The Credit Draper Read online

  Avram felt Celia take his hand. It was cool and dry and he worried how his own palm must feel, still hot and sweaty after the running. He tried not to think about it as he watched Dr Drummond make several placements of his hearing device on Papa Kahn’s chest. The doctor tapped his patient’s back a few times, requested a couple of deep wheezy breaths.

  “There is pain?”

  Papa Kahn shook his head.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Avram could not hear the response. He could only see the terrible dullness in Papa Kahn’s jaundiced eyes as the man strained to speak. Eventually, the doctor turned to address Mrs Wallace.

  “You are …?”

  Mrs Wallace told him.

  “And Mrs Kahn? She is at home?”

  Mrs Wallace spoke quietly to the doctor.

  “I see.” The doctor cleared his throat and addressed the room. “I am pleased to say the pain has passed. Breathing has returned to normal.” He gripped his patient’s shoulder as if he himself had bestowed the recovery.

  “Is he going to die?” Avram asked.

  Dr Drummond scowled at the question. “No, he is not going to die.”

  Mrs Wallace brought her palms together in a gesture of prayer. Celia let go his hand, moved to dab the spittle off her father’s chin with a corner of her apron, wipe the sweat from his forehead.

  “But he looks so pale,” she said.

  Dr Drummond ignored the comment and went on talking, barking orders to those assembled.

  “I will write him a prescription for powdered digitalis. It may be obtained from the dispensary at the Victoria Infirmary. Meanwhile, most important is that he should have rest. Yes, bed-rest, bed-rest and more bed-rest.” The doctor returned to addressing Mrs Wallace. “I will take Mr Kahn to his home in the hansom. Perhaps the children can go on ahead to the dispensary with the prescription. But first I will need help to fetch him into the cab. And then there is the matter of my expenses.”

  * * *

  The walk home from the dispensary took Avram and Celia through the park, past the deserted bandstand. The wet paths and the bushes sparkled in the lamplight, puddles sagged and cracked beneath their feet as the frost set in. It reminded Avram of the times he used to walk back with her from Arkush’s bakery on the Shabbos eve, each of them carrying a handle of the pot of steaming cholent.

  “There’s no-one to look after us any more,” Celia said. She presented a strange sight, dressed up in a serge military tunic she’d borrowed from the shop to replace her sodden coat, her pinny hanging loose below the jacket hem. “We’ll have to do the looking-after now. It’s as if we’re orphans.”

  “I’ve been an orphan for years,” he said.

  “But your mother’s still alive.”

  “She might as well be dead.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll put the ayin hora on her.”

  He didn’t want to put the evil eye on his mother. But he knew the feeling of being an orphan even if he wasn’t one. He knew what it was like to have his childhood snatched away for no-one being there to cherish his memories. He knew the desperation of lonely days on a ship to Glasgow when there was no-one to protect him from the terrors and vagaries of the adult world. He knew what it was like to be parentless and stateless. To be a nothing.

  “We will manage,” he said, trying to put on his best grown-up voice. “You and I together, Celia. Somehow we will manage.”

  She smiled at him. And he wasn’t sure if it was because she felt comforted or she was making fun of him.

  “Adults will come around,” she said. “I know they will. Anyway, it will only be for a short time. Papa will be well soon. You’ll see.”

  And then in that sudden change of mood he’d witnessed so often since her mother had been taken away, she began to sing. It was a song he remembered from his playground days before the war.

  “Old Mother Hubbard, what a cold you’ve got

  Drinking tea and soda hot.

  Wrap me up in a great white shawl

  And take me to the doctor’s shop.

  Doctor, doctor, shall I die?

  Yes, my darling, so shall I.”

  Celia fumbled in her apron pocket for Papa Kahn’s prescription. “Take this medicine, twice a day,” she sang, shaking the paper bag of powders at him.

  “And it will cure your cold away,” he chorused with her.

