The Clothes On Their Backs Read online

  ‘Did it go good?’ my mother asked me. ‘You got a respectable employer?’

  ‘Don’t let him take advantage,’ said my father, ‘just because he’s paying you under the counter. He’s not such a nice person, to break the law.’

  ‘She doesn’t pay tax,’ my mother said.

  ‘Exactly. They can arrest you for that.’

  I sat down in an armchair next to them and we watched the news.

  ‘I have to say, I find this lady quite attractive,’ my father said. ‘What do you think, Berta?’

  ‘She should wear a hat. It will make her stand out more, like the Queen when she’s in big crowds.’

  ‘Good point. Maybe I’ll write a letter.’

  ‘That’s an idea, but where would you send it?’

  ‘To her house.’

  ‘Or drop it off, it would save a stamp.’

  ‘You can’t just walk up to the front and pop it through the letterbox, can you? Aren’t there policemen guarding her from assassins?’

  ‘What assassins?’

  ‘The Irish.’

  ‘Oh, yes, those barbarians.’

  ‘Vivien?’ my father said, turning to me. ‘What can you tell us about this? You are out more than us.’

  We all knew there would be no letter, stamped or unstamped.

  ‘I’m hardly out at all,’ I said.

  ‘Such a nice woman she looks,’ my mother said. ‘Margaret, a lovely name.’

  I didn’t like the hair or the dress or the teeth or the mad eyes. ‘She’s barking,’ I said. ‘Look at her, she’s like someone you talk to on the bus and think they’re quite nice until they say something which makes you realise they’re an escaped loony, or something.’

  ‘Where,’ my father asked me, ‘did you arrive at such a nasty opinion?’

  ‘What opinion? It isn’t an opinion.’

  ‘It’s a point of view.’

  ‘No it isn’t, just a feeling.’

  ‘A feeling?’ said my father. I knew exactly what was coming next, and he opened his mouth and said it. I could see his red tongue moving around the cavern of his mouth. ‘Ideas are bad, but when they attach themselves to feelings, then you have disaster.’

  ‘She must have picked it up from one of her friends,’ said my mother, standing to draw the curtains.

  ‘About this pleasant lady, they have feelings. Some friends.’

  My parents did not believe in friends. ‘I had a friend once,’ my father said. ‘He borrowed my bicycle and took it off to go joyriding in the countryside. The paint was scratched when he got back. He never told me he was leaving the city on it. After that I said to him, “you and me are finished”.’

  This incident took place in 1935. The ex-friend was sent a letter of dismissal, in which my father laid out the terms of their divorce, involving the return of stamp albums etc., and the location of particular cafés where he was no longer to stop by after work for coffee and cake, the whole city in You and Me zones. It was his most successful letter: begun, finished, signed (Ervin Kovacs), posted, delivered.

  ‘I would forgive him if he apologised,’ my father said. ‘My arms remain open.’

  ‘He could at least have sent a reply,’ said my mother, agreeing. ‘There was no call to ignore you, not after such a letter.’

  I went to my room and tried to read but my head was full of thoughts of the chimerical world of my forebears and I looked for a long time at the map of Hungary in my atlas. I wished more than ever that Alexander was still alive so we could sit down with a bottle of wine and I could tell him everything, and he would once again steeple those long pale fingers and nod and think for a few moments before pronouncing on the situation. A view which I might have initially resisted, but certainly respected, and I doubt if I would have rebelled against his opinion, but secretly I would turned over in my own mind some other ways of seeing things.

  For while I had decided at a young age to become my family’s intellectual with the university degree, to cope with all their crazy grudges, the rages and sulks, their shouting, their obsessions and compulsions, that did not mean I was at all rational myself.

  When I was a child, I had the book which told the cautionary tales of Struwwelpeter, Cruel Frederick, Little Suck-a-Thumb, and the Inky Boys, because my mother had had it when she was little, like me. So I knew all about fairy tales, forests and witches. I had been to all those terrible places in the dark and, like the Babes in the Wood, had nearly lost my way in there. I was never really certain of my moral bearings.

