A Man Lies Dreaming (21 page)

Why they called it the ITO and not the JTO was beyond me.

‘—was established and continued to explore alternative propositions for Jewish settlement beyond Palestine, believing, as we do, not in the need for a return to a Biblical land, but rather for a practical solution to the question of a national homeland for the Jewish people, for—’

‘Quite, quite,’ I said, cutting him off hurriedly. ‘Indeed.’

He sighed. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the Balfour Declaration in 1917 did rather take the wind out of that particular sail. For a while, at least. As you are probably aware, the inherent anti-Semitism of the British, like elsewhere in Europe, has prevented commitment to
any
particular national homeland for the Jews for many years now.’

‘So you are considering other possibilities? Besides Palestine, I mean?’

‘Of course. Uganda still.’ He glared at me. ‘I mean British East Africa, of course.’

‘Of course.’ I grinned at him charmingly. The little
scheisskopf
. ‘Where else? I inquired.

‘Argentina, for instance. El Arish, in Egypt. Albania. British Guiana. There are many possibilities.’

‘But Palestine amongst them, surely.’

‘Well, yes. I’m sorry, I think I forgot your name.’

‘It’s Wolfson,’ I said. Pictured him on the ground being kicked by hobnailed boots. But said, ‘That’s quite all right, young man. You cannot be expected to remember every visitor’s name, surely!’

‘So you do understand. Yes, yes, we are quite busy here, I can assure you.
Quite
busy!’

His was the third office I had tried, after the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (too legit, engaged in arranging visas and work for Jews in Palestine) and the Council of British Zionists, or CBZ (who seemed to spend most of their time arranging black-tie fundraisers). The ITO was different. I liked the look of this con man in his too-large glasses. I liked the cut, as they say, of Eric Goodman’s jib. I liked the furtiveness of his glances and the disused air of the office and the comatose receptionist. I knew deceit like a lover and here, I thought, was somebody giving out all the right signals for a quick and dirty lying fuck.

‘So if there is nothing else I can help you with …’

‘It’s only, you see,’ I said, ‘that I have recently come into some money and, of course, the Palestinian cause is close to my heart, as it is to the heart of all Jews …’

‘Is that so?’ His demeanour became instantly sympathetic when I mentioned money. He all but beamed at me, like a cat smelling his favourite tinned fish. I hated cats. Cats and Jews. What kind of a name was ‘Eric’ for a Jew? It was typical of the Jews, to give themselves seemingly Anglo-Saxon names, the better to try and fool the unwary man or woman. No doubt he was a pervert, too, a sexual deviant of some kind.

‘If you would like to make a donation …’

‘Let me think about it.’

He lowered his voice. ‘Palestine is not out of the question,’ he said. ‘In fact …’ then he shook his head and smiled. ‘But I get carried away.’

‘No, do go on.’

He looked at me with returning suspicion. ‘You’re not a policeman, are you?’ he said.

‘Do I look like a copper to you?’

‘I don’t know. There is something about you, Mr Wolfson, that doesn’t feel quite right to me,’ he murmured, raising his head and removing his glasses. I stared into his pale blue eyes. He stared back at me, unblinking.

‘I do not need to stand for this kind of treatment!’ I said. ‘And as for a donation, young man, you can forget about
that
!’

He did not try to stop me. In fact I didn’t think he would. I marched out of there and closed the door and walked back down to the Strand and round the corner, never once looking back, not doubting that he’d be following, if only for a little while. If only to make sure that I was gone.

Yes, I liked Mr Eric Goodman, for my purposes. I liked him very much indeed.

It was surprisingly uncomfortable for Wolfson the Jew to walk the streets of London that day. Wolf realised that for all of his recent association with Mosley, he had simply not paid enough attention to the forthcoming elections. The signs for Mosley’s campaign were everywhere, his aristocratic face staring down from billboards and posters glued to the ancient walls, and his men, the Blackshirts stood and glared at passers-by like truant schoolboys.

