by Bob Biderman
CHAPTER 10
THE LIPSKI CASE had been handed over to the Treasury for prosecution (as most important cases were) – and for the next several weeks they and the defence (such as it was) went about preparing their legal disputations. There were, of course, the boring formalities to go through – the Magistrate’s hearing, the Grand Jury indictment, the charges being read – all of which were routine and matter-of-fact (or matter-of-fiction depending on one’s perspective).
Z, meanwhile, had shifted his attention to other matters. The case had triggered something in his head, something that had been gnawing at him for a while. There was a crisis brewing. He realised that. But it wasn’t the same crisis that many people, such as Maggie, had identified. It wasn’t the crisis of poverty, degradation or overcrowding – not in themselves, at least. It had more to do with the ceaseless waves of refugees that were pouring in from the East, uprooted from their ancestral soil and sweeping across Europe, lost and friendless, in a desperate quest for sanctuary.
Z is in his study, seated at his desk. He takes out a box of newspaper clippings and looks over several from the past few months. He glances through them, one by one:
‘A wholesale expulsion of Jews is being carried out in Kiev, Russia. It is reported that the number has reached the enormous figure of 15,000…’
And the next…
‘In reply to letters from Needy Jews wishing to go to Spain principally from Russia and Rumania, we warn them that they have not the slightest chance of succeeding and only starvation awaits them should they emigrate there…’
And the next…
‘The anti-Semitic deputy Dr Schonerer, enlivened the last sitting of the Austrian Reichstag by presenting a petition against the Jews, which was signed by 40,000 persons. The petitioners abused the Jews at large without having any definite request to make of them…’
And the next…
‘Some very bad riots at Pressburg in Hungary have had to be suppressed by the military. The foolish old story was raised about a girl having been decoyed away by a Jew that her blood might be used for sacrificial purposes and the house of the man suspected was besieged by a howling mob of 2,000 persons, who smashed all their windows and uttered threats of murder. The customary proposal was then made to go and wreck all the Jewish shops but the soldiers charged the mob with their bayonets fixed and, after some trouble, restored order…’
Then he focuses on one from the Jewish Chronicle which he had pasted onto a piece of foolscap so as to make some notations:
‘The speeches at the annual meeting of the Jewish Board of Guardians last Sunday were mainly occupied with one problem – the increasing influx of foreign Jews to this country or rather the increasing difficulty of disposing of them when they do come here…’
He reads the article over once more and shakes his head in dismay. It is, he thinks, a typically mealy-mouthed response from the organ of the Jewish establishment. First, they tried to show how relatively little impact Jewish immigration was having on the economy while, at the same time arguing that ‘each new family adds fresh units to the army of competitors who are bringing down the level of subsistence’. Then they blame the Russian political situation for making life intolerable for the Jews, yet they write, ‘our very interest in their welfare would in many cases cause us to put obstacles in the way of their coming hither without prospect of earning even as scanty a livelihood as they can manage to eke out in Russia.’
But Z realises there is a problem, an enormous problem, which even that most pompous of newspapers identified. Whitechapel, for all its rookeries and boarding houses that seemed to absorb endless bodies, packing them into subdivided rooms of smaller and smaller partitions, in reality was only a very limited plot of land which was bounded by nature, in the form of the Thames, and by man, in the form of the railway embankments. It could not contain even a small portion of the enormous Russian-Polish refugee population, no matter how much they tried to squeeze themselves in. It was just physically impossible. Yet the tidal barriers had been breached on the Eastern frontier. And once breached there was no turning back again.
Z reads this article over one more time, rubs his eyes, sighs, and in the margin, on the foolscap, he writes, ‘What will happen to them now? Where is our Moses when we so desperately need him?’ underlining the questions three times with his pen. Then he puts the article back into the box where he was storing it and closes the lid. After placing the box onto the shelf above his desk, he takes a fresh piece of paper and sets to work on a story he’s been commissioned to write on the people of the ghetto.
He has an image in his head. It’s the image of a girl, a little girl standing in the queue at the Jews Soup Kitchen for the last of the watery soup and a loaf of bread which she must bring home to her invalid father. After a long and tedious wait she finally receives her allotment and is returning home again. But on her way back she is stopped by a man. He asks her for some bread, some soup. He’s very hungry. But she needs the food for her father. What is she to do? He asks again, this time more forcefully. It’s clear he’ll take it if she doesn’t give it to him. So she gives him some and he wants some more. This she cannot do. Infuriated, he reaches out to grab the loaf, but, in doing so, he causes her to spill the pitcher of soup. The little girl runs away, leaving the man who was the source of her distress, eating the crust he has stolen. But once he has a little food in him, he begins to weep, for now he suddenly realises what he has done. And he starts to feel never was there a man lower than him. Never, ever was there another man more abysmal than what he felt that day.
