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

  Other times, my uncle just got the spelling wrong, or he was guessing or the village had been totally destroyed in the war, or was abandoned and left no trace. But over the course of several days, with visits to the British Library, I was able to piece together the course of a chaotic directionless journey east, from Hungary deep into the Ukraine and Russia, culminating in the town of Berdichev in 1944 where for some reason for which he had no explanation and which he anyway didn’t care to investigate, so happy was he to go home, Sándor was demobbed and sent back to Budapest.

  ‘Does your brother know what happened to you in the war?’ I asked him. ‘Does he know what you’ve told me?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course he knows. Everything.’

  ‘What happened to your mother?’

  ‘She survived in Budapest. Whenever there was a round-up, she was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, I mean the right place. All the luck was with her. It was amazing. Hers is a story I never even got to the bottom of while she was alive, but she was like one of those balls you see in that game, pinball, the one the teenagers play in the coffee bars, she pings around the city, yet the levers of fate always catch her before she falls and push her back.’

  ‘You went to live with her when you returned?’

  ‘No, that was too dangerous–for her, I mean. I stayed with my girls. They looked after me, all those beauties.’

  ‘And then the war ended.’

  ‘Yes, it did. It was over.’

  ‘So why did you stay in Budapest when you could have come to England?’

  ‘I know, I know. There were plenty of places I could have gone. The Red Cross came and found me, with a message from Ervin, saying he would sponsor me. I could have gone to Palestine, that was another opportunity, or America. But I wouldn’t leave my mother, and she was sure my father would come back if she waited. You see, whatever they say about me, I tried my best to be a good son, and I respected and loved her, even though of course I could have been a better one. Make sure you write that down.’

  ‘But he’d died of typhus!’

  ‘I know. He did, I saw him. Not when he died, but when they buried him in the lime pit.’

  ‘Why did she think he’d return?’

  ‘I told you, a human and an animal are two different things. An animal gives up, a human doesn’t.’

  ‘But it was an illusion.’

  ‘Of course, but strange things happen, there are mix-ups, people do come back from the dead, that’s what she said. How could I tell her I saw him being shovelled into a mass grave? My own mother.’

  ‘What happened to your grandparents in Mád?’

  ‘Up the chimney, of course, what else?’

  ‘And Berta’s family?’

  ‘The same.’

  So this was the big silence that had deadened my childhood. I understood a little better. How could any of it be spoken, and to a child? My parents held it all inside them, like their own blood.

  ‘So what did you do next?’

  ‘Back to the old trade. Why give it up now? I should deprive those girls of a living when they saved my life? When they sheltered me?’

  ‘How did that work under communism?’

  ‘Good question. Communism crept up on us when we weren’t looking. I didn’t notice. Then there it was. But the need for the services I provided doesn’t go away under the socialist paradise, whatever the women’s libbers say. I kept to my trade, it was just that instead of having my office at a table in the Hotel Astoria, I was assigned a position, a post. I was still in the café, that was the same, except now I was a waiter. The same people came, what was left of them. The same intellectual discussions, the same pastries, all the same old talk, just as it had been before, which reminds me, I’d totally forgotten, I went to Maison Bertaux and I got the cake, you want a slice?’

  ‘No thank you. Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Why not smile? I’m alive, aren’t I? They tried to kill me, they failed. Isn’t that a good revenge on those demons, those evil spirits?’

  You go down into the darkness, you emerge into the light, this is the nature of a subway system, and when you arise, you are in another place. You don’t see the transitions. The map turns the city into a grid, a diagram, you don’t have any sense of the distance between stops, it’s all relative. I travelled to King’s Cross, through that dreary interchange, the wait on the platform, the two stops on the yellow Circle line, the walk down Portland Place, turning into our street, up the lift, and putting my key in the lock, until I got inside and my mother was in the kitchen. I said to her, ‘Why do we never talk about the war?’

  She was straining green beans in a metal colander.

  ‘The war? Why do you raise this now? It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I just want to know why we never discuss it.’

  ‘Well, I told you. The bombing was terrible and the rationing—’

  ‘Not the war here, in London. I mean in Europe.’

  ‘We were not in Europe, we were in England, thank God.’

  ‘But you had relatives there.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  She shrugged. In the kitchen of the window of the next mansion block, a smartly dressed woman was standing at the sink, filling a kettle.

  ‘She’s new,’ my mother said. ‘What a turnover they have in that place. Must be something wrong with it. Maybe damp, do you think?’

  ‘They’re my grandparents.’

  ‘Who? This lady?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘What is this interest all of a sudden? You watch a film?’

  ‘I just want to know.’

  ‘What can I say? They all died.’

  ‘And did you have brothers and sisters?’

  ‘My lunch is getting cold, it’s already quarter to two and I’m starving. You want something to eat? I’m having this poached egg. Should I make you one?’

  ‘No, I’m not hungry. Why do we never talk?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘What do you want to discuss? Name a subject, I’ll try, though I didn’t have your education, you know that.’