‘Enough is Enough!’ screamed their signs. ‘Fight, Fight, and Fight Again!’ – ‘Stop the Open Door Policy!’ – ‘Say No to Mass Immigration!’ – ‘Vote BU: Putting Britain First’ – ‘Mosely for Prime Minister’ – and so on and so forth.

Wolf’s strawmen had been the Jews; for Mosley, it was the European refugees from now-communist Germany who must serve – and that included Wolf himself.

It was an uncomfortable realisation.

Equipped with a Thermos of hot herbal tea, and cheese-and-tomato sandwiches, and his raincoat and fedora, he returned two hours later, near closing time, to the little narrow lane off the Strand; and there found himself a sheltered space in a doorway and there he stood, unobtrusively, and sipped his tea, and ate his sandwiches, and watched the door of the Jewish Territorialist Organisation.

At 5.30 in the afternoon the comatose secretary emerged, wrapped up like a large ham, and made her way down to the bus stop. It was already very dark and it had been raining intermittently and dark wet patches covered the pavements.

At 6.30 on the dot the door of the ITO offices opened and Eric Goodman emerged, huddled in a coat, and shut and locked the door. He looked from side to side but apart from a handful of theatregoers lost on the way to the Strand there was no one on the lane. Wolf’s Thermos was still half-full but so was his bladder and he needed to pee. His leg ached from the old wound. Goodman turned right and Wolf followed him. Goodman went through Covent Garden and Wolf hobbled after.

They passed the Royal Opera House and came finally to Dryden Street, where Goodman entered a small cafe of the sort reactionaries and penniless artists frequented; that is to say, it was a dive. Wolf waited some moments, adjusted his hat and entered. The place was crowded and noisy, the clientele boisterous and young. Goodman was sitting in a corner with his back to the door. He was not alone. Wolf went into the small water closet to urinate and stared in horror at his circumcised penis before tucking it away again. He went back into the cafe and got himself a fruit juice, and sat two tables away from Goodman. He tried to listen to their conversation but they spoke in low voices. The other man was Goodman’s age but there was something hard about him, in his eyes and the shape of his mouth, in the way he held himself. He sat with his back to the wall. Wolf had the impression he was not the kind of man to ever leave his back exposed.

The conversations swelled around Wolf.

‘The situation in Europe – my brother says—’

‘Those damned Fascists!’

‘Revolution by peaceful means. The British people are too sensible to give in to a charlatan like Mosley—’

‘—understudy for
Hamlet
at the Theatre Royal, the bastard—’

‘Yes, do you like it? A wonderful artist, utterly
wonderful
—’

‘Only a matter of time before war is declared, the Americans—’

‘I blame the French, myself.’

‘Utterly
divine
cakes—’

‘Playing Rosenkrantz – well, a job’s a job, you know what they say—’

‘I didn’t like the look of him, is what I’m saying, Bitker.’

‘Listen to me, Goodman! You’re supposed to keep a clean front—’

Wolf, ears perked, trying to isolate snatches of conversation.

‘A shamus, a shamus or a copper is what he seemed to me, Bitker—’

‘You simply
must
see
Gaslight
at the—’

‘The revolution—’

‘Wolfson? But his papers were kosher?’

‘Kosher like a bagel.’

‘You let me know if he comes again, Goodman. Do you understand—’

‘My publisher? Stanley Unwin and C—’

‘Nothing can interrupt the plans, Goodman, do you understand!’

Wolf was hunched low but he saw the other man, the one he thought Goodman had called Bitker, shove his chair back, leap to his feet and leave the cafe. He was a big man, this Bitker. Wolf got up and followed.

The man strode across Long Acre. He was wary of a tail: twice Wolf saw him check reflections in shop windows, but Wolf was an anonymous face amongst others and the man did not see him. He hopped on a bus and Wolf climbed aboard too. The bus went down Holborn and Newgate and past St Paul’s. The man Bitker got off there and Wolf did too. It had begun to rain again. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a wireless playing Judy Garland’s ‘Over the Rainbow’. Wolf had seen the film but, had he been the one swept up to the magical land of Oz, he would have raised an army of flying monkeys, stuck the witches in a concentration camp, razed the Emerald City to the ground and executed the wizard for communist sympathies, being a Jew, a homosexual, intellectually retarded, or all of the above.

