The County of Birches Read online

  “Serves you right for always following me around,” she flings at my fleeing back.

  * * *

  Lillian and I leave High Banks one morning in the rain, keeping our heads down so it doesn’t get into our hoods. “Hurry.” Lillian pulls me. The puddles splash our knees. The drumming on the pavement picks up its rhythm. Rain seeps through my mackintosh, bats my face. Lillian trots faster, and I try to keep up. Soon the rain pelts us in earnest.

  “Quick!” She drags me to a massive doorway, pushes me inside.

  Out of breath. Gasping and gagging on the sudden dryness. So quiet, except for the rain thudding against the thick door and up on the roof, a quiet that feels foreign and off limits. The arched ceiling vaults above us, dark beams crisscrossing. A stuffy smell thick with chalk, dense and dry, clogs my nostrils. Air like heat that’s too heavy to take in. My eyes light on something horrid, a twisted human shape hanging from its arms. There’s no air here, so high and huge I’ll smother. Scratching at the doors that won’t yield to my measly weight. Starting a sound I don’t realize is mine.

  “Idiot!” Lillian thumps my shoulder, shoving me out of her school.

  * * *

  The grey stucco house looms behind me. I’m always conscious of its overbearing presence. I play on the stone slabs in the rockery, hopping from one to another. I know they’re stone and grey, even when they’re slippery with moss. I’m not fooled. Nor by the tinkly flowery bells that sometimes disguise them. Underneath, they wear the forbidding aspect of this place.

  “Such a good child.” My mother uses me as an example for Lillian. “She can play by herself for hours. She doesn’t disturb anyone. Look how she tidies up after herself without being told. Lili, your little sister behaves like a woman already.”

  A tidy little woman, I wear my cardigan outdoors buttoned all the way down. I trail my hand along the fence separating the neighbour’s property from High Banks. Behind it, the neighbour’s blind dog snuffles and squirms its old black length trying to find me. I crouch on my side of the fence calling it by name.

  “Here Georgie, here boy.”

  “Don’t torture the beast,” my mother half-heartedly chides. “He thinks you have food for him.”

  Georgie doesn’t take walks with his owners. He’s too fat. The best he can do is waddle once around the front lawn when he isn’t too stiff. Monahan Avenue is very quiet before the older children come home from school. I whisper to Georgie through the wood slats.

  “Here Georgie, hi Georgie.” He noses towards me. I never touch him, but I can tell his coat is thick and soft. I wonder what it would be like to put my head on the warm furry pillow of his sighing belly. I talk to Georgie sometimes and listen for the quick pant of his response. I hope he doesn’t eat so much he will burst, like my mother predicts. I would miss him.

  ALLURES OF GRANDEUR

  On weekends, we often ride into London at the top of the lurching double-decker to pay my uncle’s family a visit. I like going back to the first house we’d entered when my family arrived in England. Three cousins had spilled from the front door as Laci-bácsi brought his little curved-back car to a stop. I stared out the oval window in the back. Boys. Much bigger than me, bigger even than my sister Lili. All limbs and knees. They pulled up short beside the postbox, quickly self-conscious. One of them slapped its tin side.

  “Hi, no call for that!” Though I couldn’t understand English I could tell from my uncle’s voice that his reproach wasn’t sharp. “Give us a hand then with the boot.”

  The boys, grateful for something to do, dragged our cases from the sloping trunk of the car. My sister Lili didn’t seem to notice them. She ran her finger along some writing on the postbox, making out the letters. “Laurence W. Freed,” she sounded out in Hungarian. “Is this you, Laci-bácsi?”

  When we go into London for a visit, my mother always brings along something warm and fragrant in a pan. Our cousins and their mum peer into the pan and sniff suspiciously, rejecting the delicacies my mother makes us on special occasions only. I feel offended on her behalf, but Mummy says never mind, the dish would be wasted on the English. Uncle Larry rubs his slim hands like a cricket and gives Lili and me a wink before taking a chair into their pantry. There he drops his carefully cultivated manner and gulps my mother’s offering straight from the pan. On our way back to Purley, my father remarks indulgently that in the pantry Laci resembled his growing sons. Yes, Mummy says, satisfied with the success of her dish. With it she managed to reduce her flawlessly British brother—however fleetingly—to the greedy boy of their continental childhood.