  The next morning I was back in the cane chair, having mastered how to operate the tape recorder. We began again from the beginning. Sándor told me a second time about the plum trees and wine, and he remembered all kinds of things he thought he had forgotten, like the synagogue which had animals in it, lions and griffins above the Ark, ‘a beautiful blue it was inside’, he said, ‘you know that colour called royal blue? That’s what it was. A holy place, but you know very fascinating for a small child because of all the decoration. And on the outside, two windows and they always looked to me like a pair of eyes, brown eyes, dark ones, taking notice of everything. It was already over a hundred year old when I was living there.’

  During the trial, in 1964, and what was said about my uncle, and my suspicions that we were related, I became aware that there might be a reason other than thrift that my parents did not cook a turkey at Christmas and give me a stocking to hang at the end of my bed and fill with presents or that there were no chocolate eggs at Easter.

  ‘Look,’ my father said, when I confronted him before I left to go to university, ‘when we came here, to England, we had a choice–the choice was between the Jewish refugee agency or the nice ladies from the WRVS. And your mother looks at one, and she looks at the other, and she makes a decision. I backed her up to the hilt, and see how it turned out? No one bothers us! It was the right thing to do, in my opinion. You, you’re English. None of that other stuff has got nothing to do with it.’

  So on a fairly superficial level I understood that my parents were Jews, but that didn’t make me one, any more than the fact that my parents had discovered, just before I was born, that I was entitled to be baptised under English canon law and had gone to the local church and had me dunked in the holy water, which would later partially assuage Alexander’s parents’ misgivings about me and allow us to be married in the chapel at Hereford Cathedral. My parents had me baptised because you got a piece of paper at the end of it, and there was nothing they liked more than official documents with their names on them which they could show the authorities, if called on to do so.

  But religion has to go deeper than that to lodge itself in your soul, where it counts, and neither Christianity nor Judaism did, but I was still fascinated, and shocked by what Sándor had to say about my father’s upbringing. My parents were both city types who kept off the grass because–‘who needs grass?’ They had never been on a motorway, but they admired the idea of them. And now it turned out that my father knew all about orchards and vineyards and horses and that Mrs Prescott had been quite right about my peasant shape. Square hands, broad feet, there they were.

  The process of interviewing Sándor first gave me the ability to listen without interrupting, to use my ears instead of my eyes. Sometimes I asked my uncle a question, but mostly I stayed silent. I let him talk, I found a way to steer him as if he were a ship, a little way here, a little way there and that way he went on talking, he couldn’t stop. Later, he would tell me that he felt as if he had swallowed a snake, and the snake was eating him up from the inside. Whatever he swallowed, the snake swallowed, so he got no nutrition. He needed me to get it out of him. The snake was now emerging from his mouth, tail first, inch by inch. Its head was buried in his intestines. Maybe this was what caused his terrible digestion, he suggested, smiling sadly.

  ‘You need first a little history lesson,’ he began, ‘to understand what happens with us.’

  ‘OK, I’m all ears.’

&nb
sp; ‘You study history?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But just your kings and queens of England and France, not real history. Now listen, during the First World War, when I was a baby, we were out of the way of everything. Some of the young men went off to fight for the emperor, but everything really passed us by. The explosion in the village was the row my father had with his father, this was already 1922, when I was six year old and Ervin was two. You know there was a little communist revolution we had in Hungary? Yes, that Bela Kuhn thinks we should go be like Soviet Russia, and he makes a big racket like those people always make who get ideas in their heads that buzz around like bees so they got to let them out through their mouths or they would go mad with all the noise in there. Except he starts meddling in the business of private citizens and they saw what was what and they got rid of him, sharp. Of course how were we to know that sometimes a cold can be replaced by a cancer? You can’t predict.

