The Unbelievable Death of Joseph Goldberg

by Oliver Franks

  Got ‘em good and proper! He beamed. Job done.

  Then some brave boys quickly organised themselves and began to throw things at him (sticks, books, shoes). They had good arms and practised aims, and threw heavy objects. Quite a number of Joseph’s low flying flock were knocked out with painful, heavy body blows. A strange dizziness ensued, and he had difficulty keeping his heads together, coordinating the flock. He swooped away, dazed. Those of him who fell were left to their fates.

  As he hurtled over the school field he looked out over the rolling hills and to the sea and its wizened old man, the pier. It beckoned him, yet he was filled with an unexpected, deep unease.

  *****

  He made his way back via the town centre. The hustle and bustle of Christmas shopping comforted him, and he flew a little slower to appreciate it from above. In a similarly random fashion, he passed over the old synagogue. Situated amongst the newer shops and restaurants, it looked like a faded and worn brass shilling poking out from a purse full of shiny new gold pound coins. His birds-eye view gave him a true sense of the deterioration and expired uselessness about the temple: the dilapidation, slates missing from the roof, rubbish and bricks strewn about the courtyard. Not that he passed it that often on foot, he tended to steer clear, but when he did, the front always had a well-kept appearance. From above, looking down, it was a different story. The extent of its disuse became clear. He wondered just how many like him had given all that up?

  Joseph hovered there, a deathly sleepiness rearing its head across the flock. In all truth, he was worn out by the attack, and, he suspected, by the loss of flock members, for he dared not count the number that had fallen, dared not estimate the extent of damage caused by the lobbing boys. And so, despite the guilty fact that he hadn’t seen the inside for God knew how long, Joseph found himself coming to rest atop the old synagogue.

  An echoing conversation was taking place within the building. It reached his ears in jarring croaks, amplified by the dusty emptiness of the interior, discomforting his rest.

  “Oh Jacob, did you hear?” said the rather squeaky voice of an old woman.

  Another grunted in a lower pitch, a man. Old codger like me, thought Joseph.

  The squeaky voice persisted, whining, “About old Joseph?”

  Huh?

  Joseph never liked to hear his name in conversation.

  “Old Joseph? Joseph Flint?” said the slower, croakier voice. “I thought he passed years ago. The cricketer, you mean? What did you ever care about cricket?”

  “No… the Goldberg, you know… The birdwatcher. The barmy one, you know…”

  Heaven help me! thought Joseph.

  “Come on Jacob, you must remember!” berated the woman. Joseph imagined the old man scratching his head, caught defenceless, unable to recall, as he had been caught himself so many times when prompted to remember some long-forgotten irrelevance. “It was all the talk of the town… Don’t you remember? The boy who got away?”

  “Oh yes…” said an unconvinced-sounding Jacob. “So he died, did he?”

  It sank in, and Joseph couldn’t help but to leap into the air, the flock jumping all at once like a swarm of midges.

  The boy who got away. The barmy one. Yours truly.

  The really strange thing was just how successfully he’d put all thoughts of ‘them’ out of his mind for so long. When one of ‘them’ died he wouldn’t have the faintest clue, would have done his utmost to keep it that way. Yet some old dear from the wilting Jewish community still remembered him.

  He fluttered towards the sea, his thoughts entirely of the old days, the real old days, before Lucy, before TV, before the war, before drink and fags. That time wasn’t something he normally thought of. Ordinarily it was far too much trouble. But right now, he just couldn’t help himself.

  His thousand eyes watched the sea crashing into the line of shore along the coast, the cars chugging below, the clouds on their never-ending odyssey across the sky. Yet Joseph’s mind was elsewhere entirely. Memory was superimposing itself onto the winter morning as if the world were composed of double exposure film.

  *****

  It began with his childhood self, bang in the middle of a particularly God-awful scene in the schoolyard. There were shouts of “Yid”, some little bastard pulling his underpants right up into his scrotum. It hurt. He then relived a further two painful scenes that he normally did his best to keep well out of mind.

  First came his bar mitzvah, the embarrassment he felt chanting in a foreign language to a room full of foreign immigrants, clueless as to what any of it meant.

  Next came the terrible row he had with his parents, not long after, during the festival of Yom Kippur. His father had given the order, and so Joseph had to spend an intolerable day cooped up in the dusty old synagogue, fasting and worrying about sins he hadn’t committed yet, even having to miss a particularly unmissable inter-school game of rugby to be there. He contained his rage until about six o’clock, when the service was being wrapped up with one last collective choral wail. Just as people were beginning to allow themselves thoughts of supper, he had it out with his parents.

  “Fools!” he shouted, in loudly enunciated Yiddish, to spite them. “You forbid me to speak the language of our ancestors, yet you use it constantly amongst yourselves. Why am I forced to learn Hebrew, to grow up a Jew in a nation of bacon?”

