PerfectlyWriteFamilyTales: In which I examine the difference between truth and fiction, great stories and downright lies!
Perfect Family Tales And Other Trivia
The art of the short-story writer is that of the cartoonist. It is the magical craft of creating entire worlds with a few simple strokes of a pen.
Tales told by an idiot? Maybe! But my tales are also a mix of reality and fantasy; truth and lies; some based on my own family; others, not.
Readers must guess which characters are real; who are inventions - and who are an amalgam of both. Please draw the boundaries for yourself.
‘Outcry over department store bras for two-year-olds’ (U.K. newspaper report)
“Hey, sweetheart! Wake up!” Mel urged Angie.
“I don’t want to be mean. But today you must be quick. Remember? We’ve got a bus to catch so we can be in London for our special appointment at 12 o’clock”.
“But, Daddy …”
“Don’t argue, darling. Not today, please. Just go into the bathroom and wash while I get our breakfast ready. Then when you’ve eaten, all you have to do is to brush your teeth”.
“But Dadd-eee”, said six-year-old Angie, using her best wheedle. “I don’t need a wash. I had a bath at bedtime last night. Remember”?
“Yes, I remember. But you’ve had a sleep since then. Please, just go and …”
“But Daddy. It’s not fair. I can’t be dirty. I didn’t have any dreams. Anyway, Daddy”, added Angie, as she crawled out of bed and began to take off her pyjamas. I’ve got to tell you about something I need. Real bad”.
“What’s that?” called back Mel, beginning to canter downstairs.
“All the girls in my class are wearing bras. I want one too”.
Aunt Lucy snapped back the brim of her favourite black hat, then looked very hard and cross at her reflection in the mirror.
“This won’t do”, she said. “Things may not be good in darkest Peru. But - my word - they’re much worse in London!
“So while I’m far too old to go gallivanting, when I learn that my favourite nephew is in need of ‘parental guidance’, I know that I have no choice”.
So without further ado, she wrapped her grandest shawl around her shoulders; pushed her feet into wellington boots left unworn since she’d become resident at the Home for Retired Bears, and double-checked the contents of her outsized reticule:
Half-dozen 16oz jars Darkest Peruvian Vintage Coarse Cut Marmalade (suitable only for persons aged 18 years and over, not to be supplied to anyone below that age)
Two score and ten bars 70% extra-bitter, plain chocolate (suitable only for persons aged 15 years and over, not to be supplied to anyone below that age)
Three dozen clean pairs unmentionables in case of accidents (please don’t ask!)
Assault rifle and floor plan for use at Natural History Museum, London (violent content warning)
At last Aunt Lucy felt she was ready to leave for her arduous journey. But native good manners made her reach for her telephone to make an urgent call.
It took her a few minutes to find the correct number. But with help from a gentleman at international telephone enquiries, whom she discovered was a distant cousin and spoke excellent Spanish plus an array of minor Amazonian languages, she was connected to a line in London.
A friendly voice answered almost at once.
“Hello, Paul King here. May I ask who’s calling?”
“Hello, indeed!”, said Aunt Lucy, sounding most imposing. “If you don’t know who I am, what could happen next doesn’t bear consideration”.
“Oh, Aunt Lucy, said King, his voice oozing like melting butter on hot toast. “I thought you’d be with us by now. You know that our bio-pic,Paddington, devoted entirely to the exploits of your wonderful nephew, is due to open this week. We do hope you can join us. It’s going to be so much fun”.
”I don’t know how you can say that, Mr King. I understand you’ve – well – given my bear ideas above his station. Up to now he’s always led a sheltered life; first with me; then with the Browns in their quiet suburban house. I don’t know whether I want him mixing with Hollywood riff-raff. I find it all highly irregular”.
“But, Aunt Lucy. I – er, I mean we - ”
“Please don’t interrupt, Paul, there’s a good boy”, said Aunt Lucy, using his first name as her patience began to fray. “I really can’t bear that sort of behaviour. It’s not seemly of a film director and writer.
