Ibrahim & Reenie (10 page)

‘You're homeless?' she said.

‘Yeah. That's how come I'm in the squat.'

‘You ain't got parents?'

Casper shifted uncomfortably, looking down at the joint in his hand and the scruffy trainers on his feet. ‘Yeah. Well. My mum's dead, but I've got a dad and a stepmum.'

‘Why don't you live with them?'

‘They're just…' he allowed the sentence to drift into silence, and shook his head. ‘I just don't need them.'

‘You're living in a squat, love. I'd say you need them. Do they even know where you are?'

A nervous laugh. ‘What's this? Twenty questions?'

‘They must be worried about you.'

‘Yeah, well, my dad's, like, the CEO of this big company, and my step mum's a university lecturer, and it's like, well… I'm just this big disappointment to them, so, you know, fuck them. Besides, if they think I'm gonna turn into just another
drone
like them, they've got another think coming.'

Shaking her head, Reenie laughed and turned to the girl next to Casper.

‘What about you? Are you homeless?'

‘No,' said the girl, not quite as well-spoken as Casper but her voice hardly came from the gutter. ‘I'm a traveller. I live in a camp near Keynsham.'

‘Another traveller,' said Reenie. ‘And you?' She pointed across the fire to a man who resembled nothing so much as a shabby Jesus.

‘I'm homeless,' said Shabby Jesus. ‘I live in the same squat as Casper.'

‘Homeless,' said Reenie, still shaking her head. ‘You're homeless, and you're homeless, and you're a traveller. Have any of you ever actually slept rough?'

Casper sat up straight and frowned at her. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Have you ever slept rough? On a street?'

‘Well. Not as such. I mean, my friend Rory and I… we went to London once, for this party, and we ended up sleeping in this churchyard because the guys we were meant to be staying with…'

‘How long was that for?' said Reenie. ‘A night? Doesn't count. How about you?'

Shabby Jesus shook his head.

‘You neither. Neither of you ever had to sleep rough, but you call yourself homeless.'

‘Yeah, well that depends on your definition of homeless, doesn't it?' said Casper, indignation creeping into his voice. ‘We're in a squat. Bailiffs could come in there any day and turf us out.'

Reenie laughed, leaning back to take her face away from the glow and the heat of the fire.

‘Don't tell me you're homeless,' she said. ‘Because I know homeless when I see it, and you're not homeless. You can play at being homeless, and you can live in your squat, and it's all good fun, but if those bailiffs do come and boot you out, and there's no other place for you to go, he'd have you back. Your dad. He'd have you back in a second. And here's another thing. If, God forbid, anything ever happened to him, and you lost him, you'd have him back in a second, too.'

A silence fell around the fire, as if her words had been a clap of thunder, allowed to echo and roll for miles, uninterrupted. Before that silence could curdle, the girl next to Casper huffed and said, ‘Man, that's brought me right down. Give me a toke on that.'

‘Homeless isn't a choice,' said Reenie. ‘It's not some lifestyle you pick. It's something that happens to you. Why would anyone
choose
to be homeless?'

‘Maybe we don't want to live like everyone else,' said Shabby Jesus. ‘Maybe we don't want a semi-detached in the suburbs, growing flowers and playing golf and all that shit. Not everyone wants that.'

‘Then fine,' said Reenie. ‘Don't grow flowers and don't play golf. Don't buy a semi-detached in the suburbs. But don't you tell me you're homeless, neither, because you're not.'

Casper glowered at her. ‘I thought you were cool,' he said, his voice cracking with disappointment. ‘I thought you were, like, this really wise old woman. I thought you were one of us.'

‘Who said I was wise? I never said I was wise. I'm not saying I'm wise now. But you're right, I
am
old. I've seen a lot of things and met a lot of people. Right now, you're young. You think nothing matters, that nothing you do now will ever have any consequence, but it will. There's no such thing as the past. The present, the here and now, it only exists because of the past. Everything you've said and done before today. And the things you say and do today, they'll decide where you are and who you are a year, ten years,
fifty
years from now. Believe me.'

She wasn't sure if she'd offended them, or given them food for thought, and she didn't care. If she felt anything at all, it wasn't embarrassment, or the awkwardness of the silence that followed, or even their sullen looks – it was guilt. She wondered if they had seen through her. She had made it sound as if she'd never had their opportunities, their choices, but she had.

She'd always had the choice. To leave, to stay. To keep going, to go back. Always a choice. Like now. She could have gone back, could have given up yesterday, the day before, the day before
that.
Turned around and gone home. She could have done that, but didn't. Kept going. Always going. Never stopping. Because stopping meant it would catch up with her. Everything she'd done, all the lies she had told and the mistakes she'd made would come crashing up behind her until she couldn't move, couldn't breathe. So she kept moving, kept going, and hoped to God or whoever was listening that she could get away with it. And these kids, they had the same look about them, the same stubbornness. They wouldn't give in, and if they did, no matter what she had told them, a part of her would think less of them for it.

She could have told them all this, but she didn't. Nothing she said to them would come out quite how she meant it, and she couldn't resolve those tensions, those inconsistencies, between the many different people she had been. Refugee. Daughter. Runaway. Lover. Wife. Widow. Each word the shorthand for a million others, and none of them slotting together neatly. She couldn't defend one part of her life without condemning another, couldn't extol one virtue without exposing a dozen sins.

If anything, she thought, life was like the Russian dolls, the Matryoshka, Mrs Ostroff kept in a glass cabinet. No matter how many times Reenie had played with them, she would always forget how many there were; there was always one smaller, each dictating the shape of its container. That centre, the smallest doll, informed the shape of all that followed. So what, for her, was the smallest doll?

That first night away from home? Stepping onto the District Line train? Paying her tube fare with pennies? Walking out of the house without a key? Packing a bag with all her things? No. Earlier than that. Much earlier.

