Abner bent his head and stared down at the table-cloth. He was shredding the soft paper beneath his fingers, trying to think honestly about what he would have done.
‘I don’t know,’ he said at length. ‘I can’t imagine myself in such a situation. Can you?’
She grinned a little crookedly. ‘You think I’ve always been rich, like now?’ Unselfconsciously she stroked her expensive dress, and touched her diamond brooch. ‘You think I was born to this? Believe me, we were poor, my family. When I was a kid, we were bombed out of the East End, had nothing. My father had to drag us back after the war. A cabinet maker, he was; ended up with his own furniture factory in High Wycombe. I did all right in the end — but I remember well enough, I remember. I can see that a starving boy would do a lot for a bag of apples.’
‘He told the Germans where the people were?’
She shrugged again. ‘Libby said they caught him. Told him, either we shoot you now or you tell us. What’s more, you tell us where the people are you find food for, and we’ll give you apples. What sort of choice did the boy have?’
‘Libby Lippner didn’t see it that way.’
‘She said he should have let himself be shot,’ she said. ‘It’s understandable, I suppose. She had a bad life, Libby. What with her David and all. She had no one but him and what was he? Nothing but misery.’
‘What happened to the boy? The one who took the apples.’
Again she gave him that sharp little upwards glance. ‘That was the thing of it. He went to Auschwitz too, and got out. He’s here somewhere.’
He felt the authentic chill of excitement move through his shoulders, down into his chest and into his hands, making them shake, and he slid them off the table into his lap and leaned still further forwards. ‘Here? In London?’
‘So Libby said. She was always trying to find out what happened to him. She wanted to curse him dead or alive, but she had to know. And somehow she found out. Don’t ask me how. She found out, is all I know, so she said. And she said he was doing good for himself. Very good. But she was going to do something to bring him down. Like an evil tree.’ She shivered suddenly and then sat up very upright, her chubby shoulders and her round chin with its own ghost beneath it quivering a little. ‘Such a subject! I don’t want to talk of it any more. Go ask Sam — see what he’ll tell you! For my part it’s enough — eh, Cyril?’ And deliberately she poked the old man in the ribs, and he woke sharply and stared at her blankly and then at Abner.
‘You got some good stuff, eh, Abner?’ he said then and yawned. ‘I told you you would. Listen, how’s about that cab and the visit you said you’d take me on, hey? It’s getting on, time we was on our way.’ And he got to his feet heavily and nodded at Mrs Singer and then at Abner.
‘Enough’s enough already. It’s time to go.’ And he turned and began to make his way to the door.
‘No!’ Abner called him back. ‘Not yet. I want to talk some more here — ’
Cyril turned and looked at him, and then shook his head. ‘They don’t want to talk to you, Abner. Leave it alone, already. It’s enough for one day. Another time, I’ll fix it for you. Maybe. Right now, I want to go to Edgware for coffee. And you can’t stay here without me, can you? an’ I’m going.’
And he did.
Seventeen
‘I’m beginning to have a clearer idea about how it was you survived what happened to you, Cyril,’ Abner said, watching the old man demolish a massive slice of strudel. ‘You’re a stubborn bastard, you know that?’
‘You only just realised? Of course! Stubbornness gets you a long way further than heroism.’ He pushed away his empty plate and leaned back to look around at the crowded restaurant. ‘Now, this I like! The Ladies’ Guild, they lay on a nice supper, I grant you, but if you want a bit of life this is the place to be!’
Abner looked round too, at the tables filled with prosperous-looking people, gobbling cake and ice-cream and sucking in buckets of tea and coffee and then back at Cyril, and felt guilt seep into him. If this suburban coffee shop, over-decorated with antiqued mirrors and crystal lights, was his idea of high life, how empty were his days? And he remembered the stuffy, cluttered, chilly little house and looked again at the ersatz brightness around him and felt ashamed.
