2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (44 page)

Ben and Rip were home already. They’d been out to the football, and now they were drinking a beer and watching the television—a round-up of the week’s news.

“Good party?” asked Rip without looking up.

“Great.” I came and slumped on the sofa. Violetta jumped up on to my lap, purring.

“Look at this,” said Rip, pointing at the screen. “Who would have believed it?” Two men were being interviewed, grinning in front of a bank of cameras and microphones. One of them looked a bit like the Reverend Ian Paisley. I had no idea who the other one was. “Those two old bastards!”

“Who are they?”

“Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness,” said Ben, who’d been watching the item from the beginning. “They’ve done a deal.”

“Really? You mean, in Northern Ireland?”

I tried to think back to a time when that conflict hadn’t been in the news. How had this peace thing happened? How come I hadn’t noticed? I remembered something about a woman whose hair fell out. She’d died while Rip and I were still living in Leeds, hadn’t she?

“Who’d have thought it was possible? Peace has broken out!” Rip turned to face me. He was smiling, then the smile broadened into a lop-sided grin. “What the fuck are you wearing, Georgie?”

“Oh, I thought I’d dress up for the party.”

My jeans and jumper and Bat Woman coat had been swallowed up by the blaze—or even if they were still there, the firemen had barred access to them.

“You…You’ve changed, Georgie. You’re different.”

He was still staring at me, as though he hadn’t seen me before.

“Less…?”

“More…”

“I’ve been experimenting…” I hesitated. How could I explain that in the last six months I’d been Georgine, Georgina, Georgette, Mrs George and Miss Georgiana? Not to mention Ms Firestorm and the Shameless Woman. “…with different ways of being myself…”

“It suits you, Mum,” said Ben. “Sort of retro.”

§

Later that night, after the football highlights on TV had ended, and the thud-thud of Ben’s music was quiet, and Violetta had wolfed down a tin of tuna and curled up on the sofa, I lay in bed, reflecting on what had happened at Canaan House that day, and tuning in to the silence around me. And that’s when I heard a faint crackling sound—so faint that if I consciously tried to listen, it disappeared—it was the crackle of brainwaves coming from the mezzanine study. I put on my slippers and dressing gown and went to investigate. There was a sliver of light under the door. I tapped softly.

“Come in.”

Rip was sitting at the computer in his boxer shorts, a cold cup of coffee at his elbow, staring at the screen.

“You’re working late.”

“Got a report to finish,” he said, without looking round.

“Progress Project?”

“No. I’m done with the Progress Project.”

I glanced over his shoulder and I could see quite clearly on the monitor that he was working not on a report but on his CV. He didn’t even try to close or minimise the window.

“Is it…are you okay, Rip?”

“What do you think?”

I slipped an arm around his shoulder—it was a habit of physical affection that bypassed the picky brain and the unreliable emotions. How warm his skin was, how big his shoulders; yet there was something about the way he was leaning forward in his chair, sagging almost, that struck a sudden chime of pity in me. I stroked his hair.

“You’re tired. You should go to bed.”

“I need to get this done. It has to be in tomorrow.”

“What’s it for?”

“Something called the Synergy Foundation.”

I can’t explain why, but my heart sank. Synergy Foundation. What the hell was that? It sounded like something you put on your face.
In—two—three—four
…

“That sounds interesting. Shall I make you another coffee?”

“That’d be nice.”

I went down to the kitchen and made two cups of coffee. Then I remembered the Space Invaders Easter egg lurking at the back of the cupboard.

“D’you fancy a bit of chocolate?”

I smashed up the egg inside its foil wrapper, and we polished off the sickly chocolate between us. An hour later, when he crawled into the low canvas camp bed, I crept in beside him.

A lot of bargains

C
anaan House is now a building site. The destruction from the fire wasn’t extensive, but after the fire brigade had gone the surveyors checking the damage found an unexploded bomb left over from the war, buried deep in the roots of the monkey puzzle tree. The whole street had to be evacuated while the bomb squad carried out a controlled explosion. We all stood behind red-and-white barrier tape and watched. It was a bright windy day and dust blew everywhere—that’s all that was left in the end, dust. Mrs Shapiro was weeping quietly, and when I put my arm around her to comfort her I suddenly started sobbing, too. In fact I think I cried more than she did.

