Downriver (23 page)

Woolf's monastic self-neglect spread chokingly through the confines of this cabin. It was as if he excreted dust with every movement; it sweated from him, dandruff and mercury, crumbling over everything. Even the sour corner of an abandoned loaf was grey as pumice stone. The bed was unmade. His books were heaped over the floor, collapsed columns, a millennial ruin; pages were folded back and covers torn. Woolf made his own dim light; he scratched it, in miserly quantities, from an irritated skin – enough to locate the tape spools in their box, or to hack open another tin of mortuary beef. He had accepted a consignment, in lieu of payment, from a Tooley Street dealer who had gone into receivership.

We sat in silence. Woolf's cold-blood calm was beginning to
spook me. He seemed to exist on the far shore of some unspeakable trauma, doomed to pick through the rags of a past he had never legitimately inhabited. One of his arms disappeared into the folds of his library coat and emerged with a roll of masking tape that he used in his work. He placed his sketch of the occult rectangle on top of one of the spools of the Grundig, and stuck it down. I knew from our earlier market conversations that Woolf experimented: he was intent upon locating the voices of the dead, using blank tape as a medium: he concentrated on nothing, emptied himself, gave access to the unobliterated residues of past and future events.

Now he moved for the first time towards the window; and I noticed that a light came on in the uncurtained west tower – as if triggered by the removal of Woolf's spectacles. The energy of this remote orange cell was being stolen directly from Woolf. He knew what was revealed; he did not need to see it. A man in a pink cricket cap was staring at us, back across the chilled void. Woolf was satisfied: he felt a primary connection had been established, the second man
could not break away
. He would be eviscerated into our machine, wound out like linen. Gasping for breath, sweating heavily, Woolf pressed down the square grey button. There was a click. And the creaking spools began to revolve.

III

Fredrik Hanbury was on the phone early. A being of marvellous enthusiasm, he drove directly at whatever was out there to be grasped, with all the centrifugal desperation of a man who has somewhere lost time and is determined to recover it – whatever the cost. He had turned up a tale that might prove to be the kernel of our Spitalfields film: the myth of the disappearance of David Rodinsky.

Rodinsky, a Polish Jew from Plotsk or Lublin or wherever,
was the caretaker and resident poltergeist of the Princelet Street synagogue: an undistinguished
chevra
without the funds to support a scholar in residence. He perched under the eaves, a night-crow, unremarked and unremarkable – until that day in the early 1960s when he achieved the Great Work, and became invisible.

It is uncertain how many weeks, or years, passed before anyone noticed Rodinsky's absence. He had evaporated, and would survive as municipal pulverulence, his name unspoken, to be resurrected only as ‘a feature', an italicized selling point, in the occult fabulation of the zone that the estate agents demanded to justify a vertiginous increase in property values. The legend had escaped and the double doors were padlocked behind it; the windows were sealed in plasterboard versions of themselves. Rodinsky's room was left as he had abandoned it: books on the table, grease-caked pyjamas, cheap calendar with the reproduction of Millet's ‘Angelus', fixed for ever at January 1963.

The Newcomers, salivating over an excavated frigacy of chicken, followed by smoked collops and green flummery, had discovered a quaint fairy tale of their own – without blood and entrails, a Vanishing Jew! They fell upon it like a fluted entablature, or a weaver's bobbin. The synagogue, complete with dark secret, passed rapidly into the hands of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre; under whose sponsorship, with the aid of a good torch, it is possible to climb the damaged stairs and – by confronting the room – recover the man. ‘He's all about us,' whisper the shrine-hoppers, with a delicious shiver.

Fredrik's forefinger jabbed against my chest in uncontained excitement; an aboriginal pointing stick, a magnetized bone. It was his cudgel and his compass. We charged south along Queensbridge Road, over the humpback bridge and into bounty-hunting territory. Over his shoulder, Fredrik tossed a scarf of wild cultural references. His method was to heap idea on idea, layer after layer, until the edifice either commanded attention or collapsed into rubble. Leaving him, if he was lucky,
holding one serviceable catchphrase: ‘a post-hoc fable of the immigrant quarter'. The things Fredrik noticed were the things that mattered. He had about a yard's advantage over me in height. He could stare, without stretching, into bedroom windows. Today he was magnificently Cromwellian, fanning his moral fervour under a bouncing helmet of Saxon hair.

