by Stephen Fry
Albert needed no one. He had proved his point. He was a superb agriculturist. Now, alone with his two tiny children, his wide fields of beet and his sugar refinery, he yearned to leave the country that was no longer his own. Besides Yiddish and Hungarian, his mother tongues, he had had to learn German and Romanian for service in the Hussars and since then the languages of his new government, Czech and Slovak.
“I am leaving before Prague is taken over by the French,” he told his factotum, Tomasz. Albert held, all his life, a peculiar horror of the French tongue, unaccountably believing it to be far more difficult to master than any other in Europe.
But how could Albert leave? Who would buy his beet fields? Who would give him a good price for a private refinery? Where would he go? Many in his village spoke of America, but America meant only New York; Jews were not welcome in the farmlands. Albert’s brother Michael, or rather Amos, urged him by letter to come and join him in Palestine, where he and his new wife Nora had given the world a pair of brand new sabra children, Aron and Ephraim, who were growing up to be the new Jews of the new Jerusalem.
“After all, you’re something of a sabra, yourself, Albert,” he wrote.
Albert was puzzled by this remark. A Jew could only call himself a sabra, he had understood, if he was born in the land of Israel. A learned friend explained Amos’s meaning.
“Your brother is making a friendly joke, Albert. ‘Sabra’ is also a word for a kind of fruit. A prickly pear, spiky on the outside but sweet and soft on the inside.” As good a description of Albert as anyone ever found. He had been forced to be prickly, however, for his estate was large and took a great deal of energy and skill to run, with markets so deeply corrupt, inflation so crazily high and the people so grindingly poor. He had been forced to be prickly because his real, calm, loving and rational self was mistaken for the black soul of a hypnotic wizard.
A week after this letter from Amos had arrived, Adolf Hitler was elected by the German people to be their new Chancellor. Albert was disappointed. Hitler did not seem to him to be a suitable leader for the Germans; the anti-Semitism, he supposed, like everybody’s anti-Semitism, was an unpleasant noise that meant very little. Albert was rarely bothered by anti-Semitism. He had often felt a little that way himself when he heard Hasidim sounding off on the subject of the law or Amos and his friends sounding off on the subject of Zion. It was not that Albert was ashamed of being Jewish, it was rather that he was damned if he was going to make a big fuss about it. He was a father and a farmer, that was all.
Another week later a very surprising thing happened. An English gentleman arrived at Albert’s house, accompanied by an interpreter from Prague. Albert was beside himself with excitement to have a real Englishman within his walls. Of all the peoples of the world the English were quite his favourite. It had been a matter of great relief to him that he had not come into any hostile contact with them during the course of the war, for he was sure that he would have been greatly tempted to cross the lines and join them. He liked their formality, their tweed suits, their respect for horsemanship, their ironic humour and their lack of show.
Albert seated the Englishman and the interpreter in leather chairs in his study. He rang for Tomasz, his servant.
“The gentleman will take tea?” he asked the interpreter. He hoped that the Englishman would not think that his ringing for a servant amounted to ostentation. It really was perfectly usual for Albert to drink tea at this hour and for Tomasz to be summoned by a bell and commanded to prepare it.
“Tea would be delightful, my dear sir,” the translator replied in grand Hungarian. He seemed to Albert to be attempting to outanglify the Englishman with his pre-war pomposity and pre-war whiskers.
Once tea was poured, Albert sat politely upright and waited for the purpose of this visit to be revealed. Sipping from his cup as though he were attending the smartest party on the smoothest lawn in Berkshire, the English gentleman delivered himself of a short sentence and then cocked his head good-naturedly towards the interpreter. The voice was light and pleasant, with soft “r”s and a gentle falling inflection. The interpreter smiled broadly and declared:
“Mr. Bienenstock, I represent His Majesty’s Government in London.”
What splendid words! Albert’s head became dizzy with excitement, then dizzier still as, over the next hour, the Englishman explained his mission.
The British Empire—another splendid phrase!—was deeply sensible, the Englishman said, of her complete dependence upon the cane sugars that originated in her far dominions of Australia and the West Indies. Were there ever to be another war in Europe—and the Englishman protested that this eventuality was held by his masters to be quite discountably remote—naval tacticians were of one mind in their agreement that the seas that bounded the British shores might be all but cut off from vital supplies of hot-weather commodities, of which sugar was the most vital . . . well, after tea perhaps. The British had never in all their long history—really a most unpardonable oversight—grown sugar beet on any domestic basis. They had no expertise on the subject whatsoever. That it could be grown was not a matter that admitted of the least doubt. Sugar from cane, they were fully aware, was not a realistic possibility, owing to their weather, which Mr. Bienenstock doubtless knew was capricious to a nationally celebrated fault. Sugar beet, however, the staple of Mr. Bienenstock’s fertile native plains, seemed perfectly suited to the British climate. It was after all, was it not, akin to the carrot, the turnip and—one must assume—the beetroot? The British farmer was known for the splendour of his carrots, his turnips and his beetroots; surely the cultivation of their close cousins Beta Rapa and Beta Vulgaris could not be beyond him? The Ministry did feel, however, that someone was needed to guide them, a man who knew all aspects of the vegetable, as it were from field to sugar-bowl. Mr. Bienenstock’s name had been put forward to Ministry representatives in Prague as being one of the most authoritative in the sugar world. Would Mr. Bienenstock consider making the journey to England, in two years’ time, to counsel and instruct the ignorant farmers there, to manage test beds, to supervise refinery construction and to oversee Britain’s first tentative production of the crop? To use a meterological metaphor, the British Isles were in drought and needed a man like Mr. Bienenstock to shower them with his knowledge and expertise. Her Majesty’s Government would pay a generous salary for this work and take pleasure in defraying any such expenses in the matters of travel and resettlement as might arise. The English gentleman himself was in no doubt that should Mr. Bienenstock be desirous of such status, he could during this time apply to become a full subject of King George and be assured of a favourable outcome.
