The Clothes On Their Backs Read online

  He looked at me, as if I was the police, scanning me for symptoms of search warrants.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said, ‘Miranda, you told me to come.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know, don’t worry, I didn’t forget. I got all the goods. Come.’

  The hall was lined with doors, each with a number. My uncle had returned to property in a small way; he owned three houses in Camden, letting out the rooms and living off the rents. I had no idea how you could fit so many flats into the ground floor of such a house and opened my mouth to ask him, but he pushed me forwards, up a flight of stairs, past a bronze-green vinyl wallpaper, framed hunting prints and a smell of fresh paint. It wasn’t at all what I expected. This was not a slum, it was a good house, nicely decorated, by which I mean nothing was offensive. It was bland, but bland is often OK. Bland is better than condensation, leaking roofs, dry rot, broken stair rails, blocked toilets, faulty boilers that blow up and kill people.

  ‘This is it,’ he said, turning the key in the lock. ‘I hope you like the furniture, a lady friend chose it for me.’

  ‘Cane,’ I said, cautiously. ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘A tropical feel to it, she tells me. And look, turn round–see what is here.’

  This great gift, to a man who had been staring for many years at prison walls, was a mural, a picture of a sunset on a Caribbean island, the kind of thing you see in Jamaican restaurants in Brixton and Notting Hill where they serve jerk chicken and dishes made of goat.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Marvellous!’

  ‘See how he does it so clever that it looks like you could walk into the wall and find yourself sitting on the beach, drinking rum punch from a coconut. You like it? I see you are smiling.’

  ‘It’s lovely. Where would you like me to sit?’

  ‘Anywhere you like. No charge for sitting.’

  I sat down in one of the cane chairs: not the one that was obviously his, the wicker throne, the chair with a back like a peacock’s tail.

  ‘You want coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Please, this is a word we don’t hear so much these days. You must be well brought up. What is your family’s business?’

  I had practised all of this the night before, drawn up for myself a simple biography, based, as it happened, on the blonde-haired real Miranda whom I sometimes talked to on the bus going home from school.

  ‘Picture framing.’

  ‘That’s a good enough trade. Skilled. A person who works with their hands, am I right? Nimble fingers, your father has?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘And good eyes, too, he must have.’ He smiled cynically, and I thought he was starting to wink at me but thought better of it. ‘Now for the coffee. You see how I make it the old way in a saucepan with the grounds? I can’t stand the kind that’s new, in a jar. Revolting. You want to eat something? Here.’

  He had bought a cake.

  ‘I wanted to get something fancy, but I spend so long choosing the tape recorder and the typewriter that I forget to go down to the food hall. I got this one from the corner shop, I don’t know if it’s any good. Battenberg it’s called, go on, have a slice.’

  ‘I do like cake, but not that one.’

  ‘I know what you mean. It sounds German to me, too, but they say it isn’t, it’s just a name.’

  ‘You don’t like Germany?’

  ‘I never been there. About that place I have no opinion. A street is a street and a house is a house and a field is a field and a tree is a tree. Who walks around is a different matter. Next time I buy a real cake, then you’ll see what a cake is. About cakes I know absolutely everything. It’s my special subject, you might say, an appreciation, like some people appreciate art and music–but with me it’s pastries.’ He cut a slice of cake and chewed it nervously, the moist sponge stuck to his gums and he washed it away with strong coffee. ‘OK, let’s start. You like a cigarette?’ He held out a packet of Benson and Hedges in their expensive gold box. Mine were the cheapest available, Players No. 6. ‘In the old days I smoked Balkan Sobranie Black Russians, a very good flavour, but there was a long time when the supply was not available, so I started smoking these. An OK smoke, but nothing special.’

  I took one, and lit it. It was extremely smooth, I missed the rasping, throat-constricting rush of my Players.

  He had arranged everything on a table by the window. The tape recorder, the typewriter, a pile of typing paper.