“I simply want to speak to you before I arrive in London as I don’t think we’ll have a chance for serious conversation amid all the razzamatazz.What I must emphasise is that I don’t want ‘Paddington’ - as all you British folk insist on calling him – to be exposed to any dangerous behaviour, threats, sex references or bad language. No matter that it’s all ‘mild’. The word’s very subjective and as I must keep reminding everyone, he’s still very unworldly for a lad who was born in 1958. I suppose it was the era as much as anything. But never mind that, now”.
“Please don’t worry”, said King, relieved to get a word in. “There’s no ‘sex’ – just ‘innuendo’; the bad language is only infrequent and anyway, everyone says the film is bloody marvellous”.
“That’s what I mean”, said Aunt Lucy, exasperated. “I think this is the real reason why that Colin Firth chappie said – what audacity – ‘he simply doesn’t have my voice’. Surely, Mr Firth means that he doesn’t have my nephew’s voice. But never mind. This is what happens when people lose track of who they are. In my day, there were places for everyone and everything, with all in their proper place. Now, while I’m in the mood, I’d like to speak to Michael Bond. He’s got my bear into a terrible scrape here and I want to know why. Mr King – Paul – are you still there … ?”
-----------
Author’s Note: Paddington opens in London on Friday 28 November 2014 with a ‘P.G.’ – ‘Parental Guidance rating.
It premieres in Israel with the title הדב פדינגטון (literally, The Bear Paddington) on 26 March 2015 with a Universal rating.
Today I was astounded to receive a letter from Hilde Herrmann.
I was thunderstruck as I had neither seen nor heard from her in more than seventy years.
The very sight of her signature was so shocking that I began to tremble quite violently and when I picked up the glass I’d used at breakfast, it fell from my hand and smashed into the kitchen sink.
The last of a set that I’d used since Mummy died, it now lay scattered in a thousand champagne-coloured shards, an apt finale to what had been a terrible chapter in family lore.
Hilde Hermann – together, her names mean ‘battle warrior’ – stormed into our lives for six weeks from early January 1940.
She was brought to England during the Children's Transport rescue scheme that helped youngsters escape Nazi Europe. But she was not the underfed, docile waif delivered to other willing foster families.
Not Hilde! Then aged 12, she had supposedly been orphaned well before the war and was somehow manoeuvred on to a convoy leaving Berlin. But she was like a cuckoo in a nest, much taller than average and enormously fat.
To begin, my mother enjoyed watching her fairly demolish everything on the dinner table. But she had to keep an eye on our wartime rations and more than once, discreetly asked her to leave something for everyone else.
Hilde suffered disturbed nights and from the first, we heard her moaning endlessly in her sleep, then waking and prowling the landing by the half-hour.
The Kindertransport authorities either were unaware or refrained from advising my parents that Hilde had long endured far more than the fear and ritual humiliations heaped on German Jews duringKristallnachton 10 November 1938. Uncommon for the times – especially in the Jewish community – she had not only been conceived out-of-wedlock but had been abandoned soon after birth.
My darling, sweet-natured father intended that she would become a sister for me, his spoilt, precious only child. But it was not to be. Instead, she scared me witless; shouting, pulling, sometimes hitting me when we were supposed to be playing quiet ‘girls’ games’.
Matters grew darker when items in the house began to disappear. First, went the loose change on the hall table that Daddy always removed from his overcoat when he returned from work. Then he couldn’t find his mother of pearl cufflinks and Mummy’s carefully hoarded stash of sweeties vanished without a trace.
But worse was to come and Hilde’s continuing antics frightened even my parents:
Next, the night-time prowls became goose-stepped stomps up and down the stairs. “Sieg Heil,Sieg Heil,” she’d chant just loud enough for us to hear.
Then one night – no, two nights together – I peeked from my bedroom doorway as she strutted down the stairs, out through the front door and slammed it behind her.
Despite the freezing winter air and wearing nothing but her nightdress, she remained in the front garden for some time before banging on the door with a broken brick, demanding to be let back in.
My parents were kindly, gentle people who rarely raised their voices, even in a crowd.
“But”, said Daddy in Yiddish after the second and most desperate night, “genug ist genug– enough is enough”.
