Keys of Babylon (24 page)

Once or twice I take him to Spiller's to look at the records. But it's getting strange down there. All those apartments they've built block the light. Cardiff used to have this wonderful maritime glow. But it's lost. Cardiff has sold its soul. Like New York.

I showed Dad Bob Dylan's ‘Bootleg Series: Volume 8, Rare and Unreleased'. You know what he said? Not really, he said. I know what he means. Everything comes in a boxed set these days. All the mystery's gone. We never used to think about what was hidden in the vaults. Never used to bother. Or if we did, it was with this thrill of unknowing. Because little known is best known. The mystery was a mystery because it was a fucking mystery. Never demystify life. At least I've learned that. Now every muso's so self aware they're hoarding their own shit and thinking it's gold bars.

I had dinner with Mum and her new hubby when I was last over. Really heavy cutlery but chicken from the house of pain. Free range was the least I expected. Christ, she used to be a vegan. I've changed, she hissed. And so should you.

We'd both had a drink. At least that stays the same. The house is on a promontory and the sea was filling the room. We held each other and looked into the spray coming over the cliff. We're like sisters really. There was a piano there and I plinked out a couple of tunes. Just stay in C, girl, and you can't go wrong. I did ‘Imagine'. Yes, imagine that. And Mum sang along. She sang along with a crystal goblet in her hand and this hideous jewellery all over her beautiful skin. And we cried. We both cried. Brian stood there bewildered. With his brickie's hands. His redbrick face.

He wants to take her on cruises with retired bankers. The bankers who have destroyed the world. I went to the downstairs bathroom. There was a bidet there they wouldn't know how to use. A whirlpool bath with gold taps. Christ,
m
um used to like the Incredible String Band. Time to grow up, Rhiannon, she hissed, when Brian went to get more Valpolicella. Time to grow up, girl.

Yes, Rhiannon. I was about fourteen when the song came out. Stevie Nicks and the reincarnated Fleetwood Mac. Just a gorgeous tune. Mum and Dad used to sing it at me. Not to me. And of course I pretended to hate it. But it's been part of my set for years, a slower tempo, just me and the guitar. Some people at gigs think I wrote it.

Tonight I was going to do ‘I Would Rather Go Blind', that Christine Perfect thing. Just listen to her sing it and you can tell it's real. A woman's perfect pain. But the chords need to be sustained, like with an organ, so it's out. But it's a real bus station song. And I might do that Duffy tune, ‘Warwick Avenue'. Christ, where did that chick come from? Newest kid on the block. And there are so many of them now. The bluesy girls. The winsome girls. Yes, here come the girls.

Maybe the world's trying to tell me something. My visa's up in three months and one of my front teeth is loose. So I eat with a limp. Proclivity they call my problem. Teeth are Dad's problem too. They're down to nasty brown stubs. The junkie's giveaway.

You know why he takes codeine? And all that H? To take away the feeling. The feeling of life. He lies on his bed, comfortably, unutterably numb, while the world slinks past on the Jeremy Kyle Show. His bed's in the front room of our downstairs flat. The shop rider is parked in the hall. Peer through the lace curtain and you'll see him, spark out most of the time. But dreaming. I'm sure he's still dreaming.

In front of me in the queue for the circular the little Mennonite girl looks round. She takes in my guitar case, then my leather jacket. I whisper
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee
.

That kid's got a hard face. Kind of flat. The words don't seem to register, but she goes on looking, keeps peeking at me from under her black bonnet, the hem of her cloak dragging in the wet. Such a serious child. Aw, honey. It's too early for you to be in mourning for the world.

In our back yard on West End Avenue was a porcelainberry vine. I loved the colours of its fruit, their turquoise enamels shining through the fall. Those heartbreaking falls. The berries were like the Navajo jewellery I saw a man selling in the street, where West End joined Eleventh. The earrings and bracelets were pinned to a blanket.

Long ways from Flagstaff, he said to me.

I looked around. Are we? I asked.

I was at Iwo Jima, he said. My brother too. Left him there. I used to help him with his English.

