The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Page 11

  But he wouldn’t leave it at that, it was too important to him that I understood.

  ‘No. You tell me first, why do you care about these laws?’

  ‘Because they are fair.’ I was pleased with the simplicity of my answer. Alexander would have approved of this short definitive, cutting sentence.

  ‘What does it mean, fair?’

  Everyone knew what fair meant, it was the basis of English society, the English instinct of judging right and wrong; every immigrant understood it, as soon as they stepped off the boat. Fair play, and all that. My parents subscribed to this commonly held opinion. A Nazi party could never take hold here, my mother once remarked. People would laugh.

  But what was fairness, exactly? I had taken for granted that I knew what it meant and later that day I would look the word up in the dictionary, to be sure. ‘I’m not sure it’s something you can define,’ I said, ‘but I suppose it’s a matter of respecting others.’

  ‘Respect must be earned.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You have to have qualities inside you that can be respected.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Strength, brains. In the jungle a lion is respected by all the other animals.’

  ‘That’s not respect, it’s fear.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘Could you respect, say, that boy who just knocked on the door?’

  ‘That one?’ he started laughing. ‘Listen, he is not a bad kid, but respect? What’s to respect? He’s twenty years old and wears a leather jacket that stinks.’

  ‘Why not? He’s another human being.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So he deserves respect.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For who he is. Just that.’

  I shook my head. ‘Oy, Miranda, you are just beginning your life. Believe me, where I come from—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where you come from. It’s all the same.’

  ‘It is not.’

  ‘OK, let’s get back to the tape recording. Maybe if you listen you will hear a different point of view.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, coldly. ‘Where were we? You left the village. What happened next?’

  ‘What happened next? We came to Budapest, me, my father, my brother.’

  He must have felt that we were best in the past, me and him, not the present, for back there he was an unknown quantity and had something he knew I wanted, that mysterious life which was lived before I was born, by people who would not take me back into that life, who denied me this gift. And he was starting to enjoy some of these memories, which returned him to a very agreeable period, when the future was just a series of doors you opened, and no unpleasant surprises on the other side.

  He didn’t understand that we were finished, it was all over by the second morning.

  ‘My father has made a total break with his father, with the village, everything, the wine trade,’ he went on. ‘So we take the train to the city. I never been on a train. I never saw a place bigger than Tokaj. You know what a place Budapest was in those days? You ever seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t go. It’s a shit hole. But then! Then it was a city. A river running through it, the Danube, with the bridges across it, and all the beautiful buildings. You know it’s two different cities, Buda and Pest? Well, I became a Pest boy, and the way I started I finished, always a pest. A pest. You get it?’

  ‘Yes.’ My uncle noticed I was smiling a little and felt relieved. He believed that there were two types of people, the ones who take offence like a match to hay and it burns fast and bright and fierce and short: this was him. Then there are those whose flames bank down into glowing embers that smoulder for years: that was my father. He hoped I was like him, hot and hasty but it doesn’t last. He was right, that’s exactly how I am, whereas my father never forgave, never forgot, always bore a grudge.

  Then he went on with his remarkable story, and I confess that despite my dislike for this vile man, I was reluctantly drawn deeper and deeper into his world, to me like a film or a novel in which I was becoming engrossed. He was a fantastic talker, he could bring every moment alive, he had the seducer’s gift of the gab. I could picture with my inner eye his description of the arrival at the railway station, and all the people he saw–only at the synagogue on the high holidays had he seen so many–and everyone walking up and down as if they had urgent business they had to see to, jumping on and off trams and running around like dogs and cats. A whole city alive! His mother was holding my father in her arms, because he fell asleep on the train and when she tried to wake him up he started up with his screaming, and so she had to carry him and he fell right back to sleep and never saw what Sándor saw, that first hour in Budapest.

  ‘You sure this machine is working OK?’ he said, after this long passage from his life.

  ‘Do you want me to rewind and check?’

  ‘Yes, let’s make sure.’

  I pressed the button and let the tape whir back for a second or two. ‘…with the bridges across it, and all the…’

  ‘It’s working fine,’ I said. ‘Where did you live and how had your father got an apartment and a job?’ We had another forty minutes to go, so I might as well squeeze all the information out of him that I could, before I left. I thought that when I went home I might make some notes, just for myself, no other reason.

  ‘Ah, this I never found out, I just know he wrote letters, a lot of letters, and some he got replies and some no answer, but in the end he got a position with a firm that made hats, as a clerk, you understand, and bookkeeper, but he got to be in charge of the export department, because he spoke Russian.’

  ‘What kind of hats? Millinery?’

