Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Books were everywhere, covering the tables, spilling out of drawers and boxes: dictionaries, primers, code-breakers, histories, explanations of anti-Semitism. Inversion, agglutination, fusion, analogical extension were Rodinsky’s familiars. He took a Letts Schoolgirls’ Diary — ‘begun Tuesday 20 December 1961’ — and converted it into a system of universal time. Julian, Gregorian and cabalistic versions tumbling into the Highway Code, and out again into Aramaic, Hebrew, Latin or Greek. There was a desperation to crack the crust, to get beyond language. ‘ KÍ-BI-MA… SPEAK!’

‘It’s a lock,’ as the TV boys say. The Carnival Season would soon be over, and Sonny Jaques would be shuttling back from the Caribbean, refreshed and ready for another round of discussions, rewrites, revisions, lunching drafts. But we’d deny him even a cheese dip until he agreed to see this room for himself. It is the prize exhibit, a sealed environment; even the light breaks hesitantly through cracks in the boards that cover the windows.

Rodinsky’s diary-script reveals one last frenzied charge at the cuneiform tablets, the king-lists. We are shaking out locusts and cinders. The final entry is almost illegible. ‘ By he she / aren’t so not take .’ ‘ Not take .’ The command is ignored, Fredrik slips into his pocket the scarlet document the curators have ignored. In failing to feature the Letts Diaries, they missed the chance to turn the Princelet Street synagogue into as big a commercial attraction as the Anne Frank House. They removed everything else: the books with colour plates, the ziggurat snapshots, all the significant bric-a-brac. Urchins and sneak-thieves completed the job, cargoculting the swag to the fences of Cheshire Street and Cutler Street.

Now I began to understand the nature of the trap. I was like the fox who philosophically accepts that he has made a bad decision — only when he has to chew off his own leg to escape. There was nothing astonishing in the disappearance of this man. He could not be more available. It was all still here: the wrappings, the culture, the work he had attempted, his breath on the glass — and even, if we carried it away, his story. We could provide the missing element, fiction, using only the clues that Rodinsky had so blatantly planted. Fredrik’s fateful choice in picking up the diary made it certain that the unfinished work of this chamber would be taken to its inevitable, though still unresolved, conclusion.

The man remains, it is the room itself that vanishes . You are looking into a facsimile, a cunning fake, as unreal as the mock-up of Thomas Hardy’s study in Dorchester Museum. But the fake was crafted by none other than the apparent victim! The room’s original has shifted to another place, achieved another level of reality. You would have to share Rodinsky’s fate to find it. There is no use in stripping the panels from the walls for your Docklands condo, or reviving the set for a Gothic Tour (designed by Edward Gorey?) taking in New York and Chicago. The heritage is despair and the heritage is the measure by which we fail in visiting this grim module. It can be marketed only as a suicide-kit; a death by aesthetic suffocation, an empathy attack.

The room emerges as a deconsecrated shrine, sucking in the unwary, tying them by their hair to the weighted furniture. No one who crosses the threshold is unmarked. These psychic tourists escape with modest relics, souvenirs that breed and multiply in their pockets like pieces of the true cross. They propagate a dangerous heresy. They are scorched by shadows that do not belong to any three-dimensional object. Rodinsky is assembled, like a golem, in the heat of their attention. He is present in all the curious and seductive fragments left in this cell. And whatever was ferreted away behind all this stimulating rubbish has completely evaporated.

Chastened, I stand with Fredrik in the domestic ruin of the back kitchen, looking north towards the brewery. The true history of Whitechapel is here, unseen, invisible from the public streets. Lost gardens, courtyards whose entrances have been eliminated, shacks buried in vegetation like Mayan temples — so that only a previous intimacy could establish the meaning of these mysterious shapes. The ground is unused and unlisted: it does not age. You could hack a path into the thicket and converse — as a contemporary — with the dead centuries. You could discover the secret of time-travel: nobody ever ‘goes back’; rather, you die into what you see, you slow down, choke, peel layers from the bone until you become aware of the stranger crossing the garden towards you, recklessly parting the damp greenery, picking thorns from his wrist — the man who has your face.

