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 Edgeware 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 Evering Road the finest street in Europe. And it is in Evering Road 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 shicksa 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 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.’