The main street into which the finally came mad him blink, so wide and important did it look to his Lublin trained eyes.
‘Where are we?’ he asked, panting a little, for the little man was a fast walker and made no concessions to Nathan’s recent adventure. ‘Is this the main street of London?’
‘Leman Street, the main street of London?’ The man laughed then, turning to stare at Nathan over his shoulder. ‘Oy, oy, but you really are a greener! A know-nothing! This is just Leman Street If you make good, get some money together, dress right, maybe one day you'll really see the main street, one of them. Piccadilly, Regent Street, Bond Street, now those you call a street! This is just a hovel, a sty compared to them!’ Laughing with delight at his own greater sophistication he led Nathan to a tall flat faced building with a short flight of steps leading up to its front door.
‘The Jews' Temporary Shelter,’ he said with some pride. ‘How’s this for a splendid place, hey? You never saw anything like this in the haim, did you?’
Nathan lifted his chin. ‘I saw big places. Bigger than this,’ he said with studied casualness. He was still smarting from the little man’s scorn at his reaction to Leman Street. ‘I was in the army, you know. Got a medal. I saw a lot.
But the little man wasn’t listening, hurrying up the steps to open the door and usher Nathan inside.
It was sparse and bleak. A big room where the residents prayed three times a day, and also ate their meals, an office for the superintendent, a tall rabbinical looking man with a soft blond beard and a richly embroidered satin yarmulka on his head, and uncarpeted stairs which led to a series of dormitories where beds, each equipped with a striped ticking pillow and a pair of rough blankets, stretched in silent rows.
The little man showed him into the office and nodding cheerfully at Nathan went bustling away. Not till after he had gone did Nathan realize he hadn’t thanked him properly for his help, and he felt bad about that for a moment. ‘I'll tell him next time I see him, he promised himself (though in fact he never did see him again) and sat down on the only chair in the small, cluttered room, resting his head in one hand. He was beginning to feel the pain in his shoulders and neck more now.
The superintendent, who had followed the little man out, came back and Nathan, like the trained soldier he was, stood up and the superintendent looked approving and nodded at him.
‘So, my boy, who are you?’ he said. His voice was pleasant to listen to, a cultured yeshiva trained voice that Nathan found reassuring.
Without thinking, he drew himself up to his full height and snapped his arm in a salute, swinging his elbow wide so that his medal, still pinned firmly to his right breast, could be clearly seen. ‘Lazar, Nathan, Private. The Fifteenth Regiment, sir,’ he said, and then winced as the pain in his shoulders reminded him where Sam’s thumb had dug in so cruelly.
‘No need for that,’ the superintendent said sharply. ‘None at all, Here we have no problems about the Tsar’s army. So, let’s get you registered.’
The questions were comprehensive. Place of birth, date of birth, everything that could be thought of. Nathan answered happily, feeling his sense of security growing. Proper documentation at last.
‘So, you're looking for your family?’ the man said finally, as he blotted his ledger. ‘I can tell you, there’s a small group of families from Lublin over in Chicksand Street, the other side of Whitechapel Road, came a while ago, I'm told. They may know some of your landsleit, hmm? People from your part of your shtetl. Tomorrow, after morning prayers, you go and see them. After the bath, of course.’
The bath turned out to be a Russian vapour bath a ten minute walk away to which Nathan and all the other new arrivals had to go in line like schoolchildren. Not that Nathan minded. He felt dirty, and was ashamed of his unshaven cheeks and grimy hands and his dirty clothes. About them he could do nothing. No one could provide a change of linen, as they could loan a razor. But at least he emerged fresh faced, his scarf knotted round his neck to hide both his dirty collar and his bruises, to set about his first full day in London.
It was a better day than the previous one. The sky was a heavy leaden grey but the fog had gone leaving only a hint of sulphur behind it and he cold see both ends of the street clearly. It was a bustling street, lined with shops and almost choked with traffic. He stared, fascinated. His native energy and hopefulness was rising in him again, and he felt capable of coping with anything. Anyway, any minute now he would find his family, of course he would. Hadn’t that blond bearded rabbi said so last night?