At a distance now, in the safety of my study, I write. My pen moves over the paper, as nervously stimulated as an electrocardiogram tracing. The scarlet leatherette diary is open in my left hand. In August Rodinsky interested himself in the laws governing shechitah (ritual slaughter); the flawless blade, the uninterrupted stroke. He made notes from the Babylonian Talmud, as codified by Joseph Karo (those fated initials again, denoting aggressive victims and reluctant predators!). I can only repeat, edit, copy — ‘ Damascus… Ahab the Israelite… I and you gods… so take ’ — acknowledge the conflicting impulses, or drift into the diary’s flattened pre-Columbian world map, with its anachronistic ‘shipping lanes and railways’.

Almost unnoticed, at the side of Rodinsky’s room, is a blind passage that leads nowhere, quilted in newspaper bundles, wine bottles, broken slates. A man’s naked shoulders rub against the plaster walls, streaking them with blood. His hearing, sensitized by privation, is pitched to the rush of vital fluids within the bricks; to the telltale creak on the remembered stairs; to the public world of the street that is far beyond the reach of his restricting chain.

A news cutting, disturbed by my agitated shuffling of the pages, floats from the diary on to my desk: a codling moth, or flake of ash. I try to avoid it, but it sticks to my hand. A photograph: hollow cheeks, a dead-eyed man with the shadow-moustache of malignant fate. An involuntary traveller covering his face against a photo-degraded blizzard. ‘ And here is Yasha, seen in this Nazi-released picture after his capture .’ Why had Rodinsky preserved this image from among the mounds of unscissored newspapers? I was glad that I did not have to know.

I reseal the diary into its jiffy bag, wrap it in felt, secure the package with string. I drip hot wax over the knots. I can no longer allow that book to draw breath in my room. But — as the power of its dictation subsides — all the annotated ephemera of the Princelet Street attic also pales, and bleaches from sight. What remains, and will not be displaced, is a solitary brass key, lying on the shelf in Rodinsky’s wardrobe. Everything else, I am now certain, is a sorcerer’s smokescreen.

IV

The looped tape ran on with its mesmerizing impersonation of silence. We concentrated on the squeaking and grinding of its untended mechanism. Woolf Haince was alert, cradling his toy like a case of pet locusts; ear cupped, he nodded in recognition. ‘From the fourth corner, six to ten princes,’ he murmured, ‘the fire.’

Joblard, at the turret window, could see the dim bulb in Arthur’s hutch, a lemurian smear; but ‘The Boy’ himself had sunk from sight, sparked out, without memory. He lived in the eternal present of the vagrant, submerged, primed to mere survival. Arthur was a drowned man, returned. He had been wiped clean by his hours in the water. He was ‘Monty’. His flesh was soft, rotten blue, unmarked by razor: a prebendary pout outlined in shabby down. He was dying slowly into his portrait, exchanging breath with a single captured moment: post-coital sulks daguerreotyped on to florid card. Ruined Arthur was smoking-room bait; a gamy valentine stitched in lemon satin. The lie of his life was lost, inscribed on a sentimental flyleaf, bound in canary vellum, pillaged by bumbailiffs; auctioned, sacked, snatched, scattered. He cannot escape from any of it — rectal damage, sobranie , flushed velvet: he remembers nothing. A lurid afternoon, the clouds spinning his sickness; he lurches towards the river. He has been filed and forgotten; wormed, silver-fished, tanned to powder. Arthur in his pomp: long-necked, a curious centre parting; lavender water, spoiled Bloomsbury. Virginia Stephen dressed for some jape in her brother’s cricket togs! (And, incidentally, there is an extant snapshot of Vanessa batting, c. 1892, while sister Virginia cradles the ball, like a harmonica, to her pursed lips. Vanessa’s forward ‘push’ is hampered by a woefully inadequate, cack-handed grip. Her front leg is nowhere. And her eyes are either firmly shut, or grounded in despair. In other words, she looks every inch the missing England opener.) Arthur Singleton is transfixed by a guilt he has done nothing to earn. In justice, he is doubly punished.