The Tailor of Panama Part 9

'You should honour and revere him and tell our children about him as they grow up, so that they know how a good Samaritan can save a young orphan's life.'

'Arthur Braithwaite was the only moral man I knew until I met your father, Lou,' Pendel a.s.sures her devoutly in return.

And I meant it, Lou! Pendel implores her frantically in his mind, as he closes the shears on the shoulder of the left sleeve. Everything in the world is true if you invent it hard enough and love the person it's for!

'I'll tell her,' Pendel announces aloud as Bach elevates him to a plane of perfect truthfulness. And for a dreadful moment of self-indulgence he seriously contemplates throwing aside every wise precept he has lived by and making a full confession of his sins to his life's partner. Or nearly full. A quorum.

Louisa, I've got to tell you something which is frankly a bit of a facer. What you know about me is not strictly kosher as regards all the details. It's more in the line of what I'd like to have been, if all things had been a bit more equal than they were.

I haven't got the vocabulary, he thinks. I've never confessed anything in my life, except the once for Uncle Benny. Where would I stop? And when would she ever believe me again, about anything? In horror he paints the war party in his imagination, one of Louisa's Trust-in-Jesus sessions but full dress, with the servants banished from the house and the family nucleus gathered round the table with its hands together and Louisa with her back stiff and her mouth shrunk with fear because deep down the truth scares her more than it does me. Last time it was Mark who had to own up to spraying 'b.o.l.l.o.c.ks' on the gatepost of his school. The time before it was Hannah who had poured a can of quick-drying paint down the sink as an act of vengeance against one of the maids.

But today it's our own Harry in the hot seat, explaining to his beloved children that Daddy, for the entire length of his marriage to Mummy and for all the time the children have been old enough to listen to him, has been telling some highly ornamented porky-pies about our great family hero and role model, the non-existent Mr Braithwaite, rest his soul. And that, far from being Braithwaite's favoured son, your father and husband devoted nine hundred and twelve formative days and nights to an in-depth study of the brickwork of Her Maj-esty's houses of correction.

Decision taken. Tell you later. Much later. Like in another life entirely. A life without fluence.

Pendel brought his four-track to a halt just a foot from the car in front and waited for the car behind him to smash into him but for some reason it refused. How did I get here? he wondered. Maybe it hit me and I'm dead. I must have locked up the shop without noticing. Then he remembered cutting the dinner jacket and laying the finished pieces flat on his workbench to consider diem, a thing he always did: took a creator's farewell of them until they came back to him, basted into semi-human form.

Black rain was hurtling onto the bonnet. A lorry was slewed across the road fifty yards ahead of him, its wheels shed like cowpats in its path. Nothing else was visible through the waterfall except lines and lines of clogged traffic going to the war or trying to get away from it. He switched on his radio but couldn't hear it over the thunder of artillery. Rain on a Hot Tin Roof. I'm here for ever. Banged up. In the womb. Doing time. Turn off engine, turn off air-con. Wait. Cook. Sweat. Another salvo coming. Hide under the seat.

Sweat pouring off him, heavy as the rain. Running water gurgling under his feet. Pendel floating, upriver or down. The entire past that he has buried six feet deep, crashing in upon him: the unexpurgated, unsanitised, un-Braithwaited version of his life, starting with the miracle of his birth as related to him in prison by his Uncle Benny and ending with the Day of Absolutely No Atonement thirteen years ago when he invented himself to Louisa on an immaculate white man's lawn in the officially abolished Ca.n.a.l Zone with the Stars & Stripes flapping in the smoke of her daddy's barbecue and the band playing hope-and-glory and the black men watching through the wire.

He sees the orphanage he refused to remember and his Uncle Benny resplendent in his Homburg hat leading him away from it by the hand. He had never seen a Homburg before and wondered whether Uncle Benny was G.o.d. He sees the wet grey paving stones of Whitechapel jolting beneath his feet as he trundles trolley-loads of swaying garments through the honking traffic on his way to Uncle Benny's warehouse. He sees himself twelve years later, the same child exactly, just larger, standing spellbound among pillars of orange smoke in the same warehouse and the rows of ladies' summer frocks like convent martyrs and the flames licking at their feet.

