Shtum (20 page)

‘When I’m not hungry any more I go back out into the garden until the light goes away and then I go inside and he puts the pictures on for me because that’s what he does when the light goes away and I sit on the sofa and eat apples and watch the pictures. When it gets very dark he calls the name “Jonah” again and I go upstairs because when it is very dark and he calls “Jonah” it is time for hot water and bubbles and cuddles and squeezes and music and fish-tank light and bed again and that’s the best time again.’

I’m instantly aware of the silence. The judge breaks the spell.

‘Well then, thank you. I am aware of the lateness of the hour and the necessity for Mr Jewell to attend to his father at this time. Therefore, I will take closing statements in writing from both counsel, if that is acceptable, by three p.m. tomorrow? Good, then I will close this tribunal. Mr and Mrs Jewell, this tribunal will publish its decision within the next three weeks.’

Alien

I have no time to speak to Emma. We just hug, the relief escaping through shaking limbs. The fight is over, the legal fight at least. Out in the fresh air, my thoughts climb out of the Jonah box and take hold of my fading father. Emma says, ‘Georg and I have said our goodbyes, but kiss him for me?’ And I nod.
Goodbye –
such an inconsequential word. Most of the time it is not a permanent farewell. This is a day that will surely end like any other, I tell myself. It is the only comfort I can find.

The hospice is an oppressive place. Full of the dying and the distraught, where forced conversations with other relatives inevitably turn to the subjects of tumour growth rates, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, experimental drug trials and the relative benefits of cremation and burial.

It is quiet in an irritatingly reverent way that can only remind the residents that they are dying – at least it would if the majority of them weren’t already off their tits on morphine.

Dad’s in a single room – an honour accorded the really nearly dead, and not something you’d wish to feign just for the privacy. So he truly is near the end. Without hair or eyebrows he looks halfway there, like an alien about to be dissected in Roswell. His eyes are closed. I pull up a chair and sit close by his chest, watching for the telltale signs of the rise and fall from the thin sheet covering what’s left of him. The left side of his neck is a strange reddish purple and so swollen that his head resembles a peach stone balanced on an aubergine.

‘It went well?’

The words are barely audible, so little air now makes it through his voice box – the tumour has seen to that – but the morphine seems to allow a few through at a time.

‘The barrister is very optimistic; we should get the judgement in three weeks.’

‘Three weeks? Go back …’

‘Dad …’ But he has dropped off again. I stare at the suspended bag of fluid, the contents of which are doing their best to keep him sleepy, calm and pain free.

Three more words escape before he slips deeply under: ‘Bring me Jonah.’

Maurice has arrived and is haranguing the doctor when Jonah and I get back from playgroup. I pretend not to know him and lead Jonah into the relatives’ lounge where the television is mercifully showing CBeebies. I hand him an apple and he sprawls on a waterproofed turquoise sofa and stares at Mr Tumble.

‘Ben,’ Maurice calls from the doorway. ‘This is no place for the boy.’

‘If you’re referring to Jonah, Dad wants to see him and, as he’s the one who’s dying, I think he should be allowed to see who he wishes, don’t you?’

Maurice holds up his hand in defeat and squeezes his eyes closed in a vain attempt to trap the tears.

I check Jonah, still mesmerised. ‘I’m going to see if he’s awake. Watch Jonah for a couple of minutes, Maurice.’

‘I don’t think …’

But I’ve already left the lounge. I still need a little time alone with my father.

