The Tailor of Panama (14 page)

It was my own idea, Sergeant. . . . I did it because I hated the warehouse, Sergeant. . . . I was highly angry with my Uncle Benny for all the hours he made me work and didn't pay me for, Sergeant. . . . Your Honour, I have nothing to say except I greatly regret my wicked actions and the grief I have caused to all who loved me and have brought me up, my Uncle Benny specially. . . .

Benny is very old—to a child, as ancient as a willow tree. He comes from Lvov, and Pendel by the time he is ten knows Lvov as if it were his own home town. Benny's relations were humble peasants and artisans and little tradesmen and cobblers. For many of them, the trains that took them to the camps provided them with their first and last sight of the world beyond the shtetl and the ghetto. But not for Benny. The Benny of those days is a smart young tailor with dreams of the big time, and somehow he talks himself out of the camps and all the way to Berlin to make uniforms for German officers, though his real ambition is to train as a tenor under Gigli and buy a villa on the hills of Umbria.

“That Wehrmacht
shmatte
was number one, Harry boy,” says the democrat Benny, for whom all cloth is
shmatte,
never mind the quality. “You can have your best Ascot suit, your finest-quality hunting breeches and the boots. They were never a patch on our Wehrmacht, not till after Stalingrad, when it all went downhill.”

From Germany Benny graduates to Leman Street in the east of London, to set up a sweatshop with his family, four to a room, and take the garment industry by storm so that he can go to Vienna and sing opera. Benny is already an anachronism. By the late forties most of the tailoring Jews have risen to Stoke Newington and Edgware and are plying less humble trades. Their places have been taken by Indians, Chinese and Pakistanis. Benny is not deterred. Soon the East End is his Lvov and Leman Street the finest street in Europe. And it is in Leman Street a couple of years later—so much
Pendel has been allowed to know—that Benny's elder brother Leon joins them with his wife, Rachel, and their several children, the same Leon who, due to the said explosion, impregnates an eighteen-year-old Irish housemaid, who calls the bastard Harry.

Pendel driving to eternity. Following with exhausted eyes the smudged red stars ahead of him, tailgating his own past. Nearly laughing in his sleep. Decision consigned to oblivion while every syllable and cadence of Uncle Benny's anguished monologue is jealously remembered.

“Why Rachel ever let your mother across the threshold I'll never know,” says Benny, with a shake of the homburg. “You didn't have to be trained in the Scriptures to see she was dynamite. Innocent or virtuous was not the issue. She was a highly nubile, very stupid
shiksa
on the brink of womanhood. The slightest shove, she'd be over. It was all written down in advance.”

“What was her name?” Pendel asks.

“Cherry,” sighs his uncle, like a dying man parting with his last secret. “Short for Cherida, I believe, though I never saw the certificate. She ought to have been Teresa or Bernadette or Carmel, but she had to be Cherida. Her dad was a brickie from County Mayo. The Irish were even poorer than we were, so we had Irish maids. Us Yids don't like to grow old, Harry boy. Your father was no different. It's the not believing in heaven that gets us. A lot of time standing in God's long corridor, but for God's main room with all the furbishments we're still waiting, and there's a good few of us doubt it will ever come.” He leans across the iron table and clutches Pendel's hand. “Harry, listen to me, son. Jews ask forgiveness of man, not God, which is rough on us because man is a harder con than God any day. Harry, I'm looking at you for that forgiveness. Redemption, I can get it on my deathbed. Forgiveness, Harry, it's you who signs the cheque.”

Pendel will give Benny whatever he asks, if only he will go on about the explosion.

“It was the smell of her, your father told me,” Benny resumes. “Pulling at his hair he was, with the remorse. Sitting before me as you're sitting now, except for the uniform. ‘For the sake of her smell I brought down the temple on my head,' he told me. Your father was a religious man, Harry. ‘She was kneeling at the grate and I smelt the sweet womanhood of her, not soap and scrubbing, Benny, but the natural woman. The smell of her womanhood overcame me.' If Rachel hadn't been having a knees-up with the Daughters of Jewish Purity on Southend Pier, your father would never have fallen.”

“But he did,” Pendel prompts him.

