The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Page 13

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ach, I have to spell it out. The ladies I meet, sometimes they want money for a hat, sometimes they want money for the rent. On the other side of things is a man who has a wife, and the wife is sick or pregnant, or just had a baby, or she don’t like doing things in the bedroom. These two people are destined to meet, if only someone bring them together. But where do they meet? Not his place, not her place. But I know where there is empty apartments, and I have the keys. So this is how my business starts.’

  For all these years I had thought of him as a slum landlord, a rampant capitalist exploiting the very weakest. But he was more than that: his greed fed on human flesh.

  ‘You were a pimp.’

  ‘Very ugly word. In Hungarian we call it strici. No one used this word about me in Budapest, this is first time I hear it, from you.’

  This wasn’t really true. He had been arrested for living off immoral earnings, but I kept my mouth shut. I just looked at him with a cold disgust. He really was the dregs. I saw my parents’ point.

  ‘OK, Miss, er Collins, you want to finish?’ he said coldly, seeing that I was no better than anyone else, a person of limited understanding and imagination.

  ‘For today?’

  ‘No. Finish altogether. You don’t like to sit and drink coffee with a pimp? You want to find another job? Go and be the editor of The Times, if it suits you better.’

  He couldn’t have chosen a more cutting taunt. ‘I didn’t say anything about leaving, I—’

  ‘Let me tell you what a pimp is, what he does, a pimp is a man who—’

  ‘Look, we really don’t need to discuss this. I’m just a secretary.’

  ‘No, no, you are more than this. A secretary takes a letter. This is no letter, this is my heart I tear out of my…’

  But he saw that he had gone too far. This was the second time I thought, Maybe he knows who I am. Still I didn’t say anything.

  ‘What, what?’

  ‘Never mind, why don’t we just go on?’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Talk about pimps, if you want, but I first—’

  ‘I won’t type up this part of the tape, you know. I don’t type my questions or anything I say.’

  ‘Well, just so you understand, I know pimps, in my time, and no girl ever did any good with a pimp. My girls ran their own business, I just bring them the clients and provide the room. I take a management fee. Everyone understands this. The rules are obvious to all of us. I don’t force them into nothing or feed them drugs.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Continue.’ The shock of this revelation still jangled my nerves.

  ‘OK, let me tell you about my brother Ervin. You can hear about his way, the honest clean way that is his road, not mine. The first girl he meets, he gets engaged to her. A girl with a limp, and a stick, but a very nice person. I always liked Berta a lot better than him. He got an apprenticeship in this jeweller’s business and he is very, very lucky to keep the job, because my father, by now, has been sacked from the hat company. Business is bad, they drop workers, they have two Jews, one Jew has to go, under the race laws that came in, and since the German export department is not a department you want to be run by a Jew, bye-bye to my father, after fourteen years with this company. And by the way, it’s the same with me, I only work for a little firm, they can’t take no Jews at all any more, but I am someone who knows how to keep his head above water, and more and more my business is putting together girls and apartments, because I still manage to know what apartment or room is empty and I still manage to have the keys, because I don’t do things the official way.

  ‘Now my father can’t sell hats, all he does all day is read his books. Word gets round about me, and how exactly I manage to keep my head above water and bring home money for the rent for my parents because without it, you can be sure they would starve. Ervin can’t stand it. He has a job! He is a respectable person! He has a fiancée! Every night he comes home and starts picking fights with me. He never says directly what his problem is, he just says, Why is there no milk? Did you drink the milk, Sándor? You selfish sonofa—Now, my mother loves both her sons, equally. She cannot stand that any bad blood should come between us. I tell her, Mother, he keeps his way, I keep my way. I’m twenty-two year old, time I move out, get my own apartment.

  ‘Oy, she cries when she hears this. But I say, listen, I get an apartment on the same street, I see you every day. So this is what happens, I get my own apartment, not an apartment, a room, but a good room, very good. They are on Sip utca, I am on Dob, just round the corner. Every day I go to my office, which is the café at the Hotel Astoria.’

  ‘Your base of operations,’ I said. The story was getting very interesting now.

  To have a picture of my parents, in the few months before they left Hungary, and were photographed outside the front door of our flat, just before they slammed the door.

  ‘Yes, lot of different people come here in the evening. I see everyone.’

  ‘Did your mother know what you were up to?’

  ‘This is the thing. Ervin keeps threatening me, I tell, I tell, he’s screaming. He means he is going to tell my mother how come I still have money in my pocket and nice suits. “Why?” I ask him. “Why do you want to tell her?” “So she knows,” he says. “Know what?” “What a brother I have.” “Why do you care?” I ask him. “I have a reputation,” he says. What reputation? He works in a back room in a jeweller’s shop. I wiggle it out of him in the end, it’s this girl, his fiancée, Berta, he don’t want her family to find out.

