Ibrahim & Reenie

by David Llewellyn

  He was more than happy to marry Vera at the registry office on Plashet Grove, a subdued day that ended with the three of them – Albert, Vera and Reenie – eating a joyless supper at a West End restaurant. Then, little by little, things began to change. The pictures on the walls, the newspaper they read, the programmes they listened to on the radio. Not all at once, of course. That might have been too much. It took months for this to happen, but finally Vera gathered up the nerve to steer her new husband toward that mysterious grey building of stained-glass windows, creaking pews, and dog-eared Books of Common Prayer, and within a year of their marriage Albert Lieberman was spending his Sunday afternoons in church.

  At first the community said nothing. Albert was the survivor of something never discussed, at least not openly, among the grown-ups, not even in gossip, and perhaps this alone shielded him from the criticism any other man would have faced. The only person to say something, to say anything, was Mr Ostroff, and it was the last time he and Reenie’s father ever spoke to one another.

  ‘Listen, Avram,’ he said, his heavy, kind hands – a workman’s hands – gripping the edge of the kitchen table. He always called her father by his Hebrew name, Avram, never Albert. Reenie listened to them from the bottom of the stairs, and caught occasional glimpses of them by poking her head through the gap where one of the balusters had been kicked through long before they moved in.

  ‘It’s not that we disapprove…’

  ‘Then what would you call it?’ said Albert. ‘If not disapproval? Hmm? Prying? Is that the word for it?’

  ‘No, it’s just… we’re concerned.’

  ‘No, no. This is not concern. This is judgement. You prefer I meet a Jewish woman, yes? A nice Jewish widow or some nice young Jewish girl who doesn’t mind that I’m old and my hair is grey?’

  ‘We just think, what kind of lesson does this teach to Reenie, to your daughter?’

  ‘Her name is Irene.’

  ‘You know she is going to these dances, with boys?’

  ‘I know this. She goes there with girls. With her friends.’

  ‘But there are boys at these dances, Avram. And you want one day for her to marry a goy?’

  Albert laughed dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t care either way.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘I don’t? It’s the truth. I wouldn’t care. You would rather I keep her under lock and key? Like a strict father? You would prefer I be like you, grow a beard, wear black every day, as if I were still in mourning, as if I am always in mourning? Or should I go around speaking in Yiddish, like you and your friends? Because let me tell you, if it were to happen again, if it were to happen here, in London, in England, they will come for you first.’

  ‘Avram, what are you talking about?’

  ‘We would have been fine if it wasn’t for the Ostjuden. The Nazis, they were thugs, but they would have left us alone if it weren’t for them, with their way of dressing, their way of looking, talking Yiddish. We were Austrians. My family had lived in Vienna for a hundred and fifty years. Irina’s came from Russia in eighteen ninety-six. We looked like any other family. But not them. They came down from Galicia and they brought the shtetl with them. They had to be different.’

  ‘And what was so very wrong with being different?’

  ‘It got us killed.’

  ‘Avram…’

  ‘You have nothing to say to me. Nothing.’

  ‘Avram.’

  ‘My name is Albert. Now get out. Go.’

  His face scarlet, Mr Ostroff stomped out of the kitchen, breathing heavily through his nose. He saw her, Reenie, on the stairs, but said nothing; as if he had lost all right to even speak to her. Reenie stood, her hands gripping the banister, and looked through to the kitchen, waiting for her father to say something, to call out an apology, but he sat in silence, his hands clasped together tight enough to bleach the colour from his knuckles.

  ‘Papa?’ Her voice echoed off the hallway’s patterned tiles. Her father didn’t move.

  Reenie bolted from their house, leaving the front door open, and ran after Mr Ostroff. When she caught up with him he stopped walking, looked down at her and sighed. She had never seen him this way before, so defeated.

  ‘I’m sorry, Reenie,’ he said. ‘I’m not angry with your father. None of us are. We’re worried, that’s all. We probably won’t speak to one another for a while. I’m sorry.’

  Reenie returned to the house shuddering with anger, and went straight to her bedroom. How ungrateful her father had been. How dare he speak to Mr Ostroff – kind, lovely Mr Ostroff – like that?