“Harry, amid the mingled tears of Catholic and Jewish guilt, amid Ave Marias and
oi veys
and what-will-become-of-me's on both sides, your father plucked the cherry. See it as an act of God I can't, but the Jewish
chutzpah
is yours and so is the Irish blarney, if you could only ditch the guilt.”

“How did you get me out of the orphanage?” Pendel demands, nearly shouting now, he cares so much.

Somewhere among his muddy memories of childhood before Benny rescued him there is a picture of a dark-haired woman like Louisa on her hands and knees while she scrubs a stone floor as big as a playground, watched by a statue of a blue-robed Good Shepherd and His Lamb.

Pendel driving the homeward stretch. Familiar houses long asleep. The stars washed clean by rain. A full moon outside his prison window. Bang me up again, he thinks. Prison's where you go when you don't want to make decisions.

“Harry, I was magnificent. Those nuns were French snobs and thought I was a gentleman. I wore the full Monty—a grey suit out of the window, a tie selected by your Auntie Ruth, socks to match, the shoes handmade by Lobb of St. James's, which was always my indulgence. No swagger, hands to my sides, my socialism nowhere
to be seen.” For Benny amid his myriad accomplishments is a passionate supporter of the Workers' Cause and believer in the Rights of Man. “ ‘Mothers,' I say to them, ‘I promise you this. Little Harry will have the good life if it kills me. Harry shall be our
mitzvah.
You tell me the wise men to take him to and he'll be there on the dot with a white shirt for his instruction. A fee-paying education at the school of your choice I guarantee, the finest music on the gramophone and a home life any orphan child would give his eyes for. Salmon on the table, idealistic conversation, his own room to sleep in, a down mattress.' I was on the way up in those days. No more
shmatte
for me; it was all golf clubs and footwear and the palace in Umbria just round the corner. We thought we'd be millionaires in a week.”

“Where was Cherry?”

“Gone, Harry boy, gone,” says Benny, dropping his voice for tragedy. “Your mother fled the coop, and who can blame her? One letter from an aunt in County Mayo, saying her poor sad Cherry was worn out from all the opportunities the Sisters gave her to wash away her sins.”

“And my father?”

Benny falls back into despair. “In the soil, son,” he says, wiping away fresh tears. “Your father, my brother. Where I should be for making you do what you did. Died of the shame, in my opinion, which is what I nearly do every time I look at you here. It was those summer frocks that did for me. There's no more depressing sight on earth than five hundred unsold summer frocks in autumn, as every
shlemiel
knows. Each day that passed, the insurance policy became a temptation of the devil. I was a slave to convention is what I was, Harry, and what's worse, I made you carry the torch for me.”

“I'm doing the course,” Pendel tells him, to cheer him up as the bell goes. “I'm going to be the best cutter in the world. Look at this, then.” And he shows him a panel of prison cloth that he cadged from stores and cut to measure.

It is on his next visit that Benny in his guilt presents Pendel with a tin-framed icon of the Virgin Mary that he says reminds him of his childhood in Lvov on the days he crept out of the ghetto to watch the goyim pray. And she is with him now, next to the wake-up clock on the rattan table at his bedside in Bethania, watching with her vanished Irish smile as he drags off his sweat-drenched prison uniform and creeps into bed for a share of Louisa's blameless sleep.

Tomorrow, he thought. I'll tell her tomorrow.

“Harry, that you?”

Mickie Abraxas, the great underground revolutionary and secret hero of the students, lucid drunk at two-fifty a.m., swearing to God that he would kill himself because his wife had thrown him out.

“Where are you?” Pendel said, smiling in the dark, because Mickie for all the trouble he caused was a cellmate for life.

“Nowhere. I'm a bum.”

“Mickie.”

“What?”

“Where's Ana?”

Ana was Mickie's reigning
chiquilla,
a sturdy, practical-minded childhood friend of Marta's from La Cordillera who seemed to accept Mickie as found. Marta had introduced them.

“Hi, Harry,” said Ana cheerfully, so Pendel said “Hi” cheerfully too.

“How much has he had, Ana?”

“I don't know. He says he went to a casino with Rafi Domingo. Did some vodka, lost some money. Maybe did a little coke, he forgets. He's sweating all over. Do I call a doctor?”