  ‘What happened, for example, to Uncle Sándor during the war?’

  ‘Well, naturally, he had a terrible time, no one denies that.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘But it didn’t change him for the better. He could have made amends and set out to live a better life, but he chose not to. His decision.’

  ‘I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall.’ Nothing had changed and I couldn’t make it change. I thought that the revelations of the morning would alter everything but it was all just the same.

  ‘What is it you want to know, Vivien? Why do you bother with all this old history? What’s got into you? You’re bored, your head is full of speculations. Maybe it’s time to find a nice new boyfriend.’

  ‘Maybe I have one,’ I said, out of malice and anger.

  ‘That common boy I saw you with?’

  ‘Which boy?’

  ‘A week or so ago, I saw you on the street with a boy with a jacket made of a leather skin, with all kinds of straps hanging from it.’

  ‘I didn’t see you.’

  ‘No? Well I was there, it was not long after lunch. If this is the boyfriend, you want to be careful he doesn’t drag you down to his level. This is always a danger when you mix with unsavoury types. I don’t understand how you touch him after Alexander.’

  ‘You’re such a snob, Mother,’ I said, turning away so she would not see my embarrassment.

  She picked up the plate and hurled the poached egg and green beans into the bin.

  ‘That’s it. I have no appetite now.’

  ‘There’s an iron curtain,’ I said. ‘I’m banging my head against an iron curtain.’

  ‘Good, I hope you don’t bang so hard your brains fall out.’

  She was at the sink washing the plate.

&
nbsp; ‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ I said.

  ‘Why, do you want to join me?’

  ‘Yes, let’s have a cup of coffee together, we hardly ever do that.’

  ‘Lovely. There are some biscuits in the tin, see what you can find. I like the arrowroot at this time, the long fingers.’

  I put the biscuits on a plate and we took our coffee into the sitting room. My mother picked up a television magazine and began circling the programmes she and my father planned to watch that evening, her finger hesitating between a quiz show and a play.

  ‘Didn’t you want to make friends with other refugees when you arrived?’ I asked her.

  ‘Well, we might have done, but your father was a little sensitive.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, you know, he doesn’t like gossip.’

  ‘And what would people be gossiping about?’

  ‘Vivien, I feel I am in that programme Perry Mason and you are the lawyer and I am the accused. What do you call it, cross-examination. I wish you would stop.’

  Calmly she deflected all my questions. I couldn’t get anything out of her at all, and it wasn’t that she knew nothing, because it was she who, around a year later, after Sándor had died, told me that when he was doing labour service he had been beaten so badly on the testicles that it sterilised him.

  Throughout that summer, my parents’ fear and paranoia had been growing, until their anxiety burst out on to the surface and what had been a dream existence, a pleasant half-life, suddenly seemed to them like a waking nightmare. These external events–the political forces that were emerging in 1977 and would carry on for the next two years until they subsided and a kind of order was restored–made me want to help and protect them because they could not help themselves. They did not even have to leave the house to feel terrified: their precious television had become the bearer of dreadful warnings of what could happen when you put a foot outside the safety of Benson Court.

  ‘You see,’ my father said, pointing a finger of his fine, craftsman’s hand at the screen, a hand precise in all its movements, the nails clipped every other day to a length he measured with a tiny ruler: ‘now it starts.’

  They clutched each other as they sat on the scratched brown leather sofa, their backs upright, away from the enlivening beige cushions, ramrod straight, as if iron had suddenly entered their souls.

  ‘The government won’t allow it,’ said my mother, who had put down her knitting, a useless sock for a refugee who would never arrive. ‘This is England, not Hungary.’ But her throat closed on the words as if they choked her.

  ‘The Arrow Cross, back again. Who stopped them last time? Tell me, who?’

  ‘They’re not called the Arrow Cross, it’s something different, wait, I’ll get a pen and write it down. We need to know, it’s important. Vivien, where is a pen? You have many pens in your bedroom. Get one right away. And a paper.’

  I went to my desk and gave her a lined notebook and a biro.

  ‘You write it, darling,’ she said. ‘Make sure we got the spelling right.’

  National Front, I wrote.

  ‘Look at them,’ my father said, his face writhing. ‘They’re criminals, you can see it all over them. Hooligans, thugs. See this one here. What a low-life individual. The Englishman is a gentleman but this is not the best sort, not by a long chalk.’

  ‘Horrible,’ said my mother. Fear ran down the walls.

  ‘Why do they march through the places where the coloureds live?’ said my father.

  ‘To control the streets, of course,’ my mother said, who suddenly seemed to me to know far more than she let on. ‘So people are scared to walk around and do their business. Then when they are scared, they can beat them. I saw it in Budapest, exactly the same. Look, the police are protecting them, they’re giving them the right to march. The police are not so innocent, you can see it.’

  ‘Not all,’ said my father, whose face looked very grey and sickly.

  ‘They go into shops and beat up innocent shopkeepers just because they’re black,’ I said.

  ‘Who? The police?’ said my father, outraged.