  ‘You seen something like this before?’ he asked me, as we looked at the tape recorder.

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t actually used one.’

  ‘Actually. Now this is a real English word. I never use it myself but I heard other people, maybe I will start, it makes me sound less like a bloody foreigner, do you think?’

  I noticed how much he seemed to need to impress me. I’d never met a monster before, maybe this was what they were like, but I found him pathetic. The mural, the cheap cane furniture, the absurd cane peacock throne, the tall house with its view over the street, to other houses, dirty and poor, the pink cake and marzipan stuck to his gums, created the impression of mediocrity, and the man with the glittering wrist on which diamonds flashed, and the suede shoes and the West Indian girlfriend with the nylon leopardskin pillbox hat seemed like an old story that a child is told at bedtime and forgets in the morning.

  ‘Are we ready?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, but who is going to operate the machine?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I don’t know how. I looked at the book that comes with it but I can’t make anything out of it. See.’

  The instructions were daunting to me, as well. A diagram showed various manoeuvres you needed to make, to get the thing going. ‘It’s a bit baffling,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll leave it up to you. You have an intellectual’s head.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to be any use. Let’s try pressing this button.’

  ‘OK.’

  So I pressed Play and my uncle started talking.

  ‘The day I arrive here, which is 14 December 1956, this is a day I remember in every detail.’

  ‘Is that where we’re going to start?’

  ‘Of course, that’s the beginning of the story.’

  ‘No, no, no, I mean the beginning of your life.’

  ‘My life? This is not what we are discussing.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘My career.’

  ‘But if a book is to be publishable, it has to be more than chronology, it has to shed light on the human condition.’

  ‘Look, miss, I just want to tell you a few facts, facts that got missed out and the public is not aware of.’

  ‘OK, it’s your story, not mine. But facts aren’t as interesting as the inner truth.’

  ‘Truth?’ cried my uncle, in a hoarse voice. ‘Miss, people who like to hear the truth don’t know nothing about the truth. Truth would make them sick if they knew it. Truth isn’t nice. It’s for grown-up people, not children. You think truth is something I give away, like pennies to a beggar? A man holds on to that until his dying day.’

  ‘So what is it you want to record?’ I said, coldly. ‘A fairy story?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, a fairy story that people will pay attention to. Because only that kind of dreck is good enough for them, it’s all they deserve.’

  ‘Contempt for the reader is not a good start.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he said. And the old Sándor Kovacs was suddenly there, the beast–I knew this because I felt intimidated.

  ‘Your story,’ I said, finding it harder than was reasonable to get these two small words out.

  ‘Story?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what’s your story?’ He looked at me with those faded brown eyes which now sent out points of gold fire that pierced my heart. I could hardly bear to return his gaze. I could sense another’s flesh and the spirit prowling inside it.
/>   ‘What?’ he said, almost shouting, ‘what’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You sick?’

  ‘No, no, carry on.’

  ‘You don’t look good.’ A hand lifted for a moment, then fell back.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘OK.’ He sat back in the cane peacock throne like an exhausted king. Once, when he was very rich, he had had a chair with lion’s feet for arms, painted gold. Someone told him it came from a palace in Italy, from the old times. ‘So why are you upset all of a sudden? Is someone in your family ill, for example.’

  ‘Well, you know…’ I said hastily, to cover my revulsion.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My father is not what he once was.’ This ambiguity struck me as enough to throw him. It was a trick of my mother’s to create a slight misunderstanding that left an uncertainty in the mind, in order to change the subject, send you haring off down the wrong track without ever saying anything with a proper meaning.

  ‘What is his illness?’ Sándor said, looking like a man who has just been given his own death warrant, which struck me as strange because they were supposed to hate each other, but all passions, I now understand, are forms of attachment and if my father was to die then these intense feelings would be a ghost, howling for a body.

  I lowered my voice to a doctor’s murmur. ‘You know.’

