Read Online Hannah & Emil by Belinda Castles - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Belinda Castles
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sherbet from the shop but that just made it claggy and rather sickly.
I went to Father and took the box. âThatâs it, little Hannah. Go and help Mrs Reznik now. Home in time for prayers.â He winked. I did not wink back though it was hard not to smile. It would scandalise Mrs Reznik if we were too brazen. Father was making it rather obvious that there were no prayers in this house.
I followed Mrs Reznik up the stairs. Unlike Mother, who in spite of her current fragility was soft in the bottom and the arms, she had no behind. Father called Mother â zaftig â when he whispered to her at the kitchen sideboard. Literally: juicy. Mrs Reznik would be whatever the opposite was of that. I wondered: unzaftig ? She climbed slowly, talking constantly, so I could stare as much as I chose.
âNow, Hannah, the letter is difficult tonight. I tell to Gregor I donât know what I can send more. My health is bad, I donât have the strength to schlep around the West End looking for the little extras. I should be caught paying black marketeers? My God, prison. Can you imagine, Hannah?â
Eventually we reached her landing and Mrs Reznik unlocked the door while I waited impatiently. After an age she led me inside.
That moment, when she opened her door, never lost its glamour. The flat was the same as ours, but not the same at all. It had the same layout but it was only Mrs Reznik living here since her husband, a draper too, went back to Russia to be a Bolshevik. Mrs Reznik had a separate bedroom and a spare room with a desk where Mr Reznik once did his accounts, so rather than a bed and wardrobe being crammed into the sitting room behind a curtain as in our flat, one stepped from the front door into a proper sitting room. Then it was several large strides between the fireplace and the sofa, or from the door to the window looking out over Tottenham Court Road. In our flat, if you mapped our movements, we were like rats, following little channels between the corridors of tables, chairs, beds, laundry, Fatherâs bolts of fabric for his second business, hatstands, boxes of tobacco and sweets. This room contained simply a sofa, a standard lamp, a small dining table with two chairs, a beautiful rug and a bookshelf against one wall filled with books. Mrs Reznik could not read them, which tortured meâto think that all this, this quiet, spacious place to read and this case of books, was wasted on an illiterate. Mrs Reznik had told me that her husband sometimes took books as payment and now she was stuck with them when the money would have been of far more use. She lent them to me, and I would read them, whatever they might be: penny dreadfuls, political pamphlets, a French dictionaryâdevouring them like food in the dim light before Mother stirred in the morning.
The books were part of my payment for helping her with her letters, and she was so mean she would actually hold on to them for a moment while passing them to me so I had to give a little tug to release the object from her grasp. But so far as I was concerned, the main part of my reward was being permitted to spend time here, in this flat, with space, order and comfort, where there was a gold-rimmed bone china tea set on a tray on a sideboard next to a gramophone encrusted with dust. Every time I entered this place, separated from my own home only by a thin floor, it was a reminder, an affirmation. Yes, this was how my own life would be, how it would look to others. I would have my own flat with books and a sofa and a gramophone and no husband and no vile little boys making a mess and a noise. I would drink tea from bone china while writing poetry at a desk in the window. Playwrights and artists and actors would visit me and we would all go off to the theatre together wearing smart gloves with buttons and exquisite hats and I would visit my brothers in their squalid tenements with their enormous, ill-educated broods only when they were starving ,
I went to Father and took the box. âThatâs it, little Hannah. Go and help Mrs Reznik now. Home in time for prayers.â He winked. I did not wink back though it was hard not to smile. It would scandalise Mrs Reznik if we were too brazen. Father was making it rather obvious that there were no prayers in this house.
I followed Mrs Reznik up the stairs. Unlike Mother, who in spite of her current fragility was soft in the bottom and the arms, she had no behind. Father called Mother â zaftig â when he whispered to her at the kitchen sideboard. Literally: juicy. Mrs Reznik would be whatever the opposite was of that. I wondered: unzaftig ? She climbed slowly, talking constantly, so I could stare as much as I chose.
âNow, Hannah, the letter is difficult tonight. I tell to Gregor I donât know what I can send more. My health is bad, I donât have the strength to schlep around the West End looking for the little extras. I should be caught paying black marketeers? My God, prison. Can you imagine, Hannah?â
Eventually we reached her landing and Mrs Reznik unlocked the door while I waited impatiently. After an age she led me inside.
That moment, when she opened her door, never lost its glamour. The flat was the same as ours, but not the same at all. It had the same layout but it was only Mrs Reznik living here since her husband, a draper too, went back to Russia to be a Bolshevik. Mrs Reznik had a separate bedroom and a spare room with a desk where Mr Reznik once did his accounts, so rather than a bed and wardrobe being crammed into the sitting room behind a curtain as in our flat, one stepped from the front door into a proper sitting room. Then it was several large strides between the fireplace and the sofa, or from the door to the window looking out over Tottenham Court Road. In our flat, if you mapped our movements, we were like rats, following little channels between the corridors of tables, chairs, beds, laundry, Fatherâs bolts of fabric for his second business, hatstands, boxes of tobacco and sweets. This room contained simply a sofa, a standard lamp, a small dining table with two chairs, a beautiful rug and a bookshelf against one wall filled with books. Mrs Reznik could not read them, which tortured meâto think that all this, this quiet, spacious place to read and this case of books, was wasted on an illiterate. Mrs Reznik had told me that her husband sometimes took books as payment and now she was stuck with them when the money would have been of far more use. She lent them to me, and I would read them, whatever they might be: penny dreadfuls, political pamphlets, a French dictionaryâdevouring them like food in the dim light before Mother stirred in the morning.
The books were part of my payment for helping her with her letters, and she was so mean she would actually hold on to them for a moment while passing them to me so I had to give a little tug to release the object from her grasp. But so far as I was concerned, the main part of my reward was being permitted to spend time here, in this flat, with space, order and comfort, where there was a gold-rimmed bone china tea set on a tray on a sideboard next to a gramophone encrusted with dust. Every time I entered this place, separated from my own home only by a thin floor, it was a reminder, an affirmation. Yes, this was how my own life would be, how it would look to others. I would have my own flat with books and a sofa and a gramophone and no husband and no vile little boys making a mess and a noise. I would drink tea from bone china while writing poetry at a desk in the window. Playwrights and artists and actors would visit me and we would all go off to the theatre together wearing smart gloves with buttons and exquisite hats and I would visit my brothers in their squalid tenements with their enormous, ill-educated broods only when they were starving ,
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