Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  “And then write it down so it can be printed for people to read it,” Uncle Joe explained.

  Marianne looked fascinated. “Is that what you do?”

  “And there’s never a dull moment, believe me!”

  “Hm,” Marianne said. “I think I might do that when I grow up.”

  “Girls have to get married and look after their children,” her mother laughed.

  “Why do they?”

  “Because they always have done,” Esther exclaimed impatiently.

  “But I could do what Uncle Joe does before I get married, couldn’t I?”

  “Once our Marianne gets a bee in her bonnet there’s no getting it out again,” Esther sighed to her brother-in-law.

  “She’s got a head on her all right!” Joe pulled Marianne onto his lap and smiled at her. “I’ll tell you what, chick. If you still want to follow in your uncle’s footsteps when you’re a big girl, you come and see me about it!”

  “Go and change into your Shabbos dress, Marianne. And you two boys get ready as well. Your dad’ll be home before you know it,” Esther said briskly. The last thing she wanted was for any of her children to emulate her brother-in-law and she was apprehensive about her husband’s reaction to finding him ensconced in the bosom of their family when he walked in. Joe was Ben’s only relative and had gone to London to seek work in his youth, as Ben had come to Manchester. Esther had never met him before and he seemed a nice enough man, but had committed the unforgiveable sin.

  When the children had gone upstairs she felt uncomfortable with him, not just because of the circumstances which neither of them had mentioned, but because he was not like the men with whom she was used to mixing. His manner was smooth and self-confident and it made her feel a bit inferior, though she was sure he didn’t intend to make her feel that way. It was difficult to believe he and Ben’d been brought up together. Perhaps living in London had made Joe different? Even his creased tweed jacket looked as if it was meant to be that way. “Fancy you being a reporter,” she said searching for something to talk about. “It takes Ben all his time to put a letter together!”

  Joe laughed. “He’s like my father was. Father was the best tailor in Vienna, or so he used to tell us—”

  “He couldn’t have been. Our Sammy’s father-in-law says he was,” Esther cut in with a smile. “Ben once asked him if he’d ever met your dad, but he hadn’t.”

  “Vienna’s a big place and there’s more than one Jewish district. We lived in Leopoldstadt, if you can call it living.”

  “You didn’t have pogroms like us Russians.”

  “But we were second-class citizens, even though not officially and in some ways it’s still the same. I went back to have a look at the ghettos when I was over there on a story.”

  “You have an interesting life, don’t you? Not like Ben.”

  “He wouldn’t enjoy what I do, he was always a home bird.”

  “And he can’t string two words together on paper, like I was saying.”

  “That’s what I meant about him being like Father. With a needle my father was a magician, but with a pen in his hand he flew into a panic! I suppose I take after our Zaidie who wrote Yiddish short stories.”

  “Did he really?” Esther looked amazed.

  “I bet Ben didn’t bother telling you we’ve got artists among our ancestors, either,” Joe grinned. “Two of our uncles painted religious pictures. They were quite well known.”

  “Well I never!” Esther exclaimed. “He certainly didn’t tell me, the kids’ll be tickled to hear it.”

  “You know Ben, Esther. Things like that don’t lie in his mind.”

  “He’s got other things on it,” Esther said loyally.

  Joe leaned back in his chair and glanced around. A tear in the sofa had been carefully mended and the blackleaded grate shone as brightly as the brass candlesticks, which he recognised as his mother’s. His sister-in-law was obviously a house-proud woman who did her best with the little she had, but there was barely enough space to swing the tabby lying on the faded hooked-rug and no amount of effort could disguise the room’s shabbiness. He watched a big black beetle scuttle beneath the skirting board, but Esther didn’t seem to notice it. There’d been a time when he wouldn’t have done, either, when rooms much less salubrious than this had been all he’d known. Perhaps you had to move on before you became aware of quite what you’d left behind. His flat in West Kensington was just a modest one, but thinking of it now made him realise he’d moved on a very long way. “With three kids, I’m sure Ben has plenty on his mind,” he said warmly to Esther.

