Second Violin (13 page)

At ten o’clock, after a meal of haddock, cabbage and potatoes that left Hummel both silent and grateful, Charles lit the stove for Hummel and said, ‘Don’t let the bedbugs
bite.’

Hummel looked shocked, but said nothing.

‘A joke, Herr Hummel. A joke! Bedbugs in my mother’s house?’

‘
Ja
,’ said Hummel. ‘Joke.’

As though he had forgotten the meaning of the word.

The boy wished him goodnight. Hummel heard his feet banging down the stairs, then silence – only the odd sounds of the city wafting up from the street below.

He looked around once more. Bed, chair, table, bowl, jug, window – noticed for the first time the chamber pot under the bed – noticed how in its simplicity the room was like a van
Gogh. It was his room. Didn’t matter for how long, it was his. Bed, chair, table, bowl, jug, window, chamber pot. They none of them moved. In the wall by the crucifix over the bed was a
drawing pin. Hummel removed it, pinned up the sketch of himself next to Christ, thought better of it and moved it to the opposite wall. He would get used to living with this stranger, the man he
had become.

He lay in bed, light out, wishing he had really brought a novel with him not just a dust jacket. Tomorrow he would change money, find a foreign language bookshop and buy something. Told himself
he had never been able to sleep without reading. Then slept.

Charles warned Hummel that the black market in currency would cheat him, but what else could a man with no papers do? He said he could introduce him to half a dozen men who
would give him francs for schillings, but that each would be as bad as the other. The rate of exchange would be lousy.

The rate of exchange was lousy and Hummel took it.

Charles said that perhaps they should go home now and write to Schuster in London. Hummel said perhaps they could go to a book shop first, preferably one with some German stock, and Charles led
him to the Boulevard St Germain, to where La Hune Bookshop sat between the Café aux Deux Magots and the Café Flore. While Charles sat in the Deux Magots hoping for a glimpse of
someone famous or literary or both, Hummel found the shop’s German section and bought a first edition of
Der Steppenwolf
(S. Fischer Verlag A.G., Berlin, 1927) by a writer he had never
heard of called Hermann Hesse.

When they got home Hummel wrote to Schuster.

A week passed. Hummel walked the streets of the Quartier Latin, once ventured as far as the Champs de Mars and saw the legs of the Eiffel Tower vanish topless into mist, visited La Hune every
other day and bought another novel, and, being a quick learner, acquired some basic French.

Schuster wrote:

‘Of course we can get you papers,’ Charles said. ‘It will cost, everything does.’

‘Who do I bribe?’ Hummel asked.

‘Two people. An Inspector of Police, and his brother-in-law at the Prefecture. That’s how we did it for Manny.’

‘What does it gain me?’

‘A French visa, which would protect you from the round-ups the cops occasionally indulge in . . .’

‘Round-ups?’

‘They seem to hit each arrondissement with some sort of quota to fill. Find refugees without visas. Deport them. When they fulfil their quota they forget about refugees for a
while.’

‘Deport them where? England?’

‘No such luck. Usually Belgium. They drive them to the border and dump them. Then the Belgians will jail them all for not having Belgian visas, and sooner or later they’ll all be
shoved across the Dutch border in a giant game of pass the parcel.’

Hummel nodded, quietly appalled.

‘And of course,’ Charles went on. ‘Manny had a passport. You don’t, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then there’ll be a bit extra for a Nansen passport.’

‘But they are for the stateless, are they not? For people from all those countries that seemed to disappear off the map during the last war. I’m Austrian.’

The boy said nothing, waiting for Hummel to say it.

‘And, of course, Austria has disappeared now. Not so much a country more a memory.’

‘Joe, however much that hurts you as an Austrian, it doesn’t matter at the level of French bureaucrats and French paperwork. The visa will be real, the Nansen will be fake. Look at
it this way, you won’t really be stateless on a fake passport.’

Alex had fallen asleep. To fall asleep after lunch annoyed him. It reminded him too much of the old man he was and freely admitted to being to his family but privately denied
to himself.

He could have sworn he had heard the telephone ring. It would pay him to fall asleep at his desk and not in the morning room in an armchair.

The door opened noiselessly, Polly the housemaid peeped in.

‘Sorry boss, I thought you was ’avin’ another one of your kips.’

‘Another’ – Good God, was he making a habit of it?

‘I thought I heard the telephone.’

‘You did, but like I said I thought you was ’avin’ a kip. So I told ’em you weren’t in.’

‘Who?’

‘Some bloke with a German accent. Name like Frood or Fried.’

‘Freud?’

‘Yeah, that was it.’

Bugger.

Schuster was late. Hummel sat with two dozen others on a long wooden bench in a cold corridor, in a cold, cold February, in a cold, cold, cold 1939.

He had gained weight in the last two months, run through most of his money, learnt some French, and thanks to Charles Birotteau’s facility with languages, a little elementary English that
went some way beyond ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, but not far enough to let him understand what was happening to him now.

Schuster had insisted – do not sail into Dover or any of the coastal ports . . . ‘they have the refugee business down pat, you could find yourself in gaol or worse, on a boat back to
Calais, before Billy and I have waved the right pieces of paper in front of them.’ So it was a devious route out of Boulogne on a freighter and into Tilbury in the Thames estuary. Hummel and
two dozen ragamuffins, clinging to their respectability as tightly as to their suitcases.

The man in the blue uniform stood at a high-legged desk at the end of the corridor, like the head clerk in a counting house, called out ‘Wixstein’, pronounced with a W not a V, a
stain not a stein, and the man sitting next to Herr Wixstein had to nudge the old man to recognise his own name. He got up and before he reached the desk and the official, another man in a blue
uniform had called ‘Hummel’ – and there were no two ways to pronounce Hummel.