“You know, dear Georgine, you were right,” she said, patting her eyes with the disgusting hankie from the pocket of the astrakhan coat, “this house was too big for me. Too many problems. Too many memories. Like caught in a trap. Now is the time for moving on.”

Fortunately, Mark Diabello had managed to get the title registered in Mrs Shapiro’s name, using the evidence of her sixty years as a ratepayer to justify her claim, so she was able to sell the site to a developer for a substantial sum. Only Mark knows how substantial, and he is sworn to secrecy.

She has bought herself a lovely apartment in a sheltered housing development in Golders Green—sadly no pets allowed—and she has set up Chaim and Mussorgsky in a flat in Islington. Violetta has stayed with me. We keep each other company, and in a quiet moment when everybody is out we sit on the sofa together and share our smelly memories. I sometimes ask myself whether she misses Wonder Boy, but somehow I don’t think she does. The remainder of the money from Canaan House went, with the remaining feline residents, to the Cats Protection League. Mrs Shapiro won’t tell anyone how much, but I’m sure it was more than enough to keep any number of lean and hungry moggies in pet food for the rest of their stinky little lives.

§

I never got a chance at the party to ask Chaim about Denmark, but we meet up one Saturday in September at a café on Islington Green, near where he has his flat. It’s raining again—it seems to have been raining most of the year—but he’s found a cosy corner near the window and is flicking through a travel brochure. I almost don’t recognise him at first, he looks so completely different to the man in the brown suit. He’s wearing black jeans and a blue open-necked shirt, and stylish rimless glasses. Unless you knew, you wouldn’t even notice that he has a glass eye. I shake out my umbrella and we hug, my wet cheek against his bristly one, and order our coffees. He tells me about his new job at a travel agent’s specialising in Holy Land tours, but I’m not in the mood for small talk. I want to put the last piece of my Canaan House
puzzle
into place.

I pull the photo out of my bag—the one of the young woman standing in the stone archway—and push it across the table to him.

“This is for you, Chaim. Tell me about her.”

He picks up the photo and studies it, and that sweet dimply baby smile creeps over his face.

“Yes, this is her. Smiling like a Monalissa.”

“You said she came from Denmark.”

“Do you know the story of the Danish Jews? It was like no other Jews in Europe.”

“Tell me.”

He has taken off his glasses and is sitting back in his chair. The photo is still in his hand, but it’s as though he’s gazing right through it into another time and place.

“Naomi Lowentahl was her name. She was born in 1911 in Copenhagen. Wonderful wonderful Copenhagen! You been there?”

“No.” I shake my head.

“Nor me. Maybe I will make a trip next year. They lived in the Jewish quarter. My grandparents are buried there, in the Jewish cemetery. She was the youngest of three children. Their mother died when she was ten. Like me.” A cloud drifts over his face. “But she still had her father and two older brothers. She was spoiled like a rotter, I think, having all those men running around after her.”

Naomi’s father, Chaim’s grandfather, was a mathematician at the university, and Naomi herself taught maths in a high school. Her brothers were active in the Zionist movement in the 19308, which had taken root in the Jewish communities of Europe, seeded by anti-Semitism and persecution.

“And Naomi?”

“Naomi was sometimes with her brothers, sometimes with her father. My grandfather was one of those who believed that Jews could be assimilated as equal citizens into the countries where they lived. He believed the storm clouds gathering over Europe would simply be blown away by winds of progress and enlightenment.” He pauses, fiddling with his glasses. “But alas, eventualities were to prove him tragically wrong.”

When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, those arguments took on a new urgency. The Danish Government had come to an agreement with the occupiers—Danish butter and bacon in exchange for self-government. Nor would they hand over their Jews. “Jews and Christians, we are all Danes,” they said.

Despite the agreement, there was little active support for the Nazis, and by 1943 the agreement with Germany started to break down. The Nazis began to make secret preparations to round up and exterminate all 7,000 of the Jews in Denmark. Chaim smiled. “They thought their ‘final solution’ would be not so final when these insolent Danish Jews are strutting around Scots free.”