  Cancer, he thought. I saw it in his eyes.

  Ervin, the little shit, dying! And soon, he Sándor, and the young girl in front of him would be the last of the Kovacs. At that moment, he suddenly knew I had come as a spy for his brother. That maybe Ervin, at last, at the very end, was using the instrument of his daughter to make amends. That one brother had given the other permission to tell the truth about the past, the story which had begun in another time, another country. For he was the only bridge left between the generations–he, Sándor, would be immortalised by telling this story, sending it on, into the future, this only way we live for ever, the dead speaking to the living.

  ‘All right,’ he said, sitting up in his peacock chair, opening the iron box in which his past was held, ‘let me start with a fact. I was born 27 February nineteen hundred sixteen. That’s my birthday. I’m sixty-one.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It was a village, in the Zémplen Hills, in the east of Hungary, near Tokaj, where they make the wine. You heard of that wine? Beautiful, very sweet, the wine of kings, they used to call it. So now you have a fact, no, more than one! Are you happy now?’

  ‘What was the name of the village?’

  ‘You won’t believe this but its name was Mád. It’s true. And it wasn’t a crazy place, it was beautiful.’

  ‘Tell me more about it.’

  It had been many years since he’d thought about the village; somehow it got lost. Yet here it was, it came back instantly, when he called for it.

  ‘Quiet, peaceful. The air fragrant, a lovely smell over everything, the grapes warm in the sun when they were ripening. Plum trees in blossom, I remember them very well, in the orchards, beautiful flowers they had in the spring, then fruit, so sweet. The best plums you ever tasted in your life–you know my father lifted me up in his arms so I could reach out and pick a plum for him to eat, and then I picked a plum for myself, ach, those plums.’

  ‘What did they do with the plums?’

  ‘Nothing, they didn’t do nothing but eat them, maybe make jam and a kuchen, a cake all the women made, you put the plums on top of the dough with plenty of sugar and put it in the oven, a big iron oven, not like the modern gas cooker. The grapes, that was what was important, that was where the money was. The vineyards.’

  ‘They made wine in the village?’

  ‘Of course, wine, that was the whole business. But not just any kind of wine, not the wine you drink in a tavern in Budapest, it was holy wine, because these were Jewish winemakers. They made the wine that got sent east, to the Ukraine and Russia, to the Hasidic Jews, to make their blessings. A ruby-red wine, always.’

  ‘Did your family work in the wine trade?’

  ‘Yes, my father, God rest his soul, he worked for his own father who was one of the merchants, he helped him run the business side of things, the paperwork for shipping. He wrote the letters to the rabbis in Ukraine, in Yiddish, you understand. And also he wrote the letters to the Russian authorities in Russian, Cyrillic, the two languages he knew and also, of course, Hungarian. So he was quite an educated person, a very gentle soul. Not like me, eh?’

  ‘You say you had a brother.’

  He had been talking non-stop for several minutes. I saw I could wind him up like clockwork and off he would go.

  ‘Well, you know until I was four years old I lived in heaven,’ he said. ‘It was a very special life we had then, the neighbours, the Christians, everyone got on fine, some of them were Greeks, because the Greeks were also big in the wine trade in Hungary in those days, I don’t know if it’s the same today. Everywhere you looked there were beautiful fields, the vineyards, and hills with trees on them. Flowers. Everything quiet, except for the drays carting away the wooden barrels, going east. If I could have one moment in my life to live again it would be when I was four years old because the next minute my mother, who had got very big and fat, went to bed and out of her belly came an old man, a little old man, my brother Ervin. You want to see a picture?’

  I had never seen any photograph of either of my parents before their arrival in London just before the war. Framed portraits, held behind glass in silver frames, of their parents, pictures taken in photographers’ studios, were kept in their bedroom and the images had faded to speckled pale milk-chocolate mist, evaporating towards the deckled edges of the print.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and took from an old enamel box, decorated with sunflowers, a brown envelope that smelt of must and sweat and, faintly, blood.