The government of this same majesty would also be pleased, subject to Mr. Bienenstock’s agreement, over the next two years to buy, at a fair market price, all his fields and his refinery in Czechoslovakia and to send out a number of British agriculturists to experience with him two full cycles of the beet, in growth, harvest and refinement. The government of Czechoslovakia was most anxious to help in this matter, Britain’s friendship with the vigorous young democracy being an established fact in a fickle world, a relationship to be relied upon in these trying times for Europe.
The Englishman and Czech translator would leave Mr. Bienenstock now to digest this proposal. His decision could be given over the next few weeks. Really most excellent tea. The best the Englishman had tasted on the Continent. Good afternoon to you, Mr. Bienenstock. Such charming children.
If Albert had got down on his knees and covered his head to beseech God to grant him all that he desired he could not have framed a prayer that so exactly delineated his requirements. Albert managed to maintain his dignity enough not to reply there and then, sending word to Prague three days later that he would be pleased to assent to the English gentleman’s scheme and that he was looking forward to offering his hospitality to the agricultural experts London chose to
send out to him.
The English farmers, Mr. Northwood, Mr. Aves and Mr. Williams, arrived later that year. They impressed Albert as being both intelligent and respectful, proving themselves attentive and exceptionally apt pupils in the art of sugar. Harry, Paul and Vic, as they insisted they be called, were kind to Michael and Rebecca, who responded by taking to English as though the language had been planted inside them at birth and had been only waiting for this one chance to flourish. Albert picked up the spirit and substance of the language very quickly too, but suffered great teasing from young Michael, who could not understand his father’s inability to master its textures.
“No, Father. It’s not ‘Wick Villiams’ or a ‘vunderful willage.’ It’s ‘Vic Williams’ and a ‘wonderful village.’”
“I can’t say those letters.”
“That’s mad!” Michael would hoot, outraged by such absurdity. “If you can say ‘Villiams’ and ‘willage,’ of course you can say Williams and village.”
“Old weterans stick to old vays,” Albert would say with deliberate cussedness.
During those two exciting years for the Bienenstock household, all the talk was in English and of England. The visitors spoke of pubs and clubs, of cricket and soccer, of Oxford and Cambridge, of Leslie Howard and Noël Coward, of crossword puzzles and fox-hunting, of Huntley and Palmer biscuits and Mazawattee tea, of the BBC and the GPO, of Guy Fawkes Night and Derby Day, of the Prime Minister of Mirth and the Prince of Wales. Albert unearthed in a bookshop a copy of Der Forsyte Saga von John Galsworthy and found himself growing ever impatient to become part of this kindly, ordered world with its town-squares and sea-side hotels, its cosy fogs and rattling taxis, its politicians in top-hats and duchesses in white gloves.
On the boat over from Bremerhaven (one last look at poor Germany and poor, poor Europe), while Rebecca was being sick over the rails, little Michael raised the subject of their names.
“Harry says . . .” every statement of Michael’s for the last year had begun with those words, “Harry says that English people might laugh at the name Bienenstock. Harry says it sounds like a kind of bean soup.”
“Oh dear,” said Albert. “We don’t want people to laugh at our names. We must think of something else.”
It was a year later, when they were already well settled in just outside the town of Huntingdon, that Michael himself came up with the splendid idea. His best friend at kindergarten was called Tommy Logan and Michael, writing Tommy’s name many times all over his exercise book, as best friends do, noticed that “Logan” was really “Golan” rearranged.
Albert was delighted. “Logan,” he kept repeating to himself, “Logan . . . Logan . . . Logan.”
“You see, Father!” said Michael. “We have made an Anglo version of Golan!”
Six months later the two children walked with their father from the Naturalisation Department of the Home Office towards the Lyon’s Corner House in Trafalgar Square.
“Uncle Amos will be so pleased,” said Albert Logan, subject of the King.
Tommy Logan’s reaction, however, back at the Huntingdon kindergarten, had been one far removed from pleasure.
“You’ve stolen my name!” he howled. “You horrid Jew, you’ve stolen my name. How dare you! I’ll never talk to you again, you stinking Jew.”
