Mr. Rosenblum's List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman (20 page)

That night there was no question of the Herzfelds leaving. Freida and Sadie retreated into the kitchen so they could chatter
auf Deutsch
uninterrupted by Jack’s reproachful stares. They sat warming themselves by the hulking range, waiting for the tea kettle to boil. The making of tea was a useful distraction; the women could fuss as they fiddled with the packet of loose leaves, spilling some on the floor, which then needed to be swept up. Once the strainer was found (Jack had filched it to use for a new concoction of fertiliser), the pot must be left to brew for the right amount of time. But when the tea was poured and the biscuits set out on a rose-patterned plate, there was nothing left to do but talk to one another.

 
Freida wrapped her hands around her cup and turned to her friend. ‘
So,
do you have the television yet?’

Sadie shook her head. ‘
Nein.
No signal. Bulbarrow Hill. He is in the way.’

Freida raised a plucked eyebrow, ‘Ach, what a pity! Watching the television on a cold night is one of life’s little pleasures.’

Sadie shrugged and stirred another teaspoon of sugar into her cup. She had no interest in such novelty items.

‘How will you watch the coronation?’ said Freida.

Sadie knew this was one of the items being furiously debated by Lavender and the Pursebury Coronation Committee, but she never stayed long enough at the village hall meetings to discover if a solution had been found.

‘Is that a new sweater?’ asked Freida, pointing to Sadie’s mauve knitted cardigan, knowing perfectly well that it was not, but reaching for something to say.

‘
Nein.
’

 
Sadie refilled the teacups.

As it grew dark Edgar and Jack sat smoking cigars and sipping port by the fire in the sitting room. A backgammon board was set up in front of them on a low table and they played in silence. Elizabeth perched on a squat milking stool beside her father’s armchair. She peered forward watching the game critically.

‘Don’t move there, Daddy, or he’ll win. Put it there.’

Jack obeyed, Edgar laughed, ‘This is called cheating.’

Jack took a puff of his cigar and watched the smoke curl upwards. It floated to the roof beams and hovered there in a small cloud. Later, Sadie would complain about the smell.

‘Let me have some of your cigar,’ said Elizabeth, taking it from her father’s hand.

‘Don’t breathe, suck,’ commanded Edgar. ‘Like this.’

He demonstrated and blew a column of blue smoke into the fireplace where it spiralled away up the chimney. She tried but it made her cough and she gave it back to her father in disgust. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed. Goodnight Daddy, ’night Uncle Edgar.’

She leant over and kissed the shiny top of her father’s head.

‘You’re a good girl.’

Jack settled back in his chair and watched as she tidied away the backgammon set. This evening her hair was damp and drying in feathery curls around her face. She reminded him of Sadie all those years ago, before the sadness took her. He closed his eyes against the heat of the fire and pictured the girlish Sadie. She was so young and with such soft edges; she had the kind of bosom a man wanted to lay his head on at night. She was a delicious plumpness; like the perfect roast chicken. When they locked him up in that cell for being an ‘enemy alien’, he dreamt of her every night. He missed Elizabeth for sure, but it was Sadie’s face he saw in the darkness. With a start Jack opened his eyes. He listened to the wind outside and through a crack in the curtains watched it blow the snow into great white piles in the garden.

Elizabeth was going to make some young man happy, thought Jack, but he would never appreciate her, not until it was too late. It was the sad lot of the middle-aged man to value youth and happiness long after it had vanished. He helped himself from a supper tray, and turned to Edgar with a melancholy smile.

‘When did we get old?’

‘I am not sure’, said Edgar matter-of-factly. ‘Here, have a herring.’

By christmas eve the house was buried in two feet of snow. Jack cleared a path through to the orchard but the field beyond was smooth and perfectly unmarked like a sheet of white paper before a word has been written. Sound was muffled through the snow; the cries of the birds were muted and strange. The bright white dazzled him every time he went outside but it was oddly peaceful; time seemed to have slowed with the snow. Everything took longer; walking down the lane for a pint of milk was an expedition. The telephone cables came down with the first flurry and the bright red telephone box was buried uselessly under a vast drift. The boundaries beyond Bulbarrow signalled another far off and unreachable realm. Pursebury Ash was a miniature, ice-filled island.

Sadie looked out of the kitchen window. A robin was balancing along a sugar-coated branch with a bright berry in its beak, trying not to drop its precious cargo. The wind blew and flakes fluttered from the bough of a birch tree in spirals to the ground. Icicles dangled like doll-sized mountain ranges from the eaves and in the distance the whiteness bled into the horizon and disappeared round the curve of the earth. She could hear Elizabeth and Jack in the sitting room arguing over backgammon.

