In a moment I will transcribe my father’s story. The thought pleases me enormously. Not so much because I wish to reveal what my father told me that evening shortly before he died. No, my history is already overburdened with stories. It is the process that counts, the labour of transcribing his words. It is not a difficult process, although it is time-consuming, since the tape is damaged in places and, although my father talked at length, he didn’t always make sense. Nevertheless, I hope, with repeated listening, to make a coherent story. What a happy prospect to stop writing my own history and make use of another’s words!
I lean over, place the cassette into the tape recorder, close the lid, put my headphones on, take a deep breath and press play. The reels turn, the tape shuttles through the mechanism, I hear the hiss of warm static, that pool of shifting quiet which is one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. Then, breaking the silence, as if coming to me from a great distance, I hear the sound of my father’s voice.
…
When I was five years old I left with my family for Scotland. It was the summer of 1923, and we travelled to Lublin on the banks of the River Vistula, about four hundred miles from our home town.
That is how the tape begins. From what I can gather from the tape my father’s father had been a doctor in a small town somewhere in North Poland. Because he was Jewish, he had been dismissed from his job and was unable to find work. Apparently in 1923 the government had passed a decree making it impossible for Jews to practise medicine. My father, bizarrely, and without saying how or why, says his parents had been promised the sale of a jam factory in Dundee, and took the decision to travel west, across Europe to Scotland.
The tape continues: There were three of us in the group that sat for three days and nights in a first-class carriage to Vienna, then Munich, Strasbourg and finally Calais, from where we took the boat to Dover. It was a strange route our broker had arranged. At the time I had no idea why we were moving to a different country. Nor do I remember much about the journey itself, only small glimpses snatched from the train window: the faces of peasants selling hot chestnuts, a team of horses which ran for a short while alongside our carriage, and the dawn, which I watched stealing across the panes of a station with an arched glass roof. It seems that, more vividly than the specific events of the journey, my father recalled the travelling itself. We were always moving, he says, if not overland or sea, then in our beds at station-side hotels, or else my hands were fidgeting in my pockets. In addition to the movement, he remembers this mood during the journey, which was of great anticipation, and strangely he wasn’t afraid. But even these memories shift in his mind, he says; which strikes me as entirely appropriate, for he was constantly moving, and what seemed half-erased to him in adulthood, was then too: the packed trains, the blurred scenery, the sleep that was always broken.
The tape continues: When we got to Dover the officer asked to see our papers. We had two or three surnames and, what is more, the official did not recognize my parents’ marriage certificate, so he wasn’t prepared to let us enter the country. My parents must have carried bribes, since we were allowed to enter. On our new papers our surnames had been cut short and changed, I have forgotten from what. And in fact it felt as if we had left our old life behind at the station in Lublin. It wasn’t until several years later, after an incident which altered the course of my life irrevocably, an incident which, though in the general sense was minor and insignificant, meant so extraordinarily much to me that even now, some fifty years later, I still burn with the memory of it, the shame and the sudden intrusion into my life that impelled me to renounce not only my parents, but also our religion.
We settled in a village called Newport, my father continues, which overlooks the Tay estuary. I still remember the view we had of the river, and of the railway bridge, which was the second on that site, since I learned that the first had collapsed in 1879, only two years after it had been built. I remember the sunsets, which were so dramatic one felt a pain as the red light died. My father bought the jam factory and put what was left of his life into the business. I seldom saw either him or my mother, both because they worked long hours and, since I was often unwell, and attended school only now and then, I was sent to a home for sick children, Comerton House, just a few miles outside Newport. By that time I was speaking English fluently, which even as a small child in Poland had come easily to me, and already I spoke it without an accent. The children at the home found it difficult to pronounce my name, Rechavam, so I became known, simply, as Rex.
