When I Lived in Modern Times (2 page)

W
HO
was
Evelyn? Who took a train through France and boarded a ship at Marseilles?

Just a work-in-progress, not even that; a preliminary sketch for a person. I was only twenty and what does twenty know?

Listen, to start with I never met my father, so fifty percent of me was blank. My mother said he was an American, from San Francisco. She had a picture of the two of them standing in Trafalgar Square in 1923, taken by a street photographer. I can’t see his face properly because the brim of his hat casts a shadow. His name was Arthur Bergson and he returned to America promising that he would be back four months later, to marry her. She never saw him again and I suppose he never knew that he had a daughter somewhere in the world.

She grew up in Whitechapel in the East End of London. Her parents came from Latvia on the Baltic coast and they spoke no English. She was the youngest of seven, a wild, disobedient girl, the only one of all her brothers and sisters to be born in England.

I used to sit on her knee at bedtime while she reminisced about her own childhood, her brown eyes seeing things I had never seen, which did not seem right when we had nothing but each other and for each other we were everything. “You know, we lived in a big dirty house,” she told me, “or at least it seemed big to me, and we all slept in feather beds and my mother and father would sit up all night playing cards, talking together in Yiddish about the old country and the town they had come from and a man who had done a crooked deal over the sale of a cow or a
cheder
teacher who had beaten my father or the wind blowing through their wooden houses.

“We kept a barrel with herrings in it at the end of the yard, Evelyn, and there were chickens in a little wooden pen and my mother would go out in her slippers on Friday mornings and with her big red hands she would take one of the hens and wring its neck and I would be in the house with my
hands over my ears because I couldn’t bear to hear the other hens squawking. My brother Hymie would laugh at me and run around the room imitating a hen—he was a horrible boy Hymie, spiteful, but he came home from the war with a wound in his head that wouldn’t heal and then he died of the flu, my sister Gittel, too. She was sixteen and lying in bed and on the fifth day her lungs were full of blood. My mother would come in from the hens and with a cleaver she would cut the bird’s head off and the kitchen smelled of dark blood. It was horrible, Evelyn, horrible. Everything was horrible to me. Everything.

“The lavatory was at the end of the yard too and in the winter the water in the pan froze. We used the Yiddish papers, cut in pieces, to wipe ourselves with, and when I sat there in the dark listening to the hens scratching I used to dream of another life, a pretty life where things smelled nice and there was no unpleasantness.”

I sat on her lap with my hair curled in twists of paper and she undid one to see if there was a proper corkscrew yet.

“They called the pennies and shillings and sixpences kopecks and this made me angry. They were here in London but they behaved as if they had never left Latvia. They used to curse the tsar and they danced in the yard when they heard he had been murdered—and all his children with him.

“When I was fourteen they sent me to Cable Street to get a job in a factory that made ribbon but I didn’t want to go. I walked down our street and when I got to the end I took a tram all the way to the West End and went to a picture house and saw a film with Mary Pickford and from that time on I tried to make myself look like her and wanted the other girls to call me Mary. Mary! My God, was ever there such a name for a Jewish girl?

“Well, my father thrashed me when I got home and he made me go back to the ribbon factory the next day but he couldn’t stop me going to the picture houses. I met your father on the Edgware Road one day, when I was seventeen, and when I heard his American accent, of course I agreed at once to go with him for a cup of tea, especially when I found out that he was from California, the home of the film stars. You know I thought then that England was a halfway house, only part of the way toward the New World, and with Arthur I was going to finish the journey that my mother and father had started but not completed because of my father’s stupidity, because he did not understand the writing on the ticket, and brought us passage here instead of to America.”

This was the story of my mother and of the life she had spent without me. I heard these tales until they were almost worn through and transparent. Then she would rush forward to my birth in a home for
wayward women of the Jewish faith. They don’t like to talk about the fact that such institutions existed, but they did, supplying the contents of the cots at the Norwood orphanage. She said it had a number of wealthy benefactors, some of whom took a keen personal interest in the future welfare of the girls that passed through, and my mother came to the attention of one of them, who set her up in a hairdresser’s shop on Regent Street around the time that bobbed hair and the Marcel wave were all the rage. His name was Joe Hertz. Uncle Joe, to me. In the register her name was Miriam Chernovsky but she put the past behind her and became Marguerite. The surname she chose for both of us was Sert, because, she said, it was brief and it did not seem to come from anywhere.

