Still Here (9780748112357), page 12
‘So what does that mean for you?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘Would you turn down an affair if it was offered to you on a plate?’
‘Who with?’
‘I don’t know. I’m speaking hypothetically.’
‘I might.’
‘So what’s the difference?’
‘The difference between me and you is that I’ve been married for the whole of my adult life. I’m not looking to fall in love.’
‘Who’s talking about love? Cheap sex would do it for me.’
‘You wouldn’t be able to help yourself.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘I can see why you’re attracted to Joseph, I don’t deny that he is someone you would be very susceptible to. But you have no idea about his circumstances and I think you should leave him alone. In fact, you should go back to France.’
‘No. Why would I?’
‘For your own good. I don’t want to see you get hurt, you’re vulnerable enough already since your mother died. Do you really want a bad affair on top of all that?’
‘I can take care of myself. And I’m not going anywhere until I’ve at least seen his hotel.’
Used to getting her own way by stealth, she cooked up another plan to get me out of Liverpool, with the unwitting aid of my brother, because men can be very stupid that way.
‘So what exactly would we do,’ I said to Sam, the next morning as I was signing the probate documents for my mother’s will, ‘with an industrial building on the outskirts of Dresden, were we able to establish ownership of it with the German authorities?’
‘We could sell it. Maybe the land is worth something, make a killing.’
‘I see. The Jews return to Germany in their traditional guise, the bloated capitalist, the money-grubbing, money-bags Jew.’
‘Donate it to charity, turn it into an orphanage, a hospital, an old people’s home, an asylum, a school.’
‘How do you know it isn’t any of those things right now?’
‘No one knows. This is why we must find out.’
‘Why should we obey the dying wish of a senile woman? If she was in her right mind, do you think she would have given us this burden?’
‘We don’t know that either, we only know she did.’
‘And who will reclaim the factory?’
‘I will do the legal work, you will go and negotiate with the authorities.’
‘Why me?’
‘Why not you? You’re used to those eastern European types, you know their racket.’
‘Why not leave it where it is? Why dig up the past?’
‘You ask me that? It’s your whole line of work.’
‘This is personal. And also unnecessary. It’s a waste of everybody’s time.’
‘We have an obligation.’
‘I disagree.’
‘“Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth to thee.”’
‘“And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant she shall not go out as the menservants do.” I can out-Scripture you any day, Sam. That fucking book is a manual of hatred, misogyny and racism. The god of our forefathers is a bigot and the Jews are arselickers for praying to him.’
‘True. But a stopped clock is right twice a day. What happened there in that room, Alix? Why, when every site in her brain had failed, when speech was finished, movement finished, when there was nothing left but the breath in her body, did she speak? How can you explain it? The doctor can’t. We know it wasn’t a miracle, but can’t you take it as a sign?’
‘Of what?’
‘I have no idea. Maybe the point is that we’ll find out once we know what happened to the factory.’
‘A sign, Sam?’
We had grown up in a family committed to progress, specifically to the curing of diseases by medicines tested in laboratories with success rates established by clinical trials. We scorned herbal remedies, homeopathy, astrology. The words ‘ancient’ and ‘natural’ held no allure for us. We demanded proofs. We had sat stony-faced through every film about the Shoah. Watched the newsreels of the camps dry-eyed. It was justice we were interested in, not empathy with the victims, we didn’t need to feel their pain. We had its example before us every day of our childhood. Prosecute the war criminals, harry them to the end of their days, make old men with arthritic joints sit in court day after day, force them to listen, half deaf, to fifty-year-old testimony, visit shame upon their sons and daughters. This was the kind of thing I used to say on TV, to howls of protests from the do-gooders of this world. A student once wrote in her essay on the Nuremberg trials, ‘Instead of fighting a world war we should have bombed Germany with love.’ She was surprised to get a D. ‘Well, this is my opinion, and I’m entitled to it,’ she told the department head, when she appealed. ‘Not if her opinion is mentally retarded,’ I said, in my defence. Another black mark against me. A further sheet in my thickening file of atrocities against my students.
