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Prologue

I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After; it’s more as if they are bookends holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of the late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit. Wandering years I waste no time in recalling.

I look at photographs from those years and my presence is there, in front of the Eiffel Tower, maybe, or the Statue of Liberty, or kneedeep in seawater waving and smiling; but these experi ences, I now know, were greeted with the dull tint of disinterest that made even rainbows appear gray.

She featured not at all during this period and I realize she was the color that was missing. She clasped the years either side of this waiting and held them up as beacons, and when she arrived in class that dull January morning it was as if she herself was the New Year; the thing that offered me the promise of beyond. But only I could see that. Others, bound by convention, found her at best laughable and at worst someone to mock. She was of another world: different. But by then, secretly, so was I. She was my missing piece; my complement in play.

One day she turned to me and said, “Watch this,” and pulled from her forearm a new fiftypence piece. I saw the flattened edge peeking out of her skin like a staple. She didn’t produce it from the air or from her sleeve --- I’d seen all that before --- no, she pulled it from her actual skin and left a bloody scar. Two days later the scar was gone; the fifty pence, though, still in her pocket. Now, this is the part where nobody ever believes me. The date on the coin was odd. It was nineteen years hence: It was 1995.

I cannot explain the magic trick just as I cannot explain her sud den expertise in the piano that strange morning in church. She had no tutelage in these pastimes. It was as if she could will her mind into talent and through the willing achieve a sudden and fleeting competency. I saw it all and marveled. But these moments were for my eyes only: proof of some sort, that I might believe her when the time was necessary.

Part One 
1968

I decided to enter this world just as my mother got off the bus after an unproductive shopping trip to Ilford. She'd gone to change a pair of trousers and, distracted by my shifting position, found it impossible to choose between patched denims or velvet fl ares and, fearful that my place of birth would be a department store, she made a staggered journey back to the safe confi nes of her postcode where her waters broke just as the heavens opened. And during the seventy-yard walk back down to our house, her amniotic fl uid mixed with the December rain and spiraled down the gutter until the cycle of life was momentously and, one might say, poetically complete. 

I was delivered by an off-duty nurse in my parents' bedroom on an eiderdown that had been won in a raffl e, and after a swift labor of twenty-two minutes my head appeared and the nurse shouted Push! and my father shouted Push! and my mother pushed, and I slipped out eff ortlessly into that fabled year. The year Paris took to the streets. The year of the Tet Off ensive. The year Martin Luther King Jr. lost his life for a dream. 

For months I lived in a quiet world of fulfilled need. Cherished and doted on. Until the day, that is, my mother's milk dried up to make way for the fl ood of grief that suddenly engulfed her, when she learned her parents had died on a walking holiday in Austria. It was in all the papers. Th e freak accident that took the life of twenty-seven tourists. A grainy photograph of a mangled coach lodged between two pine trees like a hammock. 

There was only one survivor of the crash, the German tour guide, who had been trying on a new ski helmet at the time --- the thing that had obviously saved his life --- and from his hospital bed in Vienna, he looked into the tele vision camera as another dose of morphine was administered and said that although it was a tragic accident, they had just eaten so they died happy. Obviously the trauma of plummeting down the rocky crevasse had obliterated his memory. Or maybe a full stomach of dumplings and strudel had softened the blow; that is something we would never know. But the television camera stayed on his bruised face, hoping for a moment of sensitive lucidity for the heartbroken families back home. It never came. My mother remained grief-stricken for the whole of my second year and well into my third. She had no stories to recall, no walking stories or funny fi rst words, those events that give clues to the child that might become. Th e everyday was a blur, a foggy window she had no interest in wiping clear. 

“What's going on?” sang Marvin Gaye, but no one had an answer. And yet that was the moment my brother took my hand. Took me protectively into his world. 

He had skirted the periphery of my early life like an orbiting moon, held between the alternate pulls of curiosity and indiff erence, and probably would have remained that way had destiny not collided with a Tyrolean coach that tragic, pivotal afternoon. 

He was fi ve years older than me and had blond curly hair that was as unfamiliar to our family as the brand- new car my father would one day buy. He was diff erent from other boys his age; an exotic creature who secretly wore our mother's lipstick at night and patterned my face with kisses that mimicked impetigo. It was his outlet against a conservative world. The quiet rebellion of a rank outsider. 

