by Gaby Koppel
I’m just beginning to wish Mutti would wake up and challenge him to an arm-wrestling contest when Dave steps in. He manages a convincing impression of being interested in Hebrew forms of prayer. I do the rounds with a large teapot, dispensing its soothing brown linctus like the perfect housewife my mother once hoped I would become. But then I leave them to it and go upstairs to phone Bill. Compassionate leave is all very well, but we’re shooting in four days’ time.
Chapter 16
The following day I drop Dave off at Cardiff Central Station to get the train back to London, leaving me alone with Mutti. She’s subdued. Her anger seems to have dissipated, though she doesn’t actually apologise for her performance at the crematorium. She sits at the kitchen table, flaccid and purposeless. A weak sun straggles through the blinds, but falters before it reaches her corner. She always sits in the same place, an alcove by the larder, where the kitchen table nestles against a small fitted bench built into the wall, its seat covered with green velvet upholstery. Next to her hangs a small notice board, with a raffia basket attached to it – the kind of thing you find in gift shops at stately homes. She pins appointment cards and invitations to it, and uses the basket to store her pencils, crosswords, and spare cigarette holders. This is her niche, she sits there now with a cold cup of coffee and a full ashtray.
I don’t really want to, but I put my head on her shoulder. What I want most is to get back to work, but decency suggests I should stay for a couple of days at least. I wonder how she’s going to fill her days without my father to look after. Everything she used to do was for his benefit. She cooked to his tastes, and to a timetable dictated by his work. She cleaned and organised the house, and planned their social calendar with his wishes and needs in mind. Every bed she changed, every load of laundry she put in the machine was in some way determined by his needs, his schedule, his preferences.
Will it be like this for me and Dave? Torturing each other for years then abandoned and bereft? Mutti doesn’t want to cook or shop. For the first time in over thirty years her fridge is empty. The larder is still full of tins and jars, but we can’t live on morello cherries and horseradish sauce, so I take her to the supermarket. Today she blanks the special offers with a blind, robotic gaze. She’s standing there looking helpless, so it’s left to me to put a few things I think she would like into the trolley. Some fresh bread, unsalted butter, sliced Emmenthal cheese and garlic salami. They sit there on the cold metal mesh, looking stranded. Then we retreat to her house to contemplate the rest of the empty day.
Even though Dave only left a few hours ago, I’m overwhelmed by wanting and missing him. I want to marry as soon as possible, before we start hating each other, and end up like my parents. I resolve to set a date as soon as Mutti can be restored to some sort of normality.
My normality is work. I decide to make a base in the office, so that I can keep in touch with Bill. The fax machine is creaking with age, and the computer doesn’t have anything as newfangled as an internet connection, but I can do most things on the phone. As I settle into the swivelling chair, it feels odd being here without my father. I’ve usurped his place. I reach for the receiver, but shrink away with the realisation that the last hand that touched it was his. Am I imagining that the seat’s still warm? I can almost feel his shape at the desk around me, the familiar jerky movement of his pen, ancient slide rule never far off along with the silver propelling pencil he used for technical drawings. The instruments of his profession peep out from the letters and invoices scattered around the desk, as though he’s just gone to make a coffee. I hastily gather everything up into a neat pile and put it on the window sill next to his creaky old wireless set.
Press the button. Clanging chords. Of course it’s preset to Radio 3, the soundtrack to his day, and right now it’s playing some kind of modernist symphony. I switch it off again, but the silence is worse. I force myself to get on with my list of chores – update the casting agency, get the contracts sent out, book chaperones for the children.
As I type out their names and addresses, it occurs to me for the first time really how tricky a thing we will be asking of these kids. It’s like this – you are going to play the part of a little girl just like you who has been brutally murdered not long ago and right here. It’s like a horrific game of make believe. Bring on the bogeyman. The only surprising thing is that none of them have ever been too spooked to do it. Not as far as I know, anyway.