  At the park gates, she bought a handful of chestnuts from the cart of an Italian vendor who complained to them, half in English, half in Italian, about the cold. They hung around with him by the warmth of the live coals in the brazier, clenching the shells in their fists to heat up their hands before cracking them open for the bitter-sweet softness inside. The air was bitter too but Avram felt warm inside. He could see stars in the clear sky and a moon come up over the tenements as round as a football, as shiny as Lucky Mo’s bald head. Leaves glistened in the trees, moths flitted around the lamps of the cart. Two well-dressed women drew up on their bicycles, as did a butcher’s delivery boy. The name of the butcher was painted bold onto a metal sign welded on to the mainframe. The chestnut vendor stopped his complaining and began to hum a tune as he scooped out the nuts into eagerly cupped hands. Celia blew several times into her palms. Her cheeks were rosy red like a Russian doll. Avram thought she looked beautiful.

  Celia immediately assumed control of the household. She took charge of the keys, she wrote out a schedule of chores, she made a shopping list for the next day. Mary was confused at first, but in the end she didn’t seem to object.

  “After all, it’s only natural,” Mary said to Mrs Wallace, who had come round to see if everything was all right. “If I’ve taken Madame’s part, then she’s taken her faither’s.”

  It was to Celia that Mrs Wallace gave whatever money there had been at the shop.

  Avram, meanwhile, tried hard to avoid Mary’s teasings. On the day after Papa Kahn’s heart attack, she had lifted up her skirts to him in the kitchen.

  “Are you sure you don’t want a better look?” she said, showing off her woollen-stockinged legs to above her knee. Later when she passed him in the hallway, she had other words for him, close to his ear so he could feel her breath flutter against his skin. “What do you think of Mary’s body, then?” And on another occasion, “You know where to come if you want a taste.”

  He was both embarrassed and enticed by her attention, until all he could do was wrap up warm and take a tanner-ball out into the street. He would keep to himself, kicking the ball back and forward off a tenement wall, ignoring the pleas of the other boys to join in a game.

  Celia was right about the adults. They did come. But only for a few minutes at a time. Papa Kahn was still very weak and stayed in his bed, sleeping most of the time, only waking to eat little or to see the visitors. The weather had turned bitter cold, there was ice on the ground and on the windows. Avram sweated back and forward to the cellar for coal to feed the fires. Celia supplied metal hot water bottles to her two patients.

  “It’s like a bleedin’ hospital and a tea-room rolled into one here,” Mary complained as she ferried another tray of tea things into Papa Kahn’s bedroom. “I’d be better off being a nurse at the Front.”

  Solly came to visit with his father Lucky Mo, as did Mrs Wallace and Sadie from the shop, and Mrs Carnovsky from across the passage with a tin of strudel. Rabbi Lieberman called, along with Jacob Stein and a number of other men from the synagogue. The visitors also looked in at Nathan, who seemed to strengthen slightly from the attention paid and the general hubbub invading the household. Most of the time the guests didn’t linger, but when Jacob Stein came, he huddled afterwards with some of his fellow congregants in the hallway where they ate cake and drank copiously from a decanter of Papa Kahn’s schnapps. When it was time for the bailie to leave, Celia helped him on with his fur-trimmed coat. Avram brought his hat and umbrella. The handle was carved ivory in the shape of an
open-mouthed fox. He let his fingers play between its teeth before handing it over.

  “Such a pretty young lady you are becoming,” Jacob Stein said, bowing to plant a kiss. Celia twisted her head away. Herr Stein turned to Avram.

  “Mr Kahn wants we should talk.”

  “About what, sir?” Avram asked nervously. Whenever he was the subject of adult conversation, it was usually to set him on a course he did not wish to take.

  “Not now. I have to go. Come to my office. At the warehouse in Candleriggs. Tomorrow at four o’clock. We will speak then.” Jacob Stein wrote out a small card. “Here is the address.” Then, in a less business-like tone. “And the football? How is that now?”

  “There is no time for football, sir. I am needed at home.”

