Downriver (24 page)

A news cutting, disturbed by my agitated shuffling of the pages, floats from the diary on to my desk: a codling moth, or flake of ash. I try to avoid it, but it sticks to my hand. A photograph: hollow cheeks, a dead-eyed man with the shadow-moustache of malignant fate. An involuntary traveller covering his face against a photo-degraded blizzard. ‘
And here is Yasha, seen in this Nazi-released picture after his capture
.' Why had Rodinsky preserved this image from among the mounds of unscissored newspapers? I was glad that I did not have to know.

I reseal the diary into its jiffy bag, wrap it in felt, secure the package with string. I drip hot wax over the knots. I can no
longer allow that book to draw breath in my room. But – as the power of its dictation subsides – all the annotated ephemera of the Princelet Street attic also pales, and bleaches from sight. What remains, and will not be displaced, is a solitary brass key, lying on the shelf in Rodinsky's wardrobe. Everything else, I am now certain, is a sorcerer's smokescreen.

IV

The looped tape ran on with its mesmerizing impersonation of silence. We concentrated on the squeaking and grinding of its untended mechanism. Woolf Haince was alert, cradling his toy like a case of pet locusts; ear cupped, he nodded in recognition. ‘From the fourth corner, six to ten princes,' he murmured, ‘the fire.'

Joblard, at the turret window, could see the dim bulb in Arthur's hutch, a lemurian smear; but ‘The Boy' himself had sunk from sight, sparked out, without memory. He lived in the eternal present of the vagrant, submerged, primed to mere survival. Arthur was a drowned man, returned. He had been wiped clean by his hours in the water. He was ‘Monty'. His flesh was soft, rotten blue, unmarked by razor: a prebendary pout outlined in shabby down. He was dying slowly into his portrait, exchanging breath with a single captured moment: post-coital sulks daguerreotyped on to florid card. Ruined Arthur was smoking-room bait; a gamy valentine stitched in lemon satin. The lie of his life was lost, inscribed on a sentimental flyleaf, bound in canary vellum, pillaged by bumbailiffs; auctioned, sacked, snatched, scattered. He cannot escape from any of it – rectal damage,
sobranie
, flushed velvet: he remembers nothing. A lurid afternoon, the clouds spinning his sickness; he lurches towards the river. He has been filed and forgotten; wormed, silver-fished, tanned to powder. Arthur in his pomp: long-necked, a curious centre parting; lavender water, spoiled Bloomsbury. Virginia
Stephen dressed for some jape in her brother's cricket togs! (And, incidentally, there is an extant snapshot of Vanessa batting,
c.
1892, while sister Virginia cradles the ball, like a harmonica, to her pursed lips. Vanessa's forward ‘push' is hampered by a woefully inadequate, cack-handed grip. Her front leg is nowhere. And her eyes are either firmly shut, or grounded in despair. In other words, she looks every inch the missing England opener.) Arthur Singleton is transfixed by a guilt he has done nothing to earn. In justice, he is doubly punished.

As the weakened vagrant went under, let go, the reels speeded: the machine lurched and spat. The tape was flesh. The Grundig was skinning Arthur alive, peeling his memory. The spools travelled so fast, they did not move at all. Escaping sounds were coarsened in a spindle of autopsy bandages. Sound was light. Woolf made frantic motions, as if lathering his hands with soap. His tongue, still glowing like sodium vapour, lizard-flicked for imaginary flies. This passage of the tape was tidal, impregnated, sweeping over obstacles. There was a shower of static: panicked feet running the cobbles.

A moist darkness muffled the world, wrapped the tower in living felt, sooted the floorboards. Woolf waved us back; so that we formed our own rectangle, as we pressed against the walls of the circular chamber: Joblard, myself, Woolf and the Grundig. Suddenly there was no focus for our attention; we made no attempt to listen. The tape took over our critical functions: it drew our breath, massaged our heart-pumps. We were submerged in our own reveries. We had forgotten if Woolf was recording or playing; transmitting, or forcing us to transmit to other, as yet unidentified, attics.

I drifted into a sort of uninspired lethargy: sounds without images, bands of mute colour, violet-grey lesions, persistent green moulds, puddles of crushed chalk. Joblard's roll-up had ignited his mouth: it spread in a lycanthropic grin. I became convinced that his lips were on fire, his cheeks were salt and his eyes had rolled into scorched feather-balls. His whole head was a dog of
flame. And now – at this moment – the tape began to release gasps of fear; the asthma of sex-seizures, closed throats, trauma. It grated and rattled. The pain was intense, lungs shredding as they drowned in hot sand. I had to close my eyes and cover them. But it was useless. The tape was ‘passing'a worm of clotted black blood. Absurd guitars and hollow Tijuana brass had infiltrated the cupboard walls, the boards clattered and shook with stamping heels. Mad skullhouse laughter, halothane submersion: the words of the chorus stretching into phantom Yiddish. We were helpless, slithering towards extinction; ‘wetbrained' like a six-day wine school, retching on our own bad air.

