How crushing it must have been for him to face that single truth; that his daughter had become a stranger, that to her he was as intangible as an imaginary friend – powerful when invisible and silent, but bound to disappoint in the flesh. She’d created an image of him as the conquering hero, fighting his way across Europe in a one-man struggle against the Nazis (she imagined him as Clark Gable or perhaps Gary Cooper, socking Hitler in the jaw with an impressive right hook), but when he arrived he was gaunt and frail, and spoke a language she didn’t understand. Whole afternoons he would spend in their sitting room, listening to a recording of Bach’s Cantata 159, and when he was in there, listening to that piece of music, he would say nothing, and could not be spoken to. He didn’t look or sound like a hero, and so his daughter never thought of him as one, but perhaps seeing her again, and having her with him, was enough for him to taste a kind of victory, if only for a short while.
The shoebox full of trinkets became a trophy, then, of sorts. A small, shambolic memento of that brief time when Albert Lieberman, the conquering hero of his daughter’s imagination, was winning, when it looked as if they might make it, that they might not lose everything.
His grave lay only a few blocks from the gates, a short distance from the attendant’s house and the small shelter where visitors could wash their hands. Luckily for her, his grave faced out onto one of the wider paths – it wasn’t tucked in tight behind another row of graves – but on both sides of him were the graves of strangers, and every headstone told a story.
To his left, the wide resting place of a couple who had lived into their nineties, dying within a month of each other. To his right, twin boys who died the day they were born. All strangers.
Her father’s headstone was of plain, black marble; the Star of David, a line of Hebrew, his name, his real name, Avram, and the dates he was born and died written out in gold script. Below that, the inscription:
Father of Irene and Dorothy.
Beloved husband of
Irina (née Epstein) (1912-1943)
who perished in the Shoah
And Vera (née Brown)
Perished. Such an old-fashioned word. So polite. Nobody would say ‘perished’ these days. And it wasn’t the word she would use. That bitterness almost blinded her to the sight of her own name, carved into the marble as if it belonged to someone else, but there it was: Father of Irene and Dorothy. As if she and Dorothy had grown up together, known each other.
Reenie reached into her bag and took out the pebble – palm-sized, smooth, a bluish grey – which she had brought from her garden in Cardiff, and she placed it at the base of the headstone. Something to say she was there, that someone had visited him, that he wasn’t always alone.
His gravestone was practically new, the marble gleaming and the lettering unblemished, just as Lauren had said it would be. A replacement. But Reenie was too tired for anger. Those emotions required a strength she simply didn’t have. It was easier for her to be relieved. Relieved that she had got there, relieved to find the headstone was replaced, relieved she would never have to see it in whatever state those bastards left it.
There were donations from strangers, Lauren told her. Some as far away as America. People who heard about the vandalism and gave money when Reenie hadn’t even known, hadn’t even heard or read about it. On her way across the cemetery she passed headstones that had subsided, and a workman toiling at levelling one out by hammering slabs of stone beneath one of its corners. The dull smack of the mallet still echoed across the cemetery. Other headstones were worn and weathered, wind and rain bleeding the colour from their inscriptions, but her father’s grave looked bold and new, and if it didn’t bear the date of his death in both calendars, she may have thought he’d passed recently.
She looked at those dates and tried to remember where she had been and what she had done that day; tried to recall if there had been a moment, however brief, when she had felt his passing. She wondered if she thought of him at all that day. She had heard friends talk about times when they felt such pangs of sadness, synchronised invariably with remote incidents of injury or death. In these stories a relative of theirs had died, and at that very moment and before hearing the news they smelled that loved one’s perfume, suffered a migraine, or were seized by melancholy. Why, if these things were possible, hadn’t this happened to her that day?
She had felt nothing. In time it became almost inevitable he must have died, but the uncertainty of it, the lack of proof, and of a date, something to pinpoint the moment of his death, meant she never truly grieved. Had anyone sat shiva for him? Did anyone recite Kaddish at his graveside? There were no sons, no brothers who survived. No man other than the rabbi. And so, alone and sitting on the hard ground beside his grave, Reenie began reciting the prayer; a prayer she had last said aloud for Jonathan.
‘Yitgadal viyitkadash shimay rabbah…’
Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world…
The words, from a language all but dead, came easily to her, and she wondered if only this prayer, with its harsh, foreign sounds, could properly mine the seam of loss inside her. It didn’t matter that the deceased aren’t mentioned once, that the prayer is about everything other than death. ‘May his great name be blessed forever and into eternity’ is what she said (‘Yehe shimay rabbah mevorakh le alam ul alme almaya’) and These are the words we say when we’re grieving was what she thought. These are the words we say when we’re grieving, just as ‘I love you’ are the words we say when there are too many words, and ‘I’m sorry’ when there are too few. And she kept thinking this until, unfalteringly, she had reached the prayer’s end.
‘Vimru: Amein.’
And let us say: Amen.
