Hannah & Emil (8 page)

Hannah

LONDON, 1917

Miss Taylor had blonde curls and milk-white teeth and stood very straight in front of the class as though she had been trained as a ballerina. I always sat a little more upright, walked more carefully in her presence. She had just asked the class for the capital of Switzerland. There were no hands in the air. It was hot and the boys tipped back on their chairs, the girls with the fashionable hairstyles and nicer shoes showed each other notes, believing themselves clever, unobserved. Imbecilic, I thought, not that they would know what that meant.

‘Go on, Hannah,' Boris whispered from the next desk. ‘You know it.'

I would not look at him. Berne! a part of my brain shouted,
Berne!
But another part prevailed: Do not speak, it commanded. It is beneath you. Miss Taylor cast her gaze around the class, round blue eyes falling upon everyone before me, until eventually she raised a beautifully shaped eyebrow kindly. ‘Hannah, dear?'

‘I do know, but somebody else can answer. It's all right.'

Faith, one of the stylish girls, groaned quietly somewhere behind me. I knew her groan of old.

‘But I'm asking you, Hannah.'

Just then the raid alarm sounded, starting quietly and quickly building to a deafening blare. We were not used to daytime raids. Miss Taylor blinked sternly and said, ‘Quick, children, under the desks, just as we've practised.'

I felt the withdrawal of Miss Taylor's attention like being cast into a cool shadow but I dutifully stood, picked up the Philip's atlas I was sharing with Boris and pulled out my chair from under my desk. We dragged our desks together amid the screeching of the other children doing the same and crouched beneath our shelter, holding the atlas above our heads as though we were running home across Fitzroy Square in the rain with a newspaper for cover. Boris trembled. If our school had been hit, and they unearthed us later, they would have found us preserved in rubble, twenty ten-year-olds and one adult crouching, heads bent, as though what we did not see could not hurt us. Or perhaps they would decide that we were praying for mercy.

The others whispered in their neighbour's ear, hands cupped to their heads, made faces. When I saw that Miss Taylor was under her own desk, staring at the floor, whispering, I shuffled away from Boris, poked my head out from under the desk so that I could see through the window—but there was nothing there. I inched back to Boris, whose eyes were squeezed shut. I closed mine too for a moment and imagined I saw it: the long fountain-pen shape of the German zeppelin, its slow dark mass gliding out from the roofs. I didn't know that they had decided to set the Gotha planes on us by then, that the mesmerising zeppelins were already fading into the past.

I opened my eyes to peek at Miss Taylor. I do it now with air hostesses when there is turbulence:
How bad is it? Should I be scared?
It seemed I should. She was indeed praying, trying to pretend that she wasn't. Her hands were clasped in her lap and her lips were moving. I hoped that if there were such a being as God, against the insistence of Father, he would be kind enough to listen to Miss Taylor. I felt confident that Miss Taylor would pray for us, or at least for me, and so I considered myself to be insured. I was my father's girl enough to draw the line at praying for myself.

When we arrived home from school the shop was empty. As we entered its cool shade and tobacco and cinnamon smell, the bell ringing behind us, there was a space behind the counter where we would usually expect to see Father smiling in his black waistcoat, consulting his chained gold watch and saying, ‘Ah, children, I believed the
buka
got you. Why so long to walk one hundred yards?'

On the narrow stairs we heard Mother shouting in Yiddish in the apartment.

‘What is she saying?' Geoffrey whispered.

‘That she cannot bear it a moment longer.'

‘Bear what?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Hysteria will solve nothing,' Father was saying in English as we entered the flat. And then, ‘
Tishe, deti
.' Hush, the children.