He sees Uncle Benny with his hands cupped to his mouth yelling, 'Run, Harry boy, you stupid tart, where's your imagination?' to the accompaniment of ringing bells and the clatter of Benny's hastily departing footsteps. And himself locked in a quicksand, can't move hand or limb. He sees blue uniforms wading towards him, seizing him, dragging him to the van, and the kindly sergeant holding up the empty paraffin can, smiling like any decent father. 'Is this yours, by any chance, Mr Hymie, sir, or did you just happen to have it in your hand?'

'I can't move my legs,' Pendel explains to the kindly sergeant. "They're stuck. It's like a cramp or something. I ought to run away but I can't.'

'Don't worry, son. We'll soon put that right,' the kindly sergeant says.

He sees himself standing bone-thin and naked against the brick wall of the police cell. And the long slow night-time while the blue uniforms take it in turns to hit him, the way they hit Marta but with more deliberation, and more pints of beer under their belts. And the kindly sergeant, who is such a decent father, urging them on. Until the water covers him over and he drowns.

The rain ends. It never happened. Cars sparkling, everybody happy to go home. Pendel tired to death. Starts the engine and the slow crawl forward, propping both forearms on the wheel. Watches out for dangerous debris. Starts to smile, hearing Uncle Benny.

'It was an explosion, Harry boy,' Uncle Benny whispered through his tears. 'An explosion of the flesh.'

Without the weekly prison visits Uncle Benny would never have been so forthcoming about Pendel's origins. But the sight of his nephew seated to attention before him in his box-pleated denims with his name on the pocket is more than Benny's good guilty heart can bear, never mind how many cheesecakes and books on keeping fit Auntie Ruth sends along with him, or how many times Benny chokes out his thanks that Pendel has kept faith through all the circ.u.mstances. He means, kept shtumm.

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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 G.o.d's long corridor, but for G.o.d'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 G.o.d, which is rough on us because man is a harder con than G.o.d 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.'

Pendel will give Benny whatever he asks, if only he will go on about the explosion.

'It was the smell of her, your father told me,' Benny resumes. 'Pulling at his hair he was, with the remorse. Sitting before me as you're sitting now except for the uniform. "For the sake of her smell I brought down the temple on my head," he told me. Your father was a religious man, Harry. "She was kneeling at the grate and I smelt the sweet womanhood of her, not soap and scrubbing, Benny, but the natural woman. The smell of her womanhood overcame me." If Rachel hadn't been having a knees-up with the Daughters of Jewish Purity on Southend Pier your father would never have fallen.'

'But he did,' Pendel prompts him.

'Harry, amid the mingled tears of Catholic and Jewish guilt, amid Ave Marias and Oi veys and what-will-become-of-me's on both sides, your father plucked the cherry. See it as an act of G.o.d I can't, but the Jewish chutzpah is yours and so is the Irish blarney, if you could only ditch the guilt.'

'How did you get me out of the orphanage?' Pendel demands, nearly shouting now, he cares so much.

Somewhere among his muddy memories of childhood before Benny rescued him there is a picture of a dark-haired woman like Louisa on her hands and knees while she scrubs a stone floor as big as a playground, watched by a statue of a blue-robed Good Shepherd and His Lamb.

Pendel driving the homeward stretch. Familiar houses long asleep. The stars washed clean by rain. A full moon outside his prison window. Bang me up again, he thinks. Prison's where you go when you don't want to take decisions.

