Shtum

by Jem Lester

  Jonah sits twiddling foliage; the wreath kindly sent from the bowls club should probably last him a good hour.

  The minister helps Maurice on to a box provided for the shorter of the eulogists and quietly explains where to position the microphone. Maurice places his cigar stub next to it, reaches into his cardigan pocket and pulls out a wad of dog-eared notepaper. His amplified throat-clearing is like the roar of the MGM lion.

  ‘Thank you, rabbi.’

  The minister talks closely into his ear.

  ‘You’re not a rabbi? So what? A trainee?’

  The minister returns, though less closely.

  Maurice stares directly at me. ‘Shnorrer, I suppose I’ll have to say Kaddish as well? Anyway …

  ‘So, what kind of man was Georg Jewell? Don’t worry. This is no quiz, I will tell you the kind of man he was.

  ‘Georg, Georg, Georg – I hated him like a brother, but what can you do? You can’t choose your family any more than you can choose the size of your schlung. And with Georg, when we first met each other, I instantly hated him because he was bigger and stronger and I was older. We were just two skinny boys, still years from bar mitzvah, speaking two different languages – me, Dutch, he, Hungarian – we were just two boys who’d survived the Nazis, who suddenly found themselves walking side by side down a railway track in 1944.

  ‘Georg offered to share his food with me – and what did I do? So hungry I’d been eating grass? I said yes. And Georg? Georg shrugged and tore his bread and cheese in half, and we sat down in the grass on the side of the road and went to sleep. And for this I loved him, but trust – trust is a different matter altogether. Normally I would have left him by the roadside.

  ‘But two weeks later we’re still together – wandering around like a couple of shtummers talking in sign-language. I can’t leave him. Why can’t I go? I ask myself. I hated him for an act of generosity, but I couldn’t drag myself away.

  ‘I tried a couple of times, left while he was still asleep, but for some reason I began to dawdle and stop until I saw him striding toward me out of the distance and as he approached we just set off together again without saying a word. He never asked why. I never asked him if he was angry. There were many occasions when other stragglers tried to tag along – maybe for a day, sometimes a week – and when they were with us I experienced horrible jealousy. I would dream of murdering them in their sleep – but they never stayed and we still didn’t talk.

  ‘He tried me with Hungarian, I tried him with Dutch; he tried me with Yiddish, but I spoke Ladino – only Jews could invent more than one secret language. Then one day we are wandering through a small French town – the name slips my mind – and it has a library this town and I – a learnt thief through necessity – crept in and stole out with a book, a dictionary, a French–English dictionary, but crucially, a dictionary for children. With pictures. There was just one choice then – French or English, and of course we could have studied both, but we chose English because America was our destination. You may have guessed, we never made it.

  ‘It didn’t take us long to learn the basics; we tested each other with words, then sentences as we walked and lay dozing in the evenings.

  ‘Of course, we had no idea if we were speaking it properly, how could we? And we only ever used it to practise what we would say when we arrived in America, because by then we had a language that served us perfectly without the need for words – and it was a language of the heart.’

  Maurice pauses and places his head on the lectern. When he looks up again his eyes are full of tears.

  ‘The truth is, Georg saved my life more than once. It was on the seventh night after we’d met, while we sheltered in a barn, that he saved my life for the second time. We thought it was empty, and neither of us expected to be confronted by a German soldier, a deserter, no doubt, but that is what happened. As we lay on the straw, he came from nowhere and suddenly there is a knife at my skinny throat and I am being dragged toward the barn door. I was terrified, but Georg? He just stood up and stared, his hands behind his back, and began to walk towards us. I could feel the German’s sweat dripping on to my head. It was murky in that barn, but as we got to the door the moon lit us perfectly from the back and Georg moved so swiftly that the Nazi never saw it coming.

  ‘The German just dropped, like someone had ripped the muscles from his bones. Georg had caught him perfectly between the eyes with a rusty old plough blade.