After he’d run down stairs to rescue her and gently coaxed her back between the covers, he returned to his own bed hoping for a few hours’ rest before the alarm clock rang.
But Hilde did not stay in bed for long and started shuffling about, scraping the bedroom stool in front of the three-winged dressing-table mirror.
I was now so anxious that I plucked up enough courage to creep out of my bedroom, push her door barely ajar and kneel on the floor watching what she did.
“Bad girl! Wicked girl!” she hissed at her now seated reflection. Then, her face contorted with rage, she rose, leaned across and wielding the rear-side of Mummy’s silver-backed hairbrush, began hitting the three glass panels with all her might and main.
I’m still awe-struck when I recall Hilde’s hysterical accuracy and precision. She smashed each part in turn. First in half; then quarters, then eighths, smaller and smaller, screaming louder and louder until her work was done.
As everything went quiet, I realised that Mummy and Daddy had been standing behind me as Hilde’s performance raged on.
Then they motioned me to go back to my room, somehow propelled Hilde into their bed and went downstairs for what remained of the night.
Everything else that happened became a blessed blur. I believe Daddy contacted the Kindertransport authorities early the next day and Hilde was sent away.
She must have had an amazing cure because, so Mummy reported, soon after the war a large, carefully wrapped parcel arrived at the house.
It was a gift of glassware with a brief note attached inside:
“Dear Mr and Mrs Selwyn
“I’m feeling a lot better now and want to thank you for your kind hospitality when I first came to England. It’s true, you know. Work really does make you free.
Best wishes.
H. H.”
And the letter I received from her today?
It was to say that she’s returned to North London after a peripatetic life; has discovered I still live in my parents’ house and would like to get in touch.
But the very idea appalled –frightened -me afresh. So I took the paper; folded it in half, quarters, then eighths and tore the pile to shreds. It’s still lying on the table next to me as I jot this note.
Perhaps later, when I feel less fragile, I’ll go into the garden and make a bonfire. Like Hilde said, work can make you free.
There they were - two fat, ageing witches huddling in a well. The same spot where their foremothers had been hurled after torture and execution in 1684.
“Is this how it feels to be inside a cauldron?”, wondered Zena.
“Na! This is damp, wet – not toasty and dry”, said her friend, Nellie.
“Anyway”, continued Zena, “if it’s true that our blessed matriarchs were chucked in here, they’ve tidied up – left no bone unturned!”
“Hmm! And I can’t sense any souls”, said Nellie. “But”, she added, thumbing skyward, “from the number of departed spirits tumbling about me as we ran here, you’d think some blundering idiot had punched a hole in the fabric of the astral plane. None of this is how two nice Wiccan girls should spend Halloween”.
“You’re right. Meanwhile”, giggled Zena, “we’ll have to manage until dawn, then squeeze ourselves back through the hole and scoot home. But why am I laughing? For the first time in 330 years, it’s dangerous to be a witch”.
“Everything’s beyond awful”, agreed Nellie. “We’re living through a waking nightmare. Who could have imagined hiding like feral animals in our own village?
“I’ve even heard rumours about the reinstatement of the British anti-witchcraft laws that were repealed in 1953. A blissful 61 years of freedom – our own lifespans - all being snatched back on a bureaucrat’s whim”.
“Don’t think it’s without foundation”, said Zena. “Folk who hate us – that’s almost everyone – have been cooking this up for ages”.
“You’re talking about Ilyse Robens and her boycott augury? She warned that’s how things would start. But no-one listened”.
“A great lady who’d learned the lessons of history. We should remember her as a woman who fled Holocaust Europe and whose surviving family spurned her when she followed Gerald Gardner. Oh, the pride she took in her Wicca badge! ‘A yellow star was forced on me in Leipzig’, she’d say, ‘so I’ll never be seen without my pentangle here”.
“Indeed”, said Nellie. “I’ll always regret dismissing her so coolly when she described her vision of the windows of Jenny Alton’s herbalist shop being shattered”.
