All roads lead to and from Itzik. If Itzik hadn’t invited Paula to the talk at the Conway Hall she would not have met Roland, without Roland she would not have heard about the job at Harlequin Pictures, would not have gone to work for them, would not have taken coffee in the hotel lounge on Christmas Day and Agnew and Fulton would not have made The Story of the Forest and Paula would not have begun her affair with Eric. These frail strands of coincidence were being pulled as an unbroken thread by a man with his own story.
One that begins with his nasty sneaky nature, earwigging over the banisters of the house in Riga and following his sister into the forest. How he ended up in the embassy of the Soviet Union in Kensington was a tale both melodramatic and romantic. Events had piled onto events and by 1917, still a teenager, having deserted from the army and fallen in with ‘undesirable elements, though their hearts were in the right place, being of the People,’ he was shot robbing a store. Was wounded, delirious, nearly died, nearly had his leg amputated, lay in a slumber between life and death, like Louis on the battlefield, survived, came to as a citizen of the Soviet Union a long way from Riga and how he got there he wasn’t about to say. All but the most truculent members of his outlaw band found themselves absorbed into the new system while the authentic ruffians preferred to go out in a shower of bullets. What mattered was that as a fish does not notice that it is swimming in the sea and a land creature is not aware of oxygen, Itzik very quickly forgot that communism was anything but the natural order of how things were done, because the communists now did everything so what was the point of arguing about it? He was of and for the People, because the People were the majority, they alone were the route to power. And his exterior presentation, coming from that short unimpressive body, lent to him the air of a man who could be of use, who would not argue with orders or sigh but would nod and you heard later it was ‘all done, boss.’
This account had its origins not in the actual events of Itzik’s own life but in a taste for reading which he acquired in his twenties when he fell upon some stories by Isaac Babel. The tales were of the fictional Benya Krik, the gangster king of Odessa. The curse of being a Jew was that people took you for a weakling and Babel might have been (probably was) talking about himself when he described the type with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart. But in every Jewish community there was a shtarker, a tough guy who was the fists for everyone else. No one wanted their son to be a shtarker but you wanted someone’s son to be one.
‘Tartakovsky,’ Babel wrote, ‘has the soul of a murderer, but he is one of us. He originated with us. He is our blood. He is our flesh, as though one momma had born us.’
Isaac Babel had a foot in both camps. He had done his military service on horseback in the cavalry. A Jew riding a horse shooting a gun. Mowscha Mendel would never have thought of that.
Riga was a port and ports are not the same as inland cities, they smell different, different types of people live there, but Riga, situated on a northern waterway facing Scandinavia and the Arctic, was a poor relation to Odessa which reclined on the edge of the Black Sea and was, in those days, one of the most famous Jewish cities in the world. In lawless, anarchic Odessa in the years before the Revolution you could get your hands on anything you liked and Odessan Jews were known to have acquired a taste for wine and luxuries – Jamaica rum, oranges from Jerusalem, cigars from Cuba, silk from Japan. It was ruled by the machers, the Top Men, and their authority was briefly consolidated after the tsar was taken out.
For as the gangster Benya Krik observed, ‘Where there is an emperor there can’t be no king.’
What Itzik would have done to have been Odessa-born and grow up to be a macher with a spicy nickname: Mishka the Jap, Sonya the Golden Hand. He read these stories with joy and exhilaration. The glamorous world brought to life those young Jews wildly brandishing machine guns while sporting chocolate-coloured jackets and raspberry-coloured top-boots. ‘And Benya Krik got his way because he had passion, and passion rules the world.’ Itzik wished he had that kind of natural, easy fervour. How he longed to discard his sneaky nature and be a free and fearless gangster who knows what he wants and takes it with pleasure, no devious machinations. Why couldn’t he be forthright and strong? Well, his height told against him: he was only five feet four inches with a wide forehead and a loose curly mouth. His whole figure was foreshortened, his head too big, his legs too short for his torso, looking as though they could barely hold him up, though he was not without strength in the hands and forearms. He was no weakling, but he looked like one, Goliath trapped in the body of a monkey.