The photo of Bruchi we’ve been using for casting was taken at a wedding where she was a bridesmaid. I take it out of the folder. Usual kind of thing – big skirt in shiny material and a row of silk flowers on an Alice band. The high neckline and long sleeves make it look severe and unrelaxed, but her smile manages to cut through the overwhelming layers of taffeta. She was a pretty girl, sweet looking in an intense kind of way. That smile is odd. It’s a few degrees short of radiant. Is it a mystical Hasidic quality or just some kind of profound disconnectedness with everyday life? I think it is that, some quality of unworldliness, as though they’re not in touch with other people’s reality. What tosh. Actually, it’s nothing spiritual at all, just comes down to an intense distrust of outsiders. Probably they’ve been told lots of weird stuff about women in short skirts who eat bacon. I’m contaminated by the evil world of television and God forbid I may reveal something of it to them. I wonder what it’s like to grow up in a world so full of prohibitions. There are so many things they aren’t allowed to do. Or to know. Maybe that’s the look they share, the fear of breaking a thousand and one rules.
What do they really think will happen if a morsel of bacon was to pass their kosher lips? Will they wake up a Christian in the morning? They inhabit a world of fear as much as love, that’s for certain. Either way, would that have made Bruchi more or less likely to go with a stranger? Maybe she’d have been too terrified to refuse.
From the kitchen I can hear cupboard doors opening and closing, as Mutti drifts about in her purposeless way. A blanket of snow has descended and wrapped her in its icy folds. She’s become a living ghost, just like Mrs Friedmann. One woman grieving for a child, another for her husband. They’ve both got the same hunched posture and blank eyes. But a mother’s grief comes from the reversal of natural order. What about partners? One of them has to go first, barring accidents or suicide pacts. As you get older I guess you expect that one awful day you might lose your soulmate.
But Mutti’s an innocent too in a way. Frozen in childhood. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that one ghastly day she and Dad would be separated. Of course he’d never have left her while he was still alive. They were joined by some demonic force that was bigger than both of them. Love, need, terror of being apart, a shared knowledge of the unspeakable past.
The post arrives. Bill has sent me the scripts, which means I can finish the call sheets and transmit them back to London. While I’m waiting for him to approve them, I decide to clear out Dad’s paperwork. We have to notify all his business contacts about what’s happened. There will be outstanding accounts to settle. All the letters that have been delivered since he went to hospital are stacked up in a haphazard pile. I open a bank statement. It’s not good news, but this hardly seems like the right time to talk to Mutti about her medium term financial strategy and whether or not it means she’ll have to sell the house. (She will.)
I take comfort in a stroll around Roath Park Lake, which conjures up heaving nostalgia for my childhood. The day when we hired a rowing boat and I managed to drop the oars, and Dad shouted at me before collapsing in hopeless giggles. The lollies and the playground, the Scott memorial lighthouse, the grassy bank we used to roll down, and the rose garden where my grandmother enjoyed a stroll are all there, just the same as they used to be.
When I get back to the house, I notice the old photograph albums have been taken out of the wardrobe and piled up on the study bookshelf. I take them into the kitchen, and lay them on the table. Mutti puts down her cigarette, regarding the books with a look of sus
picion, as though she’s expecting a column of poison ants to emerge from their covers.
I busy myself with my paperwork back in the study. When I come back, I find her looking at a familiar picture of herself looking elegant way beyond her years and absorbed, as she holds the violin in a dramatic pose. Though lifelike, it’s actually a small format oil painting copied from a photograph, the black and white snap is pasted onto the opposite page and shows what a good job the artist did. Adding colour breathes life into the image, with the sumptuous folds of fabric and thoughtful Mutti holding up her bow as if in mid-note. The dress is magnificent. It’s fastened at the front by sweep of tiny buttons, each covered in the same red fabric. The high collar is turned up at the back, sleeves long and tight along the forearm, with another sweep of the same buttons. From the elbow, the fabric balloons out into glossy folds. Her auburn hair is swept up into a formal chignon. The whole effect is very Hollywood.
