Free Hannah & Emil by Belinda Castles

and I would take their wives bread, and sweets for the awful children, and only because my heart was too tender for my own good. Everyone would say so.
    â€˜Come, Hannah. Up at the table. Here is the paper and the pencil. Careful not to break it, I have not another.’
    I knew that in the sideboard there was a thick brick of blank paper and a cup of lovely sharp lead pencils, because I looked once when Mrs Reznik was up in the loft fetching her money tin. And so I unleashed upon myself another source of torture: the vivid and durable image of the beautiful cream paper, the perfectly pointed pencils. Who could say how much more bounty lay secreted in cupboards and in boxes under beds? I asked Mother after that how Mrs Reznik laid her hands on such treasures and Mother told me mysteriously that she was a person with connections. When I asked her what she meant, Father said, ‘It is she knows people who do her favours because she has already done favours for them.’ I liked the sound of that almost as much as I liked her large and empty flat. Imagine, to live in a world where there was a secret currency beyond coupons and money, which were things that anyone could come by. ‘Husband did too many favours,’ Father said. ‘Safer in Russia, with the Bolsheviks.’
    The reason I was here, why I was granted occasional access to this quiet, miraculous place, was in order to read Mrs Reznik’s letters from Russia and reply for her. Her relatives wrote to her in Yiddish, thankfully, because I did not have the Cyrillic script, though I assumed without deep thought that it would arrive in my store of knowledge at some point. I had not known until this arrangement began that it was possible once you were past the age of, say, seven not to be able to read and write. Some of the stupider boys in my class still struggled, but I had assumed that even for them the instinct to understand and produce language in its written form would prevail. It was like talking. It just happened for humans at some stage in their development. How could you hold a perfectly sensible conversation and not be able to read ? And so my pencil hovered above the clean paper, finely grooved, lovely, ready to turn this woman’s mix of English and Russian with an occasional Yiddish exclamation into something her cousin might understand.
    She took my wrist as always in her cold bony fingers, stared at me with her saucer eyes. ‘Please write, “Dear Gregor . . .” and I extricated my hand and wrote the story of Mrs Reznik’s failing health, which was how we began every letter, before going on to detail the price of the beef and fruit, and extolling at length the virtues of my parents who had provided the milk. I kept this passage brief. I knew it was meant for me, included simply so that I would relay it back to them. I waited with the pencil ready for her to move on. She complained about the daytime raids and claimed that she would not shelter in the tube station anymore because she had heard from a friend of her husband in Shoreditch that there was looting in the East End recently. And all the time I must correct the grammar of her fragmented language at the same time as finding the Yiddish, and Mrs Reznik going on and on, barely giving me a moment to think, except for the occasional pause for a cough, after which she would peer at my handwriting, her nose creasing.
    The nerve, I thought, if this woman were to comment upon my script. But I did have appalling handwriting, bad enough for even an illiterate to turn up her nose. I have my notebook before me now and I see described in a scrawl, the pen pressed down so hard the paper threatens to tear, what a fascinating, awful old witch Mrs Reznik seemed to me. I still see her kind about. Hungry, thin, elderly foreign women, alive in the face of all odds, refusing to make themselves less frightening, their faces lined with long memories, bodies bent with burdens never cast off.