  He threw down his skullcap, rubbing it under his boot, the whole synagogue watching in shocked silence. Even the Rabbi stopped from his bowing before the shrine. It was a painful moment. In the back of his mind Joseph knew very well he was greatly dishonouring his father.

  His tearful father slapped him clumsily across the nose. “Does it hurt to be crazy, my son?” he asked, and Joseph ran out of the synagogue, slamming the great doors of the entrance, heading blindly down to the beach.

  At first, he had regretted it, crying openly for all on the seafront to see, thinking of the terrible scene he must have left in his wake.

  But then he began to look around himself, around at the winter seafront, and he began to feel something. The cold, bracing gale blew away the pain, and he began enjoying the view. Muddy, grey sands shone from under the pebbles. Shards of sunlight twinkled atop the bubbling sea and a magnificent sunset forced its way through cracks in the thick clouds behind the grand old pier (still a well maintained, chic place in those days). And, most wondrously of all, thousands of starlings swooped majestically together in the busy skies above.

  Sitting on a bench, he watched them hurl and dance in the clear air. They never stopped to rest, never let up for one moment, creating countless, nameless shapes and spaces, shifting and melting into one uniqueness after another. They were truly possessed. It was beautiful.

  After some time sitting there alone, contemplating, he turned to strange, rebellious thoughts. Such as, why shouldn’t we paint such things on our temple walls? It made just as much sense to suppose a flock of birds was animated with the will of God; surely more sense than to suppose only stupid humans deserved the honour. Why shouldn’t we build statues of them, love them, sing to them, worship them? They were grand, Godly grand at that (if such a thing made any sense). And so he had the frightening and liberating thought that everything he’d been taught was nonsense. Just nonsense. Here was truth.

  Possessed with such thoughts, he watched until the stars began to pop out, until he heard father calling for him. Shouting for him.

  *****

  His thoughts blurred into the sadness that ensued. Very strange to think of it again. He was even more surprised to find himself following it all up with new questions. Nonsensical questions, really, going almost entirely against the grain of his life, but he couldn’t help himself. Questions like: how would things have been if he had stayed a Jew, never left it all behind? And: What if he’d patched things up with mum and dad, married a Jew, found a pretty (or at least understanding) one, led a life of well-performed mitzvahs? Everything might have been different, so much riche
r. It might’ve gone well.

  While such thoughts unfurled their dark wings, another flock appeared, a blip on the horizon at first, way out across the bay. It approached leisurely, and Joseph paid it no heed, his mind full of a million forbidden ‘what ifs’, unrelenting. Bubbles of long-buried memories were resurfacing like the flotsam of a sunken ship. The two flocks drew towards each other with steady attraction, yet Joseph found himself racing through history, past the rest of his adolescence, and heading straight to one episode in particular.

  To Burma. Straight to Burma.

  *****

  Flying low, above the jungle. A pilot for three years already. Hell of a fucking job, he always used to say, in both positive and negative senses of the phrase. He spat some tobacco out of the cockpit, trying to purge the lingering anger he felt at being whisked away from the Reich. In the lead-up to the war he’d become a sort of humanist, joining the airforce because he hated the Nazis for their inhumanity. Naturally, he wanted to bomb the fuck out of them. He’d even said so, loud and clear, yet still they’d sent him out to the jungle, to play hide and seek with the Japs. Fucking officers, he always used to say (before spitting).

  On this day, he muttered it through cracked lips, mouth dry like sandpaper, forehead hot like a burnt egg shell. But then something ear-shattering crackled and sparked to one side, and all of a sudden the sun was spinning, the wet green canopy roof was drawing messy squares around his flapping cheeks. He was going to crash, maybe even die. Strangely, the thought didn’t worry him.

  In fractions of a second, branches slapped him unconscious.

  He never could believe the next few weeks had really happened; even now it had a dreamlike quality to it. Trekking through the jungle for days, even drinking his own urine on a couple of occasions. Then, holed up with malaria in a little village along the borders. He would have died if it wasn’t for that shaman (that’s what they told him anyway).

  He could still see the naked, body-painted old madman shouting and dancing around on the bamboo floor, lighting foul-smelling incense, giving him slimy teas that made him vomit and slip in and out of consciousness for God knows how long. Occasionally his eyelids fluttered and he glimpsed the dark, animated faces of the villagers watching him, saw the bright green geckos darting across the rotting bamboo roof, heard the buzzing of flies all around.

  And the tea, that had given him vivid dreams, hadn’t it? So very vivid. One featured some of the village girls. That was nice.