At 4pm she heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel, and glanced up to see the attendant, middle-aged with a grey beard and thick-framed glasses, walking towards her. When he was nearby he stopped for a moment, blinking at the grave, then Reenie.
‘Are you a relative?’ he asked, cheerily.
‘I was,’ said Reenie. ‘I am.’ She looked at the solitary grey pebble resting beside the headstone, then up at the attendant. ‘Do me a favour, love,’ she said. ‘Sitting down’s easy. Getting up again’s the hard part.’
The attendant helped her to her feet and walked her back across the cemetery to the gates. ‘Feel free to visit us again,’ he said, with a warm smile, but Reenie left the cemetery knowing she would never come back.
At the junction of Green Street and Barking Road she thought she saw Ibrahim, just fleetingly, in a car that passed by as she waited for the lights to change. For a moment she was convinced it was him, but the young man in the car didn’t notice her. His eyes were focused on the road ahead, his expression faraway. Looked just like him. She almost waved, but thought better of it. Couldn’t be him, London was too big, and she no longer trusted her eyesight. Had to be someone else, a coincidence. Someone who looked like him. But whoever that young man in the car was, she hoped Ibrahim was safe, that he had reached his destination, found whatever it was he was walking to.
Reenie was so very tired, the pain in her feet and legs so constant, she struggled to remember a time when she hadn’t felt it.
At Upton Park, on a crowded platform, she waited. A pair of teenage girls listened to music through shared headphones. A heavyset black man in luminous labourer’s jacket and woolly hat rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. Three lads, tall and wiry and clad in tracksuits, stared lustfully at the headphone-sharing girls, but looked the other way the moment the girls noticed them. A white man in an ill-fitting grey suit, one of the few white men on the platform, checked his wristwatch and leaned out from the crowd to scan the tracks for an incoming train. Then the rails began to jangle, and with a metallic sigh the train came sweeping in. The doors opened, passengers got off, passengers got on, and Reenie began her journey back across the city.
Back, but to where? She was too exhausted to give it much thought. Her hands tingled with
the cold and her feet throbbed inside her very damp and very old hiking boots. Perhaps she could shut her eyes and sleep a while.
She rested her head wearily against the window and looked out at a shifting horizon of skyscrapers where there had once been warehouses and cranes. Beyond the towers of Canary Wharf the sky was darkening like a frown. The clouds swallowed half the sky, and they resembled geological formations, high ridges and canyons bruised pink and purple by the setting sun; a world above the world. They looked hard, unmoveable, as if carved from something much more solid, more constant than vapour, and Reenie remembered her father telling her that in Vienna, when she could have been no older than three, she had once mistaken such clouds for snow-covered mountains. She had only the vaguest memories of that day, but her father remembered it clearly.
‘We were travelling home from the zoo at Schöenbrunn,’ he said. ‘It was late winter, February, I think. Just the three of us. That month was quiet. What is it they say, in English? The calm before the storm. Things were becoming very bad for us. We didn’t leave our neighbourhood very often, it wasn’t safe. But that day we went from one side of Vienna to the other. And we looked like any other family. It was cold. Crisp, and beautiful, and sunny. But by the time we left Schöenbrunn there were large clouds in the sky.
‘I was carrying you on my shoulders, like piggyback, yes? And you pointed at the clouds, and you shouted at the top of your voice, “Berge! Berge!” Mountains! Mountains!
‘And I said to you, “Nein, meine Liebling. Sie sind keine Berge. Sie sind Wolken…” I said, They’re not mountains, darling, they’re clouds, but you did not believe me. No matter how hard I tried to tell you, you wouldn’t believe me. You were so stubborn at that age. Well. How could I convince you? So I said, You shall see, darling. They may look like mountains now, but when you wake up in the morning, each and every one of them will be gone.’
Acknowledgments
A number of books helped furnish Ibrahim & Reenie with detail, in particular Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War, Balti Britain by Ziauddin Sardar, The Islamist by Ed Husain, Radical by Maajid Nawaz, Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Islam and Its Discontents, The Mystery of the Kaddish by Leon Charney and Saul Mayzlish, The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan, and Kerry’s Children by Ellen Davis. Any factual errors or misunderstandings are mine, and not the authors’.
Where I’ve quoted from works of Sufi poetry those translations are taken from Penguin Books’ Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, edited by Mahmood Jamal, and Farid Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis.
The insights into brain injury provided by Tim Williamson and Dave Hampson couldn’t have been gleaned from any book, and were very much appreciated, as was the input of Tim Wells, Zahra Ullah and Jeni Williams.
Finally, I would like to thank Christine and Brian Stone for telling me the story that inspired this novel and Dan Edwards for providing me with the garden, table and chair – not to mention the hope – to begin writing it.
About the Author
David Llewellyn was born in Pontypool in 1978. His novels include Eleven and Everything is Sinister. He lives with his partner in Cardiff.
Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd
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© David Llewellyn
Print ISBN 978-1-78172-081-3
Ebook ISBN 978-1-78172-083-7
The right of David Llewellyn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council
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