Alone in the quiet kitchen, she opened the sturdy farmhouse dresser, took out her box, removed the lid and laid out her family on the battered table. Her brother’s face smiled up at her and she felt a twist in her stomach. Next, she took the picture of her father and placed it on the table, first dusting away the toast crumbs. It was tattered at the edges, beginning to yellow and curl, but it wasn’t a good photograph in any case; he looked stern and cross. It was taken when he was a young man and Sadie still a baby. He had a neatly trimmed black beard in the snap but he had shaved it off when she was small and she didn’t remember it. Yet this was the only picture she had of him and, as her memory began to wear and fade, the face in the photograph seemed to loom where once her father’s had been.

She placed the picture of Mutti beside her father. It was taken shortly before Sadie left for England and showed a fretting, middle-aged woman doing her best to look cheery for the camera. She wasn’t worrying about things to come – this was no premonition – she was concerned whether she had picked up enough chicken schmaltz for supper. The mismatched photographs presented an odd couple: her father glowering in his twenties and her mother twenty years later, huddled in middle age, so that husband and wife looked more like mother and son. Sadie reached into the box for another picture: a studio print of Jack, Elizabeth and herself taken several years ago for the holidays. She arranged all the photographs in a circle, her family together.

‘Sadie Rose. Sadie Rose,’ she said, to the pictures, introducing herself. This new name was strange; it had an unpleasant taste like strong mustard and burnt her tongue. It was one more thing to take her away from them, to separate her from
before.
Her family had known her as Sadie Landau and later, when she married Jack, as Sadie Rosenblum. This Sadie Rose was someone new, and they
would never be able to find her. When Emil was small, they used to play hide and seek in the apartment building, hiding in the hallway shadows or the creaking elevator car. She would crouch in the space underneath the stairs, listening as he called, ‘
Sadie, Sadie Landau, I’m going to find you
.’ Now she could see him walking through the fields calling for her, but she wouldn’t hear. He had the wrong name.

Several days ago, she’d found Jack completing forms for new passports for the entire family, under this unfamiliar name. Of course she had remonstrated, scratching at him and trying to grab the papers and rip them into little pieces.

‘Give me back my name! You can’t take it from me.’

‘Stop being hysterical. It is sensible. It’s all part of the naturalisation process.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘Well, I want to have the same name as my daughter. Families share a name.’

‘Why do we even need new passports? Are you taking me on holiday?’

Sadie’s face contorted into a mocking smile, knowing exactly why Jack always applied for passports. He wanted to feel that this place was home and not exile, but there was always a flicker of doubt and, like Houdini or the Scarlet Pimpernel, he liked to have an escape plan. Just in case. Despite everything, she knew that he was an outsider like her.

That afternoon, the Roses walked together by the banks of the river Stour. It had frozen over and a wintry carnival erupted in what had been water meadows and were now ice fields. Boys in greatcoats and girls in mufflers skated over the still surface. Jack shuddered, he did not like deep water, solid or not. When he looked at it, he could feel the wetness pulling him downwards, his breath escaping in bubbles above his head and hands grabbing at the fronds of weed as he sank deeper into blackness. He shook his head and clapped his hands to drive away such gloomy reflections. Elizabeth, ignorant of this aversion, took his hand and dragged him resisting out onto the river. He wobbled, his feet sliding away from him.

‘
Scheiße!
Let me go. I don’t like this at all.’

Elizabeth laughed and pulled him along. ‘Look, we’re like Moses, see, see!’

Sadie smiled and shook her head, ‘No, no he parted the sea
then
walked.’

Jack succeeded in crawling back to the bank where, breathless, he rested against the trunk of an alder tree. ‘You see, even Moses would not walk on water. It’s not natural.’

Tiny silver fishes were suspended in the ice, and he peered at them, wondering if they would unfreeze and swim away in the thaw. The air was punctured by the happy shouts of children upon toboggans and makeshift sledges made of coal sacks, which left dirty smears on the white ground. Half-wild dogs careered madly, chasing sticks and barking at the sky. The poplars were so laden with snow that they leant forward heavily like stooped old men. The willows on the banks dangled down into the river, their branches frozen in a silent waterfall.

Jack and Sadie perched on a tree stump on the shore, watching Elizabeth skate. Jack could hear the earth shiver and hum and felt that he had fallen to the other side of the world; this was an arctic, unearthly place – not the muddy, wriggling place he knew but some strange netherworld. Elizabeth was hidden for a moment in the crowd of skaters and Sadie scrambled to her feet, anxious at losing sight of her. Jack smiled, he understood his wife’s concern, even though they were parted from Elizabeth for months at a time. A moment later she reappeared, her red hat a crimson streak against the blur of white. She skated to a halt by her parents and grabbed on to a branch to steady herself.

‘I’m hungry.’

‘Well, let’s get you something to eat.’

He offered her his arm and heaved her onto the glittering bank. The three of them strolled along to where stalls had been erected between the trees at the edge of the skaters. There were chestnuts and cobnuts burning gently in the coals, twists of home-made liquor to warm the throat, and the smell of sausages and sizzling fat. Elizabeth, catching sight of her mother’s tight smile, wavered for a second. Then, she pointed to a sausage. ‘One of those.’

