2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (4 page)

“Here,” she held it up to my chin, “this I think is more flettering for you.” I looked at the label—it was a size 12—my size—and a Karen Millen. In fact it was a gorgeous dress. Where on earth had she got this from?

“It’s lovely, but…” Actually, when I thought about it, I could guess where she’d got it from—she must have pulled it out of a skip. “…but I can’t possibly take it.”

Who would put a dress like this in a skip? Then I thought of Rip’s clothes, which I’d put in the skip, and in a flash I understood—another heart had been splattered somewhere.

“Is too big for me,” she said. “Will look better on you. Take it, please.”

“Thank you, Mrs Shapiro, but…” I brushed away the cat hairs that were clinging to the silky fabric. As I shook it out, I could smell the faint sweat and expensive perfume of its previous owner, and I wondered what had driven her lover to get rid of the dress.

“Try it! Try it! No need to be emberressed, darlink.”

Did she expect me to put it on straightaway? Obviously she did. She stood over me as I stripped down to my knickers in the cold foul-smelling hall and slipped the dress, still slightly warm from the sleeping cats, over my head. It slid down over my shoulders and hips as though it was made for me. Why was I doing this? I asked myself. Why didn’t I just put on my own clothes and firmly but politely say goodnight? I thought of escaping, I really did. Then I thought of the trouble she must have gone to, to prepare the meal, and how let-down she would feel. And I remembered my empty house and the bright pink sausages in the fridge and
Casualty
on TV. And by then it was too late.

“Wait, I will zip it!” I could feel her hands, bony like claws, on my skin as she wrenched the zip up behind me. “Beautiful, darlink. You already looking much better. You are a nice-looking woman, Georgine. Nice skin. Nice eyes. Good figure. But look at your hair. Looks like a sheep’s popo. When you last been at the hairdresser?”

“I can’t remember. I…” I remembered the way Rip used to look at me, the way he would run his fingers through my hair when he kissed me.

“You want I will put some lipstick on you?”

“No, really, Mrs Shapiro.”

She hesitated, looking me up and down.

“Okay. For tonight is okay. Come, please.”

I followed her through a door into a long gloomy room where an oval-shaped mahogany table had been spread with a white cloth and two places set at one end with cutlery, napkins and glasses. In the centre of the tablecloth, a large white cat was curled up asleep.

“Raus, Wonder Boy! Raus!” She clapped her hands.

The cat stretched one muscular black-socked leg behind its ear and began licking its private parts. Then it scratched about, sending bits of fluff flying everywhere. Then it rose to its feet, stretched itself a couple of times, jumped down from the table, and sauntered around the room.

“This is Wonder Boy.” (She pronounced it Vunder Boy.) “Looks like he has made a little wish in the corner.” There was a wet patch on the wall by the door, more or less at the height of Wonder Boy’s tail, that reminded me of our first meeting. She reached out and scratched him behind the ears, and he let out a purr like a motorbike starting up. “He is my darlink. Soon you will meet Violetta and the Stinker. The pram babies you have already met. Mussorgsky is somewhere hiding. He is a little bit jealous of the Wonder Boy. Borodin you will not see. He comes only to take the food. Seven altogether. My little femily.”

I handed her the bottle of wine I’d brought. White Rioja. Nice with fish. We both struggled with the corkscrew, but she got it open and poured us each a glass.

“To bargains!” she said. We clinked.

“Can I help you with anything?” I was nervous about what could be happening in the kitchen, but she gestured me severely to a chair.

“You are my invited guest. Please, Georgine, tek a seat.”

