2009 - We Are All Made of Glue (6 page)

“Georgine? Thenk Gott you come. You heff to get me out of here.”

“I’ll do my best, Mrs Shapiro. When you’re better. What happened?”

“Slipped on the ice. Wrist brokken.”

She waved her left hand at me, which was plastered and strapped, the fingers protruding from the dressing like bent grey twigs with splashes of chipped nail varnish at the tips.

“You heff to get me out. Food is terrible. They mekking me eat sossedge.”

“Shall I tell them you want a kosher diet?”

“Kosher pick and mix. No hem no sossedge. But bekkon I like.” She winked a mischievous eye. “A little bit of something does you good, isn’t it?”

The sister in charge was a small brisk unsmiling woman with scraped-back hair who sniffed at the idea of pick and mix, so I asked her to put Mrs Shapiro down for kosher. She scribbled it in the file, then she added, “She doesn’t seem to be registered with a GP. We need her NHS card or some form of ID to verify her entitlement.” She must have seen my jaw tighten. “It’s the rule now. Just a box I have to tick.”

When I came back to her bedside, Mrs Shapiro was sitting up looking chirpy and trying to get into conversation with the woman in the next bed, who was lying on her back, breathing through an oxygen mask.

“Mrs Shapiro,” I asked, “are you registered with a doctor?”

“What for I need the doctor?” She was in a fighting mood. “These young boys, what do they know? Only to ask shmutzig questions. When you last been on the toilet? Please stick out the tongue. What kind of a doctor says this? In Germany we had Doctor Schinkelman—this was a real doctor.” A faraway look had come into her eyes. “Plenty medicine. Always red. Tasted of cherries. And plenty tablets for
Mutti
.”

“But do you have a medical card? Any form of ID?”

She sighed dramatically and passed her good hand across her brow.

“Seventy year I been living in this country, nobody ask me for no card.”

“I know,” I soothed. “It’s like Sainsbury’s—the surveillance society. But you need something to show how long you’ve been living here. What about the bills on the house? Council Tax? Gas?”

“All papers are in the bureau. Maybe they will find something.” She sat up and blinked rapidly. “They are looking into my house?”

“I’m sure it’s just a formality. I’ll go and get them, if you prefer.”

She turned around, gesturing with her strapped-up hand.

“Key to my house is in the coat.”

In the bedside locker was a dark brown astrakhan coat with a turned collar and cuffs, elegantly fitted at the waist, and conspicuously moth-eaten, with bare patches down to the leather all along the back. She saw me examining it.

“You like this coat? You can heffit, Georgine.”

“It’s very nice but…”

It smelled of old cheese.

“Please. Tek it. I heff another. What’s the matter—you don’t like it?”

“…I think it’s a bit small for me.”

“Try. Try it.”

I made a show of taking off my duffel coat, and trying to squeeze myself into it. It had a heavy satin lining torn under the armpits, with a sheen of grease around the buttons and cuffs, but still it had a residual touch of luxury. Once, about fifty years ago, it had been a fabulous coat.

“It suits you good, darlink. Tek it. Is better than your coat.”

True, my brown Bat Woman duffel coat, even in its 1985 heyday, had been in a lower league.

“It’s lovely. Thank you. But look, it doesn’t fit.” I pretended to struggle with the buttons.

“You must be more elegant, Georgine. And look at your shoes. Why you don’t wear mit heels?”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs Shapiro. But I like to be comfortable.” I slipped my hands into the generously deep satin-lined pockets. “Where’s the key?”

“Always in the pocket. You must be more elegant if you will catch a man, Georgine.”

I rifled through the pockets. There was a disgusting snot-caked handkerchief with traces of dried blood, a box of matches, a cigarette butt, a sticky boiled sweet with bits of fluff stuck to it, half a crumbled biscuit that had covered everything in greyish crumbs, and a pound coin. No key.

“Should be in there. Maybe is fallen in the leaning.”

The key had slipped through a hole in the pocket, and was shaking around in the hem of the lining, along with a stub of black eyebrow pencil, two more cigarette butts, an apple core, and some loose change. I fished them all out through the hole and put them in the other pocket.

“Here it is. I’ll have a look in your bureau and see if I can find something official to keep them happy.”

