The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Read online

  The dredger pushed downriver. We were going east, towards Woolwich where they were building the steel barrier against the floodwaters. Beyond were the open waters of the North Sea. Everything was sparkling–the starry sky, the crescent moon like a curved silver knife, the lights on the shore–and I felt a solitary weightlessness, as if I was air or energy. No hunger or thirst. The dredger’s progress seemed ponderously slow and the silt of the river churning held back my progress–to run along the Thames, to race on water.

  ‘Look at you,’ Claude said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re really high.’

  ‘Am I? I feel different. I feel good, really good but my mouth tastes like metal. What are we passing now, can you see, how far are we from the sea, which bridge is this we’re going under, I don’t recognise it in the dark but I don’t know the bridges, I’m not familiar with the other side, the roads are wider, I think and it smells different, but I don’t go there, only to the South Bank for films and plays and concerts, but nothing else. I know a girl in Lewisham but I never went to see her, we always met in town and…’ The ongoing rush of banality from my lips alarmed me. How long could I go on talking like this? I couldn’t stop, I said whatever came into my head.

  But Claude stood, smoking a roll-up, thin and contained.

  ‘How did you get the job with the old man? Doing his paperwork?’

  ‘I met him in the park, when I was walking across to…and he was by the lake with water birds, I was sitting on his bench and we got into conversation, he offered me some work and I—’

  ‘He’s got that dead white look, hasn’t he? The kind you get when you’re inside.’

  ‘He goes out, he goes dancing with—’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  I had licked his finger. I had allowed him to drug me. He was on the deck of this iron vessel moving implacably through the waters, under a moon turned milky, standing in his drainpipe jeans and leather jacket, his red canvas boots, his hair standing in spikes, his sultry mouth and little teeth, the blue eyes assessing me. I felt I was being made use of, but for what? What? Everyone was using me: my uncle who was transmitting through me his messages to his brother. But was it not better to be used, than useless?

  ‘I know just to call him Mr K, that’s what he told me. Like cornflakes. The special Mr K.’

  ‘He’s had a complicated life,’ I said.

  ‘Haven’t we all.’

  ‘How’s your life complicated?’

  ‘Nothing’s ever what it seems. My old grandma taught me that, before she ran off back to Ireland with my dad’s wages and the gold watch my mum won in a raffle.’

  We were further east now, past the Greenwich Observatory and its meridian, its Mean. From here, all time was a deviation. Above us lay the Isle of Dogs, which was not a real island, like Sheppey, just a lump of land sticking out like a big thumb pressing down on the river. Then the dredger turned back. The hull pointed west, towards Teddington. The passengers were engaged in ecstatic silent dancing on the deck, silhouetted darkly.

  Claude put his arm round me and kissed my hair. I knew it was the start of something I could not resist, did not even want to. I was twenty-four years old, a West End girl, the child of Benson Court and its concealed garden, its wrought-iron lift, its ballerina teetering on points in the middle of the afternoon, its secret drinking, its hidden mistresses, its fears and sorrows behind closed doors. On the river, its banks lightening as the sun lay an inch beneath the horizon of hills, I experienced the strange exhilaration of the sailor who has no home port, only the next landfall, wherever that may be, with all its dangers and possibilities. But the sea itself is home, the unsteady, unstable surface, always moving, drawn back and forth under a gravitational moon.

  His hands felt my cold breasts. ‘I’ll warm you,’ he said.

  Dawn behind us. At Southwark Bridge a heavy bundle was being pulled from the river. Every night, Claude said, the river police would set out in their boats to look for suicides and find floating corpses or decaying limbs tangled in the weeds by the pilings. Posters went out across the city and usually they were recognised but sometimes after years in the morgue unclaimed, they were buried in unmarked paupers’ graves. A horror came over me, and a sadness that a person could have no connection at all to life, could go missing and not be missed. For the whole heavy weight of history that fell across my family, the Kovacs, meant that we were deeply implicated in the world, even though my father thought he could bar the doors and live anonymously. But if Mrs Prescott had decided to leap from stone balustrades in her cloche hat and submerge her Cupid’s bow mouth beneath the waters, who would have reported her absence? The pity of it all struggled inside me, against the amphetamine rush of the pills.