  “Ah, I see.” Jacob Stein thought about this for a moment. “Anyway, not a career for a Jewish boy.” He fixed his bowler on his head and departed, leaving behind his familiar scent of sweet brandy and cigars.

  With the visitors gone, Mary retired upstairs to her room in Uncle Mendel’s flat. Avram remained by the window in the sitting room. Ice coated the glass in thick sworls, and he leaned up close trying to melt the shapes with his breath. Celia sat in Papa Kahn’s armchair knitting by a fire.

  “Jack Frost,” she said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “He makes the patterns on the window.”

  He imagined a man not unlike the lamp-lighter visiting each house to paint the panes with his hoary breath.

  “I’m going to start playing football again,” he said.

  “You will not.”

  “Who’s to stop me?”

  “I need you in the house now more than ever.”

  “I promise I’ll do everything you ask. You’re the one in charge now. But I want to start going to practice again. And playing in the matches. If my chores suffer for it, I’ll stop playing.”

  He waited for her response but she continued with her knitting, her brow furrowed in a thoughtfulness over her task.

  “I’ll come with you tomorrow,” she said.

  He went over to sit close to her. “I’ll be all right by myself.”

  “It will be good to go into the city. To look at the shops.”

  A coal shifted in the grate. Avram thought of Nathan and Papa Kahn asleep in other rooms, as if they were his and Celia’s own children.

  Twenty

  THEY TOOK A TRAM. Even though it was cold enough for the snow still to be lying on the ground, they chose to sit upstairs huddled together in the uncovered area at the front just above the destination board.

  “So we can see where we’re going,” Celia said.

  Avram loved the trundle and the rattle of the journey, especially the crackle and blue-white flash of the pantograph lighting up the otherwise grey day. Celia brought out a bag of sweets.

  “Take a handful,” she said. And he did, happy in the conspiracy, knowing Papa Kahn’s opposition to the irresponsible rotting of his children’s teeth with soor plooms, lucky tatties and sugar-ally sticks bought from Glickman’s on London Road. An opposition somewhat diluted by Papa Kahn’s own habit of sipping tea through lumps of sugar.

  Celia paid their fares to a young woman in a Black Watch tartan skirt who cursed them for making her come out in the cold to give them a ticket.

  “I wouldn’t complain,” Celia said when the conductress had gone back down the stairs. “I’d always have a smile for my passengers.”

  Over Glasgow Bridge the tram went, with the River Clyde flowing beneath, murky, swollen, barely visible in the mist. Tall electric lamps sentried the bridge’s central aisle. On either side of the tramlines, streams of horse-drawn wagons laden with barrels, sacks, crates and loose coal trudged a weary track through the dirt-marbled snow. Pedestrians, swathed tight in scarves, mufflers and mittens, carefully picked their paths across the bridge’s wide icy pavements. Avram tried to count the number of military men in their trench coats among the passersby only to be interrupted by Celia pointing out the giant Paisleys store with the lettering – Tailoring Establishment and Juvenile Outfitters – displayed on the side.

  “Papa supplies them sometimes,” she told him proudly, a fact he already knew from a hundred times in the telling.

  He read off the other advertising billboards along the quayside – Oxo, Bovril, Lux, Pears, Bryant and May, Whitbread’s Stout, Colman’s Starch. He watched a steam train pull out from Glasgow Central on its own parallel bridge bound for somewhere south like Carlisle, Manchester, or even London. A couple of soldiers were leaning out of a carriage window. They waved and he waved back, feeling an overwhelming sadness as he did so.

  The tram swung along its tracks into the city, the buildings came in tall on either side forcing him to arch his head back to wonder at the ornate balustrades and turrets of the banks, the stores, the merchant chambers and the hotels. He held himself tight and marvelled at the sheer grandness of it all.

  Avram was shown into a large office lit only by dull winter rays filtering through tall windows. To the rear of the room, he saw Jacob Stein slumped fat into a leather armchair behind his desk, his fingers tapping the buttons of his waistcoat. Avram’s own fingers were just beginning to flow warm again. As were his feet in the dampness seeping through the soles of his battered shoes. He swept off his cap and approached, wondering whether to sit down on the chair in front of the desk.