The man's face was dark. Skin like earth.

All he cared about was horses, the Navajo man said.

So why do I remember that? Why do I remember anything?

And now they tell me the porcelainberry is banned in New York. It's apparently a pest. They root it out, use poison spray. Ah well, I think. Ah well.

Our housekeeper would tell us that Mr Rachmaninov used to stay at 502, West End Avenue. Not far from where we lived later on. And yes, there I was, the girl from Dove Street and Kazimerz, become an Upper West Side lady. Well, that's where they told me I come from.

As to West End, I always thought later it was a melancholic avenue. It runs parallel to Broadway and is Broadway's quiet, no, tongue-tied, cousin. West End somehow thinks it might be grand. But really it's relieved to be dark and away from the burlesque. A European street, everybody said.

Yes, it was all mansions, sometimes with faces at high windows. I imagine the composer's face, white, haggard. Another concert that night for the great Rachmaninov. Great Christ, another concert. Surely that's what he would think. His shinyassed tuxedo on its hanger. Or the hateful tails. Like a man dressed for his own funeral. Then downstairs the limousine waiting, the big Phaeton ready to take him to Carnegie, the chauffeur in his purple livery smoking a Lucky on the sidewalk.

Poor Rach. All that concert nonsense when music was simply firelight on snow. The colours of the porcelainberries. And for him, the tunes not coming. The riffs, the grooves as they say on the radio. The ideas. Rach on the wrack. How he longed to get down to it, the housekeeper told me. Down to proper work. Sleeves rolled up, a shirt and dangling braces, the score like a white sheaf exploded around the Bechstein. Yet the music uncatchable in his head.

Yes, I used to imagine the composer. In the front bay. A face up there. A genius made performing flea at 502 on the West End. Such a doleful district I came to think, strong with the smell of exiles. Or that's what people said. So what was that smell? Mothballs and damp astrakhan. Chainsmokers lighting up. And the usual sight? Why, rich Jews of course, and rich Nazis too, standing together, watching their pekes lift their tiny legs to piss against the iron kerb.

Meanwhile, I was listening to the radio. It was fantastic. Little Anthony and the Imperials were always on. A neighbour here in Zichron told me they are still going strong, fifty years later. Don't be ridiculous, I said. How strange is that? And The Excellents. I liked their ‘Coney Island Baby' because I liked Coney Island. Maybe it was there we went on the carousel. Or maybe the carousel was out on Broadway on a Sunday, or in the park. I'm confused.

But then, I've always thought time ran a crooked line. Like a river meandering, so it seems to run backward or even parallel with itself. The green Vistula with the ice in it? No, I can't remember the Vistula. But that's how I imagine it when they talk to me of Krakow. Or the Hudson's dirty sleeve.

In school, I liked geography better than anything except English. I liked the ideas of cliffs and rivers and whole oceans changing their shape. I liked to picture a river that flows both ways, like an underground train. And yes, my own river, the Hudson, too close to home, was such a river. Yes, it flows both ways. I loved that.

So high school was fine. My friend there was Millie. Her address was 3960 Broadway and we'd go to her bedroom with its Keep Out! sign and play her doo-wap records and eat crackers with peanut butter and jelly. Once she took me to 126 Street and we saw the crowds for the Apollo Theatre. It was late afternoon and I still had my school bag but the people were there already to catch a glimpse of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Who were white. So it was a big deal. Some of the crowd didn't like it, and a few of the women hissed at me, the gawky girl from the Upper West Side. But Millie said it was all right. I was with Millie and Millie was a celebrity on that stretch of Broadway, a cool street cat in her tight red trews and hair piled high with a red barrette.

I could see the men looking at Millie but she never glanced back. Not even once. She was an eel wriggling through the crowds and I had to follow as best I could. And Millie would turn to look for me and say don't get lost, and suddenly we were at the back of the theatre and Millie pushed a door and we were in a corridor and then we stepped out into the auditorium. Not a soul about.

