5

But Mowscha Mendel did not come round and his passive wife had nothing more to say about the situation – or not to him.

One day she roused herself from her torpor and went to her son and said, ‘If you want to go, you should go.’

‘What, I should go?’

‘Why not?’

‘But I’d never leave you.’

She looked at him as if there was a fly up his nose. She was not a woman of tenderness.

‘Don’t you think you can do better than this life?’

‘I know I can.’

‘So, this is your situation. He is stubborn, he is a fool. Don’t take after him. But take Mina with you, she’s getting out of hand.’

His grey mother was striking words out like a clock, what had got into her?

‘Have you heard something? What do they say in the town? It’s all lies, nothing is wrong with Mina.’ Already her reputation was ruined, and all for some mushrooms.

‘I heard nothing, I can see what’s in her eyes. A person knows without the mouths of gossips. If you wait, he’ll get her married off. And why? To save himself trouble. He’ll take anyone who can give him an advantage, and then who will pay the price?’

‘She’s too young.’

‘Is she? I was younger.’

He thought, You cannot say these things to me, you can’t talk like this. I don’t want to hear. He stopped himself from holding his hands to his ears. But she saw his face, she saw him withdrawing. She thought, They are all the same. None of them had an ounce of feeling. But who was worse? Mowscha or Jossel? Jossel would have to do.

‘You will look after her; it’s like she’ll have a father by her side. That’s my opinion.’

He saw that she was serious, that she was asking him to rise to the occasion, to become a man and take off on this adventure, to uncouple himself and his sister from the great possession of their father’s love. Spinoza was no help here.

‘But how will we go? I have no money.’

‘About that side of things I don’t know, it’s up to you. You have to decide what kind of bed you want to sleep in in this life. If it’s a feather bed all your days, then you must stay comfortable.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mean mean mean, too many questions.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes, that is all I have to say.’

‘Sometimes you should say more.’

‘Your father has most of the words; the few he leaves to me I use as I can. Talkers are talkers, you are a talker, you take after him.’

For the rest of his life he would remember how he came out of Latvia, through the agency of his mother who wore a wig, and eased off her shoes to relieve her corns, and had a low opinion of the human race, thinking men were beasts and women took advantage of them. She would remain an enigma to him. He wished he could reach back through time to that conversation and ask her a thousand questions. In his lowest moments he would raise his fist to heaven and cry out, ‘Mother, Mother, where are you?’

But she could not answer.

‘I forbid this,’ cried their father. ‘It’s not happening.’

It happened. There was a ship, they went to the dockside. Their father stayed at home. Their mother, brothers and sister waved goodbye from the shore of the old land.

Rebellion had been incited in the minds of those who were open to new ideas. The following year Itzik would run away and disappear into the black maw of the twentieth century, the earth burrowed from underground and thrown up in mounds and mountains of history temporarily obscuring his movements. To his father he was already dead and he turned the mirrors to the wall and rent his garments and then said, Good riddance. Be happy in hell.

Rivka and Solly stayed in Riga. For the time being. That was to be their fate, not to board that ship.

Dora’s face was a white disc in the sunlight. She was drained of any recognisable emotion. Solly didn’t know what was happening. He did not know from a ship. He did not understand. The day was a game, his brother and sister were high up on the deck, waving. Mina was shouting something, the wind carried the words away. Rivka said, ‘When are they coming back?’

Itzik said, ‘Maybe there will be a storm and the ship will sink and they will be shipwrecked. That would be an excitement.’

On deck, as they pulled away from the land, Mina burst into tears. The tears wet her face, the wind dried them. For the first time she understood what she was doing, what she was about to lose, her mother’s face frozen in a photograph, never to speak to her again, a heavy hank of false hair weighing down her sorrowful head. The smell of her, her hands that could be rough, but gentle with her children, her mysterious maladies, her emphatic silences, her wrists sore, rubbing them, and little Mina darting forward to wipe a kiss on the bone. She felt her father must change his mind; how was it possible that they would never see each other again? It could not be, she did not believe it. And baby Solly toddling round the kitchen in his little shoes, falling over on his backside, everyone laughing, picking himself up and looking round with a wronged expression. These recent memories were full like an overflowing well. Only yesterday. The world of yesterday.

She cried until they pulled away from the coastline. In the sky she saw seabirds, patterned white against occasional patches of blue. Her cheeks were rosy in the wind, she looked really pretty. Her sorrow was distracted. Boys her own age glanced at her and tried to become friendly. America, they were all going to America, and what would it be like and who would they become?