Back at the Shelter they were given breakfast, black bread and margarine and that same stewed heavily sweetened tea he had had last night, with milk in it. He grimaced a little, preferring the familiar Russian style tea, clear and weak with a lemon slice and drunk through a sugar lump held between the teeth. But it was plentiful fare, and he was hungry. His next meal, he promised himself, would be of his momma' cooking.
In fact it took three days to find them. It seemed to him an eternity of tramping down street after street, looking for people of his own shtetl, asking stranger after stranger. He went in and out of the little shops, places where they sold salt herrings and pickled cucumbers and soft sweet kierchel biscuits like those he had loved so at home in Rivka' kitchen; in and out of workshops and yards where they thought he was looking for a job and sometimes offered one to him. But he wasn’t interested in work. He had a family to find, a rich family who would soon make him all well, with the insurance money safely collected because he had gone into the army to make it possible.
Antcliff Street, someone told him. There are some Lubliners in Antcliff Street. A Miller? No miller. Just an old man who sells a few things, from a tray, in Watney Street market. Go up the Commercial Road, they said to him, ten minutes, twenty minutes. You walk slow it’s twenty minutes, you walk fast it’s ten minutes, past Cannon Street Road and Cavell Street till you come to Sidney Street. That isn’t it. It’s not the next street either, you go into Bromehead Road the next one along and the next on the right, this hand, not that one, the right hand, that’s Antcliffe Street …
He escaped the garrulous women who were so eagerly giving him this information in an interval of buying a pair of salt herrings and a pound of black bread, and starting walking, feeling hope skulking low in his belly. When he started three days ago - was it so short a time? It felt like an eternity - he had been sure he would find them at any moment. Now his hope was dwindling, and he was beginning to fear that something had gone dreadfully, horribly wrong. Maybe they hadn’t come to London at all. Maybe they’d gone on to New York, for they had a lot of money, after all. The insurance money would have made them rich. Maybe they’ve gone to New York and I’ve got to get there too and where do I get money of that sort? And what happens if I don’t? Do I never see Momma and Poppa again? Never see Bloomah again?
That was the first time he had allowed himself to think of Bloomah for a long time. Firmly he pushed the vision of her face away. Find Momma and Poppa first. First things first. And if he didn’t find them today, he’d see what he could do about New York. Maybe he could manage it the way he’d managed the journey from Brody. It could be done, surely?
He walked on, brooding on ways and mans of making the Atlantic crossing, and almost missed his directions. It was Bromehead Road he turned into at last, a narrow street with matching rows of small houses, each with a front door and one window at ground level and two windows on the level above. There were children playing in the street, running noisily from door to door and shrieking at each other as children always do. Feeling old, he picked his way among them till he was on the corner of Antcliff Street. Number nine, they had said. That’s the house.
It was a tiny house exactly like all the others. The front door stood open and he banged on it with his fist a couple of times, peering into the narrow hallway. He could just see the bare boards of the floor and a door beyond, and on the left a staircase rising steeply into the darkness. The place smelled of c
ats and carbolic soap and the lingering smell of cooking, and suddenly he was home again. His mother was rendering down chicken fat, cutting the yellow slabs into little lumps, throwing them in a pan with a chopped onion to fry until the fat ran liquid gold and could be poured safely into a basin leaving crisp fat pieces and the crunchy onion to be piled on a price of fresh rye bread. His mouth watered at the memory, so did his eyes.
The door at the end of the hallway creaked open and an old woman came shuffling towards him, staring suspiciously. He said carefully, ‘I'm looking for my parents - Rivka and Lazar. From Lublin. You might know if they are here? I was told maybe … ’
The old woman turned and shuffled back the way she had come wordlessly, but she jerked her head at the staircase and after a moment he stepped over the threshold and began to climb.
The smell of frying chicken fat and onions became stronger and for the first time in three days his hope began to burgeon. It really did smell so much like Rivka’s kitchen.