Mickie was back on the line before Pendel could answer her.

“Harry, I love you.”

“I know that, Mickie, and I'm grateful, and I love you too.”

“Did you do that horse?”

“I did, Mickie, yes, I have to say I did that horse.”

“I'm sorry, Harry. Okay? I'm sorry.”

“No problem, Mickie. No bones broken. Not every good horse wins.”

“I love you, Harry. You're my good friend, hear me?”

“Then you won't need to kill yourself, will you, Mickie,” said Pendel kindly. “Not if you've got Ana and a good friend.”

“You know what we do, Harry? We make a weekend together. You, me, Ana, Marta. Go fishing. Fuck.”

“So you have yourself a good night's sleep, Mickie,” said Pendel firmly, “and tomorrow in the morning you come round for your fitting and a sandwich and we'll have a nice natter. Yes? Right, then.”

“Who was it?” Louisa said as he rang off.

“Mickie. His wife's locked him out of the house again.”

“Why?”

“Because she's having an affair with Rafi Domingo,” said Pendel, wrestling with life's ineluctable logic.

“Why doesn't he punch her in the mouth?”

“Who?” said Pendel stupidly.

“His
wife,
Harry. Who do you think?”

“He's tired,” said Pendel. “Noriega beat the spirit out of him.”

Hannah climbed into their bed, to be followed by Mark and the giant teddy bear he had given up years ago.

It was tomorrow, so he told her.

I did it to be believed, he told her, when she was safely back to sleep.

To prop you up when you get wobbly.

To give you a real shoulder to lean on, instead of just me.

To make me someone better for a Zonian roughneck's daughter who blurts a bit and goes ballistic when she's threatened and forgets to take short steps after twenty years of being told by her mother that she'd never get married like Emily if she didn't.

And thinks she's too ugly and too tall while everyone around her is the right size and glamorous like Emily.

And who would never in a million years, not even in her most vulnerable and insecure moment, not even to spite Emily, set fire to Uncle Benny's warehouse as a favour to him, starting with the summer frocks.

Pendel sits in the armchair, pulls a coverlet over himself, leaves his bed to the pure in heart.

“I'll be out all day,” he tells Marta, arriving in the shop next morning. “You'll have to do front of shop.”

“You've got the Bolivian ambassador at eleven.”

“Put him off. I need to see you.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Until now they had gone as a family, picnicking in the shade of the mango trees, watching the hawks and ospreys and vultures lazing on the burning breeze and the riders on white horses looking like the last of Pancho Villa's army. Or they'd haul the inflated rubber dinghy across the flooded paddies, with Louisa at her happiest as she waded through the water in her shorts, playing Katharine Hepburn in
The African Queen
to Pendel's Bogart, and Mark pleading for caution and Hannah telling Mark not to be a drip.

Or they'd drive the four-track down cloudy yellow dust tracks that stopped dead when they reached the forest's edge, at which point to the huge delight of the kids Pendel would let out one of Uncle Benny's wonderful wails of despair, pretending they were lost. Which they were, until the silver towers of the mill rose out of the palm trees fifty yards ahead of them.

Or they'd go at reaping time, ride in pairs on huge tracked harvesters, the flails hanging out in front of them, beating the rice and raising clouds of bugs. Sticky hot air pressed under hard low sky. Table-flat fields fading into mangrove swamps. Mangrove swamps fading into sea.

But today as the Great Decider drove his solitary path everything he saw bothered him, everything was an omen: the I-hate-you razor wire of the American ammunition dumps, reminding him of Louisa's father; the reproachful signs saying, “Jesus is the Lord”; the squatters' cardboard villages on every hillside: any day now and I'll be joining you.

And after the squalor, the lost paradise of Pendel's ten-minute childhood. Rolling tracts of red Devon earth from holiday school at Okehampton. English cows that stared at him from banana groves. Not even Haydn on the cassette player could save him from their melancholy. Entering the farm's drive he demanded only to know how long it was since he had told Angel to get these bloody potholes fixed. The sight of Angel himself, in boned riding boots, straw trilby and gold neck chains, only quickened his anger. They drove to the spot where the corporate neighbour from Miami had cut his trench into Pendel's river.

“You know something, Harry, my friend?”