'Harry, I was magnificent. Those nuns were French sn.o.bs and thought I was a gentleman. I wore the full Monty, a grey suit out of the window, a tie selected by your Auntie Ruth, socks to match, the shoes hand-made by Lobb of St James's which was always my indulgence. No swagger, hands to my sides, my Socialism nowhere to be seen.' For Benny amid his myriad accomplishments is a pa.s.sionate supporter of the Workers' Cause and believer in the Rights of Man.' "Mothers," I say to them, "I promise you this. Little Harry will have the good life if it kills me. Harry shall be our mitzvah. You tell me the wise men to take him to and he'll be there on the dot with a white shirt for his instruction. A fee-paying education at the school of your choice I guarantee, the finest music on the gramophone and a home life any orphan child would give his eyes for. Salmon on the table, idealistic conversation, his own room to sleep in, a down mattress." I was on the way up in those days. No more shmatte for me, it was all golf clubs and footwear and the palace in Umbria just round the corner. We thought we'd be millionaires in a week.'

'Where was Cherry?'

'Gone, Harry boy, gone,' says Benny dropping his voice for tragedy. 'Your mother fled the coop and who can blame her? One letter from an aunt in County Mayo saying her poor sad Cherry was worn out from all the opportunities the Sisters gave her to wash away her sins.'

'And my father?'

Benny falls back into despair. 'In the soil, son,' he says, wiping away fresh tears. 'Your father, my brother. Where I should be for making you do what you did. Died of the shame in my opinion, which is what I nearly do every time I look at you here. It was those summer frocks that did for me. There's no more depressing sight on earth than five hundred unsold summer frocks in autumn, as every shlemiel knows. Each day that pa.s.sed, the insurance policy became a temptation of the devil. I was a slave to convention, is what I was, Harry, and what's worse, I made you carry the torch for me.'

'I'm doing the course,' Pendel tells him to cheer him up as the bell goes. 'I'm going to be the best cutter in the world. Look at this then.' And he shows him a panel of prison cloth that he cadged from stores and cut to measure.

It is on his next visit that Benny in his guilt presents Pendel with a tin-framed icon of the Virgin Mary that he says reminds him of his childhood in Lvov on the days he crept out of the ghetto to watch the goyim pray. And she is with him now, next to the wake-up clock on the rattan table at his bedside in Bethania, watching with her vanished Irish smile as he drags off his sweat-drenched prison uniform and creeps into bed for a share of Louisa's blameless sleep.

Tomorrow, he thought. I'll tell her tomorrow.

'Harry, that you?'

Mickie Abraxas, the great underground revolutionary and secret hero of the students, lucid drunk at two-fifty a.m., swearing to G.o.d that he would kill himself because his wife had thrown him out.

'Where are you?' Pendel said, smiling in the dark, because Mickie for all the trouble he caused was a cell-mate for life.

'Nowhere. I'm a b.u.m.'

'Mickie.'

'What?'

'Where's Ana?'

Ana was Mickie's reigning chiquilla, a st.u.r.dy, practical-minded childhood friend of Marta's from la Cordillera who seemed to accept Mickie as found. Marta had introduced them.

'Hi, Harry,' said Ana cheerfully, so Pendel said 'Hi' cheerfully too.

'How much has he had, Ana?'

'I don't know. He says he went to a casino with Rafi Domingo. Did some vodka, lost some money. Maybe did a little c.o.ke, he forgets. He's sweating all over. Do I call a doctor?'

Mickie was back on the line before Pendel could answer her.

'Harry, I love you.'

'I know that, Mickie, and I'm grateful, and I love you too.'

'Did you do that horse?'

'I did, Mickie, yes, I have to say I did that horse.'

'I'm sorry, Harry. Okay? I'm sorry.'

'No problem, Mickie. No bones broken. Not every good horse wins.'

'I love you, Harry. You're my good friend, hear me?'

'Then you won't need to kill yourself, will you, Mickie,' said Pendel kindly. 'Not if you've got Ana and a good friend.'

'You know what we do, Harry? We make a weekend together. You, me, Ana, Marta. Go fishing. f.u.c.k.'

'So you have yourself a good night's sleep, Mickie,' said Pendel firmly, 'and tomorrow in the morning you come round for your fitting and a sandwich and we'll have a nice natter. Yes? Right, then.'