  But Claude was still staring at the shape on the deck of the police boat.

  ‘Bodies used to wash up on the beach near us,’ he said. ‘When we were kids we used to steal their wallets and dry the notes in front of the fire. If there were any notes, if you were lucky. You had to hand the rings and the watches in, cos you couldn’t get rid of them, not if you were eight like us. Sometimes the big boys would take them off you, but they only ever gave you a sixpence for them. It wasn’t worth the bother. You could always get a note changed, especially a ten bob one, you just said it was for your mum.’

  ‘How horrible.’

  ‘What? That we were little tearaways?’

  ‘No, the dead bodies.’

  ‘They did sometimes stink. The fish eat the eyes, you know, and the testicles because they’re soft. They were suicides mainly, or sometimes drowned sailors.’

  ‘That was your childhood? Robbing the pockets of the dead?’

  ‘I never said I didn’t have a deprived childhood with no flowerbeds or nothing. Come here, give us another kiss, posh girl.’

  It was full daylight. The dredger pulled up at the Embankment and we filed off on to dry land. In the early sun, the young vampires looked weary, their clothes torn and their paint smeared across their faces. It was still too soon for the buses to be running.

  We walked miles until we found a night café near a bus depot. The city was locked up tight, nothing was stirring. You could walk down the yellow lines in the middle of the street, you could run and rattle the gates of the tube stations, you could howl like a banshee in the middle of Oxford Circus and no one would hear you. Five a.m. The clocks chime and the bells peal.

  The café was full of night-time souls and early risers, people with nowhere to go, and a greasy strain fell over everything. The stools we sat on were revolving faster and faster.

  ‘I’ll tell you what you’re going to like about me,’ he said, fiddling with his little home-made cigarette and drinking sweet tea, and his voice came from far away. ‘I’m out of the gate like a greyhound.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, and my own voice echoed, tapped inside my head.

  He laughed. ‘You’ll see.’

  An hour later, in his room I had the simple, straightforward experience of what had been missing since my husband died. For a few moments I lost consciousness, and came round to find him looking at me, the lips wet, the eyes darkened. There was an inexpressible sense of having committed a sin for which I could not be forgiven, though I didn’t believe in sin or guilt. But what had I done, who had I hurt? I liked it. I loved it. That’s all.

  It was at our next session that my uncle told me something which would make a deep impression on me. He said that it was his observation, while a slave labourer, that people can bear much more than animals. A horse, for example, its ribs still covered in flesh, suddenly drops down dead in the middle of the road, while an emaciated man in rags keeps going, struggles on long after his internal organs have been irreparably damaged by starvation. Only the ones who lose their minds are quick to go under, but if you can keep your sanity, then you are capable of extraordinary feats of endurance.

  It was also of great interest to him to note that in many cases an individual wa
s exactly the same at the end as he had been at the beginning. Beneath it all, he argued, people are concerned with the same things all their lives: sex, food, power, ideas, if that’s their interest. A sourpuss stayed a sourpuss, of course, but there were some whose optimism, humour, their pleasure in fun and their indestructible love of life remained intact all the way.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I was one of the ones who didn’t change. I began as a businessman and that’s how I continued.’

  It is very strange to realise that when you see those old films on television of the toothbrush moustache dictator ranting and the mass rallies, and the stiff-armed salutes and all the marching up and down, and the well-known flag standing to attention, that famous menace and what it would lead to–all of it was happening while people went on buying shoes and handbags and party dresses and gramophone records and ornaments and choosing a new car or a new wireless set, or just sitting in a café eating cream cakes.