Throughout dinner Mother clenched a handkerchief and ate nothing. She looked pale and her hair had come loose from its bun. I saw suddenly that she was beautiful. I could not stop staring. Had her eyelashes always been so long, her skin so pale? She seemed to be from some other world, this woman I so often ignored as she moved about the kitchen and leaned over the tub in the yard. Now her white blouse, her long cheekbones, seemed touched by light. A ghost at our table while the rest were noisy, smelly, ruddy, alive. Father wrapped a dark square hand around hers and she pulled it away. The boys made big eyes at each other over their dishes and Benjamin could not help but giggle. I wished, not for the first time, that my two infantile brothers could be exchanged for an older one, away at war, who came home and spent his pay on taking me to tea at the Lyons Corner House or Selfridges.

As we cleared the table there came a sharp rap at the door. It had to be Mrs Reznik from upstairs; she was the only one with the key to the side passage in the alley that adjoined our staircase behind the shop.

‘Come!' bellowed Father. She thrust her head around the door like a mouse, her long face twitching at the smell of food. ‘Mrs Reznik.'

Father stood from the head of the table. ‘Will you eat? There is plenty left.'

‘No, no. I have just had supper.'

‘But Mrs Reznik! You insult my wife's cooking.'

‘Oh no. Well, just a little.' She was already at the table next to me, pulling back the chair I had just vacated, easing her mantis frame into it and waiting for a clean dish. She had money, I had seen inside the biscuit tin of bright silver shillings and crowns that she kept at the top of a ladder in the loft. She wouldn't spend it on food for herself, though, and was as thin a person as I ever knew, though quite vigorous and nimble in spite of being considerably older than Mother and Father. If I had as much money as that I would have spent most of it on chocolate and cake on the black market and rations be damned.

I dragged over the extra chair from beside the bed, behind the curtain, and we sat, waiting for her to finish eating. She hunched over her bowl, a thin person who could never be warm or full, long mechanical arms scooping relentlessly. The borscht disappeared quickly and as she wiped the dish with her bread we were able to stare openly at her deep red moustache, so absorbed was she in the act of eating.

‘Do you need Hannah tonight?' Father asked eventually. They spoke in English. Father always spoke in English to Mrs Reznik. It seemed to me like acting, for the benefit of others, for two Russians to speak in English. I could not see why one would bother, but then my interest in manners has always been a little underdeveloped.

‘Well . . .' she belched a little behind her hand. Benjamin exploded with the giggles and I kicked him. Mother and Father wore their polite faces, smiles fixed, eyes a little wide, though Mother kept glancing at the window which trembled loosely in its frame with every passing cart and motorbus. ‘If it is not a trouble. A short letter only. I have tinned beef and peaches and my cousin's family are very hungry.'

‘It is no better?' Father asked. ‘We have no letters for a little while. Your parcels are arriving?'

‘Some I think, yes. But, you know, there is not even so much milk for the baby.'

‘But we have some milk powder,' Mother said quietly, the first thing she had said since we came home from school. Father gave me a look that was technically irreproachable but whose timing made it secret, risqué. I loved him fiercely for a moment.

‘Yes, yes,' he agreed, leaving me to stifle a grin. ‘Send our milk, while you are making a parcel. The children have milk at school.'

‘Never. I cannot take children's milk, Mr Jacob.'

‘Of course, take. They are fat. Look at my sturdy little Hannah! The baby must have milk.'

Mother was already in the cupboard, fishing for the box. She knocked a bag of porridge to the floor where it scattered wide. ‘Oh my!' I watched her, wondering whether she would cry.

‘Oh, Mrs Jacob, look what I make you.'

‘It is nothing,' Father said. ‘Hannah, you take the milk up for Mrs Reznik. We clean up here. Boys, come. Help Mother.'

He stood and took the box from Mother, who kept her back to the room as she bent down to fetch the dustpan and brush from under the basin. His hand was on her shoulder. What was wrong with her? It was only porridge. None of us liked it anyway. There was never enough sugar to make it palatable. Father let us have sherbet from the shop but that just made it claggy and rather sickly.

I went to Father and took the box. ‘That's it, little Hannah. Go and help Mrs Reznik now. Home in time for prayers.' He winked. I did not wink back though it was hard not to smile. It would scandalise Mrs Reznik if we were too brazen. Father was making it rather obvious that there were no prayers in this house.