‘I’m glad you like it,’ he said. ‘And we can do better than this. I’ll take you to a few other places, too hmm? What do you say?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ Cyril said and lifted his eyebrows at him. ‘Sure, I say yes! Mind you, I don’t think I got much more for you. To tell you the truth, that stuff Doris Singer was telling you — I never knew it. That was an extra.’ He laughed then. ‘Like the boy scouts say, you do good deeds, you get paid back. You turned out tonight to bring me some supper and get a bit more out of me, and look what happened! But I can’t promise you no such extra rewards another time.’
‘I don’t do things just for what I get out of it,’ Abner said, stung. ‘Believe it or not, I made the offer out of — out of — because I just wanted to. Not everybody’s out just for themselves, Cyril!’
‘No?’ the old man said and again gave him that raised-brows stare. ‘Prove it.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Abner almost snapped at him. ‘You should know better than anyone! Didn’t you come through that hell of a life in the camps, didn’t you see how — how heroic people were? And can’t you see how much people care for each other, even in little ways? Those women there at the synagogue hall tonight, working their butts off to give a bunch of thoroughly miserable old people a night out, a bit of supper. How can you say that people — ’
Cyril leaned forwards, moving ponderously. ‘Now, just you listen to me, mister. You got a lot of notions that are very pretty in a boy, not so clever in a grown man. The women at the schul? Sure they’re good to us old people — us poor things they can patronise, and why shouldn’t they be? Never think there isn’t as much in it for them as there is for us. They ain’t just doing us favours, you know. We make their lives worth living! They’ve got comfortable husbands they’re bored out of their heads with, and grown-up kids who never have time for ’em no more, and no jobs to fill their days, no way to feel important. So what do they do? They start a committee and have officers and elections and chairmen and secretaries and the whole schmear, and suddenly, punkt! They’re important, they got something to be busy about. They raise money and they make food — and what can anyone enjoy more than getting food ready for a party? — and they collect us all up and they bustle about, busy busy geferlich, the big “I Am” they’re being all the time, and we have to be grateful. And you say they’re doing it just out of the goodness of their hearts? You’re a baby, Abner. I thought better of you.’
‘Now, just a minute — ’ Abner began, but Cyril would have none of him.
‘Nah, it’s your turn next. Right now, just you listen to me. You talk about how I saw heroism and goodness in the people in the camps, right? Well, let me tell you there was about as much heroism as that — ’ and he spat over his shoulder, a minute bead of saliva that seemed to disappear in the air before it reached the floor. ‘There was no heroism! There was scheming and managing and struggling and getting by and doing your best for yourself and your own and to hell with everyone else, take it from me. Do you think all those people in the camps didn’t steal from each other, didn’t push other people in front of them to get out of the gas chambers, out of the work, out of trouble? Of course they did! That’s what survival’s about, Abner. It ain’t like the movies, where people make monkeys of themselves for stinkin’ principles! You people in the films, you want nobility and self-sacrifice and virtue — well, to hell with all that! In real life you do what you have to do to stay alive and to get your share and anyone else’s you can get your hands on too, and to the fire with anyone who gets in your way. And if this film you’re making don’t show that, then you’re just another liar, looking for his own glory and using other people’s lives to do it. And you’re a fool, too. Becaus
e if you tell the story the way it really was, and the way it still is, at least you’ll get some respect from people like me. If that matters to you. Though why it should I don’t know. What the hell good did respect ever do anyone? It’s a luxury — ’
He caught his breath and then began to cough and Abner moved towards him, alarmed. There were patches of hectic colour in the hollows of his cheeks and his lips had a faintly bluish tinge; but he looked satisfied, even though he was coughing till his eyes watered and people turned to stare.
‘Here, have a drop of water,’ Abner muttered and Cyril took the glass and sipped and then gasped and relaxed; and slowly the sick colour subsided and his eyes lost their redness and he looked normal again, and he managed to smile at Abner and shake his head ruefully.
‘Why can’t I keep my mouth shut? I get so busy tellin’ other people how to run their lives I nearly finish my own. Making a liar of myself, eh? Being self-sacrificing. Only I’m not. There’s something in it for me, of course — proving to you you’re wrong. Very satisfying, that is.’