“You never play any more,” I say. She nods, turning the pages this way and that.
“I haven’t got a violin.”
“I thought it was upstairs.”
“We sold it.”
“But you brought it with you when you left Hungary.”
She nods. “It was made by a student of Stradivarius.”
“I remember you playing it when I was little – what was that? I sing, “Debrecenbe kene neni…” I know the words only in a phonetic way. The syllables and their tune, but not what it means.
She smiles, and picks up with “Puy ko ko kosh kene venni.”
We laugh, at the lisping melody. “What is it?”
“It’s a nursery rhyme. All Hungarian children know it.”
“What does it mean?”
“Come, come to Debrecen everyone, come.”
“But I never heard you play anything else.”
A pause, a remnant of her childhood stammer. “I didn’t. After I married, I played in an orchestra for a few years. Amateur, but good standard. Before you were born.”
The story of my life. It’s all near misses and things that weren’t quite said. So maybe it’s apt that I grew up with the next best thing to a Strad in the cupboard, and all I ever heard it play was a squeaky kiddie song. However much my parents claimed to revere Kultur, the only evidence of music in our home was a battered, upright piano that hid in the spare bedroom. And a walnut veneer radiogram I wasn’t allowed to touch. Yet I had a musical mother, concert standard, trained by legendary teachers. She fingers the page. “Because I hated it.”
“You can’t have.” She shrugs.
“My parents were – not that easy to please.”
“But you were concert level, Liszt Academy, worthy of a valuable instrument. How much pleasing did they expect?”
“Ja, ja. I know, sounds – I don’t know. Really I don’t.” She has turned back to the ballet pictures. In one picture, she is wearing a peasant costume and tap shoes.
“It started with this. My mother was an ambitious woman, she wanted me to be a – what is it? A prodigy, is that the word? So I learnt to dance.” She points to a picture in which she is dressed as a balletic chicken, with a costume made of coloured ribbons, and a headdress. She is standing en pointe. “How old do you think I was there? Five? Six? Too young to stand on my toes. I wasn’t ready.”
I look closely. She’s right. The shoes with their reinforced toes look too big for the little-girl legs, rippling with babyish curves.
“When I was about ten, I started getting these terrible headaches. Migraines, I suppose, but we didn’t know that word. My mother took me to one doctor and then another, finally the specialist paediatrician. He said no more ballet. My mother was furious. She had invested everything in this prodigy and now I’d let her down. So she said OK, no more ballet. We will have violin.”
“But you were obviously good at it. You were good at ballet, you were good at the violin. Your mother must have got the message that you were clever and talented?”
“People didn’t think like that in those days. Now, we’ve all read the psychology books. Listen to your child, find out what makes the child tick. They tell you to praise, praise, praise. If your child coughs then you praise her for making such a nice cough.
“Those days it was different. If I didn’t practise, I was beaten. If the teacher said I could do better, I got beaten. My mother would shriek at me. Then he’d come in and take off his belt.” She pauses, eyes swimming.
“When I had my own children, I always said I would do the opposite.”
Looking exhausted, she shuts the album, and puts a cigarette into her holder. It’s as though she has emptied herself, and has nothing else to give.
“What’s the opposite, exactly?” I ask. “What does it mean?” She doesn’t answer.
In the London office, Millie’s putting together script packs. She calls me towards the end of the afternoon.
“Elizabeth, just one thing. I can’t see a booking for a white van.”
“What white van?”
“If you look at the script, on page ten, it calls for a rusty white mini bus or minivan, which one of the witnesses saw pass the house around the time of the crime. It’s an appeal point. Have you booked it?”
I rummage through my copy of the script. How could I have missed that?
“Oh God, no. What’s the driver supposed to be wearing?”
“Mmmm, male Caucasian driver, black clothes. Quite vague.” I look at the script again. The white minivan is observed by Passer By One, a local mum with a kid in a buggy. It’s not a brilliant appeal point. There are hundreds of crummy white minibuses in Stamford Hill. There must be a farm where they breed them.
