Still Here (9780748112357), page 2
Further back, further back I would go, the hand turns in only one direction and I make them vomit over the side of the boat, the first time any of them has ever set foot on the uncertain, unstable, treacherous sea. And then the curtain comes down, darkness falls because before Liverpool, before the century that has just ended, there’s nothing. Only the tiniest scrap of memory handed on and torn, so that the ink of the writing fades and the creases in the paper wipe out whatever was once there and we must fill in the blanks with our own imaginations and what we know from the historians who went to eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism and resurrected towns and villages from the ashes of history.
Before the Jews came, before even that bearded patriarch, the Liverpool ship-owner or insurance merchant or sugar magnate who built this absurd, overweening house, even before the Irish came, Liverpool was a few streets and a semi-derelict castle put up in the time of King John. Where my father would one day grow up, on Brownlow Hill, there is a hill but no Brownlow for it to be named after. Windmills stand, their vanes turning, their stones grinding; corn grows on the farmlands, which will one day house the teeming tens of thousands living in the worst squalor in Europe, and the corn makes flour and the flour makes the daily bread of the people of the emerging port. To the north, where the first wet docks are beginning to reclaim the sand-dunes, horses race on Whitsunday, their manes tearing the sea wind. Salt is in your mouth and your hair and you can taste it on the back of your hand with the tip of your tongue. Behind you is the village of Everton, whose beacon looks out over the Mersey on which the wooden ships will sail to America with cargoes of slaves and back again with cargoes of raw sugar. And before that? A fishing village on a tidal inlet of the river, which flows quite fast through shining silver beaches, and beyond them, a wooded ridge of red sandstone, because in Liverpool even the rock comes from the sea.
Within my mother’s body, the doctor observed, time was also being reversed. Unable to walk or speak or control her bladder or bowels, she cried when she was in pain and slept when she was not. God walked about her, turning off the lights. Around lunchtime, while I had shopped for Cartier watches at Orly, my mother, Lotte Rebick, had had a strange period of animation.
She lay in her chair and her hands made fluttering gestures as if she was beckoning or addressing invisible friends. Her mouth moved without sound in a continuous monologue. She was taking up again her end of a conversation that had fallen silent three years ago when she put an end to speech. Every morning in the home she spent a long time dressing, a long time creaming her face and applying her lipstick, straightening the seams of stockings that were visible to her alone, in her mind’s eye. She wore a little chiffon scarf around her neck to conceal the ruins of a throat my father had wanted to kiss and kiss when they were first courting, just after the war when he was a young ex-serviceman smashing Mosley’s fascists with his bare hands. For four years my mother had descended like a queen to the first meal of the day, would eat sparingly, still following the regime she had begun as a young bride. Then, resisting every attempt at conversation or therapeutic interaction by the staff (‘How are you today?’), she would sit bolt upright in her chair staring into the middle distance. Nothing moved her, not the reminiscence work, not the singalongs.
Sally, Sally, pride of our alley,
You mean the whole world to me.
Sally, Sally, don’t ever wander
Away from the alley and me.
There were many wanderers in the home. They wandered up and down the corridors, but not our mother. Her brain is very, very damaged, the doctor said to us. It was hard to know what remained. Mary O’Dwyer injected her with antibiotics and the bacteria died for a few hours or went to set up house somewhere else. But then it came back, always it came back, and the urine that seeped from her body stank and with each breath her lungs banged against her ribs like iron hammers. Mamma was dying in full view of the others and of their relatives, their sons and daughters and noisy grandchildren. Care assistants walked past with sponges and cups of tea and boxes of tissues. Her nose stood out like a sharpened beak in her sunken face and her eyes were grey and filmed. Her lips were slack and askew. A smell came off her, an odour of disinfectant masking waste materials. She was half-way through the door into the other world. The biochemical processes that would render her body back to the earth were already beginning. Horror. Disgust. My mother rotting before my eyes, her hand rotting in mine.
‘Sam, my God, what . . .’
She was hot, she was burning up with feverish infections.
‘It’s terrible, just awful.’ We cannot bear too much reality, not even Sam who deals with nothing else.
‘When did you see her last?’
‘Sunday. She was nothing like this, nothing. She was just like when you last saw her. Exactly the same for three years, identical, the same every day, now this.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘I don’t know. I’m fucked if I know.’
‘What did the doctor say?’
‘A stroke, he thinks, strokes happening every half-hour. Felling her.’
‘How long?’
‘He can’t say. Could be any minute, could be weeks.’
Levy came over. He squinted at me, his eyes red and watering. ‘Is it Alix Rebick?’
‘Yes.’
‘You come home to see your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘I remember when your father first brought her back to Liverpool after the war,’ he said, feeling in his pocket for the cigarettes that weren’t there because the doctor had made him stop smoking after last year’s coronary. Still his fingers twitched in the lining, closing on emptiness. ‘She was a picture, a doll. A little girl, I can see her now.’
