Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  ‘Well . . .’ she belched a little behind her hand. Benjamin exploded with the giggles and I kicked him. Mother and Father wore their polite faces, smiles fixed, eyes a little wide, though Mother kept glancing at the window which trembled loosely in its frame with every passing cart and motorbus. ‘If it is not a trouble. A short letter only. I have tinned beef and peaches and my cousin’s family are very hungry.’

  ‘It is no better?’ Father asked. ‘We have no letters for a little while. Your parcels are arriving?’

  ‘Some I think, yes. But, you know, there is not even so much milk for the baby.’

  ‘But we have some milk powder,’ Mother said quietly, the first thing she had said since we came home from school. Father gave me a look that was technically irreproachable but whose timing made it secret, risqué. I loved him fiercely for a moment.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed, leaving me to stifle a grin. ‘Send our milk, while you are making a parcel. The children have milk at school.’

  ‘Never. I cannot take children’s milk, Mr Jacob.’

  ‘Of course, take. They are fat. Look at my sturdy little Hannah! The baby must have milk.’

  Mother was already in the cupboard, fishing for the box. She knocked a bag of porridge to the floor where it scattered wide. ‘Oh my!’ I watched her, wondering whether she would cry.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Jacob, look what I make you.’

  ‘It is nothing,’ Father said. ‘Hannah, you take the milk up for Mrs Reznik. We clean up here. Boys, come. Help Mother.’

  He stood and took the box from Mother, who kept her back to the room as she bent down to fetch the dustpan and brush from under the basin. His hand was on her shoulder. What was wrong with her? It was only porridge. None of us liked it anyway. There was never enough sugar to make it palatable. Father let us have sherbet from the shop but that just made it claggy and rather sickly.

  I went to Father and took the box. ‘That’s it, little Hannah. Go and help Mrs Reznik now. Home in time for prayers.’ He winked. I did not wink back though it was hard not to smile. It would scandalise Mrs Reznik if we were too brazen. Father was making it rather obvious that there were no prayers in this house.

  I followed Mrs Reznik up the stairs. Unlike Mother, who in spite of her current fragility was soft in the bottom and the arms, she had no behind. Father called Mother ‘zaftig’ when he whispered to her at the kitchen sideboard. Literally: juicy. Mrs Reznik would be whatever the opposite was of that. I wondered: unzaftig? She climbed slowly, talking constantly, so I could stare as much as I chose.

  ‘Now, Hannah, the letter is difficult tonight. I tell to Gregor I don’t know what I can send more. My health is bad, I don’t have the strength to schlep around the West End looking for the little extras. I should be caught paying black marketeers? My God, prison. Can you imagine, Hannah?’

  Eventually we reached her landing and Mrs Reznik unlocked the door while I waited impatiently. After an age she led me inside.

  That moment, when she opened her door, never lost its glamour. The flat was the same as ours, but not the same at all. It had the same layout but it was only Mrs Reznik living here since her husband, a draper too, went back to Russia to be a Bolshevik. Mrs Reznik had a separate bedroom and a spare room with a desk where Mr Reznik once did his accounts, so rather than a bed and wardrobe being crammed into the sitting room behind a curtain as in our flat, one stepped from the front door into a proper sitting room. Then it was several large strides between the fireplace and the sofa, or from the door to the window looking out over Tottenham Court Road. In our flat, if you mapped our movements, we were like rats, following little channels between the corridors of tables, chairs, beds, laundry, Father’s bolts of fabric for his second business, hatstands, boxes of tobacco and sweets. This room contained simply a sofa, a standard lamp, a small dining table with two chairs, a beautiful rug and a bookshelf against one wall filled with books. Mrs Reznik could not read them, which tortured me—to think that all this, this quiet, spacious place to read and this case of books, was wasted on an illiterate. Mrs Reznik had told me that her husband sometimes took books as payment and now she was stuck with them when the money would have been of far more use. She lent them to me, and I would read them, whatever they might be: penny dreadfuls, political pamphlets, a French dictionary—devouring them like food in the dim light before Mother stirred in the morning.