  My cousins aren’t to know that we’re Jewish, but we might let on with their mum. If we’re at their house on Sunday, their mother pulls on her gloves pointedly, then herds them, scrubbed and grumbling, out to church. My uncle stays behind with us, but no one says anything for some moments after the door shuts behind them. We always refer to our cousins as “the boys,” but in the wake of their departure we think of them as “his sons.” His, but he lets them be raised in the faith of the oppressors.

  Our Jewishness is best disguised. There was a time and a different place where being Jewish got you killed. That was before me and Lili; the world is better now. But on Friday evenings, my mother draws the drapes before she lights the Sabbath candles. The candelabra is what remains of two families’ silver. It’s been smuggled over many borders, sewn into a satin-covered eiderdown. On Fridays, Apu takes it from a drawer in the dining-room sideboard and lovingly scrapes off the waxy remains of the previous week’s blessing. It is safer in England; in Hungary we didn’t light candles at all. But my parents don’t trust the tolerance of their Purley acquaintances.

  We hide our Jewishness as a courtesy. We have no desire to offend those who have welcomed us. Colonel Reid from across the road, bringing a cutting from his garden, might be taken aback by the presumption of Hebrew candlesticks on a High Banks mantel. What might Lillian’s friends from Christ Church School make of Hebrew lettering on the spines of the prayer-books my father salvaged from the rubble of his birthplace, if we put them in plain view in the bookshelf?

  On weekend walks along Purley’s winding, hedge-lined roads, we sometimes stand in front of the school’s double doors. “It’s not really a church,” Lili feels it necessary to remind us. Christ Church is a state-run school housed in what used to be a church building. Still, when we take in its arch and look up at the steeple, we can’t help but wonder what we are doing here. How have we arrived at this?

  High Banks, where we live, is the family home of Miss Tait. She is headmistress of the school where Uncle Larry teaches, and she shares a house nearer the school with her sister. She had asked Uncle Larry a lot of questions about the uprising in Hungary, her interest making it clear that it is decent to provide asylum for refugees of the revolution. Because she didn’t ask about the war that had really changed everything, I presume it isn’t as respectable to harbour Jews. Miss Tait has lent us the house with an open heart, but if she were to find out we are Jewish, it would reflect poorly on Uncle Larry. This doesn’t make sense to me. The Golden Past Lili and I have heard about was distinguished by its Jewishness. All the cherished Lost World was by nature Jewish. Were my father asked what manner of person he is, he would answer “I am a Jew” before “I am a man.”

  Once in a rare while Miss Tait pays us a visit. She is my parents’ most honoured guest, but really she is a nice English lady who pats my head and asks Lillian what she’s been reading. She lets Apu lead her around the manicured flower beds.

  “Mr. Weisz, you’re a genius. Do you know how long it’s been since the myrtle bloomed?”

  My mother produces one continental delicacy after another from the dim kitchen where the table we children eat on has been dusted in flour for days.

  “Surely you didn’t make all this yourself, Mrs. Weisz!”

  When Miss Tait leaves, my mother presses upon her packets of pastry to take back to her staff and to her sister.

 
“You’re too good to me,” Miss Tait sighs, as though defeated in the contest of kindnesses.

  The big house in which we live is flanked by immaculately maintained properties. Miss Tait said Apu would be doing her a favour to pull the neglected grounds together, but we know it is really she who is magnanimous. On hearing that Uncle Larry’s brother-in-law, recently fled from Hungary, was an agronomist by profession, she asked if he would do her the kindness of moving his family into High Banks and tending its garden.

  “Garden!” gasped my mother when she first set eyes on the house. Looking up at High Banks from Monahan Avenue, I saw more windows than I could count.