The truth about the years Itzik spent between the events which overtook the rest of the Mendel family during the war and his re-emergence as another kind of macher in a food procurement unit was unknown to anyone but himself and he told no one. The times were chaotic, there were few records. He might have been hiding out with the outlaws in the forest but if he did his compatriots were all dead and not available as witnesses. By 1925 Itzik found his present situation unsurprising and uninspiring. The son of a Riga grain merchant had wound up as a provincial Soviet government grain merchant. What was the difference? In his bitterest moments he wondered if a snowy miasma of flour would ever leave him. He knew about flour by osmosis, all those evenings spying on his father’s conversation hoping to hear something to his advantage. Which turned out to be an understanding of the relations between the millers of grain and the bakers of bread. And in such a position he thrived, for he was a conduit between two spheres of activity. He heard things, he picked things up, he passed them on to the authorities. He acquired a nickname: Itzik the Worm, for the way he wiggled his way into greater and greater positions of responsibility.
He had always felt he was a type naturally unlovable because of his appearance; Jossel had fairer hair and dreamy eyes, or so the girls were likely to say. Itzik congratulated himself on his isolation from the human heart with its easy capacity to betray and condemn when it feels aggrieved. In thirties Leningrad, where he ended up in a certain job in a certain place under a certain somebody’s direction, to have an intimate friend was to risk revealing one’s secrets or be betrayed for reading a pamphlet too early before it had been adopted as Party policy, or too late when it had been denounced – all the crimes you could be accused of, including ones they hadn’t thought up yet and which could be applied retrospectively. But at night in his bed he felt like his insides were clouds. He would never be a gangster in raspberry-coloured top-boots, that time was over, and what else could fill the painful hollow in his chest, for he felt as if he was nothing but stale air. In this period of his life, like Paula much later, he was waiting, waiting for the day to be over so he could go to bed and escape into dreams where everything seemed real and they couldn’t touch you. Dreams were messages of hope and happiness. Asleep he was invincible.
He dreamed of the house of his childhood, the bustling rooms, the voices and footsteps passing in and out, his mother in the kitchen, saying little, understanding everything, the country maids shaking out the bedding, the iron stove, the row of dolls in his little sister’s bedroom. Mina and Jossel talking on the stairs about the forest, their subsequent flight on a ship to the New World, their father’s face blackened for weeks as if by fire. His mother never expressing that she loved him, as if she wished he had been stillborn, that’s what he read into her silence. Was he right, or was she just a natural non-talker? He woke up from a dream of her singing him a lullaby (‘Schlof, mein yingele schlof’) and doubted for the first time his sense of grievance. His parents were dead, that he had been able to find out. His father shot in the street, his mother gone quickly of a fast cancer in her breast. He would have liked to have asked her, ‘Did you love me, love me just a little bit, a thimbleful of love to wet my newborn head?’
But that whole world had disintegrated into dust and was lost forever. The house in Riga might be still standing but if he ever returned there he would find it inhabited by strangers and no friendly faces to greet him. The past was a dead, cold planet.
And this led him to two conclusions about his life. That he would remain in this isolation for the rest of his days, waiting for the nails in his coffin to close over his face, or he must take a chance and make a new family: the family of Itzik, with wife and children and in-laws and cousins and nieces and nephews. All his instincts were for the first course of inaction, not to risk everything that love promised and threatened you with. Better to lie in the dark, preparing yourself for the perpetual darkness. But the heart wants what the heart wants, it has its own agenda, he could not help himself. Who could stand this loneliness? Who could bear to live so long with your body untouched? Some have cats and dogs, they stroke their pelts, but did the animal ever stroke you back? His heart wanted to be thawed out, could it? Even in the coldest Russian winter spring arrived eventually, and the birds sang their incessant high-pitched mating calls and the plants sent forth blossoms in the warmer air. It all started up again, out of death, and if it was possible for snow and ice to melt even in Siberia, then the heart of Itzik Mendel could also be touched. Against his nature he went looking for a wife.