  ‘I knew that I was a burden to him after that, that he would have a better chance on his own and, many years later, I asked him, “Georg,” I said, “why didn’t you just leave me?” And his answer? “Any more than one is too many. Losing one is painful, losing two is painful more, losing three and the pain goes. Everyone needs a little pain and you, Mauritz, you are a little pain – so I can’t afford to lose you.” And he never did lose me. But now I have lost him and Georg, you were wrong, losing one is very, very painful.’

  And then he starts to cry, which doesn’t suit him, and I am dumbstruck by these revelations, staring at the furnace doors, while the jigsaw of my life with him goes up in flames, unfinished. I stand up as Maurice shuffles back to the pew and attempt to put my arm around him.

  ‘Maurice, when was the first time he saved you? Tell me.’

  But he shrugs me off. Then we stand together as he intones the Hebrew prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, from a battered old Hebrew prayer book and I try to keep up with my internet-downloaded transliteration:

  Yisgadal v’yisgadash sh’mey rabah …

  With the final Amen, the scant crowd disperses toward the back of the hall. Jonah sits, as he has sat the whole way through, picking the wreath to the wire and littering the floor with leaves and petals.

  The handshaking takes an eternal five minutes, but I can’t drag myself back to the car and, while Jonah investigates more wreaths, I stroll the length of the blood-red wall, reading the names on the memorial plaques. Each religion has its place, marked out by a gentle change in surnames – Stephenson, Singh, Shah, Stein. I scan from top to bottom looking for the familiar, the Jewish geography of the dead.

  ‘Your cousin went out with Marc Bolan, didn’t she?’

  Turning from the rock legend’s memorial plaque, I reply. ‘When he was Marc Feld, yes. But I’ve told you that a hundred times.’

  She’s smiling. ‘A thousand times, at least.’

  I let the silence settle between us, replacing the tension with needles of memory. ‘A million.’

  ‘A gazillion,’ Emma says.

  ‘You win.’

  ‘No one wins,’ she whispers.

  We stand together and stare at the plaque.

  ‘I’m so very sorry about Georg, Ben.’

  I feel her breath on my ear, it is as close to touching as we’ve been for nine months.

  ‘It must be hard. The grief, I mean.’

  ‘There’s been a lot to grieve for, Emma.’

  I hear a sigh, feel a hand in mine. It is small and insistent. It’s Jonah. He wants to leave.

  ‘Can we talk, Ben? Now?’

  ‘If he lets us.’ The phrase lingers.

  The sun has filtered through, so I have an excuse to don my sunglasses. I give in to Jonah’s tugging and, as I turn to be led, notice that he has Emma’s hand too – a beautiful young boy with his parents, what could be more natural?

  ‘He knows where he’s going?’ I ask.

  ‘You do, don’t you, Jonah? You’re going to the park,’ she says.

  A park I don’t know, or at least have never been to with him.

  ‘You’re going to Goldstream Park, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘It’s where Georg used to take him.’ And then, as if to the sky: ‘I would meet them there sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes?’ I ask.

  ‘Quite regularly,’ she says.

  ‘A chain of extraordinary coin
cidences?’ I smile.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Jonah releases his hands and continues four or five paces ahead. He’s programmed the SatNav and we’re now robotically following its instructions.

  Through the gates he picks up speed and begins to trot with arms by his sides. I begin to run after him.

  ‘Leave him, Ben. I know where he’s going. He’s off to the water garden.’ His laughter carries back to us on the breeze, it is high and joyous, disbelieving almost – like he’s the luckiest person in the world, like something so stupendous has happened that his whole body has been freed of its own weight, his head thrown back, his legs adjusting from trotting to skipping. All that’s left for him to do is fly.