  The books were part of my payment for helping her with her letters, and she was so mean she would actually hold on to them for a moment while passing them to me so I had to give a little tug to release the object from her grasp. But so far as I was concerned, the main part of my reward was being permitted to spend time here, in this flat, with space, order and comfort, where there was a gold-rimmed bone china tea set on a tray on a sideboard next to a gramophone encrusted with dust. Every time I entered this place, separated from my own home only by a thin floor, it was a reminder, an affirmation. Yes, this was how my own life would be, how it would look to others. I would have my own flat with books and a sofa and a gramophone and no husband and no vile little boys making a mess and a noise. I would drink tea from bone china while writing poetry at a desk in the window. Playwrights and artists and actors would visit me and we would all go off to the theatre together wearing smart gloves with buttons and exquisite hats and I would visit my brothers in their squalid tenements with their enormous, ill-educated broods only when they were starving, and I would take their wives bread, and sweets for the awful children, and only because my heart was too tender for my own good. Everyone would say so.

  ‘Come, Hannah. Up at the table. Here is the paper and the pencil. Careful not to break it, I have not another.’

  I knew that in the sideboard there was a thick brick of blank paper and a cup of lovely sharp lead pencils, because I looked once when Mrs Reznik was up in the loft fetching her money tin. And so I unleashed upon myself another source of torture: the vivid and durable image of the beautiful cream paper, the perfectly pointed pencils. Who could say how much more bounty lay secreted in cupboards and in boxes under beds? I asked Mother after that how Mrs Reznik laid her hands on such treasures and Mother told me mysteriously that she was a person with connections. When I asked her what she meant, Father said, ‘It is she knows people who do her favours because she has already done favours for them.’ I liked the sound of that almost as much as I liked her large and empty flat. Imagine, to live in a world where there was a secret currency beyond coupons and money, which were things that anyone could come by. ‘Husband did too many favours,’ Father said. ‘Safer in Russia, with the Bolsheviks.’

  The reason I was here, why I was granted occasional access to this quiet, miraculous place, was in order to read Mrs Reznik’s letters from Russia and reply for her. Her relatives wrote to her in Yiddish, thankfully, because I did not have the Cyrillic script, though I assumed without deep thought that it would arrive in my store of knowledge at some point. I had not known until this arrangement began that it was possible once you were past the age of, say, seven not to be able to read and write. Some of the stupider boys in my class still struggled, but I had assumed that even for them the instinct to understand and produce language in its written form would prevail. It was like talking. It just happened for humans at some stage in their development. How could you hold a perfectly sensible conversation and not be able to read? And so my pencil hovered above the clean paper, finely grooved, lovely, ready to turn this woman’s mix of English and Russian with an occasional Yiddish exclamation into something her cousin might understand.

  She took my wrist as always in her cold bony fingers, stared at me with her saucer eyes. ‘Please write, “Dear Gregor . . .” and I extricated my hand and wrote the story of Mrs Reznik’s failing health, which was how we began every letter, before going on to detail the price of the beef and fruit, and extolling at length the virtues of my parents who had provided the milk. I kept this passage brief. I knew it was meant for me, included simply so that I would relay i
t back to them. I waited with the pencil ready for her to move on. She complained about the daytime raids and claimed that she would not shelter in the tube station anymore because she had heard from a friend of her husband in Shoreditch that there was looting in the East End recently. And all the time I must correct the grammar of her fragmented language at the same time as finding the Yiddish, and Mrs Reznik going on and on, barely giving me a moment to think, except for the occasional pause for a cough, after which she would peer at my handwriting, her nose creasing.

  The nerve, I thought, if this woman were to comment upon my script. But I did have appalling handwriting, bad enough for even an illiterate to turn up her nose. I have my notebook before me now and I see described in a scrawl, the pen pressed down so hard the paper threatens to tear, what a fascinating, awful old witch Mrs Reznik seemed to me. I still see her kind about. Hungry, thin, elderly foreign women, alive in the face of all odds, refusing to make themselves less frightening, their faces lined with long memories, bodies bent with burdens never cast off. Who but a wilful, impatient child could hold it against them?