  And while they were doing all that, the signs were there, on the streets, such as the sign of the Arrow Cross men, the Hungarian Fascists, which my uncle drew for me on a sheet of paper and which looked like this:

  I have to keep remembering that he was only twenty-two in 1938, two years younger than the age I was then, the summer of 1977 when I knew him. Like me, he had a taste for and an interest in flashy unusual clothes; he wanted things that were all the rage and he used to mooch around the shops looking for the latest fashions, would go to the cinema and look carefully at what the film stars were wearing and see if he could find copies. A few months later he would march off to labour service in a suit which would not leave his back for a further four and a half years. During that time, he kept sane by picturing himself lounging on the gilded chairs of the Café Astoria, holding court with his girls, dressed in a fine suit. Whenever he slept and dreamed, that’s how he saw himself, not a slave in rags. He thought of spats and tie-pins and cravats and Oxford bags and double-breasted jackets and turn-ups and leather brogues and embroidered braces and opera pumps.

  My uncle was drafted into Labour Service Company 110/34, along with his father in 1939. The Jews had been placed into a category called the ‘unreliables’; in other words, they were not to be trusted with a gun or even a uniform. They wore their own clothes, with a yellow armband. These labour units were under the auspices of the territorial battalion commands within the Ministry of Defence, and commanded by Hungarian army officers, usually NCOs. It was the luck of the draw, fate if you like, whether you got a decent officer or an anti-Semitic sadist from the Arrow Cross.

  For the first two or three years of the war they were operating within the Hungarian borders, armed with shovels and pickaxes, building railways, digging trenches and tank traps, and clearing minefields. Routine work. My grandfather, the hat salesman and self-taught expert in comparative religion, was surprisingly adaptable, having grown up in the countryside, and although my father inherited from him his delicate frame and short sight (my grandmother was fleshier, Uncle Sándor took after her), he was scrappy and could go for long periods with no food; he must have had very stable blood sugar.

  My uncle, the pimp and Budapest playboy, already at only twenty-three had acquired the double chin that would create a Hitchcock profile later on in life, which would lead the English papers to ask if he was the face of evil. Fattened on cream cakes and pancakes with cherries in the cafés of Budapest, he felt his heart pounding as soon as he picked up his shovel. Everyone had been told to bring a suitcase; Sándor had packed shirts, ties, jackets and shoes, but confronted on the first day of service with a steep hill in the blazing heat, he dumped them. This select wardrobe was returned to the city and distributed to the Arrow Cross men who wore the clothes in the very cafés my uncle had frequented, so he was there, in a sense, though not in person. And the clothes which he left the house wearing that morning in 1939 were the ones he was wearing when he got back to Budapest in 1945, though they no longer resembled clothes, but a kind of fungus excreted by his skin.

  In 1943 at Staryy Oskol, a bombed city in what is now the Russian Federation, they cleared rubble. They marched across it for hours looking for somewhere to be billeted and saw no intact buildings. Their diet was black tea and flour soup, and they slept in the open air, warming their hands on cinders. At Pieti-Lepka, a small village near Veronezh, their legs blistered with frostbite, they wandered across rock-hard frozen snowfields and left behind to die what the Hungarian officers called the ‘faulty goods’–the injured.

  By now they were starting to go a bit crazy. Deep darkness, dread, fear of death.

  ‘Was it fear that kept you alive?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yes, that and business, which we’ll come to.’

  That year they covered a distance of one thousand kilometres from Male Bikoro to Belograd in thirty days exactly, on a ration of one hundred grams of bread a day and hot water with a few carrots floating in it. They were near the Soviet Occupied zone, there was a possibility of escape to the Allies, but my uncle said that he had been warned not to set any store on Russian hospitality.

  All the time, my uncle and grandfather marched together. The older man was mostly silent though on some evenings he would go off in a corner and have exhausting discussions about theology with a rabbi from Debrecen. Sándor helped his father as much as he could, but at Zhitomir they both contracted typhus and were transferred to a quarantine camp at Krasno Ceska. People were demented. A man was screaming that his legs had been cut off at the hip. Another said he had to have an alarm clock, would anyone, he cried piteously, give him an alarm clock, he had to go to meet his fiancée at the railway station and if he fell asleep he might not wake up in time to take the tram to the station, and he would miss her.