But this man, this thief, is not a villain. He is an immigrant and has recently arrived, just the day before. He is in London all alone, with no money and no place to go. When he left Warsaw there were a few gold sovereigns that he had sewn into the lining of his coat. But they were gone. How had he lost his meagre funds just a few hours after coming to London? After disembarking he was met by a man who addressed him kindly and offered to take him to a boarding house which was run by a cousin who would look after him, give him safe housing and food, deferring payment until he found work. The cousin did this out of the goodness of his heart as he, too, knew what it was like to have been a penniless immigrant. As it turned out, this gentleman, the man who met him at the docks, was not so gentle. He took him for a ride to the far reaches of town, took his money, and left him there to find his own way back. Back to where? He had no money and no place to go. Of course, there was never any cousin or, if there was, not one with a boarding house filled with immigrant Jews who were given a room and food out of the goodness of his heart. So, this man, this soon-to-be thief, struggles to find his way through the intricate maze of London’s streets and byways, back to the East End without a single word of English at his disposal. At least in the East End he can make himself understood, so it’s there he belongs. That’s the way he feels.
It is almost night when he arrives and he is very cold and hungry. His valise with his few personal possessions has been taken as well, so he has only the clothes he wears. He sees a few beggars plying their trade but he is still too proud to beg. But he is very hungry – he hasn’t eaten for several days – his head is beginning to feel light and the world around him is starting to spin. He prays to God and wishes he was back in his little Polish shtetl and thinks that even the Russian army from which he has escaped couldn’t have been worse than where he is now. He walks through the fading light, down narrow streets smelling of sewage and rotting food which he cannot see because if he had he would have eaten it. Finally, he reaches a quiet alley and, feeling he can go no further, leans himself against a dirty brick wall, wet with slime and spittle, and then slowly lets his body slide down until he lies, exhausted, on the edge of the dirt road. An older man, a bit unstable from drink, comes down the street and must climb over him because his body is blocking the path and the older man curses him as he climbs over this unfortunate creature ly
ing huddled on the ground who, at that moment, feels like a piece of rubbish that has been tossed from the window of one of those warm houses across the road. It is as if he, himself, has been tossed out to rot. This is how he feels. Life is elsewhere. Life is inside those warm houses, not within his mortal being, for he is dead – dead to himself and dead to the world. But at that instant, just when he feels the cold claw of Azrael tighten around his chest, at that very moment he sees a girl coming down the street. He sees her like a little angel, a vision of the most astounding beauty, surrounded by a phosphorescent glow radiating sparkles like a gossamer of gold. The girl is dressed in shabby clothes, but, to him, she wears the robes of a fairy queen. She is holding a pitcher of hot soup in one hand and a loaf of bread wrapped in her cape, the folds of which she clutches in the other. She slows her pace as she nears him, somewhat suspicious perhaps but saddened that another human creature should have been brought to that awful state, lying helpless on the grime encrusted ground just inches from the human filth running through an adjacent ditch into an open sewer. And yet perhaps she saw something in him, something about him that was special because as she comes closer she seems to lose her fear and gives him a sweet and tender smile. Entranced with this magical vision of an angel which he now believes has been sent from heaven to save him, he rises up, till on his knees, and reaches out his hand in supplication. The little girl, who has allowed herself to feel sympathy for this man because she senses he is unlike the multitude of beggars she has seen every day of her life as she walked up and down the road, tears off a bit from her precious loaf and hands it to him. It is just a tiny piece, a crust, which is hardly enough to satisfy his hunger. He holds out his hand for more. The girl now is torn with conflicting emotions. She would like to give this man more bread and perhaps even some soup but the thought of her hungry brother and father, too ill to rise from his bed, suddenly takes over from the sympathy she feels for the strange, frightening man worshiping on his knees before her. The expression on her face now changes from tenderness to terror – both of him and herself, for what she has done and the danger she has brought to her family’s sustenance. She edges herself backward, and as she does, the man’s vision of the angel suddenly transforms into that of a demonic vixen tantalising him with tasty desire. Now all he sees is the bread and he reaches out and grabs it. Horrified, she tries to pull away. But the man tenaciously clings to it like a drowning swimmer grasping at a bit of flotsam keeping him afloat. The girl cries out. The man by now is oblivious to her and thinks only of the food. The raw desire to satisfy his brutish hunger gives him strength. He pulls and the bread with the girl attached to it comes closer to his swollen lips. The girl cries out again and tugs once more at her loaf but in doing so, she loses hold of the pitcher which slips from her grasp, falling to the ground, its watery contents forming a little stream which slowly oozes along the ground towards the sewage ditch. Aghast, the man falls to his hands and knees and tries to lap up the steaming liquid before it is absorbed into the ground. But it is already hopelessly mixed with the filth of the pavement. The girl takes advantage of his distraction to grab the fallen pitcher and the rest of the bread and runs off, weeping, to her dingy room just a few houses down the road. The man, meanwhile, is on all fours, like a dog, trying to lick at the soup which has already become mud. Even in this state he can still see her and later her image comes back to haunt him – the figure of a small girl, silhouetted in the moonlight, a frightened child, sunk in gloom and despair, who had failed her father and her brother because of a simple act of kindness. And when he thought about it later the man felt as if a knife had gone through his heart and through his soul – a knife that he, himself, had plunged inside his chest; an invisible dagger that would stay there, inside him, forever.
