Free Last Rights by Barbara Nadel Page B

time too. ‘You know the old Jews have ways of breathing life
     into stones,’ Dad would say. ‘Magic. They use it to protect their people. Christ knows, they need something, poor sods. There’s
     a story they tell about an old magical rabbi, somewhere like Warsaw I think it was, walked clean through the walls of his
     synagogue. Poles or whoever they were were out to kill him. But he just walked through this wall. Never seen again. It’s said,
     the Jews say, that he isn’t neither alive nor dead but something in between.’
    When Dad told me this, I was a nipper and I didn’t understand what he meant. But maybe now I do. It was, after all, a sort
     of magic that meant I survived the Great War. I can’t account for it any other way. Not that survival is quite the right word
     for what I’ve got now. Like that oldrabbi out in Poland I’m something in between the state of living and that of death. I know that place the old Jew told my
     dad about because that’s where I spend most of my time. Just occasionally, with Hannah usually, I come alive.
    ‘So, what’s your sister’s name, then, love?’ Hannah was asking Pearl, when I eventually came back to the world around St Anne’s
     Church in Limehouse.
    ‘Ruby,’ Pearl said.
    ‘Ruby what?’
    ‘Er . . .’ She turned her head to look down what I think is one of the most strangely named streets in the whole East End,
     Three Colt Street, down beside St Anne’s graveyard.
    ‘What?’ Hannah was frowning. ‘Don’t you know your own name or—’
    ‘She could be married now,’ Pearl said, as she turned back to Hannah. ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Yes, but if she isn’t married,’ Hannah continued, ‘she’ll have your old name, won’t she? So what was that?’
    Pearl turned her face away again and said, ‘Reynolds,’ as if she were ashamed of it in some way.
    Hannah, who had noticed this too, gave me a look before she said, ‘Right-o. As you like.’
    ‘I do,’ Pearl said, and we all lapsed into silence.
    After Limehouse we had to push up north into Stepney on account of a group of coppers blocking the road. There was an unexploded
     bomb somewhere down in Ratcliff and they were waiting for a team of sappers to arrive. A lot of these bombs the Jerries drop
     are faulty. When it first started happening, right from the start of the bombing,people would run for their lives. But now they just saunter off, moaning. Somehow, sometimes, the inconvenience of it all
     has got greater than their fear.
    We reached Brick Lane at just before six. It was already getting foggy and dark and all my old dislike of the place came flooding
     back into my mind. In the blackout I knew those hungry, suspicious eyes would take on an even more sinister look. Hannah wasn’t
     happy about speaking to Doris’s paper-and-string man, not for any other reason, or so she said, than she’d never heard of
     him. So we all followed her into a house that looked as though it was about to collapse into the ground. Not because it had
     been bombed, it was just so old and worn and dirty.

Chapter Six
    H annah didn’t tell me who the old couple were. I knew her parents were long dead and her only brother died in the first lot.
     Maybe this old man with his black skull-cap and long grey sidelocks was an uncle. Maybe the woman with eyes like a corpse,
     much of her face hidden behind a headscarf, was his wife. But Hannah never said. We went in, she talked – for what seemed
     like hours – they answered, in short, hard Yiddish sentences, and then we left. I got the feeling afterwards that there was
     little or no love lost between these people and my girl.
    ‘They don’t know nothing,’ Hannah said tightly, as we picked our way along the street, every so often one or other of us falling
     off the kerb and into the road. At one point poor Velma turned her ankle on a box someone had left outside a darkened shop.
     It had contained Fry’s Chocolate Sandwich bars – once. But the girl