I refused to cry. Boys do not. But Mrs. Chard did. She hugged and kissed me and called me her darling, while I quailed in terror at so much emotion that both did and did not involve me; then quietened at last to heaving sobs, she fell to her knees again, snatched the shoes off, and left me to resume my own.
After our fit of shared passion she seemed unwilling to face me. When she did she was as cool as a schoolmistress. She stood watching me sweat over the laces, fixing me with a look of such plain hostility that I thought she might at any moment reach for a strap. The tap-shoes had disappeared, and it was clear to me that if I were ever to mention them, here or elsewhere, she would call me a liar and deny they had ever been.
Of course all my mother's predictions, in Uncle Jake's case, came true. He did go to gaol, though only for a month, and as he got older his charm wore off and the flash suits lost their style. The days of Cagney and George Raft gave way to years of tight-lipped patriotism — to austerity, khaki. The Americans arrived and stole the more stunning girls. Uncle Jake was out of the race. Something had snapped in him. He had bluffed his way out of too many poker-hands, put his shirt on too many losers. He began to be a loser himself, and from being a bad example in one decade became inevitably a good one in the next — the model, pathetically threadbare and unshaven, in a soiled singlet and pants, of what not to be. I came to dread his attempts to engage my ear and explain himself. His rambling account of past triumphs and recent schemes that for one reason or another had gone bung ended always in the same way, a lapse into uneasy silence, then the lame formula: "If you foller me meanings.” I was growing up. I resented his assumption of an understanding between us and the belief that I was fated somehow to be his interpreter and heir.
“Poor ol’ Jake,” my father would sigh, recalling the boy he had grown up with, who had so far outshone him in every sort of daring. He would every now and then slip him a couple of notes, and with his usual shyness of emotion say, "No mate — it's a loan, I'm keeping tag. You can pay me when your ship comes in.”
My mother had softened by then. She could afford to. So far as she knew I had escaped contagion. “Poor ol’ Jake,” she agreed, and might have felt some regret at her own timidity before the Chances.
So it was Uncle Jake who came to spend his days in the third bedroom of our house, and as he grew more pathetic, as meek as the milk puddings she made because it was the only thing he could keep down, my mother grew fond of him. She nursed him like a baby at the end. It's odd how these things turn out.
A Change of Scene
1
Having come like so many others for the ruins, they had been surprised to discover, only three kilometres away, this other survival from the past: a big old-fashioned hotel.
Built in florid neo-baroque, it dated from a period before the Great War when the site was much frequented by Germans, since it had figured, somewhat romanticised, in a passage of Hofmannsthal. The fashion was long past and the place had fallen into disrepair. One corridor of the main building led to double doors that were crudely boarded up, with warnings in four languages that it was dangerous to go on, and the ruined side-wings were given over to goats. Most tourists these days went to the Club Mditerrane on the other side of the bay. But the hotel still maintained a little bathing establishment on the beach (an attendant went down each morning and swept it with a rake) and there was still, on a cliff-top above zig-zag terraces, a pergolated belvedere filled with potted begonias, geraniums, and dwarf citrus — an oasis of cool green that the island itself, at this time of year and this late in its history, no longer aspired to. So Alec, who had a professional interest, thought of the ruins as being what kept them here, and for Jason, who was five, it was the beach; but Sylvia, who quite liked ruins and wasn't at all averse to lying half-buried in sand while Jason paddled and Alec, at the entrance to the cabin, tapped away at his typewriter, had settled at first sight for the hotel.
It reminded her, a bit creepily of pre-war holidays with her parents up on the Baltic — a world that had long ceased to exist except in pockets like this. Half-lost in its high wide corridors, among rococo doors and bevelled gilt-framed mirrors, she almost expected — the past was so vividly present — to meet herself, aged four, in one of the elaborate dresses little girls wore in those days. Wandering on past unreadable numbers, she would come at last to a door that was familiar and would look in and find her grandmother, who was standing with her back to a window, holding in her left hand, so that the afternoon sun broke through it, a jar of homemade cherry syrup, and in her right a spoon. “Grandma,” she would say, "the others are all sleeping. I came to you.”
Her grandmother had died peacefully in Warsaw, the year the Germans came. But she was disturbed, re-entering that lost world, to discover how much of it had survived in her buried memory, and how many details came back now with an acid sweetness, like a drop of cherry syrup. For the first time since she was a child she had dreams in a language she hadn't spoken for thirty years — not even with her parents — and was surprised that she could find the words. It surprised her too that Europe — that dark side of her childhood — was so familiar, and so much like home.
She kept that to herself. Alec, she knew, would resent or be hurt by it. She had, after all, spent all but those first years in another place altogether, where her parents were settled and secure as they never could have been in Poland, and it was in that place, not in Europe, that she had grown up, discovered herself, and married.
Her parents were once again rich, middle-class people, living in an open-plan house on the North Shore and giving al fresco parties at a poolside barbecue. Her father served the well-done steaks with an air of finding this, like so much else in his life, delightful but unexpected. He had not, as a boy in Lvov, had T-bone steaks in mind, nor even a dress factory in Marrickville. These were accidents of fate. He accepted them, but felt he was living the life of an imposter. It added a touch of humourous irony to everything he did. It was her mother who had gone over completely to the New World. She wore her hair tinted a pale mauve, made cheesecake with passion-fruit, and played golf. As for Sylvia, she was simply an odd sort of local. She had had no sense of a foreign past till she came back here and found how European she might be.
Her mother, if she had known the full extent of it, would have found her interest in the “morbid,” meaning Jewish. And it was perverse of her (Alec certainly thought so) to prefer it to the more convenient cabins. The meals were bad, the waiters clumsy and morose, with other jobs in the village or bits of poor land to tend. The plumbing, which looked impressive, all marble and heavy bronze that left a green stain on the porcelain, did not provide water. Alec had no feeling for these ruins of forty years ago. His period was that of the palace, somewhere between eleven and seven hundred B.C.,when the site had been inhabited by an unknown people, a client state of Egypt, whose language he was working on; a dark, death-obsessed people who had simply disappeared from the pages of recorded history, leaving behind them a few common artefacts, the fragments of a language, and this one city or fortified palace at the edge of the sea.
Standing for the first time on the bare terrace, which was no longer at the edge of the sea, and regarding the maze of open cellars, Alec had been overwhelmed. His eyes, roving over the level stones, were already recording the presence of what was buried here — a whole way of life, richly eventful and shaped by clear beliefs and rituals, that rose grandly for him out of low brick walls and a few precious scratches that were the symbols for corn, salt, water, oil, and the names, or attributes, of gods.