THE HOUSE WAS not as he had imagined it.
He fumbled in his satchel and checked a crumpled bit of paper on which he had scribbled the address. Yes, this was it: Folgate Street, number 12. Where his father had said he lived.
But this couldn’t be it, surely. This was an expensive street. Although the terrace looked a bit crooked and rickety, these were still grand houses with fine tall windows. They boasted well-kept wooden window shutters, carefully chosen to be in keeping with the age of the houses, some of them painted in tasteful colors.
A buried fact swam into focus: ah yes, these were the famous Huguenot houses, which had first accommodated French weavers in the 18th century and then waves of immigrants after that.
Nowadays they’d be worth, what, one point five minimum? More, even. But his father had never said anything about Huguenots or historic houses. All Jack had told him about where he had been born and spent his early years was that it was in a slum in London’s East End, where his parents and he and five siblings had been crammed into a couple of rooms in some hovel with a privy in the back yard and a tin bath in the kitchen.
“That landlord, what a swine,” he would say. “The place should’ve been firebombed as a health hazard.”
Jack had never even known that the place had a history, let alone any innate grace. If he saw it today, he would be astounded. But then, he was a fool when it came to money.
Time changes things out of all recognition, thought Russell, as he wandered through the neighboring streets. Signs of gentrification were all around: here was a little coffee shop displaying French Poilâne loaves and cupcakes with brightly colored fondant icing and cherries on the top; there was a tiny chic boutique selling expensive leather goods. But he hadn’t come here to enjoy such yuppie delights.
He had come to scout out the East End in order to work up his proposal to submit to Damia. Of course it was personal: she had been right. It wasn’t just an interest in social history. It was a desire to connect for the first time to the nearest thing to a history that he himself had. To go back to where his father had come from, to anchor himself in that reality.
He had never paid it the slightest attention in the past; he had never asked about it, never wanted to know. Now he was frantically scrabbling in his memory for the shards of information lodged there from Jack’s often maudlin reminiscences about his childhood.
Maudlin, but also bitter. Was that just because of the poverty, or had there been some deeper misery? Was it because he had been so ill, because of his breakdown? He had presumably come back to these streets a different person altogether from when he had left them. What had he been like before, when he’d been a character who would run headfirst into danger in order to save an injured comrade? Had he then, in these streets, been seen as a leader of men, as a man who would inspire followers? Russell would never know. And now he wanted to know.
His father’s face loomed up in his mind. He dreamed about him; twice he was sure he had seen him in the street. He had a deep yearning to talk to him. But of course it was all now too late. There was so much he didn’t know about his father, about his family, he thought to himself, stricken. If he went back to those mean East End streets where Jack had lived as a boy, maybe he could fill in some of those gaps in the picture, connect himself to his father, close up that enormous gap in which there was only silence, anger and rejection.
But the East End had changed.
It was still dingy, dirty, poor. But the streets were now full of men in long jubba coats and galabiyya tunics, women in every kind of veil, hijab, niqab, burqa, and of course the ubiquitous shalwar kameez. There were Bengalis, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks, Somalis; the shops had signs in Arabic; racks of cheap clothes and stalls selling fruit and vegetables and household goods spilled all over the pavements; snatches of Punjabi and other languages he didn’t recognize floated in the air as he passed by.
“It really is a different country,” Russell thought, and immediately felt guilty. How could he of all people have had such a thought? He detested with all his being that crabbed, sour, intolerant attitude that saw multiculturalism as a threat. Hadn’t his father fought that very attitude all his life, first in Cable Street and then in Notting Hill?
What would his father himself have thought of these changes in his old stamping ground? Well of course he would have welcomed them. How could he not have done? After all, weren’t these latest arrivals following exactly the same trajectory as the Jews of Eastern Europe who had preceded them, and the Irish and the Huguenots before them? Didn’t people like his grandparents and great-grandparents themselves wear strange and even outlandish clothing, and weren’t they too treated with disdain and dislike; didn’t his own grandmother wear a headscarf and speak no English? Weren’t these veiled women exactly the same?
This fear of the other, he mused as he walked through Spitalfields market, this suspicion of the stranger, the outsider, just because they were outsiders, yes, that really was the most pernicious thing.
His phone buzzed. Text from Alice. What now?
Govt ever more shitty, prisoner torture, racist immig plcies. Am being lined up for imptnt role advising Labour P on creeping fascism. R involved unsuitable boy
Unsuitable how? he tapped out in dread. Drugs, maybe? Police record?
Israeli wrong sort
She meant he was not a post-Zionist, an Israeli who hated his own country. He knew that because that’s how he also would have thought, not that long ago. He deleted the text in irritation without bothering to reply.
He found himself in Henriques Street, gazing up at a building called Bernhard Baron House. Suddenly he had a clear memory of his father talking animatedly about the Oxford and St. George’s boys’ club to which he had belonged, and which had been housed here.
“They taught me to box, to use my fists to defend myself,” his father had said, “but they also taught us something else, us poor Jews from the East End. The club was divided up into four houses, just like the public schools. We were Britons, Danes, Normans and Saxons. Saxons! Can you believe it! This maybe was to make us feel we weren’t only Jews, but Englishmen.”