Perhaps the day her father came home with a new friend, Vera. The young war widow from down the street. Reenie had recognised her. Younger than Reenie's father, maybe not even old enough to be Reenie's mother. And Vera's handshake was a limp, insipid kind of handshake, though perhaps Reenie thought this because she knew already Vera was more than a friend. She'd heard snatches of gossip in shops, talk of Albert Lieberman ‘courting' and ‘romancing'.

Romancing? Had they actually met her father? Albert Lieberman didn't wear his heart on his sleeve. If he wanted for company, for intimacy, he'd never said so. If he'd fallen madly in love with this woman, he never said so. If it was purely lust, well, his daughter found that hard enough to consider, let alone believe.

But Vera hardly fitted the fairy-tale mould of Wicked Stepmother, no matter how hard Reenie tried framing her that way. She was only seventeen years her senior, but so quiet, so dowdy, so
goyish
. How was it possible for a woman so young to be so dull? And how was it possible for a woman so dull to exert so much influence over Reenie's father?

From the minute they had moved into their house on Harold Road, just a few doors away from the Ostroffs, Albert Lieberman had kept the one surviving photograph of his wife framed on their living-room mantelpiece. The portrait, soft focus and sepia-tinted, was taken when Reenie's mother, Irina, was just nineteen, and was as stiff and mannered as any other portrait from the time, but it was the only image of her mother Reenie had. From that one, inexpressive picture she tried to imagine how her mother must have looked when she smiled or when she laughed, when she scowled or when she cried.

As a child, Reenie pretended to remember her mother vividly. When her father, in his broken English, told her stories about Vienna she'd say, ‘Yes, Papa. I remember that.' And she'd genuinely believe that she remembered, but in those forced memories her mother was forever nineteen years old, and inexpressive, and every memory was sepia-tinted.

On the morning of his marriage to Vera, Albert Lieberman took the photograph of his first wife from the mantelpiece and placed it somewhere far from view, never telling Reenie where he'd hidden it. Though this was done in such an understated way, there was something in her father's expression, some deep, unspeakable agony, that she could never bring herself to ask him why he'd done it, or to even ask him where the photograph now was, and once the second Mrs Lieberman was in their home, the first, Reenie's mother, was never spoken of again. Sometimes, if her father and stepmother were out, or otherwise busy, Reenie would look for the photograph, searching through the few boxes of belongings Albert brought with him to London, but the search was always fruitless.

The only photograph she found was one of her father, taken when he was a young member of the Vienna Maccabi gymnastics team, but even then she barely recognised him. In it, Albert Lieberman was broad-shouldered, athletic, like Johnny Weissmuller or Buster Crabbe. His eyes and his smile hinted at something mischievous and knowing; a happy-go-lucky confidence. On seeing the photograph for the first time, Reenie spent minutes wondering if it was some unknown cousin or uncle. Only the hint of a familiar scar, near his hairline, gave it away. It had to be her father, couldn't be anyone else. But what could have happened to him? And if this was what They – the unnameable ‘They' – had done to him, what had they done to her mother?

Had there been uncles and aunts, other members of the family, in London, Reenie might have spoken to them about her mother, asking all the questions she had yet to ask, but Albert was the only one to have made it. Theirs had been a large family – three sisters and a brother on her mother's side, two sisters and three brothers on her father's, and with fifteen cousins in all, but they'd heard nothing of them since the end of the war. Albert and Reenie were, most likely, the last ones left.

By this time, neither Reenie nor her father were observant. While staying with the Ostroffs, she had attended the
cheder
at their synagogue every Sunday until she turned ten, and had picked up a little Yiddish from them but all that stopped when Albert found them a home. There, they were to speak only in English, no matter how hard her father might struggle, and if a neighbour spoke to him in Yiddish, Albert demurred, preferring to battle on in English than default to a language he'd used only rarely back in Vienna. To him, Yiddish was the language of the
Ostjuden
, Jews from the east. He was an Austrian, he spoke German, but even that language was now poisonous to him.

A few months after his arrival in London, the Ostroffs took Albert and Reenie to the Grand Palais, to watch Meier Tzelniker in
The Merchant of Venice
. Perhaps they had thought Albert would enjoy it. Perhaps they thought a night of Shakespeare, in Yiddish, in London would make the perfect initiation to the city. Whatever they'd thought, he hated it, squirming throughout the play. Maybe he could have withstood Shylock's great speech had it been spoken in English, but in that old language it was too much. Or perhaps it was an immigrant's shame. In Vienna he'd been a school teacher. In London, his hesitant English saw him working in a warehouse. Why should he watch plays in Yiddish? How would this help? And so he taught his daughter no more Hebrew and refused to foist any more religion on her. Some had survived Europe with their culture and beliefs intact, reinforced; survival alone the proof of their importance. Albert Lieberman was not one of those people.

He was more than happy to marry Vera at the registry office on Plashet Grove, a subdued day that ended with the three of them – Albert, Vera and Reenie – eating a joyless supper at a West End restaurant. Then, little by little, things began to change. The pictures on the walls, the newspaper they read, the programmes they listened to on the radio. Not all at once, of course. That might have been too much. It took months for this to happen, but finally Vera gathered up the nerve to steer her new husband toward that mysterious grey building of stained-glass windows, creaking pews, and dog-eared Books of Common Prayer, and within a year of their marriage Albert Lieberman was spending his Sunday afternoons in church.

At first the community said nothing. Albert was the survivor of something never discussed, at least not openly, among the grown-ups, not even in gossip, and perhaps this alone shielded him from the criticism any other man would have faced. The only person to say something, to say anything, was Mr Ostroff, and it was the last time he and Reenie's father ever spoke to one another.