  ‘Anyway, my grandfather was a very religious man, he had a beard that smelt of tobacco and those curls that come down in front of your ears, and he thought that any minute now the Messiah is coming back to earth, so what does it matter what this rabble in Budapest thinks, because they’re deluded. But my father, he gets hold of books. Not politics, he’s not interested in that, he starts reading about other religions, the Christians, our neighbours, because in those days everyone gets on fine, as I said. Particularly the Greeks, we always liked the Greeks. Then he starts with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Boodists, everything under the sun. He’s always sending away to Budapest for books and at night he reads them, while my mother is washing and cleaning. Always his head is in a book, and he starts talking all kinds of crazy things about Allah and Booda and Shiva. No one knows what he’s saying. My mother holds her hands over my ears when he starts. I remember that, her hands, smelling of lye soap from the laundry.

  ‘Finally, this got too much for my grandfather. He was a terribly religious person, for him there was only one thing that mattered–the first commandment. You know that one?’

  ‘Thou shalt not kill?’ I said.

  ‘No, no, that’s not the first, the first is–I am God, I am in charge over you. There is only me, no other. You hear? This is the big message as far as my grandfather is concerned, so when his own son starts talking about Jesus and Booda and Shiva, it was like his son has become a Nazi, though that was later, he doesn’t know anything about it then, this is years before all of that business.

  ‘One day they had a row in the street, in front of everyone. The whole village stopped. It was an epic match between father and son, I was trying to listen to it, but my mother’s hands were clamped over my ears and I was wriggling to get away from her, because I was a strong boy. My little brother Ervin puts up such a scream, about nothing, some piece of bread and honey he wants, so what with my mother’s hands over my ears and my little brother’s squawking there’s so much din I can’t tell what’s happening. But then my grandfather picks up a piece of horse dung from the street–and this, you must remember, is a most fastidious man, who washes his hands all day and says a blessing over them, he has nothing to do with animals, just grapes and paperwork–and he throws this piece of shit at my father.

  ‘Oy, my mother is screaming, Ervin is screaming for his bread and honey, I’m trying to get out the door to get a better view because the people are standing in the way, grown-up people, and all I can see is through their legs, when they don’t keep shifting about. I want to see what my father does next. Is he going to throw some shit at my grandfather? But he doesn’t do nothing. He just stands there, and he starts shouting at the people who are watching, calling them dirty fools, ignorant. He walked off down the street in such a hurry, and no one followed him except the dogs. He went off into the orchards and disappeared under the trees.

  ‘And then we left the village, my birthplace. I never saw it again. We moved to Budapest, that was us and the Zémplen finished. Now we will have a cup of coffee. And biscuits. Or you want a piece of German cake? Sorry, still I don’t get to the place where they sell the good pastries.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I don’t blame you, it’s horrible. Make sure everything is working.’

  I rewound the tape, and his voice came out of the machine, ‘…on the outside, two windows and they always looked to me like a pair of eyes, brown eyes, dark ones, taking notice of everything…’

  ‘This is me?’ He felt that he was looking at himself in a mirror. When he did that, he saw his bulbous face, the hanging lip. The tape recorder told him what his voice sounded like and it depressed him.

  ‘Is someone knocking at the door?’ I said.

  ‘What? Yes, knocking. I go see who.’

  He held the door open only a few inches. I couldn’t see who was on the other side.

  ‘Oh, you,’ he said, sarcastically. ‘Yet another visit.’

  ‘That window’s still broken.’ The voice on the other side of door was high and sharp, but not feminine; the words came out like metal arrows from the unseen mouth.

  ‘What’s the hurry? The fresh air will do you good. You should always sleep at night with an open window, I keep meaning to do this myself.’ He turned and winked at me.

  A short, abrupt laugh. ‘Then you can whistle for the rent till you’ve done it.’

  ‘Oh, oh! Threats. You hear that Miranda? Go and drive your choo choo train, I’m busy.’ And he shut the door in his face.

  ‘Is that boy sleeping with a broken window?’ I said, eagerly, having found, I believed, an irrefutable sign of my uncle as the evil landlord.