  ‘No, no, no. Fedoras. In those days every man had a hat. These was good quality hats and they exported them all kinds of places. Now when they took him on, remember this is 1924, they think they’re still going to be exporting hats to Russia but they don’t know that first of all, the Russians don’t want no hats, except the kind the workers wear, caps, and second, even if they wanted a fedora, they want one made in Moscow, and not a capitalist hat. My father tells them all this, after he gets nowhere selling hats to the Soviet Union. Now he was very quick with languages, like me by the way, he learns German, studying every night with a book and going out to cafés and listening, because in those days a lot of people spoke German, and soon he sets up the German export department. By this time he looks just like a Hungarian, no beard, nothing. The firm was in the Erzsébetváros, the seventh district, and that’s where we got an apartment, in not a bad building. And this is where I start my new life as a city boy.’

  He told me how he had to stop speaking like a village child. ‘I wanted to be a Magyar, like all the rest. This was very important to me, to be Hungarian, not a Jew. To speak their language, not Yiddish which we spoke in our childhood. And my father, he was not that interested in being a Jew any more, either. At work he sold hats, at night he read all the religions, and he liked the Boodists best of all, he said they were nice quiet people who never did no one any harm. Of course my mother paid no attention to any of this, and she kept all the Jewish rules like she always done.’

  ‘And what about your brother, Ervin? How did he get on?’

  ‘Ach, well he was a city child from the word go, because he was a mamma’s boy, and a mamma’s boy is no good in a village. Now he was also a pest, what a pest he turned out to be! I’m laughing just remembering him. When he started school, I remember, my mother had to stand outside the classroom while he was screaming at her not to abandon him, the little baby. But the funny thing is, you know, me–I was the one who ran wild in the fields and spent all day running under the vines and going to the stables to see the horses–but once I got to Budapest, it turned out I liked school, I was not a stupid person. I came top of my class in many subjects, including mathematics which was always very easy for me, the numbers just jumped around in my head, they were like dancers, and if I closed my eyes I
could see them holding hands with each other and then when they held hands they turned into different numbers. I never understood that it was just me that did this in my head, I thought it was everyone, but other boys, they were very slow with numbers and you could always cheat them, like that trick with the three cups and the dice.

  ‘Ervin, he was something different. Ervin was no good in school but with his hands he was very skilful. His hands were always busy with something, always making, and painting his pictures.’

  ‘Painting pictures?’

  ‘Yes, what’s the big surprise?’

  ‘I don’t know, you didn’t make him sound like an artist.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was an artist, I just said he painted pictures. That doesn’t mean they were any good.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Well, you know, he’d take a bowl of fruit, and he made a picture and somehow he makes it like he wants the fruit in his picture to be more like the fruit in the bowl than the fruit is itself Like he’s in a competition with nature. That’s what I told him, and he got angry with me, and my mother was angry too, because she said, how can you be unkind to your baby brother? You should encourage him. But that was her, she was a very soft woman, motherly. What time is it?’

  ‘Eleven-thirty.’

  ‘OK, now we stop, you got to start the typing. You leave here one o’clock, prompt. I got a visitor coming.’

  I sat down at the table which overlooked the street, and the children playing, the dogs whining, the cats sleeping, a rag and bone man passing with a horse-drawn cart.

  My uncle went into the bedroom and lay down. I think he fell asleep. I began the laborious task of transcribing the tape on to the typewriter, half a sentence at a time, rewinding every half-inch or so. His voice echoed through the flat–and beyond the bedroom door the same voice was lightly snoring. Listening the first time was interesting, but listening again, I started to notice how he made a sentence, and that guttural accent which grated on me when I first heard it started to get inside my own head. I could hear a mind recreating the past out of its mysterious material.

  But it was tiring, as well. When he woke up, I was calling through the door, ‘It’s one o’clock, I’m finished, I’m going now.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Hold on a minute, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

  Hurriedly he got dressed and emerged from the bedroom in a blue suit, pink shirt and purple silk tie, his hair slicked back and his skin smelling of that expensive scent he wore. I had never known a man who smelt of anything but soap. Alexander’s skin smelt of himself, and the fibres of his clothes, and his mouth of toothpaste.

  ‘I look all right?’ he said.

  ‘Very smart.’

  ‘I’m expecting a lady. A man should always dress up for female company. You don’t want to give them no disrespect. Come on.’

  ‘So you do understand respect, after all,’ I said, as we walked downstairs past the hunting pictures.

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Where are you meeting her?’

  ‘She’s waiting in the hall, you’ll see her. She’s always bright and early, that’s Eunice, all over. Yes, here she is.’

  ‘Eunice,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet Miranda, the person I was telling you about, who is helping to write it all up, everything, like we discussed.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said and held out a blue leather glove.

  That was the first time I saw her, and felt that fine-boned hand in mine, like a silver fork. She was a beautiful woman then, and more elegant than anyone I had ever known, in a navy suit with a white blouse, the navy leather gloves with three buttons at the wrist, and her hair a shining helmet of blue-black waves. Under it, her dark eyes looked at me as if they were taking a photograph to be blown up and examined later, with a magnifying glass.

  ‘You hear that?’ Sándor said to me, as she spoke. ‘You know where she comes from?’

  ‘Wales?’