  Months later, while walking home from school, Reenie passed the Ostroff’s house, and Mrs Ostroff came running out and called her name. She invited Reenie in for tea and cake, and the three of them – Reenie and Mr and Mrs Ostroff – sat together in the front room, the room they only ever used for special guests.

  ‘We’re going away,’ said Mrs Ostroff. ‘To Israel.’

  ‘On holiday?’ said Reenie.

  Mr Ostroff shook his head. ‘No. Not a holiday. We’re going there to live. A new country. My brother, from New York? He’s there now, with his family. He says the sun shines every day. It hardly ever rains. And the figs… he says the figs are incredible. And Mrs Ostroff and I… we aren’t getting any younger. And London is so cold.’

  It was the last time she saw them, and the three of them wept as they said their goodbyes. A few weeks after they had left, Reenie received a postcard. Blue skies and blue sea. Cream-coloured houses around the harbour at Haifa, and a Magen David stamped on its back. A message in Mrs Ostroff’s ever-so-neat handwriting, the last exchange of words between them.

  It was hard, despite the drabness of the woman, for Reenie not to blame everything on Vera, to imagine that everything was part of some devious scheme of hers. Was it she who had suggested they might change their surname, make it more English? Less German. Less Jewish. Her father only broached the subject once, and Reenie’s expression was enough to see it never raised again, but he must have drawn the idea from somewhere, or someone. At times Vera Lieberman – and how silly, how wrong that name sounded – seemed to Reenie a gentile Jezebel, luring Jewish men into her strange, exotic church.

  The decisive, climactic insult was Vera’s suggestion, one Sunday morning, that Reenie join them. Until then there’d been some tacit agreement that Reenie would stay at home on Sundays. She was old enough by then to look after herself, and there was invariably last-minute homework to be done for Monday morning. With this invitation, it felt as if Vera was making a final move in her domestic game of chess.

  It was impossible, six decades distant, for Reenie to remember precisely how thoughts led to action that afternoon. If she sat there, stewing in her anger, she could no longer remember it. Condensed by time, she remembered everything happening at once. Her father and Vera, dressed in their Sunday Best. The sound of the front door closing, the knocker bouncing against its brass plate. Running upstairs, packing a bag, leaving the house. Did all that take minutes or hours?

  A tantrum, that’s what it was. Just a tantrum. But she couldn’t turn back on it, couldn’t back down or give up. She had to keep going. Stopping meant it would catch up with her. And there was nowhere else for her to go now the Ostroffs had gone.

  She had no idea, no real plan. While her father and Vera spent their afternoon in church – rising for the tiresome hymns, sitting or kneeling or whatever it was goyim did for their dreary prayers – Reenie went about packing her belongings into the small, paisley-patterned case that had been her only companion on the crossing to Harwich. She searched in desperation for her mother’s photograph, but still couldn’t find it.

  By mid-afternoon she was on the District Line, heading west, with only a young girl’s notion that something would happen when she reached the bright lights of the West End; something brilliant and magical. Perhaps she’d meet a theatrical agent, and wouldn’t you know it? They were looking for a girl just like her t
o star in the next big show. Or perhaps she’d meet an exiled foreign prince, and they would strike up an unlikely romance. He would rescue her from the grey, bomb-scarred drudgery of East London, from her hand-me-down clothes and ration books, and she’d taste champagne for the first time, and wear dresses by Dior, like Rita Hayworth when she married Prince Aly Khan.

  In the event, Reenie found herself in a grubby café just off Piccadilly Circus, making a single cup of tea last more than an hour by taking tiny, bird-like sips until it was tepid. The sky grew dark, and the walls of the buildings outside were lit up in gaudy shades of red, pink and blue by the Circus’ electric lights. A man in a cheap, ill-fitting suit propositioned her with words she didn’t quite understand, and when she left the café he followed her as far as Charing Cross Road, falling back and vanishing only when she stopped to ask a policeman for directions.

  With what little money she had, Reenie checked into a hotel near Covent Garden, and the woman on the reception – large-breasted but haggard, with a towering peroxide blonde bouffant and a rose tattooed on her hand – studied her over the green plastic rims of her cat-eye glasses.

