Once on the moat’s other side, Esther steps through patches of light falling through the trees, flecking the shoulders of the cyclists who ride on the roadway beside her. Everything seems still to demand of her, Attend to this. Another child, rocking unsteadily as he stoops to touch the shifting patterns which he finds are not there to pick up on the rise above the moat. A middle-aged man speaks to her. He wears a Tahitian shirt, which seems an oddity. She smiles, shakes her head, he moves on without nodding. Was it the time he asked her for? A direction? She has no idea. She stops and touches the iron railing that runs beside her, above the sloping bank to the water. For a moment she closes her eyes; the light shows red inside the screen of her eyelids. The hiss of bicycle tyres the louder for her not seeing them. A girl laughing from the bridge she was at a few minutes before. She crosses the street to the deeply shadowed footpath on the other side, beneath the cliff-like rise of drab unlived-in buildings, the decay of what once, as the ornamentations, the fine bay windows tell, were gracious apartment blocks. She leans back to read the street sign attached to the wall above her, the word filmed with dirt, the letters hard to make out. Although she knows already what it will be. Ozcrim. She says it aloud, as she heard Mrs Boronsky pronounce it for her, when she showed it to her on the map. And the name her landlady would not have heard, the only one that matters to herself. It was not a number she looked for then, but the building, the scrap of building, in the photograph she had known since as a child she stood on tiptoes to look at it on Daddy’s desk, Babcia when she was young. A bigger word too he had said, the one the old lady had told him the house was called, and the child’s mother, the first wife who so disappointed him, saying again, ‘You’ll only confuse her, David, using words like that.’ The steps of the building Esther now stands at, beneath the projecting ornamental windows, the deeply scalloped stone panels to either side. A building similar but not identical is beside it to the right, a vacant weed-strewn scrap of raw earth to its left. The panes of glass in the different windows on several floors are smeared with grime. Remnants of curtains hang at some of them. The effect is dismal, charmless, the hollowed shell of what she would like to imagine, the impossibility of anything but what this minute they are. The summoned dead refuse to assist. The glamour of the street as David had always thought of it, the colourless shell she now stares up to. She walks up the broad curved steps to stand in the cavern of the high porch, its smell of damp and powdery stone. She touches the black ornamental iron knocker, a beast of some kind with a heavy ring through its mouth that moves stiffly as she grasps at it. The dead fall of its knock against the wood. As close as one comes.
Esther descends the steps and looks back along the pavement. The street is empty. The laughing of the schoolgirls still there, but distant now, until hushing into the tunnel beneath the trees. She crosses the road to stand again beside the rail above the water, the slant of afternoon light. She looks for the last time at the high grey building, the embrasures of empty windows, the shreds of curtain. She then walks back, past the wooden bridge, further on again, taking in across the street another group of buildings, these ones lived in, two children at a window on the second floor, a small dog with its paws against the glass of another, its head jerking with the yelps that cannot be heard. She walks to where the width of water ends in a sudden abutment, and wide roads curve and meet beyond it. She is at a huge memorial, its stone vigilant lions too tall for children to be able to clamber, a huge sculpted naked man, his legs braced, his back arched, his posture the grand defiance victors assume, high above her. She begins to read but does not understand its inscription, something she assumes about victory and defeat, the dates of one inevitably the date of the other, before the century even that concerns her. It may as well be the hieroglyphs of an Egyptian monument. For a moment Esther feels not oppressed by all this, but liberated. It is not her quarrel, not her triumph. There is nowhere to fit, ever, but where one is. Milan would mark that as another of her clichés.
Mrs Boransky smiles and is glad when her young visitor, who must be worn out she supposes with galleries and churches and whatever serious young foreigners find of interest to them, says yes, she would love some soup, and then coffee and cake, she would be so grateful. She had not felt like eating as she passed the rows of restaurants on the way back. Music had come from groups playing at different places, string quartets and jazz groups and occasionally soloists who struck her as heroic, gifted cellists, saxophonists, musicians her own age, who busked for casually attending tourists, offering the classics they once presumably had thought it was their gift to serve, now watching the opened cases of their instruments as coins rattled into them, or where occasionally a person who had attended to them longer leaned forward and placed a note. The gift at least of attention. Paying that.