“Now it’s happened. Three times”, said Zena. “Then the self-appointed War on Witches brigade drew crude broomstick cartoons on the main door; smashed her healing crystals and threatened to report her ‘criminal activities’ to the police.
“As a trained pharmacologist, they said, she had to choose between her professional work and her links to the International Society of Alchemy. So she’s shut the shop and judging by her appearance, has aged ten years almost overnight”.
“It’s another horrible story”, said Nellie. “Jenny’s so decent. I’d noticed that her premises had been boarded up, but didn’t know why.
“Everything gets worse each day. I read inThe Guardian and Moralistthat Arthur Miller’s playThe Crucible has been deemed ‘too sympathetic to witches and witchcraft’, so a proposed West End staging has been cancelled and the producer has been arrested on charges of intended ‘incitement to hate’”.
“But who is hating whom? Ridiculous and unjust”, sighed Zena. “This sounds like another War on Witches publicity stunt. They’re looking for any excuse to attack us.
“And it’s not only here in England. Europe, Africa, the Middle East, even American university campuses are astir with anti-witch protests of the type not seen for generations.
“Much of the frenzy has been whipped up by international news services like The G and M, especially since the outbreak of the Weevila pandemic. Well- respected witchcraft practitioners everywhere have been accused of infecting water supplies and of gratifying the most hideous sexual perversions that their accusers can contrive”.
“Of course”, said Nellie, “the situation’s being made much worse by a few genuine wrongdoers and it’s difficult for outsiders to differentiate. There have also been stories about ritual child abuse linked to witchcraft, with allegations of drownings and rapes as part of attempts to ‘drive the devil out’ of small children”.
“But surely”, asked Zena, “even if these bizarre rumours had the slightest substance, they couldn’t have anything to do with our members?
“All I read and hear is: ’Put the witches on trial. Prick them! Burn them! Bring back the Witch Finder General! King James I was right!’
“But hardest to believe or comprehend is how a baying mob of protestors found their way this week to a pre-Samhain gathering in the woods outside Heaton-Under-Mallows. It’s claimed that the rioters tormented the worshippers about their ‘asymmetrical’ numbers. “Only thirteen?”, they chanted. “Unlucky for some!” Who told them about the meeting? We can only guess”.
“It was an ‘insider’ – of course”, said Nellie, beginning to weep. “I know. There’s nothing – no-one – like an apostate to cause trouble between heaven and earth. You must have read the rubbish spouted online by members of ‘Sword and Shield Ministries’”.
“What are you saying?”
“It’s my son, Adrian who’s behind much of the terror. I’ve carried the burden of this terrible secret for too long. I must speak now, Zena. You’ll know him as ‘Father Johnny Spicer’. But I don’t believe he’s been ordained.
“We’ve had no contact since he left home aged 16 after a row that almost killed my Cecil. A long time later we learned that after living rough he was given shelter by a well-meaning charity. Then he fell in with a bunch of bigoted do-gooders, had his head turned and decided he loathed everything about witches and our craft”.
There was a long silence. One that frightened Nellie more even than the screams of the mob that was thundering down the path towards the well.
Then Zena spoke.
“ I understand now, Nellie; why Spicer’s so-called ‘sermons’ start with “speaking as a former Wiccan and as the son of a practising witch …’
“But don’t blame yourself. There must be something wrong with his wiring. Adrian’s no son of yours, darlin’. He’s just a sad, mad traitor. And a fool!”
Betty bounded the final flight of steps two at a time. No-one – nothing – must stop her now.
The door at the top on the right was barely ajar. It had to be the one. She pushed the handle and peered cautiously round the opening. But a rank fug from fifty-seven years of incessant smoking and relentless drinking made it almost impossible to see.
Then her vision cleared and she made out three men hunched over a rickety table. They were playing Seven Card Stud.
“Hullo”, she said, her deep voice more sultry than ever.
“Y ’short-handed?”
There was no reaction.
The next second dragged like an hour.
Betty tried again.
“Hullo – Bogie? It’s me!”
“Hullo, y ’self,” said Bogart, unmoved. “Huh, Baby. Y ’took y ’time. What kept ya?”
