by Maisie Mosco
Maisie Mosco
SCATTERED SEED
Dedication
To the memory of
Doctor Frank Rifkin,
an irreplaceable friend
and mentor
Verse
Children of the martyr-race,
Whether free or fettered,
Wake the echoes of the songs,
Where ye may be scattered.
Yours the message cheering,
That the time is nearing,
Which will see all men free,
Tyrants disappearing.
From a Chanukah hymn
Part One
Relative Values
Chapter 1
Sarah stood by the window waiting for Abraham to arrive home from work. On weekdays, there was no fire in the parlour grate to warm the chill air and she had slipped her faded shawl around her shoulders. She preferred it’s comforting folds to the smart cardigans her children bought for her. And in a way it was like an old friend: from the days when she had not owned a coat and it had been her outdoor garment.
She could hear the wild, autumn wind tearing the few remaining leaves off the tree by the garden gate, and the angry crackle of the bare branches as they were whipped this way and that. How quickly the seasons passed. Another winter approaching. Another year gone by. She rarely paused to think about it, but this morning the calendar had brought her up short.
She and Abraham had been in their twenties when they left Russia. Now, they were in their fifties. But she hadn’t noticed her ageing appearance until the date reminded her that the Sandbergs had stepped ashore in England thirty years ago today.
Her neighbour’s grandfather clock chimed on the other side of the wall, intruding upon her thoughts. Usually, she was busy in the kitchen at this hour, but she had prepared the evening meal early and had put on her best frock. She smoothed the box-pleats which fell from her still-slender hips and adjusted the white, lace jabot she had pinned to the neckline to give the simple, grey serge a festive touch.
The frock was not new, but she took care of her clothes and would probably still be wearing it five years hence; not like her daughter-in-law, Bessie, who discarded things the moment they were no longer fashionable, Sarah thought as her eldest son’s car pulled up outside and she went to open the door.
The cat joined her in the lobby and she bent down to fondle its marmalade fur. Tibby was pregnant again, but when had she ever had a cat that didn’t keep having kittens? And they’d all been called Tibby. Except the first one, the ferocious black tom named after the Tsar by the friends who’d given him to her. The calendar had reminded her of those friends, too, whom she hadn’t seen for years and rarely thought about, but the Berkowitzes had been part of her first weeks in England.
“Hurry up and come in before it starts to rain, Abraham!” she called, watching her husband ease himself out of David’s car. The night sky had a sullen look about it, with clouds the colour of dead cinders scudding across the surface of the moon. It’s a Manchester night, she thought, comparing it with the crisp, starry nights of her youth, which she had not done for a very long time. A sudden memory of riding in a sledge through snowy streets with a strong young man at her side assailed her.
“Turn up your coat collar,” she instructed the frail figure he had become.
“You think I’ll have time to catch pneumonia walking up the garden path?” he retorted spiritedly.
Everyone knows how delicate his chest is except him, Sarah said to herself exasperatedly. Would he bother to wear a muffler if I didn’t wind it around his neck myself every morning before he left the house? But at least he didn’t have to wait in the cold for a tram, like most people. Working for his son was a blessing: David drove him to the factory and brought him home.
“You’re not coming in for a minute, David?” she called as he stretched across the car to shut the door, which his father always neglected to do.
“Not tonight, I’m late already and we’re going to a card party,” he shouted back.
“So, enjoy it. Give Bessie my love, the children also.”
“Such a busy life they lead, those two. Never an evening by their own fireside,” Abraham muttered when the car had moved away. He wiped his feet on the porch mat, then followed Sarah inside the house and wiped them again on the extra one she had placed in the lobby to preserve the new carpet David had bought for them. “Every night with the card parties!”
“And where do the winnings go?” Sarah replied. “To the refugee fund, in case you’ve forgotten. A card player for the sake of it David isn’t.”
Abraham took off his hat and coat, and put on the shabby, black yamulke he always wore on his head indoors. “It’s someone’s birthday?” he asked, pausing in the kitchen doorway.
The table was covered with a lace cloth instead of the usual darned linen one, and it had been set with the best china and cutlery. A bowl of the Michaelmas daisies, which grew in profusion in the back garden, decorated the centre.
Sarah smiled at Abraham’s mystified expression. “My birthday is in March, and yours you had two weeks ago. Do you see anyone here but you and me?”
He gave the table another perplexed glance, then went into the scullery to wash his hands.
When he returned, Sarah was sitting by the hearth. “All he noticed is the table,” she said to the air. “That his wife is dressed in her finery, he doesn’t see.”
“I see that you haven’t got on the nice link of crystal beads David and Bessie brought you from Blackpool. A person could give you diamonds, and you’d still wear that brooch you brought from Dvinsk!”
Sarah fingered the small, gold filigree oval pinned to her collar. “So, it’s my favourite. But even if it wasn’t, I’d wear it to mark the occasion. Thirty years ago tonight, you weren’t driven home in a motor car, Abraham. We had no home and a horse and cart took us from the railway station to the Berkowitzes’ house.”
