Emmanuel Cheifitz was always anxious these days.
‘You vorry too much, dolly,’ Dumpling rebuked him lovingly. ‘So you get old before your time, I tell you.’
But he only smiled his tolerant smile and patted her plump shoulder and went on worrying. ‘I am old, Raizel,’ he said, ‘and life ain’t easy.’
There were so many reasons for anxiety. The dread of cholera was a perpetual heaviness dragging his mind, even though the number of cases were said to be dropping, and Gracie and the baby seemed safe enough for the time being. And then there was Rachel who was making herself so unhappy because she wouldn’t accept David’s marriage; to say nothing of the usual alarming fluctuations in the rag trade. Nu-nu, life was not easy and it got more difficult year by year.
He went stooping off towards Mr Goldman’s workshop in Wentworth Street, his spine bowed, plucking at his tatty grey beard, muttering to himself, ‘If only she would visit a bit more, see the childer, say something good about the house. Ai-yi! Who would have thought my Rachel could be so stubborn. A mule, has vesholem.’
Commercial Street was so crowded that summer it was impossible to move more than five yards at a time without halting to make way for somebody else. Only the trams made unimpeded progress and that was by dint of such a clangour of bells that even the donkeys stepped clear of them. Even though he was accustomed to the grinding noise and the incessant pressure of too many people in too little space, by the time Friday evening arrived Emmanuel felt enfeebled by it all. The pavements were so hot they were making his feet ache and what little air was left in the chasm between the tenements was frantic with flies and bluebottles. They flicked against his face as he walked along, and everywhere he looked they were crawling and buzzing, on fresh meat and rotting fruit, horse dung and vegetables, or gathered in obscene black clusters round the eyes of the horses waiting patiently beside the stalls, so that the poor creatures stamped and snorted and tossed their heads in a useless, repetitive effort to shake themselves free of torment.
We live like flies in this place, Emmanuel thought. We breed, we swarm, we die. Only the Lord God is dependable. Stable and eternal and incorruptible. And the thought cheered him a little, as it always did. ‘The Lord reigneth: the Lord hath reigned: the Lord shall reign for ever and ever.’
Just ahead of him a furious row had begun with a roar of exasperation, ‘You take me for a schlemiel!’ The arguers stood toe to toe, red in the face and glaring with anger at each other, their arms flailing like windmills.
When life is hard, we should try to tolerate each other, maybe, Emmanuel thought, and he stepped into the road to avoid their anger.
The noise behind him suddenly grew louder, with an alerting hysterical edge to it; screams, raucous shouts, ‘Be’ind yer! Mind yer backs! Clear out the way!’ and above it all the unmistakable pounding of hooves. He turned to see the crowd parting in panic, reeling away to right and left, and charging through the gap a huge chestnut horse, galloping at full tilt, foam-flecked and white of eye, its tilted cart ricketing behind it, two wheels in the air and two stuck in the tramlines. A bolting horse! Gottenyu! he thought, paralyzed at the sight and sound of it.
He knew he ought to run, but everything was happening too quickly and anyway it was all too late. The horse was directly above him, up on its hind legs, forelegs flailing, with the carter’s grey face shifting and mouthing behind it. And then the hooves chopped down towards his chest and foam flecked his upturned cheeks and he was down in the road, with the breath knocked out of his body and a suffocating weight on his chest. Horse flesh swelled against his eyes, and the acrid smell of its sweat blocked his nostrils, and somewhere a long way away there was a stinging pain in his right hand.
Time and reality detached themselves from him. Nothing was really happening. It was all confusion. And his mind slid away from it into a rocking unconsciousness, and he let it go, placidly.
The horse was being dragged to its feet. He could feel its flanks quivering as it rose and hear its pathetic snorting. ‘Don’t be angry vid the poor creature,’ he begged, but his voice wasn’t working properly and the words stuck in his throat. I must get to work, he thought. It is the morning, nu? I shall lose pay if I stay here and there’s the rent to pay on Friday. And he struggled to his feet, surprised and a little annoyed to find that his legs wouldn’t support him properly.
‘Where d’yer think you’re goin’?’ a rough face said, and the voice and the expression were so kind and concerned he wanted to weep.
He staggered on down the road, pushing at his own weakness. ‘To vork,’ he managed. ‘Got to get to vork.’ And then his knees buckled and he fell for the second time.
A wall of dark legs obscured his view, dirty moleskins, tailors’ black trousers, thick skirts with dusty hems. He had his head in somebody’s lap and somebody else was asking questions. ‘Where d’yer live, mate?’
He tried to tell them, but the words became groans and he was ashamed to be groaning and tried to stop himself. There was a dull ache in his chest and an odd roaring in his ears like the sea. He wondered where the horse was. He wondered how long he would go on lying in the road. Voices buzzed around him like flies. He drifted.