‘Yes, sir,’ Hummel said, hoping nothing in his inflexion sounded impolite.

The man was leafing through the eighteen crisp pages of Hummel’s Nansen. Hummel knew the cover by heart, so much had he treasured it like a love letter since the day he had received it. He
looked at the cover now, held up in front of him.

‘
France – Passeport Nansen – Gratuit.
’

Now there was a joke, the Nansen had been far from ‘free’ – it had cost him a week’s wages.

‘
No. AS4424
–
nom Hummel – prenom Josef – Certificat d’identité et de voyage.
’

And that had been the beauty, the wonder of this fake – the word
‘voyage’
had almost moved him to tears the day Charles had brought the passport home in a slip of
cellophane.
Voyage,
quite possibly the most beautiful word in any language that day.

The official pulled out the visas Hummel had folded into the passport; a British Entry Visa that Schuster and his boss Billy had posted to him, and the French Residency Visa that he and Charlie
had paid for with bribes. Neither was a fake, but he took more time over these than he had over the passport, but, then, apart from Hummel’s name, the passport was blank. He hadn’t been
anywhere to get it stamped.

‘There are two men outside who have come to vouch for you,’ said the official. ‘They appear to be offering work and accommodation. So you’re in. One of the lucky ones. If
I had my way you’d all be on a boat back to Yidland at dawn. But I don’t make the rules. I just enforce ’em. On yer way . . . you’re just what England needs right now . . .
another Jew.’

Fortunately Hummel understood not a word of this.

If one knew at any given moment the significance of that moment, would one behave differently or merely take notes?

Confronted by the sight of two short men, one of whom he knew well, the other he had never met before, Hummel took notes. One look at Billy Jacks, master tailor of Stepney Green, and he knew.
This was one of the moments that changed lives. And his changed.

‘Billy Jacks,’ said the scowly, fat-faced little man in the homburg hat. ‘We been waitin’ for yer.’

His was accented Yiddish, but perfectly comprehensible to Hummel. Hummel did what he had done in Paris, stuck out a hand and said, ‘Hummel.
Aus Wien.
’

The grip was tight, a big, muscular hand on the little man that went with the broad shoulders and the barrel chest. The scowl, which Hummel took to be merely the natural lack of upward inflexion
in the facial muscles and the preponderance of five o’clock shadow, broke into something like a smile and the troubling hint of brutality vanished from his face.

‘Yeah, well. Billy Jacks.
Aus
Stepney. And the sooner we drum some English into you the better. My wife won’t understand a bleedin’ word you say!’

Left to himself Hummel would have embraced Schuster. He had known Schuster all his life. It seemed at once natural and impossible.

‘So, Joe, you made it. This is England.’

This England in February was bleak. The night wrapped itself around them. The Thames seemed to suck every last ounce of warmth out of the air, and the view across the river seemed to Hummel like
an infinity of darkness, broken only by a few pinpoints of light on the Kentish shore. Again, he wanted to embrace Schuster, but Billy Jacks was anxious to move off.

‘Brass monkeys. We’ll freeze if yer hang about. You two have yer chinwag on the way back, why don’t yer.’

Schuster looked older, but then he was. Nearly seventy, Hummel thought. But the warmth in his smile, the brightness in his eyes made him seem younger than anyone he’d left behind. The
lights in Vienna might still be on, the light in the Viennese had been snuffed out.

‘
Ja
, Joe. In the car we shall talk. Billy has a car. Better still, a car with a heater.’

He had not dreamt of it. If he had, it could so easily have been everything he had dreamt of. The all-enveloping womb of family life, from the gust of heat, the faint soot-tang
of an open coal fire as the front door was thrust open . . . the swish as the heavy curtain was drawn back across the door on its iron rail . . . shutting out night and fog and cold . . . to the
patter of a child’s feet in the room above . . . and the smell of cooking from the kitchen. It picked up Hummel and wrapped him in sensations he had forgotten. Sensations scarcely remembered,
they had stopped with his mother’s death. At thirty-odd he felt like a child, a willing child wanting the Jacks’ household to pick him up, to adopt him, to feed him and tuck him up in
bed. It was not the opposite of the freedom he had felt in Paris – ‘my own room, mine’ – it was the complimentary sensation . . . the house of Jacks, its larder stocked, its
fires lit, its curtains drawn . . . everything you might want in a place you might find it . . . from the scissors hanging by the mantelpiece to the roller towel on the back of the scullery door.
It was a created world, a maintained world. A world someone cared enough to make. His world, and his father’s too, had been one of easy neglect. And the nagging voice of guilt told him that
perhaps that was why it had been so easily taken away from him . . . because he had neglected it.

‘Hello, I’m Judy.’

With one hand she pulled her pinafore over her head and dropped it onto a chairback, then she leaned over, pecked Hummel on the cheek and said, ‘You must be Joe. We been hearin’ so
much about you. Old Manny, he’s talked of little else since he heard you got away from ’Itler.’

Schuster whispered in his ear, ‘Mrs Jacks does not speak Yiddish, Joe. In fact she isn’t Jewish.’

He was not prepared for a ‘mixed’ marriage, in fact he’d never come across one before, but he had prepared a stock phrase for just this occasion.

‘How very please to meet you. I am . . .
sharmed
.’

The blonde, blue-eyed vision smiled, turned to her husband and said, ‘I don’t care what you think, Billy Jacks. For that he gets another smacker.’

And she kissed him again.

Jacks said in Yiddish to Hummel, ‘The missis, my Judy. Gets a bit sentimental y’know.’

And in English, to himself, ‘And the rest of the time you could cut diamonds with her.’