by Maisie Mosco
Howard found himself telling her that his divorce was not yet finalized, and of his father’s illness that was making it increasingly difficult for him to visit Ben.
“I am truly sorry for you,” she said when he had finished speaking.
“I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself! But I oughtn’t to be boring a total stranger with my problems –”
“I am not in the least bored,” she answered, “and we must complete our eating, or the trays will shortly be snatched from us.”
“You’re obviously a more experienced traveller than me,” Howard remarked, while they ate.
“Our family business is to manufacture optical lenses and that is worldwide trade. May I ask what you do?”
“The same as you. Work in our family business. It’s a retail store.”
“You do not go abroad for the buying?”
Howard’s wanting to do so had always been a bone of contention between him and his father. “No, we buy from the sales reps who come to us.”
“And what are the goods that you sell?”
Was she a Nosey Parker? Or interested in Howard?
She dabbed a blob of chocolate mousse from her lips and gave him a smile that encouraged him to believe the latter.
“Curtains and bedlinen, tablecloths and towels,” he replied. “That sort of thing has been big business since the British discovered decor and the duvet, though we’re still suffering the effects of unemployment, like everyone else. When the recession was at its worst, I recalled my late grandfather telling me when I was a kid that before the war he’d sold men’s socks for twopence-ha’penny a pair and wished we could cut our prices down to the bone. In my granddad’s time they sold clothing, as well.”
It was as a cut-price store that the business was established, its profits accrued via turnover. Begun by Ben Klein in the thirties on a shoestring, Howard reflected. And later carried forward by Harry to the substantial concern it now was.
“Our business too was founded by my grandfather,” the girl told him, “but when Hitler came to power…”
She paused while the stewardess poured their coffee and said after sipping hers, “You are Jewish, like me, are you not?”
But it hadn’t occurred to Howard that she was.
“So you will understand that for my parents to return to Germany it was not easy,” she went on. “Their own parents, they had died in the camps. Needless to say, somehow they survived, or I would not be here. And how I knew you are Jewish was the Star of David engraved upon your ring.”
“My sister, who lives in Israel, gave it to me.”
“I have my brother living there. He is an army officer and my mother, she worries about him all the time.”
A brief hiatus followed while their trays were whisked away though they were allowed to keep their coffee cups.
Then Howard took advantage of his first encounter with one of Germany’s post-war Jewish community to ask a question related to his son.
“What is it like for you and your children, living where you do?”
“Most of the time I don’t think about it,” the girl replied, “but I would not call it a happy situation. The Nazi graffiti has, as perhaps you know, begun appearing here and there, as my parents say it did in their youth. The difference between now and then is that the authorities remove it. And my children, they experience no more anti-Semitism at school than I myself did.”
“I experienced some in my schooldays in England,” Howard told her.
“And I have heard that in your country also are the neo-Nazi groups. But there cannot be for you there the dimension attached to it for Jews in Germany,” she said quietly. “For my parents what they sometimes see on a wall in Berlin, it must surely freeze their blood. For myself there is an uneasiness that has always been with me.”
“Would you mind telling me why your parents returned?”
She gave him another smile, her expression wry. “I am aware that to the rest of Jewry our community it is an enigma.”
Howard would have called it a phenomenon.
“I cannot speak for others,” she went on, “but I would guarantee that all had very personal reasons. As for my parents, they were living first in what was then Palestine, to where they had gone after the camps. It was there that they met and married. Then one night, my father dreamt of his own father and the next morning told my mother of his intention to return to Berlin. In the dream, his father had told him that there being no Jews in Germany was letting Hitler win.”
“That’s an amazing story,” said Howard.
“But true nevertheless,” said the girl, “and it ensured that their children would be born and raised in Germany, for which my brother has not forgiven them. Since returning, my father, he has fulfilled my grandfather’s ambition disrupted by the Nazis, that the Schulmann Optics Company continue from generation to generation of our family. My father would have wished it to pass to my brother but will have to make do with me. My name is Karin Schulmann and I should like to know with whom I am having this conversation!”
Howard introduced himself and they shook hands.
“You know about the Jewish Community Centre in Munich?” Karin asked.
Howard shook his head. “My wife isn’t Jewish.”
“Nor,” said Karin, “is the man I married. You and I we have much in common, do we not?”
Howard then invited her to dine with him that evening at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where he habitually stayed and ate in solitary splendour.
She said when she had accepted, “If we are to eat in the restaurant, I shall have to dress up!”
“Would I take you to the beer keller place downstairs for Bratwurst mit Sauerkraut, on our first date!”
Thus it was that Howard’s further entanglement with Germany began.
Chapter 12
In the weeks that followed Ronald’s visit, family matters continued to dominate Marianne’s life.
Her lecturing Harry on the subject of Ann’s devotion and his tyranny had resulted in a shouting match from which Harry had emerged victorious by feigning a pain in his head. Nor was Ann willing or able to accept Marianne’s offer to relieve her while she took a break. Harry had informed her that he would be dead when she came back.