Z put down his pen as he finished writing. Why had this image come to him, he wondered? He knew the girl for he had written about her before. But the man – the man was a stranger. Who was he? And the tragedy, was it really such a tragedy? After all, it was only a loaf of bread and a jug of soup. A loaf of bread and a jug of soup – it was nothing to anyone who ate regularly, who had no idea of hunger. But to those who had tasted the terror of starvation, a jug of soup and a loaf of bread was everything there was in the world. And this man who Z could hardly picture in his head – he knew his soul. He knew this man well. For Z, himself, had once been without bread and soup. And he understood that everything he held dear and cherished came to nothing once hunger had taken him over. And once hunger had taken him over he was capable of anything. Anything. Even… Even what? He wondered. No, there were limits, though he hoped he never had to put himself to test.
Where was this taking him? It’s the little girl he was interested in, not the man. The girl whose innocent eyes he had borrowed to view the ghetto so it could be understood as only a child could understand it – as a world unto itself, a world of poverty but also one of humour as well as deep emotions. She was bringing the soup and bread home and would, he thought, trip upon opening the door, fall and spill the contents of the jug herself onto the floor whereupon the soup would leak through the floorboards onto the wedding dress of the young woman who was preparing for her nuptials in the apartment below. The young woman from below would then bound angrily upstairs to berate the poor child for damaging her trousseau, totally oblivious of the tragedy which meant the family would be without their evening meal. And it would be her little brother licking the floorboards to get the last of the broth before it seeped into the cracks, not that mysterious man who just seemed to appear out of nowhere.
PART II
Week 5: The Trial
CHAPTER 11
ON FRIDAY MORNING, July 29th, Z found himself outside the largest of the Old Bailey courtrooms along with the milling crowd of expectant observers all dressed in sombre tones touched with a dash of the frivolous, giving the appearance, he thought, of something between a Jubilee Ball and a Jewish funeral. They waited patiently (or not) for the great, sanctimonious doors of authority to open onto the culmination of what had become an epic every bit as large as a ghetto version of a Shakespearean drama (at least they hoped as much, even though few if any of them had ever heard of Shakespeare – ‘Maybe he’s the shmata man on Wentworth Street between Moishe-the-butcher and the Horwitz–the–gonif?’) Though only a few would actually get inside the chamber itself, the rest would be close enough to feel they had – if only vicariously – and, thus, to have participated in the moment. For to participate in the moment is to be, rather than not to be. It is fulminating with the present. You are, therefore, alive – even though tomorrow you may be dead. Like Lipski.
But something was wrong. Z could sense it immediately. There was an acrid scent in the stale courthouse air: the unmistakable smell of barely contained panic. Where was it coming from? He noticed a circle of men gathered to the side – professional men from their appearance. He couldn’t hear their words but he could feel the intensity of the emotions like the urgency that might have been felt on the field of battle when someone had forgot to bring the cannon.
One of the men – there were three and he was the leaner (thin as a string-bean too long in the sun, someone once said of him) – was gesticulating, wildly, with his hands, like convulsive supplications to a god who, it seemed, had become significantly less beneficent than twenty minutes earlier. Another rather corpulent man, was thrusting out a pointed finger toward a humble-looking figure opposite him. The corpulent man had a face that was red and was growing even redder.
The man being fingered, at first glance looked to Z like a human sponge whose sole purpose was to soak up any emotional detritus thrown at it. But the slight, enigmatic smile he wore was in striking contrast to the pliant, rather unctuous-looking figure the large man with the red face was hectoring. It was that sense of curious contrast along with his foggy spectacles which he had removed and was wiping with his stiff white handkerchief, that made him recognisable to Z as Myers, the man he had s
een the other day at the house of Greenberg. And catching his eye, Z saw him squint, in a painful sign of recognition.
A moment later the other two men walked off. The one who had pointed a threatening finger was Hayward, Z thought. But, he was wrong. Hayward, as it happened, was the bean left out in the sun. And when he found that out, he realised at once why Myers was so very important to a man like Hayward. It was as clear as light through crystal, neatly refracted into its true colours, that Hayward desperately needed someone like Myers who was calm under stress and could, in the most trying circumstances, persevere no matter what was thrown (or pointed) at him.
As Myers had been left alone to ponder – Hayward and the mysterious corpulent-looking man having gone off – Z took the opportunity to approach him. It was a delicate moment. Myers, Z understood, was not made of stone. But he knew others of this sort; others who had learned that time-honoured technique of apparent servility – finessing a need but inside feeling the sharpened blade of history twisting in the dark reaches of their gut. Yet for people like Myers, there were two dignities they possessed – one for the Jewish and the other for the Christian world. The one for the Christian world was pliable – it could be bought and sold. The one for the Jewish world was held in a mental sanctuary many thousands of years old. And it was that duality – among others – which made someone like Myers an extraordinary man who could maintain his honour while being treated like a dog. For dogs are dogs and men are men, but survival meant that sometimes one had to play the mongrel even if it was a momentary invention.