  ‘A lucky child to have a window. He has ventilation. Sometimes I slept in a hole, just a hole.’

  ‘Well, that’s there, wherever that was, and this is here, in London, and you have a responsibility as a landlord. There are laws. You can’t—’

  My uncle looked at me, his niece who went to university and studied Shakespeare and had admitted that she didn’t know about life, and thought it was time that I heard some facts about laws. He didn’t want to keep me in ignorance because in his experience people who were ignorant were easy meat and he did not want that for me. He wanted me to know how to stand up for myself, not to be a victim, because it was his opinion that if you wanted deliberately to scramble a man’s brains and drive him out of his mind with total nonsense, you started out for practice on the intellectuals who were the easiest meat. An intellectual had no idea at all how to look after himself when times got rough, because he believed that thoughts were more significant than deeds, whereas my uncle knew it was the exactly the opposite.

  ‘Yes, laws,’ he said, quietly, at first so as not to scare me, but he did scare me because white foam started coming from the corners of his mouth. ‘You talk to me of law? And where is the law that a landlord who rents rooms must make a profit?’

  ‘The law shouldn’t be there to protect the powerful, it’s supposed to protect the weak.’ I was not political, at all, like my parents I had never voted, but such ideas were the stuff of student life, you could not avoid them

  ‘Oh, oh, oh, I see, I get it now. Socialism. Listen, you’re going to start hearing about socialism soon, when we get to that part of my story. You won’t like what I have to tell you.’

  ‘I’m not interested in party politics, but anyway that wasn’t socialism, it was communism.’ Or so Alexander said.

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Communism is total rule by the state, what I’m talking about is laws that will protect the—’

  ‘My profit? Is there a law to protect that? No, just the scrounger who tries to sponge off me, for him there is a law. For me, nothing.’

  ‘Why on earth should there be a law to protect your profit? Everyone has the right to have a roof over their head, profits aren’t a right.’ It was a new experience for me, moral indignation.

  ‘Oh, so you don’t want that a landlord makes a profit? You think he is a charity? Why a charity? Why should a man be a
charity? A charity is full of people with nothing better to do because they don’t need no profit, they got everything they want already and they start up a charity. Fine, let them be landlords and I’ll find another business, but for now, a young man comes to me, he says he hears I got a room to rent. I tell him the rent, he says, yes, I agree, I pay this rent. Why is this rent £6? Because the government tells me I can’t charge any more than £6. It’s the law, your law. So when I can’t make no profit on £6, still he wants a window fixed, not tomorrow, not today, he wants that the window never be broken. If I had a profit, I would fix his window.’

  The expression on my face was one he recognised, which he had seen many times before when people looked at him. He knew it well, a mixture of fear and contempt, a queasy nausea at something you don’t want to touch, and if you really have to, you take a piece of paper and pick it up between your fingers and wash your hands afterwards.

  Politics didn’t come into it. The man really was Fagin, and now perhaps I would have to reassess my previous evaluation of that Victorian villain.

  ‘I’m sorry, I frighten you,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘Don’t pay any attention. You must understand, I am not a violent man. I just raise my voice a little, sometimes.’

  He was sweating, and he took a tissue from the box on the table and wiped himself. Purple blotches broke out over his skin. The eyes were milky and looked at me with fear.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s continue.’ I had heard enough and I knew what kind of man my uncle was. Everything my father had told me was right, in this once-in-a-lifetime instance, to be grudgingly acknowledged. The plan was, I would finish out the morning, collect my £8 and that would be the end of the experiment. I didn’t consider that my uncle was evil, that was sensationalist nonsense, he was just a deeply unpleasant person, a creep, and I didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. Satisfied with the information he had already given me about my family’s antecedents in the village, I knew that anything else he could tell me was to be paid for with a price too high–a kind of contamination by someone in whose presence I could no longer bear to stay. My parents loved me and they did the right thing, protecting me from this horrible relative.