The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “It means he had money.”

  “Wait a minute. You find a length of dusty pipe among some rags in my brother’s flat and now all of a sudden he’s a drug dealer?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe something like that. It would explain a lot.”

  “What would it explain?”

  “Rose, I think his disappearance is something to do with crack.”

  “How addictive is crack?”

  “Extremely addictive. You said he’d been pretty unhappy. He could have gotten hooked on it very quickly,” Bernard said soberly.

  “What’s that capsule you just took?”

  “It’s an antibiotic. I’ve had a really nagging chest infection. Started as a throat thing . . . well, first a flu-type cold that really hung on, then a throat thing which has now gone to my chest. I’m okay, though.”

  “Well, even if it is crack, what do we do now? How does it help us find him?”

  “If it is crack, and I’m almost certain it is, then, Rose, we have to find the local source of it because it’s probably the reason he’s gone missing. Where was he getting it? Since he didn’t have a car or any money, at least at the start, chances are it was someone who operated in the vicinity of where he was staying who was supplying him with the stuff. If this guy was supplying him, he’d be supplying other users in the area. People will know. We have to find those people.”

  “Who, the other crack users in the area?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “You go back to work and I’ll get out of this loading zone. I’ll meet you back here after work. When do you knock off?”

  “Five thirty.”

  “Will you want something to eat?”

  “Bernard, what are you going to do between now and five thirty?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Because you don’t know.”

  “Look, I’ve got a day and a half to find your brother. I think we’re making excellent progress. You haven’t even had to take the day off work. You really should try to be a little more supportive . . . perhaps even encouraging.”

  “I’m sorry, Bernard.”

  “I understand. You’re under stress. This is not about me, except in a peripheral way. I’ll see you back here at five thirty.”

  I didn’t know anything about crack or metal pipes. I knew very little about Bernard and I was starting to think that I knew even less about Pavel. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Why couldn’t Pavel use crack? What was there to keep him from using it: a sense of well-being, friends, a girlfriend, a job with a future? His father was falling apart. Why not the son? Every day he went out and cracked his head open on the English language. Every day he saw people looking at him, and what they saw was young, foreign, poor and stupid. That’s the way he saw it. His father was a public embarrassment and a private source of eternal conflict. His mother was a fountain of anxiety about which he felt guilty and powerless. And I? In the pursuit of my own survival, I had let him go.

  Bernard had bought me a salad roll for dinner.

  “I hope you like salad. Do you like salad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I didn’t know whether to get them to leave out the beetroot. I like beetroot myself but I can’t eat it.”

  “Why? Are you allergic?”

  “No, I always get it all over me. Especially in a car situation. Beetroot is very dangerous around me, also chocolate-coated ice cream. I really should only eat certain foods with a plate. Even then—”

  “Bernard, have you found out anything?”

  “Yes, I have. There is a group of kids, teenage boys who hang around the station not far from Pavel’s flat. They probably know something.”

  “About Pavel?”

  “About crack. They probably know how to get it locally.”

  “How do you know they know?”

  “There are empty vials around the station. I’ve seen them on the ground. If those kids aren’t actually taking it themselves, they know who is.”

  “So what are you suggesting we do, go and wait at the station?”

  “Rose, you don’t have to go. I can call you if I find out anything.”

  “No, no. I’ll come with you. What else should I be doing?”

  Within twenty-four hours of meeting him, I found myself trusting Bernard Leibowitz with the safe return of my brother. Should I have gone to the police? Should I have told my parents? Was Pavel using crack? Was that why he had disappeared? Why did I think that waiting in a car outside a suburban railway station for a group of disaffected adolescent boys would help me find my brother?

  The sun had gone down. We had already waited forty minutes and seen nothing but people getting off trains: men and women in suits, mothers trying to carry their babies and hang on to small children, the adult children of immigrants and the young unemployed in stonewashed jeans. Schoolchildren had come and gone. Trades-men were rare, office workers more common, each with a briefcase or a bag of some kind. They took themselves each day to and from that part of their lives that was evaluated by reference to their age. Not yet a junior manager, but then, not yet twenty-seven. Still a junior manager and almost thirty-seven. They took the train every day and never spoke to anyone. They never had the chance to while away the hours sitting in a car with Bernard Leibowitz.

  “Bernard, how do you know about vials and pipes? How do you know about crack?”

  “I’ve been around . . . more than you think.”

  The flashing light of the pizza place across the street lit and unlit one side of his face. It seemed unusual, in my recent but concentrated experience of him, for him not to want to talk of his past, not to want to shed light on his experience.

  “Was it through one of your jobs? You’ve told me all the different jobs you’ve had, but none of them . . . well, none that I can remember, sounded like it offered an opportunity for close contact with any drugs.”

  “Well, actually that’s not right but . . . that’s not where I learned—”

  “Bernard, have you used it?”