The next crisis was Nathan’s learning that Ronald, whom he looked upon as a son, was not just leaving the practice but in effect departing from his life. Bridie had called Marianne to ask her, in Leona’s absence, to come and comfort her uncle, who had taken to his bed.
Again Marianne had thought, Why me? She had nevertheless driven post haste to Nathan’s home, but was not allowed to enter his room.
The news with which Leona had returned from Florida had seemed the final straw. Though his marriage was but a sham, how would Uncle Nat’s dignity withstand his wife’s deserting him in his old age? He was well known in the community and it would not take too long for the grapevine to do its worst. Added to which the support he might have expected from his daughter had not been forthcoming.
I’m no Sarah Sandberg, nor did I ever pretend to be, Marianne thought, blessed with unlimited patience, the wisdom of Solomon, and a selfless devotion to anyone and everyone in the family.
Sarah would have sorted Harry out in two seconds flat. Nathan and Leona, too. Somehow she had always found a way of dealing with people.
Marianne’s inclination right now was to tell the family to go to hell and let her get on with her work, which between crises she had tried and failed to do.
These were her ruminations on a wet August morning when she had sat staring at the blank paper in her typewriter trying to summon the inspiration that once had come naturally. Had she lost her creative impetus? Would this have gone on for weeks if it were just a bout of writer’s block?
Outside the study window the elm tree was tinged with the hue that bespoke an early autumn. The geraniums in the flower bed looked bedraggled from the heavy rain. And the weather matched Marianne’s mood.
She dialle
d her son’s number and interrupted his work.
“What is it, Mum?” he asked in the crisp tone she herself employed when her concentration was disrupted by a phone call. “Can I get back to you?”
“No, Martin. I need to talk to you now. The family is coming between me and the book I’m writing, to the point where I’ve completely dried up. Has that ever happened to you?”
“Frequently! But I’m sure it’s a new experience for you. I’m not surprised it’s happened to you now, though. I saw it coming.”
“Been keeping an eye on me from the distance, have you!”
“And now Dad’s gone, I’d much prefer to do so at close quarters.”
It was a moving moment for Marianne. Despite his heavy work schedule and his problems with his wife, her son was concerned for her.
“Which I shall soon be able to do,” he went on. “There’s only one answer to your situation vis-à-vis the family and I intend to see that you put it into practice. You must remove yourself from where most of the action is. Sell the cottage and come back to London.
Part Two
1985…
Chapter 1
By the spring of 1985, the Soviet Union had a new leader whose emergence lent hope to the world, and Marianne had made a trip to Moscow and Leningrad to meet some of her Jewish brethren, for whom oppression remained their lot.
She had returned thinking: There but for the grace of God go I, as she had when she visited the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and saw the pictorial evidence of what she had escaped.
Since taking her son’s advice she had resumed the travel, which, before Ralph’s death, had punctuated her lengthy stints at the typewriter, necessary not just to revitalize her, but to add depth and colour to her novels.
The book she had feared she was unable to write was published the previous year. And in some respects it was for her as if she had never left London.
Her former home in Hampstead was up for sale when she decided to return south and she had bought it without thinking twice, its availability as though Fate had intended her to live out her years alone in the flat in which she and Ralph had spent the bulk of their married life.
In her bleak moments there was the comfort of having Martin – Laura too – a stone’s throw away. Also the stimulation of imbibing once again the lively atmosphere of Hampstead Village, where the famous rubbed shoulders with arty young people and a motley of tourists. There was too the pleasure of walking on the Heath, where once she had walked on Sunday afternoons with Ralph.
Now there was only his memory to keep her company. Increasingly Marianne’s personal solitude was making itself felt. How had her mother and her grandmother dealt with it? Both had had what they had referred to as “chances.” Marianne, too. In her working world she encountered interesting men and had dated several. Jake had introduced her to a fellow South African on the lookout for a second wife, which Marianne had not known until Laura whispered the information to her in the restaurant where Jake’s match-making exercise took place.
His friend had proved to be attractive and personable. But Marianne had yet to meet the man for whom she would renounce the independence she would not have chosen but valued now that she had it.
With Ralph she had not minded the disadvantages of sharing one’s life with another. But they had met and fallen in love when they were young, feeling their way together along a sometimes rocky path, and still friends and lovers when they reached their fifties.
Nowadays, though, Marianne reflected wryly, a relationship did not have to include marriage and the loss of independence that went with it. Even the middle-aged and some of the elderly had accepted for themselves the behaviour patterns that had horrified them when their children and grandchildren began thumbing their noses at convention.
Shirley had had at least two resident boyfriends, no doubt with marriage in mind though it had not come to that. And Uncle Nat had recently found himself a girlfriend two years his senior, with whom he had spent a holiday in Majorca which Leona suspected had included their sharing a room. There would be no shenanigans in his house, though, lest Bridie walk out on him!
Marianne smiled at the thought of two septuagenarians enjoying what would once have been called an illicit love affair. Bend with the wind of change though she had, what would Sarah Sandberg have had to say about that!