I don’t want to imagine what he has to tell me, don’t want to accept that there are certain things I long to hear him say before he goes. When I enter, he’s lying slightly propped up with a pen in his left hand and a piece of hospice notepaper resting on a book on his lap. I sit next to him. His eyes are barely open and with so much morphine in his system, the concentration and energy required to drag the pen across the paper is monumental. The pen falls from his hand and he dozes off again. The cancer has ruined his handwriting. That sophisticated cursive artwork that I so admired is now the uncertain, scratchy symbols of a four-year-old forced to write on a bouncing Tube train. It is for me, though:

Ben
Do not forget

Don’t forget what? I want to slap his cheeks or throw water on his face to bring him to. I want the rest of the message. I put my hands on the edge of the mattress and my face on my hands and run through all the possible permutations like a Bletchley Park code-breaker, trying to imagine my father mouthing the words to me, examining his strange syntax, running through his lexicon, the things he has so far left unsaid – and the pen begins to scratch again, each letter revealed with unbearable slowness. I turn away, get up and walk to the window. It’s raining in Hampstead, which only seems to add to its aura of classy, creative melancholy.

The pen stops scratching and he’s drifted off again. I go back to the chair and take the paper from his lap and read and read again and laugh, loudly. It is a genuine spontaneous laugh, without bitterness, because it is a glorious, final punch-line.

Ben
do not forget
tax return due end October

I find Jonah still glued to the TV with his face and shirt now covered in pink yoghurt. Maurice sits uncomfortably in a brown leatherette tub chair, reading.

‘Where did he get the yoghurt?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Maurice, where did he get the yoghurt from?’

‘I don’t know. The fridge, I think?’

‘You think? I asked you to watch him.’

‘I did.’

‘Then how come he’s plastered in yoghurt?’

‘I watched him go to the fridge,’ he says, without looking up.

I take wet wipes from Jonah’s bag and clean him up as best I can.

‘How’s Georg?’ Maurice asks.

‘Go and see for yourself.’

‘No, I don’t want my final memory of him to be this.’

‘What? Alive?’

‘Mr Jewell.’

Both Maurice and I turn round as the nurse calls.

‘Your father is conscious again and asking for Jonah.’

‘Be there in a minute,’ I say. ‘Maurice? Are you coming?’ But he doesn’t answer.

Jonah baulks at the antiseptic odour, but an apple and a feather disperses his irritation.

‘Jonah, Papa wants to see you. Come and sit here next to him.’

He skips to the chair at the near side of the bed and drops into it, bouncing three or four times as the springs give beneath him. I stand at the other side, out of the way, leaning against the cooling window. I study my father. Not much of him still looks alive and what little life remains has – it seems – made its way down his left arm into his grey fingers, which are heroically reaching out for his grandson.

Jonah leans forward and places his head on the mattress next to his papa’s hand. The fingers crawl spider-like up Jonah’s head, disappearing into his hair as they climb, and then slowly settle into a barely perceptible caressing motion. I know how it feels to run my fingers through Jonah’s hair and for him not to resist. It is in these moments that I feel most certain that he loves me back, that every word, like Dad said, is a little lie built for a purpose with an agenda and that the physical, sensory world that Jonah inhabits is the purest form of truth there is.

Lying there, he is as still as I’ve ever seen him.

An hour passes and no one moves. My father’s breathing has become low and erratic; Jonah’s eyes have closed and he is snoring softly, his face set in a dreamy grin.

A nurse comes in and smiles at the scene. She checks Dad’s breathing, feels his pulse, looks in his eyes.

‘Any time now,’ she says gently. ‘He’s peaceful. Would you like me to stay?’

‘Yes, please, but could you let Maurice know? He’s in the lounge.’

‘Certainly,’ she says, and leaves, only to return a minute later by herself. ‘For some people, it’s easier,’ she says.

At the very end it happens so quickly, almost with impolite haste. Just a simple ‘he’s gone’ from the nurse, who calls the time of death and leaves us to say our goodbyes. Dad’s fingers are still curled round Jonah’s hair and I gently stroke his face to rouse him and he sits up bleary-eyed.

‘Papa’s gone, Jonah.’

Jonah climbs up on to the bed until his face is directly over his papa’s and stares into his lifeless eyes – it’s enough to burst the dam inside me and I start to blubber and cry. Jonah leaves the bed and bounces up to me, laughing, and I take his hands and bounce with him, also laughing, following him around the room in a crazed dance while my father lies dead on his hospice bed, and I can think of no other ritual that would mark his passing better.