He did like the tune, though.

He followed Bitker in the dark through the City, abandoned to the night at this hour. The streets were taken up by the homeless and the criminal, and police presence was light. Outside the Bank of England Wolf saw a group of protesters, their faces obscured by scarves, setting alight a vast straw figure dressed in the Blackshirts’ uniform. Policemen did arrive then, and the protesters threw bottles and stones and the policemen cursed and advanced on them with their clubs and Wolf walked on, following the elusive Bitker.

The night made Wolf uncomfortable. It was filled with grotesque human shapes, shambling through the narrow streets, their feet bare in the cold or wrapped in hastily torn bandages: some were missing limbs, others had scars from torture or acid, others still carried sharp implements the better to remove a man’s valuables or life. All were beggars, the lowest of men, the lost, those who had despaired; refugees, unwanted, undesired, holding on to life tenaciously, hungrily, like beasts. They frightened Wolf, he saw himself bared, ugly in the mirror of their suffering.

Yet Bitker navigated these selfsame streets with ease and Wolf in his wake was left unharmed. They came shortly to Threadneedle Street and descended a flight of stairs to the door of a basement flat. After looking from side to side but missing Wolf again, Bitker knocked three times and waited. Presently the door was opened and light spilled out, illuminating a plain-faced Jewess in a flower-patterned dress. Bitker disappeared inside and the door closed and Wolf was left outside in the darkness. He crouched on the stairs and peered through the lace curtains.

*    *    *

The watcher in the dark, too, was watching, but this time he could no longer control the eagerness. He was watching the whores and had missed the detective’s whereabouts and only knew that the detective wasn’t there. Earlier he had fiddled with the cheap lock on the door and opened it and gone up the stairs and into the detective’s office and he sat behind Wolf’s desk. It felt so good to be sitting there. It felt so right.

The detective was so
stubborn
, he thought. It was because the man had lost a part of himself after the Fall, and was unable to get it back. It was pitiful, watching him hobble along, this once-great man, this
leader
of men, now like a decommissioned soldier, blinded by gas, a beggarman, a sleepwalker almost. The watcher in the dark wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, shake him so hard and shout,
Wake up! Wake up, you daft old fool! We need you!
but no sound emerged and the detective wasn’t there and hadn’t been listening so far, but by God the watcher was going to get his attention. You did not just abandon a
destiny
.

Tonight. Soon. He could feel the need and the desire and he knew he could not put it off any longer, he needed … he shuddered in the chair and got up, moved softly around the room, not touching anything, just …
feeling
it. Was this what it was like to have been in his presence, before? In his office with men always coming and going and the sound of hobnailed boots on hard floors, the rustle of stiff leather, the whisper of flags like silk, the smell and taste of
power
so strong it suffused the very air and changed all who came into contact with it?

He left the office regretfully, softly, and picked Wolf’s bedsit’s lock. Once the door was open he closed his eyes for a long moment and stood there, and when he opened them again it was as though the room was transformed and for just a moment he was standing in Wolf’s old bedroom, in the Berlin residence, and the swastika flags were moving in the breeze, and outside the chauffeur was polishing the official car. For a moment he pictured a young blonde woman in the bed … she opened her eyes and smiled sleepily, her eyes filled with slowly fading dreams. Her long blonde hair was the colour of the sun and her skin was white as snow, but hot, so hot … the watcher was so erect just standing there and he moved with a great effort, looking at Wolf’s books, Wolf’s
toilette
, his meagre possessions: his razor, his soap, his threadbare blanket and the books, all those books everywhere. The watcher stood over the sink, imagining Wolf brushing his teeth, shaving his cheeks, washing his hands. The watcher looked in the mirror but it was only his own ordinary face staring back at him and that broke the spell. He left and locked the door behind him and went back down to Berwick Street. He had work to do, so much work.