I remember, my father says, my days at Comerton House more keenly than almost any other time in my life. There was a large garden which ran alongside the road and was separated from it by a wall. The garden itself was divided into two sections. In the fore-section, the smaller part nearest the house, the janitor, Mr Welsh, grew our vegetables. Further back, concealed from the house, was the larger, always slightly wild section. Nettles grew abundantly in summer, and, although Mr Welsh cut them back, they seemed to spring up all the taller. There were playthings in this back section, a set of swings, a crooked seesaw which gave you splinters and a roundabout on which we were not allowed to play. But best of all was a strange contraption called a Witch’s Hat. It was shaped just like that, a conical structure of metal rods with a wooden bench that ran around the lip. The whole thing was raised a yard or so off the ground by a central pole crowned by a ball bearing. This simple device allowed the Witch’s Hat to rotate from its tip. We sat on the bench and with our feet drove it around and around, and all of us, the thin, pale children, most of whom had ginger hair, liked it better than anything else at Comerton House. I remember the nights too, which I dreaded. In the library, a large pine-panelled room which was used also as the assembly hall, the gym in winter and for staging the Christmas play, there, among the poorly stocked shelves, was a book of ghost stories. I knew it would terrify me to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. I always regretted looking at that book, and I regretted my curiosity, and that the other children brought it out, others who, unlike me, seemed to enjoy their fear, and for whom darkness held a weird appeal.
I dreaded the nights in Comerton House. By dinner time, two hours before curfew, I would start to shake and involuntarily wave my spoon. Eating had always been difficult for me, and fear of the approaching night intensified my distaste for food, especially meat, which I have always associated with murder, and it was during that period, the time of the great fear, that I became a vegetarian. At night I would wake into a foreign land. My shoulders shook uncontrollably, and I would draw my blankets over my head. I believed that unless every part of me was covered the banshee would be able to take me away, to where I did not know. There were two of us in the dorm who experienced acute fear at night. We had an agreement that if one needed to go to the bathroom we could wake the other. We would hold hands and advance half-running along the hall, all the while chanting, as loudly as we dared, We’re getting married, We’re getting married, not stopping as we passed water but only when we were back beneath the blankets. In fact the whole of Comerton House was filled with noise at night, for sick children away from home tend not to sleep, and when they do they almost always have nightmares. I’ve since learned that the home is now privately owned, and I often imagine the present occupants must be aware of the noise that by night filled Comerton House. For where have all those cries gone?
At this point on the tape my father starts to ramble. I hear the fizz of matches as he lights his cigarettes. He goes on to talk more about his daily life at Comerton House, the lessons, fears, rituals, punishments and so on. But I am unable to arrange them into any kind of coherent order. No matter. For long stretches as I worked my father’s voice flowed effortlessly from the tape to my ears, from my ears to my fingers, from my fingers to the keyboard, and from there on to the screen. What a relief to forget my history and copy someone else’s words!
The tape continues: What I remember best of all is my dearest friend at the home. His name was Nicholas. Let me tell you how we met. Once after lunch Nicholas approached me in the corridor and said he had a secret to tell me, he said it was a serious matter which no one else knew about and would put both our lives in danger. I was to meet him at the Witch’s Hat later that afternoon. He was there when I arrived and invited me to sit. He looked me sternly in the eyes and told me that he was the son of the Devil. I believed him instantly. But to prove it he pulled up his shirt and showed me a birthmark on the left side of his chest. It seemed no more than a faint web of veins showing beneath the skin, but he told me to look harder and I saw it resembled a medallion, a small circle that enclosed a tiny crenulated shape, like a rose. Have you ever seen anything like it? Nicholas asked. Of course I had not. He said the secret of his ancestry had plagued him all his life, that he had never been at home in this world, and had felt condemned to wander. But since he had told me, Nicholas continued, he felt much better both about his sinister paternity and about things in general. He asked if I had any sweets, which I did, since my mother had only recently sent a package, and I offered to share them with him. But he told me he must have them all. He opened his large eyes very wide, and I gave him my sweets. On another occasion he stole my wooden train, I knew it was him, although I was unable to prove it. Nonetheless, we became friends. I learned that in fact he wasn’t the son of the Devil but of a widower. Shortly after this, Nicholas and I became inseparable. We did everything together. I remember we made declarations of love by the Witch’s Hat, and one evening cut small lesions in our wrists and mixed the blood. Yet there was a spiteful side to our relationship. I forgave him for tricking me into giving up my sweets, but I never forgot what he told me, and I think there lived in me an impression that he was somehow connected to dark forces. He was in my mind a golem, or a child-moloch to whom my love was sacrificed. There were times when I was afraid of him, when he looked at me intensely with those large dark-brown eyes, or when he told me he had been in contact with a banshee and had instructed her to take me away.