Lightbulb

My father leaves instructions for his cremation, and that – ever the humorist – his ashes be dispersed over Margaret Thatcher.

It’s a small affair – Jonah, Maurice and I, the rest of the card school, a handful of ancient Trotskyites and a solitary woman hanging back in the shadows. Emma? I’m too anchored to this pew to check, too scared to let my mind go orienteering. A rousing recording of ‘The Internationale’ blasts as the plain chipboard coffin is conveyor-belted into the furnace like a forgotten prize from the Generation Game.

I am happy not to provide a eulogy because I only have platitudes, and Jonah … well, Jonah. So it is left to Maurice – or rather Maurice insists. By his standards, he is dressed for the occasion – a shiny charcoal-grey three-piece that’s never seen a dry cleaner – and I close my eyes as he walks down the aisle toward the lectern platform, the trail of sweet pungency that accompanies him turning this redbrick barbecue joint into an Orthodox church, incense swinging.

Jonah sits twiddling foliage; the wreath kindly sent from the bowls club should probably last him a good hour.

The minister helps Maurice on to a box provided for the shorter of the eulogists and quietly explains where to position the microphone. Maurice places his cigar stub next to it, reaches into his cardigan pocket and pulls out a wad of dog-eared notepaper. His amplified throat-clearing is like the roar of the MGM lion.

‘Thank you, rabbi.’

The minister talks closely into his ear.

‘You’re not a rabbi? So what? A trainee?’

The minister returns, though less closely.

Maurice stares directly at me. ‘
Shnorrer
, I suppose I’ll have to say
Kaddish
as well? Anyway …

‘So, what kind of man was Georg Jewell? Don’t worry. This is no quiz, I will tell you the kind of man he was.

‘Georg, Georg, Georg – I hated him like a brother, but what can you do? You can’t choose your family any more than you can choose the size of your
schlung
. And with Georg, when we first met each other, I instantly hated him because he was bigger and stronger and I was older. We were just two skinny boys, still years from bar mitzvah, speaking two different languages – me, Dutch, he, Hungarian – we were just two boys who’d survived the Nazis, who suddenly found themselves walking side by side down a railway track in 1944.

‘Georg offered to share his food with me – and what did I do? So hungry I’d been eating grass? I said yes. And Georg? Georg shrugged and tore his bread and cheese in half, and we sat down in the grass on the side of the road and went to sleep. And for this I loved him, but trust – trust is a different matter altogether. Normally I would have left him by the roadside.

‘But two weeks later we’re still together – wandering around like a couple of
shtummers
talking in sign-language. I can’t leave him. Why can’t I go? I ask myself. I hated him for an act of generosity, but I couldn’t drag myself away.

‘I tried a couple of times, left while he was still asleep, but for some reason I began to dawdle and stop until I saw him striding toward me out of the distance and as he approached we just set off together again without saying a word. He never asked why. I never asked him if he was angry. There were many occasions when other stragglers tried to tag along – maybe for a day, sometimes a week – and when they were with us I experienced horrible jealousy. I would dream of murdering them in their sleep – but they never stayed and we still didn’t talk.

‘He tried me with Hungarian, I tried him with Dutch; he tried me with Yiddish, but I spoke Ladino – only Jews could invent more than one secret language. Then one day we are wandering through a small French town – the name slips my mind – and it has a library this town and I – a learnt thief through necessity – crept in and stole out with a book, a dictionary, a French–English dictionary, but crucially, a dictionary for children. With pictures. There was just one choice then – French or English, and of course we could have studied both, but we chose English because America was our destination. You may have guessed, we never made it.

‘It didn’t take us long to learn the basics; we tested each other with words, then sentences as we walked and lay dozing in the evenings.

‘Of course, we had no idea if we were speaking it properly, how could we? And we only ever used it to practise what we would say when we arrived in America, because by then we had a language that served us perfectly without the need for words – and it was a language of the heart.’

Maurice pauses and places his head on the lectern. When he looks up again his eyes are full of tears.