“Dunno. Suppose it was the three kids to put through college. A couple of Tony Awards, an Academy Award nomination and an Honorary Oscar. Not much to write home about. Sorry you had to wait”.
“I thought - maybe you and your motor-bike had broken down on the highway to heaven”.
“Y ‘know about that? I needed the thrust; the power”.
“Then you ran out of gas. Here, we know about everything. Y ’ll pick it up pretty damn quick. Y ‘as always a quick study …”
“So were you, Bogie. Now I’m here, do you want some help with your hand?”
“You always knew where to put it. And Frank, here,” added Bogie, shrugging his left shoulder, “says you always helped him, too. How could you do it, as I lay dying, Betty? That’s what makes me so mad”.
“Hold on, Bogie. I’ve been here barely five minutes and already you’re beating on me. Y ‘haven’t even offered me a goddamn drink. What’s the matter?”
“Look, I know I was a mean ol’ critter as the cancer grabbed m’ throat but was that an excuse to go off whoring?”
“What about you, Bogie? Hell, I couldn’t go fetch your medicine without you getting a call from – I can barely say her name without spitting – ‘Ve-ri-ta’. It was the nurse who told me you rang her from your deathbed. My! Where did you find the energy?”
“Well, she cared. Worried enough to call me. She rang me; not me, her. She loved me enough to visit our boat to see everything was all right.
“Then when she discovered I’d had it painted, she realised I knew my time was up; that the boat had to look good so it could be sold. So, ‘Verita’ – your first lesson is learning how to say her pretty name – called me and I said, ‘Don't drink all my scotch, I'll be down there soon’.
“But it didn’t happen. I was brought here almost right after, with only your whistle for company. Then when ‘Verita’ followed a few years ago, we carried on from where we’d had to leave off. So she’s still got a head-start on you. Go check for yourself. She’s in the next room”.
“Yeah. I’m goin’ through. But on the way, I’m gonna work out how to kill a dead woman. That reminds me, Bogie. You have the whistle. Me? I’ve got my Oscar. You’ll know, of course, what I said when I received it? ‘A man at last!’”
“You’re still goddamn cute, Baby. So I’m surprised you’ve not asked after my other friend. You remember him?”
Betty looked at the third man. Curious.
“I’m not sure we ever met. Umm? Yeah, that’s it. You’re the thriller hack, Raymond Chandler. I didn’t recognise you, sober!”
“Spot on”, chuckled Chandler. “And while you’re doin’ some head scratchin’ try and remember what I wrote”.
“What was that, Ray?”
“As I always remind my Cissy,‘Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.’ If I were you, I’d try to keep to the script”.
“And the Lord said to me; What do you see, Amos? And I said, "A plumbline." And the Lord said: Behold I place a plumbline in the midst of My people Israel; I will no longer pardon them”. (Book of Amos 7:8)
First they came for Jimmy,
but he’d already slipped away downstairs.
Then they went for Stuart,
whose time on It’s a Slop-Out will thrill us all for years.
Bill came next with a bravura showwell beyond our ken.
But we understood at once why Max’s mini organ would never play again.
Then they came for several odd-balls – a couple still bounce loose.
Last – for the nonce - they came for Rolf who once drew the Queen - and large, delighted crowds.
But now, he too resides behind thick walls placed by a plumbline. And it’s there that no-one’s left who’ll speak for him. Ever.
Rough waters have sent the surfers home, leaving the coast clear for marauding zealots who craft their murder round the clock.
Ah, love, who could have dreamed up such a plan?
Just as an Israeli gunboat nears the shore, to have four sweet-faced fisher boys playing footie in the sand, hard by a band of po-faced hacks with cameras – phones - notebooks – even sticking-plasters in their their hands?
The nights are long and hot; the moon is ripe with woe, oozing stale absolution on those meddling in the muddy, foreign waters of human misery.
“So, you want to know why I didn’t want to visit France for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy landings?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m here”, said Kevin Martin, a trainee reporter with theNew Hampshire and Dorset Review, who was struggling to interview 90-year-old British veteran, Arthur Horton at Westview Sheltered Housing in Portsmouth.