The time of the shadchans was over. Still, the general principles applied when you came to look for potential matrimony: a girl from a good family bringing not a dowry but opportunities for an ambitious man in the prime of life. And so Beyla appeared on the scene, twenty-four and small, almost dwarfish, she reminded him of a china doll with reddish curls and a happy smile. He first saw her walking in the Summer Garden with her friends, panting along behind them like a small dog they adored, and made it his business to be there the next weekend and to catch up with her and detach her from her group. How charming she appeared to him, how easy it turned out for a man to be captivated by the way her cheeks bunched up and shone when she laughed. Her button nose and black nostrils, she snorted like a piglet when she laughed. He thought you could pick her up and take her down from the shelf and put her back again, and she would be waiting for you when next you were ready for her.
Beyla took the courtship by this shabby young man with a pragmatic resolve that she would have him. She had always known she was destined for a short person and by the time she was fifteen she had cottoned on that shorties tended to have an inferiority complex, some try to punch above their weight, are ambitious beyond their natural reach. Itzik was such a man; Napoleon, she had heard, was another. Another thing, she was a doctor who worked in a medical laboratory and came home odorous with chemicals. Some men might find this off-putting but Itzik had a poor sense of smell. Roses were a closed book to him, but so were dung hills. Her father said, ‘If you marry this one, he’ll go far. Whether he loves you or not, I can’t say, it depends on whether that kind of thing matters to you.’ Beyla said, ‘He’ll come to love me, why not? Am I not lovable, doesn’t everyone say so? He is not, so just showing him some affection will bind him to me. I’m not afraid of life with him. Also, no in-laws, no mother-in-law looking around for corners I haven’t cleaned. He’s all alone, our family will absorb him.’
Itzik thought he had chosen Beyla, as Jossel thought he had chosen Lia on board that ship, but Beyla was the one who decided, she was the one who had figured it all out, her mind unclouded by emotional longings and pain and loneliness and dreams.
Itzik was reborn, he was a new man, a family man with two small daughters like little imps, full of energy and having inherited their mother’s laughter and smiles. Finding a bird pecking in the street a cause for uproar and pointing and chasing. The sight of them on little legs trying to catch the bird now in flight, rising fast into the sky to the safety of a tree in leaf, caused in Itzik a stab of joy when he recalled it. And would they always be joyful and loving when they grew up or would life beat it out of them? Would they turn into sombre and sullen women with bad husbands and dubious thoughts? He hoped he did not live long enough to see it, but if he did, at least he would remember.
But his memory was the only place they survived. The times killed them, history assassinated their brief lives. Aged nine and seven was as far as the girls got; under the harsh conditions of the war they did not survive their childhood illnesses. Beyla had died of hunger during the siege. He had watched her yellowing skin as she starved to death. And he had come through intact; the smallest, the runtiest of the Mendels, needing little, was unaccountably still alive and walking the earth.
He knew the fate of Rivka and her husband and children who were still alive up to 1943. He knew the name of the camp. No one came out. Now it was just a clearing in the forest. She and her family had been driven there and murdered and the evidence destroyed. The quiet leaves were the only witnesses. Solly, the kid, the baby, had fared better; how he had done it Itzik did not know. But he guessed that when you have your back to the wall and a gun pointed at your head you behave like Benya Krik, be a shtarker, not a martyr. Enquiries released a bad smell around him, he consorted with evil elements and was said not to be loyal to the People in ways that Itzik couldn’t afford to be associated with.
On a bus in Moscow he had suddenly burst into tears and cried out, My family! I have no one! And a comrade took pity on him and gave him the sleeve of his own coat to dry his tears. Itzik felt something had cracked inside him, he was a leaky jug, no use. Love did this to you. Better he had never laid eyes on Beyla, and enjoyed the pleasures of a solitary bed for the rest of his life in peace.