‘The truth is, Georg saved my life more than once. It was on the seventh night after we’d met, while we sheltered in a barn, that he saved my life for the second time. We thought it was empty, and neither of us expected to be confronted by a German soldier, a deserter, no doubt, but that is what happened. As we lay on the straw, he came from nowhere and suddenly there is a knife at my skinny throat and I am being dragged toward the barn door. I was terrified, but Georg? He just stood up and stared, his hands behind his back, and began to walk towards us. I could feel the German’s sweat dripping on to my head. It was murky in that barn, but as we got to the door the moon lit us perfectly from the back and Georg moved so swiftly that the Nazi never saw it coming.

‘The German just dropped, like someone had ripped the muscles from his bones. Georg had caught him perfectly between the eyes with a rusty old plough blade.

‘I knew that I was a burden to him after that, that he would have a better chance on his own and, many years later, I asked him, “Georg,” I said, “why didn’t you just leave me?” And his answer? “Any more than one is too many. Losing one is painful, losing two is painful more, losing three and the pain goes. Everyone needs a little pain and you, Mauritz, you are a little pain – so I can’t afford to lose you.” And he never did lose me. But now I have lost him and Georg, you were wrong, losing one is very, very painful.’

And then he starts to cry, which doesn’t suit him, and I am dumbstruck by these revelations, staring at the furnace doors, while the jigsaw of my life with him goes up in flames, unfinished. I stand up as Maurice shuffles back to the pew and attempt to put my arm around him.

‘Maurice, when was the first time he saved you? Tell me.’

But he shrugs me off. Then we stand together as he intones the Hebrew prayer for the dead, the
Kaddish
, from a battered old Hebrew prayer book and I try to keep up with my internet-downloaded transliteration:

Yisgadal v’yisgadash sh’mey rabah
…

With the final Amen, the scant crowd disperses toward the back of the hall. Jonah sits, as he has sat the whole way through, picking the wreath to the wire and littering the floor with leaves and petals.

The handshaking takes an eternal five minutes, but I can’t drag myself back to the car and, while Jonah investigates more wreaths, I stroll the length of the blood-red wall, reading the names on the memorial plaques. Each religion has its place, marked out by a gentle change in surnames – Stephenson, Singh, Shah, Stein. I scan from top to bottom looking for the familiar, the Jewish geography of the dead.

‘Your cousin went out with Marc Bolan, didn’t she?’

Turning from the rock legend’s memorial plaque, I reply. ‘When he was Marc Feld, yes. But I’ve told you that a hundred times.’

She’s smiling. ‘A thousand times, at least.’

I let the silence settle between us, replacing the tension with needles of memory. ‘A million.’

‘A gazillion,’ Emma says.

‘You win.’

‘No one wins,’ she whispers.

We stand together and stare at the plaque.

‘I’m so very sorry about Georg, Ben.’

I feel her breath on my ear, it is as close to touching as we’ve been for nine months.

‘It must be hard. The grief, I mean.’

‘There’s been a lot to grieve for, Emma.’

I hear a sigh, feel a hand in mine. It is small and insistent. It’s Jonah. He wants to leave.

‘Can we talk, Ben? Now?’

‘If he lets us.’ The phrase lingers.

The sun has filtered through, so I have an excuse to don my sunglasses. I give in to Jonah’s tugging and, as I turn to be led, notice that he has Emma’s hand too – a beautiful young boy with his parents, what could be more natural?

‘He knows where he’s going?’ I ask.

‘You do, don’t you, Jonah? You’re going to the park,’ she says.

A park I don’t know, or at least have never been to with him.

‘You’re going to Goldstream Park, aren’t you?’ she says. ‘It’s where Georg used to take him.’ And then, as if to the sky: ‘I would meet them there sometimes.’

‘Sometimes?’ I ask.

‘Quite regularly,’ she says.

‘A chain of extraordinary coincidences?’ I smile.

‘Exactly.’

Jonah releases his hands and continues four or five paces ahead. He’s programmed the SatNav and we’re now robotically following its instructions.

