III
Fredrik Hanbury was on the phone early. A being of marvellous enthusiasm, he drove directly at whatever was out there to be grasped, with all the centrifugal desperation of a man who has somewhere lost time and is determined to recover it — whatever the cost. He had turned up a tale that might prove to be the kernel of our Spitalfields film: the myth of the disappearance of David Rodinsky.
Rodinsky, a Polish Jew from Plotsk or Lublin or wherever, was the caretaker and resident poltergeist of the Princelet Street synagogue: an undistinguished chevra without the funds to support a scholar in residence. He perched under the eaves, a night-crow, unremarked and unremarkable — until that day in the early 1960s when he achieved the Great Work, and became invisible.
It is uncertain how many weeks, or years, passed before anyone noticed Rodinsky’s absence. He had evaporated, and would survive as municipal pulverulence, his name unspoken, to be resurrected only as ‘a feature’, an italicized selling point, in the occult fabulation of the zone that the estate agents demanded to justify a vertiginous increase in property values. The legend had escaped and the double doors were padlocked behind it; the windows were sealed in plasterboard versions of themselves. Rodinsky’s room was left as he had abandoned it: books on the table, grease-caked pyjamas, cheap calendar with the reproduction of Millet’s ‘Angelus’, fixed for ever at January 1963.
The Newcomers, salivating over an excavated frigacy of chicken, followed by smoked collops and green flummery, had discovered a quaint fairy tale of their own — without blood and entrails, a Vanishing Jew! They fell upon it like a fluted entablature, or a weaver’s bobbin. The synagogue, complete with dark secret, passed rapidly into the hands of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre; under whose sponsorship, with the aid of a good torch, it is possible to climb the damaged stairs and — by confronting the room — recover the man. ‘He’s all about us,’ whisper the shrine-hoppers, with a delicious shiver.
Fredrik’s forefinger jabbed against my chest in uncontained excitement; an aboriginal pointing stick, a magnetized bone. It was his cudgel and his compass. We charged south along Queensbridge Road, over the humpback bridge and into bounty-hunting territory. Over his shoulder, Fredrik tossed a scarf of wild cultural references. His method was to heap idea on idea, layer after layer, until the edifice either commanded attention or collapsed into rubble. Leaving him, if he was lucky, holding one serviceable catchphrase: ‘a post-hoc fable of the immigrant quarter’. The things Fredrik noticed were the things that mattered. He had about a yard’s advantage over me in height. He could stare, without stretching, into bedroom windows. Today he was magnificently Cromwellian, fanning his moral fervour under a bouncing helmet of Saxon hair.
‘This is Poland,’ he shouted, ‘old Kraków. The attics, the cobbles; rag-pickers scavenging a living out of nothing. Unbelievable! The landscape of the Blitz. Brandt’s photographs. Any day now we’ll have acorn coffee and shoes made from tyres.’
We bounded down the Lane — I was jogging steadily to keep up with him — shunned the hot bagels, passed under the railway bridge. I noticed the old woman who always stands smiling against the wall, not begging, nor soliciting charity, but ‘available’ to collect her tithe from the uneasy consciences of social explorers.
‘Chequebook modernism,’ Fredrik spat at the Brewery’s glasshouse façade. ‘By reflecting nothing but its own image, this structure hopes to repel the shadows of past crimes. Listen, I’ve been reading the journals of the Quaker Brewmasters — fascinating — did you know families actually starved to death on this spot, had their fingers chewed off by their own dogs?’
The turn into Princelet Street, from Brick Lane’s fetishist gulch of competing credit-card caves, is stunning. One of those welcome moments of cardiac arrest, when you know that you have been absorbed into the scene you are looking at: for a single heartbeat, time freezes.
We are sucked, by a vortex of expectation, into the synagogue, and up the unlit stairs: we are returning, approaching something that has always been there. The movement is inevitable. But we also sensed immediately that we were trespassing on a space that could soon be neutralized as a ‘Museum of Immigration’: as if immigration could be anything other than an active response to untenable circumstances — a brave, mad, greedy charge at some vision of the future; a thrusting forward of the unborn into a region they could neither claim nor desire. Immigration is a blowtorch held against an anthill. It can always be sentimentalized, but never re-created. It is as persistent and irreversible as the passage of glaciers and cannot — without diminishing its courage — be codified, and trapped in cases of nostalgia. But we ourselves were ethical Luddites, forcibly entering the reality of David Rodinsky’s territorial self: the apparent squalor and the imposed mystery.
There was no mystery, except the one we manufactured in our quest for the unknowable: shocking ourselves into a sense of our own human vulnerability. We were a future race of barbarians, too tall for the room in which we were standing. We fell gratefully upon the accumulation of detaiclass="underline" debased agents, resurrectionists with cheap Japanese cameras.
We dug, we competed, we whispered our discoveries. There was the hard evidence of a weighing-machine ticket, wedged into a Hebrew grammar, that presented Rodinsky at twelve stone twelve pounds (what numerological perfection!) on 2 August 1957. We estimated his height by holding up an ugly charity jacket from his wardrobe. We felt a footstep-on-your-grave tremor as we read his handwritten name in an empty spectacle case. We sniffed at the boxed bed in its corner, and the rugs that had coagulated into planks. We fondled pokers, gasmasks, kettles. We scraped at the mould in the saucepans. We would have interrogated the rats in the skirting boards, or depth-profiled the vagrants who had skippered in this deserted set. We knew the names of the films that Rodinsky had attended, and the records he had played. We snorted dust from the heaps of morbid newspapers; sifted foreign wars, forgotten crimes, spasms of violence, royalty, incest, boot polish, dentures and haemorrhoids.
Books were everywhere, covering the tables, spilling out of drawers and boxes: dictionaries, primers, code-breakers, histories, explanations of anti-Semitism. Inversion, agglutination, fusion, analogical extension were Rodinsky’s familiars. He took a Letts Schoolgirls’ Diary — ‘begun Tuesday 20 December 1961’ — and converted it into a system of universal time. Julian, Gregorian and cabalistic versions tumbling into the Highway Code, and out again into Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin or Greek. There was a desperation to crack the crust, to get beyond language. ‘KÍ-BI-MA… SPEAK!’
‘It’s a lock,’ as the TV boys say. The Carnival Season would soon be over, and Sonny Jaques would be shuttling back from the Caribbean, refreshed and ready for another round of discussions, rewrites, revisions, lunching drafts. But we’d deny him even a cheese dip until he agreed to see this room for himself. It is the prize exhibit, a sealed environment; even the light breaks hesitantly through cracks in the boards that cover the windows.
Rodinsky’s diary-script reveals one last frenzied charge at the cuneiform tablets, the king-lists. We are shaking out locusts and cinders. The final entry is almost illegible. ‘By he she / aren’t so not take.’ ‘Not take.’ The command is ignored, Fredrik slips into his pocket the scarlet document the curators have ignored. In failing to feature the Letts Diaries, they missed the chance to turn the Princelet Street synagogue into as big a commercial attraction as the Anne Frank House. They removed everything else: the books with colour plates, the ziggurat snapshots, all the significant bric-a-brac. Urchins and sneak-thieves completed the job, cargoculting the swag to the fences of Cheshire Street and Cutler Street.