All I remember is the smell. Women's perfume. And that lemony stuff the men used. The dance floor was like a lake of black ice. Millie wiggled her hips and spun round on her bottom on the polished blocks. Her ass was just a perfect red heart. So I held my bag like I thought you might hold a boy. Then I hugged it and smooched it, and Millie hooted and then a man chased us back down the passageway and I went home on the 1 Train.

And, yes, I remember the little cabbages. They grew on the sidewalk at West End. Ornamental cabbages with dainty leaves, green going mauve. Cabbages for show? How peculiar. The Kazimerz cabbages would have been eaten, every one. Or so they tell me. Cabbage
zupy
with dark green and pale green shreds. Stinky cabbage soup in every kitchen. I think that's what I'm supposed to remember. But I don't remember. I don't remember the attics where I was kept, or the ocean liner that brought me to New York. No, the first things I remember are the West End cabbages. And the elevator in our building. It had a mirror in it with a gold frame. That's how I came to know what I looked like. Going up. Coming down. A man polished it every day and sometimes I helped.

In 1961 when David asked me to marry him I didn't understand. I was twenty-one, and he was David. I had lived with him for fourteen years in the big apartment. Yes, I came from Krakow. Yes, I was concealed. Smuggled like a parcel from roof to roof. But I thought David was my brother now. David who had never kissed me. His older sister, who was my sister, lived with us on West End too. And their mother, who was my mother. And now he wanted to marry me.

David was exactly my age and at twenty he had started going downtown every day to the bank. With his briefcase, his umbrella. Careful David, his sandy hair already sparse, his wire glasses pebble-lensed.

The week before our wedding he moved out to the Hotel Wales, over on Madison. Sometimes we had all gone there for brunch or Sunday recitals, the whole family. They wheeled the palm trees round on castors. So David was comfortable. I stayed there too on the wedding night, and then we took the train to Los Angeles.

That way I saw America. The highways, the swamps with their night herons. Then the deserts, and one evening a herd of horses running beside the train, wild white eyes and streaming tails outside our window until they veered off. Like stars, I thought, the lather on their flanks. Soon even their dust was gone. Or maybe that was a dream, like everything else. Dream horses in a dream life, the dream horses that go round and round on their carousel, Rachel and David and Nathaniel. Where had I seen that carousel and the horses' names? On the cobbles of Kazimerz? Maybe Coney Island where we went twice a year, I think.

During our train journey there was a sign. Flagstaff it said, and I remembered the Navajo. How small the town was. But the train kept on through the parched land, the red dream desert racing away as we followed the line to Union Station. When I stepped on to the platform I stumbled. Perhaps I fainted. Our sleeping carriage had been so small. We were much too close. But instead of taking me in his arms, David called a porter to give assistance. David wringing his hands. David my brother, David my father. David my husband in his white nightshirt, his spectacles gleaming, his jars of wintergreen and goosegrease upon our sleeping car's
cabinet de toilette
. Yes, my David. Skinny with a pot belly. Once I wetted my forefinger and traced the vein in his cock. Just like my forefinger on page after page of the atlas, following the railways, the roads, the great blue rivers. But he tut tutted and pulled down a handful of hem.

After we returned we stayed on in West End. We had the third floor to ourselves. His sister loved him, his mother needed him, loved and needed David who went downtown every day, a rolled
Times
, a furled umbrella, David who worked for Sachs until his seventieth birthday, and then said, yes, we must go. To Israel. We must go. It's all arranged.

The apartment was sold quickly, his sister provided with a place hidden away near the Nicholas Roerich Museum. West side again, on 107. Another dreary street. More cabbages behind the railings.

Now I sit outside, under the olive tree. David is comfortable in the cool room, the cedar shade over the window. The young man has hoisted him from bed to chair. A young woman will put him back this evening. David will drool, David will murmur and I will spoon him bread and milk. Sometimes I damp his lips with the local wine. Diluted of course. The Baron's wine they call it here, the best wine in Israel. I often take it myself and sit and talk to myself as I always have. And then I will read to David from the English newspaper.