Abner had to laugh and the old man sat and glinted at him and there was suddenly a bubble of accord that seemed to wrap them round in comfort. Abner thought, Hyman, why wasn’t it ever like this with Hyman? And at once the bubble burst.
‘Well, I’ll prove you’re wrong. I’ll take you to a few other places, just for the fun of it. Not yet — I’m short of cash. But next week I’ve got a job to do and that’ll help. Do you have any special places you’d like to go to?’
‘Theatre,’ Cyril said promptly. ‘I never get to see the theatre. I see on TV all right, but the real thing — ’
‘TV’s real as well, for Chrissakes!’ Abner said and then shook his head. ‘Goddamn you, Cyril! You have a real gift for making me mad.’
‘Then I’m good for you,’ Cyril said with great satisfaction. ‘Getting mad keeps your circulation going. All right, we’ll go to the theatre as soon as you can manage it. Me, I’m free any time. And an Indian restaurant, maybe? There isn’t one near enough to my place to get takeaways and I’d like to have some of that — ’
‘Indian,’ Abner said, with resignation. ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do.’
All through Sunday morning he chewed away at it all in his mind; the story that Doris Singer had told him went round and round in his head as he tried to see how he could use it; for there was no question but that he had to use it. It was too real, too vivid, too true; and then as he was sitting hunched over a cup of coffee at his big round table in the window staring sightlessly out into the street, it hit him. The whole story stank. It had been offered to him secondhand for a start; and that always made everything dubious. There was no way it could be otherwise, of course: Libby Lippner was dead and the only way to get her story was from someone else, but the tale he’d been given had a huge hole in it. And he’d only just seen it.
How the hell did she know what the boy had been offered to shop the people for whom he was finding food? It made a great story, the image of the sixteen year old pretending to be a man, but a scared boy at heart, letting the Germans talk him into revealing the hiding place of his group in exchange for a bag of apples, but it didn’t ring true. They didn’t have to bribe him into telling all he knew. They just had to threaten him.
And anyway, how could Libby Lippner have known what the Germans offered the boy they’d apparently caught? Did he come back down to the sewers and tell them all, ‘Hey, you lot, better get packed up. The Germans are coming to get you all. I swapped you for a bag of apples’? No, it didn’t make sense.
But there was something there, of that he was certain. He thought again of Doris Singer and all she had told him and knew as surely as he knew that the coffee in his cup was cooling that she had been as honest as she knew how. She had told him exactly what old Libby Lippner had told her. There had been no guile in that over-dressed, plump little red-head. She had been told the story, believed it implicitly, and passed it on in the way she had got it. And even though he had never seen the dead woman, had never heard of her before last night, Abner was seized with the conviction that she had believed her own story completely. She had somehow become convinced that the boy, whoever he was, had sold her and her child and the rest of her friends for that bag of apples. And because she believed it she had made Doris Singer believe it. Yet he, Abner, could not.
And then he remembered; could hear Doris Singer’s voice again, rather thin and nasal, trying to be polite but displaying its raw backstreet origins in every vowel. A comfortable pleasant voice, an honest voice: That was the thing of it. He went to Auschwitz too, and got out. He’s here somewhere …
He’s here somewhere in London. That had been the only thing that kept Libby Lippner going until she had her stroke. She had wanted to find out who he was, and she had managed to do just that; and she had wanted to bring him down like an evil tree.
He had to find him, too. Whoever it was that Libby had found, Abner Wiseman had to find. But how? That was the huge barrier that stood before him. How the hell could he get the information he needed from a woman who was dead? A woman who had had only one relation in whom she might have confided, and who was — from all accounts — inaccessible? Damaged in some way. He takes fits, you understand, Doris Singer had said. And when he’s not having fits he’s not — it’s not nice to talk about. Don’t ask.