Jack gestured to the man, who speared a sausage, popped it onto a piece of bread and handed it to Elizabeth, who ate hungrily, a little smear of grease trickling down her chin. Jack ignored Sadie, indifferent to her disapproval. Elizabeth was not a Rosenblum, she was a Rose and could eat pig if she wanted. What did it matter? The smell burnt the inside of Jack’s nostrils, it was so delicious, salty and smoky. He had never eaten pig before, it was a taboo he obeyed, instinctively and without resistance. Fish he ate and whenever the opportunity arose he mixed milk and meat. Pig was the one deep-rooted aversion he did not think to overcome. It was as unnatural as drinking seawater. Yet here in the darkling light, the hissing of sausages mingled with the wind in the stripped branches.

‘ . . . And another.’

The man passed it to him, and Jack hesitated only for a moment before biting into the bread and blackened pork.

The sun dipped behind the bank of bare trees, and dusk crept forth. The children were taken home to their beds, and the river took on a different shade. The ice gleamed blackly in the darkness and the skaters moved faster and faster, fuelled by cold and alcohol. They took swigs from bottles and shrieked into the night. Jack did not like it.

‘Where
ist
mein kind
?’ Sadie’s voice trembled.

Jack patted her arm. ‘She’ll be fine, dolly. She’s a big girl.’

A second later Elizabeth glided into view, her cheeks bright with exercise, and waved happily at her parents. Jack went to the edge of the river and beckoned to her.

The Roses picked their way back along the meandering river. As they turned the corner the cries of the last skaters drifted away into the night air. Jack thrust his hands deep into his pockets, grateful for the soft fur lining.

‘
Snow is a white, white word,
’ sang Elizabeth into the darkness.

She took hold of her mother’s hand and tried to make her run and skip. Sadie stumbled to keep up, unaccustomed to moving so fast and young. Elizabeth skidded to a halt. ‘Look,’ she whispered, still clasping her mother’s mitten.

A clamour of rooks rested upon the shadow of a dead tree, its branches outspread like pairs of lifeless arms and grasping fingers. There were hundreds of them, sitting on every limb of the tree. The birds were black, black against the snow.

‘They is nasty creatures,’ said a voice.

Curtis appeared in their midst. Expertly, he skimmed a large stone, which bounced across the ice and hit the tree carcass with a hollow crack. The rooks beat their dark wings and rose into the sky, circling with angry caws.

‘’arbingers of death,’ he added cheerfully.

Elizabeth laughed.

‘And them mare’s tails sproutin’ in the frost. Terrible omen, for sure,’ he said pointing to where a green brush like plant poked through the snow.

Elizabeth snorted. ‘Do you know any tales that aren’t nasty?’

Curtis was crestfallen. He thought for a moment.

‘Well, I does know that comfrey flowers is an excellent cure. Can’t remember what for ’xactly. But tis excellent. Also, you mustn’t wash on New Year’s Day, or yer’ll wash yer family away. That’s a good ’un.’

He reached into his pocket and passed a flask to Jack, who tried to drink surreptitiously while joggling from foot to foot in an attempt to stay warm.

‘It’s a night as dark as a badger’s backside,’ said Curtis, replacing the flask. ‘Yer shouldn’t linger here. The Drowners will get ’ee.’

Elizabeth laughed into her mitten. ‘The Drowners?’

Curtis swiped the flask from Jack and fixed Elizabeth with a hard stare. ‘They puts out precious things upon river bank. Yer know, things that yer have treasured and lost. Then, when yer creep down to the edge of the water to grab it, they snatches yer and pulls yers under.’

Jack shuddered; he felt the cold water closing above his head once more as he sank to the bottom of the river.

‘You shouldn’t say such things in front of my girl,’ Sadie scolded the old man.

‘She don’t believe me anyhow. Modern wi-min.’

Elizabeth suppressed another giggle. She liked the books coming from America – Kerouac, Faulkner and Arthur Miller – that was the future. She was going to save up for an airplane ticket and go to America after graduation – Europe and the Old World were worn out and threadbare. Curtis and his folk tales belonged to another century.

They reached the gate at the foot of the hill leading to the golf course. Curtis leant against it and, steadily ignoring Elizabeth, waggled a finger at Jack and Sadie.

‘Lost people in this village to the Drowners. I ’ad a cousin who ’ad a lovely gold watch, present from his granpa. Went out drinkin’ one night and lost it. Was very upset, got a big hidin’ from his pa when ’ee got home. Then. A year later. Maybee five. I doesn’t remember. Anyhow tisn’t important. Walking home ’ee sees ’is gold watch on river bank. It’d bin snowing like, and it were twinklin’, and he bends down to git it, and then . . .’

His voiced trailed off and he gave a little wave into the darkness.