The rim of the porthole-window was a spinning disk of heat, in which it was possible to transcribe the cracks and dirt-veins as runic violations, bad will, attempts to seize the power of an ill-directed sacrifice.

The sound of a loose tape-end, repetitively thwacking against the spool, died: the machinery was running down. Nothing was moving. A faint spiral, or fountain of light, lifted in an uncontrolled vortex. It was more a comical irrelevance than any kind of grail or chalice: a trumpet in a sham séance. The voices of which it was composed competed for the dominant roles in a meaningless operetta. We had begun to ‘see' – or perhaps to be seen – but that was not astonishing, and would not open the path to the field we desired, without daring to approach.

In the morning, over a late breakfast in the Market Café, Woolf asked if we had experienced it. ‘Yes,' I said, ‘the terror of being trapped underground by fire, choking on black smoke. I couldn't breathe.'

‘Fire?' replied Joblard. ‘You mean drowning, going under. I saw black trails of river-slurry sliding from your nostrils. You were going down for the third time in the corner of that room. Then mud packed close around my skeleton. I couldn't raise my hands from the floor. I was a living fossil; lying beneath the Thames, watching my own past float over my head, exhibitionist and unforgiving.'

Woolf Haince, post-human, nodded; mumbled; picked up and set down his canvas satchel of paints and brushes. He refused to adjudicate between our competing visions. Or to tell us what we ‘should' have seen. Nothing surprised him: he lived at such a pitch of nerve that every moment was his first. He was not implicated in his own destiny. He had seen the worst, and passed through it. He was stamped and registered in a book that was marked for the furnace. He made no claim for this place, above any other.

We walked with him, and we walked alone – Woolf had withdrawn into an impenetrable cocoon of melancholy – up Wilkes Street towards the Heritage Centre. A little, pigtailed girl with polished black shoes and tailored overcoat was standing in the doorway of a refurbished Georgian residence, plucking at the handle of her new travelling bag; while her father, impatiently stretching his cuffs, rotated on his heels, staring up and down for the taxi he had ordered. The perfect proportions of his Doric doorcase with the regional rustication, so little used outside Spitalfields, gave him no comfort. ‘Do stop that, darling,' he scolded. And ‘darling', recognizing the danger signal, obeyed. The desired cab was, in fact, stalled within thirty yards of its goal; the cabbie cursing and mouthing, leaning on his horn, trapped behind a double-parked van, into which a sharply cased pair of Bengali disco-dancers were waltzing a herd of heavy-odour leather coats, for the traildrive ‘Up West'. They could have given the girl a lift to Knightsbridge, and lowered Daddy's blood pressure which was beginning to pump the mercury, gathering itself for the big bolt, as he
heard
the crash of markets, screen-glitch, the runaway numbers, the futures that were all used up.

Cornering into Princelet Street, we paused to admire Woolf's handiwork, the
trompe-l'oeil
versions he had painted over the plasterboard windows of the synagogue. But, before we could advance on Brick Lane, Woolf plucked at my shirt-tail and dragged me into the building. In the hallway was a table, on which had been spread a rack of sponsored booklets, produced
for the Museum of the Jewish East End: everything you never realized you needed to know about ‘East End Synagogues' or ‘Yiddish Theatre'.

‘The fourth corner! Six to Ten, Princes,' Woolf insisted, stamping his plimsolls, ‘the address! Here, this street, last century, used to be called “Princes”, not “Princelet”. Got changed, didn't it, 1893? Too many, they said, princes in the East End. January 18, 1887, remember, the Hebrew Dramatic Club? Lenin spoke there once, they're trying to get the money.' He held the red guidebook up against his face, pretending to read, turning the pages, backwards and forwards, until he found the passage he wanted. Then pointed across the road to the Club's exact location. He closed the book, recited by rote, at speed; a frantic, unpunctuated single rush of breath.