  ‘You’re not having company in there, are you?’

  ‘Company?’ It took a second or two for Reenie to realise what the older woman meant. ‘No. No company.’

  By the following night she had almost run out of money, and years later she realised that if there had been an opportunity for her to go back to her father and Vera with a brace of apologies, that was it, that was the night, but she couldn’t. Behind her was a force, a momentum, driving her on, further west, further away, and from what? Not just Albert and Vera and the invitation to join them in church. Not just Harold Road and Friday night dances in Bethnal Green and Limehouse. Not just the grim certainty of leaving school to work in an office or – if she didn’t do so well in her O Levels – a factory before settling down with a Nice Local Boy and making lots of Nice Children.

  No. She ran away from all those things, but above all she ran away from her life’s two pillars, the grief and sympathy of others, and in running hoped she might become more than just the young girl on the ferry with the little paisley bag.

  ‘Synchronicity, yeah?’ said Womble; eyes bloodshot, eyelids drooping. ‘Everything happens for a reason, Reenie. Did you know, when they were making The Wizard of Oz, you know… the film… with Judy Garland… the costume department were looking for a coat for the Wizard to wear, and they found this coat in a flea market, and it was perfect. And only when they’d finished making the film did they find out the coat’s original owner was L. Frank Baum. The guy who wrote The Wizard of Oz. Straight up. True story. He owned the coat. When he died, it got sold on, ended up in a flea market, and then used as a prop in the film based on his book. See what I’m getting at?’

  She nodded, humouring him, but viewed through sober eyes the scene around her was depressing. Womble, Casper and their friends acted as if they were on some sort of quest, attacking each new substance – joints and pills and spindly brown bouquets of dried mushrooms – with an almost military intent. Philosophical rambling gave way to unfinished sentences and bouts of giggling. The girl who had described herself as a traveller spent half an hour staring at a pebble in the palm of her hand, while Shabby Jesus closed his eyes and held up his hands as if shaping some massive, floating ball of clay.

  Reenie couldn’t quite remember what brought her here in the first place. Curiosity, perhaps. Good old-fashioned nosiness. She’d always been a nosey one. Inquisitive, she’d rather call it, remembering how a school teacher once told her that if she carried on like that her nose would grow, like Pinocchio’s, and she had replied by telling the teacher Pinocchio’s nose grew because he lied, not because he was nosey.

  One hundred lines (‘I will not answer back’) and a slap across the palm of her hand with a wooden ruler.

  But it wasn’t prying if you needed to know something, and she had needed to know for herself, to know what drove them; what, if anything, inspired them. She had spent so much time indoors, never talking to anyone, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to anyone their age. There was Ibrahim, but he didn’t count. He seemed old beyond his years. But these kids… these kids…

  And look at them. Hanging on his every word. A man old enough to be their father – their grandfather, some of them – and he calls himself Womble. And they sit around him as if he’s an oracle, the fount of all knowledge, and when he opens his mouth, what does he say?

  ‘I’m just overcome by the… thinginess… of it all.’

  Thinginess? Thinginess?

  And the kids all nodded and hummed as if the Womble’s words had illuminated the greatest of life’s mysteries.

  Reenie had seen and heard enough. She got up without saying goodbye, and went back to her tent, leaving the noise and lights of the party behind her. At first, she worried she might not sleep, but the day’s walking had drained her. She passed out to the distant thudding of a synthesized bass drum and the howls and the cheers of those still dancing.

  When she woke she could still hear the music. It was getting light, a strawberry-coloured sun creeping up out of the haze, and as it got lighter still a row of electricity pylons drew long shadows across the barren field. Looking up toward the farmhouse, Reenie saw the campfires had died out; a jaundiced kind of smoke drifting from their embers. Everything about the farmyard and the party looked dead, desiccated, used up and burnt out, but there was still music playing, and human shapes staggering around in the dawn, clinging on to straw-prickled blankets and almost-empty bottles of cider and wine. Had no one told them the party was over; that it must have ended hours ago?