“Well, I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone before”, said Arthur, clearing his throat.
“I wouldn’t be doing it now if our warden here at Westview hadn’t gone squealing to your newspaper. But I suppose I’d better explain myself to set the record straight”.
“Thanks, Arthur”, said Kevin. “I appreciate your time”.
“Hmm! We’ll see about that! Anyway, what I’d told Mr Blabbermouth was that after we’d won the Battle of Caen and erected ‘Port Churchill’ at Arromanches, the bastard French refused to give us any drinking water”.
“What?”
“Yes! That’s right. When the 1st Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment had embarked here at Portsmouth I was even younger than you – barely more than 20; a scared, scrawny kid who had become an instant chain-smoker, trying to look bigger, braver – and much older - than my years.
“But I didn’t have to pretend for long. Twenty-four hours later I already felt old! Every time I think about it I’m lost in a fog of cordite and ripped, burning flesh. I can even hear the moans of other lads my age, weeping for their mothers.
“As we landed and saw the dead and maimed tossed about in bloodied sea water near the shore, we couldn’t stop to help. So we just pushed the corpses and the injured men out of our way. We had no choice. We had a job to do”.
“But I don’t understand”, said Kevin. “At college, our tutors say journalists write the first draft of history. Now you’re rewriting what the books say. Thousands of men like you helped to liberate Caen and Arromanches. This is what other D-Day veterans and world leaders have celebrated. But you’re saying that your intervention became self-preservation and that you weren’t welcome, anyway”.
“Oh, the locals wanted our help, make no mistake. They just didn’t want us hanging around begging for basics. Don’t forget, there were thousands of soldiers and the war had been going on for almost five years. So when they saw us walking towards their homes they hid in the back or slammed their front doors in our faces. They just wanted us to disappear once we’d done our job!
“But we – I - got over it. I grew up fast and got very hard. In the end I was even promoted to sergeant. I’m a great British patriot. If I was still young and healthy, despite everything, I’m sure I’d do it all again. But those at the top who were supposed to be running the show for the Allies kept dropping us in it. So the rest of us became like the lads who landed before me on Gold Beach – just swept up by the tide of events – tiny bits of wreckage bobbing on the sea.
“What happened to you after D-Day?”
“Things have gone a bit hazy in my mind, but all of us in our unit fought across Europe for what seemed ever-and-a-day until we reached Germany.
“But hang on!”, added Arthur suddenly, before Kevin could interrupt. “I’ve just remembered that I once got a free ticket to the official opening of the film,A Bridge Too Far as I’d fought in the real campaign in Holland that was code- named ‘Operation Market Garden’. It was as much a miracle for me that I got through everything with no more than a few scratches as it was when the Germans couldn’t blow up the bridge at Nijmegen because the wires to the detonator had been cut. I kept staring at the screen that night in town muttering ‘I was there, I was there’! Amazing, really!”
“Did you help to liberate any concentration camps”?
“Now that’s a good question. No, I didn’t. But before I was demobbed, I helped to form the guard for that bloody murdering sadist cow, Irma Grese when she was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint for her crimes at Belsen. It was thirsty work! We all went for a jar after the hangings. Albert liked his pint. That was a good day!”
“Arthur, you seem much more bitter about these events than a lot of other people your age. Why?”
“It’s not that I’m ‘bitter’. I’ve led a quiet life since the war. I’ve not done anything you might call ‘exciting’. I stayed single and kept busy as a carpenter. I’ve always been good with my hands and I’ve made a lot of furniture for myself. Funny though, despite my army rank, I never got far at work although I made sure I always did what I was told.
“At one time I went up north to make coffins for the Co-operative Society but I came back here as it’s where I belong. Now”, added Arthur, wiping his eyes, “it won’t be long before someone makes a box for me”.
----------------
This story first appeared asLittle Water, Less Love in the July 2014 edition ofLive Encountersmagazine (http://liveencounters.net/?p=7860) edited by Mark Ulyseas, a faithful supporter of Israel and all matters Jewish.
