his grandchildren would have it to remember all their lives.

  In the Autumn of 1930, David sat in the Central Synagogue with his brothers and brother-in-law, allowing the timelessness of the Rosh Hashanah prayers to wash over him. Services always had this effect upon him, as though he was participating in something immense and mysterious. The first time he had felt this had been at his Bar Mitzvah.