“Tell me about my father,” I would beg her. But all she would say was this: “Oh, he was a good-looking man. He wore his hat with the brim down, shading his face, and he smoked cork-tipped cigarettes.” And that was all. I had a Jewish father with the shortest story in the world.

But I had Uncle Joe and what a story
he
had! He came as a young man from Warsaw and his family took winter cures at Austrian spa towns and his own father had traveled across the continent in his business, which was jewelry. Uncle Joe could still taste in his mouth the chocolate that his father brought back from Paris and the cheeses wrapped in a gauze which returned with him from Antwerp. He remembered him talking of the years at the century’s end when he would journey through Russia to deliver sapphires to Riga. Of the endless forest and its parched, fragrant stillness, the crunch of dry snow beneath the wheels of his carriage, of coming upon a town—a small metropolis of Jewish loggers and sawmill workers, crude men in long beards, their
tzitzes
hanging from beneath their waistcoats, shirtsleeves rolled up as they manhandled birch planks, shouting and cursing in Yiddish to each other, their words freezing in the icy air, then dissolving into white clouds of vapor. Where were they now? Followed their language, become mist.

So I found out early that England was not the whole world. I learned that I belonged in part to anther country, another continent even, where things were done differently and that what I thought was real was not inevitable or incapable of changing into something else, as the Russia of the tsar’s time was not the same Russia as now.

My mother dedicated her life to being a mistress and learned the arts of a minor courtesan: how to dress and paint her face and which perfume to use. I would watch her in the mornings sitting in front of the mirror in her curlers, cold-creaming her face, or plucking her eyebrows with sharp tweezers into two surprised black parentheses, powdering the bald place above her lids where the hair had been. She knew the erotic attractions of
her body and how to attract her man with it. She cultivated an exquisite femininity, understanding exactly how to entice with hats and fragments of veil and a painted-on beauty spot. She understood the mysterious power of allure and I was fascinated and appalled by the secret arts she practiced.

My mother and I shared all our secrets. We were inseparable. We went to the pictures and out to the ABC for tea and toasted teacakes. Once a year we took the train to Brighton and stayed for a week in a small hotel, enjoying the musical shows at the end of the pier. We both loved Max Miller. “Very smutty,” my mother said. “But you can’t help laughing.”

Uncle Joe ran a number of concerns including a cigar shop on Jermyn Street and kept a
real
wife in a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. We were family number two and we lived in a flat on three floors, each with two little rooms on it, above a grocer’s in Soho. I spent my childhood and youth with the Italians and the Belgians and the man who sold knives and chef’s hats. They felt sorry for us at Christmas and bought us yeasted cakes like domes, made with butter and scented with lemon, or tarts of flushed, scarlet strawberries on a mound of custard, or marzipan sweetmeats in the shape of fruits.

Was he like a father to me, Uncle Joe? Well, we sized one another up and he saw me as the child he had to keep in with if he wanted the mother, and I saw him as someone to manipulate for my own ends, for God knows my mother was incapable of manipulating anyone. I always knew that we were the second string, that there were other daughters, four, as it happened, pampered and spoiled and showered with even more luxuries, which they took for granted and which I
calculated
to receive. They were the family he showed off, the public family, the ones whom he went to the synagogue with, the ones whom his business associates met. And when he died
they
were the ones whose hands people would shake at the funeral and say what was said on such occasions. “Long life.”

We were the shadow family, we didn’t quite exist. Sometimes, walking along the street, I felt that I couldn’t be seen, that you could pass your hand through me. And I wanted to be seen. Inside I was shouting, look at me, pay
me
some attention.