I blossomed into an inquisitive and capable child, one who could read and spell by the age of four and have conversations usually reserved for eight-year-olds. It wasn't precocity or genius that had become my bedfellow, simply the influence of this older brother, who was by then hooked on the verse of Noël Coward and the songs of Kander and Ebb. He presented a colorful alternative to our mappedout lives. And every day as I awaited his return from school, my longing became taut, became physical. I never felt complete without him. In truth, I never would.

“Does God love everyone?” I asked my mother as I reached across a bowl of celery to take the last tea cake. My father looked up from his papers. He always looked up when someone mentioned God; it was a reflex, as if he was about to be hit.

“Of course he does,” my mother replied, pausing in her ironing. “Does God love murderers?” I continued.

“Yes,” she said. My father looked at her and tutted loudly. “Robbers?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Poo?” I asked.

“Poo’s not a living thing, darling,” she said seriously. “But if it was, would God love it?”

“Yes, I expect he would.”

This was not helping. God loved everything, it seemed, except me. I peeled off the last curve of chocolate, exposing the white marsh mallow mound and the heart of jam.

“Are you all right?” asked my mother.

“I’m not going back to Sunday school,” I said. “Hallelujah!” said my father. “I’m glad about that.” “But I thought you liked it?” said my mother.

“Not anymore.” I said. “I only really liked the singing bit.”

“You can sing here,” said my father, looking back down at his papers. “Everyone can sing here.”

“Any reason?” my mother asked, sensing my withholding. “Nope,” I said.

“Do you want to talk about anything?” she asked quietly, reach ing for my hand. (She had started to read a book on child psychol ogy from America. It encouraged us to talk about our feelings. It made us want to clam up.)

“Nope,” I said again through a small mouth.

It had been a simple misunderstanding. All I had suggested was that Jesus Christ had been a mistake, that was all: an unplanned pregnancy.

“Unplanned indeed!” screamed the vicar. “And where did you get such blasphemous filth, you ungodly child?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “ just an idea.”

“Just an idea?” he repeated. “Do you honestly think God loves those who question his divine plan? Well, I’ll tell you, missy, he does not,” and his arm shot out and pointed toward my banishment. “Corner,” he said, and I wandered over to the chair facing the damp, crumbling green wall.

I sat there thinking about the night my parents had crept into my room and said, “We want to talk to you about something. Some thing your brother keeps saying to you. About you being a mistake.”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“Well, you weren’t a mistake,” said my mother, “ just unplanned. We weren’t really expecting you. To turn up, that is.”

“Like Mr. Harris?” I said (a man who always seemed to know when we were about to sit down and eat).

“Sort of,” said my father.

“Like Jesus?”

“Exactly,” said my mother carelessly. “Exactly like Jesus. It was like a miracle when you arrived --- the best miracle ever.”

My father put his papers back into his battered briefcase and sat next to me. “You don’t have to go to Sunday school or church for God to love you,” he said. “Or for anyone to love you --- you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, not believing him.

“You’ll understand that more as you get older,” he added. But I couldn’t wait that long. I’d already resolved that if this God couldn’t love me, then it was clear I’d need to find another one that could.

 

“What we need is another war,” said Mr. Abraham Golan, my new next-door neighbor. “Men need wars.”

“Men need brains,” said his sister Esther, winking at me as she hoovered around his feet and sucked up a loose shoelace that broke the fan belt and made the room smell of burnt rubber. I liked the smell of burnt rubber. And I liked Mr. Golan. I liked the fact that he lived with a sister in his old age and not a wife, and hoped my brother might make the same choice when that faroff time came.

Mr. Golan and his sister had come to our street in September and by December had illuminated every window with candles, announcing their faith in a display of light. My brother and I leaned against our wall and watched the blue Pickering van turn up one mild weekend. We watched crates and furniture carried carelessly from the truck by men with cigarettes in their mouths and newspa pers in their back pockets.

“Looks like something died in that chair,” said my brother as it went past.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Just know,” he said, tapping his nose, making out he had a sixth sense even though the other five had proven many times to be shaky and unreliable.