  “No, no . . . been offered, though.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, you know . . . here and there . . . nightclubs.”

  “Do you go to nightclubs?”

  “Why is that so surprising?” he asked, a little hurt.

  “Do you?” I repeated.

  “Not anymore . . . used to . . . when I was younger.”

  “Bernard, you’ve never really seen any crack, have you? It’s all right, you know. You can admit it.”

  He turned to face me. The light from the pizza place lit and unlit the back of his head. On and then off, on and then off. I saw in his face for the first time the look of a man who has lived more than once that hour when worlds collapse.

  “Adam was mixed up in it.”

  “Adam, your brother, the one who lives in Israel?”

  “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath of the kind one takes before telling a story one almost doesn’t tell.

  “I don’t think I have told you much about my mother, have I? Where do I start? Both my parents went through the Holocaust. They didn’t know each other before the war. They met in a displaced-persons’ camp, married and came out here in the late forties. They didn’t know any English before they got here, didn’t know anything about this place, didn’t really know anything about each other. This seemed the farthest place away from Europe. They were teenagers. That’s all they were. They couldn’t have known even themselves.

  “They had come from . . . I can only try to imagine it. You know, they say there are two common responses of survivors to the Holocaust: one is never to talk about it, the other is to talk about it incessantly. That’s obviously an oversimplification, but my father reacted by almost never talking about it while my mother always wanted to talk about it. My father, who had come from a secular home, became increasingly religious after the war. Ap
parently he was barely observant at all before the war. My mother had no time for religion at all. She said that she had seen huge chimneys belching out smoke from the burning bodies of the people from her town, from the town next to hers, the town next to that and from every town she had ever heard of. She saw it, Rose. Day after day, hour after hour, it never stopped. We cannot imagine it. She saw people come in and smoke go out way up into the air where God was supposed to be.

  “As children we heard her in the middle of the night. She would wake up screaming. She used to sleep in a separate room to my father because she needed to sleep with the television on.”

  “Why?”

  “In case she had a nightmare. She often had nightmares. The television would immediately remind her that her screams belonged to the past and that this was the present, the death camps were behind her. She had a husband now, two sons, a job.”

  “Where did she work?”

  “In a bakery. Posner’s bakery.”

  “Near the shoe repair shop?”

  “Yes, that belongs to a fellow called Kuznetsov now. He’s Russian. Do you know him?”

  “My mother works there.”

  “For Kuznetsov?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really! He’s a good man. Kuznetsov! What a . . . world.”

  “You were telling me about your mother. . . .”

  “She was one of those who was always talking about it. She would tell us, Adam and me, stories, hundreds and hundreds of stories. She told the story of the two-year-old boy who was smuggled out of his parents’ house after his mother was shot there. The mother had been ill when the Germans came and when they saw that she was unable to get out of bed, they shot her as she lay in bed. The father took the child to the house of a nearby Polish woman. The Polish woman didn’t know what to do with the two-year-old boy so she put him under the bed. He stayed under the bed or else in a cupboard for four years. He had to be taught to walk. The children of the Polish woman were afraid their mother would be found out and shot in the street, as they had seen happen to other Poles who were hiding Jews. They hated the little Jewish boy. They would beat him.

  “A story like this we might hear at breakfast before going to school. Then at night some more with dinner and then she would put us to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night we would hear her screaming. My father would come in and try to comfort her, but if he mentioned God or if she heard him pray for her, she would throw something at him. I think it wasn’t that she didn’t believe in God, it was rather that she blamed him.”

  “What about her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s her story?”

  “Well, it’s funny to say this but, as many stories as she would tell, she was always sketchy about the details of her experience. We knew how her family was rounded up, we knew about the ghetto. She lost a lot of her family in the ghetto from disease and starvation. A brother was shot trying to escape. A sister was in the resistance. We knew she was in Auschwitz, like my father, but we don’t know how she survived. Adam and I speculated privately but we couldn’t bring ourselves to ask her. She was in the part which had factories, not in the extermination part in Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, as it was called. Nobody survived from there. Despite all the neuroses she was left with, she was a great mother. Does that sound strange?”

  “No.”

  “I mean . . . she was obsessed with her children. Every little thing we did was important, special. Our friends, our school results. It wasn’t enough just to bring home drawings from school. She wanted us to explain them. There was nothing to explain but she wanted meaning. Usually there wasn’t any. It was a very intense household. Nothing was ever light. She stuffed us with food, with stories of the war . . .”

  “And with love.”

  “And with love. Yes, so much love you could touch it. That’s why, when she died, Adam just fell apart.”

  “Was she ill?”

  “She committed suicide almost nine years ago.”