  ‘Well one night, I bumped into him on Karoly Korut, on the way home from work. I tried to be friendly, I said, come and have coffee with me at the Astoria. So we go, we have coffee, I try to make nice with him. After we finished our coffee I buy him a drink. He don’t drink, Ervin, usually, but I say, let’s have a glass of Tokaj, to remember our childhood, so he agrees, then we have another glass, and for the first time I ever see, he is mellow and rosy. This girl I know comes in, she sits down. Ervin goes to the toilet to take a wee. I say to her, this is my little brother, be nice to him, and I give her a few notes.’

  He started laughing and took a tissue from the box and wiped his eyes.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ I said.

  ‘I’m just seeing Ervin in front of my eyes, as he was then.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ I said, eagerly, I think I had so much forgotten myself that the mask was lying on the table and behind it was just a young girl who doesn’t know about pretending.

  ‘He is not a big man even now, and then he was little and thin. His cuffs come down to his knuckles because he was mean and he thought he would still grow, though he is eighteen already, so he don’t have to buy a new jacket. All his clothes are too big for this reason. He always remind me of that animal, what you call it, the one with the shell on its back?’

  ‘Snail?’

  ‘No, bigger.’

  ‘Tortoise?’

  ‘This is the one. An old man’s face he has already, sticking out over his shirt collar. Anyway, I go off to do some business and I see them leaving. Later in the evening she come back to the Astoria, and she tell me everything went fine, but he is a virgin, so there is not much work for her to do. It’s all nice and quick, and now he goes home.’

  You think your parents are there just to love and irritate you. You see them as satellites spinning round your sun and you try to run away across the universe while they chase you. The time before I was born–the city where I had never been, the country that was just a coloured shape on the map–was newsreel land, black and white, one-dimensional. Time is such a strange thing. Here I am, walking home across Regent’s Park carrying a new dress, and the year 1977, when these events that I am describing took place, is almost as distant as 1938 was from then. Was it real or imaginary? My father, as a young man, having sex with a prostitute after all his talk about his prescience in leaving Hungary. Could there be a more ridiculous pro
position?

  ‘You OK? You want a glass of water? I don’t want to happen to you what happen to your husband.’

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘I thought you were swallowing your tongue.’

  ‘Go on, please, I’m all ears.’

  ‘Few days later, my mother comes and knocks on my door. She is in a terrible state. Ervin is emigrating, he is leaving Hungary, I got to come to our apartment immediately. OK, I say, let’s hear what he has to say. Now this is a time in Hungary when it is not that the noose tightens, it is rather that now we notice for the first time that there is a noose on our neck. Ervin taps his spoon on the glass of tea he is drinking and says that suddenly, there is a danger for Jews in Hungary, he and Berta have to leave at once.

  ‘“Tell him not to go,” says my mother. My father just sits and says nothing. “Well, Ervin,” I say, “tell us how you see things going here in Hungary.” Then he begins with a big story about what is happening in Europe. Germany he talks about, and the Soviet Union.

  ‘“Seems to me like you been reading newspapers,” I tell him. “You must have been sitting in the cafés.” When he hears this, he goes berserk and takes a pinch of sugar from the bowl on the table and throws it at me. I’m laughing. “I’m sweet enough,” I say, “without your sugar.” But it took all night for Mother to calm him down. So now it becomes known, through the neighbourhood, that Ervin Kovacs and his fiancée Berta are leaving Hungary, fleeing the Jewish persecution. But in the cafés it’s another story. In the cafés, Ervin Kovacs is leaving Budapest because he is terrified that his fiance will find out he slept with a prostitute.

  ‘And this is the story of my brother. Next thing we hear, he is in London, a refugee. Refugee from what? Gossip.’

  So that was it. All those years living behind closed doors, the timidity, the obedience, and the terror that Sándor formed in my father’s mind: not only that he was a gangster, a slum landlord, a liver off immoral earnings, but that he knew about the worm at the heart of the marriage, the little lie that it was based on.

  ‘But he was right, wasn’t he?’ I said, thinking of all I knew about what had already started in Europe and what was not to get any better, but worse.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Leaving Hungary. Getting out when he did.’

  ‘Right, but for the wrong reasons. I still can’t give him the satisfaction.’

  ‘Because if you had left at the same time, things would have turned out differently for you.’

  ‘How do you know how things would have turned out?’

  ‘I mean, the war. You would not have been in Hungary during the war.’

  ‘True.’

  While I was transcribing the morning’s tapes, seated at the table overlooking the street, Sándor was in the bedroom, spending a long time getting changed. I heard taps running, the slapping of his face, and the whiff of a strong eau de Cologne filled the flat. When he emerged, he was no longer in his zip-up cardigan but a blue suit, not unlike the mohair one he had worn on that visit to our flat long ago, with two-tone matching leather shoes, in blue and black.

  ‘You‘re all dolled up,’ I said. I preferred him like this, in full colour, rather than the monochrome man in the mac. He was born to a jazzy tie and spats.

  ‘Of course. Today is the day that Eunice and I go dancing.’

  ‘Ballroom dancing? Foxtrots and things?’

  ‘Yes, and also tango. We take lessons. These shoes, these are special for tango. You have to buy them at a particular place, a shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. You can’t wear any old shoes, it’s out of the question.’

