They disembarked at Hull and crossed the Pennines by horse-drawn power. The horse took them to Liverpool. ‘Magnificent city!’ cried Jossel, deeply impressed with what was obviously a forerunner to New York but already surpassing his imagination. The Three Graces stood guarding the waterfront, the Irish Sea lapped their shores, gave way to the Atlantic, a vast turbulent waterway leading to the promise of freedom and riches. A life of salty commerce and unending possibility. Wasn’t it fine? Wasn’t it grand? It made Riga look like a small town.
They found temporary lodgings on Brownlow Hill, a three-storey red-brick house in a neighbourhood dense with other Jewish émigrés, to await the next ship. To Mina they might as well be in New York already but this, Lia said, was nothing on where they were going. Mina looked up at the white birds circling and squawking in the grey cold sky and felt nostalgic for her old home. She thought about her mother and father, brothers and sister left behind. Moving was disrupting, upsetting, exciting.
A few days later Jossel asked her to join him for a few minutes in the backyard by the outside privy with its torn-up pages of the Liverpool Echo to wipe your backside with. He had a confession, he tried to make it sound not too much of a catastrophe, he laid it out: faltering, ashamed, ‘ … not enough money to get us all the way to America.’ That is, he had the fare, yes, but only the fare for steerage, and he did not dare tell his new wife.
‘Mina, darling, what am I going to do? Our father would give us nothing. How do you think I got us this far?’
‘You told me you sold your books. The books that made you a learned man.’
‘Not so much sold, as cooked.’
‘What do you mean?’ She imagined leather-bound volumes stirred in a pot by her mother.
‘I embezzled a little from Father’s business. Only so much as I dared. Nothing too drastic, a bissel here, a bissel there. Whatever you do, don’t tell Lia, it’s our secret.’
‘You turned yourself into a criminal and still it wasn’t enough?’
‘Not to sail the way she wants to sail. She will be with her father in second class, we’ll be with the common, rough people in the bad part of the ship.’
‘Who cares? We’ll meet them on the other side, and I’ll have you to myself for a week. Brother and sister once again.’
Stinks drifted over from the wooden lean-to. Jossel held his breath and tried to talk at the same time.
‘Lia will definitely care. You don’t know what goes on with these steerage types, the fighting and the sex, the beastliness of them.’
‘I’m open-minded, I’ve seen a little of life by now, not like what I’m going to see in America, but don’t forget, I’ve been kissed by a goyishe Bolshevik, so I’m not so green.’
‘Lia won’t stand for it. I’m finished, I don’t know what to do.’
‘Let’s get out of here. We’ll find a cup of tea.’
They went to a cheap café. Kelly’s was painted over the door. Jossel jingled a few coins in his pocket to calm himself. Maybe he had been a fool to marry so quickly, had forgotten his own situation. The waitress spoke to them with an accent they didn’t understand. Everything was foreign but not the right kind of foreign. Not American, irradiated with the glow of optimism.
‘When are you going to break the news to her?’
‘Tonight, it has to be tonight, or I’ll lose my nerve. What am I going to say?’
‘Let me do it, I’ll talk to her and bring her round.’
Next morning Lia and Mina walked up and down Brownlow Hill as Lia heard her sister-in-law out.
‘What is it, five days? Not even a whole week. You already have your ticket with your father, it’s just me and Jossel who will have to make do below deck. It will pass in no time and then we’ll be there and it will all be forgotten, or maybe a funny story for your grandchildren.’
Lia, with the security of a wedding ring on her finger and the promise of arrival in the New World as a married woman not a widow, had not anticipated that anything would now stand in the way of a new life. She took the news with her characteristic determination not to be thwarted. God had sent her Jossel. Her father had funny ways, he was overly religious, for a start. Jossel was a gentleman, or a Jewish version of one, which would have to do for her.
‘And when they say to me, where is your husband, what am I supposed to reply? In the hold with the muck? I’m not having it. We sail together, we disembark together, we are at Ellis Island together.’