‘William Cohen, a weaver of Brick Lane, Spitalfields, described what happened to a reporter from Reynolds Newspaper:

“The piece played was the ‘Spanish Gypsy Girl' and it being a favourite in this quarter the club room in Princes Street was literally packed… Everything went smoothly up to the last act, and five minutes after that had commenced I heard the sounds of a disturbance in the gallery. I thought at first it was only a fight, but presently I heard a cry that the gas was escaping, followed by a shout of fire. A fearful panic was created: everyone rushed towards the doors. Simultaneously someone turned out the gas; the building was then enveloped in darkness… the screams of the women and children were deafening and heartrending… presently some candle lights were brought on to the stage, and then I saw a fearful sight. Round about the doors bodies were piled up to the height of several feet… the stream coming down from the gallery had met the stream from the body of the hall and every minute some one was falling, only to be trampled upon. Presently a policeman appeared on the scene…”

‘Seventeen people lost their lives in the tragedy. In fact there had been no fire, and the inquest failed to establish whether there
had indeed been a gas leak, or whether, as Abraham Smith the manager suggested, the accident might have been deliberately caused by the jealousy of a rival clubowner, Mr Rubinstein of the Russian National Club in Lambeth Street…'

I walked with Woolf through the body of the synagogue. Potted histories, simplifications, and reproduced photographs were tacked to the walls – maps of the Diaspora – nailing us to a censored version of the past. The names of the dead, and the amounts of their family donations, were painted on panels beneath the Ladies' Gallery.

‘Lovely bit of lettering, that,' Woolf offered his approval, turning away from me towards the place where the Ark would have been kept, bending his head. ‘The fire was first,' he said, ‘before the tape, before I could trap and hold it. Fire against water. It was close behind me, scorching my heels, burning the shadows. Fire is the essence of voices. It is what you cannot reduce to ash. It's all that's left. Last night I saw nothing. I have never seen anything.'

‘But there was no fire.' I couldn't resist playing the pedant. ‘It was a false alarm. Someone imagined the smell of gas, someone else freaked out and screamed. Claustrophobia, a mass hallucination. Skulduggery by rival anarchists. A premature panic reaction, anticipating the…'

‘No cellar fire,' Woolf grunted, chin on chest, making a confession. ‘
It was our fire, transmitted
: the fear I can never see. We lifted it last night, gave it entrance. And the skins of those poor people blistered, came away in flaps and patches. The shock singed their coats, blackened their hair. They were like limbs of timber, raked from the ashes. Our self-inflicted terror gained access to that Princes Street Club and caused the first shriek from some exhausted working woman.'

Joblard, who had wandered upstairs for another look at Rodinsky's room, now rejoined us. He wanted to know what it was that Woolf had seen in the night.

Woolf shook his head, shuffled back towards his faked
windows. He had seen nothing. Neither had Joblard anything to report from the golem's attic. Bottles of rare dust, books, an unmade bed, the calendar with Millet's ‘Angelus'. He was moving across the room to tear off the leaf for January 1963 (which for some reason caused him irrational annoyance), when an unexpected light from across the street caught his eye: flames breaking from the ground, a basement transformed into a clay oven. He smelt gas, a solution of bitter almonds. He had taken up the key from the wardrobe and – pressing it to his forehead – had drunk all the coldness of the metal, calmed himself. His skin was marked, flushed with the jagged, angry imprint. He replaced the key, with enormous care – his hand trembling – so that it lay once more,
precisely
, within its own outline in the dust of the shelf. Nothing in the room had been disturbed by his presence.

V

Still high, and not yet ready to come down, I thought I'd drop in at Fredrik's house on my way home, and feed him a selection of these latest picaresque retrievals; sound him out, see if we could work them into the Spitalfields film – which was, I suspected, a dead duck, well on its way towards the proverbial ‘spike'. ‘Look here, no problem,' Fredrik reassured. ‘We've got a production number, so we're OK. Yes?' I'd read these entrails before. When a property's ‘hot', you get a phonecall every day, in the late afternoon, as soon as the producer comes in from lunch. Then it cools to once a fortnight – in the morning: from the production secretary. Then silence. Alarmed for the fate of your loving months of research, you crack, lose your cool, ring in. The office has been given over to a think-tank of graduate juveniles who are working up the fillers for the new culture season. Our bossman, we learn, is taking a well-deserved sabbatical at Oxford, recharging the batteries, browsing in libraries (who knows where that could lead?), locking horns with some radical frontline
thinkers, and punishing the claret. He was – so the word went – ‘lunched out', and had taken to snapping, ‘But where's your justification?' And: ‘I'll have to take that one upstairs.' His wife couldn't get a decision out of him on next year's holiday plans, and his boyfriend did not know who was kosher for the dinner-at-home list.