  ‘What happened with that boy’s window?’ I said, as we got down to the hall.

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘Claude, the one who lives there.’

  ‘Why do you care about his window?’

  ‘Under the law—’

  ‘What is it with you? I try to explain, you never understand. It goes in–what’s the expression, one eye out the other.’

  ‘Ear,’ said Eunice, who was waiting in the hall. She was fabulously turned out, in a short beige satin dress that came to just above her knees, with those excellent legs brown and shapely in fine sheer nylons. Mine were like milk bottles.

  ‘This girl,’ Sándor says, ‘has led a very sheltered life, not like us, eh? She wants me to fix a window that a boy broke himself.’

  ‘It was already cracked,’ I said.

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘He showed me.’

  ‘You have been in there, with that lout?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  ‘Some people don’t know who their friends are,’ Eunice said, with a knowing expression.

  How could I have known that Eunice did not like or trust me, though we had barely met? She was madly in love with Sándor, he was the love of her life, this wildly unlikely combination of the Budapest shark and the black girl from Tiger Bay, with the Welsh accent; the immensely dignified, terrifyingly correct woman with her intense dedication to grooming–the hair, the fingernails, the make-up, the eyebrows; the sharp gaze that noticed a loose thread or a hanging button or a grease stain; the ramrod back (formed in early lessons at Miss Halliburton’s School of Deportment in Stockwell, for which she had saved every penny from her wages).

  Over the course of many years she had worked her way up from Saturday girl to an extraordinarily trusted position as manageress of the Seymour Street dress shop behind Marble Arch, whose clientele were drawn from the mansion blocks off Marylebone High Street, in fact the ladies of Benson Court, among others–a shop which had opened in the early 1950s when clothes came off the ration and West End women click-clacked on high heels, swishing their ballerina-length full skirts, Yardley-scented, fuchsia-lipped.

  Sándor took her to the finest places, where a waiter in a black coat wheeled round a dessert trolley and she picked from all its numerous temptations a little coffee mousse and ate it with a silver spoon. He bought her trinkets, an Omega watch, a Colibri lighter in its own velvet pouch. He treated her like a queen.

  And when, the first time she saw him naked, she touched in pity the places on his back that still gave him pain, the marks of the whip. ‘Oh, Sándor,’ she said, ‘you and me were slaves in the land of Egypt.’

  Then I appeared. The deceitful niece who was spying on her uncle for reasons neither of them had fathomed yet, and with whom she sometimes thought, after what Sándor told her of our sessions, that he was falling in love. Why? She did not at first understand, until one night when he moaned in his sleep and wept, and she saw the tears on his face as he was sleeping and realised that it was all because he was a man without a child, who knew that one day he would be nothing but bones in a box and nothing going forward into the future, except me, my memories of him. I was danger. I had the power to hurt him. She knew all about that.

  ‘But she’s not had our experiences,’ Sándor went on. ‘She has led a sheltered life at the university, with books, talking about things you know the way the thinkers do. She doesn’t know. How could she know?’

  ‘What people know is what they know,’ Eunice said, looking at my stained blue silk dress and my denim jacket.

  ‘Say,’ said Sándor, ‘maybe she should come with us.’

  ‘To dancing?’ Eunice said, opening her eyes wide, so that the whites encircled the irises altogether.

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  Have you ever seen a cat swish its tail?

  ‘She can’t go dressed like that. It’s out of the question, she’ll make a show of you.’

  ‘No, that’s true. We can get her something in your shop.’

  ‘I can’t afford to buy dresses,’ I said, in a panic.

  ‘Don’t worry, I pay,’ Sándor said. ‘Come, Miranda, come and see life. Which you tell me you don’t know about.’

  ‘And we, dear, know too much,’ Eunice said, linking her arm through his, and looking at me with the Persian cat face.

  ‘Something nice
for a young girl,’ Sándor said, looking round. ‘Expense no object. Eunice, it’s up to you.’

  It was the first time I went to the shop on Seymour Street, a shop I had passed without paying any attention, on my way to some more important destination, without looking, and without seeing the parade of rich women who passed in and out through its wrought iron door.

  Eunice in her element.

  ‘This is lovely for her,’ she said, her fingers expertly running through the rails and coming out, lightning quick, with a green silk dress. ‘It will match her eyes,’ she said. ‘And it has a nice shimmer. Not too ostentatious.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ Sándor said, ‘try it on, go ahead.’

  ‘What about shoes?’ Eunice said, next. ‘You can’t wear those plimsolls. Have you got anything at home?’

  Under the bed, still in their box, was the pair of red snakeskin platform-soled shoes that I had worn only once, the night Alexander died. I could not forget how after we had made love he went on looking at them while we were dressing to get ready to go down to dinner and he said, ‘Get more shoes like that.’ Sometimes at night, after my parents had gone to bed, alone in my room in my nightdress, I put them on, and looked at them, and all sorts of weird ideas came into my mind, memories, thoughts, feelings, that I had no words for. But they gave me a perverse comfort, this bright emblem of our little marriage, this exquisite point, dancing in the darkness above his grave.