As his mind swam back to consciousness for the second time, he heard a voice he recognized. ‘Mr Levy!’ he said, and the words were quite clear.
‘Ve get you home, nu?’ Mr Levy said, bending down so that their eyes were inches apart. ‘Ve bring a door for you.’
‘So?’ he said, not understanding. And something snapped in his chest like a piece of elastic. And he was struggling for air, and every breath a pain like the stabbing of knives.
Rough gentle hands were lifting him. ‘’Old on, mate! You’re all right now! We got yer.’
‘Ve don’t say nothink to Rachel,’ he begged.
Ellen and Gracie were down at the end of the garden watering their mysterious seedlings. Jack had been fed and settled for the night, and now they were enjoying the one time of the day when they could talk without interruption.
And Mrs Brunewald put her head over the fence and interrupted them.
‘Pardon me for bothering you,’ she said apologetically, seeing Gracie’s frown, ‘but there’s someone at your door. I thought you ought to know.’
It was Aunty Dumpling, ashen-faced, breathless but entirely dry-eyed. ‘Oh Ellen, bubeleh,’ she panted. ‘The vorst news. The vorst. Is our Davey home yet?’
Her lack of tears was more alarming than any amount of weeping would have been.
‘What is it?’ Ellen said, opening the door to let her in.
‘My poor Manny?’ Dumpling gasped as she followed Ellen into the kitchen. ‘Ai-yi-yi! My poor Manny! Home on a door they bring him. Ai-yi! Knocked down by a horse he vas, his poor chest black and blue, and such pain you vouldn’t believe. And he von’t have the doctor. Ai-yi! Vhat ve gonna do, dolly? He could be hurt bad, has vesholem.’
It ain’t possible, Ellen thought, stupid with fright. He was here only Sunday, helping us lay the lino in the front room. He was all right then. Grey, a bit slower than usual, tired probably, but not hurt bad. ‘David’ll get the doctor,’ she said as she filled the kettle. ‘’E’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
But Dumpling only sighed.
‘Don’t c’y Aunty Dump’in’,’ Gracie said, cuddling the old lady’s ample knee. ‘Ma kiss it better, nu?’
‘I would if I could, lovey,’ Ellen said. But the sight of Dumpling’s terrible dry-eyed distress was making her more afraid by the minute.
When David came home and heard the news he reacted quickly, a tightly controlled expression on his face.
‘We’ll go straight back,’ he said to Dumpling, putting on his hat again. ‘Don’t wait supper for me, Ellen.’ And they were gone.
The nightmare had returned, with a different terror, but as merciless as ever. ‘Dear God,’ she thought, ‘don’t let it be too bad. ‘E’s a nice old man an’ ‘e’s been ever so good to us. ’e didn’t oughter be hurt bad.’ And all sorts of vague impressions crystallized into knowledge inside her busy brain. She knew that she was praying, and praying directly to God, even though she’d never given Him a thought until that moment. In fact, she hadn’t even considered whether she believed in Him or not. And she recognized that she had grown very fond of old Papa Cheifitz, and that David was very much like him, especially now when he was taking responsibility and worried sick and determined not to show it.
And she had to take Gracie upstairs at once and wash her face and hands and get her ready for bed, or she would have been weeping.
When David and Dumpling got back to the Buildings they found the flat crowded with family, Rivke and Ben and all their children and all their grandchildren huddled in a dark anxious group round the table, muttering and whispering together. Nobody had thought to light the gas and the far end of the room was already diminished by shadow, but a faint steel-blue haze was reflected through the half-open window. It burnished the planes of their faces with an eerie grey-blue sheen, and when David arrived and they all turned suddenly to look at him, their eyes glimmered like blue night-lights. And he thought of unearthly lamps, edging the dark road to death, and the thought made him shudder.
‘Vhat ve gonna do, David?’ Rivke said, from her seat in the midst of her family. ‘Vhat you think?’
‘You are the son,’ Ben said hovering beside her. ‘You must decide.’
They’re putting me in charge, David thought. The son. In charge. And even in the middle of his anxiety and his eerie sense of unreality, the thought pleased him. ‘I see him first, nu? Then I decide,’ he said. And for the first time in his life he walked out of the room where he’d lived and slept and dreamed, and into the private world of his parents’ bedroom.
His father was slumped in the bed, propped up by a mound of pillows, but half asleep and making a subdued groaning noise as he breathed. His face was blotched with mauve bruises, and his chest was concave under its thin nightshirt. Even at first glance and by gentle gaslight, David could see how ill he was. Rachel sat beside him, holding his hand, her shoulders drooping with fatigue and anxiety.