A black Zephyr pulled up and parked badly on the pavement in front and an old man got out, a man older than any man I’d ever seen before. He had goosewhite hair and wore a cream corduroy jacket that hung off his frame like loose skin. He looked up and down the road before heading toward his front door. He stopped as he passed us and said, “Good morning.” He had a strange accent --- Hungarian, we later learned.

“You’re old,” I said. (I’d meant to say hello.)

“I’m as old as time,” he said, and laughed. “What’s your name?”

I told him and he held out his hand and I shook it very firmly. I was four years, nine months, and four days old. He was eighty. And yet the age gap between us dissolved as seamlessly as aspirin in water.

I quickly shunned the norm of our street, swapping it instead for his illicit world of candles and prayers. Everything was a secret and I guarded each one like a brittle egg. Abraham told me that nothing could be used on Saturdays except television, and when he returned from shul we ate exotic foods --- foods I’d never tasted before --- foods like matzo bread and chopped liver and herring and gefilte fish balls, foods that “evoked memories of the old country,” he said.

“Ah, Cricklewood,” he’d say, wiping a tear from his blue, rheumy eyes, and it was only later at night that my father would sit on my bed and inform me that Cricklewood bordered neither Syria nor Jordan, and it certainly didn’t have an army of its own.

“I am a Jew,” he said to me one day, “but a man above all else,” and I nodded as if I knew what that meant. And as the weeks went by I listened to his prayers, to the Shema Yisrael, and believed that no God could fail to answer such beautiful sounds, and often he would pick up his violin and let the notes transport the words to the heart of the divine.

“You hear how it weeps,” he said to me as the bow glided across the strings.

“I do, I do,” I said.

And I would sit there for hours listening to the saddest music ears could bear, and would often return home unable to eat, unable even to talk, with a heavy pallor descending across my young cheeks. And my mother would sit next to me on my bed and place her cool hand on my forehead and say, “What is it? Do you feel ill?” But what could a child say who has started to understand the pain of another?

“Maybe she shouldn’t spend so much time with old Abraham,” I heard my father say outside of my door. “She needs friends her own age.” But I had no friends my own age. And I simply couldn’t keep away.

“The first thing we need to find,” said Abraham, “is a reason to live,” and he looked at the little colored pills rolling around in his palm and quickly swallowed them. He began to laugh.

“Okay,” I said, and laughed too, although the ache in my stomach would years later be identified by a psychologist as nerves. He then opened the book he always carried and said, “Without a reason, why bother? Existence needs purpose: to be able to endure the pain of life with dignity; to give us a reason to continue. The meaning must enter our hearts, not our heads. We must understand the meaning of our suffering.”

I looked at his old hands, as dry as the pages he turned. He wasn’t looking at me but at the ceiling, as if his ideals were already heaven-bound. I had nothing to say and felt compelled to remain quiet, trapped by thoughts so hard to understand. My leg, however, soon started to itch; a small band of psoriasis that had taken refuge under my sock was becoming heated and raised, and I urgently needed to scratch it --- slowly to start with --- but then with a voracious vigor that dispelled the magic in the room. Mr. Golan looked at me, a little confused.

“Where was I?” he said.

I hesitated for a moment. “Suffering,” I said quietly.

“Don’t you see?” I said later that evening as my parents’ guests huddled silently around the fondue burner. The room fell silent, just the gentle gurgling of the Gruyère-and-Emmental mix and its fetid smell.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” I said solemnly. “That’s Nietzsche,” I continued with emphasis.

“You should be in bed, not wondering about death,” said Mr. Harris, who lived in number 37. He’d been in a bad mood since his wife left him the previous year after a brief affair with (whispered) “another woman.”

“I’d like to be Jewish,” I pronounced as Mr. Harris dipped a large hunk of bread into the bubbling cheese.

“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” said my father, topping up the wine glasses.

My mother lay down with me on my bed, her perfume tumbling over my face like breath, her words smelling of Dubonnet and lemonade.

“You said I could be anything I wanted when I was older,” I said. And she smiled and said, “And you can be. But it’s not very easy to become Jewish.”