  Mrs Reznik was quiet for a second or two, during which I rubbed the side of my aching fist, before going on: ‘Gregor, if you send the girl to me, I help you and Nina. I have a little bit money—’ she glanced sideways at me ‘—and I would take care of her like she is mine. She eats well and goes to good school, and when she is big there are good young men here that would not make disgrace for you. I pray the war ends soon and you send her to me in London. Then she is clever and successful and she brings you here. You can do anything in London if you work hard.’

  I shook my hand, blinked my eyes. Mrs Reznik had been speaking more quickly than usual, and it took all my concentration to structure the sentences in my brain as quickly in Yiddish as the woman spoke, to push the pencil across the page without losing the flow. I paused, waiting to see if there was more. After a moment I looked up. Mrs Reznik was staring at the wall. Just wait until I told Mother why she tucked all her money away and sent tins of beef to Russia while she herself starved, and hoarded paper and pencils in secret cupboards. She leaned back on her chair and closed her eyes briefly. I watched a little pulse flicker in the crepey skin under her left eye.

  ‘Come now, Hannah,’ she said, gathering herself. ‘Is it books you have not read?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Come and choose. I find your sixpence.’

  I decided I would chance my arm, as the barrow boys would say. ‘Mother says not to take the sixpence, Mrs Reznik.’

  ‘She thinks I do not have it?’

  ‘She says only that food is scarce and it is better for you to use it for your cousin’s family than to give me pocket money, which I shall only fritter on shows and riding the motorbus.’

  Mrs Reznik laughed, a harsh, brief sound that I only recognised as a laugh because I sensed that I might have just said something a certain sort of person could construe as amusing. ‘You will take shilling. You tell your mother I pay every bill.’

  It was a hot afternoon. The weekend seemed far. I trudged along the pavement, brothers at my heel, flushed and ready to pounce on any annoyance. Benjamin was dancing about in my path. ‘Hannah, I read from the blackboard. I read my name aloud.’

  ‘Tell Papa,’ Geoffrey said. ‘You’ll get a sweet.’

  ‘Really?’ Benjamin asked, still looking at me.

  ‘Yes, really,’ I replied.

  ‘Will we all get one?’

  ‘No, just you,’ Geoffrey said. ‘He gives you one when you start to read.’

  We were not short of sweets, what with the shop and an indulgent father, but Benjamin was about to experience something special. I remembered the day I had run home from school, the boys still small and glued to Mother’s feet beneath the table, and I had told Father, as Benjamin had told us, that I had read my name on the blackboard. Father had clapped his hands, made me stand at the head of the table where he had been examining his ledgers, and gone to look in the pantry.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he ordered.

  I heard Mother whisper, ‘It is the wrong kind of sweet.’

  ‘Shhh,’ he replied. ‘It is the sweetness who matters.’ And then, louder, to me: ‘What word did you read?’

  ‘Hannah,’ I said proudly.

  ‘You see it now, behind the eyes, how it looked on teacher’s board?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Open the mouth now, very wide.’

  I put out my tongue and felt the chocolate, closed my lips over it, let the sweetness dissolve.

  ‘Still, still you see your name?’

  I nodded, my mouth crammed with dissolving cocoa, cream, sugar.

  I felt his breath in my hair. ‘Knowledge is sweet,’ he whispered.

  Benjamin was still tugging at my hand as we walked along the street. I looked at his delighted face and felt a stab of envy. Then a siren filled the shadowy space between the buildings and I thought: Oh Lord, what now? We looked at each other. The street was empty of people, traffic. The noise grew. We put our hands over our ears and tried to speak.

  ‘We have to get to the tube,’ Geoffrey was shouting.

  ‘It’s miles away,’ I replied.