When I was ten and Nicholas eleven something happened, which at the time seemed relatively insignificant, but which now I see was an important point in a friendship that was soon to fall apart. You see, we both had beautiful singing voices. And for each of the three years I stayed at Comerton House the children put on a Christmas play, a rendition of the nativity. There was a tradition at the home whereby one member of the class was given the part of Balthazar, the leader of the wise men, whose role was to sing a eulogy to the Lord. The lucky child was he whose voice was judged sweetest by the home staff. We each chose a verse from ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and stood in the assembly hall to deliver our recital. This was one month before Christmas. On the night of the performance the winner would sing the entire carol in front of the parents. It is hard to convey the importance of this role to the children of Comerton House. I think that most of us, though each from a prosperous family, were not used to feeling at all special, except that each of us was damaged in some particular way. Several months before the day of the competition we began to practise our chosen verse. We compared voices and judged our closest rivals. Nicholas had a very pure and natural singing voice and without effort reached the highest notes. I had a more roughly cadenced voice, although I felt I was able to inspire deeper emotion. In each of the previous years we had been overlooked, but in the third year of my stay at Comerton House I was given the part of Balthazar. Nicholas was deeply affected by my victory. I think he felt it as an insult. I was thrilled to be playing the part, yet I was careful to hide my happiness, and although I felt I concealed it well, I suppose it showed on my face and gestures and in my whole person.
If the sole effect of my winning the part of Balthazar had been the cooling of our friendship, says my father, then the event would not have lodged so firmly in my memory. But it had a second and, I now know, more destructive and significant effect on my life, an effect that, in addition to harming the friendship between myself and Nicholas, cut me irrevocably from my parents; not physically, for I was still too young to leave their care, but in my heart, which from that day on turned both from them and the Jewish faith. On the night of the performance, held in the large pine-panelled hall at the back of Comerton House, my parents arrived early. I had not told them anything about the performance, only that I would be singing a solo. They sat in the audience as we, the children, each dressed in his costume, gathered behind the makeshift stage. The performance was proceeding well, the baby Jesus had appeared among the animals. I came on to the stage and, together with my two associates, moved beside the manger. The piano began to play. I held my breath for the duration of the introductory bars. Then I started to sing. I kept my eyes focused on the bookshelf at the far end of the hall. I saw a spider on a thick volume. There was a fly caught in its web. The stage was brightly lit. Soon after the second chorus I became aware of a movement in the audience. It was my father. He had risen from his chair. People turned to look. I was singing the third verse. He walked quickly out of the hall and into the dark garden. The door slammed behind him. My eyes followed him as he walked down the garden path, and I faltered for what seemed like an inordinately long time. The piano played on without me, and when I tried to sing again, I had forgotten the words. I stood there in front of the crowd, paralysed. Later, back at our house, my father called me into his study and told me that I was no longer allowed to go to school at Comerton House. Then he said something which I have never been able to forget. He told me that Jesus was a Jew, that Matthew was a Jew, that so were Mark and John, and that Luke too was a Jew, although he had been born a Gentile. The following summer I was taken from Comerton House, and I never went back; the period of my sickness had long since ended. But I felt a sickness in my heart, which over time became a feeling of emptiness that has returned every so often.
Here, said my father, this is me in the garden at Comerton House.
That is when he handed me the photograph. I must have glanced at it at the time, even taken it to show Damaris, but I don’t remember. Sometime later I must have stored it with the tape recorder, because that is where I found it. I am holding it now, before my computer; the light from the screen reveals a small boy no more than nine years old, sitting on a swing. In the picture, taken many years before I was born, and which I look at now some three decades after my father’s death, I see him in a curious grey-blue light. He is looking fixedly at the camera. Behind him rises a stone wall partially covered with ivy. The boy has small white hands that grip the twine of the swing. He is wearing winter clothes: knitted cap, house slippers, ribbed woollen socks, kilt, tweed waistcoat beneath an open blazer. His eyes seem to stare back at me with great anxiety. The way he holds himself – stiff-necked, eyes focused intensely on the lens – expresses great worry, as if he felt like an intruder in the garden, as if he feared that at any moment someone would come to turn him out, as if the swing, the ivy, the vegetables, the paths and all the lovely things had been intended for another boy entirely, and that his enjoyment of them was eclipsed by the knowledge that at any moment now this error would be discovered, and that he would be obliged to give up what was the only truly happy period of his life.