Dr. Ludovic Bouland gripped a scalpel between his right thumb and forefinger, using his left hand to smooth the wide rectangle of flesh he was about to cut.
“Madame Nul de Nulle Part – Mrs No-one from Nowhere”, he muttered, arcing his arm over the prone form on the dissecting table before him, “my work here will give you posthumous fame and glory! The skin off your back is to serve as the binding for an important book, Des Destinées de L’âme – Destinies of the Soul. This is a profound meditation on the soul and life after death by my dear friend, the distinguished essayist and poet, Arsène Houssaye”.
But the doctor’s reverie was interrupted by a shrill, disembodied female voice.
“You, who cup my corpse in the palm of your hand, how can you know what Heaven has ordained for my soul or the after life? You seem to cherish books more than living beings. Why is this?
“Here, where I now dwell, there is neither time nor space that you could recognise. Yet we know everything – past, future, good and evil.
“In the time to come the world will learn that my husband flung me into the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, claiming falsely that I was an ‘hysteric’. This was after I’d told his mother that I had caught him in our bed with his mistress!
“So before dying unattended of a sudden stroke, I spent my prime years lying in the gloom on a thin straw pallet with inadequate food and no visitors.
“All this, mark you monsieur, was while my husband enjoyed sex with the over-fed, hideously painted cuckoo which had usurped my place and laid her putrid eggs on our goose-feathered mattress!
“Now I can tell you that within the first score years of the 21st century, savages living in what is presently named the Ottoman Administration of Iraq, will burst into a police officer’s house, hack off his head and tell the world ‘this is our football. It is made of skin’. The world, Monsieur Le Docteur, will become less human than you, a polished Parisian clinician and bibliophile, could possibly imagine.
“Before that though, in the mid-years of the 20th century, millions of people will be incarcerated in prisons far worse even than the hospital where you’re dissecting me, only to be starved, beaten, tortured, gassed then burnt. These barbarities will occur simply because the victims have not conformed to a peculiar notion of sterile purity.
“What will follow? Eternal arguments on earth as to whether these ghost people – like me, given numbers instead of names – also had had their skins reused – to cover a cigarette case, maybe – or to make a nice lampshade, perhaps two. I’ve yet to extract the truth from another so-called doctor, Josef Mengele, who was chief among the faux surgeons in these hellish prison camps”.
But Dr Bouland was unmoved by her speech. Surely, he mused, he was hallucinating, having spent much too long in the deepest bowels of the hospital, butchering human flesh.
“This book”, he said aloud, “will be bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament will be stamped to preserve its elegance. By looking carefully, the viewer will easily distinguish the pores of the skin.
“It is interesting to see the different aspects that change this skin according to the method of preparation to which it is subjected. Compare it, for example, with the small volume I have in my library, Séverin Pineau’s De Integritatis & Corruptionis Virginum Notis - (The Characteristics of Integrity and Corruption of Maidens).
“This is also bound in human skin but tanned with sumac. A book about the human soul deserves to be dressed in a human covering. It seems more fitting, somehow, like the confessions of criminals bound in their own skin.
“That reminds me, Madame. Are you sure your husband was the guilty party?Perhaps I should start to investigate who you really were”.
---------------
Author’s Note: Houghton Library at Harvard College, USA is the main repository for the university’s rare books and manuscripts. Arsène Houssaye’s Des Destinées de L’âme(FC8.H8177.879dc), bound in human skin, is considered to be among its most sinister.
‘Without his evil inclination, a person would not build a house, marry, or have children’ (Bereshit Rabbah 9:7).
“In my beginning when I was created from stone and wood I believed I would stand forever.
“My facade glowed and my scarcely-seasoned timbers rippled, restless, unreposed, yearning for the scented forest from which they’d been most artfully hewn.
“How long did my crystal-eyed windows dance dust-motes on rays of the glancing sun? How often did my broad-backed, gardened roof shelter those beneath in winter or offer relief to the sleepless on airless August nights?
“I was magnificent! The holy city of Tiberias was my fiefdom and I was emperor-king.
