E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80075-464-5
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Stephen May is the author of five novels including Life! Death! Prizes! which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and The Guardian Not The Booker Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year and is a winner of the Media Wales Reader's Prize. He has also written plays, as well as for television and film. He lives in West Yorkshire.
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1
How Can Anyone Live Like This?
10th May 1907
Morning of a damp day when the ferry from Esbjerg bumps knuckles with the quay at Harwich. Three men descend the gangplank slowly, carefully. It has been a restless journey. A choppy sea and too much strong Danish beer. Too much singing. On the glistening quayside now the men from the boat sigh, straighten stiff backs and try to keep their feet on slippery flagstones. They attract the eye, these men. Koba – you know him as Stalin – is small and wiry, his face pockmarked, dark hair dishevelled, eyes burning from beneath a perpetual frown. Stepan Shaumian is taller, more at home in his body, his mouth more generous, more inclined to smile. They could be artists or actors or itinerant musicians. They have that kind of dangerous shimmer. The third man, Mikhail Tskhakaya, is older, body fleshier and hair greyer, but you can still see a boyish idealist’s face beneath the well-trimmed beard and the lecturer’s spectacles. Koba is the most energetic of the three even when not moving. His leg twitches, pulsing to some internal music. His agile, crow-like face stares around impatiently. He slaps the tramp steamer soot from his trousers. Takes it all in: these looming grey warehouses; these chests full of fat pink shrimps; these coils of wet rope. This litter of unattended barrels and boxes. This stench of rotting fish and tar. These listless horses, plodding past the barges and the pleasure steamers. These children giggling at nothing who should be in school. He hasn’t written poetry for years, but he has tried to retain a poet’s eye. Behind them, the porter drops their cases noisily. Clears his throat. They turn and murmur indistinct thanks. Koba pays the man and sees immediately that he has overdone it again. Sees it in the way the surly fellow brightens. A sudden grin transforms his face. The rough verge of his moustache seems to cakewalk on his thin lip. Koba knows he has to stop doing this. The budget is two shillings a day, nowhere near enough to be acting like some millionaire, like some bloody hertsogi. There is the need to say something. ‘Har-witch,’ he says, flicking the strange syllables from side to side in his mouth. ‘Har-witch.’ ‘Harridge,’ Tskhakaya corrects him quickly. ‘It’s pronounced Harridge.’ Koba scowls. Tskhakaya shouldn’t have done that. Koba will have to find a way to put him in his place now. His brow corrugates but he says nothing. Strokes his dark moustache. Thing about Tskhakaya is that he is too much the teacher, too much in love with his own knowledge, tone-deaf to the feelings of others. He compounds the error. ‘Time for a little stroll through the town,’ he says in English. English! Another little dig. Koba speaks the most basic English of the three of them. He can muddle through, but languages aren’t a strength. Not much French either and he didn’t even speak Russian until he was nine. ‘Let us meander towards the railway terminus. Meander – such a beautiful word, don’t you think, Josef?’ This annoys Koba too, the way Tskhakaya won’t use the name he has chosen for himself, the name he took from the great hero of the old stories. Koba the gmiri, the poor man who showed true nobility by defending the weak against the strong, who robbed the rich to help the poor, the outlaw who brought justice. Tskhakaya speaks again, in Georgian this time, ‘Come on now Comrades! London awaits!’ Such an arse. The revolutionists walk from the quay to the station, past scuttling citizens who barely glance at them. Places to go, people to see. Fish to buy. Harwich is a place proud to call itself a town of hurry and business. They walk past the Alma Inn, where a sign proclaims that wholesome pies and other refreshments can be had at short notice; past the British Flag where a former landlady drowned in the cellar as the estuary surged one stormy January; past the Angel, so-called because it was once – not so long ago – the haunt of child prostitutes. They saunter past the spot where last year an abandoned baby was ripped apart by starving street dogs. Every town, however small, has its horrors after all. They skirt around the knots of men outside the Packett Inn, the Duke of Edinburgh and The Little Eastern. ‘England has so many drinking holes,’ says Shaumian. ‘A nation of drunks.’ They keep their heads down as they pass The Elephant, where the soldiers of the garrison like to meet, and sometimes fight with, the sailors of the naval base. Koba leads the way, striding ahead. He does not meander. He looks hard at the people around him as he marches on – that poet’s eye – but he is uninterested in discussing what he sees. Of course there is also something that only Koba sees. The shadow that flits from doorway to doorway, always at the very edge of his vision, disappearing if you try and look at it directly. A presence still barely perceptible but growing stronger, more definite, with every passing day. A smoky third-class train journey. Smuts in their eyes. The smell of cheap coal seeping into the folds of their clothes. Taste of soot in their mouths. Trying to get comfortable on crowded wooden benches, staring silently out of smeared windows as they are rattled through small, flat fields. Cabbages and sugar beet and potatoes. Fat cattle. Thin horses. Sweet tea bought from a cheerful railway worker pushing a cart along the corridor outside the compartments. He wears a stained blue uniform in heavy serge as if he were a military man back from some bitter campaign overseas. He looks the men up and down in an insolent way. He says, ‘Up the Workers!’ and laughs as he slops his wheat-coloured brew into whitish china cups. He adds milk without asking whether they want it and lurches down the corridor coughing and leaning heavily on his trolley. Tskhakaya and Shaumian discuss whether this man will be supporting the English railway strike due to start next week. They are inclined to doubt it. Shaumian asks Koba what he thinks. Koba stares into his tea cup. ‘I think I can’t drink this grandmother’s piss.’ Ninety minutes later the men stumble into the suffocation that is London. They have heard about the city’s wet black fog – everyone has – but the reality is something else again. As Shaumian says, this fog is like gravity, it’s like being pressed into the ground by many heavy hands on your head and on your shoulders. ‘Like being pressed into shit,’ says Koba the poet. ‘Like being drowned in other peoples’ faeces.’ It is true that the cobbles are treacherous with excrement. There are a million horses in London pulling carts, carriages and hansoms. Each one drops many pounds of dung every day. Then there are the cattle swaying gently on their way to market or slaughterhouse, the clinker-blackened sheep, the pigs who, sensing their final destination, squeal and fight in savage protest, the dogs yelping excitedly around the wheels of the carts. All of them urinating and defecating and no one clearing it up. Here and there in this shallow ocean of manure are spooled little islands of human turds. It makes their stomachs turn. There is no stepping around this filth, either, there is just too much of it for that. And there is absolutely no escaping the smell, which chokes and strangles, leaves you gasping. The whiff of sewage, but also of tanneries, breweries and dyers. Textile mills, leaky tanks of town gas. Decaying offal. Underneath it all the sickly-sweet odour of unwashed human bodies. Every step means feeling your way through a thick noxious soup. Then there is the noise. The engines and the motors, the clanking orchestras of machinery. The bells of churches and ambulances, the thump of hammer on anvil in the blacksmiths’ workshops, the hollow rumble of the underground trains beneath your feet. Human sounds too. The wild jigs of musicians, the bawdy refrains of the ballad singers, the cries of the hawkers and the beggars. How can anyone live like this? How do they stand it? The people of London seem unbothered. Maybe they have other more pressing things to worry about. The wide haunted eyes, papery skin and distended bellies of the children suggest that they are just too hungry to notice irrelevancies like stink and uproar. Nothing on their minds except food. As Shaumian says, if you fall down here these mites will be on you like rats or piranha fish, stripping the flesh from your bones with their sharp little teeth in seconds. You’ll be finished before anyone has time to pull them off. From time to time they pass policemen impassively watching the crowds. Even accounting for their tall helmets and heavy capes, it’s clear that they are bigger and stronger than most of the people flowing around them. ‘Farmers’ sons,’ says Tskhakaya knowingly. ‘Fattened on meat and eggs and brought to the city to defend the property of the bourgeoisie and to intimidate the working class.’ Twenty minutes’ walk from Liverpool Street station the men approach the narrow streets of Whitechapel, where the square boxes of the houses become smaller and where the pavements are even dirtier, even more crowded, yet the Georgians begin to feel a little more at ease. They now hear languages more familiar to them than English: Russian, Polish, German, Yiddish, Hungarian, Turkish. A lively choir of almost intelligible...