  Suddenly there was a draft of warm air from a doorway, a hand was slapping down on my shoulder and we were all being pulled off the street and into a baker’s that I had never before noticed. It was not the one we used. Mother was particular, though Father told her it did not matter where you bought your bread. ‘Bread is bread, Maria. It is all the same. Go where it smells good.’ A woman with meaty hands and a lot of jewellery said, while the dozen or so people crowded into the shop stared at us, ‘You are the children of the tobacconist.’ She spoke slowly, as though we were hard of hearing, or simple. ‘Wait in here until the all-clear and I will come with you and explain to your father.’

  The baker gave us an iced bun each and we sat on the floor in a corner while the customers grumbled about the audacity of the Germans now with these daylight raids. I tore off and devoured large pieces of sweet bread while the boys did the same, Benjamin cramming his into his mouth so fast I was sure he would make himself ill. There was a movement in the earth somewhere close by, as close as I had ever felt it, and the people in the shop were quiet as a fire engine’s siren grew louder and louder and soon tore right by the boarded-up window, a flash of red just visible where the ply did not quite meet the frame at the top.

  ‘My stars,’ murmured the woman who dragged us in here.

  ‘Bit close for comfort,’ replied the baker, and they started up again, more quietly than before, speculating where it might have hit.

  ‘Hope it wasn’t the tube,’ a man said. ‘We’ll have to walk to Warren Street. Pain in the you-know-what.’

  I grew drowsy among the feet, at least one pair of which were ripe I noticed now I had finished eating, and I leaned my head against the wall and tried not to breathe through my nose. Then Geoffrey was shaking my shoulder, the all-clear was sounding, and the woman insisted on walking with us to the shop, though it was only around the corner and we did it by ourselves every day.

  Once more the shop was empty when Father should be waiting for us, and we burst into the flat to find them silently contemplating a long, curved, jagged-edged piece of metal on the table. Mother jumped up and pressed us to her roughly. ‘Where have you been, you terrible children?’ The buttons of her blouse pressed into my cheek until I wriggled from her grasp so that I could take another look at what was on the table. There was nothing else on it. The usual teacups and ledgers and little heaps of change to be sorted had been cleared as though the piece of metal were some kind of exhibit.

  Geoffrey gasped. ‘Is that an anti-aircraft shell?’ He drew closer.

  ‘Perhaps it’s part of a German bomb.’

  ‘Can I touch it?’ Benjamin said.

  ‘My God, no,’ said Mother.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ I asked Father, staring at its deadly edge, allowing myself to imagine bri
efly it jutting out from Geoffrey’s head.

  ‘On the front step,’ he told us. ‘Your mother has packed your bags. You are going to the country.’

  We saw when we reached the tube platform that all the adults in the area had conspired to banish their children. Around us parents bellowed instructions, as though their children were already on a train moving off from them. ‘Don’t eat your sandwich until you’ve changed trains. Mind your cousin.’

  Mother was silent and pale. Her strange light had grown more intense lately while the outline of her seemed to fade within it, reduced to a core of worry. She held Benjamin’s hand tightly, he complaining and grimacing, without seeming to notice. When she handed me my new brown case, acquired for me especially for this trip by Father, I saw that the veins in her bony hand were raised.

  Father leaned down to embrace me. The wool of his jacket scraped my cheek. ‘Hannah, you are strong and clever little woman. These boys rely on your brain now, yes?’ He straightened, held my eye.

  Mother’s hand was cold when I took it. She was little and round. She need only lean forward slightly to kiss me on the brow, though I was always small myself. My heart faltered for a moment, as though I were some other child, not the girl I knew myself to be: stout-hearted, indefatigable.

  Father crushed a pound note into my hand, smooth with handling. I had only touched paper money in the shop as I placed it carefully in the register and counted out change. ‘Emergency fund,’ he whispered. I rubbed my thumb over it in my pocket.

  A blast of hot air gusted along the platform and the train’s snub engine nosed into the station. All over the platform mothers clutched at their children. I had thrown some wicked tantrums at the idea of being sent to the country, but now that we were packed and standing on the platform I longed to be off. The doors creaked heavily as children climbed aboard. I wished to be with those who were moving, not these old, slow ones remaining behind. It was the first time I had been away from my parents and I felt somehow that my life to now had been lived in preparation for this moment.