‘She was twenty-three,’ I said. To hell with these second-hand memories of my mother, I wanted to be alone with my own, of watching her sit in front of her dressing-table mirror on the satin stool, massaging her face with the special cleansing cream that had come with her from Dresden, and me saying, ‘Mamma, am I old enough yet to use the special cream?’ Because I knew she had something to teach me, that there was a lesson I was waiting to learn, eager for it, rushing ahead precociously towards womanhood. And always the answer, ‘On your sixteenth birthday. Not a day before, not a day later.’
‘All the boys were in love with her but she was a married woman, already. A shame. Anyone would have had her.’
And walked off, shaking his head, his newspaper clamped under a stiff arm, an eighty-five-year-old man with a dowager’s hump and tartan carpet slippers who used to sell ladies’ dresses in three shops in Walton, West Derby and Fazackerley. Schmatte shops, outfits that came apart at the seams after one wearing, ‘Because there’s no quality, no workmanship, you only pay for what you get, Alix, but I’m not selling them a garment like your mother would wear because for that they would have no appreciation.’
Sam turned to me, the face of sorrow, and said, ‘Shall we sing to her?’ For she always sang to us: we were a family who sang. We gathered round the gramophone, a hefty, leather-covered box, and listened to our parents’ records, show tunes, from Judy Garland all the way to Barbra Streisand, American, of course, because it was America, my father said, who had given the world the popular song. We sang ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face’ and ‘Surrey With The Fringe On Top’. My father’s baritone, my mother’s wavering soprano, my own firmer, louder contralto and Sam, who said he was tone deaf but only because he loved to hear us sing, a chorus of voices filling the house, attempting rudimentary harmonies, the Rebick choir of loudmouths sweetly singing together.
Mamma is weary, weary of this hard life in which so much has been lost. Sam and I sit, each holding a hand in one of hers, and I am crying until I think my heart will break at this thing that lies in its chair, this scabby rag that is supposed to be my mother.
We sit until close to midnight. The nurse comes over and tells us to go home, get some rest, and this is the end of my first day back in the city. We drive downtown to my brother’s flat in the Albert Dock, I get undressed, in the bathroom cleanse my face with the special cream, holding the flannel against my skin just as Mamma taught me on my sixteenth birthday so long ago, climb between the white sheets in the spare room, while outside the Mersey flows past me from the granite hills of the Pennines down to the turbid sea.
When I was a child I heard the loud, echoing horns of the ocean-going liners pulling out on a midnight tide and their lights turned the river gold and the funnels sang the song of our city. For the Mersey ran out to Liverpool Bay, and our bay led to the Irish Sea, and our sea opened up to the Atlantic Ocean and our ocean touched the shores of Mexico and all the way down to the bottom of the world. All the old Jews, every one, like their nurses and helpers (‘Angels! Florence Nightingale’s bog-Irish bitches, more like’) had come from over the water. In our city everything comes from the sea. The Irish girls wheel the old Jews out along the promenade at Otterspool, and the old Jews look at the river and hear the ships’ sirens and the foghorns and the motors of the tugs and the pilot boats. ‘In your dreams,’ the care assistants say, for there are no more ships on the Mersey, or at least not very many and they only go as far as the container port at Seaforth.
The old Jews knew they wouldn’t be there much longer, watching the river. They were bound for the other side, the unknown peninsula. That they were still there at all was a miracle. It was the same with the city: it was hanging around long after anyone had any further use for it. My mother was dying on the banks of the Mersey, in a derelict town, the worst place in the country, the very worst. Yes, it’s depressing. But it’s not the story, only the beginning of the story. When I came back to see my mother I fell in love. Me - the arrogant, angry, wilful, sarcastic daughter of Liverpool and of Saul and Lotte Rebick.
At the time of these events, this explosive thing that happened to me, I had just returned, the previous month, from India. I had not gone there to seek spiritual enlightenment, far from it: I had no plans to sit at the feet of a guru or reach a more evolved mode of consciousness. The last thing I was looking for was transcendence; I had enough of that at home in France. I went out as part of the administrative team that was doing the documentation research for the restoration and preservation of a synagogue in Cochin. There are Jews in India, a few still remain. They say they are the descendants of King Solomon’s sailors, shipwrecked in Biblical days, though perhaps the truth is they arrived from Spain or Portugal around the time of the great expulsion, the same year Columbus discovered America, as it happens. I have no opinion either way about where they came from or how they got there; the only thing that interests me is that in the sixteenth century they built their synagogue where women in saris still come to sing the old songs of my race, mumble the same prayers as my mother and father said.