So who cared about a pile of bricks? The factory in Dresden was, to me, a myth, a fairy story. It constituted the oral history of our family, virtually fiction, its power was only in the story. Not to Sam, though. Melanie knew him through and through. I don’t know what she said to him, when they sat up in bed talking and I heard the low murmur of their voices in the bedroom next to mine, but she had made it her mission to get me to Germany, well away from the temptation of breaking up, or at least damaging, someone else’s marriage. And Sam, of course, had swallowed it. He was now determined that I was to be the instrument of the factory’s return to Rebick custody.
As for me, I believed that our mother’s dying wish, to ‘get the factory back’, was merely one last throw of the dice by Mamma, a final attempt to make us understand that we would never be free of our parents, that they would always thwart our yearning for autonomy, forcing us to address the truth: that though we were the children of immigrants and had the right to be anyone we wanted, we had no capacity to be reborn and that, in fact, reinvention was out of the question. And the joke was that the only reason I could live in France or do my job for token pay restoring synagogues, or that Sam could afford to buy the Albert Dock flat, cash down, or that Melanie could urge him to give so much money to charity, was because of the legacy they had left us. As the papers I was signing confirmed, it consisted of a house in Cressington Park, also near the river, some jewellery, which would need a valuation, a very small Lucian Freud painting my father had bought in the early fifties through a cabinet maker he knew in London from his time in the 43 Group. And a business, which had its roots in a German city near the Polish border, which, like our own town, had managed to survive when it shouldn’t.
When I recalled all my mother had lost before the age of fourteen - her parents, who loved her; her brother with untidy brown hair, who taught her how to ride her first bicycle, and his young wife, who gave her her own childhood album of traced outlines of woodland animals and a paintbox to colour them in; her friends, with whom she played games with dolls and stuffed animals in the nursery on the top floor of the house from whose windows you could watch the river Elbe flow through the flood-plains of Saxony; her childhood home, with its dear, familiar objects; her country and its culture, whose writers and composers she had been taught to consider hers also; and her language, in which she spoke only to herself and the small number of German refugees in Liverpool who held little musical evenings - I could not understand why it should be the factory that grieved her mind with its memory. Yet the rage that soured her, the oaths curdling in her mouth, her sense of dispossession all revolved around the memory that once she had been the daughter of a doctor and a businessman.
She was a child in Dresden, a city stuffed full of art and artefacts, fabulous paintings, apparently, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione, Veronese and Tintoretto representing the Italian Renaissance, and Dürer, Holbein and Cranach among the Germans. Gorgeous buildings as well, but she never once returned there after the war. ‘Why not, Mummy?’ ‘Because if my parents had not been so attached, had not been oh-so-loyal Germans, with obedient little German hearts, we would never have stayed, we would have left in 1933, the minute Hitler came to power. But no, no, my parents were proud to be Dresdeners, they thought it was marvellous that they could step out on Saturday afternoon and visit the Zwinger and admire the paintings and think of themselves as cultivated people.’
She seemed to me to be the moon, a smaller orb that reflected the light of that great blazing star, my father, who calmed and soothed her and urged her to think rationally about her grievances. And what, he pointed out, did she do on her twice-yearly visits to London? It was not solely for the pursuit of pleasure that she made these excursions but (despite what she said about her parents) to satisfy in herself a hunger to be German once more. German at a concert at the Wigmore Hall. German standing in front of a Dürer at the National Gallery. German in the consumption of Black Forest gateau in a tea shop in the Cromwell Road years before it had become a cliché of the dessert trolley and still carried with it associations from her childhood of fairy tales. Woodland creatures clambered on the counterpane of her bed while she slept, only to be vanquished by turning on the goose nightlight, which glowed with a fat yellow radiance on the familiar things of her room, and her father would come in and say, ‘Lotte, did you have a bad dream? Maybe tomorrow we will have a cake with cream and cherries but only if you go back to sleep.’
