Читать книгу The Doomington Wanderer - Louis Golding - Страница 25

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Begley Hill, in the dark city of Doomington, was where he lived. He was the sort of obscure little Jew you saw but did not look at. He might speak but you did not listen to him. Why should you?

He lived with his mother in Jilk Street, which is one of the meaner avenues in that unradiant neighbourhood. His mother was not notable, except for the excellence of her cooking. But her competitors in Jilk Street were nearly all as able. Perhaps there was a certain ultimate savour about her varrenikas which Mrs. Levinsky could not compass, and her blintsies were so fragile and airy that her own tenants, Mr. and Mrs. Murphy (who occupied the parlour and the front bedroom), condescended to share them with her.

His first name was Hyman. There was no reason why it should not be. The family name was Lipshin. He did not resent it. If some entirely grotesque destiny had named him Porphyrogenitos Ebenezer Andritsaena, he would have taken no steps in the matter. He had been educated at the Ealing Street school, not far away, where he had achieved no formidable distinction. His history was bad; his drawing was scarcely better; in geography he was top of the class. He knew where jute came from and whether Cotopaxi was a mountain or an isthmus, and where it was. The whereabouts of Cedar Falls in Ohio did not deceive him, but he lost ground, as I have suggested, in the Wars of the Roses.

He was not elected, therefore, to any scholarship at a secondary school which might have enabled him to continue his researches into the products of Sfax and the situation of Filicudi. He became an invoice clerk in Messrs. Cohen & Montague’s Hat and Cap Works, where he remained for the next twenty years of his uneventful existence.

Messrs. Cohen & Montague allowed him to repair home well before his mother lit the Friday evening candles on the eve of the Sabbath, nor did they expect pagan dues from him in the matter of invoice clerking on the holy day that follows. The festivals, too, remained inviolate; for, though Mr. Montague was a scion of the ancient Norman aristocracy, Mr. Cohen was aware of the sacrosanctitude of the Feast of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles.

Hyman Lipshin drew a dim pleasure out of the white Friday evening cloths, the serried candlesticks, the brimful wine-beaker; out of the long hours of holy invocation at the little synagogue round the corner. I said his pleasure was dim, not because any other pleasures he experienced were crimson, but because he lived dimly. His mind was not in Jilk Street nor at the hat and cap works of Messrs. Cohen & Montague. Do I make that statement purely on a posteriori grounds? Would Hyman himself have declared any such disturbing thing? I doubt it.

Mrs. Lipshin did not occupy herself with the question. Her domestic labours achieved, she brought forth her Pentateuch, with its Yiddish version interleaved, and bent her black wig towards the dog-eared pages. A butcher’s skewer, held in her frail but efficient fingers, pursued hour beyond hour the awful eloquence. Her voice did not cease from its single intonation, hour beyond hour, until the Friday evening candles flickered in their sockets and she made ready for bed at length, stumping off in her loose slippers. Hyman sat snoring in the corner, under the shelf where the samovar, so reverently brought over from Russia, stood. His feeble lower jaw drooped towards his chest.

Were there dreams, then, beyond that sallow brow, behind the leaden waters of his eyes? What dreams shall Hyman Lipshin dream in a Jilk Street kitchen at the heart of the dark city of Doomington?

“Come then, Hymele!” his mother said, clawing at his shoulder. He followed her as obediently at the age of thirty as at the age of three.

“I come, mutterel, little mother,” he said.

Dreams? Dreams? What folly! No room for dreams in Doomington. What would Mr. Cohen say about it to Mr. Montague should their third invoice clerk take to dreaming? Rather more, I should fancy, than the old greybeards at the synagogue might have said should they have heard that young Hyman Lipshin was possessed of any such malady. For they did not take much notice of him where he sat in his praying-shawl at a corner of the bench against the women’s partition. He was not meritorious in the fervour of his religious transports; nor, on the other hand, an object of suspicion for any laxity in ceremonial observance. It was true he carried his handkerchief on the Sabbath, not round his waist, but in his pocket. That was to be deplored. But no man had ever seen him ascend a tramcar upon the Sabbath. The bearded gentlemen greeted him courteously. They called him, honorifically, Reb Hyman.

Now what, I ask you, can have explained the mystery of the Pocket Atlas? Why Mr. Lipshin should find a Pocket Atlas an object worthy of his attention at all is mystifying, but why he should secrete it in his prayer-book on no less a day than Rosh Hashonah, the feast of the New Year, is surely a problem beyond all human solution. Most regrettable—oh, most regrettable. The thing slid from his prayer-book on to the floor, open at a map of Polynesia. The beadle picked it up—not more than two yards away from the Holy Ark. There was a gasp of horror, a beardy whistle of dismay. Hyman Lipshin blushed all round his ears and a long way down his neck. He seized the atlas, thrust it into his pocket, and glued his eyes on to his prayer-book.

No explanation was asked for or forthcoming. It was all so incredible that quite soon everyone ceased to believe it. It was held to be a sort of autumnal hallucination. If it had happened at all, it had happened eight years ago.

Ten years ago ...

Twelve years ago ...

Then Uncle Gustave died.

Uncle Gustave was quite the supreme uncle of fiction. His name was very rarely mentioned in Jilk Street or anywhere at all in Doomington. He had lingered but briefly in that city during his pilgrimage between Russia and the Argentine. He had disappeared westwards in the company of a Gentile maiden. There was only this much to be said regarding him, little though it was. He was not married to the Gentile maiden. He developed ranches and converted them later into cinematograph companies. It was rumoured the Gentile maiden was dead without issue. Uncle Gustave in due course died too, and confirmed the rumour. He left a handsome fortune to his brother’s son, Hyman Lipshin, of Jilk Street, in Doomington.