Abraham stared into the fire for a moment, then a long sigh escaped him. “It’s really that long?”
“In 1905 we fled here from the pogroms. You can’t add up any more? All day I’ve been thinking about it. And how we arrived in Manchester with only a shilling to our name.” Sarah’s smile grew reminiscent. “Which David wanted us to spend on a cab, remember? Such big ideas he had.”
“He hasn’t changed.” Abraham got up from his rocking chair and went to eye his reflection in the sideboard mirror, as Sarah had done that morning. “Red hair I had when we came!”
“Mine has gone grey, too.”
“But otherwise you don’t look much different,” he said, turning to survey her.
Sarah laughed and rose to bring a dish of sweet and sour mackerel to the table. “Put on your glasses and look at me again!”
“So, we’re not what we used to be, is that what we’re celebrating?” Abraham asked dryly as they sat down to eat.
“Thirty years of freedom’s what we’re celebrating,” Sarah answered quietly, dishing up the fish. “For Jews that’s something to celebrate. Especially now.”
Abraham contemplated the sprig of parsley garnishing his plate. “Maybe one day we’ll drink to Hitler’s downfall, like we did when the Tsar got what was coming to him.”
“The Tsar was toppled by his own people. Who is going to topple Hitler when the Germans believe in him as if he’s God?”
“So, what can you do?” Abraham sighed. But it was the age-old Jewish question, to which he expected and received no answer. “A nice celebration we’re having, with what you’ve just reminded us of.”
“A person can rejoice in their own good fortune without forgetting those who aren’t so lucky,” Sarah informed him. “You had a good day at the factory? I didn’t ask you yet.”
; “I haven’t had a good day since David put in those Hoffman presses.”
Sarah shook her head disapprovingly. “Something to make things easier for him my husband doesn’t like. He prefers those heavy flat irons, from which he’s got stooping shoulders and still gets pains in his arms after using them all those years.”
“So, I’m old-fashioned.”
“And if David was like you, where would the business be?”
“Still in his father-in-law’s house in Southall Street and he wouldn’t be having sleepless nights about his big overheads,” Abraham replied.
Sarah squeezed some lemon juice on to her mackerel and kept her thoughts to herself. She could not change her husband’s nature and saying too much would hurt his feelings. Abraham had never thought it necessary for people to strive for more than they had.
“How many meals can a person eat? How many clothes can they wear?” he asked as though he had read her mind. “But David is never satisfied. He’s got too much ambition.”
Too much is better than none, Sarah thought. When David had told her, he was moving to new premises, she had been anxious about his extending his business when others were cutting down their expenses. But he had said the time to do it was while property was cheap because times were bad. In good times a factory building would be beyond his resources, he’d explained. That had been two years ago and now trade had begun to pick up and Sarah was no longer worried. What David set out to do he always did, he was the only one of her four children who took after her.
“Fruit and cream on a week-night?” Abraham said when they had eaten their fish and Sarah brought the dessert to the table. “We really are celebrating!”
“But don’t mention we had a party to the children,” Sarah said guiltily. “We never had one without them before, they might be upset I didn’t invite them.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t.”
Sarah licked the cream off her spoon and smiled at him. “I wanted it to be just you and me. The children would make fun of me, they take freedom for granted.” Her expression clouded as memory carried her back. “To value it, you have to know what it’s like to be oppressed, Abraham.”
Chapter 2
When David arrived home, the house was unusually silent. Generally, Bessie’s voice shrilled from the kitchen the moment he opened the front door, upbraiding him for being late, and his children rushed into the lobby to greet him and share a wink because their mother was behaving true to pattern and it had become a secret joke between him and them.
“Where is everyone tonight?” he called.
The maid’s voice answered him mournfully, from the kitchen. “Summat’s ’appened, Mr. Sandberg.”
David saw his reflection pale, in the hallstand mirror, as he thought of some nameless catastrophe having befallen his children or his wife, in that order. Then Shirley and Ronald appeared at his side and his knees felt weak with relief. “Where’s your mother?” he asked them.
“It’s Mam it’s happened to,” Shirley replied, and Ronald burst out laughing.
“If you’re having a lark with me, I’ll lam the pair of you!” David barked though he had never laid a finger on either of them and knew he never would. He stalked through to the kitchen, where the angular Yorkshire housemaid, whose hands were never still, was seated on the overstuffed sofa, crocheting a white, rabbit-wool scarf for Shirley. “Where’s my wife, Lizzie?”
“At the ’airdressers, ’avin’ a perm, Mr. Sandberg.”
“At this time of night?”
“Summat went wrong wi’ t’solution’n ’er ’air’s fell out.”
“What!”
“It’s true, Daddy,” Shirley said. “She phoned up to tell us not to wait supper for her.”
“I don’t think I feel like any supper,” David muttered, trying not to imagine Bessie’s pudgy countenance without a frame of hair.
“Thi’re doin’ what thi can, ah expect, Mr. Sandberg,” Lizzie consoled him. “I expect that’s why t’missis ’asn’t come back yet.”
“I don’t see what they can do if there’s no hair to do it to,” Ronald said practically.