  It was so quiet he feared the frantic thumping of his heart was audible to his host. His apprehension lasted only a few seconds until the silence was broken by the screech and clatter of a tramcar tackling the snowy bend of the street below. The crackle of a spark from the overhead wires electrified the room for an instant, making Jacob Stein’s face flash blue-white and ghost-like in the dimness. The warehouse owner stirred, motioned with a flick of his hand for him to sit. He did as he was told, holding himself stiffly in his chair as Jacob Stein leaned forward, slowly placed his hands on the desk. A burnt-down cigar lay wedged between two of the man’s fingers. Avram looked down at his feet. Just as he felt the whole interview was to be conducted as a silent scrutiny, he heard Jacob Stein clear his throat.

  “First, there is some good news,” the warehouse owner said.

  Avram looked up.

  “I have just heard this morning,” Jacob Stein continued, “that Madame Kahn is to be released. I expect she will be back in Glasgow within the next few days.”

  Avram tightened his fingers around his cap.

  “Are you not pleased, boy?”

  He did not know how he felt. People who disappeared from his life were a common occurrence for him. For them to come back again was unique.

  “You, of course, must give this news straight away to Mr Kahn.” Jacob Stein retreated into the luxury of his chair and sighed. “It was not easy to obtain her release. Glasgow, with all its shipyards and munitions factories, is a prohibited area for aliens. But the appeals of the Jewish Representative Council fell on sympathetic ears. The so-called enemy alien members of our community can be registered under our protection.” Jacob Stein raised his arms to his sides as if to weigh the worth of what he was to say next. “Justice and fair play. Never forget that, Avram. We Jews have been treated well here. Madame Kahn, after all, was persecuted for her nationality. In other countries, we are persecuted for our religion. In other countries, to be a Jew is to carry a death sentence over your head.”

  “I know that, sir.”

  Jacob Stein’s normally steady gaze wavered for a moment, then returned to fix on him hard. “Of course you do. And do you know why Scotland is such a fine place for us?”

  “No, sir.”

  Jacob Stein leaned forward again. “There is so much hatred between the Protestants and the Catholics.” His voice lowered to such a conspiratorial level that Avram had to strain to hear. “And when they are not hating each other, they combine to hate the English. Hah! What a wonderful city Glasgow is. No-one has any hatred left over for us Jews.” Jacob Stein clapped his hands together as
if it were he himself who had manipulated such a ploy. He then struck a match, puffed and sucked the remainder of his cigar alight. “There is something else,” he said. “You are now going to secondary school?”

  “Yes, sir. Papa Kahn wanted me to stay on to study. He thinks I could sit for the university.”

  Jacob Stein waved a hand in dismissal, causing some ash to drop onto the desk. “Well, you can forget about that.”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “I said you can forget about that. Education costs money. Mr Kahn is in no position to fund your secondary schooling. He is in no position to even run his own business for the present. I have arranged for temporary management of his affairs until his condition improves.”

  As Avram struggled to absorb the impact of this new information on his life, his gaze wandered to the three tall windows beyond Jacob Stein’s head, each stained on the upper third with the identical emblem. He recognised the badge as being the same as the one engraved on the fountain at Glasgow Cross. He remembered the schoolyard riddle Solly had once taught him.

  Where’s the tree that never grew?

  Where’s the bird that never flew?

  Where’s the fish that never swam?

  Where’s the bell that never rang?

  “On Glasgow’s coat-of-arms, ye daft bampot.” And there they were now, emblazoned on each of the three windows – the tree, the bird, the fish and the bell. Underneath scrolled the motto: Let Glasgow Flourish. Avram had first thought it meant Glasgow should be like flour. Clean and white and soft. Not the dirty, dark and hard city that it was. But Solly told him the real meaning of the word. Let Glasgow flourish. When would anyone let Avram Escovitz flourish?

  “Are you listening, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what a credit draper is?”