When my father told me, in my childhood, that she had ‘lost’ her mother and father back in Germany he was speaking metaphorically. They were alive into the early part of my life, though not well, victim to a host of ailments, some hypochondriacal, others all too obvious, such as my grandmother’s crusted eyes and the clenched veins on my grandfather’s head, an external manifestation of the clot that was making its way to his brain and would kill him as he bent over to pick up the milk from the step one morning in May 1957. He was only sixty-eight. Back in the twenties, in Germany, as part of the general post-war liberation of young women, my grandmother the young bride had cautiously begun to wear rouge, powder, lipstick and even sometimes kohl to outline her eyes. Soap, she found, did not adequately remove these cosmetics. Near the Altmarkt, one afternoon, she bought a jar of cleansing cream from a pharmacist who displayed on his counter a pyramid of specimens, bluntly called ‘Washing Cream’. The results, she found, later that night, were dramatic. Never before had she felt her face to be so clean, yet the skin was not drawn and tight but soft to the touch and had a translucent glow, which she admired in front of the mirror. On her recommendation, her friends flocked to the Altmarkt to buy exactly the same product and the pharmacist was hard pressed to supply his growing trade. From three or four jars a week, he was now selling nine or ten a day. My grandfather was a doctor but he also had a sharp head for business. Recognising an opportunity, he proposed that he himself come up with the capital to manufacture the cream on a wider scale and sell it in department stores in Dresden and Leipzig under the name Violette Schimmer, or Violet Lustre, having added a tint to the mixture to make it look less chemical. Soon, with absolutely no advertising, just word of mouth, it was all the rage among the women of Germany and was stocked as far away as Hamburg and Munich. Together they had done a roaring trade and at the same time as my grandfather’s medical practice had dwindled under fascism and the boycott of Jewish businesses caused the virtual closure of the pharmacy, the factory had thrived, for even Nazi fraüleins liked a lovely complexion and were not too fussy where it came from. Listen, there was all kinds of co-operation between middle-class Jews and the Reich that no one talks about if they can help it; there were corners, there were cracks where a Jew could carry on a business if the Nazis preferred production to continue without interruption or unnecessary restriction. That’s why they stayed so long - far longer than necessary. My grandparents were already in negotiation for exit permits for themselves, Ernst and Dora when they put my mother on the train to England. The formula for the face cream in exchange for their lives, that was the deal they were making. The Germans got the factory, Herr und Frau Dorf, der Juden, got exile in West Hampstead.
The linoleum on the stairs of their house was a pattern of brown flowers, brown. The warm milk they gave me in a smeared glass was sour like the smile on my mother’s face. The poppyseed biscuits were weeks old and the butter in them as rancid as the curses my mother uttered on the way home. ‘That they put me on the train alone, of course I can forgive, everyone was doing the same, but that when they arrived in London only a few months later, they did not come to rescue me, that they allowed me to stay on with the Schwartzes, they never again made a home for me, that my childhood was destroyed by those people . . .’ That everything, every penny in charity they received, every half-crown someone gave her father for carrying out a little operation on the foot, went to the pursuit of getting her brother Ernst and sister-in-law Dora a visa for America, and sending money to them every month when they got to New York - this my mother could not stand. ‘He sits on a stool and tends to the stinking feet of those high and mighty Jews who think they are doing him a favour because he’s on his uppers now, he literally stoops to this little profession, chiropody, so my brother in America gets the best of everything, and I received nothing from them, they left me to rot, to clean steps and polish silver, when I should have been eating from silver . . .’ ‘Lotte, calm yourself, you want for nothing now.’ ‘Yes, Saul, I have everything, it’s true, but why did my parents allow the humiliation of their own flesh and blood? How could do they do this to me?’