David controlled a shudder. “You and the kids sit down and eat, Lizzie. I’ll wait for Mrs. Sandberg.”
He went into the parlour and sat tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair, edgily, then fished in his jacket pocket for his packet of Goldflake. Some of his friends smoked cigars, but he had never learnt to enjoy them. Not in the way his late father-in-law had once prophesied he would, he thought as his mind swooped irrelevantly into the past.
Why had he suddenly remembered that? A picture of Isaac Salaman offering him a Havana swam before his eyes as he lit a cigarette. “I don’t smoke, Mr. Salaman,” he heard his own voice echo nervously down the years. Well, he smoked now, couldn’t open his eyes and start the day without one. Why had he ever started? he asked himself, stubbing the cigarette out. Was it living with Bessie that’d made him need something to calm his nerves? No, the need had been there before then.
He sat cracking his knuckles for a moment, then another voice echoed in his mind. “I wish you’d stop doing that, David. It sets me on edge!” Miriam’s voice. He’d begun smoking to stop cracking his knuckles, he recalled with a wry smile, and lit another cigarette absently, thinking of the heartache he could have saved himself if he’d known then what he knew now.
That there was no such thing as a love you couldn’t recover from. That Miriam would marry his brother Sammy and the passion he’d once felt for her would die away and be replaced by uncomplicated affection. That he could share his life with Bessie, though their marriage was founded on nothing more than a bargain; a business partnership coupled with Bessie’s hand, offered by Salaman the day he’d said David would learn to enjoy cigars.
Maybe the recollection hadn’t been irrelevant. Hadn’t the early years of his marriage been beset by Bessie’s anxiety about her plainness, compared with Miriam’s beauty? She had doubted that David could really care for her and had made him miserable because of it. Her self-doubt hadn’t been in evidence for some time. Would it return because of what had happened to her hair?
It’s how it’ll affect me I’m thinking of, David admitted to himself as he got up to find the beauty salon’s number in the telephone directory and was shocked because he had never considered himself a selfish man.
“What’ve you done to my wife, Ruby?” he said as lightly as he could when the hairdresser answered the phone.
“I hope you’re not going to sue me,” she replied nervously.
This had not entered David’s mind. “Don’t be daft!”
“My parents would have a stroke. The Cohens and the Sandbergs came over on the herring boat together,” she reminded him as if she were not convinced.
“What would I want to sue you for?” he asked impatiently.
“Money. Revenge, maybe.”
“Stop talking nonsense and let me talk to Bessie.”
“She left here nearly an hour ago. Perhaps she called somewhere on her way home.”
But David knew his wife would have done no such thing. He lit another cigarette and began pacing the room, eyeing Bessie’s collection of cut-glass ornaments which filled every nook and cranny and wondering where she could be. Losing her crowning glory would devastate any woman. It was enough to make one of Bessie’s mentality jump into the Irwell. Appearance was all to her, it always had been.
His fears were cut short by the sound of the front door opening. He rushed into the lobby and found Lizzie and the children there, too.
“It’s not the end of the world, love,” he said comfortingly as his wife removed her coat, but not the scarf swathed around her head.
“It is to me,” she replied in a quivering voice. “I’ve been walking the streets. I couldn’t even bear to come home.”
Shirley touched her own carroty ringlets self-consciously. “Your hair’ll grow again, Mam. Don’t be upset.”
“Course it will,” Lizzie said enco
uragingly.
“We’ll still love you even if it doesn’t,” Ronald declared. “But let’s see what you look like now, without your scarf. In case it does.”
His mother gave him a withering glance. “Nobody’s going to see what I look like, Ronald.” She glared at David as if he were responsible for her plight. “Nobody at all.”
David watched her walk upstairs, leaning heavily on the banister, and smiled reassuringly at the children. But an ominous sense of déjà vu had settled like lead in the pit of his stomach. Another stormy passage in his marriage had just begun.
Chapter 3
Marianne watched the high school boys and girls alight from a No. 11 tram. How she wished she was one of them, but next year perhaps she would be. If she’d been born a few months sooner, she’d have sat for the scholarship exam last winter when her cousin Martin did.
Her brother Arnold’s red head, under his Manchester Grammar School cap, and then her brother Harry’s dark one, capless, appeared in a noisy crush of lads jostling each other on to the pavement.
“What’re you doing here, our kid?” Harry inquired, loosening his Central High School tie.
“Where’s Martin?” she asked Arnold, ignoring Harry’s question.
“I’m not glued to him just because he goes to my school now. Maybe he couldn’t find his way out of the building, it takes the new boys ages to find their way around,” Arnold answered with the superiority of a second-former.
Marianne peered down Cheetham Hill Road to see if another tram was approaching.
“You’d better come home with us, it’s getting dark,” Harry said to her.
“I’m waiting for Martin.”
Arnold grinned. “It’s no use arguing with that one, Harry. She’s only little, but she knows her own mind.”
Marianne flicked her black fringe away from her eyes and glowered at him. “What if I am little? Cousin Shirley’s packs bigger than me, but she never comes top of the class.”