  Harry and Arnold were so intrigued by the unexpected arrival of a new uncle, they forgot their mother had not given them their afternoon tea. Marianne had noticed the oversight and the nonappearance of the scones and jam which always awaited them to stave off hunger until they had their proper tea, which on Friday nights they called supper, heightened the drama of the situation for her. Her father’s expression when he arrived home and saw his brother did so still more.

  Ben’s swarthy complexion paled to parchment when he opened the kitchen door and his homecoming greeting to his family ended in mid-sentence.

  “It isn’t my ghost, it’s really me,” Joe said with an apologetic smile. “I had to come to Manchester on a story and it seemed like an opportunity to—well you know what I mean, Ben.” He moved forward and gripped Ben’s hand between both his own.

  Marianne could feel something rippling through the room, the kind of something that made her want to cry.

  “So how’ve you been, Joe?” Ben asked gruffly, then he sat down and scanned his brother’s face. Joe was the elder by two years and had been only twenty when they last saw each other. The time since their estrangement had aged him, his hair was thinning on top, the way their father’s had and deep lines were etched beside his mouth. He looked more like forty-five than thirty-five.

  “How’ve I been? Up and down like everyone else.” Joe smiled at the watching children and Ben became aware of them and pulled himself together.

  “Why didn’t you tell us about Uncle Joe?” Marianne asked Ben reproachfully.

  “Don’t keep asking questions!” Esther said to her sharply.

  “Well you can’t really blame the kid, can you?” Joe laughed. “The way I popped up from nowhere!”

  “You’re here now,” Ben said in a resigned voice.

  “And you’ll stay for supper,” Esther invited.

  “Look, I don’t have to. I can eat at the hotel. The conference I’m covering doesn’t end until noon tomorrow, so I’m in Manchester for the night.”

  “You’ll stay,” Ben told him brusquely, but the shortness was just a screen for his emotion. “And there’s no need for a hotel. Harry and Arnold can sleep with their cousin Martin, you’ll have their bed.”

  “We’ll be late for shul if we don’t hurry,” Harry reminded his father.

  “Ben can’t go to shul on Saturday, it’s his main day at the market,” Esther explained to Joe. “These days our living has to come first. But he always comes home early on Friday nights so he can go with the boys.”

  “Tonight we’ll give it a miss,” Ben decided to his sons’ surprise. “Because Uncle Joe’s here.”

  Harry looked upset. His Hebrew teacher always ticked off the boys who missed a service. “Uncle Joe can come too.”

  “Leave it at that, will you, Harry?” Ben avoided Joe’s eye and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. “Time to light the candles, Esther.”

  Marianne could feel the strange something rippling through the room again. Her uncle had sat silently staring at his fingernails while Dad talked to Harry. She watched his face as her mother said the Shabbos prayer over the candles and saw that he had tears in his eyes. Whatever the mystery was, it seemed to have something to do with shul and prayers.

  Her father still wasn’t looking at Uncle Joe and didn’t glance at him whilst blessing the wine, either. After it was blessed, everyone had to take
a sip from the glass and she noticed Dad’s hand shaking as he passed it to his brother. Uncle Joe didn’t take a big gulp like most grown-ups did, but barely touched the glass with his lips.

  The feeling she experienced was tension, but she was too young to recognise it as such and stood behind her chair gripping the back of it tightly, wishing this part of Shabbos evening was over, though she usually enjoyed it. As the youngest present, she was the last to receive the wine and spilled some on her dress because her hand was shaking, too, but her mother did not rebuke her.

  “So give my brother a nice big portion of chopped liver, love,” Ben instructed his wife when they sat down at the table and busied himself slicing the chalah. The golden-crusted bread, feather light and moist within, was shaped like a bulky plait. On Friday nights it stood on the table covered by a small, white cloth and custom demanded it be cut and handed out by the head of the family who first blessed it with a prayer, as he had the wine.

  Joe received his slice of chalah and spread some of the savoury liver pâté on it, then his gaze moved to the candles.