The actual voyage wasn’t as exciting as they had expected. No storm blew up, the lifeboats were not launched, no spies or international criminals were on board, it was the usual mix of passengers. Jossel had plenty of time to walk about the deck and admire the majesty of the sea. The air grew colder, they passed the coastline of Scandinavia and he thought of Hamlet, for even Jewish boys in Riga had heard of Shakespeare. Hamlet seemed to him now like a bit of a sap, unable to take matters into his own hands.

A young woman saw him gazing out at the salt spume. Her name was Lia. She was twenty-four, older than Jossel, a young widow travelling with her father; her husband had been kicked in the head by a runaway horse as he was crossing the street and had lingered painfully for a few weeks before dying. They had only been married for three months when the accident happened, and she had already forgotten what he looked like, though she had a picture of him. He would be found in a box of photographs in a hundred years and nobody would be able to work out who he was. ‘Just some random,’ Mina’s great-granddaughter Zoë Fletcher would say. A sepia young man in a too-large bowler hat and a mark, as if from spilled tea, across the lower half of his face.

Lia had married later than was the custom because her mother was ill with consumption and the wedding had been postponed until after she died. Her father had been satisfied with her waiting if it meant a delay in handing over the dowry. Her husband was not really interested in women, and would not live long enough to understand or express his true desires, so he didn’t mind either. The whole marriage was one of various forms of convenience, but not for her.

‘I have no luck,’ she complained to her friends. ‘An unlucky woman is on her own.’

Now Lia approached Jossel on the deck of the ship. He could almost hear her breathing behind him, her leather shoes tapping towards him on the wooden planks. He turned and saw a good-looking young woman aiming for him like an arrow. Like an arrow she was going to pluck his heart. Lia knew how to make something of herself, she knew about the latest fashions, she cut a nice appearance and had a new hat in the latest style, for Riga. These were advanced arts that were unfamiliar to Jossel. His mother was what they called a haimishe woman, she looked like she belonged indoors sweating over the stove. Lia would be a natural at strolling through a park on a summer’s afternoon under the shade of a parasol.

They fell into conversation. It turned out their families shared some acquaintance in the city, the trade of baking and of flour milling allowed a wide circle of connection. She was also educated. She had not read Spinoza but she had consumed some chapters of David Copperfield, in translation. She had a smattering of polite phrases in the English language and was assiduous with her dictionary in acquiring more.

The only contact Jossel had had with a young woman had taken place at family functions where the matchmakers hovered like flies, and these stilted chats were truncated by the fear in his eyes. But on board ship, in the general atmosphere of optimism and of being fellow-travellers reaching out towards a new reality without the need for parental authorisation, they spoke easily and naturally, exchanging information about the cities of America and where one might find the most hospitable welcome if you were an energetic, modern young person willing to do your very best. He told her about Hamlet. ‘I can be too much of a dreamer myself,’ he said, ‘but maybe it gets you nowhere.’

‘Poor young man. Seeing ghosts. The dead are dead. My mother is dead, my husband is dead, I don’t see them, they don’t speak to me. You’ve got to think of the future.’

‘You’re right.’

All her life Lia would be known as the decisive one. Decisions came down like a sharpened chopper decapitating a Friday-night chicken. There were no U-turns and her mind operated at high speed. Jossel was a pleasant young man. He was unencumbered with relatives. No interfering mother-in-law or overbearing father-in-law, just the sister, who seemed to her to be impressionable. They could make an effective team if she got to know the girl and got her on her side. Without the presence of a shadchan, Lia was her own shadchan. All the covert enquiries she made added up to a good match. She unfolded from her trunk her best dress, she smoothed the straw-coloured silk with her hands. On the deck the sunlight formed a halo round her frizzy light brown hair. A crowd of young admirers followed her round the ship. Jossel grew inflamed with jealousy as she had intended.

As if, Mina would later say, he spent all his money in the first shop he walked into, Jossel boarded the ship in Riga a free man and disembarked in Hull engaged to be married. When he tried to account for his impulsiveness, he concluded that there was a bundle of reasons – defying his father, leaving home, travelling halfway across the world, and becoming a man in the sense that a man has a wife and will have children. It was all flowing into one another, this sequence of events. He would justify his marriage by telling himself that it was in Mina’s interest to have an older sister to protect her. ‘I did it for you,’ he would say.

But Mina replied, ‘No you didn’t. You did it because of sex. She versext you.’

Ashore in England, they went straight to a rabbi and were wed. As short as her brief first marriage had been, and as unenthusiastic as her late husband had proved to be in bed, Lia still had more sexual experience than Jossel (a single evening in a Riga brothel, a place so phantasmagorical to a student of Spinoza that once he was relieved of his misapprehension that the belly button was somehow involved in reproduction he never went back).