Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The rabbi was sheltered by shepherds, fed on slaughtered sheep ‘that did not offend his principles’. The Turkish frontier. America. Time. Despair. Europe again. Vienna. And, late at night, the doorbell. An old woman with ‘bluish lips’, carrying a basket. His Gentile servant.

‘I have found you,’ she said. ‘Your house is safe. Your books are safe, your clothes even. For years I pretended it was now a Gentile house. I am dying. Here is the key.’

The key returns, fate: a wrist tattoo. I am dying. Here is the key . Trains promote confessions, as cruising yawls promote the leisurely spinning of tales. I was wrong about Rodinsky. Now I can open the letter I received this morning from Mr Shames. I had written asking for his permission to quote from his original letter to Michael Jimack in my Spitalfields story.

Stoke Newington

Dear Mr Sinclair,

Please forgive delay in reply to your letter for which I thank you.

I herewith have your article dated Aug 1988 which was most interesting, but I must correct your assumption about David Rodinsky. Firstly, I knew him when young, a pasty-faced chappie who always looked under-nourished. He was not Polish, but born in London, he was a tenant together with his mother in two rooms let to them above the Princelet Synagogue, not a scholar, his sustenance was given to him and his mother from Jewish charities.

Neither was he invisible. My daughter Lorna spoke to him many a time, & she remembers him well, it was I that named (pardon me) his mother ‘Ghandi’ & is mentioned by my sisters-in-law to this day.

The Synagogue was cared for very well by Bella, even after her late father died, until she decided to move away & it was closed. All prayer books & Torah scrolls were returned to the Federation of Synagogues, together with their silver appurtenances, & thereby closed an era of East End Jewish history. As a member of the synagogue, I was Mr Reback’s son-in-law, having married in those premises. I can assure you that some of my contemporary members included Dr M. L. Barst, a most likeable practitioner, also some wealthy merchants, like the merchants who dealt with government clothing contracts, three brothers who were master bakers, the Rinkoffs, the Olives, wholesale & retail umbrella merchants, cloth merchants etc, their names have been forgotten in my memory.

It was in 1948 I last saw & spoke to David, it was at a bar-mitzvah of my nephew, the son of Monty Fresco, the press photographer, & author of 50 years in Fleet St . It was then I related to him about my experiences in the Middle East, Egypt, India & Burma.

At that occasion he told me he had learned, while resident in a home, Arabic. I spoke to him in Arabic, & his reply was understood by me, & I guessed his Arabic teacher was an Egyptian Jew. He was taught Arabic, like myself using English vowels & consonants; I too was taught Arabic & Urdu during my service in the canal zone.

To conclude, I had pity on David, he kept himself interesting during his short life, but unfortunately attained nothing, this was due to his low IQ. With people like him, they know not of having an ambition nor the initiative to get somewhere in life. David invisible? Definitely NO! My daughter Lorna, also the Reback family living at the Synagogue always treated him well. He had a sister Bessie, she paid occasional visits to Princelet St, but she too had a mental illness & was a patient in Clayberry mental home, from my deduction she may be there still.

A word about myself. In my travels I returned with many ‘objet d’ art’, I possess a collection of gold sovereigns from George III to the present day, as well as a fine collection of Israeli proof coins.

Today, in my garden I have two vines, black grapes growing on one wall, white grapes growing on the opposite wall — this year’s crop is a record due to the long summer. From the grapes I make a black portlike wine, the white grapes make a fine dessert wine. So at the age of seventy-six, I’m still pretty active.

To close, I sincerely hope this finds you well, if you have an hour to spare you are always welcome to see some of my collections.

Best wishes,

I. Shames

The speeding train leaves no visible wash. The uncertain past is erased by its passage. My early tales vanish behind me; they are not to be trusted. But each new version of the Rodinsky legend only increases its interest for me. Was his life so ‘short’, if Mr Shames met him, capable of conversing in Arabic, in 1948? Were his attainments so negligible? How could a man scratching by on doles of chicken-broth charity have left fifty-three cases of books worth removing to the Museum of London?

I was standing once more on the banks of the river. Deleting the dead versions only cleared the track ahead — on! Throw off the rattling tin cans, the barnacled anchors. The river is time: breathless, cyclic, unstoppable. It offers immersion, blindness: a poultice of dark clay to seal our eyes for ever from the fear and agony of life. Events, and the voices of events, slurp and slap, whisper their liquid lies: false histories in mud and sediment; passions reduced to silt.

I let my sickness lead me where it would, to discover its specific ‘spot’ on this dull ribbon of shore. The Telecom saucers were lanced skywards: the harm was there to be imagined. No immediate lacerations were available, no blistering, hair loss, no cankers or amputations. Future damage would be required, at the insistence of the courts, to invent a more distinguished parentage. The silver funnels of the Sugar Factory gleamed in the Reach: a death-kit, a plug on its back, blunt prongs wounding the sluggish puffball clouds.

Yard after yard, step by step, I dragged myself past the Royal Pavilion (its red, river-facing sign: COURAGE); and on into the pleasure gardens. Downstream once more to bear witness to the sinking of the Alice in Gallions Reach. As if, by staring into the leaden waters, I could clear the shame of my obsession, could see the jaws of the paddle steamer rise from the depths — healed — band playing, smoothing its circuit of water, reversing on to the pier; its white-faced voyagers stepping ashore to join the perambulation of other ghosts on these geometric paths. A whelk-stall Marienbad!

The gardens were an extension of my pre-emptive convalescence. I would get that out of the way before the blow actually fell and fever boiled my blood to water. Shrubs remained unshakeably calm in their pools of shadow. Willowy transplants (willows?) from more exotic regions drew me in among their yellow-gold skirts of sunlight. The bark tasted of freedom. Even the tennis courts were painted amulets, untroubled by the dance of ball-punishing fanatics.

But there is always a territory beyond the gardens (there has to be), a wilderness that makes the tentative notion of a garden possible. Beyond music (gossip, ease, assignations, French kisses, sticky fingers, cigar smoke, sweet Muscat) is a concrete balcony, a fierce ramp aimed at the suck of the river: an unshaven wall of threat, sprayed with curses, among which I notice the delicate invocation, ‘Acker’. The tide is teasing the rug away from under the usual catalogue of broken bottles, pieces of chain, grievous bodily weapons that failed their audition, lukewarm motors escaping the net of insurance investigators. Yellow river-sick plasters the hubcabs. This is where you will find (should you so desire) whatever is spat out when all the meat has been picked from the bone. A last run of wild ground which heavy plant instruments are obscurely, but inevitably, eliminating. A brief no man’s land. An Edenic flash in an atrocity album. A truce between the mental gardens and the Creekmouth Sewage Works. I can go no further.

I sit on a stone block in a sheltered hollow, and look from my map (Landranger 177) to the river, and back again: the sun dance, the golden float of midge-bright particles. The love soup. Teasingly, the light reveals itself. The tainted water is marked on the pale blue that represents the Thames with a heavy cross of ink. (There could be no mistake.) The death place, between Gallions Reach and Barking Reach, is named: Tripcock Ness, or Margaret. The chill of that baptism inflicts, as if by ordinance, its own shock waves of ruin. Margaret mines the channel, exacts her toll, visits the drowned; a succubus, she drinks their terror, licks the weed from their mouths, irradiates them with her glory. Punitive strokes of benevolence flay them to the last wafer of skin. A curtain of nuclear winter hangs across the river — a second barrier — a thin line of artificial snow, a mantle of ash through which all traffic must pass.