When Louis Polack turned up in Liverpool in 1919 to ask for the hand of Mina Mendel in marriage, he did so primarily out of a sense of obligation and in the strong hope that the situation would have resolved itself by now, and that she was already married or at least engaged, or possibly even dead of the Spanish flu. He had taken literally Jossel’s suggestion in the field hospital, consulted with his father, who talked to the rabbi, and the consensus was that he was bound by the iron shackles of indebtedness, that he must be a mensch and at least make the offer. Jossel remembered Louis but had completely forgotten what he had said during that long night when he was running out of words. It had been nothing more than a foolish postscript, but the speech had been enough to get Louis to cross the Pennines to make an offer and Jossel thought that Mina should at least hear him out. She could make her own choice, though the Jewish boys of Brownlow Hill offered slim pickings during the war and some were dead, and others in a bad way in their minds, and others without an arm or a leg or both or all four, so when a serious proposition turns up on your doorstep you don’t send him away without giving him an opportunity to make his presentation.
Louis could not have been more nervous. The photograph of Mina, as far as he could remember it, had been acceptable to him at the time, but wasn’t he then on the brink of death? Wouldn’t any old sow have looked pretty enough? Even if she had seemed okay, that picture was out of date. She could have changed, coarsened. And what kind of girl was she? One who had been employed in a munitions factory with the roughest types. He also had stood shoulder to shoulder with the common man, but men are crude by nature and must do what they can to elevate themselves, whereas women are naturally flowery and can become debased. He knew about the visits to the forest, which told him she had a certain amount of spirit, zest that could go bad, become rancid. Of Bolsheviks he knew next to nothing. Of political theory he was completely innocent. His father had made something of himself in Leeds. The business was thriving. He had a future. There were plenty of young girls who would gladly marry him, even if imposed by the shadchan. He could do very well, he believed, but he had to go find this girl and set out his stall. God forbid he should not do his duty.
He had not rushed straight to the house when he arrived in Liverpool; he had carried with him his courting clothes, getting changed in the lavatory of a tea room, and presented himself, carnation in his buttonhole, at the front door of the address scribbled on a piece of scrap paper, folded in his wallet. Looking like a suitor, wanting to be taken for one, but not too disappointed to receive a refusal and go straight home to Leeds, fully discharged of his responsibility. His whole idea of himself was that of an honest person, somewhat in the shadow of his older brothers, somewhat overlooked, laughed at and mimicked because he took care of his appearance and dressed the best one could. His brother Mottie thought the wound on the battlefield had left him a little soft in the head, a disposition already easy-going, susceptible to being taken advantage of, and the debt to this unknown girl was no exception. There were always ways to get out of a situation. But there he is knocking at the door in a navy serge suit, a bowler hat, carnation in his lapel, and a prepared speech he has rehearsed on the way in his head so he’s word perfect.
A knock on the door. Lia opens it. (He thinks, This isn’t the girl, is it? She’s a bit of a heifer.) She hears him out, says, ‘I know you, my husband wrote me letters from the Front. He never said nothing about you marrying Millie, but here you are so you should take your chance.’ Shouts, ‘Millie. There’s a fellow here says he wants to ask you something.’
Mina comes into the hall. Sees a respectable-looking young gentleman with a fair complexion and a flower in his buttonhole. Listens to him recount the story of his salvation from certain death on the battlefield. They go into the parlour to wait till Jossel gets home. She’s not, like Louis, wearing courting clothes, her hair is a mess. She is conscious that she is not making the best of herself.
Lia picks this up and whispers to her to go and get changed, she will entertain the stranger herself.
Mina runs to her bedroom and combs her hair and puts on a dress that has been waiting for such an occasion. The bedroom has a suffocating flowery wallpaper, blooms she does not know the name of – she has the word for violet and for rose but not these viney monstrosities with their fleshy leaves. The dress is folded into a wooden chest carved with Oriental faces. The sharp tang of mothballs stifles her throat. In the marital bedroom Lia has a small vial of scent Jossel bought her when he came back from the war, claiming it was from Paris (but he had been nowhere near France). Mina, on her mettle, goes in there and finds it where she knows it’s hidden in the second drawer of the tallboy and presses a few drops against her neck and hopes for the best. It is the first time she has worn perfume. She feels herself no longer to be a girl but a woman teetering on the edge of womanly maturity, and all it takes is the essence of a few flowers. From a kiss under the trees to city courtship by a war hero.