Through the gates he picks up speed and begins to trot with arms by his sides. I begin to run after him.

‘Leave him, Ben. I know where he’s going. He’s off to the water garden.’ His laughter carries back to us on the breeze, it is high and joyous, disbelieving almost – like he’s the luckiest person in the world, like something so stupendous has happened that his whole body has been freed of its own weight, his head thrown back, his legs adjusting from trotting to skipping. All that’s left for him to do is fly.

The water garden is a vast circle of brightly coloured rubber bitumen, formed into a mosaic of sea-creatures – sea horses, star fish, dolphins and a giant yellow octopus. Among the wildlife sit child-activated fountains that throw jets of water high and wide. The air is full of spray and the piercing cat-calls of two- and three-year-olds. Around the circle there are benches and grass and Emma and I settle on one, two sets of eyes bonded to the Gulliver-like form of Jonah, skipping circuit after circuit after circuit, carefully weaving in and out of his Lilliputian comrades, who seem totally accepting of this giant among them and his maniacal chuckling.

‘I …’

‘I … No, you first,’ I say.

‘I will not apologise, but I’m sorry …’

‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Will you just let me speak, please, this is hard enough without …’

‘I’m sorry, go on.’

‘Thank you.’

I can sense her gathering herself.

‘Ben, you know it’s over, don’t you? Not just know, but
accept
it?’

I nod assent, while my mind searches for a caveat, the slightest grammatical twist, a tiny semantic get-out clause. Jonah has begun to venture timidly toward the spouting fountains. His face is set in a gentle smile.

‘Okay.’

There is relief in her voice, like her planning is working so far. The conversation-and-response key that she has no doubt used specialist software to produce is proceeding down the correct branch – if ‘yes’, say this; if ‘no’, say that.

I try to identify my feelings for her. My emotions are a compass needle, struggling to settle on a fixed point. Is it love? Is it hate? Love-love-hate, or hate-love-hate? Or am I too close to the pole to ever get a true reading?

Jonah has taken off his shoes and left them in the middle of the circle. Now he sits on the grass opposite, picking at some dandelions and waving their gossamer-like seeds into the air. Wherever they land they will grow, but what if they never land?

‘I think it’s fair to say that our life, together – with Jonah, too – has been excruciating at times.’

‘That’s a little harsh,’ I say.

‘But true?’

‘I suppose.’

‘We are both accountable, Ben.’

‘Responsible, you mean?’

‘No, I mean accountable. We both have to accept our part in this, but without blame. There is no blame. We did the best we could, what we thought was right, for the best reasons, with the best of intentions. I need to tell you how it was for me, Ben, and how I tried.’

‘You’ve already told me that, at the tribunal, remember?’

‘No, Ben, I didn’t. That was about Jonah.’

‘So go on then. How was it for you? How did you try?’

Emma gets up from the bench and takes a couple of paces toward Jonah, her arms folded tight, her hands in her armpits. When she sits back down she is close to me. For the first time I look openly at her face. Her cheekbones have lost their prominence, her eyes are brighter than I remember and less sunken.

‘The break’s been kind to you,’ I say. Now it’s her turn to laugh.

‘Yes, it’s been like nine months in Barbados.’

‘There’s no need, I was only saying …’

‘I know what you were saying, Ben. So let me put you straight.’

‘Yes, please do.’

There is silence.

‘Have you any idea how angry you’ve been? Not just the last couple of years, but ever since I’ve known you? It was different when we met, it felt like passion, it looked like passion. It made you enigmatic, charismatic, admirable even. But it’s not passion, it’s simply anger. I’ve learnt that about you, Ben. The anger holds you back, it’s all fear and resentment and frustration. I tried for years to drag you out of it, but you’re comfortable there. It’s all you’ve ever known. That and the booze that fuels it. I’ve watched you quit rather than face the prospect of failure, dismiss something as worthless rather than risk the chance of succeeding at it. I cried inside when you left marketing to join your father in that stinking warehouse.’