“However did they know that you are Jewish?” Albert had wondered when Michael related this falling-out to his father.
“Miss Hartley told them on my first day,” Michael said. “She said that everyone was to be nice to me, because decent people have forgiven us for killing Christ.”
“Is that so?” said Albert and a small furrow appeared on his brow.
But furrows were not for Albert’s forehead, they were for his fields. The government test beds in Huntingdonshire were the sensation of the day and for a short season the talk of England.
“BRITAIN TO BEET THE WORLD!” a page-five headline in the Daily Express had declared above a photograph of Albert and a government agriculturist standing proudly in front of their “experimental” acres.
“This unprepossessing vegetable, no more in reality than a turnip with a sweet tooth, could be the key to Britain’s future prosperity,” a leader writer declared.
The members of the British public were less sure.
“Will sugar from beet be purple?”
“Can it be turned into proper English cubes?”
“Is it more fattening?”
“Will it taste of soil?”
“Can beet be baked in a pie?”
“Can I grow it in the garden and make my own sugar?”
“Is it fair on the colonies?”
“You can bet they won’t be serving it in the Tate Gallery tearooms.”
Over the next four or five years, the smiling Hungarian in tweed plus-fours toured the south coast and East Anglia in his holly-green Austin, bestowing government grants and agricultural advice on puzzled but welcoming farmers. Michael and Rebecca continued with their studies at Miss Hartley’s kindergarten in Huntingdon, a town to which Albert was by now greatly attached, despite initial misgivings.
“Oliver Cromwell?” he had cried, when first he had heard. “Oliver Cromwell came from here? The king-killer?”
He simply could not believe that the otherwise loyal and respectable townspeople of Huntingdon could be so sincerely proud of their wicked son, that disgrace to English history, the British Lenin. In time, however, he learned to forgive the Lord Protector who was, after all, a gentleman farmer like himself and had been pushed by dread circumstance, not by Bolshevism or bloodlust, into the events that led to that awful January morning in Whitehall. The people of Huntingdon, in their turn, learned to love the strange Czechoslovakian with the charming manners, perfect English children and inexplicably Scottish surname. They were less sure about the refinery whose construction he had supervised and which he now ran. It gave off a sickly smell of burnt peanut-butter which would hang over the whole town on windless days. The creation of a second refinery in Bury St. Edmunds gave young Michael his first lesson in management technique, however, and can be thanked for that.
One rainy afternoon, when Rebecca and Michael were playing on the floor of their father’s study, an engineer came to call on Albert. He left a 600-page report, full of technical drawings and scientific data, which he was anxious for Mr. Logan to approve.
Michael watched that evening as Albert sat with the report on his lap.
“Have you got to read all that?”
“Read it? What do I know from pressure-gauges and amps? This is what I do.”
Albert riffled his thumb through the pages of the report and opened a page at random. With a red-inked pen he underlined a few words and flipped through to another page where he circled some numbers, writing a large question mark in the margin. He did this four or five times before scrawling at the bottom of the last page the words, “Can the sub-station take the extra load?”
Michael happened to be outside the study a week later when the engineer called again.
“I’ve checked and checked and checked the figures you queried, Mr. Logan, and so have my colleagues, but we’re blowed if we can find any error.”
“Ah. I’m so sorry, my dear fellow. I must have made a mistake. I should not have been doubting you.”
“Well, we do like to be thorough, sir. We were pretty sure about the sub-station too. Then, you’ll never guess, but the contractors telephoned to say they had made a miscalculation with their tolerances. They should have been greater by ten per cent.”
After Albert had shown the grateful and admiring engineer from the house, he addressed Michael, whom he had seen lurking in the corridor.
“You see? Now they have checked so many times that everything is sure to be fine.”
“But the sub-station? How did you know?”
II
One day, it was during the holidays, the very week before Michael was due to start his first term at boarding school in Sussex, Albert summoned the children to his study. He was looking very serious and spoke in Hungarian, a sure sign of distress.
“I have just had a letter from your Uncle Amos,” he said. “It means that I shall have to go away for a little while. This is a good time for me to take a holiday. You, Michael, will have to go early to your new school. I have telephoned the headmaster and he will be happy to look after you. You will stay at home, Rebecca, and be looked after by Mrs. Price.”
“What is it, Father?” asked Michael. “What has happened?”
“Our cousins living in Vienna, your Uncle Rudi, your Uncle Louis and your Aunts Hannah and Roselle and all the children, they would like to leave Austria and come to England. I can help because I have my British passport. But I must go there myself. A tiresome necessity, but a necessity all the same.”
The next day Albert had gone to London to see his old friend in the Foreign Office, the English gentleman who had visited him in 1933. Albert forbore from making any reference to Britain’s “firm friendship with your vigorous young democracy,” the “established fact in a fickle world” of which the gentleman had spoken on that afternoon in Czechoslovakia. It was not for Albert to question Mr. Chamberlain’s tea-party with Hitler.