Down in the parlour Lia is interrogating Louis. He answers all her questions in a satisfactory manner. Jossel arrives home, is astonished to see Private Polack in the parlour with his wife, remembers him, they cry out and embrace, begin to reminisce about the army when Mina comes back downstairs and the speech Louis has so laboriously prepared goes out of his head completely. Impulsively he cries, ‘I’m Private Polack, your brother saved my life on the battlefield and I’ve come from Leeds to ask you to marry me.’
Have you now? We’ll see about that, she thinks.
The boy looks okay to her but she knows nothing about him. She’s not going to throw herself away just because someone has come all the way from Leeds, and probably wants to take her back to Leeds, which as far as she knows is a city that has something to do with wool and sheep. Where it isn’t is America, which she has not yet given up hope of getting to one of these days, though it is a long time since anyone discussed arrangements for the next stage of their lives.
‘What a mensch,’ says Jossel to Mina, genuinely surprised. How is she going to do better than this? Louis has done everything by the book so far and further questioning reveals he works in an expanding family business.
Yes, Louis is agreed to be a mensch, you can’t fault him on that count, now it’s just a matter of leaving the two young people alone together to see if Mina likes him. There will be a courtship, but if she doesn’t, no dice. There will be no arranged marriages in this modern post-war world. Jossel has got her away from the Riga shadchan, he’ll let her make her own choice, but on the other hand why shouldn’t she choose Louis?
Why not? Mina has not been kissed again. Before all the boys were called up there hadn’t been time to find a sweetheart. She has never given much thought to whom she will marry, she doesn’t think there’s any rush. The war is over, she’s liberated from the canteen and back home doing some sewing – mending and alterations. She’s not bad at it; it’s a life on hold, though. That is how it feels, the impetuous side of her wants something to happen; she wants to try her luck in the world.
On the other hand, from the moment she laid eyes on Louis and heard his story, she is pretty certain she’ll have him, pending further acquaintance. Because, as Louis wants to do his duty, what Mina wants is to get away from Lia. To no longer be the third point in the awkward triangle of her brother’s marriage and be bossed about and expected to take her share in the management of what is going to be sooner or later a whole brood of children.
A month of courtship followed, in which Louis took her to the moving pictures and for a promenade along the central boulevard of Princes Road on a Sunday with the strolling gentry.
‘I owe your brother everything,’ he said. ‘I owe him life itself. I’ll always be good to you, I’ll make you a wonderful husband.’
As Louis suspected, she had been exposed to the coarseness and vitality of the working-class women of the city, their familiarity with sex, with ribald jokes, with hunger and hardship. Down among the women on the factory floor Mina had felt not so much solidarity as sorry for them, for their bad feet and bad backs and bad husbands who beat them and their children who got sick and died and all the woes and ailments of being women. God forbid this should be her own fate. And it turns out Louis is the type who always wants the best, the finer things in life. As he would later say, when they entered the lobby of a splendid hotel while actually staying at a lesser establishment, ‘We can at least have a cup of tea; nothing is too good for my family. Walk in like you own the place. Why shouldn’t everyone have a silver teapot and an Irish linen napkin?’
So, no argument, Louis was better than she could have hoped for. Away from the horrors of the battleground he was soft-spoken, beautifully dressed. His health would never be as good as it had been when he marched off to the war: he was bronchial, wheezing, coughing phlegm into his handkerchief but doing so discreetly, his back turned to her. Taller than Jossel, broader in the chest, better proportioned, with a soft chin and prominent ears and sensual lips, he was a good-looking boy. He would surprise his young wife by coming home with a box hidden behind his back and inside it was a beautiful pair of white kid gloves. She tried them on at night when everyone had gone to bed, they were a wasteful extravagance, but Louis said, ‘Never mind, I know you have them,’ as he would pay extra to have his initials handblocked in gold into the sweat band of his hat. ‘I will know.’ And Mina could see it in the way he walked, that yes, he knew.
