Inside the Conway Hall the faces of the rows of men and women, shabby, careworn, were now lit up as if they were facing the rising sun in the form of the speaker, who sent greetings from Comrade Propp himself with whom he was in regular correspondence. At these words the satellite planets shone even brighter in the reflected glow; it was incredible, Itzik thought, what a lecture could bring out in these uninteresting souls who had formed long, eager queues waiting to get in. A man with a piece of ham wrapped in newspaper in his pocket, a woman reapplying the stub of a lipstick to her chapped and flaking lips for it was a clammy evening when the leaves were slimy underfoot. And there, idling on high heels, the elegant figure of his niece Paula, whom he had summoned from her bedsit, sparkling around the lapels.
So far Vladimir Propp with his formalist insistence on structure had survived the incessant change in fortunes of the Soviet intellectual classes. The folk tale, with its origins deep in the oral histories of the peasantry, contained elements of magic and talking animals, it was childlike and primitive also, but the reason everyone knew these stories: they heard them on their mother’s knee, so even the most rigid of doctrinarians became enchanted or lachrymose and retreated back into infantile memories. Yes, everyone liked a fairy story, as they were called here in England, and was able to immediately recognise the structural elements that bound them together. It was easy to understand Propp and far less of a headache than Hegel or Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, which personally bored Itzik, who was of the type who sees any political philosophy through the lens of what is in it for himself.
Every folk tale is one great bourgeois deviation, a blueprint for personal advancement and survival rather than the collective endeavour of the Masses. It begins with the departure of the hero from his home with a purpose. Now we have an adventure. Then the donor turns up, an agent like a talking bird or some such, who tests or interrogates. The hero is given a magical prop: a bean that grows a stalk that reaches the sky, or a hen that lays golden eggs. Next the hero is guided to a location which will change everything … On this all goes, the villain is punished, the hero marries the princess and ascends to a throne. The end.
The ending is always happy, the hero is never thwarted, though he may be discouraged. The task will be accomplished.
Standing in the back of the hall in his double-breasted suit, with that smile of complicity which hoodwinked people into thinking that they shared a delicious secret (if only they could remember what it was), Itzik raked the room harrying and winnowing like an agricultural implement.
After it was over he came and took her arm. ‘We won’t be missed if we leave now,’ he said. ‘Or do you want to stay for the reception, though I wouldn’t recommend it? It’s just tea. Unless you placed some hope in it as a social occasion?’
She had. She had hoped to meet young people but the ones she had queued up with, bundled-up pamphlets ruining the line of their jacket pockets, were untidy in their dress. There were no intellectuals in the Polack family unless you counted the rabbi, they were all members of the aspiring bourgeoisie, immigrants, not exiles or émigrés. Uncle and niece walked across the square.
‘That was …’
‘Yes? You enjoyed it?’
‘Up to a point, I suppose. He did go on, I mean, two hours, and all the questions. I’ve really no idea what they meant by them, they seemed to be trying to, oh, I don’t know, prove a point. Yes, that was it. They all had tricks up their sleeves one way or another, as if they wished to be noticed, to be cleverer than the lecturer. Though I liked the man who asked about chess, why the Soviet Union is so keen on the game with its kings and queens and knights and clerics and the pawns, who are the peasantry, sent out like cannon fodder. And when you send people away to camps they’re made to carve chess sets. I thought it was a good question.’
‘I know that man, a troublemaker.’
‘But what kind of trouble?’ She laughed. ‘You people are such sticklers for always having to say the right thing. And think it too, I suppose. Are you going to put him in a camp?’
‘We need not speak of camps, they are largely a myth.’