Well, he was going to ask. Somehow he’d have to, because that was the only way he could see to find out what he needed to know. And that he needed to know it was undoubted. His film was growing in his mind, spreading and shapeless in places, and with ill-defined edges, but at its heart two hard stories. Miriam Hinchelsea’s grandfather David, walking all over Europe to find his daughter Barbara; and this story, the tale of the Jews who were the Rats of Cracow, delivered into the Gestapo’s hands for a bag of apples. Or so it had been said.
He stood in the doorway hovering, and pulling awkwardly at the bow tie he had managed to dig out of his luggage. It wasn’t the evening suit they had demanded — who the hell travelled tuxedos these days? — but he’d have to get away with it. It was a very sober bow tie after all, and the suit was a good dark one.
All this had better be worth it, he thought now grimly, looking round the place. One of the medium level London hotels, he decided. This was no Waldorf Astoria or Hyatt Regency; this was a place that people who lived suburban lives imagined was glamorous, a larger version of the Edgware coffee shop to which he’d taken Cyril last night, but no more than that.
But it was full. The ballroom strewn with silver balloons and festooned with blue and white paper streamers had been arranged with tables set for dinner and there was a small area left for dancing. The band on the dais was small and dispirited, playing big band numbers with just three instruments and sounding as tired as they looked, but the people milling around beneath them seemed contented enough. There was a good deal of glitter about the women; hair had been sprayed with it and cheeks and eyelids painted with it, and most of the dresses were sequinned. The men in their well-creased tuxedos, Abner decided, looked as though they’d all put on a good deal of weight since they’d first invested in them; bellies held barely in place with cummerbunds argued with shirts with bulging buttons, and again he tweaked his tie and felt a little less uncomfortable than he had feared he would. He at least had the advantage of being younger and better built than most of this lot.
His eyes moved as he looked around, trying to find the man, and then he spotted him and moved through the crowds towards the glint of his glasses. He’d been less than helpful last night, but who knows? Here clearly he’s a big noise, an important person — and he grinned at himself, remembering Cyril’s pithy account of the fire that drove the Ladies’ Guild — and maybe that would have softened him.
Abner touched his sleeve. ‘Mr Hersh? Thank you for leaving the ticket for me.’
The pebble glasses turned and gleamed at him for a moment and then the man managed a thin smile. ‘Oh, yes. Mr — Wiseman, wasn’
t it?’
‘Yes. As I say, it was good of you to fit me in.’
‘Listen, for this cause I can always take a man’s money,’ Hersh said, and the smile seemed to grow a little. ‘There’s no way I get involved with films about the bad times, but I’ll get involved with anyone for this cause. It’s a good one. Listen, I can’t pretend you’ve got the best of tables. A long way from the band, I’m afraid, but you booked late and there’s not a lot I can do — ’
‘That’s fine,’ Abner said fervently, deeply grateful to be well away from the band. ‘It really doesn’t matter. I — ah — there aren’t many people I know here, being a stranger in town and all …’ He smiled winsomely, hating himself for putting on such an act, but it was necessary, after all. ‘I’d be glad of the chance to talk to you about this charity. I didn’t manage to get all the information when I called you this morning — ’
‘You were lucky to find me in at all,’ Hersh said reprovingly, as though Abner had been pestering him. ‘The day of the Ball, you understand. It’s the biggest event of our fund-raising year. The money we make tonight keeps Roseacres going for three months at least. The rest we struggle for with covenants and so forth — so as I say, I’m usually gone very early. I had to go back to fetch something my wife managed to forget — ’ He looked malevolently over his shoulder at a small woman who looked as though she had been upholstered in acid green sequins — ‘So you were lucky.’
‘Very lucky,’ Abner said, thinking of the forty pounds he had just had to pay for the ticket Hersh had bullied him into buying. He’d only tracked down his phone number and called him to try to find out the name of the home where the son of Libby Lippner was, but Hersh had been implacable. First resistant but then highly opportunist, he’d made it very clear that he only talked to people who needed information of any kind if they supported his pet charity and there was an end of it; and Abner, thinking bitterly of Cyril’s dictum that no one ever does anything out of real altruism, had been caught in his trap. If he wanted to know more about the boy and the apples, this was the road he had to go down. Goddammit.
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