She accepted him by the boating lake in Sefton Park. He accepted her acceptance. Neither of them was in love, love did not come into it, that kind of love had barely been invented. Louis had fulfilled his side of a bargain with the Almighty, who had sent Jossel to save him on the battlefield in exchange for a wife. And Mina would have her own household. She would be on equal terms with her sister-in-law. There was nothing wrong with Louis. Exciting, he wasn’t. Her heart didn’t jump when she saw him. It was more like choosing quality goods. Maybe, she thought, I’ve had enough excitement to last a lifetime. (But the idea itself was discouraging, it sank like a sour weight on her stomach and rose back like acid in her throat.)
They got married in shul. A posse of Polacks came over from Leeds to see Louis wed to the girl by whom he had done the right thing. ‘We’ll never want for family,’ said Jossel, looking round at the men in good suits, smiling, straining their necks to see the bride as she walked down the aisle on her brother’s arm. ‘You’ve landed the best boy in the world, one of a kind our Louis,’ the brothers said. ‘Mazel tov, mazel tov, let’s dance and be happy.’
That night Louis waited in his nightshirt on the edge of the bed for his bride to come in scented, adorned in her best nightdress, ready, knowing what was to happen. Her sister-in-law would have told her everything. He knew what he had to do and how it was to be done but he didn’t want to give her a fright. She opened the door of the bedroom, her hair was loose, black, unpinned. His hands were trembling, he did not dare bare her body. Was there a prayer a man could say so God could guide him through this holy act, the deed of increasing, like stars in the firmament, the numbers of the Jewish people? Minutes later he pushed himself inside her. She gave a small sigh, of pain or pleasure he did not know.
So this is the big deal everyone talks about, she thought after it was over and something wet was seeping out of her onto the sheet. Fuss and nothing. Better I should have run off with the boys in the forest and died young and beautiful and the outlaws would have sung songs about me.
Mina wrote a letter to her mother and father and sent it to the last known address they had, which was the old house in Riga. She told them all was well, still in Liverpool, but soon, sure enough, they would be on their way to the golden land, America. She omitted any details of the factory: her father would not be happy about his child labouring with her hands among the common folk. She extolled the virtues of her young husband and affirmed she was happy and content. She did not know how long it would take to receive a reply, it could be weeks or months. War had made a mess of everything. It was a long time since she had heard from them but letters got lost, people moved around, plans were altered as theirs had been. She wondered about the fate of Itzik. Jossel said, ‘Dead on the battlefield is my guess.’ ‘You hope, you mean.’ Her little sister Rivka would be not so little anymore, would have grown out of dollies. Solly, the baby, she could not imagine as anything but a little kid.
Mina was set along a course now, a transformation as great as her brother’s. She was in the process of being and becoming, fulfilling her destiny: a housewife and mother. She reminded herself that she should not forget, never lose the recollection, the sliver of her true self she wants to hang on to. Here in Liverpool there is no forest, just some woods out beyond the limits of the city where the wealthy people live. If you owned a motor car you could drive north to the land of the lakes where there was nothing, just hills and fields, and here, she thought, you could build houses for the workers. That is what the Bolshevik boys would say, she told Louis, and weren’t they right? ‘No factories,’ Louis pointed out. ‘Where are people supposed to work? Leave it at that, land good for nothing.’ (One of their great-grandsons would in the next century own a farm near Keswick which his wife ran while he commuted to London during the week doing digital consultancy for environmental organisations. But that was a long time after Mina and Louis had been resting together in their adjacent plots in Rice Lane cemetery.)
So they stayed in Liverpool, America forgotten. The young couple got the hang of sex, got the hang of each other, made love with gusto once a fortnight. Mina sat in the warm kitchen with her children, Harry, Benny and Paula, crowded onto her lap or hugging her knees. Above her on the clothes airer raised up and down by a pulley the shirts steamed in the heat of the coal fire. Little Paula, the youngest, looked up and saw her toy rabbit hanging by pegs from its ears, floating in the airy draughts from a poorly sealed window. The kitchen smelled of chicken, everything smelled of chicken. Her mother was a dark round woman with a faint moustache. What was she thinking about? Words so worn and faded in her mind they resembled much-thumbed coins whose raised imprints have started to smooth away. She might go to the library and take out a book on the subject, a refresher course, but she could not command the language necessary, hers was still simple, everyday English with bad grammar and a small vocabulary, for who had time to apply yourself to night school with three children? And her husband, the almost native-born speaker, could resolve any matters beyond her own power of speech.
So big ideas grew like mushrooms in the dark inside her, stunted, needing more light, never emerging into speech.