It is a mitzvah, what I do, a good deed. I travel the world and visit old buildings, in Fez, in Hungary, in Poland, in France, in Montenegro. I see synagogues that are warehouses, storerooms, cinemas, department stores, cattle sheds. I am in a team with architects and engineers who give me their opinion about whether such a structure could be restored, and I write a report that is circulated to rich Jews around the world telling them of the community that once was and is now, if any of it remains, and what has been lost and what might be regained. I tell them, We can resurrect something from the ashes of history, we can make it live again. Look. Here is its current state, here’s an artist’s impression of what could be once more. You want to see this come to life? Give me your money. I write reports that are very, very persuasive. I say, There are a million evils in the world, believe me, I know. Cancer, Aids, malnutrition, war, the illegal occupation of territories, refugees rotting in camps, discrimination, torture, crimes against women and children - rape, incest, paedophilia, infibulation - and against animals, whole species about to vanish from the earth. It’s terrible what goes on, and in my time I have studied cruelty and sadism, have looked at photographs few other people have seen, which are kept locked in police files, have lain awake at night and, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, have been overcome by thoughts about our nature, that evil perhaps exists independently of the human mind, bound into the atomic structure of matter. But this little project, this harmless pinprick of good, I believe in with all my heart.
I stood in the street in Cochin, in that ferocious sunlight, overwhelmed by the scent of pepper, tamarind, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, ginger, turmeric, entered the synagogue, the warm tiles beneath my feet, gazed up at the branched brass lamps, felt the tremor of shuffling feet behind me, some kind of bells clanging outside, heard the old words unscroll in my mind, Shema Yisrael, adonai elohaynu, adonai echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. A pitifully small handful of men and women saying that every day, when they rise in the morning, a speck of dust in India. Hear, O Israel . . . and God answers back, What the hell are you doing there? I grew up on the most westerly margins of the continent of Europe, so nearly there, nearly in America. I am still here, as my city is, and as those few surviving synagogues, by some miracle, are still there too, and the Jews of Cochin.
The day Sam rang to tell me to come home because Mamma was dying, I was doing the preparatory work for the next project. A synagogue with frescoes had been discovered in a remote village in Romania, where it had been used since the end of the war as a warehouse for storing plums, which they make into a famous local jam. There is, I know, only a finite number of restorable synagogues in Europe, yet every time a new one is documented I feel the same deep astonishment at what manages to survive and in what form it does so. The little shul, when I looked it up on the map, was only a few miles on the other side of the former Soviet border, east of the Carpathian mountains and within half a day’s drive from a town. It gave my heart a sudden shock to see it written there, fixed, identifiable, capable of cartography. Kishniev! Where it all started, the landslide of Jews leaving the east after the two pogroms - terrible atrocities, mass murder, rape - my father’s parents among that flight, and even here there is still, I had found out, a Jewish community. Who decides to stay, who decides to leave? Who thinks they made the right choice and at what stage do they realise they did not? What makes a person still a Jew after seventy years of Communist government where their very selves are officially denied? ‘There were Jews here once,’ a man said to me, in a village in Slovakia. ‘Where did they go?’ I asked him. ‘They evaporated, like the dew on the fields and on the backs of my sheep,’ he replied. ‘Dew returns every morning,’ I told him angrily (through our interpreter, a girl we brought with us from Prague who wore frosted-pink lipstick and weighed down her neck with a heavy gold cross). ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but my fields and my sheep are here all the time, we never come and go. It doesn’t matter who is the government, or if you build roads, me and my family don’t budge.’
Waiting for Mamma to die, I needed to be back in Romania once again where it was clear to me who I was and what I was for. Immersed in my work it is easier to bear the absence of attachments. To be a single woman at the age of forty-nine is no laughing matter, to fear that love and erotic desire will now and in the future always be a thing of the past. It is bearable, but only with a great deal of mental ingenuity.
I had a lust problem. With no boyfriend, no lover, no marriage, no relationship, I was raging inside. Then I fell temporarily into the grip of a conviction, that I could transcend desire by attaining peace of mind - liberation from sexual urges - through sheer willpower. I bought a house outside a village near Bergerac in southern France. Alone there I had forcibly made myself practise silence, which turned out to be an almighty struggle against fidgeting and jumping up to run to the window if a car came down the lane. I would lie on my couch and listen to the clock tick in that absolute stillness, my breath toiling in my chest; even the padding of a cat’s feet on the concrete path behind the house became audible to me. It was an exercise, a force of will, not to fall asleep with the sheer boredom of it, this Zen, trance-like state I was trying to induce, a suspension of self by brute force. Meditation lasted only minutes, sometimes seconds, and gave way to easy slumber, to dreams of cities shimmering in a heatwave, frantic streets, tall buildings with glass lifts shooting up and down. When I went outside, the sky was high and white and silent. The grass made little noise. The dry earth kept its thoughts to itself.