  Uncle Larry had planned a surprise. He had described the garden but deliberately didn’t mention the house. The house and the genteel neighbourhood were his joke. My parents had arrived in England with just thirty British pounds, and within weeks they would be residents of a grand house in Purley. Enjoying his prank, and pleased with what he could furnish, Uncle Larry awaited their response. First my father nodded, as though in consent. Born into a wealthy family, Apu didn’t take concerns about money too seriously. When money was a question, Apu would say with complete assurance, “Don’t worry, God will provide.” “God will provide,” promised my father, who had been stripped by this same God of all he had held dear. “God will provide,” he affirmed without a trace of sarcasm. He looked up at High Banks, then chuckled along with Uncle Larry. God had certainly provided.

  I stared at the house, not catching the adults’ humour. It was much bigger than Uncle Larry’s, but, I thought, not as friendly. Grey, square, stolid, it overlooked Monahan Avenue impassively. Mummy’s exclamation of surprise and Apu’s delight in the rockery that ran down to the street didn’t dispel my mistrust. Lili had bounded up the stone slabs to the thick door at the top. I gazed up at my big sister, who had receded with the height. Impatient to get in, she shuffled and scuffed her shoes on the doorstep. It disturbed me how diminished she looked up there, dwarfed by the house, her bare legs skinny beneath the pleats of her skirt. Small to begin with, I might disappear in the house’s shadow.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Lili insisted. “Can’t we go inside?”

  It smelled chilly when we entered High Banks. Uncle Larry pulled open drapes as we passed into each room. The light made the dust dance, especially as he lifted the throws that protected the furniture. My mother ran her finger along the braided borders of chesterfields. My father kept one hand in his pocket, the other on my back urging me forward.

  “See here, Dana,” said Uncle Larry. “Shall we make the lady dance?”

  The lady in a pink ball gown fit in his two hands. Something pretty shone in her dark hair. He held her up to the window, releasing the china’s glow, and wound her at the bottom. When he placed her back on the small round table she twirled slowly to a tinkling waltz.

  “How’s that, then?”

  I gave Uncle Larry my hand and let him show us the rest of the house.

  Lili shouted, “Look at this, there are stairs behind the pantry!” Her shoes clicked her excitement over the parquet. I heard them clatter down the hall. Uncle Larry squeezed my hand reassuringly, but the house still seemed dark and cold, shrouded under cotton wraps as though guarded against our intrusion.

  Mummy has taken on the house like an opponent. No one expects her to beat the years of disuse from its rooms, but she won’t be outshone by the neighbours. She intends to make it clear that we are as good as the English. She and my father are well educated and well bred; she won’t let it appear otherwise. She engages one room after another. Even those sealed and never used have their day in the sun when she opens their windows and beats out the dust. Urns and ornamental vases taller than I am are stripped of their thin cotton wraps. They look bland and shapeless until she unveils their exotic forms.

  “For goodness’ sakes!” she cries, rocking back onto her heels as though the colours on the vase were indecent. “Where did this come from?”

  I ripple the lush silky fringes on lampshades never lighted, breathe their dust, stroke the plush insides of rolled-up rugs.

  “Can’t you stay out of my way? You’re always under my feet!”

  I’m intrigued by these collectibles that seem to have no real place in the lives of the English. Mummy speculates about them at times, but after wiping them clean, wraps them up without regret. No one feels any sentiment for these forgotten foreign objects.

  “Allures of grandeur,” Apu pronounces, poking his head in to see what Mummy has uncovered. I’m not sure what he means. “Allures of grandeur” is how he refers to the roots, position and wealth of his lost family. They had put their faith in “allures” when it is clear to us now that they should have given up all and run for their lives.

  “Allures and folly,” Apu sighs defeatedly before retreating to his garden. He makes it sound as if we were compelled to come to this place and succumb, as well, to the blandishment of “allures.”

  Grandeur notwithstanding, my parents work at a factory that makes televisions. I study the television at my uncle and auntie’s. Auntie Christine is tall and slim with curls on top of her head. She speaks only English, unlike my mother who, in addition to Hungarian, can make herself understood in five other languages. Auntie Christine’s English, however, has all the proper tones and glib expressions.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” she says, tweaking my ear as I gaze at the dead screen in the sitting room at their house. Rarely is it animated. It sits there, a dumb fixture with a doily under its two-pronged antenna. The speaker is covered in a textured crisscross design. I run my finger over the brushlike velvet and think no wonder the sound comes out fuzzy. The television cabinet is as sturdy as a chest of drawers. I can see how heavy it would be to load into a delivery van. My father is not a young man, nor brawny. He is round and soft with a head that is in all ways his largest part.