  “A fine night you chose to call on us, eh?” Ben said with his twisted smile and his voice had a tinge to it which Marianne could not recall having heard before.

  “So what can you do?” Joe shrugged.

  The brothers exchanged a long glance, then Ben averted his eyes. “Try my wife’s cooking already!”

  “You can get chopped liver in the East End delicatessens.” Joe tasted Esther’s. “But believe me, it isn’t the same.”

  “A person makes their bed,” Ben said cryptically.

  “I’m not complaining, Ben.”

  “How many kids’ve you got?”

  “One boy and he’s the image of Father.”

  Ben’s eyes misted over. “So what can you do?”

  They used the old Jewish cliché over and over again during the meal, as if it conveyed all the things they were carefully not saying.

  “And your wife?” Ben made himself ask. Years ago he’d wanted to strike this unknown sister-in-law dead for the way she had caused his brother to disgrace the family, defile their dead parents’ memory. He never wanted to set eyes on her, but now Joe had taken the step towards reconciliation between them he was glad to see him and politeness called for the inquiry about his wife.

  “Sally’s fine.”

  But the nephew was Ben’s own flesh and blood. “Your son had a Brith?”

  Joe smiled. “Which rabbi would circumcise him?”

  “So he’ll be a goy all his life.”

  “Like his mother,” Joe replied.

  “I’ll dish the chicken and tsimmes up,” Esther said to distract them. The conversation was moving in a direction she did not like.

  Marianne saw Harry and Arnold exchange a puzzled glance. She found what she had just heard hard to understand, too. Uncle Joe’s wife and son were Christian. Only how could they be, when he was Jewish? Families had to be all the same. “What’s our new cousin’s name, Uncle Joe?” she asked as she helped her mother to remove the empty soup plates.

  “Christopher.”

  Esther saw Ben blanch, but which Jew wouldn’t be shocked to discover he had a nephew with the word Christ in his name?

  “I’d like to meet him,” Marianne said.

  “Maybe you will someday, chick.”

  “Harry and me, too?” Arnold asked.

  “We could come and stay with you in London, like my pal Asher Reubens does with his cousins,” Harry said excitedly. “Then he won’t be able to crow over everyone anymore because he’s the only one in the class who’s seen Buckingham Palace. Can we, Dad?”

  “We’ll think about it,” Ben answered.

  But the children knew the frown on his face meant no.

  “Have you been to the cemetery lately?” he said to his brother. Their parents’ grave in Leeds was the only reason they had retained contact. They contributed jointly to have it kept in good order and every year Joe sent his share of the expense to Ben.

  “It’s years since I was last up North,” Joe replied. “But I’m going on Sunday.”

  Ben played with some crumbs on the table, forming them into a neat square. A brother was a brother no matter what he had done. You could banish his presence, but not what he meant to you. They’d been suckled at the same breast, had wept together at their parents’ funerals, two scrawny lads left with nobody but each other in the world. The shiksah wife he would never accept as a sister-in-law, but he could not exile his brother again. “We’ll go to the grave together,” he said touching Joe’s hand.

  The next afternoon, Joe went with Esther and the children to her mother’s Shabbos tea party and Ben left his market stall in the care of his assistant in order to arrive at Sarah’s earlier than he usually did.

  It’s like being pitched backwards in time, Joe thought nostalgically as he ate strudel and Sachertorte in the midst of the noisy throng. He had forgotten the special atmosphere, peculiarly Jewish, of such occasions. When he didn’t have to work on a Sunday and he and Sally took Chris to her mother’s for tea, how different it was from this! Sally’s three sisters would be there with their husbands and kids, but there was never any noise. Everyone sat with plates of dainty egg and cress sandwiches balanced on their laps and afterwards they each received a slice of raspberry jam sponge. The conversation was bandied back and forth in polite middle-class voices and there were sometimes silences when you could hear the grandfather clock ticking in a corner of the room.