A few weeks after Kristallnacht she had stood on the platform at the railway station in a crowd of Jewish children. The boys were in tweed suits, which their parents, studying old copies of magazines, had assumed was the correct form of dress for the English, winter and summer. One boy had a deerstalker hat, taken from an illustration of a Sherlock Holmes story. My mother aged fourteen wore a green woollen dress and a woollen cape, edged in emerald braid. Her hair was in plaits. She waved goodbye to her parents as the engine pulled away from the station, accelerating towards to the west, through a land in colour, not newsreel black and white, through green forests and brown plains and brick-red cities where women walked wearing spring outfits in pastel shades with cream and blue handbags, lilac hats, nut brown shoes, past red and black swastika flags, and crossed the border to the Hook of Holland. She marched up the gang-plank on to a ship bound for Harwich. At the far end of her journey was the person who had responded to this advertisement in the classified pages of the Jewish Chronicle:Which family can give a home to a young Jewish girl,
speaks German, French, some English, very well
educated. Very urgent case. Communicate with Dr SL,
116 Mare Street, London E8.
Who turned out to be in need of an unpaid maidservant for a family of five, where she stayed for the duration of the war while her parents lived in their West Hampstead bedsit and sent the money they saved to their son, who had made it all the way to America.
I knew bile rose in her throat because she caught herself occasionally, muttering in German, and stopped herself, reapplying colour to her straight lips as a means of telling her mouth she was in other circumstances now. Every dish she washed in the scullery in Stamford Hill, the maid’s uniform they forced her to wear (itself a hand-me-down from their previous girl who had gone to work in a munitions factory), each framed family photograph she dusted, the piano she could polish but was not allowed to play - every aspect of her life in London took her on a downward course, slipping rung by rung down the class system.
And whether it still stood or had been demolished decades ago, the factory was maybe the only permanent structure in a century’s worth of flight. The house where my father had been born, for example, into which my grandparents moved when they stepped off the boat in 1906, had been torn down during that post-war period known to everyone in the city as the time when ‘the corporation did more damage to Liverpool than the Luftwaffe’. What did we care about where we’d come from? Our condition, the one we had inherited from our father’s Polish stock, was that of non-attachment to the dismal, flat agrarian plains of the east where - as I saw with my own eyes when I was taken by the Rosen Foundation to have a look at the restored synagogue in Tkochin - men still moved about the roads bearing heavy loads on carts pulled by dray-horses. ‘Primitive,’ my father said, when I asked him about the Rebick hame. ‘What more do you need to know?’ While the Rebicks were ragamuffins who never had quite enough to eat and, skilled in no trade, were sometimes forced into beggary, the Dorfs had no need of an exit door to the New World. When my mother looked back she saw a golden, lost realm of affluence and status, of Bohemian crystal wine glasses and Irish linen tablecloths, her brother Ernst in starched collars, herself in a russet velvet party dress with two types of petticoat beneath it and an embroidered bodice over which a seamstress had laboured, her needle threaded with silver and gold strands. In her mind, the factory was the substance of everything that had been brutally eradicated by racial theory. Something of the past could, through a lengthy judicial process, be restored. This was the difference between my parents. ‘The future!’ my father cried. He saw us passing down the radiant way to tomorrow. ‘All that I have lost,’ my mother murmured, heartsick.
So I suppose the factory had been there in her mind all the time we were growing up, a two-storey brick rectangle in a suburb of Dresden with its workforce of thirty girls in starched white coats and sturdy laced shoes standing at benches, their hair pinned back from their young German faces, bent over filling glass jars, talking of the things young girls talk about: boyfriends, fashion, film stars. During their break, my grandmother would sometimes come round with trays of cake to keep them happy and my mother remembered the girls - ‘die hübschen jungen deutschen Mädchen’ - laughing with cream and crumbs around their mouths. She remembered particularly the overseer, a tall young woman in a navy suit, always with a sparkling white blouse beneath it, who controlled with a firm will every aspect of production including the design of the labels and their portrait of a racily modern, sporty girl with shingle-cut hair, marcel-waved, holding her hands to her flawless face. This manageress, whose name was Marianne, always took great trouble to be most cordial to my mother and to examine her complexion and pronounce it lovely, while my grandmother stood a little way apart, aloof. And presents sometimes came from Marianne too, on my mother’s birthday. A doll or a book or a small bouquet of pansies fashioned from velvet.