In fact it was a German attache who foiled the Nazi deportation plan by leaking the details to a Danish politician. What was to have been a swift and secret operation was thwarted when the Danish people simply said no. Not here in Denmark. Not to
our
Jews.

Spontaneously, haphazardly, as word got around, friends, neighbours and colleagues offered help, money, transport, and places to hide. They would have no truck with the horrors that defiled the rest of Europe. It was Naomi’s head of department, a Lutheran, who called at her apartment late on the night of 29
th
September and warned her that there were two passenger boats moored at the docks with orders to take 5,000 Danish Jews away—they were due to sail on ist October. He advised her to go to the Bispebjerg Hospital, where a shelter had been set up.

She and her elderly father stuffed what they could into a suitcase and made their way to the hospital. They found a quiet corner in the psychiatric unit and watched with apprehension as more and more of the city’s Jewish population arrived, alone or in groups, bewildered, anxious, carrying their most precious possessions in cardboard suitcases. In the end some 2,000 people were crammed into the psychiatric wards, the nurses’ accommodation, and anywhere else they could be fitted in. Secrecy was impossible, and there was no need for it—everyone in the hospital from the director to the porters was involved. The staff looked after them and fed them from the hospital kitchens, and as word spread, gifts of food and money poured in from local people. Day and night, ambulances drove them to secret hiding places on the coast.

Others Jews, including her brothers, were hidden in churches, schools, libraries, and many in private houses by their neighbours. In holiday villages all along the northern coast, support groups sprang up to shelter the fleeing Jews while they waited for a boat and the right weather conditions to cross to neutral Sweden. Even the coastguards were in on it.

Squashed up in the stinking hull of a fishing boat with twelve others, Naomi and her father made the short crossing to Sweden on 3
rd
October 1943. They were stopped by a German patrol, but the fisherman sucked obtusely on his pipe and offered them a pair of herrings, while under the hatch beneath his feet the passengers held their breath. The fisherman thought it was a great adventure and posed with his beaming human cargo in the Swedish port before setting off home to pick up another load.

“I have the picture,” says Chaim. “I will show you.”

Sweden was teeming with refugees, and seething with talk of resistance, of freedom, of an international union of Jews, of safety, of Zion. In the refugee centre in Gothenburg she was reunited with her brothers. Although they were Zionists, they had struck up a friendship with a young socialist Bundist from Byelorussia. His name was Artem Shapiro.

“Did they fall in love on sight?”

Chaim grins. He has a little frothy moustache on his upper lip from the cappuccino.

“I haven’t a foggy. Remember, I was not born yet.”

Of more than 7,000 Jews in Denmark, the Nazis got fewer than 500, and even most of those survived in Theresienstadt, for the Danish authorities sent medicines and food over for them. Those Jews who returned to Denmark at the end of the war found their homes intact and looked after, their gardens watered, even their dogs and cats sleek and well fed.

I don’t know why it’s the thought of those plump Copenhagen moggies that finally makes me choke up and reach for a tissue as Chaim gets to the end of his story. I’ve seen the pictures of the stick-like walking dead of Belsen, the heaps of corpses, the terrible piles of children’s shoes. I know all that happened, but I want to believe that something else is possible.

“Thank you, Chaim. You told me what I wanted to know.”

It’s still drizzling as I make my way across Islington Green towards Sainsbury’s. I’ve arranged for Rip to pick me up in the car park at one o’clock, so I have a couple of hours to do my shopping. He’s gone off to a meeting with the team at the Finsbury Park Law Centre, where he’s starting his new job next week. The Synergy Foundation turned him down.

It seems that if you hang around for long enough in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning, the whole world passes by—or maybe my imagination has filled in the gaps. I see the same
Big Issue
seller, lurking under the canopy by the entrance, and there goes the Robin Reliant man crossing the road with his stick. The Boycott Israeli Goods girl is there, brandishing her clipboard, though her hair has grown a bit and she’s now collecting signatures on a petition to save the whales. Ben is there with her—he often comes down here on a Saturday morning—and his hair is longer, too, twisted into incipient dreadlocks and tied behind his neck with the red pirate-style scarf.