His English wasn’t bad; they had sent him on a language course before he arrived. But his accent was that of Mina and Jossel, she could hear her family in him, it made her homesick and she clung to his forearm as they crossed the square; she was an inch taller than him. So strange to share her blood with this funny little man and all the questions she would be obliged eventually to ask about the unknown family whose letters to her parents had stopped dead just before the war. Things had been chaotic after the peace, people moving about all over the place, trying to get home, when sometimes there was no home to return to, and maybe that had happened to Rivka and Solly; they were trying to make their way back to Riga and were still in transit. They would hear from them sooner or later. The candle flames burned in a glass on the mantelpiece, ‘to remember my mother and father, olovashalom,’ Mina said, ‘though I never heard when exactly they were taken from us or where they are buried or whether they even had a proper Jewish burial or—’ And she could not stop herself from breaking down into tears that she had run away and left them, never thinking they would not somehow be reunited because they were all she had ever known. ‘That good-for-nothing ship.’ But no yahrzeit candles for Rivka and Solly, they were young and strong and had no reason not to be alive.
They reached the door of a public house. ‘They know me here. We will find a warm welcome.’ The barman nodded as they entered, it was hardly a cry of greeting, she thought. Poor Uncle Itzik, thinking people liked him. The bar had an air of waiting for more interesting customers, ones who spent more freely and gave the place the atmosphere of somewhere you might want to go to have a good time. It was the very first public house she had entered and it seemed like everywhere else she had been in London, not all it was cracked up to be. She had come to the lecture straight from work in her office suit, only adding the diamanté clips as she came down in the lift to the street.
He ordered himself a whisky and she asked for a Gin and It.
So this was it, what all the years of waiting had led to, and the learning to type and take shorthand at the secretarial finishing school and the acceptance of a position in London which came directly from the proprietor of the school itself, who had ‘my connections.’ A stifling evening followed by a cocktail of sorts in a dingy pub in the company of a gnome-like individual who claimed to be her relation from beyond the seas. And probably was, unless it was a case of mistaken identity. She had escaped from suburbia for this? I am green, she thought, I know I am, I’ve been nowhere really and seen almost nothing, but honestly. Could there be a deadlier evening?
The lecture had started at seven, it was now a quarter past nine. I’ll give him half an hour, she thought. Then she would return to her bedsit with the wireless and her library book and a hot-water bottle and the silk-shaded lamp that cast a sulphur glow over the pages. Wait for something better to turn up, surely it had to? She turned her attention to him while thinking of a hat she had seen in a window. It had a bottle-green feather which stood erect like a small flagpole.
‘I remember your mother very well and the day she ran off to the forest to be with her boyfriend, or boyfriends, shall I say. Who knows how many she was attached to?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, stopping herself from blurting out the common What? She must not be thought of as common, as her brothers Harry and Benny were. She could not afford to be mistaken in her class.
‘The boys, the Bolshevik boys, she never told you? She was a great activist, until my dear brother dragged her away from that danger.’
‘I think you’ll find you are quite wrong about that. Quite wrong.’ She managed the last two words in imitation of that air of condescension only the English upper classes can pull off. And didn’t, she thought, do a bad job.
‘But I hear she is a little bit of a socialist. That is her reputation.’
She could not remember when she had not known about the forest. It was only a story to her, a fairy story to fall asleep to, and a slim thread holding together the past in the hame to her mother’s peculiar political tendencies. Always on the side of the underdog, full of pity when she heard of the suffering of others, full of fire when others rose up against their chains. When Hitler opened his second front, she said, ‘Now he’ll get what’s coming to him. The Soviet soldier is unbeatable. I knew the Bolsheviks, I mean the originals, right back at the beginning when we still had the tsar. They were fine young boys. I don’t say they were right about everything but, you know, in their hearts they were good. To each according to his need, from each according to his ability. That is the golden rule. Does that sound bad to you? What’s there to argue with? But life has painted me into a corner, life has made me what I started out as, a bourgeois. What can I do?’
Paula was exasperated. There was a finality to her next words as if she’d won the argument, like the chess question man.
‘Well yes, a socialist who collects toby jugs.’
‘And what are toby jugs, please?’
‘Well, they are funny little men with hollows where their heads should be and … Oh, why are we talking about toby jugs, they’re hideous, and she has willow-pattern plates, ghastly things.’