Close up I could see that the tablecloth was not white at all but a sort of mottled greyish yellow, bristling with cat hairs of many colours. The napkins weren’t white either, they had pink and red blotches that could be wine or beetroot or tomato soup. While Mrs Shapiro busied herself in the kitchen, I discreetly tried to clean away the grunge that was encrusted between the prongs of my fork, and to study the room I was in. The only light was from a single long-life bulb screwed into a brass chandelier whose other five bulbs were defunct. On the wall opposite the door was a marble fireplace, and above it a large gilt-framed mirror so spotted and clouded that, when I stood up to take a peep at myself in the green dress, I seemed faded and grey, sadder and older than my mental image of myself, my eyes hollow and too dark, my hair wind-snaggled and too curly, the dress so different to anything I’d worn for ages that I hardly recognised myself. I turned away quickly as if I’d seen a ghost. On the facing wall were two tall windows that seemed to be boarded up behind the curtains, and between them hung a photograph in black and white, an old-fashioned studio portrait of a young man in evening dress with sharp clean features, fair curly hair swept back from a high forehead, and in his left hand, held up against his cheek, the neck of a violin. He had startlingly pale eyes staring out of the picture that caught and held my gaze as though he was present in the room. Strangely, although the photograph was in black and white, it seemed more vivid and alive than my own image in the mirror.

As I studied the photograph I became aware of a smell—a faintly fishy smell that seemed to have wafted into the room. I looked round and saw that Mrs Shapiro was standing in the doorway carrying a large silver tray on which were two steaming bowls.

“
Soupe depoisson. Cuisine franfaise
,” she beamed, placing one bowl in front of me and seating herself opposite me with the other. I looked into the bowl. It was a thin scummy-looking liquid in which some greyish gobs of matter were floating part-submerged.

“Please start. Don’t wait.”

I dipped my spoon in. Probably it won’t kill me, I told myself. I’ve eaten worse than this in Kippax. Across the table, Mrs Shapiro was slurping away with gay abandon, pausing only to dab her lips with her napkin. Ah—that’s what those red blotches were. I found that if I held my breath as I swallowed I could manage the liquid. The grey gobs I tried to mash up in the bottom of the bowl so it wasn’t obvious how much I’d left.

“Lovely,” I said, trying to find a clean corner of napkin to pat my mouth.

The second course was in some ways better and in some ways worse. It was better because there were boiled potatoes and leeks in a white sauce which, although lumpy, looked reasonably edible; it was worse because the fish, a whole curled-at-the-corners filet of something hard, brown and yellow, smelled so sickening that I knew I would never be able to bring myself to swallow it. Even Mum never served anything as bad as this.

As I was poking away at the potatoes and leeks I felt a sudden warm pressure in my groin. I looked across the table at Mrs Shapiro. She smiled. The pressure turned into pounding, rhythmic and insistent. What the hell was going on?

“Mrs Shapiro…”

She smiled again. I could feel a vibration accompanied by a strange rasping sound like a car engine trying to start on a cold day. Now through the silky stuff of the dress I felt a sharp prick of claws on my thighs. I slipped my hand down under the tablecloth and touched warm fur. Then I had an idea.

“Mrs Shapiro, that photo,” I pointed to the wall behind her, “who’s it of?”

As she turned her back for a moment, I slid the filet off my plate on to the floor, and gave the cat a shove.

“That is my husband,” she turned towards me and clasped her hands together, “Artem Shapiro. My beloved Arti.”

Beneath the table the purring had intensified, and turned into a satisfied chomping.

“Was he a musician?”

“One of the greatest, darlink. Before the war. Before the Nazis got him into the camp.”

“He was in a concentration camp?”

“Kaiserwald.”

I’d never heard of Kaiserwald. It wasn’t among the names I’d learned in history lessons at school, like a horrible roll-call of death.

“Where’s that?”

“Riga. Besides the Baltic Sea. Many Jews from all over Europe ended there. Even some we knew from Hamburg.”

“Your family was from Hamburg?”

“Left in 1938.”

“But Artem—he got away, too?”

“This story is too long, Georgine. Too long and too long ago.”

The young man in the picture held me with his pale intense eyes. I noticed how elegantly his fingers were clasped around the neck of the violin. In
The Splattered Heart
the heroine’s lover would have hands like this, I thought. Ms Firestorm was already on the prowl, looking out for a great romance set against the turbulent background of World War Two.

“Please tell me, Mrs Shapiro. I love stories.”

“Yes, this is a loff story,” she sighed. “But I do not know if it will heff a happy ending.”

The story she started to tell me that night did turn out to be a love story of sorts, and though she related it in her funny hobbled English, my imagination filled in the spaces between the words so vividly that afterwards I couldn’t remember what she’d said and what I had imagined.

