The Goldberg Variations. Mark Glanville

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СКАЧАТЬ on my changing mood), so that I and it might live in peace thereafter. What follows is an account of that campaign.

      ‘So Abey goes into a mensvear shop …’

      Sometimes we’d go into ourselves, his captive audience perpetually on hand to applaud a nightly stand-up that ran until we’d all left home.

      ‘I vont to buy a suit!’

      With a shift of the jaw his face would fall comfortably into a parody of a ghetto Jew’s cheek-straining smile.

      ‘I think I can help you, sir,’ the shop assistant would reply with the bright, clipped elocution of the forties public-school-boy Dad had been.

      There were certain jokes that bore umpteen retellings. Mum was usually the first to laugh, with a hearty whoop to convince you she’d never heard it before, then we’d come in, each a different note on the xylophone counterpointing the melody of his speech.

      ‘Here we are. If you don’t mind … slipping it on … that’s right …’

      By now he’d be treading the amtico tiles that formed his stage, miming the appropriate movements of his dramatis personae.

      ‘But look! It’s coming up here,’ he’d cry as the Jew, hunching his right shoulder in a gesture ludicrous enough to silence the percussion of our dining.

      ‘Er, do excuse me, sir, but if you don’t mind my saying, that’s because you’re not standing properly. Now if you were to … that’s it. Splendid!’

      ‘But now it’s coming out here!’

      The sight of Dad’s head between his shoulders, jacket hunched, a Jewish tortoise, snapped our last resistance and earned him the laughter he yearned for. At such times we were a team, playing catch with smiles round the table, listening for each other’s laughter with an unspoken sense of belonging engendered by the joke and its teller.

      ‘Sir, you’re still not standing properly. Now if you … That’s it … Excellent!’

      ‘Vunderful! A perfect fit!’

      Bending his doppelgänger double, he’d exit his imaginary shop as a Yiddisher Quasimodo.

      ‘So he’s walking down the street like this, when he bumps into his old friend Morrie.

      “‘Keneine hora! Abey, vot happened to you?”’

      We didn’t know what the Yiddish meant, but it was a meal in itself. You could bite into the boiled chicken and smell the pickled cucumber.

      “‘I’ve just been to see my tailor.”’

      By now he’d be really milking it, Abey growing ever more grotesque as Dad hobbled up and down the kitchen.

      “To see your tailor. I should go to see your tailor. Vot a vunderful tailor he must be! Vy, if he can fit a cripple like you he can fit anyvun!’”

      And as Abey, Morrie, the tailor and the narrator left the stage, five suns formed a spotlight he could bask in, Dad’s ‘Thank you, thank you,’ reflecting our joy back at us with a nod and a bow.

      Family life was played out around a circular kitchen table. The court of King Brian and his fair queen Pamela was a boisterous one at which each bite of food gained was a soundbite lost. We’d peck away incessantly at meat and conversation, all fighting to be heard and fed, picking up the debris left behind in the wake of Dad’s voracious appetite and machine-gun verbal barrage. He had a favourite image of someone eating as if Cossacks were about to swoop down and steal all his food; and speaking as if they were going to cut out the tongue that ate it, he might have added. We children developed habits of our own to survive, one of which was speed-eating. Liz, twin to Toby, extended this to speech, cramming extraordinary quantities of words into the millisecond gaps that occurred when Dad caught his breath or swallowed a chicken thigh, while I’d try speaking louder in the hope of engaging at least one other person in conversation, but woe betide any dialogue that threatened to drown the monologue.

      ‘Keep it down to a dull roar could you! Heard a good one the other day. Why do they have dustbins at Polish weddings? To keep the flies off the bride.’

      ‘Your Dad’s being very naughty.’

      ‘Fucking Poles!’

      ‘Brian!’

      ‘Sorry, mutteler, those damned Poles,’ he’d correct himself in pre-war officer tones before returning to those of the public school that he always joked had cost his parents a fortune.

      ‘Worse than the Germans. They couldn’t wait to get at us.’

      ‘Brian, can we stop this?’

      ‘Three million killed in Poland alone,’ he’d sigh, energy draining from his face. ‘And they let so many of them over here along with those bloody Ukros.’

      It was ironic that, wracked daily with the torments of the Holocaust, we should be living two doors away from the Ukrainian Cultural Institute of Great Britain, which was founded and frequented by men who were reputed to be former members of the Waffen SS.

      ‘Brian, you’re so filled with hatred. You have to learn to forgive. At least you didn’t lose anyone. Never a week goes by when I don’t think of poor Theo. One has to carry on. I don’t understand why you’re like this.’

      He’d cast me an ally’s wink. This was a scene that played at least once a month.

      Jokes blessed us. They bottled an essence of something that belonged to children denied the ordinary trappings of identity portrayed on the labels of religion and suits. After all, we didn’t even own our name. Around 1880 my Lithuanian great-grandfather, a quack dentist, arrived in Ireland. B the turn of the century his sons were all qualified and practising in Dublin. After moving to London and marrying an East End Jewish girl, my grandfather opened a telephone directory at random and out popped the Anglo-house of Glanville whose scions would doubtless have had e time for him and his kind as they passed through the Rhineland en route for Jerusalem. Thus poor Goldberg, having survived a thousand years of persecution, assumed the name of one of his tormentors. After Dad was sent to where he could acquire the mannerisms to complement the new name, the deception became complete.

      Mum hadn’t heard such jokes before she met Dad. Her father had been brought up in Prussian Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, one of those middle-European cities of uncertain identity where Jews flourished, in which people weaned on wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut would have winced at the odour of lokshen soup, even if they might have eaten the carrot on the head of the gefilte fish. Deluded German Jews, Yekkes, revelling in the fruits of an emancipation not enjoyed by their kindred to the east, began calling their children Siegfried, after the hero of Wagner’s myth of Teutonic superiority, oblivious to the fact that it was his enemy Alberich, the ugly, covetous dwarf whom the composer envisaged as the prototype Jew. Meanwhile in their synagogues the plangent wail of the cantor was drowned beneath the organ-accompanied congregational wash flowing in from the church across the road.

      There was nothing obviously Jewish about Mum. Her delicate, Reform nose captured the more refined scents that wafted past Dad’s Orthodox schnoz, and she laughed in hearty major keys. Another Morrie, who worked in another menswear shop, this one up the road from us in Notting Hill Gate, once described her to a colleague as ‘the СКАЧАТЬ