Home is where...

A great aunt, twice removed, as calm as a summer evening after the sun has set. She sits next to me, unruffled by what most people would call the tribulations of life; impassive, unperturbed, as if from another era, her back to the world, a rounded, bovine acceptance of her fate. She has an old way of talking...

She asks me: " How is your work?"

"Theek hai"

"And your father, how is he now?"

"Theek hai"

"And your mother, is she well?"

"Doing well-thank God." I add the last bit taking a leaf out of her own book and with such self-confidence that it doesn't appear that I'm taking the mickey; it's just a natural flourish.

"And after all these long years, your heart must be settled now, it must find things familiar now?"

"No, my heart is not settled," I say in all earnestness. There is no time for gaiety or flourishes now. This is the core. The day it is settled, it is not mine, I think to myself [slightly adjusting my Jewish hat].

She seems to be thrown off by this and even for a fraction of a second the barriers are down and she thinks I might be a human being after all. But the window is quickly closed, the two bridges are drawn and we are alone again. We must make do with what light we have.

"And your sister, I'm sure she is doing well?"

"Yes, she is fine."

~~~

My sister speaks like a cloud or a dream; she is profound when she doesn't know what she's saying and silly when she does; my daughter speaks like she's reading the Constitution. She has, to my great delight, learned the word 'scallywag'. "This will stand you in good stead, my son," I say to her, pretending to be the Lion King. Yes, there is a streak of madness in our family (hadn't you guessed by now?). Some generously mistake it for clownishness (but that's just my father's side!). My mother's..ah, the infinite sadness...

"Little r, you must go to America. They love people who speak quickly and incessantly." She's not impressed but says the word 'hand' like haarnd, a bit like the woman in Singing in the Rain, if you know what I mean.

~~~

We are strangers to ourselves, kid. I look in the mirror and I see someone who is not me. You too? I have left all of my hats in Woodford and the sun bears down on me like a god I don't believe in.

Not being a spiritual person, I run in the evenings. My clothes are unwashed and so I stink to high hell. As I run I have to make my way through tens of low-flying wasps or dragonflies, a few bats, and the crows. Crows will wait to the last minute before they fly off...

~~~

At four o-clock in the morning there is a great gust of wind, as if it was blown in from the sea; a gulp of grey rain smashes against the centre of the window (it feels as if it is only the centre). Dreams interrupted. Not much can be recalled at this late stage. One is faced with the dawning reality that you have to let things slip by...I walk up some wooden steps to a cabin in which some lights are on, 'basement yellow' light. My flight leaves in 30 minutes but I've come back, 'd forgotten something. The swami says she's kept two black and white pictures of me up on the wall. I hug her. I don't know when I'll be back...

~~~

I am walking up the incline, past the dodgy Chinese restaurant and mock Tudor houses on Chigwell Road. It is evening and I wonder if I'm really here or just walking in another one of my dreams. It certainly feels that way but how can we be sure of our sensations? I think of 'S'. I remember 'S'. This is 'S'? It corresponds to another dream I had Ludwig.

It is evening and as I turn the corner onto Snakes Lane I'm up at the highest point. The sky opens up into a wide expanse, the clouds are purple, charcoal grey. There are patches of blue and a few white clouds surviving, like puffs of memory, as if they'd lost track of time and strayed in from the afternoon. Crimson and lush pink clouds. The moment is so beautiful that your eyes instinctively narrow, squint. This ancient gesture, carried over from when we were nomads.

Who or what is real any more? I cannot look at what is real.

~~~

Why do only prostitutes wear yellow?

It is a curious fact but you very rarely see women in 'the east' where yellow.

The yellow star. Venice. 1530. First it was the Jews, then the prostitutes. Contagion, impurity. Strangers, exiles, the rootless, those without a home in the world must be marked out, separated. Qadosh.

~~~


The Courtauld, the glorious Courtauld. Less grand than the RA. You enter it through a side door. That in itself should tell you. There are no direct approaches any more. We see everything from the wrong angle, slightly displaced.  There are a few small domestic rooms in which the paintings are huddled together. Outside: a vast empty space...

~~~

The first ghetto but not the last. You cannot build outwards, only upwards, only by separating what lies inside. You are there, face to face with the beloved, but also with strangers, people who speak a different language, whose customs are different from yours. Huddled together in this makeshift city, this inner city. There are sixteen Chinese Jews, strangers amongst the strangers, the Mussalmaners of the Camps, unseen, already dead.

Why yellow? Is it because it is so sad?

The startling irony. The model for segregation was that of the German resident immigrants in Venice. Would some German remember this five hundred years later?

The women must wear plain clothes, look sad, so as not to be mistaken for the nobility. The whores must wear plain clothes, look sad...

The model. Yes, let's get to this even though we can't face it. The Red Man, kept in a reservation or was it the Boer War? Dig up the books. Who will speak of our captivity? Speak, memory.

~~~