And how proud his father had been to become one, thought Russell. He had forgotten this memory until this very moment. He had boxed; he had used his fists. It had never before occurred to Russell that this hardly fitted the timid, terrified father he had known. Whenever his father had talked about this club, Russell had rolled his eyes. Boxing! How primitive. And he had dismissed it with a shudder.
But now he saw it differently. His father had been tough. He had learned how to stand up for himself. He must also have been physically nimble, adroit. And brave too. How he wished he’d know all that. How he wished he’d been a different person back then, to have been able to be proud of his father for the boxing instead of always feeling so ashamed.
He felt a great weight of sadness descend on him. Come on, he thought, no point in wallowing. But the melancholy persisted. He turned a corner and came across a church, its whiteness shocking against the surrounding drabness; somehow incongruous, as out of place as a lily in a coal hole. Its solidity comforted him. He went inside.
It was a beautiful church, light and airy, with a magnificent ceiling picked out in gold offsetting the poignant simplicity of its cream walls and magnificent, tall, clear-glass windows. A workman was busy with the thick wooden front door, apparently sanding it down. Russell walked round the church, lost in thought.
“Nice, ain’t it.”
Russell turned his head. The workman had come inside and was messing about with buckets and sprays.
“Beautiful. And so tranquil. A real oasis.”
“You can say that again, mate.” The man jerked his thumb back towards the door. “Wicked, what some people do, i’n’t it.”
Russell looked. Now he saw the door had been defaced. “Christian scum” had been scrawled on it in black paint.
“Terrible. Anyone know who did it?”
“Youths,” said the man, darkly. “Thass all we’re allowed to say, isn’t it. Youths. Prob’ly the same youths what smashed up the gravestones out there a few months ago. And maybe the same youths what smashed up the vicar a year or so back.”
“Lot of vandalism round here, then?”
The workman straightened up and wiped his hands. He gave Russell a steady look. “Well, less put it this way. These ’ere youths what smashed up the graves painted on ’em ‘death to infidels,’ yeah? Another church round ’ere, what got a brick through the winder, people heard these youths screaming ‘shouldn’t be a church, should be a mosque.’ And these youths what beat up the vicar ’ere, who kicked and punched ’im in the ’ead, they shouted ‘effing priest’ as they did it. Those ones, they got caught but they were let off, weren’t they, ’cos the prosecution, like, they said it wasn’t racially or religiously motivated. And the vicar himself, he said it was only stupid drunken youths, and that community cohesion was very important round ’ere. Well, something missing ’ere, if you ask me, and it ain’t no community effing cohesion.
“Now the vicar, ’e’s a good Christian gentleman, like. But there’s attacks going on round ’ere all the time. They want to force us out, to make everything so shit we’ll just give up and leave. They’re even attacking them Asians as well. And the police they don’t do nothing about it. There’s Muslim women working in shops what’ve been threatened if they just show their hair. There’s white girls being sworn at and set upon, knowwhattamean, just for wearing a mini-skirt. And there’s these gay people being beaten up just for being what they are. One young guy drinking at one o’them gay pubs or what’aveyou down the road from ’ere, he was left paralyzed he was so badly hurt. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re not my cuppa tea, but they should be able to have a drink without getting beaten up, like. But all we’re told is, it’s youths. No one’s joining up the dots, knowwhattamean?”
Russell finally got away. Useful, he ruminated. Nothing to beat getting this kind of feedback. To hear such attitudes from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, in all its exaggerated…well, yes, sheer bigotry, of course, it really was so valuable. Maybe Damia would rush a camera crew down here to film this? Then again, probably not. It would only detract.
Nevertheless, as he resumed his walk he began to notice things he had not noticed before. A sticker on a lamppost depicting a rainbow-colored band inside a black circle with black line across it proclaiming “gay free zone”; a billboard with a model in underwear advertising a deodorant, over whose torso black paint had been smeared; the girls’ school he passed at going-home time, with crowds of young girls in veils spilling into the street but where one young girl tore off her black face-covering as she turned the corner out of sight of the school.
He had been walking a long time and had a raging thirst. Too early to go for a pint, so he nipped into a small grocery store and bought a bottle of beer. He twisted off the cap and took a long swig. He walked on and came to Fieldgate Street. Fieldgate Street! He was sure that was where his father said he had gone as a boy. Was the synagogue still there?
The whole street, the whole block, seemed to be filled by an enormous mosque, all red brick and large white dome and minaret; and there, alongside this vast and domineering edifice, stood the fragile, tiny synagogue now closed down but still bearing its name and a Hebrew inscription carved in to the stone above the door, the only sign of what it had been below the two stories of flats above.
It seemed to tremble alongside the mosque like a mouse in a lion’s paws.
Russell took another swig of his beer as he stood looking at its blue door and inscription. There was a shout from down the road.
“Hey man! No alcohol!”
Three young men in hoodies were looking at him, pointing and gesticulating angrily.
“This is Muslim area! No alcohol! Respect, man! This is a mosque! Is against Islam!”
The three started to run towards him. There was a glint of a blade. Russell turned and fled. He ran down a side road and kept going, across one road and then another. Then he got to a junction with a bigger road, and ran down that.
It was only when he eventually stopped running that he realized he had been running away down Cable Street.