“You must look only in the bureau. Not everywhere poking, Georgine.” She was smoothing the bedclothes with a nervous movement. “Darlink, I am worrying about the Wonder Boy. If you go to my house, you will please put some food for him? Other cats can catch, but this poor boy he is always hungry. And next time you come, Georgine, you bring some cigarettes mit you, okay?”

“I don’t think smoking is allowed in hospital, Mrs Shapiro.”

“Nothing is allowed.” She breathed a dramatic sigh. “Only sleeping and eating sossedge.”

In the next bed, the woman with the oxygen mask had started to make a horrible gurgling noise. A couple of nurses rushed up, and drew the curtain around the bed. The gurgling continued. There was a clatter of instruments, and low voices talking urgently.

“You heff to get me out, Georgine.” Mrs Shapiro gripped my wrist again. “Place is full of krankies. Everybody dying.”

I stroked her hand until her grip relaxed. “You’ll be home soon. Would you like me to bring you anything?”

She gave me an appealing look.

“If you could bring the Wonder Boy…”

“I don’t think they allow pets in here.” Especially not Wonder Boy, I was thinking, with his disgusting habits. “What about your photo of Artem? Would you like to have it with you? I’m sure they’d allow that.”

She shook her head. “Too many teefs in here. But Wonder Boy nobody will steal.”

Well, she was right about that. Rather than getting drawn into a plan to smuggle Wonder Boy into the hospital, I changed the subject, thinking maybe reminiscence would settle her, for old people often feel more at home in the past than in the present. And I was curious to know the end of the story she’d started to tell me that night over the fish dinner, twisted up in her convoluted English.

“You never finished telling me the story about Artem. How he got to England. How you met.”

Letting go of my wrist she sank back on to her pillow.

“It is a long
megillah
, Georgine.”

“You said he ran away to join the partisans in the forest.”

“Yes, in Naliboki. Almost six months he was living mit the Pobeda partisans.”

§

Shlomo Zorin and his Pobeda band of partisans had set up a family camp along the same lines as the Bielski camp in a clearing in the vast Naliboki forest in Belarus. Here they sheltered any Jews who made their way there, and even sent scouts back into the ghettoes to organise escapes. Artem Shapiro undertook several of these missions, using stolen papers; his bright blond hair, inherited from his grandfather, allowed him to pass himself off as a Christian.

“Such a beautiful blondi, he was. He could pass easy.” Mrs Shapiro’s voice wavered. “So one day he made his journey back to Minsk.”

Early in the autumn, while there was still plenty to eat in the woods and before the snows started, Artem set out to find his mother and sisters, thinking to lead them back to the forest with him. But the Minsk ghetto, when he arrived, seemed like a ghost town of living skeletons shuffling around the once-familiar streets with death in their eyes. He learned from a former neighbour that his mother was dead—she had died of starvation, or maybe of a broken heart, shortly after he had been taken away. One of his sisters had died of typhus. No one knew what had happened to the other sister. Someone told him that she’d been taken to Auschwitz; someone else told him that she’d used her mother’s gold teeth to bribe a local brigand, and had got away, “To Sweden. Or mebbe to England.”

After that visit to Minsk, something broke apart inside Artem’s heart. All the music died. A terrible chorus of wailing filled his head night and day, so he could neither sleep nor work nor think. In a situation where morale is crucial, he felt himself becoming a drag on the Pobeda camp, undermining everyone’s spirits with his own misery. One morning, after a night of wailing dreams, he smashed his violin against a tree. Then he said goodbye to Zorin and headed eastwards through the silent snow-laden forests towards his birthplace at Orsha. Maybe he was hoping to make contact with surviving members of his family, but when he arrived in the spring of 1942 the Orsha ghetto had already been liquidated. Thousands of Jews had been shot and the remainder had been herded on to freight trains.

“They put them on the trains but they been transported to nowhere. They been poisoned where they waited, in the wagons. The Russian prisoners dug up a mass grave and buried them.” She paused. Her breath came slow and rattly. “Truly they wanted to kill us all.”

Artem did not return to Zorin. Such a fury possessed him that simply surviving in the forest was no longer enough. The chorus of wailing resolved itself into a single long howl—the howl of a wounded animal ready to kill. He headed north to join up with a group of Russian partisans who were harrying the German army, which had by now encircled Leningrad. The first time he ambushed a German jeep with a tree felled across the road, he taunted them with savage delight: “
Ich bin der ewigejude!
”

“Shut up that nonsense!” bawled Velikov, the commander of the unit, “just shoot!”