“I know,” I said forlornly. “I need a number.” And she suddenly stopped smiling.

It had been a fine spring day, the day I actually asked him. I’d noticed it before, of course, because children would. We were in the garden and he rolled up his shirtsleeves and there it was.

“What’s that?” I said, pointing to the number on the thin translucent skin of his underarm.

“That was once my identity,” he said. “During the war. In a camp.” “What kind of camp?” I asked.

“Like a prison,” he said.

“Did you do something wrong?” I said. “No, no,” he said.

“Why were you there, then?” I asked.

“Ahh,” he said, raising his index finger in front of himself. “The big question. Why were we there? Why were we there indeed?”

I looked at him, waiting for the answer, but he gave none. And then I looked back at the number: six digits, standing out harsh and dark as if they had been written yesterday.

“There’s only one story that comes out of a place like that,” Abraham said quietly. “Horror and suffering. Not for your young ears.” “I’d like to know, though,” I said. “I’d like to know about horror.

And suffering.”

And Mr. Golan closed his eyes and rested his hand on the num bers on his arm as if they were the numbers to a safe and one he rarely opened.

“Then I will tell you,” he said. “Come closer. Sit here.”

My parents were in the garden fixing a birdhouse to the sturdy lower branch of the apple tree. And I listened to their laughter, to their shrieks of command, to the “Higher,” “No, lower,” of clashing perspectives. Normally I would have been outside with them; it was a task that would have thrilled me once, the day being so fine. But I’d become quieter those last couple of weeks, gripped by an introversion that steered me toward books. I was on the sofa read ing when my brother opened the door and leaned awkwardly in the door frame. He looked troubled; I could always tell because his silence was flimsy and craved the dislocation of noise.

“What?” I said, lowering my book.

“Nothing,” he said.

I picked up my book again and as soon as I did he said, “They’re going to cut my knob off, you know. Or part of it. It’s called a circumcision. That’s why I went to the hospital yesterday.”

“What part?” I asked.

“Top bit,” he said.

“Will it hurt?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Why are they going to do that, then?”

“The skin’s too tight.”

“Oh,” I said, and must have looked confused.

“Look,” he said, a little more helpfully. “You know that blue roll neck jumper you’ve got? The one that’s too small?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know when you tried to put your head through and you couldn’t and it got stuck?”

“Yes.”

“Well your head’s like my knob. They’ve got to cut off the skin --- the rollneck part --- so the head can be free.”

“And make a round neck?” I said, sounding much clearer.

“Sort of,” he said.

He hobbled around for days swearing and fiddling with the front of his trousers like the madman who lived in the park, the man we were told never to go near but always did. He recoiled at my questions and my request for a viewing, but then one evening about ten days later, when the swelling had subsided and we were playing in my bedroom, I asked him what it was like.

“Happy with it?” I said, finishing the last of my Jaffa Cake.

“I think so,” he said, trying to suppress a smile. “I look like How ard now. I have a Jewish penis.”

“Just like Mr. Golan’s penis,” I said, lying back onto my pillow, unaware of the silence that had immediately filled the room.

“How do you know about Mr. Golan’s penis?”

A pale sheen now formed across his face. I heard him swallow. I sat up. Silence. The faint sound of a dog barking outside. Silence.

“How do you know?” he asked again. “Tell me.”

My head pounded. I started to shake.

“You mustn’t tell anyone,” I said.

He stumbled out of my room and took with him a burden that, in reality, he was far too young to carry. But he took it nevertheless and told no one as he had promised. And I would never know what actually happened when he left my room that night, not even later, he wouldn’t tell me. I just never saw Mr. Golan again. Well, not alive anyhow.

He found me under the covers, breathing in my nervous, cloying stench. I was fallen, confused, and I whispered, “He was my friend,” but I couldn’t be sure if it was my voice anymore, not now that I was different.

“I’ ll get you a proper friend,” was all he said as he held me in the darkness, as defiant as granite. And lying there coiled, we pre tended that life was the same as before. When we were both still children, and when trust, like time, was constant. And, of course, always there.

Excerpted from When God Was a Rabbit © Copyright 2012 by Sarah Winman. Reprinted with permission by Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved.

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