  My uncle’s hallucination was one of the strangest I have ever heard of, a physical hallucination. He thought that his body had somehow been divided in half, and that the lower part was someone else. His face, chest, hands, arms were him, Sándor Kovacs, but his groin, testicles, legs, were those of another man, a stranger. He was trying to run from him, but he had no legs to escape with so he clutched at his thighs with his hands, trying to prise them from his torso. Some time in the night, my grandfather died, but my uncle didn’t notice the exact moment; he was busy trying to rid himself of the lower impostor. When he came out of his hallucination, his father was dead.

  After the quarantine camp, they were all taken for a bath, the first in over three years, and their clothes, the ones they had left home in, were boiled and ridden of the millions of lice that had taken up residence there.

  In clean clothes they felt suddenly reborn. They examined their rags for signs that they had once been human beings. Might this flap be a lapel, and was this an indication of a pocket? A piece of cloth bore faint traces of once having been tweed. This man’s trousers had once been exhibited in the window of a fashionable department store in 1937, with a ticket indicating a high price. But though the slaves were clean and dry, they were also starving. They ripped grass from the earth and ate it. Men were writhing and dying in their boiled clothes.

  At a place whose name Sándor said he didn’t know, some Germans appeared and cut off a block of men and herded them into a building which they then set fire to, and as the screaming slaves ran from it they used them as an exercise in target practice. That was the worst, he said, that is what I call a crime, not what they write about today in the newspapers or what I see on television.

  Yet amongst all this horror, my uncle maintained that he had been kept alive by trade.

  ‘Yes, business was going on constantly. You see, although often we were starving, there were also times when we weren’t. Don’t ask me about the logic of it, there wasn’t any logic. What was, was. We had rations, and rations had value. Now a man is given a can with something in it. If he is starving his natural inclination is to open the can and devour the contents, that’s obvious. Or a cigarette, you smoke it at once, what’s the point of saving it? But I
could see that the minute I had a ration of some kind, then there was an opportunity for trade, and the essence of trade is profit, this is the capitalist system. So when we came to a village and the officers gave us some supplies, I would find a building and I would open a bazaar and sell the food and the cigarettes to the local peasants. Then, you see, I had cash, real money, and with money I could talk to the officers on a more equal footing.

  ‘Now when they gave us the supplies in the first place, we had to give them a coupon in exchange. We didn’t know what these coupons were, they were just worthless pieces of paper on which we signed our names. But you see when these noble Hungarians got back home they took the coupons to our families and said that this paper was a deed we had signed which gave the bearer the right to take over our apartment. And if our families said no, then they threatened them with the police. So we sold our birthright for a mess of pottage just like it says in the Bible.

  ‘But not me, no way. I didn’t take the supplies, I took other people’s supplies and I sold them and split the profits with them, so there was no coupon with my name on it, and this is why, at the end of the war, my mother still had an apartment. And now do you understand why your ideas about what is decent, and respect, and equality are for babies? A boy like that one downstairs, strong and stupid, is the kind who is most like the animal who suddenly lies down in the shafts of the cart and dies, for no reason, because his strength is exhausted. His strength is all he has. I’m not that type, and I hope you are not either. Nor is Eunice, by the way, but that’s her story, not mine. Maybe if you ask her, she’ll tell you.’

  Years later, I tried to trace the route of my uncle’s forced march across eastern Europe, but I was frustrated by the maps. The names Sándor gave me, spelled out at my insistence and carefully transcribed, did not appear in my atlas. Names themselves had been altered, as towns and villages changed hands over the generations, from war to war to war, and after all, my uncle was recording only what he remembered. The slaves asked the townspeople or the villagers where they were, or their officers did, and what they were told was often not what appeared in any cartography. It did not matter to the villagers that a regional governor had decided to rename their hamlet after some hero of the Bolshevik revolution.