  The water garden is a vast circle of brightly coloured rubber bitumen, formed into a mosaic of sea-creatures – sea horses, star fish, dolphins and a giant yellow octopus. Among the wildlife sit child-activated fountains that throw jets of water high and wide. The air is full of spray and the piercing cat-calls of two- and three-year-olds. Around the circle there are benches and grass and Emma and I settle on one, two sets of eyes bonded to the Gulliver-like form of Jonah, skipping circuit after circuit after circuit, carefully weaving in and out of his Lilliputian comrades, who seem totally accepting of this giant among them and his maniacal chuckling.

  ‘I …’

  ‘I … No, you first,’ I say.

  ‘I will not apologise, but I’m sorry …’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Will you just let me speak, please, this is hard enough without …’

  ‘I’m sorry, go on.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I can sense her gathering herself.

  ‘Ben, you know it’s over, don’t you? Not just know, but accept it?’

  I nod assent, while my mind searches for a caveat, the slightest grammatical twist, a tiny semantic get-out clause. Jonah has begun to venture timidly toward the spouting fountains. His face is set in a gentle smile.

  ‘Okay.’

  There is relief in her voice, like her planning is working so far. The conversation-and-response key that she has no doubt used specialist software to produce is proceeding down the correct branch – if ‘yes’, say this; if ‘no’, say that.

  I try to identify my feelings for her. My emotions are a compass needle, struggling to settle on a fixed point. Is it love? Is it hate? Love-love-hate, or hate-love-hate? Or am I too close to the pole to ever get a true reading?

  Jonah has taken off his shoes and left them in the middle of the circle. Now he sits on the grass opposite, picking at some dandelions and waving their gossamer-like seeds into the air. Wherever they land they will grow, but what if they never land?

  ‘I think it’s fair to say that our life, together – with Jonah, too – has been excruciating at times.’

  ‘That’s a little harsh,’ I say.

  ‘But true?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘We are both accountable, Ben.’

  ‘Responsible, you mean?’

  ‘No, I mean accountable. We both have to accept our part in this, but without blame. There is no blame. We did the best we could, what we thought was right, for the best reasons, with the best of intentions. I need to tell you how it was for me, Ben, and how I tried.’

  ‘You’ve already told me that, at the tribunal, remember?’

  ‘No, Ben, I didn’t. That was about Jonah.’

  ‘So go on then. How was it for you? How did you try?’

  Emma gets up from the bench and takes a couple of paces toward Jonah, her arms folded tight, her hands in her armpits. When she sits back down she is close to me. For the first time I look openly at her face. Her cheekbones have lost their prominence, her eyes are brighter than I remember and less sunken.

  ‘The break’s been kind to you,’ I say. Now it’s her turn to laugh.

  ‘Yes, it’s been like nine months in Barbados.’

  ‘There’s no need, I was only saying …’

  ‘I know what you were saying, Ben. So let me put you straight.’

  ‘Yes, please do.’

  There is silence.

  ‘Have you any idea how angry you’ve been? Not just the last couple of years, but ever since I’ve known you? It was different when we met, it felt like passion, it looked like passion. It made you enigmatic, charismatic, admirable even. But it’s not passion, it’s simply anger. I’ve learnt that about you, Ben. The anger holds you back, it’s all fear and resentment and frustration. I tried for years to drag you out of it, but you’re comfortable there. It’s all you’ve ever known. That and the booze that fuels it. I’ve watched you quit rather than face the prospect of failure, dismiss something as worthless rather than risk the chance of succeeding at it. I cried inside when you left marketing to join your father in that stinking warehouse.’

  I am indignant. ‘Hold on, I did that for you.’

  ‘For me? How? It was just another stick to beat yourself and everyone around you with.’

  ‘I did it so we could afford to have Jonah.’

  ‘Did I ever once ask you to do that?’

  ‘No, but it would have meant …’

  ‘Me giving up work? Is that what you were going to say? Did you ever ask what I wanted?’