Another one who was dead was Isaac Babel, the imaginary Benya Krik could not save him. He was arrested, imprisoned in the Lubyanka and executed in 1940. Ashes and ice in the mouths of his admirers. Itzik had seen men dead one minute, ghosts come back to life the next during a temporary period of rehabilitation, no longer shadows and mist but corporeal in the world. But in the case of Babel it could not be in person as his body had been cremated and his ashes buried in an unmarked mass grave at the Donskoi Cemetery. For a long time the authorities would lie and tell his family in Paris that he was alive somewhere in the Gulag. The French intellectuals like Sartre and de Beauvoir who Roland admired were warm towards the Soviet Union and would not have wanted to hear that it had murdered one of its greatest writers. Itzik knew, he stayed shtum; what else was he supposed to do? Truth was a worthless currency, a bad coin. A man was not entitled to an inner life, it belonged to the State, the truth belonged to the State, it was whatever it said it was. And in the end, Itzik thought, how do you tell the difference between your own spontaneous feelings and the ones the State has created for you? For he should feel glad that his little family had stood up to the Nazi Beast, preserved the integrity of the People and the Soviet Union; he should be proud of their martyrdom. And sometimes this was what he did feel and other times he thought, To hell with that.
He had thought he had no one, not a soul in the world; the last he had heard Mina and Jossel were waiting for the guns to stop in France so they could sail on from Liverpool to America, which was a country for which he had no remit, no connections. But they were here, still here. There was a sister and a brother, nieces and nephews, the whole mishpochah of relatives, the ones who had got away to safe shores, away from the intense reality of history. These people, Paula in particular, who turned up looking like a mannequin with jewellery, a mouth drawn in with red paint.
Mina had sent him a letter in the end. She defied Jossel. Was she not the one who felt sorry for cast-offs? Why should she not drop him a line, make nice, what would it cost her after all? It was just words, words she wrote with Harry’s help.
So she told Harry to say that she was glad her brother was still alive, and how strange everything had turned out, when it was her who had met the Bolshevik boys, and shouldn’t they all be proud the way Stalin had held the line, how the Russians had won the war with their sacrifices, but where was everyone, where had they gone, did he know? Did he have any information? Maybe they would meet one day, take a cup of tea together and reminisce about the old times, about their mother and father and how happy they had all been in the house by the harbour, though their father was a proud unyielding man and what good had it done him?
Which Harry wrote down in short staccato sentences, starting with ‘I am in receipt of certain informations – such persons known to you – wartime expediencies …’ and concluding with ‘Yours sincerely,’ which was the proper way to sign off. Making his mother’s voice sound like a bank manager, because that was the only kind of letter he knew how to write, how they’d been taught in school, leaving no hostages to fortune.
Mina said, ‘Can I see what you wrote down?’ He handed her the letter.
‘This is the correct way?’
‘Yes, this is how it’s done, Ma. Businesslike.’
‘I’m not so sure it’s right; he’s my brother, after all.’
‘I know, I know he is, but remember where it’s going, to an official address. You got to be careful. We don’t want any trouble.’
‘From who?’
‘You never know who is going to read it before it gets to him.’
‘This is true. But you don’t even mention some things I said, about the boys.’
‘Better not. I’m just taking precautions, Ma.’
‘Whatever you say, son, you know best.’
‘I can get the girl to type it for you, if you like.’
The letter was put into the typewriter, entered an envelope, a stamp licked and affixed, the King’s head looking sideways like he did on the money giving it all the necessary authority, sent to the embassy where numbers of people read it and copies were taken, and filed in more than one place until it eventually reached Itzik who felt that sense of foreboding when one knows that no good can come of this. The wording made no sense to him, this was not a letter from a sister. Who had dictated it, and on whose orders? And why no mention of that business in the forest? It had all started there. What was she trying to hide? And who from? Out of his paranoia grew a desire for revenge.