‘Davey bubeleh,’ she moaned. ‘Your poor fader!’
The sound of her recalled Emmanuel from his half-sleep. ‘Davey!’ he said, but even that one word was an effort.
‘I think you should see the doctor, Papa,’ David said. ‘Just to be on the safe side, nu?’
‘Is he bad, Davey?’ Rachel asked. She seemed listless, unable to decide anything for herself, and her face was drawn and more deeply lined than he’d ever seen it, as if she’d aged since yesterday.
But she must know how bad he is, David thought, pitying her. ‘You agree, Papa, nu?’ he asked.
Emmanuel had closed his eyes and seemed to be drifting again. It was too serious to wait for his agreement. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he promised his mother and tiptoed from the room.
Dr Turiansky lived in Osborn Street at the other end of Brick Lane, and when David arrived outside his premises he was sitting in his consulting room reading by the globed light of an amber table lamp. He listened patiently while David described his father’s symptoms, then he set his book aside and rang for his servant.
‘Pony and trap, if you please,’ he said when the man answered the bell. When the servant had gone he took his familiar high hat from the hat stand and brushed the rim thoughtfully with his fingertips. ‘I shall be there before you,’ he said.
And he was. But his visit brought little real comfort to any of them. He stitched the gashes on Emmanuel’s fingers, and shone light into his eyes and examined his chest and his spine, and required him to sit up and lie flat and turn on his side until Emmanuel was panting with suppressed pain and exhaustion. Dr Turiansky’s eventual diagnosis was cheerful, but it didn’t seem to have any relevance to the hunched man suffering so stoically in the bed below him. ‘No bones broken,’ he said. ‘No concussion. Extensive bruising, of course. Some laceration. You have cracked a rib or two, but there’s not a lot I can do for that. Your stomach is tender which is why you feel sick. Light diet, Mrs Cheifitz. I shall return on Monday if you need me. If he hasn’t improved by then, I will bind him up. Otherwise send him down to the surgery in a fortnight to have those stitches out.’
When David paid his half-crown fee, and escorted him politely from the premises, he felt demoralized with disappointment. He knew instinctively and unreasonably that his father was far more seriously ill than this kindly medical man was telling them.
His mother felt it too and so did Dumpling, and even though Aunt Rivke said, ‘Not so bad, nu?’ her expression belied her hopeful words. And when Emmanuel struggled to eat a little noodle soup, and then vomited it up again almost immediately and very painfully, they were torn with anxiety all over again.
That weekend was an unnatural limbo, a mixture of anxious labour for Emmanuel’s three self-appointed nurses, and long periods of enforced waiting for the rest of the family. David visited him night and morning and was more upset by every visit. But Ellen and the children stayed at home. And that distressed them all, for Emmanuel asked after their health continually, and was so obviously missing the sight of his ‘little chickens’ that by Sunday evening David was tempted to bring them to the flat and at least let him see them from a distance.
‘They could stand in the bedroom door maybe?’ he said to Dumpling.
But she wouldn’t hear of it. ‘The very idea!’ she said. ‘Nu-nu. You let them stay at home vid Ellen. You think your fader vant them to catch the sickness? Nu-nu! Don’t you vorry, bubeleh. Ve look after him good.’
The three women took it in turns to sit beside Emmanuel’s bed in a room that steadily became more claustrophobic and sour-smelling. His breathing grew more laboured and eating was impossible. From time to time they tried to coax him to take a little sustenance. But it wasn’t any good. They tried kugel, and chicken soup with barley, they even tried egg beaten up with a precious spoonful of brandy, but he couldn’t keep anything down, no matter how mild or how lovingly prepared. It was a terrible trial to him brought up to be long-suffering and considerate and never to give offence to anybody, and soon he was reduced to tears by the treachery of a body he couldn’t control. The smell of his vomit distressed him even more than the terrible retching that accompanied it. After a bout of sickness he would feebly turn his head away from the mess he’d made and try to apologize. ‘I am so sorry, Rachel bubeleh. Such vork I make for you.’
And she, dabbing his burning forehead with the utmost gentleness, would croon at him as though he were a baby. ‘Hush bubeleh! Don’t you fret yourself, dolly. It don’t matter. You can’t help it, bubeleh.’
He slept fitfully, tossing and moaning, but when he was awake and fully conscious he used all his energy to control himself, keeping his lips tight together and making no noise even though his eyes were shaken with the pain that racked him with every breath. The family were torn by his suffering and on Monday they sent for the doctor again.
This time he agreed with them that his patient was rather more ill than he had thought at first. ‘He should have been improving by now,’ he said. ‘His breathing is rather too irregular. The result of those cracked ribs, I daresay. We will give him till Friday, Mrs Cheifitz. If he is no better by then I’m afraid he may have to go to hospital.’ He gave them aspirin for the pain and left them to struggle on for a little longer, knowing how desperately they all wanted to avoid the hospital if they could.