And then the mystery of the Pocket Atlas was resolved. Hyman Lipshin promptly took a ticket to Otaheite.

I wonder if it is all clear now? Surely it is. There was never a time when an infinite nostalgia for far places did not possess the sad little mind of Hyman Lipshin. Whether he checked moneys for the further glory of Messrs. Cohen & Montague, whether he stood meekly in his corner of the synagogue reciting the Nineteen Prayers, enjoying a mild prestige due rather to his mother’s piety than his own merits, whether he dozed under the samovar in the Jilk Street kitchen—his soul was over the seas and far away. He was possessed by a planetary glamour. He ascended the fir-slopes of Kirishimi or lay down under the date-laden palms of the oasis of Nefta. He penetrated the palæolithic caverns of Puente Viesgo and beat the swamps of Papua. The surf thundered against the outer reefs of the coral islands. Lulled by that organ-music, a scarlet lily behind his ear, his fingers idly paddled the pellucid waters of the lagoon.

Otaheite, mainly. Bread-fruit, yam-yams, colossal turtles, coco-nuts, green macaws screeching in the branches, a scarlet-tufted monkey swinging by his tail. Otaheite ...

He was no dynamic young man. They would merely at length have transported him to the cemetery on the confines of Begley Hill (for he had paid the burial dues punctiliously from an early age), and Kilimanjaro, Sunium, Nebraska, would have dissolved equally into undistinguished dust.

But, as I have said, Uncle Gustave died. And Hyman took a ticket for Otaheite. But to go to Otaheite and to be there are not the same things. Let me insist on making that clear. For it was not the thunder of the surf he heard in Otaheite, nor in Ravenna the soughing of the pine-branches. It was the sirens of the factories in Doomington he heard. He did not hear the dusky maidens chanting as they twined their hair with flowers, nor the bronzed peasants hallooing behind their oxen. He heard the old men and women wailing on the Fast of the Destroyed Temple. How should little Hyman Lipshin detach from his ear-drums those ancestral voices, and from his timid nostrils expel the fumes of the dark city?

Otaheite was a failure, as Ravenna was destined to be. He fared forth from the coral islands towards the creeks of the Amazon and later found himself upon the peaks of the Rockies. The voices were not stilled. And though the most superb cuisine of the expensive continent was laid before him upon such plate and flanked by such silver as Sennacherib would not have scorned, he found himself aching for the halkies steeped in the fat of chickens and the stuffed varrenikas and the crisp blintsies of his mother, though never in Jilk Street had the prospect of them caused any especial excitement in his bosom. Gentlemen of considerable accomplishments and ladies of no mean beauty courted him. But he remembered odd half-hours he had spent in the Jilk Street parlour with Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, his mother’s tenants, and wondered how he had not perceived what wisdom was theirs and how graceful a humour.

Thereon he found himself in the Mediterranean basin, disconsolately wandering between Stamboul and Oran, hoping to find in Sicilian Castrogiovanni or in the holy Tunisian city of Kairwan the glory he had dreamed of in the offices of Messrs. Cohen & Montague. He did not succeed, nor in Nauplia, nor in Burgos. The great factories interposed themselves; he heard only the machines drumming and, closer at hand, the old men chanting in the synagogue. A curious obstinacy seized him, sapless little man that he was. He wandered wretchedly from continent to continent, from bleak northern fastness to lush tropic glade, seeking the lost glamour. Doomington was not to be dislodged. He was himself Doomington.

And then a letter reached him in some obscure corner of the world from his mother in Jilk Street. (She was a lady of the older sort, and, though she might now so easily have transferred her black wig and Pentateuch to some horrific mansion in the Gentile suburbs, she would not for the world be dislodged from Jilk Street, from her next-door neighbours, or the synagogue round the corner.)

Mrs. Lipshin was, in fact, ill. She hoped she might set eyes on her son again before she died, though the strange demon had withheld him so long from her. Her son sped home by whatsoever most speedy and costly mode of travel was available. He did not arrive too late.

But when, some weeks later, she died, and all that had seemed to bind him to Doomington was thus dissolved, he did not make swift preparations to render himself once again in the world’s lost places. For, indeed, no sooner had he set foot once more in Doomington than the Otaheite and Ravenna that had eluded him became manifest. He heard the thunder of the surf and the chanting of the dusky maidens. He heard the hallooing of the bronzed peasants behind their oxen. He appeared duly among the old men of the synagogue, but now that their wailing was in his ears he did not hear it. Now that the smoke-pall hung all day over his head his vision pursued brilliantly and ruthlessly the superb contours of Etna. He did not move from the tiny house in Jilk Street, even though his mother was dead and the Murphys long since gone. He was appeased in the presence of their ghosts. He wandered from Jilk Street into Ealing Street, through the drab places of Begley Hill, linking thus the Carpathians with the Blue Mountains of Australia. His soul was fulfilled of its desire. He sat meekly among the greybeards of the synagogue, but there was no second scandal of an impious Pocket Atlas slipping down from the sacred pages of the prayer-book. He saw now those tawny pillars of Corinth which he had been blind to when his physical eyes beheld them. His Jilk Street candle was the infinite terracing of lights above the harbour of Hong Kong.

But it had been Otaheite mainly—green macaws, hairy coco-nuts, tufted monkeys. And when he died, it was the thunder of the surf among the coral-reefs he heard, as he lay paddling his fingers in the pellucid waters of the lagoon. Otaheite was a scarlet lily thrust behind his cold ear.