But I have to concede that Joe was loyal to my mother. They whispered together in Yiddish, their private language. I suppose he loved her. If she asked for something (and she didn’t ask very often) he always gave in, got his checkbook out. He paid the fees for a private school where I got an education that prepared me for a future far above the station in life I might otherwise have expected. He did it because he was a Jew and believed in the best, the best that money could buy. He was convinced that
learning was never wasted, once you had it. It was something no one could take from you.

“A great man once said”—Uncle Joe was a devout admirer of great men—“if you learn a poem by heart and they put you in prison, still you’ve got the poem.” I was set to work to learn to recite by rote chunks of Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning. Always the narrative works. “What is a poem,” asked Uncle Joe, “that cannot also tell a story?”

So yes, he was a good man, a
mensch
, but that didn’t stop me worrying that my mother was not getting any younger, despite her dexterity with cosmetics, and—old before my time, with a precocious, courtesan’s wisdom that I shouldn’t have had—I thought that sooner or later his sexual and financial favors might be withdrawn and we would be stranded, back where we started, with nothing.

Meanwhile, I was looking around to figure out who exactly I was. In the end, all I had to know myself was a fragment of something and I was trying to find out what was the main whole it had broken off from.

It turned out that the fragment was part of a story, I was part of a grand narrative that had started before I was ever born. Who was I? I was a Jew. How did I know? Because of the tales they told me, of Poland and Latvia, and also the times we lived in when anti-Semitism was a wolf roaming the world.

And because we lived in Soho.

Maybe in some other place my mother and I would have been forced to dissolve our identities. Maybe we would have tried not to attract unwanted attention, an unmarried mother and her child, but in Soho it didn’t matter. No one asked questions. Within those few streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road it was acceptable to be different, it was
normal
. We were all ethnics, from somewhere else. Everyone had their own churches and social clubs, little colonies in which we preserved the customs of the place we had come from, as my mother and I had the synagogue on Dean Street we attended three times a year, for the most important high days and holidays. We bent our heads over our prayer books among a congregation of market traders and shopkeepers, actors and theatrical impresarios.

I grew up in a world of night streets, of stage-door johnnies ardent or wan with hopelessness holding bunches of flowers; of little ballet dancers from Sadler’s Wells like brown wrens when out of their costumes and in their gabardine macs, warming their thin hands over cups of tea; of wrecked men from the first war blowing into harmonicas along the Strand; of the amber and scarlet flame of the braziers that roasted chestnuts on street corners; of the lit-up windows of Fortnum and Mason—once with a
fairy coach pulled by silver-painted plaster horses and Cinderella inside it; of the electric advertisements at Piccadilly Circus and bronze Eros with his bow and arrow.

This was my home, but I always knew I was a Jewish child growing up in a Christian country. That I woke up, every Sunday morning, to the sound of church bells ringing across the whole of Christian England and when I heard them I was not summoned to God. After the bells, silence. The shops shut, the traders on Berwick Street market not loading their stalls or sweeping up cabbage leaves, the theaters dark, the pubs closed. If you got on a bus and went to the suburbs there was nothing but the monotonous smell of roast dinners squeezing out through the cracks under the closed front doors. On Sundays life halted. England became a morgue. Outside there were a few walking corpses on the streets. I never understood why England did this, stopping the very flow of blood in its veins on Sundays and allowing it to flow again on Monday mornings. To rest? Why rest? You rested at night, in your bed!

I was a Jewish child in a country where, unlike America, there was no contribution I could make to the forging of the national identity. It was fixed already, centuries ago.

I was eight years old, and already I was an exotic. The English fed their dogs better food than they ate themselves. They fascinated me.
They
were exotic.

I was a round-faced, stubborn, dark-haired girl whose lips were too red and whose eyes were too black. I would grow up into a watchful young woman who stared at herself in the mirror and thought her neck was a fraction too short and whose hair had to be bullied into curls with strong chemicals. I was naturally argumentative but my mother warned me early on that this was not considered an attractive quality in the female sex and so I learned, from her, to curb my tongue and to do what I could to cultivate prettiness and a feminine style.