‘This is Poland,' he shouted, ‘old Kraków. The attics, the cobbles; rag-pickers scavenging a living out of nothing. Unbelievable! The landscape of the Blitz. Brandt's photographs. Any day now we'll have acorn coffee and shoes made from tyres.'

We bounded down the Lane – I was jogging steadily to keep up with him – shunned the hot bagels, passed under the railway bridge. I noticed the old woman who always stands smiling against the wall, not begging, nor soliciting charity, but ‘available' to collect her tithe from the uneasy consciences of social explorers.

‘Chequebook modernism,' Fredrik spat at the Brewery's glasshouse façade. ‘By reflecting nothing but its own image, this structure hopes to repel the shadows of past crimes. Listen, I've been reading the journals of the Quaker Brewmasters – fascinating – did you know families actually starved to death on this spot, had their fingers chewed off by their own dogs?'

The turn into Princelet Street, from Brick Lane's fetishist gulch of competing credit-card caves, is stunning. One of those welcome moments of cardiac arrest, when you know that you have been absorbed into the scene you are looking at: for a single heartbeat, time freezes.

We are sucked, by a vortex of expectation, into the synagogue, and up the unlit stairs: we are returning, approaching something that has always been there. The movement is inevitable. But we also sensed immediately that we were trespassing on a space that could soon be neutralized as a ‘Museum of Immigration': as if immigration could be anything other than an active response to untenable circumstances – a brave, mad, greedy charge at some vision of the future; a thrusting forward of the unborn into a
region they could neither claim nor desire. Immigration is a blowtorch held against an anthill. It can always be sentimentalized, but never re-created. It is as persistent and irreversible as the passage of glaciers and cannot – without diminishing its courage – be codified, and trapped in cases of nostalgia. But we ourselves were ethical Luddites, forcibly entering the reality of David Rodinsky's territorial self: the apparent squalor and the imposed mystery.

There
was
no mystery, except the one we manufactured in our quest for the unknowable: shocking ourselves into a sense of our own human vulnerability. We were a future race of barbarians, too tall for the room in which we were standing. We fell gratefully upon the accumulation of detail: debased agents, resurrectionists with cheap Japanese cameras.

We dug, we competed, we whispered our discoveries. There was the hard evidence of a weighing-machine ticket, wedged into a Hebrew grammar, that presented Rodinsky at twelve stone twelve pounds (what numerological perfection!) on 2 August 1957. We estimated his height by holding up an ugly charity jacket from his wardrobe. We felt a footstep-on-your-grave tremor as we read his handwritten name in an empty spectacle case. We sniffed at the boxed bed in its corner, and the rugs that had coagulated into planks. We fondled pokers, gasmasks, kettles. We scraped at the mould in the saucepans. We would have interrogated the rats in the skirting boards, or depth-profiled the vagrants who had skippered in this deserted set. We knew the names of the films that Rodinsky had attended, and the records he had played. We snorted dust from the heaps of morbid newspapers; sifted foreign wars, forgotten crimes, spasms of violence, royalty, incest, boot polish, dentures and haemorrhoids.

Books were everywhere, covering the tables, spilling out of drawers and boxes: dictionaries, primers, code-breakers, histories, explanations of anti-Semitism. Inversion, agglutination, fusion, analogical extension were Rodinsky's familiars. He took a Letts Schoolgirls' Diary – ‘begun Tuesday 20 December
1961' – and converted it into a system of universal time. Julian, Gregorian and cabalistic versions tumbling into the Highway Code, and out again into Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin or Greek. There was a desperation to crack the crust, to get beyond language. ‘
KÍ-BI-MA… SPEAK!'

‘It's a lock,' as the TV boys say. The Carnival Season would soon be over, and Sonny Jaques would be shuttling back from the Caribbean, refreshed and ready for another round of discussions, rewrites, revisions, lunching drafts. But we'd deny him even a cheese dip until he agreed to see this room for himself. It is the prize exhibit, a sealed environment; even the light breaks hesitantly through cracks in the boards that cover the windows.