‘What’s the difference?’ Mina cried to the salty sky. ‘You don’t have to be so fancy-schmancy, just because you have a parasol.’
‘You’re a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m glad my Jossel wants to protect you from the sordid realities of life.’
‘Oh, I know all about them.’
‘No, you don’t. I have a husband; in fact, I have had two, come to think about it. I know all about men and the ways of the world.’
‘I was kissed by a Bolshevik,’ Mina said stubbornly.
‘Please keep that quiet. I don’t want us arriving in America with this old story hanging round our necks.’
A horse slid on a heap of dung in the road. It was a baker’s dray. The familiar sight of sacks of flour falling from the cart set up a commotion in the street. They hurried on and reached the Adelphi Hotel, where languid-looking women mounted the steps enrobed in furs.
‘Now that’s the type we’re sailing to America with,’ Lia said, energised by their upper-class manners.
Mina looked at them. They seemed to her like pipe cleaners without the wire inside them, with a tendency to fall over. If Yiddish-speaking Lia from Riga with a few sentences of governess English thought she’d be hobnobbing with them on the ship, she was a fool.
That night, in bed, Lia said to her husband that she had a plan. She had worked it out while mending a broken spoke of her parasol.
They would stay in Liverpool for a few months and earn enough money to go in the best class they could afford, with the best type of passenger.
‘How will I make the money? I have nothing to sell, it’s hopeless.’
‘Don’t worry, I have it all figured out. This place we’re staying, what’s all around us? Jewish businesses. Every house is also a shop. Now you have a finance brain, you know numbers and money. Go down every street, knock on every door, offer to do the books. The people who keep chickens and bake bread haven’t got the time to do their own bookkeeping, their money is bound to be a mess. My father can go on ahead, he can establish himself in America and make a home for us when we arrive.’
Jossel told Mina the next day.
‘You have to hand it to her, she’s got it all worked out. She wants the best that money can buy, it’s what she’s used to.’
‘Is she? What did that first husband ever give her? Be careful, Jossel, she will wring you dry if you let her.’
‘She’s what your friends from the forest call a bourgeois, that’s just the way it is.’
‘God forbid that should be my fate,’ said Mina, who was mildly disappointed not to be travelling steerage and seeing how the other half lived.
But God laughed at the Mendels; Mina thought he must have tears running down his face when he heard the dreams of this funny little family.
He sent a man with a gun to a city in Bosnia who shot the Archduke riding in his carriage and this riled up all kinds of feelings and created what Jossel called ‘a situation’ and next minute there was a war. The Atlantic was menaced by enemy submarines, uncrossable. This they had never thought about, never considered in all their plans. And whose side were they supposed to be on and why should they care? What did it have to do with them? They were not fighting people.
For a few months they received letters from their mother, very short, not much information, she was not a person for words, whether with a pen or with her lips. There was news about Rivka and Solly, growing up fast, missing their brother and sister, asking when are they coming home? But Itzik had run away. Itzik, the one who Jossel always said had the soul of a murderer, in his element, already gone to the war with his rifle on his back. He never thought, Why are they shooting at me? Run! like any sane person. No, he, he thought it was a big opportunity. His life had finally begun.
Jossel said, ‘The good thing is we never have to see him again. How long can he survive?’
‘But he’s our own flesh and blood, whatever he’s done. Have pity on him.’
‘He’s a louse.’
‘That’s not a nice thing to say.’
‘You never had to share a bed with him, and know the things he got up to.’
‘Like what?’
‘Never mind, forget about Itzik, he won’t bother us anymore. He must have broken Momma’s heart and for that he deserves whatever is coming to him. How can a runty like him survive a war?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You never had any affection for him before, why start now?’
‘I never really believed when we left home we wouldn’t see everyone again.’
‘We will, we will, just not Itzik. Take my word for it, a louse is a louse.’
For he remembered how Itzik would crudely imitate the sound of his older brother pleasuring himself in the night back when they shared a bed. For that there was no forgiveness.