On Wednesday Emmanuel seemed to be rallying. He ate a little soup and managed to keep it down. But on Thursday he was worse again, struggling for breath and obviously in pain. And when David came to see him on his way to work on Friday, he was shocked to tears by how ill and frail his father looked. His hands were transparent, like bony fishes, and his skin was wrinkled and yellow like parchment. Because he’d lost what little flesh he had, his chin and nose seemed enormous in his shrunken face, and his grey hair stuck out from his skull like a wig that didn’t belong to him. But his expression was calm and he was making a great effort to speak clearly, for what he had to say to his son, now, was important.
‘You get Rabbi Jaccoby, nu?’
‘Now, Papa?’
‘Now.’ There was a peaceful finality about the word.
He’s giving in, David thought, looking at the oddly composed expression on his father’s raddled face. He’s going to die and we both know it. And he was surprised that he felt no sorrow and no alarm.
He still felt no emotion as he strode through the Buildings to fetch the Rabbi. It was as if he was an actor in some strange play.
‘You will send one of the family to your workplace to make your excuses,’ Rabbi Jaccoby said. ‘We shall stay with him now. You and I and his wife. It is the time.’ But even those ominous words provoked no reaction. David waited beside the bed, silently holding his mother’s cold hand, as his father slept with his mouth fallen wide open and his bruised chest visibly pulling in air in a series of high-pitched screaming snores. Nobody spoke, for what could any of them say?
Around midday Emmanuel stirred from sleep and put out a hand feebly towards the chair where David was sitting. Every breath was raspingly audible, the air dragging into his lungs slowly and painfully, but he struggled to form words. ‘Hear O Israel …’
David caught at the hand and held it and Rachel knelt by the bed and gathered his other hand and lifted it against her face, and Rabbi Jaccoby began to pray. ‘I acknowledge unto thee, O Lord my God and God of my fathers, that both my cure and my death are in thy hands …’
This must be death, David thought, but he was still calm, noticing the play of sunlight dappling the bedhead, and the white glint of his father’s eyes before those papery lids creased down to cover them. ‘O may my death be an atonement for all the sins, iniquities and transgressions of which I have been guilty against thee …’ A slight breeze was curling the edge of the curtain, whorling it back on itself in a fat curved shape like a snail shell. ‘Bestow upon me the abounding happiness that is stored up for the righteous. Make known unto me the path of life: in thy presence is fullness of joy …’ The glint of eyes again, his mother’s grey hair silver in the sunlight. And that awful screaming snore as the slack mouth shuddered soundlessly towards the last words of the prayer. Then they were all speaking the words together. ‘Hear O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.’
And in the total silence that followed when the prayer was finished he knew that his father was dead.
Nevertheless Rabbi Jaccoby felt for his father’s pulse, standing for an endless time beside the bed, head bowed. And David and Rachel stood too, fearful and resigned.
‘Cover the mirrors, my daughter,’ Rabbi Jaccoby said tenderly. ‘They should not witness our misfortune.’ And the words released their sorrow, so that she began to wail and he to sob aloud. But she went off to fetch the cloths from the dresser, obedient as a child, and David closed his father’s eyes and straightened his poor thin arms and shut his mouth very very gently, because that was the last duty of a son towards his father.
He carried out all his other duties too, telling the family, consoling his aunts, coaxing his mother to eat, and finally arranging the funeral. But he was numb, and although he wept, his tears brought no relief.
It wasn’t until the day was over and he was back in Mile End Place with Ellen and the children that the full force of his sorrow drenched down upon him. Then he wept and raged, ‘He can’t be dead, Ellen. I can’t bear it. He’s always been there, all my life, always. A chawchem, Ellen, a righteous man, everybody said so. Why should he die?’ There was no one left to turn to now this good man was dead. Who would advise him and talk to him and joke with him and stand beside him in the synagogue? There was no one. His mind battered itself against the empty space this death had left. ‘Oh, why did it have ter be him? The street was full of people, hundreds of ’em. Why him? I can’t bear it, Ellen.’
And she held him and stroked his hair and wept with him. And they were both bleak with loss.
The next day he went to work unshaven and with his hair uncombed, and that upset her even more than his grief had done, even though old Mrs Brunewald assured that that was the way Jews always went on. ‘They call it the shiva,’ she said. ‘Seven days of mourning, the shiva. They don’t shave or do their hair or nothing like that. Some of ‘em don’t even wash. They’ll have the funeral ever so quick too. You see if they don’t. It’s their way you see, dear.’