I followed Mrs Reznik up the stairs. Unlike Mother, who in spite of her current fragility was soft in the bottom and the arms, she had no behind. Father called Mother ‘
zaftig
' when he whispered to her at the kitchen sideboard. Literally: juicy. Mrs Reznik would be whatever the opposite was of that. I wondered:
unzaftig
? She climbed slowly, talking constantly, so I could stare as much as I chose.

‘Now, Hannah, the letter is difficult tonight. I tell to Gregor I don't know what I can send more. My health is bad, I don't have the strength to schlep around the West End looking for the little extras. I should be caught paying black marketeers? My God, prison. Can you imagine, Hannah?'

Eventually we reached her landing and Mrs Reznik unlocked the door while I waited impatiently. After an age she led me inside.

That moment, when she opened her door, never lost its glamour. The flat was the same as ours, but not the same at all. It had the same layout but it was only Mrs Reznik living here since her husband, a draper too, went back to Russia to be a Bolshevik. Mrs Reznik had a separate bedroom and a spare room with a desk where Mr Reznik once did his accounts, so rather than a bed and wardrobe being crammed into the sitting room behind a curtain as in our flat, one stepped from the front door into a proper sitting room. Then it was several large strides between the fireplace and the sofa, or from the door to the window looking out over Tottenham Court Road. In our flat, if you mapped our movements, we were like rats, following little channels between the corridors of tables, chairs, beds, laundry, Father's bolts of fabric for his second business, hatstands, boxes of tobacco and sweets. This room contained simply a sofa, a standard lamp, a small dining table with two chairs, a beautiful rug and a bookshelf against one wall filled with books. Mrs Reznik could not read them, which tortured me—to think that all this, this quiet, spacious place to read and this case of books, was wasted on an illiterate. Mrs Reznik had told me that her husband sometimes took books as payment and now she was
stuck with them
when the money would have been of far more use. She lent them to me, and I would read them, whatever they might be: penny dreadfuls, political pamphlets, a French dictionary—devouring them like food in the dim light before Mother stirred in the morning.

The books were part of my payment for helping her with her letters, and she was so mean she would actually hold on to them for a moment while passing them to me so I had to give a little tug to release the object from her grasp. But so far as I was concerned, the main part of my reward was being permitted to spend time here, in this flat, with space, order and comfort, where there was a gold-rimmed bone china tea set on a tray on a sideboard next to a gramophone encrusted with dust. Every time I entered this place, separated from my own home only by a thin floor, it was a reminder, an affirmation. Yes, this was how my own life would be, how it would look to others. I would have my own flat with books and a sofa and a gramophone and no husband and no vile little boys making a mess and a noise. I would drink tea from bone china while writing poetry at a desk in the window. Playwrights and artists and actors would visit me and we would all go off to the theatre together wearing smart gloves with buttons and exquisite hats and I would visit my brothers in their squalid tenements with their enormous, ill-educated broods only when they were
starving
, and I would take their wives bread, and sweets for the awful children, and only because my heart was too tender for my own good. Everyone would say so.

‘Come, Hannah. Up at the table. Here is the paper and the pencil. Careful not to break it, I have not another.'

I knew that in the sideboard there was a thick brick of blank paper and a cup of lovely sharp lead pencils, because I looked once when Mrs Reznik was up in the loft fetching her money tin. And so I unleashed upon myself another source of torture: the vivid and durable image of the beautiful cream paper, the perfectly pointed pencils. Who could say how much more bounty lay secreted in cupboards and in boxes under beds? I asked Mother after that how Mrs Reznik laid her hands on such treasures and Mother told me mysteriously that she was a person with connections. When I asked her what she meant, Father said, ‘It is she knows people who do her favours because she has already done favours for them.' I liked the sound of that almost as much as I liked her large and empty flat. Imagine, to live in a world where there was a secret currency beyond coupons and money, which were things that anyone could come by. ‘Husband did too many favours,' Father said. ‘Safer in Russia, with the Bolsheviks.'