“But on a day since embedded in my foundations, my owner went away.
“’Dear house’, he whispered, brushing the amulet on my doorpost with a graceful finger before putting it to his lips, ‘without you and my beloved wife, who’s borne me four fine sons, I would have shamed myself, achieved nought. Now we must leave. But I promise to provide a new occupant worthy of your noble frame’.
“With that, he blessed me, intoned a prayer for his family’s safety on their journey to I know not where, then left without a further word.
“But he had lied. No visitor called. I’d been abandoned; was forsaken; felt betrayed.
“Days, weeks, months, until what seemed like forty years vanished in a breath. I could not comprehend how an edifice like me, the nearest neighbour of the tomb of the great sage and physician Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon could be neglected for so long.
“I had become invisible. The glass in my windows clouded and crazed as the frames warped and buckled with age. The columns of my portico cracked and sagged; my vast main door lost its varnish, became deformed, swinging idle in the path of any aimless breeze.
“Much worse was how the walls of my once grand reception rooms grew deaf, then leprous with sinister hollow streaks of green and red. The very chambers that had hosted the devout at prayer, solemn study sessions and joyous banquets were now exposed to all that was dishonoured and disgraced.
“I had become untouchable; exiled, not only from grand society, but from the very piety I once had held so dear.
“What great sin was mine? To have revelled in my departed majesty? If so, I swiftly learned humility. Paradise had become wilderness and a different, degraded life took charge.
“Next I was reclaimed by nature and feral animals made me their home. A donkey grazed on weeds in the once carefully tended courtyard while a family of hyraxes that first used my rock garden as a burrow, wandered in through my broken basement window for comfort against the rain.
“One sad day I was spotted by a rabid she-wolf in her final throes. Everything nearby froze in fear as the bitch juddered through my main entrance, her foaming jaws agape, desperate for relief.
“But she could cause no harm; collapsed exhausted in the centre of my ante-room, convulsed, then died.
“Still, she was my near undoing. Her remains lay rotting for so long that their stench attracted wicked men whose antics drove me almost manic with despair.
“Yes. Even I, chief guardian mansion of the Rambam’s final resting place, became a vagrants’ den. I was now a worthless, wretched crack house for the depraved and dispossessed.
“My internal torment continued unabated until I begged Heaven for the reason for my woes.
“Was my arrogance the sin behind my ruin? Had I caused the Rambam’s feet – and mine – to be dangled in vile muck? Was old pride why my walls were violated and now half-submerged in the lewd language of the semi-literate and profane?
“Thus I hungered for insensibility; begged to return to the dust and ashes from which I’d come. Could I will myself to shrivel to oblivion? Could I simply vanish, truly invisible, into the dense, black void?
“But I was granted no relief. Rather, during the coldest, deepest part of one night before another dreary dawn my walls heard a faint, familiar voice.
“’Adon Bayit– Mr House’, it said. ‘You must keep faith. Do not disappoint Me. Hold fast and you will be renewed; be bright and bold as in ancient days’.
“And so it came to pass. My evil years had ended as new owners visited and effected the many cures that have nursed me back to health.
“If I could speak a human tongue they would know that I have welcomed their thousand kindnesses even as my freshly clad facade is furbished by the warmth and honeyed light of each new day.
“Once more I am a fitting eyrie for the ‘Great Eagle’ of Torah. Again I am a place for earnest study and sincerest prayer.
“But now I recognise that I can’t exist forever. Like the wood and stone from which I first appeared, I must age and wither, perhaps to be reshaped for use in different guise.
“So with Heaven’s grace I would like to conclude with thanks for this life regained:
“’Thank you, eternal King. You have mercifully restored my soul within me, allowing me to be a place of deepest study and devout prayer. Your faithfulness is great and only You will last forever’. Let me say ‘Amen’”.
---------------
TheMaimonides Heritage Centre -Mercaz Moreshet HaRambam - was founded in the Autumn of 2003 by American Rabbi Yamin Levy and a group of colleagues in Tiberias – one of the four holy cities of Israel. The full story may be read at: http://www.mhcny.org/?page=ourstory