  ‘No, the National Front.’

  ‘Where do you get these ideas from? I thought you spent all morning in a library, with the books. Do you read this in the books?’

  ‘No, it’s not from books, it’s from real life.’

  ‘What real life do you know about?’ my father said, with a look of anxiety in his face.

  My parents’ reclusiveness had been reinforced by a horrifying encounter with this unknown property, real life, in mid-February. My father arrived home from work with blood on his face. My mother screamed out loud when she saw him, a piercing yelp like a cat. ‘Ervin!’ she cried. ‘What happened to you?’

  He ignored her and went straight to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water and sat down. The blood was clotting in his hair and my mother wet a tea towel under the tap and gently began to wash it away but the gash reopened, the blood dripped down into his eyes.

  He kept very quiet until she had put a bandage on him, and allowed her to take his hand and lead him into the living room, to his armchair, and sit him down with a cup of strong coffee. After a while, he began to talk. He had seen something. What? we asked. He just shook his head, it was terrible, no need for the details, but we wanted the details, we demanded them. He described, in a whisper, how a young girl was walking along the street and a gang of brutes came along and for no reason grabbed her hair and began to bang her head against a wall. What kind of brutes? we asked. You know, the ones with the boots, the shaved heads, that type. And what kind of girl? The kind who came with Sándor that time, you know, a coloured girl, but perhaps a little more respectable, she had nice sensible shoes and big glasses on her nose.

  So how was he involved? Nothing, he had no choice. He just stood there watching in horror this incident, which took place on the corner of Farringdon Road, in broad daylight, just past five o’clock when the shop had shut, and he was waiting for the traffic lights to change–and when he saw what he saw, he might even have taken the drastic step of crossing on the red light, but the traffic was too heavy. So you see, he said, this wasn’t even going on in a corner, an alley, but right on the main road, and then they turned round and saw him, and they realised they had a witness.

  Now they began screaming horrible words at him, hateful filth, he wasn’t prepared to say what. He didn’t confront them, of course not, what did we take him for–a hero? Had he a gun or an arrest warrant? The traffic lights changed, he broke into a run (and I had never seen my father run) but as he reached the middle of the road he tripped over his shoelace which he had failed to tighten properly before he left the workshop. He went down on his hands and knees and his head cracked the pavement. The lights were changing once more, the traffic was starting to move, he couldn’t believe it, the drivers were putting their foot down on the accelerator, they were revving their engines and moving forward because they had the right to go forwards, and my father was lying there on the ground, in their way.

  A lady ran into the road and helped him get up. She stood with her umbrella erect in her hand, holding back the traffic–like a demon, she was, he said, waving that green silk stick above her head. She got him to the other side and then he was all right. She wanted him to go to the hospital but he said it wasn’t necessary, because by now he was so frightened (even of the woman with the umbrella) that all he could think of was to get home as fast as he could, to be safe inside Benson Court, where everyone was kind and generous and kept themselves to themselves.

  The long period of calm in my parents’ lives, which had lasted from the end of the war to the present day, years that were placid and uneventful, which was how they liked it, was coming to an end. They felt they faced a frightening, uncertain future and they had no idea at all where they might go next, if it became necessary to flee once more, and anyway, they were too old now to start new lives.

  But me, it wasn’t too l
ate for me, if things got bad, they said, I could always go to America, surely? But I replied that I had no intention of going anywhere.

  The magnetic pull of Benson Court and my parents’ inert lives had weakened to a faint, plaintive tug and now reality lay all around me, clear and finely etched, visible. King’s Cross, Brixton, Wood Green, Harlesden, Islington, Southall, New Cross, Lewisham, and far beyond to terra incognita, the Thames estuary and its islands–the Isle of Dogs, the Isle of Grain, Sheppey. This London was a great eye looking upwards, blinking by night and day. Railway lines crossed it, gouging scars into its face. Bridges. Steeples. The serpentine river. Derelict factories. Blocks of flats. The smell of human flesh and orange peel, chip papers, asphalt bus shelters, old age, queues for everything.

  And everywhere this:

  It was on bus stops, bus seats, bus windows. On railway bridges, shop windows, litter bins. Tattooed on to fingers and foreheads. The elegance of its form simplified everything, you could write it easily, even if you were no good at writing. It was as blunt and uncomplicated as a fist. But what did it actually mean?

  There was a lot of discussion at the time about this. To some it was an old nostalgia for times lost, when Britain had an empire and ruled half the world; the white man had lost his place and the Queen on her throne, celebrating her silver jubilee in a jewelled coach, crown and sceptre, riding behind plumed horses trotting through the streets of London, this emblem of monarchy, mysterious and divinely ordained, was reduced to a dumpy, ageing woman in reading glasses and a canary-yellow coat with matching shoes and buttoned gloves. Others said no, this was the real Nazi McCoy: that the British Fascists who had been forced underground after the war went on breeding and thrived on grievances, like white maggots in the dark. In Yorkshire they will build the gas chambers, believe me.