  I look up at Jonah and before I realise it I’m halfway across the water garden – my shoes sloshing through standing water. Jonah is jumping up and down in a puddle, his skin turning browner before my eyes. I reach out for him, but he bats away my hand and skips to another part of the circle where he stands, playing with his hair, while a knot of toddlers splash nonchalantly beside him. Emma is at my shoulder.

  ‘He was a gift for you, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Not for you?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but I’m talking about you. He’s been a gift to your sense of self-loathing. Because as soon as Jonah arrived, as soon as his autism became apparent, he became your mission. You had the perfect excuse not to look at yourself ever again. Just focus on your son, your poor autistic son and nothing else. Forget about me, I should understand where the priorities lie, shouldn’t I? I too should give up on myself. Isn’t that right, Ben? I should give my whole life to Jonah too. But I need something back. I know you think I’m selfish, but I want to be loved back. And you just stopped. You always fall back on your devotion to Jonah. But in what sense did your self-piteous drinking help Jonah with his autism?’

  ‘My drinking did not cause Jonah’s autism.’ There, I’ve said it out loud, as if the volume will convince me that I completely believe it.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she says softly. ‘But how present were you? How useful could you be, half-cut most of the time? It couldn’t all just be cuddles, kisses and laughter. You forced me to be the serious one.’

  My daydream of this meeting was one of emotional reunion or, at the very least, a tearful exclamation of eternal love fucked by the fickle finger of fate. I want to find the words, but I am scared they will wreck my fragile equilibrium.

  ‘I just wanted to be his father.’

  ‘Ben, you wanted to be everything to him that didn’t involve any thinking ahead. So you made me be Jonah’s secretary and press officer.’

  ‘So, what, you thought you’d just dump us? Make up some bullshit story about single fathers being more likely to win a tribunal. I can’t believe I fell for it. Throw us out of the house, dump us on my dad, make me ask him – no, beg him – for the money to fight for Jonah. You sent me back there, Emma, and I had to wipe his arse before he died.’ My sunglasses are blurring. The tears are hot and burn my shaven cheeks.

  ‘I was desperate, Ben.’ She’s digging at her cuticles with her thumbnails; the ends of her fingers are bitten and sore.

  ‘You couldn’t have been that desperate if you made it to Hong Kong! Emma, I …’ Her face has turned strawbe
rry-mark crimson. ‘You weren’t in Hong Kong, were you? My God, you weren’t! Well, Emma, Jesus …’

  ‘I had to, Ben. I had to go away, I had to find a way, it was all I could think of. Georg, he …’

  ‘He knew? My dad knew?’

  ‘I was ill, Ben! I’d been sick for years.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about, ill? You’ve never taken a sick day from your precious job in your life. No, I would have noticed. You looked fine. If you were ill you would have told me.’

  ‘I couldn’t even admit it to myself. So how could I have told you? It was all I had left that was mine. You’d stolen my peace of mind, I thought it was keeping me alive …’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Pills, Ben, bloody pills.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says, stirring her coffee and picking at a blueberry muffin. We are alone, for now, in the park café.

  ‘I remember, but didn’t the doctor give you something that helped?’

  ‘Yes, it solved all my problems.’

  ‘But the doctor gave them to you, it’s not like you were snorting cocaine. If you were taking that many, wouldn’t you have been asleep all the time?’

  She holds her mug with two hands and lets the steam creep through her eyelashes. ‘Zopiclone. A feeling of well-being, followed by a yummy drift into sleep. I liked the feeling, more than the sleep …’ She sips from her mug. ‘Especially in the mornings. I’d wake up with a feeling of impending doom. The prospect of Jonah, his moods, the smell, the rush, what I hadn’t managed to do the night before, the day ahead, you – and I found the tablets helped. Just the one, as I woke up, got me over the hump. And it was fine, for a long time, but I’d begin to run out before the end of the month and the edginess I felt before I could get another prescription – God, I can’t tell you.’