  What must that day have been like, the day he learned of his mother’s suicide? Or did he find her? I was unable to ask him this, just as I was unable to ask him how she committed suicide. It really didn’t matter how. I thought of him reliving it in his mind in the years since she did it. And I thought of this as he talked. It was not long after this, he told me, that he came to learn the difference between rock salt and crack and about the use of L-shaped domestic plumbing pipes of the kind he had found loose in my brother’s unit. His brother had taught him all about it. This was how he knew what my brother was doing. I had chosen well out of the phone book.

  Bernard told me how Adam had started coming to him for money. Adam would have known that Bernard was unlikely to have any, working one or two of his precarious jobs and having just started studying a trade at night school. But he came anyway because he needed it, and when he came he looked gaunt and distracted. He was moody, sullen or else obnoxious in a way he had never been before. At first Bernard had taken all of this to be Adam’s reaction to his mother’s death. But the mood swings were so wild. Then he found the vials.

  Bernard hadn’t known what to do. He knew that it would finish his father off to find Adam like this. His father was in a deep depression as it was. He had blamed himself for his wife’s suicide, at least for missing the signs. But there had been signs since 1945. Bernard was afraid of forcing his brother to seek proper medical attention in case there was some mandatory legal requirement for doctors to report crack addicts to the police. What did he know about any of this? Whose brother uses crack? His. Mine.

  In desperation he bundled Adam into his car one day while Adam was high and took him to Bernard’s then girlfriend’s place. They locked him in a room there while Bernard made discreet inquiries about the length of time it takes a crack user to detox. His girlfriend took it upon herself to look after Adam whenever Bernard went to check on his father. After five days Adam had cleaned out his system, but Bernard knew that it would take more than five days to turn his brother around completely. Having made some calls to an old school friend then living in Israel, Bernard borrowed money against his portion of his mother’s share of the house and sent Adam to his friend in Israel. It seemed that Adam has not looked back. Nor has he been back in nine years.

  Since then Bernard has looked after his father by himself. His father had become more difficult and taciturn in recent years. If he talked at all it was generally to himself.

  “What does he say?”

  “Often I can’t tell, because it’s not in English. But for years I’ve heard him rumble to himself, ‘I am eighteen and I have a trade. I am eighteen and I have a trade.’ Just like that. You understand what he’s saying, don’t you?”

  I didn’t understand but I let it go. “It can’t be easy living with him,” I said.

  “It’s not so hard. And in the absence of anyone else in my life, how can I leave him alone? He’s getting older faster than most people. He’s seen his family shot. He’s been through Auschwitz. His wife is dead and he blames himself. I’m all he’s got now.”

  There was so much more to Bernard Leibowitz than I had suspected. I thought that if I had been half as strong as he was, my brother would have been safe and we would not be parked outside a railway station, waiting for scraps of information to help us find him. This man next to me, with his ridiculous ties, had learned to take his distress, bundle it up and store it somewhere away from himself so that he was able to tackle each day anew. Now he was trying to help me find my brother.

  “And the girlfriend?” I asked.

  “We’re still in touch. She’s a really good person but . . . I can’t really blame her.” He looked at his hands. “I’m pushing forty and not looking . . . Well, she’s with a guy who can take care of her now, not in some distant future. He’s a nice guy, too, from what I can tell.”

  “‘Take care of her’?”

  “Don’t you want someone to take care of you, Rose?”

  “I’v
e never really thought about it.”

  “She’d thought about it. She’s a lot older than you. She wanted children before she got too much older, and I’ve never really looked like the kind of guy who could be counted on to feed them.”

  Bernard sat forward and leaned on the steering wheel. It was dark by then. He was looking toward the station. Seven or so boys were smoking, skateboarding and shaking up cans of spray paint. There was no one else around. Bernard told me to stay in the car and I did, until I saw him go to the boot and take out the metal pipe. We were in the shadows of a railway station, where all the Met warning signs and designated safe areas did nothing to dispel even the menace of a well-aimed spit from a kid with a baseball cap turned back to front.

  I got out of the car sufficiently behind Bernard for him not to hear me close the door. If he had heard me he would have sent me back to the car. It shouldn’t have been dangerous. Wasn’t he just going to ask these kids some questions? But it looked dangerous. I wasn’t going to watch from the car.

  Bernard walked toward them at an even pace. He carried the pipe nonchalantly by his side in one hand. Up closer, these boys were more like men. Two of them were leaning against a wall, one lighting the other’s cigarette. Another one skateboarded around them, doing tricks, perhaps trying to get the attention of the one who’d had his cigarette lit. A little further along two others were spraying something on the wall, talking to each other and laughing in bizarre staccato bursts. Bernard approached the smoker but was addressed suddenly before he had a chance to speak. The others stopped to watch.

  “What the fuck do you want, mister?”

  “I just want to ask you a couple of questions,” Bernard said, far too politely.

  “Why don’t you read the timetable, like everybody else?”

  At this they all laughed. Bernard continued walking up to him.

  “I don’t want to talk about the timetable,” Bernard said.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want to talk to you at all, so why don’t you piss off before you regret coming here.”