The door at the top of the stairs was ajar and he pushed it open, and stood there looking in.
She was standing beside the fire, a pan in her hand. She turned at the sound of the door and stared at him, holding the pan awkwardly in fro of her. After a moment she held it out towards him and said, 'Greben, Nathan. You want some of Momma’s greben?’
The tears were over. The hugging and the exclaiming and explaining were dying down. His shirt and underwear were drying in front of the fire, and he was sitting wrapped in a blanket a glass of schnapps in one hand and a piece of freshly baked sugar-strewn kugel in the other. His mother was sitting on the other side of the fire staring at him as though it were the only way to keep him safe, as though turning her gaze away from him would make him disappear. He laughed with the sheer joy of looking at her, and drank his schnapps and held out his glass for more.
‘So, tell me Momma, everything that’s happened. I must know everything. Where’s Reuden? Where are Benjamin and Alexander? And why do you live in this little place? I mean, with the money from the mill you should be better that this.’
He looked around, trying to see the home they had had back in Lublin. They hadn’t been rich, but they had been comfortable enough. Solid furniture hewn from whole trees; rich red curtains in the windows, plenty of handsome gold decorated dishes on their shelves and a fine brass samovar on a lace clothed table in the corner. He could see it all clearly, superimposed on this tiny shabby place with its rickety table made of cheap pine and its four straight backed chairs, one with a rope tying in place the broken strut at the back. The wooden floor bare, with a couple of old sacks spread over it, and the grimy wooden box in which some pans, a kettle and a few coarse white plates stood. The fire was warm and the pot on it smelled good, but it wasn’t what it had been at home.
‘Why are living here, Momma?’ he repeated. ‘ With all that money?’
‘You'll have to ask your Poppa,’ she said and got to her feet. ‘Listen, Bobbalah, the clothes are dry. You put them on, hey? Better you should be dressed. I can’t iron them, on account I got no iron, but I pulled them straight as I could. Soon maybe we get an iron and then you'll look better, hey? When we get an iron … ’
His father came in just as he was putting on his boots again still nagging at his mother to explain. He straightened up as the old man came in and stared at him across the tiny room. And Nathan could have cried.
He had never been a big man, Lazar Ben Chaim. Spare and wiry, really. But now, he looked like a thread. His hair, a vigorous pepper and salt when Nathan had last seen him, had become a thin and straggly grey. His face was lined and bitten with fatigue and at the sight of him the words that had been pouring out of Nathan as he questioned Rivka dried up completely.
‘Nathan?’ Lazar said after a long moment. ‘Nathan?’ He set down the tray he was carrying on straps across his shoulders. It had toys on it, cheap little tin things with clockwork interiors that sat there, pathetic in their gaudy colours.
The exclaiming and weeping started all over again, but with less enthusiasm on Nathan’s side this time. Something had obviously gone dreadfully wrong. His vision of a peaceful and comfortable life with his parents made affluent by the insurance money his army service had brought them began to recede rapidly down the corridors of his imagination.
They ate then, the three of them round the rickety table, a bowl of soup and black bread to bulk it out.
‘Not a proper soup, bobbalah,’ his mother apologized. ‘A whole chicken I can’t manage this week. Giblets and a bit of schmaltz from the butcher, so I can make soup, a few knaidlech – you got to have chicken fat to make good dumplings, this your remember! – but a whole chicken? Next week maybe.’ She shot a sideways glance at Lazar, silent on the other wide of the table, and then clamped her lips tightly closed.
They are silently, listening to Nathan telling of his exploits. He told them of the medal, of course, and how he got it, though they were left rather confused about the details.
But even he couldn’t keep it up for long, and by the time they were drinking tea, proper Russian tea with lemon and sugar lumps, all three were silent again, watching the candle in the battered pewter candlestick and the firelight as the last of the day’s coal burned down.
When he’d finished his tea, Nathan took a deep breath and leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on the table.