  “Do you want it on then?” asks my auntie. “There’s nothing to see until teatime.”

  On a couple of evenings each week, Uncle Larry teaches my father English by telephone. Apu struggles with the words in the newspaper. He sits at a little tiered corner stand, the Times spilling awkwardly from his lap, while Lili does her schoolwork at the dining-room table. I assume he chooses the small stand because he typically allows his children the biggest and best. He takes the smaller table, not because it happens to be the one on which the telephone rests but because of the kind of father he is and how we figure in his life. I imagine Uncle Larry comfortable in his sitting room, one light leg swaying casually over the other as he listens to my father read the headlines haltingly. Apu traces the lines of newsprint with one hand and holds the voice of Uncle Larry in the other. He declaims each word of world news laboriously, ensuing with a stream of commentary in Hungarian. He and Uncle Larry spend a half hour this way, mutually edified.

  Uncle Larry teaches Auntie Christine, too. My mother barely conceals her pleasure in Auntie Christine’s trouble with her studies. Auntie Christine wears rings with fat twinkling stones my mother says are real, “God help poor Laci.” Any mention of the real stones is followed by the epithet “God help poor Laci.” But Uncle Larry is the one who does the helping from what I can see. He wants Auntie Christine to get her diploma so she can teach school. My mother, who was a teacher in Hungary, bitterly acknowledges that by the time Auntie Christine finally passes her exams, she will still be stuffing English televisions with tubes.

  Auntie Christine fails, but not because she isn’t smart. During the examination her breath comes out too fast and light and the words on the paper begin a Charleston. As she describes this condition to Mummy, she grabs me by the hand, kicks her long legs behind her and breezily glides us down the hall to the sitting room. Auntie Christine’s rings sparkle merrily as she dances. I don’t see why God shouldn’t continue to help Uncle Larry buy them.

  One Saturday, Auntie Christine drops by in the little car to take Lillian to the shops to buy Christmas gifts for her school chums. Mummy f
eels slighted. Lili hasn’t said anything to her about shopping.

  “If that’s what she wants to spend her allowance on, it’s her money,” Mummy says. Lili winces, wishing Mummy wouldn’t always sound so grudging.

  “It’s not the same having boys, you know,” says Auntie Christine, trying to smooth things over. “Boys just come along because they want you to buy them something. Girls take pleasure in choosing. This will be a treat for me.”

  Mummy doesn’t answer. In her opinion shopping is a sport of the recently elevated peasant class; people of quality don’t need to show off money. She doesn’t like Lili wasting her few pennies on the spoiled children of strangers.

  “You’re so lucky,” continues Auntie Christine, finger-combing Lili’s tresses. “Girls are much more fun to shop for and dress. Shall we find a velvet ribbon, Lillian, while we’re at it? A nice wine red to go with your dark hair would be just the thing for the holidays.”

  Mummy pushes back her chair noisily from the kitchen table, where she’s been peeling potatoes, and wipes her hands vigorously on her apron.

  “Lili has plenty of ribbons from home, unused in her drawer, some of them silk.” But velvet is what the English girls wear at Christmas; I can tell by the expectant look on Lili’s face.

  Later that evening, Mummy holds the wreath Auntie Christine bought at arm’s length, like something smelly: “She thinks she may bring this thing into our home and tell us what we must do!”

  Apu says, “What harm? A little decoration to make the neighbours happy? It’s nothing.” He’s so rooted in himself such trivialities don’t matter. He had assumed the role of master of High Banks with ease, but also humour. Noting the heavy brocades and sensitive chintzes and lion’s-paw table legs, he jested, “You see, we cannot escape the allures of grandeur.” For Apu the wreath isn’t Christian or offensive, just another of God’s little jokes he has to forbear.