  Reenie splashed water on her face, made herself a cup of tea, then ate some bread, just enough to take the edge off a rumbling stomach, and began packing away her things. The field was soft and spongy with morning dew, and she had some difficulty steering the trolley back to the road. As she carried on, along the London Road and toward the village of Marshfield, the music from the party grew quieter and quieter until she could no longer hear it at all.

  10

  When Nigel first took her there, Gemma told him it was the most beautiful sunset she’d ever seen. They’d walked out over the Big Field, to the edge of the copse, and watched the sun set over the channel. Funny how the Severn could look so mucky in the daytime, even on a summer’s day, all brown with silt and God knows what else, but get a few sunbeams bouncing off it and it looked quite pretty. He had known this before taking her there. Knew just the right time, when the light would be perfect, just right, when it would be at its most romantic.

  Even so, for his money the sunrises were better than the sunsets. There was something magical about the early morning, the day fresh and new. Sometimes the sun would come up blood red and boiling, and there was a stillness and a silence, not like in the evening. In the evening you might hear cars on the nearest road and planes passing overhead, the tractors and haymakers on neighbouring farms, but in the morning it was almost silent. The early morning, when his wife and son were still asleep, was when Nigel did all his thinking.

  Or perhaps ‘worrying’ was a better word for it. And what better time and place for him to worry than when he could be alone, surveying all that was his. Though, of course, it wasn’t his, not truly. The fields and the farmhouse, the place where he grew up, they belonged to the bank. He owned some, but not much of it. The cattle were his, more or less. The sugar beet and the barley were his. But the soil, and the space, these belonged to people far away; faceless, nameless men and women he would never meet.

  The letters they sent, each one more aggressive than the last, had signatures printed rather than written onto them, and he doubted that the signatory had so much as glanced at each one before it was sent. He knew how these things worked.

  Gemma never saw the letters, and so had no idea just how much they stood to lose. He had told her they couldn’t take a holiday that year – just as they couldn’t the year
before – because he was so busy with things. He couldn’t afford to take a whole week off. Who would run things while he was away?

  He sometimes felt that he was born at the wrong time, in the wrong age. Hadn’t there once been a place for men like him? Men who knew and understood the land, and were passionate about nothing else? If he’d been born a hundred years earlier it would have been easier. A hundred years ago he’d have known where he stood, who owned his farm, who would buy what he had to sell. And he’d have been paid a fair price for it all, too. Wouldn’t have to rely on handouts. He hated that most of all. His father had never relied on handouts, at least not when he got started. The food on his table and the money in his bank were his, the product of hard graft, as witnessed by the callouses tough as leather on his big hands and the permanent scythes of dirt beneath his fingernails.

  Nigel was getting hands like his father, the palms more leathery with each season. In one of his hands something had worked its way loose; a little ball-like nub of bone or gristle floating about near the knuckle of his third finger. Could be a ganglion cyst, Gemma said, but it had been there three months and showed no sign of subsiding. He told her he would get it checked out by the doctor some time, but he hadn’t visited a doctor in years.

  Near the cowshed, out of view of the house, he lit a cigarette. He’d cut down to just two a day; one in the morning and one last thing at night. Sometimes Gemma would smell it on him, and she’d tut and shake her head, but so long as he didn’t smoke around Josh she didn’t mind so much. Without his first cigarette he’d spend the morning like a coiled spring, wound tighter and tighter, the tension bunching up in the back of his neck. Stupid things, daft things annoyed him. He’d kick something or throw something, and sometimes would feel as if he was about to cry for no reason at all. Without the last cigarette, smoked just before he went to bed, he couldn’t sleep. Instead he would lie there, staring at the ceiling, imagining everything that could happen to them in painstaking detail. The bailiffs and the auctions and the move to a small house somewhere in town. Tiny little garden out the back, probably decked over or covered in paving slabs. Nowhere for Josh to run around. And in the mornings just the sound of traffic rumbling past as their neighbours set off for day jobs in Gloucester or Chepstow. A night spent thinking this way left him exhausted by the time his alarm went off, feeling hollowed out and angry at everything and nothing.