‘So, Momma, Poppa?’ he said. ‘What’s happened? Where is Reuben? Where are Benjamin and Alex? And where’s the insurance money I worked so hard for? I'm here now and it’s time I had my share, isn’t it? What happened to it?’
16
Mary Lammeck did not think she would ever be able to cry again. She had wept for three days, waking with tears in her eyes, feeling them trickle down her cheeks as her maid opened her curtains and the nurse came padding across the heavy carpet to start the day’s fussing, continuing all though the morning and on into the long afternoon and evening.
When Emmanuel came, as he did punctiliously each morning before he left for the office, she did her best to hide her misery for she knew it angered him, but failed every time, for she was too weak and too drained to exert any control at all. He would stand beside the bed looking down at her as she lay there her face turned to the pillow and breathe in sharply through his nose and then pat her shoulder, at first awkwardly and the as the days passed an the same pattern persisted, with some asperity and bid her cheer up and escape with relief to Lammeck Alley.
It was worse when her mother-in-law came each day after the nurse had taken away her untouched luncheon tray, and sat there silent and majestic beside her. Mary knew perfectly well how much efforts Augusta was putting into remaining silent. Had she given vent to her feelings Mary had no doubt at all that the result would have been a tidal wave of reproach. Hadn’t Augusta herself given birth five times with no mishaps at all? Had not each and every one of her infants been born exactly when it should have been, bawling and lusty? How could she not fail to despise such a one as Mary, who could not even carry her first pregnancy beyond seven months, and then produced so puny a child that it had gasped but once and died?
Yet Augusta sat silent, preventing any word of reproach from passing her lips, and that made Mary feel worse. Even complaint would have been better than silent contempt. And she would weep even more helplessly, lying there with her eyes closed and the tears pushing through her lids to slide down her pallid cheeks and soak her pillow.
In fact, she did Augusta an injustice. Augusta did in truth feel sympathy for her daughter-in-law, little though she had ever found in her to admire. To have spent thirty-seven hours in painful labour only to have a dead baby at the end and then to be told by the doctors that she had been so appallingly damaged by her experience that she could never hope to have another pregnancy, was to Augusta, healthy vigorous Augusta, quite dreadful. Poor pathetic creature that Mary was. It really was too sad.
But her sadness for Mary was as nothing as compared to her distress on her s
on’s behalf. That so splendid a boy as her Emmanuel should be deprived of children of his own blood was a dreadful thing; so dreadful that she had hoped for a couple of days after Mary was first delivered that the poor wretched child would succumb to loss of blood and general weakness. A wicked thought she knew, but understandable, surely, for such an eventuality would have relieved the situation so … we, so neatly.
But Mary somehow survived to weep the days away, and Augusta would come and sit beside her every afternoon as a mother-in-law should and watch her weep and failing to find anything useful to say would say nothing. Mary would lie there praying for her to go, and then she had, weep for her to return for even a silent reproachful mother-in-law was better than having no mother at all.
Now, four days after they had taken away that scrap of red haired infant, so dead and helpless in her little white shawl, she at last stopped crying. It was though the pool of tears that had filled her belly had at last dried up leaving her desiccated and incapable of further distress. She just lay and stared the elaborate loops of Nottingham lace that swathed the three windows of her huge bedroom and listened to the way the traffic outside became muffled as it passed over the straw that had been laid in the street beneath. ‘It would have been better for everyone if I had died,’ she thought bleakly. ‘Much better.’ She didn’t care at all that it was a wicked thought and ungrateful to a good God who had seen fit to spare her life.
That afternoon for the first time Fay came to see her. Mary had expressly asked in the beginning that she should not come; the only thought she had had for anyone apart from herself in those first dreadful days had been that she wanted Fay protected from her distress. The nurse and doctors had been glad enough to enforce her wish. They would have banished everyone but Emmanuel from visiting if they could, but even the most celebrated accoucheur in London and the most expensive physician could not prevail against Augusta Lammeck, and wisely had not tried to do so.
The Running Years Page 16