  In another, which until now he’d always assumed was most definitely and irrefutably a dream, a young man brought a severed head to the shaman, who proceeded to juggle it like a clown. Minutes later, Joseph had the distinctly odd sensation of shrinking to the size of a nut, scuttling across the floor, and escaping through a small crack in the wall. Once outside, he was defenceless and almost instantaneously spotted by a humongous boy. He was stalked, caught, and kept captive for the next hour in a cavernous wicker basket. Later, the boy successfully used the promise of a sticky sugar cane to trick him into climbing up a twig and into allowing string to be tied round his waist. So shackled, the boy proceeded to whip him into a frenzy of anger and aggression by spinning him around and around at a ferocious velocity above his head. Joseph remembered hearing other boys cheering when wings he didn’t know opened, causing him to fly around and around in orbit of the boy, tethered by the string. He began to feel ever more and more livid. When he was about to explode, the boy stopped the spinning and dropped him onto the floor. Enraged, Joseph found himself suddenly locked in mortal combat with a giant stag beetle. Then he understood. He himself was also a giant stag beetle. And so he got on with the business of putting that unfortunate other beetle into a pincer movement, repeatedly smashing his shiny black backside until they were both shuddering and squealing with their own, dissonant, terrible emotions.

  All in all, it was a nightmare. And until now that had always been his literal interpretation.

  He’d passed out of the delirium the following day, waking up himself again on the bamboo floor. Next, the drudgery of a full recovery. Later, trekking back to base.

  It was all a terrible bother, and he’d always refused to believed it had happened. How could it have? Fucking unbelievable, he always said. Just a vivid dream, so amazingly unbelievable he soon forced it entirely from his mind.

  Yet now, here he was, a man made of a thousand birds. What on earth had that bloody shaman given him?

  *****

  When the two flocks met one another at high speed Joseph was so deep in thought he barely had time to notice. By that point, it was all over anyway. Something like a car crash without the blood or the screeching metal. A collision of events. Merging. Thousands dancing together. Instinctively. With pure joy. Their collective being growing bigger, taller, stronger. Safer.

  For Joseph, though, the opposite. A descent into juddering slow motion. A fall into black and white, into softness and quiet. Disappearing echoes. For him, a scattering. For him, dilution. For him, an unbelievable death.

  The Chair

  There was a method to Gerald’s madness, though he didn’t understand the how or the why.

  She would call to him in the night, her voice floating in his ears, warm and fuzzy.

  “Gerald, you must go to the spot in the morning. I will be there. I will be waiting.”

  And so, with a tingle of excitement, he would prepare.

  He would meditate in his room before sunrise, practising the technique taught to him by the Grand Master. He would light a blue candle (it always had to be blue), burn the incense and begin the deep breathing rotations. There were words that must be recited over and over until his entire being vanished like a wisp of smoke blown away by the breath of a child. He would become the words, which were Tibetan and roughly translated as, “I am one with all things, time has no meaning, place has no meaning, the ‘I’ has no meaning.” He would spend at least an hour sitting on the floor in the lotus position ‘being’ these words, starting when the first hint of blue phased itself into the black of the night sky, and ending with the extinguishing of the last star and the stroking of the sun’s warm rays on his face. It was necessary to follow this ritual as precisely and vigorously as possible to achieve the artistic magic.

  Next, he would wash, get dressed in his overalls, gather his tools and easel ready for later, and wait for them to come and escort him down to breakfast and medication.

  When they eventually came they always said the same things: “Good morning Gerald, it’s time for breakfast now, did you sleep well?” and all the rest, and he would smile at them serenely, answering their questions with a simple positive or negative. On the days when she called, he must never elaborate or give their inquisitive minds even the faintest wrinkle to grasp hold of, lest the special artistic outlook should evaporate in the process. It was a delicate calibration and had to be maintained.

  He had no choice but to take breakfast in the noisy canteen with all the others and their chattering and, in some cases, their screeching and howling. To deal with this, he had devised special methods: he wore ear plugs, and as he ate, he would recite to himself the ‘mindfulness of food’ prayer taught to him by the monks, who, he would remind himself, sometimes took an hour or more to appreciate a single spoonful of rice.

  He was now prepared, in the perfect state to take full advantage of the cocktail of pills which came after breakfast. As the medicines worked their wonders, the hardest part thereafter was maintaining enough concentration to collect his equipment and transport himself to the correct spot outside, without anyone insisting that he go and sit in the ‘sunshine room’ or take a lie down, or any other of the myriad distractions they would try to foist on him in the name of ‘treatment’.

  Today was a success. He escaped unnoticed, kept his head down (without letting it droop) and by ten o’clock he found himself once again sitting with brush in hand and easel set up in the gardens. He sat just beside the bridge that crossed the bubbling little strea
m, with the empty bench on the other side in full view amongst the hanging willow trees – the ‘spot’.

  He was intensely aware of the birds twittering brightly and the colours of nature pulsating in everything around him – colours as vibrant and vivid as if drawn from solid rainbows.