Mina received a letter which she thought at first was a reply to her own of years earlier, announcing her marriage. But it was obvious that that had never been received. The letter was from Rivka, trusting that they were either still at the same address she had last heard from or, more likely, settled in America and the landlord might forward it. Mina read the letter in disbelief. Jossel was harrowed. Any doubts that he had done the right thing bringing his sister out of that place were chillingly confirmed, but what if he had been more patient and more resourceful, argued with his father until the old fellow cracked, and the whole family had left together? For years had passed and while everything was happening to them, everything was happening to the rest of the family.
Rivka did not know how to explain the nature of the events that cracked about their heads. She saw everything at street level: when the soldiers came and drove them out, deported the Latvian Jews into mainland Russia. What were they supposed to have done wrong to be kicked out of their houses, their businesses? Now they say we are spies, shouted her father, spies for Germany. What has Germany got to do with us? A soldier got sick of the racket and thought he’d shut him up. Mowscha Mendel was shot through the head and his beard ran with blood as he lay face down on the pavement.
The address from which Rivka was writing was an unfamiliar town in the Soviet Union. Rivka, Solly and their mother Dora were now Soviet citizens. They belonged to the USSR. They had become Bolsheviks without ever having to venture into the forest. Itzik’s whereabouts remained a mystery, he was last heard of as a deserter rumoured to be living with a gang of outlaws, not revolutionaries – scavengers and criminals, Rivka wrote.
‘Didn’t I tell you, Mina?’ Jossel said. ‘He always had a taste for blood.’
‘A terrible person,’ Lia said, who had never met him but wanted to disavow the connection.
‘A louse through and through.’
‘You were right about him,’ Mina said. ‘He’s come to a bad end.’
Rivka wrote that their mother was clinging on in a shadow world, a wounded widow not right in the head who was apt to say the wrong thing when outside the protective confines of her family and attract attention to herself, bringing down the gaze of The Authorities. Jossel knew that it was a fact of life for every Jewish family that you always told The Authorities what they wanted to hear, for the noble authentic truth was rarely of any help in such circumstances when someone in a uniform was examining your papers to see if they were in order. You assembled a story, a narrative that fitted the current requirements. Authority and bad times were like cockroaches, unavoidable.
Solly, now a young man, was doing fine. He looked after their mother with tenderness, he had found work in a bakery, he was strong and barrel chested, looked just like their father. His beard was coming in thickly. Rivka was bringing in money dressmaking. The Soviet Union was wonderful. The People looked after everything, and the people in charge of the People made sure they got it done.
Mina and Jossel came to the end of their sister’s letter. At least now they had a fixed address, Jossel said. They could write again with all their news. Jossel remembered the fate of Rivka’s doll, fallen down the stairs; the Bolsheviks would throw everything out in a fit of destruction.
But Mina wanted to believe that somewhere in the Soviet Union her Andrievs, the young dancer in the forest, was in a position of authority and was working for the good of the Common Man. In reality he lay buried in the frozen earth, a body murdered by White Russians during the civil war then thrown out like a gnawed chicken bone. Wolves tore him apart.
It was all leading to death, but here in Allerton they were near a park and the park was beautiful. In the park was a boating lake, and there were ducks, swans even, big white clacking creatures with huge beating wings – who had ever seen such a thing? Only in a picture book.
‘Did you know,’ said Jossel to his family, ‘I read about this, the King owns all the swans, personally. You try to kill or steal a swan, they put you in the Tower of London. What a punishment, what a tsar, what a country we are living in.’
They laughed at the harmlessness of their overlords.
There was a thousand-year-old oak tree. There were standing stones which went back to the Druids. None of this history had any meaning for them, but they lapped it up anyway, it was their right to walk in the park, nobody stopped you. There was a white stucco mansion house with an open-air theatre and in the summer they would go to see the singers and dancers perform their hearts out, singing and clowning, red spots of greasepaint on their cheeks, crazy costumes under the blue suburban skies, high kicking, making jokes the immigrants didn’t understand but laughed at anyway. They had the right to laughter.
Louis took out an account for Mina at Bon Marché. She bought silk stockings to wear at simchas and a butterfly brooch with glass eyes. She learned about fitted carpets, carpet sweepers, Madeira tablecloths, hostess trolleys, coffee pots with matching cups, soda siphons, whisky decanters, coal-effect electric fires. Lia’s house was a great maw into which she emptied objects Mina didn’t need, and didn’t even want, but a home, Louis insisted, must be furnished, made nice to come home to, nice for visitors, and for the voices that thronged the parlour streaming through the mesh of the wireless who should find themselves in polite company.
A load of hooey, Mina thought.
So much of life was hooey. But you must put up with it.
She forgot to dust, to clean, she was not much of a cook, but she was a wonderful mother to her three children, willing to get down on her hands and knees and make her back a horse for them to ride on. Here was her hearth and she rose in the cold dawn to sweep out the ashes and build the fire before the family came thundering downstairs and Louis eventually appeared, smelling cleanly of soap and toothpaste, his chest proudly bearing his new gold-plated tiepin glinting in the weak sun of an English winter morning filtered through leaded windowpanes.
The garden was not as it should be. The neighbours had had a word. ‘I’ll get a man in,’ Louis said, ‘or a boy. There are people who can do these things. What do I know from flowers?’
Around the house, he couldn’t even fit a cup hook. ‘I don’t have the tools. You must have the right equipment for the job.’
Mina waited so long she finally banged them in with the heel of her shoe. Was everything around the house this easy? In the ironmongers she enquired the price of a hammer, a saw, bags of nails. Louis said it wasn’t ladylike, these were ideas she got from the factory during the war, there was a certain coarseness in her that made him queasy. ‘But what do you want,’ she said, ‘a living doll?’ And then he felt ashamed. Perhaps he could help her, she said, perhaps he could kneel on the floor and straighten the seams of her nylons? ‘Kneel?’ he cried. ‘And get dust on my trousers?”
She sat in the garden with the children and smelled the summer. What more could you want? What? she asked the birds and the trees and the roses.
On Wednesday half-day closing, in the middle of the afternoon, she went to the pictures by herself with all the other Allerton matrons with time on their hands. She liked the knockabout American comedies, she didn’t have to understand every Marx Brothers joke to understand who they were – a bunch of anarchists! They were crazy people, Jews who had escaped the fate of history and lived in the present tense, gone wild. Another time she took a solo voyage on the Mersey ferry and back again, gazing down at the rushing water with the inclination to push herself off from the side of the boat and plunge into the dirty river and be swept out to sea. Why am I doing this? she asked herself. Why would I leave three orphan children and a grieving husband and a stain on the family?
Only for the momentary exhilaration, then you’d have a mouthful of muddy water and your lungs would fill and you would die screaming for fresh air and your body would be swept out to the Irish Sea, though maybe this way you would finally reach the shores of America.