Mrs Boransky laughs as she tilts a slender bottle and pours wine into a blue flute for the girl, and into another for herself. Once poured, the wine looks as though they are drinking ink. They touch glasses. Mrs Boransky says, ‘Na zdrowie.’ Laughing, Esther repeats it after her. Later the older woman pours another glass, glad to have the occasion to allow it. They chat easily together. She asks what the girl has done all day, and is amused when she answers, ‘Looking for history.’
‘Did you see so much?’
‘It seemed to know I was coming so we couldn’t see each other.’ It’s good, being like this, as if knowing exactly what the other says is unimportant. Mrs Boransky asks, ‘Our university, you must have seen that?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Esther says.
‘Seven Nobel Prizes. A town so small as this.’ Three was it?—four?—were Jews. The man who invented chlorine gas for the Germans. Whose wife was also a scientist and killed herself when the gas was used. Another fact. Another pebble fallen down a well. Esther again touches the rim of her glass against the landlady’s, who cannot believe she likes her young English visitor so much. She says the words again that say more or less what they intend, ‘welcome’ and ‘this is to your future, your happiness’, for only those who are content together would want to say it, ‘Twoje zdrowie’. She then looks at Esther, not remembering quite what it was they spoke of.
‘Seven at least,’ Esther reminds her.
She comes back to the dinner Debbie has prepared for them that afternoon, a stew that isn’t English, as Milan’s mother likes to say, something from foreign parts she supposes but one of the good things her husband has left her that didn’t wear off over the years, the recipes he picked up in one place or another in his years knocking about. She says as Esther opens the door to the flat, ‘No woman wants to come home to cook for herself first night back.’
Debbie has set views on how people should live together, a checklist of protocols she draws on as occasion calls for them. ‘Especially,’ she says, ‘back from a place like that. You need something that’s good for you.’ Milan tried to tell her the trip to Poland was a kind of homecoming in its way, but it cut no ice. That Esther wouldn’t like what she was forced to eat there was to be assumed. ‘Well, apart from where I stayed you’re right about that. Dull food. Rude waiters. Now I’ve found what my heritage is.’
‘Proves my point.’ Debbie takes her jacket from the peg behind the door. As if she’d think of hanging around to share the meal with them on the girl’s first night back! She’d be home in half an hour, after the worst of the traffic, and watch television that meant something, as she always put it. Another of her certainties is that what Milan chose will be unwatchable. But then again, as she also likes to point out, if they weren’t so different the three of them mightn’t get on so well, might they? Esther is not always sure where Deb’s utter certainty ends and pretence begins. As Milan says, ‘If mum wasn’t convinced education separates families, she wouldn’t be English.’ But they all hug at the doorway, there is a warmth there is no call to explain. Esther follows her down to the car. She presses her arm, leans down and kisses the older woman’s cheek through the lowered window.
&
nbsp; ‘That’s all very well,’ Debbie says by way of thanking her.
‘She loves it,’ Milan tells Esther, ‘loves it I didn’t end up with the kind of trashy local girls she warned me about since the time I was ten.’
Once back in the flat they embrace, kiss properly as they’ve wanted to do since she came back. ‘Can I have my tongue back?’ Esther says.
The table is already set. A clump of pansies flare in a small glass vase in the centre. Milan picks up an oven-mitt and takes his mother’s stew from the oven. He places it on the tile they bought last year in Avignon, a medieval drawing of a skinny clawing cat. The suddenly opened oven door steams his glasses to white discs. He swears and bumps at a chair and Esther says, ‘The blind feeding the hungry. See, I do know your Bible.’
‘Pity Deb went home. She’d have been proud of you.’
‘Smells divine anyway.’