  I recognised my grandmother, just about. At her knee was a sturdy boy with a thick lower lip, hair plastered back under a glassy layer of pomade, and what I’d call an adventurous expression. In her arms, wrapped in a shawl, my father peered out beyond the white wool, with a face that at a few months old already seemed like it was looking around for his glasses.

  I burst out laughing.

  ‘You think it’s funny? My life came to an end when he entered the world. Ervin. Oy. What a nasty child.’

  ‘What was the matter with him?’

  ‘He was a screamer. He screamed, he whined, he would never let go of our mother. You know one time he found a pot of glue like they use to paste the labels on to the wine bottles, everyone had this stuff round the house, and he paints himself in glue and goes and runs at our mother and presses himself against her, so they can get totally stuck. It took her days to get the glue out of his clothes.’

  ‘Was he jealous of you?’

  ‘Who knows? He was crazy. Full of phobias. Nothing ever happened in his life to make him the way he was, not like me, with me it could have gone either way. The circumstances could have been different.’

  ‘Are you still in touch?’

  ‘Maybe we should stop it and play it back, to see how it sounds, make sure everything is working.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, breathless from all the revelations, about which I knew nothing, absolutely nothing. My father was born in a village? Him? With plum trees and grapes?

  I pressed the button on the tape recorder marked Stop and then pressed the button marked Play again, but nothing happened. Silence.

  ‘Try the volume knob, maybe that’s the problem.’

  Still nothing.

  ‘What’s the matter with this? Here, look at this book again.’

  I looked.

  ‘Oh. It seems you have to press two buttons simultaneously, not just Play but also Record, both together.’

  I pushed my finger down hard on the two buttons. Another light came on.

  ‘Say something.’

  ‘My goddam brother Ervin. The little screamer, ha ha. That enough?’

&n
bsp; Then his voice. ‘My goddam brother Ervin. The little screamer ha ha. That enough?’

  My uncle had never heard this before. He knew he did not sound like an Englishman or a man with an education, because he never had an education, not the kind I had, but when he heard his voice coming out of the tape recorder, for the first time he understood why no one believed anything he said in court. The voice was guttural, it was coarse, it was hard even for him to make out some of the words.

  I could see he had had enough. He was tired and didn’t want to talk any more. He looked as if he had torn off a chunk of his soul and handed it to me, as if he had given me his liver, or his kidneys. He didn’t look good at all.

  ‘We’ll start again tomorrow,’ he said to me. ‘A fresh start.’

  He had the money all prepared in an envelope, with my name on it.

  ‘I pay you forty pound a week, but each day is be one payment. Like the lady in the Tales of Arabian Nights. She always kept the end of the story for the next night. Eight pound is not enough to live on. You’ll come back tomorrow this way.’

  ‘Of course I will come back tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe if my life story takes long enough you get the money to buy a little car, that would be a good start for you in life.’

  Because my parents never answered any questions about the past–that’s finished, it’s over and done with, here you are in England, that other place has nothing to do with you, stop bothering your head with this rubbish, no no no–I learned to stop asking, and eventually I forgot all about wanting to ask. Suddenly, a treasure chest had opened and out spilled all these precious objects. I was full of everything my uncle had told me; it was not only my parents who suddenly acquired an additional dimension (time) but me too. In my past there were rabbis and plums and grapes and wine. Everything was different now. I felt like I’d eaten a horse.

  I couldn’t go home at once so I went to see a film, then wandered along Bond Street, looking at the impossibly expensive, dull, grown-up clothes in the windows which I did not want to buy, but I was interested in watching others go in and come out with carrier bags, and speculating what might be inside them. This exercise calmed and soothed me, it was a neutral space between home and my uncle’s flat. When I got back to Benson Court my parents were finishing fish fingers with tomato ketchup and baked beans off a tray in front of the TV.