The Credit Draper

Episode 10

Celia began to cry. “Avram. Give me something. Quick. Quick.” “Give you what?” “A farthing. A morsel of food.” “Me? I’ve got nothing. You give them something.”

“What? I’ve nothing either. Wait.” She lifted her arms, undid the ribbon tying up her hair. “Here,” she said, holding out the thin fabric. “Take this.”

A skinny arm snaked out from under the cloth, snatched at the ribbon. Celia turned back to look at him.

“They live like animals,” she said, continuing to sob. “It’s not right. It’s just not right.”

“Come,” he said, gently taking her hand, feeling her warm fingers quickly lock into his own. “We should go.”

Greatest fear

Sometimes, Avram would awake in the middle of the night to the sound of a window rattling, the creak of a door or the clang of the ash-cans being emptied, convinced that in the darkness he could see Mary’s shadow approaching, ready to pounce and drag him off to the backlands.

But even then, in these moments of his greatest fear of her, he remembered the fate of Moses the Lawgiver.

He would clench his fists and whisper into his pillow: “I will not be angry with her,” until he fell back into restless sleep.

His only respite came at weekends when Mary had the Sabbath and Sunday off. Her last job on a Friday afternoon was washing the entranceway to the close and when she had finished and departed for the weekend, Madame Kahn gave both him and Celia blocks of pipe-clay to decorate the passageway.

Together they tried to outdraw each other with elaborate patterns on the steps and the sides of the close to welcome Papa Kahn on his return from work.

“Which steps are nicer?” Celia would always demand of her father.

“This week I think your steps are nicer. But last week I remember Avram’s designs were very good too.”

The silver-plated thimble winked at Avram from under an armchair in the lounge. He dropped down on to his knees, picked it up, tried the tiny cup on each of his fingers. As he settled it snugly on his thumb, he remembered how he had once done the same with a thimble of his mother’s. The memory surprised him as it had been some time since he had thought of her.

But that was how it was with her, suddenly these details popping up like little dybbuks at his shoulder, catching him off-guard, forcing the images of her to come flooding back, reminding him of the hole in his life where her love should have been.

He pushed the thimble down on his thumb, began twisting it at an angle until it raised a welt on his skin. It wasn’t enough.

He wanted to pierce his flesh, see and smell his blood, but the edges were too rounded to produce the cut.

“You seem sad.”

It took him some time to realise Nathan had spoken. Such a small, pale, frail child who possessed the same dark circles under his eyes as his Uncle Mendel, a mark of birth that seemed to absorb the pain of the world around him into their blackness.

Anxieties

Nathan was three years younger than Avram, yet his face bore all the anxieties of an old man, his head full of adult questioning.

“No, I’m not,” Avram countered a little too harshly, then felt guilty for startling the boy.

Nathan continued staring at him, head dropped to one side, eyes watery with concern. “Yes, you are. I can feel it.” “Feel what?”

“Your sadness.”

Avram shrugged.

“Why are you so unhappy?” Nathan persisted.

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.” “Sometimes I think about my mother.” “When was the last time you saw her?” “In Riga. By the ship. She left me there.” He closed his eyes. He was back on the frozen streets of the Russian port listening to a sullen-faced fiddler play.

The violin music pleaded at his ears while his mother held on tightly to his mittened hand, her face glowing red in the cold like a doll’s painted cheeks as she spoke to him of his father and the music and when she was young.

He stamped his feet against the chill as his mother talked on, her words soaring in the crisp blue air to the swirl of the bow or dropping to an agitated staccato as she muttered into her scarf.

When the violinist stopped, his mother stopped too, somehow angry at the loss of accompaniment to her rant. She scattered a few coins into the battered violin case then moved off in the direction of the docks, dragging him with her.

He turned to Nathan. The boy was sobbing.

“What’s wrong now?” Avram asked. “Mary.”

“Mary?”

“Listen.”

Avram held his breath. He could hear Madame Kahn’s voice.

“Stay here,” he told Nathan. He opened the lounge door, padded to the back of the hallway where Papa and Madame Kahn had their bedroom. The door was open slightly.

Reflection

From the reflection off the wardrobe mirror, he could see Madame Kahn. She was beating Mary with the back of a hairbrush.

Thwack, thwack, thwack. Just like she might pound the dust out of a carpet.

Mary was squirming on the floor trying to protect her head against the onslaught with her hands and her bare forearms.

Madame Kahn, her face red, her hair hanging loose in a way Avram had never seen, knelt over the maid, swiping at her back and face.

“Why?” Madame Kahn screamed. “Why? Why? Why? Why must you steal from me like this?”

“A bit of soap,” Mary sobbed back in a respite between the blows. “It was only a bit of soap, ma’am. Just a bit of soap.”

Nathan was three years younger than Avram, yet his face bore the anxieties of an old man, his head full of questioning

More tomorrow.

The Credit Draper is the first in a trilogy by J. David Simons. He has written five novels and is published by Saraband. His work can be purchased at saraband.net