Artem Shapiro, her husband, she told me, was born in 1904 in the small town of Orsha in a country that sometimes belonged to Poland, sometimes to Russia, sometimes to Lithuania, and most of the time was just a place where people—Jewish people, anyway—got on quietly with their business, keeping their heads down during the years of wars and pogroms and the political machinations of the great powers.

“It is our way. We believed if we kept quiet we would survive.”

His father was a violin maker, quite a successful one, and he thought the boy would learn the trade, too, but one day Artem picked up the instrument and began to play, and that was how it started. Every day for an hour or two after working with his father, he would sit outside in the backyard and play the popular tunes he heard on the street. Then he tried to improvise his own tunes. The neighbours would drop whatever they were doing, and hang over the fence to listen. It was not long before he began to show real promise as a violinist.

“Darlink, everybody who was listening was astonished. They could not believe that such a young boy would be playing like this.”

When Artem was in his teens, the family moved to Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia. His parents paid for him to have lessons with a violin teacher, and it was the teacher who suggested that the young man should go to St Petersburg, or Leningrad as it was by then, several hundred kilometres to the east, to study at the conservatoire.

“He was tooken to it like a duck into the water!” she said, gobbling up the vile brown-yellow fish with apparent enthusiasm as she talked.

After the revolution, Leningrad was a hub of political and cultural life; musicians, writers, artists, film-makers, philosophers were caught up in the ferment of political ideas. Many had revolutionary sympathies and were eager to put their art to the service of the people. One of these was Sergei Prokofiev, who met the talented young violinist from Orsha when he conducted the orchestra in which Artem was playing.

“Arti, too, wanted to bring the great music in front of the masses.”

He had learned his socialist sympathies from his father, who was a Jewish Bundist, she explained. Before I could ask what a Bundist was, she rattled on, “So long as you were not saying something bad about the Bolsheviks, in that time you could play what music you liked.”

By the late 19305 Artem was playing lead violin with the People’s Orchestra and had just started to perform as a soloist. But as Stalin’s grip tightened musicians, too, were booted into line. Mrs Shapiro frowned and wolfed down her fish.

“Like poor Prokofiev. He had to repent, isn’t it? When I listen to the seventh symphony I think always of how they made him change the ending.”

The false sense of security afforded by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact meant that Russia did not anticipate the German invasion in the summer of 1941. So when Artem heard that his father was ill, he felt safe enough to set out to visit his family in Minsk in June that year. Byelorussia was at that time in the eastern part of the former Polish territories, which had recently been annexed by Russia, and rumours were flying about of what had happened to Jews in the German-occupied west. Artem hitched a ride on a goods train heading west at exactly the time when every Jew in Europe who could flee was heading east, just as the pact collapsed and the German armies swept eastwards through Poland into the Soviet Union.

“But he was reunited with his family?”

“Yes. His parents and two sisters still were there. But the Nazis were building a wall of barbed wires around the streets in Minsk where the Jews lived so no one would run away.”

“A ghetto?”

“Ghetto. Prison. Same thing. But ghetto is worse. Too many peoples crammed inside. No food. Potato peels and rats they were eating. And every day soldiers were shooting people in the streets. Other ones died from diseases. Some suicided themselves out of despair.”

Mrs Shapiro’s voice had grown so quiet that I could hear a tap dripping in the kitchen, and the scuffle of a feline scratching itself under the table.

“But what happened to Artem’s family?”

By the time Artem arrived in Minsk, the population was already swollen by the thousands of Jews who had fled eastwards, as well as by German Jews for whom there was no longer room in the German and Polish ghettoes or concentration camps. Despite starvation and the periodic typhus and cholera epidemics that raged through the ghetto, and daily summary executions, sometimes of hundreds of people at a time, they just weren’t dying fast enough. Shooting them all would use up too much ammunition. Then a local Nazi commandant came up with a clever idea to kill Jews efficiently without wasting precious bullets.

One morning some forty Jews were picked up at random off the streets, herded to a woody spot on the outskirts of town, and forced to dig a pit. Then they were roughly roped together and pushed into the pit they had dug. Russian prisoners of war were ordered to bury them alive.