‘To the lot of us,’ Milan says.
Esther tells him, ‘I seem to have been drinking toasts for days.’
An hour later they sit on the battered sofa that came with the flat, when they took it over from a friend who had gone to Stanford. To the privileged world of the elite, Milan had teased him, and their friend, a physicist, told him, ‘Journalism’s envy of the higher callings.’
Milan empties the last of the wine into their glasses. Esther leans against him. She says, ‘I sound like your socialist mates when I say I detest those pits of seduction at airport Duty Frees. Every bottle I buy adds to the argument.’
They are quiet, as he runs his hand along her leg. He asks, ‘So you’re back another person, are you? Now you’ve been?’
She had told him the obvious things over dinner, how the rebuilt city centre had struck her as impressive and vibrant and yet sad too, the replica that becomes the real thing, defeat turning into something else one has to believe in. How she admired the whole country for that. But the older parts that survived, the few bits of it in the streets away from the centre, were where she had felt more at ease, where she could say, ‘At last I’ve been here.’
Milan stood to turn off the lights, apart from leaving the candle burning low on the table next to Deb’s bowl of pansies. He came back to sit with his arm across Esther’s shoulders. ‘Glad you’ve come back anyway,’ and she said, ‘A good place to come back to.’ She laughed, brushing his cheek. ‘I’m at my best when I’m trite. My father used to say that about his business partner. For a long time I thought it was saying something nice.’
‘Well it can be,’ Milan told her. ‘Both at once I mean.’ His face pressed against her hair. ‘We don’t have to talk.’
She closes her eyes and must have dropped off at once. The candle that much lower when she opens them. A flicker now as it burned near the rim of the candlestick that held it. She says, ‘Your arm must be killing you?’
‘Now that you mention it.’ Then ‘Here,’ he says, standing, drawing her up beside him.
Esther says, ‘Your mother would think I’m a slattern, leaving the kitchen like that until the morning.’
He takes her hand and raises it towards the wall, now a fall of deep shadow. He tells her, ‘I got a sort of present for you. I’m dead scared now it might be one of the silliest things I’ve ever done.’ It surprises her, his saying that, quiet, confident Milan. He is talking now to cover his awkwardness. He says he asked his friend Siggy at the Institute, a tough New Yorker so he knew he’d be straight with him, who had told him, Sure, you’re not breaking any rules, but what the hell? Siggy had even gone with him to a place in Cricklewood, a room of antiques and such, if it was nineteenth-century he was after, this was the place. He even came back and advised Milan how to fix it, ‘If it means as much as you want it to mean.’
Milan raises her finger and places it against a small metal strip at the side of the door. He said, ‘Just to make it more like home for you. That’s what I had in mind.’
Esther is glad that what light there is conceals the rush of blood to her throat, her cheeks, as if she was blushing, which she has never done, as if she might be angered even, but she could not be further from that. Milan lets go her hand, as her fingers spread against the metal case. He feels her tenseness as his own hand falls to her shoulder. He assures her, ‘The design when you see it properly is from back then. It’s the right kind. From the right place, I mean. Genuine.’
She presses her face against his woollen jersey. Merino. She had made a point of that, ordering it online from a factory in Dunedin last Christmas. Possum and merino, the label confirming it.
It is so vivid to her, the memory of her father coming to her, her mother too, when she was small, the way he touched the mezuzah as they came into the house, and her mother picking her up, her parents laughing as the child insisted she touch it too, and her somehow realising even then, how her mother so wanted it to please her father, the little girl asking to be lifted to do as Daddy did, to touch whatever it was. David’s solemn explanation to her years later no doubt, why it was there, the tiny words on the scroll inside their metal case, declaring the room, the house, a special place.
She put her arms round Milan. She raised the wool at the back of his jersey, felt the warmth of his skin through his shirt as her palms spread across him. ‘I can’t believe,’ she begins to tell him, ‘can’t believe you thought of it. It’s a bit mad and mixed up and I’ve never had anyone do anything near so kind for me. So important.’