The partisans were trying to open up a supply route into the beleaguered city. It was a dangerous mission, for the German grip on Leningrad and the Finnish corridor was almost total, but by early 1943 Meretskov had brought the front forward from the east, and a few supplies started to get through. Artem was with a group of partisans who were driving a sleigh loaded with potatoes and beet across the frozen Lake Lagoda when they came under fire from a German patrol. The other three perished instantly, along with their stubby-legged Mongolian pony, but Artem was only wounded in the shoulder. He knew that running away over the ice in winter would be certain death; instead he crawled into the sleigh, hid under the wolfskins which covered the beets, and waited for his destiny to catch up with him. Either the Germans would take him, or the Russians would rescue him, or he would freeze to death. Everyone knows that hypothermia is a pleasant drowsy death. At least I won’t die of hunger, he thought. He waited and listened, trying to staunch his wound with a cloth wrapped around a lump of ice. He could hear shooting and voices calling, but they seemed to be getting further away, not closer.

Then started the snow to fall.

He must have fainted or drifted off to sleep, for he lost track of how long he’d lain there, when he was jerked into sudden consciousness by a sharp jolt of the sleigh. He peeped from under the snow-heavy wolfskins, and saw that it had been harnessed to what he thought was another pony that was trotting over the ice into the whirling blizzard. Seated above and behind him, he could hear two men talking. He caught the sound of laughter and a whiff of cigarette smoke. Were they talking German or Russian? He couldn’t tell.

“And all this time the pony was walking in the snow and the ice, and the snow was falling all the time, and the pony was walking on in the freezing snow and on and on over the ice and on and on…”

She stopped. I waited for her to continue. I thought she must be remembering and maybe she found the memories too painful to talk about. But after a while I heard a gentle snoring and I realised she’d fallen asleep.

§

“When do you think Mrs Shapiro might be able to come home?” I asked the sister at the desk on my way out.

“It’s too early to say. We’ll see how she gets on,” she replied without looking up.

“But it’s only a broken wrist, isn’t it?”

“I know, but we’ll have to assess her home situation. We don’t want her to go back and have another fall. At her age, she might be better off in residential care.”

“Why, how old is she?”

“She told us she was ninety-six.” She looked up. Our eyes met, and mine must have betrayed my astonishment. “Isn’t she your gran?”

“No, she’s just a neighbour. I live a couple of streets away. I don’t really know her that well.”

Could Mrs Shapiro really be ninety-six? But why would she lie about her age?

“Another reason it’d be useful to have some ID.”

Biopolymer

I
spotted Wonder Boy lurking in the porch of Canaan House as I walked up the path. He was ripping the guts out of a bird he’d caught—it looked like a starling. It was still alive, struggling between his paws. Feathers were everywhere. He bolted off into the bushes as he saw me coming, the bird still flapping in his jaws. This cat can well take care of himself, I thought. Usually I’m fond of cats but there was something horrible about Wonder Boy. I tried to imagine catching him, stuffing him in a bag, and taking him on the bus to the hospital. No way.

The key Mrs Shapiro had given me was only a Yale, in fact any enterprising burglar could have just smashed the frosted glass and put his hand through to turn the lock. I pushed the door open against a heap of mail that had piled up on the inside. As soon as I stepped into the hall the stink hit me, a bitter must of cat pee, damp and rot. I put my handkerchief up to my nose. Out of nowhere, Violetta materialised around my ankles, mewing pitifully. Poor thing—she must have been locked in the house for at least three days. I picked up the mail and flicked through it in case there was anything that needed attention, but it all seemed to be junk. There was even an offer for a Salisbury’s Nectar Card.

I followed Violetta through to the kitchen. A chaos of dirty plates, dead cups with remains of disgusting brown fluids, empty tins and greasy ready-meals packaging was spread across every grimy surface. In a cracked pot sink under the window, a stack of unwashed dishes and congealed food remnants was soaking in scummy water on to which a cold tap was drip-drip-dripping. The gas cooker was crusted with dark brown grunge, and so old that it had levers instead of knobs. There was an Aga, but it was unlit and seemed to be used for storing old newspapers. A dank mouldy chill pervaded everything. I shivered. Even in my warm duffel coat I was cold.