  ‘Exactly, Wales, like Shirley Bassey. Tiger Bay. Same place. What do you think about that?’ And he give Eunice a kiss on her face, so I would know that she was his special friend, his lady friend, very different from the little tart he took to our flat.

  ‘I got you a present,’ he said to her, ‘I show you when we get there.’

  The sun struck her hair. She looked like a black lacquer ornament. They walked off down the road together in the warm spring sun, arm in arm.

  As I watched Sándor and Eunice walk down the street, the voice of the boy who had knocked on Sándor’s door said, ‘Who are you?’

  I turned round. He had come out of his flat and was sitting on the step with the door open behind him, smoking. My first impression was of a sharp face with blue eyes, very short dark hair pushed back from his forehead, fingers drawing the home-made cigarette to his lips, and a red mouth with a lecherous smile. A twenty-year-old with the edgy, cocky, sexual confidence of someone who knows that he must always look out for number one, because no one else will do it for you.

  I didn’t know how to answer his question; it would take some thought. I was startled to be addressed.

  ‘While you’re remembering, do you wanna come and sit down?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here, on the step, if it’s not too hard on your arse. Nice arse, though, from what I can see.’ He laughed. It came out short and quick and without pleasure or humour.

  But after the hours upstairs–the dust of the Kovacs past, the old soiled memories, the faded photos, the frozen sunlight–I laughed too. And of course I was not without an ulterior motive and wanted to know from the mouth of one of his own tenants what kind of a man Sándor was these days. Here was a person with a grievance against my uncle. So I sat.

  ‘Do you want a roll-up?’ he said, offering me a tin with tobacco. ‘I can make it for you if you like.’

  ‘No, thanks, I’ve got my own cigarettes. How long have you lived here?’

  ‘Few weeks.’

  ‘Is it all right?’

  ‘No, it’s not all right. The old man’s a shyster. He can smell a pound note from ten feet away.’ He rubbed his fingers together as if they were feeling money, a disagreeable gesture. ‘So what were you doing up there in his flat?’

  ‘I work for him.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Paperwork,’ I said.

  ‘Right.’

  I lit a cigarette and we sat for a few minutes, smoking in silence, as people passed on the street. As if my pores were full of my uncle, I tried to expel him with each breath. When I got home I would have a bath and soak and dream amongst the yellow ducks, try to think about what, if anything, the future could hold for me. A black cat squatted and urinated against a tree across the road, then snarled at the legs of a passer-by.

  ‘Do you want to have a look at my window?’ the boy said. His fag had gone out and he put it away carefully in his tin of tobacco. ‘Come on, I won’t bite. Though I like biting.’ His laughed again, quick and hard, showing a row of small, sharp teeth.

  I was curious to see how my uncle had managed to squeeze so many flats into the house. I stood up. ‘Go on, then, show me.’

  The door was at the back of the hall. A room that had started out in its youth large and handsome and well proportioned, with high ceilings and elegant cornices, had been hacked up like butcher’s meat, chopped into several diminished slices with one third of what had been a substantial sash window overlooking the garden.

  ‘Freezing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on. You can see what’s happened: the glass in the top pane had a diagonal crack and I think, “what happens when you push it with your finger?” and it fell out. Look, there it is.’

  The garden was dark and overgrown with weeds, self-seeded saplings, branches fallen in the winter storms. No lawn or path. On the ground a transparent triangle pressed down hard on the nettles and dandelions and dock leaves, a strange three-cornered section of reflective green glaring back at the
sky which dropped some clouds on its surface. And the window was left with a triangular hole, through which the early summer breezes blew.

  The room wasn’t much: a single bed, an enamel-topped table with a hotplate and an electric kettle, a small, hard armchair upholstered in maroon velvet plush, stained brown on the arms, a plywood chest of drawers with a row of five or six books, all horror stories. Jammed between the bed and the window was a small glass tank containing some tropical fish in fluorescent colours.

  ‘What are those?’

  ‘My fish, of course. Do you want to have a go at feeding them?’

  ‘Not really. Why did you bring fish with you? This place is hardly big enough to stretch your arms out.’

  ‘I didn’t bring them. I’ve got more at home but the tank’s too big for this room so I had to start again. It’s a hobby, I like looking at them. They’re good. And quiet, too, no mess.’

  ‘What’s happened to the others?’

  ‘Someone’s looking after them, they’re all right. But what about my window? Can you get him to fix it?’

  ‘I don’t have any influence.’

  We were jammed up together next to the tank. I could feel his breath on my neck. ‘I think that blue fish fancies you a bit. Look at the way he’s swimming round and round in circles, you’ve got him in a right state, he’s not used to female company. In fact, you’re the first person he’s seen apart from me since he left the shop.’

  The claustrophobia of the tiny room, his physical presence next to me, the sight of the forearms with their dark hairs and his hands with their long fingers pointing at the tank, his odd, arousing smell, of musk and lemon and leather, disturbed me. My breath felt trapped in my chest.