‘That’s all right then,’ Milan says. ‘Just glad you’re home.’
1938
What Mother liked best was the family in what she called ‘full flight’, meaning the dining table in the room with the big embrasure windows laden with good things to please her guests. The number who might sit there varied from week to week, travelling relatives on their way through to Berlin or even further, occasionally slightly awkward but still welcome Ostjuden, when Father deliberately embarrassed her a little with the halting Yiddish he drew up from his youth, teasing Lisabet even more by translating for her. But he delighted in seeing how the Shabbat dinners so enlivened her. And whatever the number that sat there, always those who lived at the handsome residence in Schweidnitzerstrasse, Chaim and Lisabet of course, and old uncle Sol, with his sentimental addiction to operettas, his self-flattering belief he had spent a life working hard in the bank where yet another relative had kindly kept him on; Mother’s sister Hannah, with her journals, her novels, the packets delivered each month with their Berlin postmarks; Father’s less than brilliant brother Ephraim, a mild accountant who disliked argument, whose saving phrase was ‘the worst has passed, surely?’, whom Hannah quickly grew impatient with and would at times go so far as telling him, ‘We are a people afflicted with paralysis, does that occur to you?’ Mother then taken by embarrassment of another kind, by any challenge to her certainty that the family was an example to all, that harmony was yet another approving seal to what they had all become, in the generations from the shetl—not that she would ever have put it so starkly—to the handsome city they were part of. She liked repeating that. Not lived in but were part of. But Vati’s deep satisfaction too, that he could provide all this for those who mattered to him, a deep quiet pleasure his daughter Ruth more than any of the others was aware of, as he encouraged the harmless fantasy of those he housed and fed that they contributed in some substantial way to the life they shared. His insistence from the end of the table, holding the long thin bottle of Gewürtz, ‘You’re not stinting yourself there, Sol?’, or ‘Eat up there, Hannah, we owe it to ourselves.’ The Friday evenings especially he looked forward to, his agnosticism notwithstanding—the feeling of timelessness as the bread was uncovered and his uncle intoned the verses that bound them, his catching Ruth’s eye through the meal and winking at her. Dear Ruth, so solemn and competent and kindly, but would to God, he thinks, that there might be some young man, even one of the older earnest students from the seminary across from the synagogue, whose eye she might catch? So unlike her sister there in distant Berlin for years,
with her politics, her clever writing, the rest of her life that he and Ruth might at least protect the family from being distressed by. He sighs and puts the thought to one side, and says when the talk comes back, as inevitably it must, to the bad things that each week get worse, ‘There is so much to put our minds to.’ The streets even here they already make a point of avoiding, the careful recent awkwardness with neighbours they have spoken with for years. The friends who are one day not there, who sensibly moved on. The Blumhardts from the pastry shop gone this week. They are fortunate with relatives in England, which is not so far. But Mrs Blumhardt, a nervy, garrulous woman, Lisabet says, why be surprised at the suddenness of it? One must think about these things more rationally.
‘Bad times,’ Ephraim mildly supports her. ‘When have we not had bad times?’ The Hirshfelds, Vati tells them, whom he heard about only today, that humourless family who have sailed for Australia! How would they go down there, Chaim wonders, the boys with their long curled locks, their hats, the father with his chest-length beard! How his own family’s certainty of their being Germans after all, say what you like, and whatever fanatics might be shouting at the moment, closing on them like a door, as only Ruth comprehends. A door they cannot imagine seeing through.
Father’s friend Doctor Guzmann, who is often their guest, begins, ‘Should you ask my opinion,’ at which Lisabet leans to touch his sleeve, ‘Whose else would we ask for, Herr Doktor?’ Her sister Hannah nods agreement. And so he tells them, ‘If my wife was not so confined by illness, as you know she has been in recent years, I would now be in practice in Main Street, Bronx.’ The doctor likes to be precise, informed. He uses the address of a cousin, who married into real estate.
All This by Chance Page 27