Rodinsky's diary-script reveals one last frenzied charge at the cuneiform tablets, the king-lists. We are shaking out locusts and cinders. The final entry is almost illegible. ‘
By he she / aren't so not take
.' ‘
Not take
.' The command is ignored, Fredrik slips into his pocket the scarlet document the curators have ignored. In failing to feature the Letts Diaries, they missed the chance to turn the Princelet Street synagogue into as big a commercial attraction as the Anne Frank House. They removed everything else: the books with colour plates, the ziggurat snapshots, all the significant bric-a-brac. Urchins and sneak-thieves completed the job, cargoculting the swag to the fences of Cheshire Street and Cutler Street.

Now I began to understand the nature of the trap. I was like the fox who philosophically accepts that he has made a bad decision – only when he has to chew off his own leg to escape. There was nothing astonishing in the disappearance of this man. He could not be more available. It was all still here: the wrappings, the culture, the work he had attempted, his breath on the glass – and even, if we carried it away, his story. We could provide the missing element, fiction, using only the clues that Rodinsky had so blatantly planted. Fredrik's fateful choice in picking up the diary made it certain that the unfinished work of this
chamber would be taken to its inevitable, though still unresolved, conclusion.

The man remains,
it is the room itself that vanishes
. You are looking into a facsimile, a cunning fake, as unreal as the mock-up of Thomas Hardy's study in Dorchester Museum. But the fake was crafted by none other than the apparent victim! The room's original has shifted to another place, achieved another level of reality. You would have to share Rodinsky's fate to find it. There is no use in stripping the panels from the walls for your Docklands condo, or reviving the set for a Gothic Tour (designed by Edward Gorey?) taking in New York and Chicago. The heritage is despair and the heritage is the measure by which we fail in visiting this grim module. It can be marketed only as a suicide-kit; a death by aesthetic suffocation, an empathy attack.

The room emerges as a deconsecrated shrine, sucking in the unwary, tying them by their hair to the weighted furniture. No one who crosses the threshold is unmarked. These psychic tourists escape with modest relics, souvenirs that breed and multiply in their pockets like pieces of the true cross. They propagate a dangerous heresy. They are scorched by shadows that do not belong to any three-dimensional object. Rodinsky is assembled, like a golem, in the heat of their attention. He is present in all the curious and seductive fragments left in this cell. And whatever was ferreted away behind all this stimulating rubbish has completely evaporated.

Chastened, I stand with Fredrik in the domestic ruin of the back kitchen, looking north towards the brewery. The true history of Whitechapel is here, unseen, invisible from the public streets. Lost gardens, courtyards whose entrances have been eliminated, shacks buried in vegetation like Mayan temples – so that only a previous intimacy could establish the meaning of these mysterious shapes. The ground is unused and unlisted: it does not age. You could hack a path into the thicket and converse – as a contemporary – with the dead centuries. You could discover the secret of time-travel: nobody ever ‘goes back'; rather, you
die into what you see, you slow down, choke, peel layers from the bone until you become aware of the stranger crossing the garden towards you, recklessly parting the damp greenery, picking thorns from his wrist – the man who has your face.

At a distance now, in the safety of my study, I write. My pen moves over the paper, as nervously stimulated as an electrocardiogram tracing. The scarlet leatherette diary is open in my left hand. In August Rodinsky interested himself in the laws governing
shechitah
(ritual slaughter); the flawless blade, the uninterrupted stroke. He made notes from the Babylonian Talmud, as codified by Joseph Karo (those fated initials again, denoting aggressive victims and reluctant predators!). I can only repeat, edit, copy – ‘
Damascus… Ahab the Israelite… I and you gods… so take
' – acknowledge the conflicting impulses, or drift into the diary's flattened pre-Columbian world map, with its anachronistic ‘shipping lanes and railways'.

Almost unnoticed, at the side of Rodinsky's room, is a blind passage that leads nowhere, quilted in newspaper bundles, wine bottles, broken slates. A man's naked shoulders rub against the plaster walls, streaking them with blood. His hearing, sensitized by privation, is pitched to the rush of vital fluids within the bricks; to the telltale creak on the remembered stairs; to the public world of the street that is far beyond the reach of his restricting chain.