‘A mother and father do not necessarily tell the child everything. The mother and father have a responsibility to protect the child from harsh reality. Maybe your mother all this time is a secret sleeper cell for our country.’
‘What on earth is a sleeper cell? It must be very secret because I’ve never heard of it.’
He was enjoying talking to her. He had had no idea what line he would spin her when they finally met. Her denials were beginning to sketch out a rough portrait of his sister, who had succumbed, it seemed, to the most ordinary of possible outcomes, neither in the Soviet Union nor in America but in this porridge land, this beige country in the middle which flattered itself into thinking it had won the war. Its self-aggrandising myths riled him. They told him they had suffered. They didn’t know the meaning of the word. He hated all of them. They were not fully human. Only a person who had lived through the blockade was a real person, someone who had seen everything. He walked among them as if they were a fog. Unreal, insubstantial. Yet here he was, he had been assigned.
But oblivious to his loathing, Paula went on talking about her mother. ‘How she and my father get on I’ve no idea because they have nothing in common, and how they met is such a well-worn family story, you must have heard it, hasn’t everybody? No? Well …’ And she rattled off the account of the battlefield, of her father’s near death, of him arriving at the door with the carnation in his lapel to woo her.
‘Some story,’ said Itzik, who felt drawn back, for a moment, into a long-lost real world he remembered. ‘What I find the most surprising about it is my brother’s role. He was always such a dreamy type.’
‘Yes, everyone says that, but I suppose the war must have knocked that out of him. It was before I was born and I don’t remember him any other way.’
She told next the story of the wedding and its consequences for those concerned. Itzik listened carefully.
‘What a mamzer!’ he said. ‘His wife must be heartbroken, and the poor girl going through what she went through. And now he is an outcast; I’d never have known.’
He did know, it was his business to know, the Liverpool comrades had filled him in on everything. But the way she told the story was something else, this svelte girl in what he broadly recognised as fashionable clothes, smoking her cigarette like an amateur with no browning round the index finger as his was brown all the way down to the second knuckle, her air of having seen it all, but between the lines she had seen almost nothing. Where did she fit in? He had no idea, yet.
‘But you,’ she said eventually, ‘what’s your position?’
‘In relation to …?’
‘Your position at the embassy? Are you a spy?’
‘No, I am not a spy. Our mission is quite open. We would like to bring England under our sphere of influence but it must be done the English way. Which means the introduction of a Soviet system may not be necessary. An intermediary form of socialism could be enough.’
‘Such as the government we have now? How convenient.’
‘Are you interested in politics?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘What do you think of your king?’
‘What should I think? He’s just there, like wallpaper.’
‘Don’t you think it’s unfair that he should sit in his palace with his gold goblets and gold forks and priceless paintings on the wall while the people starve?’
‘Who is starving? I’m not.’
Now the first members of the Conway Hall audience were entering the pub, still talking about the lecture, about absentation, interdiction, departure, first function of the donor. They gasped through pints standing at the bar, unrefreshed by embassy tea and dry, dusty biscuits.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘no one can say your evening hasn’t been quite the success.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look at everyone, they’re still discussing it all. I suppose he could have gone on all night and some of them would still be there, hanging on his every word. Wait till I tell Mummy and Daddy where I’ve been and who I have met, they’ll never believe it.’
‘And when will you tell them?’
‘I expect I will ring them tomorrow night; it will be a surprise, they normally expect my calls on Thursdays.’
‘But why ring? Why not save your sixpences and send them a letter?’
‘Well, Daddy worries, he needs to hear my voice to know I’m still alive. There’s a phone box downstairs, it’s quite convenient.’
‘Yes, but you will have so much to tell them! You will run out of change. No, a letter is best. And when you receive an answer we can meet for coffee and you can show it to me. I am very excited at how my brother and sister take the news.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll bet you are.’
Yet I wonder, she thought, why you didn’t write to them yourself, your long-lost— But at that moment a young man approached the table.