'Who was it?' Louisa said as he rang off.

'Mickie. His wife's locked him out of the house again.'

'Why?'

'Because she's having an affair with Rafi Domingo,' said Pendel, wrestling with life's ineluctable logic.

'Why doesn't he punch her in the mouth?'

'Who?' said Pendel stupidly.

'His wife, Harry. Who do you think?'

'He's tired,' said Pendel. 'Noriega beat the spirit out of him.'

Hannah climbed into their bed, to be followed by Mark and the giant teddy bear he had given up years ago.

It was tomorrow, so he told her.

I did it to be believed, he told her, when she was safely back to sleep.

To prop you up when you get wobbly.

To give you a real shoulder to lean on, instead of just me.

To make me someone better for a Zonian roughneck's daughter who blurts a bit and goes ballistic when she's threatened and forgets to take short steps after twenty years of being told by her mother that she'd never get married like Emily if she didn't.

And thinks she's too ugly and too tall while everyone around her is the right size and glamorous like Emily.

And who would never in a million years, not even in her most vulnerable and insecure moment, not even to spite Emily, set fire to Uncle Benny's warehouse as a favour to him, starting with the summer frocks.

Pendel sits in the armchair, pulls a coverlet over him-self, leaves his bed to the pure in heart.

'I'll be out all day,' he tells Marta, arriving in the shop next morning. 'You'll have to do front of shop.'

'You've got the Bolivian Amba.s.sador at eleven.'

'Put him off. I need to see you.'

'When?'

'Tonight.'

Until now they had gone as a family, picnicking in the shade of the mango trees, watching the hawks and ospreys and vultures lazing on the burning breeze and the riders on white horses looking like the last of Pancho Villa's army. Or they'd haul the inflated rubber dinghy across the flooded paddies with Louisa at her happiest as she waded through the water in her shorts playing Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen to Pendel's Bogart, and Mark pleading for caution and Hannah telling Mark not to be a drip.

Or they'd drive the four-track down cloudy yellow dust-tracks that stopped dead when they reached the forest's edge, at which point to the huge delight of the kids Pendel would let out one of Uncle Benny's wonderful wails of despair pretending they were lost. Which they were, until the silver towers of the mill rose out of the palm trees fifty yards ahead of them.

Or they'd go at reaping time, ride in pairs on huge tracked harvesters, the flails hanging out in front of them, beating the rice and raising clouds of bugs. Sticky hot air pressed under hard low sky. Table-flat fields fading into mangrove swamps. Mangrove swamps fading into sea.

But today as the Great Decider drove his solitary path everything he saw bothered him, everything was an omen: the I-hate-you razor wire of the US ammunition dumps, reminding him of Louisa's father, the reproachful signs saying 'Jesus is the Lord', the squatters' cardboard villages on every hillside: any day now and I'll be joining you.

And after the squalor, the lost paradise of Pendel's ten-minute childhood. Rolling tracts of red Devon earth from holiday school at Okehampton. English cows that stared at him from banana groves. Not even Haydn on the ca.s.sette player could save him from their melancholy. Entering the farm's drive he demanded only to know how long it was since he had told Angel to get these b.l.o.o.d.y pot-holes fixed. The sight of Angel himself in boned riding boots, straw trilby and gold neck-chains only quickened his anger. They drove to the spot where the corporate neighbour from Miami had cut his trench into Pendel's river.

'You know something, Harry, my friend?'

'What?'

'What that judge did is immoral. Here in Panama when we bribe somebody we expect loyalty. You know what else we expect, my friend?'

'No.'

'We expect a deal to be a deal, Harry. No top-ups. No pressure. No comebacks. I say the guy is antisocial.'

'So what do we do?' Pendel said.

Angel gave the contented shrug of a man whose favourite news is bad.

'You want my advice, Harry? Straight? As your friend?'

They had reached the river. On the opposite bank, the neighbour's henchmen refused to notice Pendel's presence. The trench had become a ca.n.a.l. Below it, the river bed was dry.