Ned Beauman - Boxer, Beetle

So while Sinner washed and changed his clothes, Kölmel went into his office, telephoned Rabbi Berg and persuaded him not to serve wine at the dinner, achieving, in ten minutes, what thirteen years of Prohibition never had.

Out in the street the five o’clock sunshine seemed to rise up like dew from the cracks in the pavement. Sinner and Frink took a cab back down to their hostel on the Lower East Side next to the old Bialystoker Synagogue. Kölmel knew the owner, and Sinner had been put in a room with bars on the windows and a heavy lock on the door. Sinner drank a Dr Pepper — which he had never tasted before and found almost alarmingly delicious — flicked through a boxing comic called The Abysmal Brute — which despite the name made boxing appear as bloodless as cricket — and changed into a suit borrowed from a tailor friend of Kölmel’s — which was both too tight and too long in the legs. Then the two Englishmen walked over to Rabbi Berg’s house on Cherry Street.

Frink couldn’t pretend he didn’t feel guilty to be treating Sinner like this, to be dragging him around like a convict on remand, to be denying him a single moment’s unharnessed enjoyment of this extraordinary place. When Frink fought ‘for England’ in the war he had really fought for London, and yet he had to admit that New York felt like an even greater city. This was what he was stealing from Sinner, who would only be seventeen once. But to reassure himself, he only had to think of the times that the boy had turned up to prizefights drunk, or vomited during training, or disappeared entirely for days at a stretch — not to mention the more carnivalesque episodes, like the time he stole a police horse. Frink had known Sinner had that chaos in him ever since the day they met, but it had got worse and worse. And despite all the help Frink had given Sinner, with his jabs and his scabs and his dinners and his debts, he couldn’t do the first thing to help him with this. He desperately wanted to, but he couldn’t. Frink knew what it was like to want to drink sadness into the distance, and he knew the sadness that Sinner had, or some of it. But he often felt that Sinner wasn’t drinking because of sadness, but rather because he looked at drunkenness like he looked at almost everything else: as a territory to be conquered, an opponent to be tested, a lover to be used up. No gouging, no biting: those were the words spoken before every fight like a harsh grace. Gouging and biting, though, were both just ways of grabbing a little bit of something that wasn’t yours. And Sinner, if he could, if he wasn’t stopped, would try to gouge and bite until there was no world left. Or until there was nothing left of him but fingers and teeth. Or until there was nothing left of him at all. Which was why he had to be a prisoner, as guilty as it made Frink feel.

But actually, to Sinner, as they passed a shop window advertising ‘MOSHA 100 % PURE PUMPERNICKEL’ which just at that moment was nearly smashed by a little boy kicking a tin can, this place didn’t seem all that different from Spitalfields; except that New York had a certain deep generosity of sky which he would never forget. And, anyway, Frink wasn’t wrong to be wary: Sinner wanted gin, or whatever they drank here, and one way or another he would get some. He looked back at the little boy, and thought about how the kid would soon know his name, just like everyone else in this city would.

Rabbi Berg’s house was crowded with paintings and ornaments and little lamps and half-broken things. He welcomed them in saying, ‘Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.’ His face was deeply and finely lined all over, as if he’d once been caught in a shrimping net. ‘A great pleasure to meet you, Seth. Who is your rabbi in London? Rabbi Brasch? Our paths have not crossed. Come and sit down because I cannot stand up for too long and Mr Kölmel is already here.’ They went into the dining room and drank iced blackberry cordial. Within a few minutes the two remaining guests had arrived: Mr Balfour Pearl, a handsome dark-eyed man in his mid-thirties, introduced as having come straight from the mayor’s office, and Rabbi Shmuel Siedelman, who was around the same age as Pearl and much more reserved than his colleague Berg.

Their host sat at the head of the table, with Kölmel and Siedelman on his left, Sinner and Frink on his right, and Pearl at the opposite end. As his maid brought out their dinner of veal sausage with minced onion dumplings and cabbage, the rabbi led his guests in a prayer for the Jews in Germany. Everyone closed their eyes except Sinner, who looked around the dining room. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in a nice house: there were toffs he’d met in the Caravan who’d taken him back to grand old places in Belgravia or Knightsbridge. But this was the first time he’d been in a nice house as a proper guest, let alone a guest of honour, and the first time he’d been attended by a maid. The rabbis he knew in London didn’t live like this, and they wouldn’t aspire to have government officials over for dinner, either. He wondered what the difference was, really, between a man like Rabbi Berg and a man like Albert Kölmel. You knew everybody, everybody knew you, and that was the foundation of your power: before long, there was no one left who didn’t owe you a favour. It was only the incantations, it seemed to Sinner, that were different.

‘Tell me, Seth,’ said Berg after the prayer, ‘how long have you been boxing?’

Sinner shrugged. ‘Since I can remember.’

‘Max, tell them how you found him,’ said Kölmel.

‘I don’t want to embarrass the boy,’ said Frink, looking at Sinner, but Sinner made no response, so Frink went on, ‘Well, this was when he was twelve years old. Some rich bloke in a big black Bentley — no idea why he was in our bit of town — but he’d given Sinner — Seth, I should say — he’d given Seth a shilling to watch his car for an hour, with another shilling promised when he got back. After ten minutes the boy just sidled off. Probably spotted something he could pinch,’ he added, smiling at Sinner, who again made no response. ‘When he got back, some pimply steamer was sitting on the bonnet, smoking. Must have been eighteen or nineteen. And Sinner wanted his second shilling. He told the other bloke to leave. He didn’t leave. So Sinner just jumped on him. I seen the whole thing from the dairy across the road. Had to run over and pull him away or I don’t know what might have gone off. Blood all over the both of ’em. Told Sinner he ought to be a boxer.’

After Berg had questioned Frink and Sinner a bit more, Siedelman said, ‘And you are not worried that the sport is a little … goyishe midas ?’ Sinner didn’t know what that meant. ‘Lashing out to shed another Jew’s blood.’

‘Come on now, Shmuel,’ said Berg. ‘You take the Jews out of boxing and there is no more boxing. We should be proud of that. And it is no coincidence, I think. We know how to keep a diet. We know how to keep a fast. We know how to keep clean. We know how to keep good habits. Of course we make good boxers. Have you never seen Barney Ross, Shmuel? I taught him for his bar mitzvah. These days he gets into the ring with the talaith on his shoulders and the tvillan on his arms. He unwinds them slowly and kisses them and puts them in a velvet bag which he gives to his trainer, and everyone in the crowd stays silent as if they were at shul. It is a beautiful thing to behold. Whereas I hear he doesn’t even have the Star on his trunks, our Mr Roach?’

‘We’ll fix that, Rabbi,’ said Kölmel.

‘I love to see Jews fight,’ said Pearl. ‘It is not our scripture that says to turn the other cheek. We are all Darwinians now, aren’t we, gentlemen? And survival of the fittest means you have to learn how to throw a punch.’