  Did he miss this lusty ambience? There was no other way to describe it. It was not just the raised voices and the gesticulating, but an inimitable zest which the people exuded even when they paused for breath. How could he not have missed it, when he was one of them? But he hadn’t let himself admit it until now. Judaism was more than a religion, it was a way of life in the fullest sense of the term and he’d never been more aware of it than he was in Sarah Sandberg’s parlour that afternoon. It would take generations of everyone doing what he had done, to change it.

  “Have some more strudel, Uncle Joe.” Marianne came to sit on the arm of his chair, bringing the dish.

  “I prefer the Sachertorte, my mother used to make it.”

  “There’s a piece hiding under the strudel,” she whispered. “Martin put it there for himself, but he won’t mind you having it.”

  Joe took the cake and smiled at her. He liked this little niece and felt she liked him. “So when are you coming to London, chick?”

  “When my mam and dad let me,” she said as if she had assessed the situation. “If they don’t, I’ll come when I grow up. What’s London like?”

  Joe tried to tell her and her cousin Martin came to perch on the other arm of the chair, listening as avidly as Marianne.

  “Heaven help you, Joe, now those two’ve got you in their clutches!” Ben grinned.

  “Give your uncle a bit of peace, Marianne!” Esther shooed the two children away, wishing the tea party was over. But Joe looked more at ease than she felt. She had called to see her mother while he was still at the trade union meeting he had been sent to report. She would not have brought the outcast to Sarah’s family gathering without permission and when she received it had told her mother to warn everyone to be discreet. The only one who had not been warned was Nathan who had been at the library and had just arrived home. Esther watched Ben introduce him to Joe and hoped he would not say anything out of place.

  She hoped in vain. “You must be the skeleton in the Klein cupboard!” Nathan joked without pausing to think it might be the truth. “I didn’t know you existed.”

  “It depends on how you look at things,” Joe replied wryly. “Ask my brother to tell you about it sometime.”

  Nathan did not need to, he was told by his mother when everyone had left. “You mean he actually went ahead and did it, even though it meant cutting himself off?” He had never met anyone before who had found the courage to do so.

  “And for what?” Sarah exclaimed.

&
nbsp; Nathan went to the window and gazed at the houses across the street, so he would not have to look at her. His hasty resolve to marry Mary come what may, inspired by the matchmaker’s proposition, had by now subsided into indecision again.

  Sarah was cleaning the Sabbath candlesticks before replacing them on the mantelpiece. She scraped off some wax with her thumbnail. “Now he has a wife who won’t be able to sit Shivah for him when he dies and a son who won’t know Hebrew to say the Kaddish. Only Ben, whom he disgraced, can pray for him.”

  “Isn’t being happy while he’s alive more important?”

  “Who could be happy with what he has on his conscience? Thank God his poor parents weren’t alive to see it, it would have killed them,” Sarah said irrationally. “To be happy a person must first be at peace with the Almighty, or what should taste sweet will always taste bitter.”

  Every word his mother said heightened Nathan’s own dilemma. Oh Mary, he thought desperately. Why must it be this way? His medical studies were not yet halfway through and if he ended their relationship he would still have to see her, when he began working on the hospital wards. But he was not going to end it!

  Chapter 8

  If the presence of the sinner at her tea party had not been so distracting, Sarah would have told Helga to take her mother back home and put her to bed. The sight of the frail figure drooping in the bath chair had made her want to cry out. She had not seen her friend for two days, but the deterioration in her condition during the short interval was marked.

  Helga had not wanted to bring Rachel. Even the slight effort of being gently moved from the sofa into the chair had exhausted the sick woman and her hands had felt icy cold despite the warmth of the room. But Sigmund had insisted that his wife was fit to go out and Helga, who had never argued with her father, could not bring herself to do so now.

  The next day, Sarah called at the Moritzes’ house.

  “You don’t get enough of our company?” Sigmund chuckled when he opened the door. “You saw us yesterday!”

  Sarah often sat with her friend in the afternoons, but this was early morning and Sigmund knew the visit must have a special purpose. She had not entered through the back door and walked directly into the kitchen where Rachel lay, as she usually did. On Sunday mornings he was always busy in his workroom and it was there that he ushered her.