“Can we get one for Monday?” I ask.
“I’ve got a handful of companies to try,” says Millie. Let’s hope it’s not too late.”
I put in last-minute calls to DI Jenkins and the police liaison officer. I’m sitting at Dad’s desk, and by now I’m relaxed about being here because though I can actually feel him in the room, I don’t mind. Actually his presence is quite soothing. I’m finally showing him that this is how I do my job, and allowing him to see that despite appearances to the contrary, I’m actually quite competent. It’s a good thing Mutti doesn’t actually come in, because I’m talking to him out loud, having the conversation I always wanted to have. As dusk is settling on the semi-detached houses that hunker down around a grassy square, I have a last rundown through my checklist for the shoot. Mrs Friedmann and her family are expecting us. As is Reb Stern. Of course.
Under the circular glow of the anglepoise, I tap all the documents into a neat wad and push it back into its file. The photograph of Bruchi as a bridesmaid falls out onto the teak desktop, and I have to wedge it in on top, the formal pose and reserved smile peeking out as I close the cardboard flap over her. I suppose her mother must have looked like that once, all girlish innocence instead of borne-down by exhaustion and grief. Even before this happened, I imagine Mrs Friedmann always wore an expression that reflected the pains of life, not its joys. She’s like a sponge that absorbs unhappiness from the world around her. Probably not even forty yet, just a few years older than me, but she moves like a biblical ancient, criching around that forlorn looking house with its oily carpets and torn wallpaper. I suppose there’s no escape for her. It’s like a filthy prison. She’s still got six kids, no husband and no money to speak of, just an unending round of praying and the relentless cycle of joyless Jewish festivals. And that’s her reward for marrying a nice Jewish boy.
I’m clearing a space on the desk to sort out my paperwork, when I find a plastic folder containing paperwork from the hospital. It’s worth checking that the insurers have been told to stop taking my father’s premiums. A spare sheet is stapled to the back of the insurance document. It’s headed in thick capital letters “STOP. DNR”, and on the next line “Do Not Resuscitate”. In the body of the text, my eye catches the lines “…has directed that life-prolonging procedures be withheld or withdrawn in the event of car
diac or respiratory arrest.” So, this was his parting shot. No electric shocks, no cardiac massage. No scenes from Casualty. He wanted out, that much is clear. I’m just the collateral damage.
Later on I decide to show Mutti the document. But when I go into the kitchen, she’s sitting in her usual place, swaying gently like an abandoned child. I groan at the all too familiar sweet smell of spirits on her breath.
Over the next days, Mutti potters around the house aimlessly. She doesn’t say much, barely responds to my feeble efforts to engage her in a bit of low level cooking, but spends long hours sitting in the kitchen smoking, with daytime telly on in the corner. It’s a relief that I have to leave on Sunday night. She hardly seems to register that I’m saying goodbye and when I call to say I’ve arrived home, she sounds listless. I ask her what she’s doing.
“Nothing.”
“What about tomorrow? You can’t just do nothing all the time.”
“Well, actually…”
“Yes?”
“Mrs Breslauer phoned to ask if I like to go round for coffee.”
“Sounds good. ”
“Maybe I take round a poppy seed cake. Oma’s recipe.”
“Ideal. I can’t think of anything better. How about a game of bridge while you’re there? Very therapeutic.”
I don’t tell her that I’m at Dave’s. I need a bit of his nonchalant, understated supportiveness. But I can’t even really explain to myself why I should need to conceal this.
Chapter 17
A black people carrier with tinted windows is parked outside the Friedmann house, passenger door open. The cameraman Roger and sound recordist Ernie are on the pavement, taking a digi camera out of a silver case. They set it onto a tripod, watched by a dozen boys in skullcaps and earlocks. As Bill gets out of his GTI, and crosses the road towards them, the gaggle of kids doesn’t move. They are crowding into the crew’s personal space, staring unembarrassed with open mouths as Bill shakes hands all round.