She put the cover on her typewriter, at which she was seated musing after completing a difficult chapter and went to remove a wilted leaf from the Busy Lizzie that lived in the window bay, behind the old leather Chesterfield where she sometimes sat to do her thinking.
Both the plant and the sofa had travelled north with her and back again to this spacious study overlooking the garden. And the bookshelves Ralph had built for her were still there to greet her on her return, albeit painted black by the erstwhile occupiers, to enhance the emerald green they had imposed upon the walls.
A little time and a lot of money had restored the flat to its former ambience, and soon restored too was the rhythm of Marianne’s work.
But while I’ve been pounding my typewriter, family history has gone on writing itself, she reflected while giving her plants a drink of water from the copper can she kept topped-up because Busy Lizzie and African Violet preferred it to be room temperature. She had once lost one of Violet’s sisters after thoughtlessly holding her under the tap. Next day, the plant was wilted as if in protest, never to recover.
Begonia and Ivy, though, seemed not to mind about temperature so long as they got their drink. Marianne’s habit of humanizing her plants was a family joke. And back with what had gone on in the family since her return to London… Well, Marianne Dean was not short of material should she ever try her hand at writing a family saga.
But which author would fictionalize the skeletons in their own cupboard? You took your themes from life overall as you observed it, though an understanding of human nature came in handy when you found your characters behaving on paper as you hadn’t planned that they would. When a nasty character suddenly performed an act of kindness, you knew that you had created a true to life person. Nobody was all bad, nor, conversely, all good. And there had to be a reason for the unpleasantness some people habitually displayed, buried deep in their pasts perhaps.
In Harry’s case, though, illness accounted for it. His body had let him down, and he was consumed by an inner rage and making others pay for it. Now that Marianne no longer saw him frequently, she was able to put into perspective a situation which had puzzled her when she was on the receiving end.
A situation which time would do nothing to alleviate, as it had for Uncle Nat. Her uncle was now relishing a freedom to be himself formerly denied him. He had not wanted to be a doctor, but obligation imposed upon him by his family had shackled him to that profession. Nor had he wanted the marriage his mother and brother had viewed as a fool proof way of smoothing his path.
Time had proved it the opposite of fool proof, and was there, thought Marianne, any such thing? Even those who set out with goodwill, which her uncle had not, were liable to encounter unforeseen hurdles along the way.
Uncle Nat was a good and respected physician, but his compassion and his clever mind had ensured that, not the vocational calling that had led his friend, Lou, and his nephew Ronald to study medicine. Uncle Nat had hoped to read the classics, and Marianne’s mother had told her that his teachers at the Manchester Grammar School had considered him Oxbridge material.
No, my mum wouldn’t have put it that way, Marianne thought reminiscently. What did Esther Klein know from that composite word and the dreaming spires it conjured up?
A more prosaic woman than Esther would, even in her day, have been hard to find. The conversation Marianne was recalling had taken place in her mother’s kitchen and she could still see her mum, immaculate as always, though she had been cooking all morning and was then frying fish balls, carefully turning them in the pan of sizzling oil.
Even when she grew old, Esther had continued taking pr
ide in her appearance. A streak of vanity at odds with her personality, Marianne the author thought objectively. Marianne the daughter found that her eyes had misted with the remembrance.
She left her study and went to take a shower, her mind still engaged by family matters – perhaps because this was the Passover Eve and she had still not accustomed herself to celebrating the festival minus those whose presence had dominated the family Seder tables of the past.
Her Uncle David was notable among them, his glasses slipping down his nose as he read aloud from the Haggadah, and woe betide the child who allowed his or her attention to wander! Time was when Marianne’s grandfather, Abraham Sandberg, had conducted the proceedings, his shoulders stooped from his early-immigrant years in a sweatshop, the foul air and the steam from the pressing iron he had wielded responsible for the diseased lungs that had precipitated his end.
In her swish 1980s bathroom, it was hard for Marianne to believe that from such penurious beginnings the comfortably off clan of which she was part had sprung. And with each succeeding generation, it would be the more difficult – if the beneficiaries of their forebears’ blood, sweat and tears bothered to think about it, which Marianne doubted. Few had granddads like David, whose taking Laura to see the “ancestral home” in the old Strangeways ghetto had shaken her rigid and done a lot for her character.
With Abraham Sandberg’s death, his mantle had fallen upon David’s shoulders, and how strange it had at first seemed to see Uncle David seated in Abraham’s chair at the head of the big table in Sarah’s dining-room.
Sarah’s response to Marianne’s communicating that feeling to her was a gentle reproof, and that cameo from the past too now returned to her – herself, a young mother, nursing her baby. And Sarah wearing a grey dress with a white collar to which the little Russian brooch was pinned.
“I’m surprised at you, Marianne,” she had said. “How can a girl with your intelligence find it strange that a son takes over where his father left off? It’s how God arranges things, and what is that child in your arms if not proof of how He arranges the going and coming so a family shouldn’t die out? You were pregnant when your grandfather was taken from us, weren’t you?”