The Credit Draper Episode 6

Uncle Mendel took a poker and with a skilful flick he turned over a parcel of damp newspapers baking in the white embers of the grate. Celia gleefully clapped her hands together. A curious combination of smells began to fill the room – that of wet paper drying and charring, the tantalising aroma of cooking fish, the essence of sweet, dark tobacco.

“And who also was the son of Rachel?” Uncle Mendel asked. “Of Rachel and Jacob? Quick, quick, quick.”

Avram felt Celia poke him so hard he almost fell off the chair. He managed to steady himself.

“Joseph,” he replied. “Joseph was the son of Rachel and Jacob.”

“So he was.” Uncle Mendel nodded his head around the room as if to some invisible audience.

“This is a good Jewish boychik who knows his Pentateuch.”

Avram waited for another question but none came. Instead Uncle Mendel continued to draw on his pipe, making gentle sucking noises as he did so, his watery, melancholy eyes lost to faraway places.

Vision

After a while, the man turned his attention to minding the herring baking on the fire, tipping the bundle up here and there as if some special vision enabled him to see past the newspapers to the progress of the cooking flesh within.

Avram tried to keep still but Celia wriggled in the chair. Avram had already heard Madame Kahn’s complaints about Uncle Mendel’s lapses into silence. She put it down to loneliness.

A man his age should have been married with grown-up children already. Too much time on his own. Travelling around the countryside, schlepping his parcels around. Or stuck up in that miserable flat of his. Or in that broken-down hut in the countryside.

What does he do there all the time? Drinking that awful whisky. Or baking his herring. Baking his brains more like it. Too much time to think. Too much thinking is not good for you. He forgets how to talk to other human beings.

“Only Joseph?” Uncle Mendel asked eventually, prodding the stem of his pipe at Celia.

“No, Uncle. There was Benjamin. The youngest of all Jacob’s 12 sons. But only the second he had by Rachel.”

Uncle Mendel chewed on the white stem, drifting away on some memory. “Uncle Mendel?” Celia prompted. “Yes,” he sighed.

“Is Benjamin the right answer?”

“Of course it is, my dear.”

Celia folded her arms smugly while Uncle Mendel reverted to bobbing his head in rhythm to the consideration of some other thought.

He pulled his pipe out of his mouth, drawing out a thread of spittle.

“Cossacks, Avram. The Cossacks still hurt our people?”

Avram nodded.

“It is a terrible thing. But here you are safe. Here are a good people.”

“They don’t hate us here?”

“No, they don’t hate us here. They don’t have time to hate us here. They are too busy hating each other. Or hating the English.”

“But why do they hate each other?” Avram asked.

Uncle Mendel didn’t answer, for known only to him some significant cooking threshold had been achieved in the grate. “Aha! Dinner is ready,” he announced.

Uncle Mendel took up the poker, nudged the bundle of fish out of the fire on to a large plate.

With dancing fingers, he unwrapped the package, the skin of the herring peeling away easily with the paper to leave the naked steaming flesh.

Uncle Mendel then picked off a piece, passed it to Avram, then another to Celia. “Mind the bones,” he warned. Avram popped the succulent flesh into his mouth. It was delicious.

Two lives

Avram discovered he had two lives now. Back in his homeland there had only been one integrated narrative, where the world of his senses was the same as the incessant chattering going on inside his head.

But here in the Gorbals there existed not only this outer world involving these strangers with their strange language in this strange city – there was this inner world too, quite separate, the world of his dreams.

“What will happen to you, Mama?” he screamed across the chasm of water into the wild eyes of his mother. “What will happen to you?”

“God will look after me, Avram. Don’t worry. God will look after me.”

He clung on to the mast of a raft that was being lashed in its moorings by towering waves as high as a steeple. The sky was so grey it was impossible to see where the ocean ended and the air began.

Water lapped over his feet, slapped at his face, drenched his clothes. Bodies of silvery fish, swept up in the swell, wriggled on the makeshift deck then disappeared over the side with the next sea-burst.

There were other figures on the raft, men with vague, bearded faces. Many men, far too many for such a small cramped craft, but miraculously the limited space coped with their presence.

Engrossed

Avram had already heard Madame Kahn’s complaints about Uncle Mendel’s lapses into silence. She put it down to loneliness

Papa Kahn and Uncle Mendel could have been among them or they could have been the prophets he had seen illustrated in biblical textbooks. Elijah, Isiah, Jeremiah, Obadiah, Zehariah.

They were engrossed in tasks with winches and thick wet ropes that coiled and snapped among them like wild snakes as the raft slid up and down on the belly of this ocean beast.

The men murmured as they worked, creating a deep bass tone that resonated like a synagogue prayer above the roar of the ocean. He reached out towards his mother, towards the harbour jetty which lurched in and out of his view with each heave and suck of swell.

“What will happen to you, Mama?” he shouted.

His mother spoke effortlessly, yet her words still reached him clearly over the buffeting wind. “I told you. God will look after me. Why do I have to keep repeating myself ? God will look after me.”

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