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The Vortex (Blok's First Dream):
Born again nevertheless and despite protests, he squeezes out of the vaginal cavity amid a storm-tossed sea. Passport stamps pressed coldly to his buttocks, he crawls, off the immigrant ship, through Arrivals, merging with a seething mass of humanity, a multitude dressed in costumes of all known eras: pantaloons and turbans of the medieval orient, periwigs ofLouis Quinze Versailles, Salonikan porters, Volga boatmen, Edwardian flat straw hats, Prohibition tuxedos, top hat, white tie'n'tails, flowing gowns, crinolines, corsets, chastity belts, shapeless schmutters of the shabab of all nations, the lower classes, the sans culotte, the mob, khaki uniforms of Everybody's Defence Forces, bashi-bazouks, centurions, Biblical hordes dressed in cardboard. The contorted faces of Hieronymus Bosch. (Ship of Fools, Ecce Homo, The Ascent of Calvary, Christ Crowned With Thorns, Carrying the Cross.) But as he stands, reeling in the pungent reek of halitosis, he now notices that they all possess surplus eyeballs, watching him suspiciously from collar buttons, jacket pockets, open flies. They turn upon him, demanding instant visas. He runs, stumbling across the great hall. Pudgy, purulent fingers clutch at his pyjamas. He reaches the exit, marked, in many languages: NO SMOKING, NO SPITTING, NO CRACKING OF SUNFLOWER SEEDS. But his way is barred by a phalanx of individuals he recognises as an assortment of his ancestors, who have, it appears, poured out of his genes. Shaking their fists and kaftans, they proclaim themselves to him: Yisroel Belzheim, of Szeged, seller of glue, bespoke clothing and rubber goods; Dov Baer Gold, the Rabbi of Torokszentmiklos, his uncle's grandfather's uncle; his mother's grandmother Rosa, who gave his mother her name; Yehezkel Blok, registered Bratislavan mohel, direct progenitor of Papa, and Nehama, his spouse. Epikoros! they shout at him. Blood is Blood! Flesh is Flesh! You can't keep a good Jew down! His parents, Baruch and Rosa, buffeted in the melee, Mama pulling Papa's wheelchair out of the way.
A small group of the friends he has left behind rush forward to try and stay the onslaught, spraying the hordes with cans of mace: Long-suffering Avi, red-haired Esther, and Shuh, and no-longer-young Yissachar, assistant editor of Holyland Films and later sidekick of the mogul Adir Kokashvili, tossing his eyeballs in the air and catching them. `Listen Avram,' he says. `You have a right to break even. You gotta knock 'em dead out there.' He claps a piece of paper with a scrawled address upon it into Blok's palm, and turns away. A resilient female cry sounds from above. Blok looks up, astonished at the spectre of Victoria Happenstance, revolutionary par excellence, Friend of the Oppressed and unrequited love of previous incarnations, swinging upon a glass chandelier. Her great blonde mane dazzling in the lights. She shouts again: `Play the game, kafirboetie!' The crowd pushes him back, pressing their familiar faces up against him: old inmates of asylums, a skinned lamb, a great Pig with sunshades, under a yellow canopy, with a mangy, bandaged black cat, curled upon the massive corpse of a fat man with a fez crawling with roaches hoisting the skull and crossbones. Angrily, they throw their spare eyeballs at him, which crunch painfully on his forehead, arms, shins. He falls, crawling among the scattered loose eyes bursting beneath him as he trawls desperately forward amid the stench of unwashed feet, pulling on the chain of the giant plug which he finds in the centre of the hall. The multitudes cry and struggle as they are drawn inexorably down the hole. He replaces the plug, shutting off their cries, rising to his feet amid the cavernous litter of torn leaflets in wet vomit, the chandelier swinging empty above him. He strides out of the hall, into the Strand, and the throb of London traffic. He flings his hand for the Number 9 bus. It draws up, and he climbs aboard, to the top deck, taking the empty front seat. The Cathedral of Saint Paul looms before him.
`You OK man?' the bus conductor twangs.
A scroll of the law flaps slowly and ponderously across the overcast grey sky.
He gets off the bus, walks back, up Fleet Street, turning into a narrow alley between warehouses with trucks unloading massive bales of paper, ready to print tomorrow's obfuscations, up Holborn and High Holborn, along the tall commercial buildings, with the crowd, the red double-deckers inching past like brightly painted ocean liners, faces buried in newsprint pressing by, the photocopy shops, newsagents, electrical goods, office furniture, the circling hub of Holborn Station, above Kingsway, below Southampton Row. The human cascade.
He fingers the two London addresses Yissachar, in Tel Aviv, had given him, before he had set out for the International Airport. On his first day he had telephoned both numbers, but had drawn a blank. People move on, change lives, destinies. He discards these umbilical links in a wastebin, amongst used Cola cans and abandoned Evening Standards, and walks on, towards Russell Square. A man should go forth, alone. Though he would have to find a longer term sanctuary, examining what might be a last option, one more echo of the dreamed past ... It, too, appears barren, but, nevertheless, a chance meeting opens the door...‘. . Amandla!'
‘ . . I'm here . . .'
‘ . . not you Amanda, sit still . . .'
‘ . . have another of these continental crisps . . the time is near . . .'
‘. . the times are far . . .'
‘ . . put hair on your chest . . . Mayibuye!'
‘ . . small sausages in the kitchen . . .'
‘ . . became a Black Muslim long ago...’
‘ . . well, he could hardly have become a white one…’.
‘. . Goddammit! who's in charge of the booze ... ?'
‘ . . the fatted calf? Meat for the chopping block, my boy . .’
`You have met my friend Avram Blok? You don't remember...?'
‘. . ah, but if it hadn't been for the coup . . .'
‘ . . thirty pounds an ounce? I could have died . . .'
'Stamford Hill, wasn't it, ten years ago ... ? Gottverdommen!'
‘ . . I haven't touched a grain since the Seventies . . .'
‘ . . memories? It's all we have of her, poor Victoria…’
‘ . . Walter! what happened to the boerewors?'
‘ . . still some taramosalata . . .'
‘ . . of course, we do remember them all . . .'
`E, Avram, over here, meet your compatriot, Asher Katzman, another exile from the Promised Land. And let me introduce you to the lady of this, ah, memorial, our fair maiden here, Jacqueline. She is our, ah, departed sister Victoria's sister ... Jackie, this brother here is Avram Blok . . .'
‘ . . and Kaunda said: I want that man's balls on a plate . . .'
‘ . . then he cried . . .'
‘ . . he always does . . .'
‘ . . the tears rolled down his cheeks .
‘ . . they always do . . .'
`Good to know you, Avram. Walter here tells me you and Vicky were friends, back in '68 . . .'
`Yes. I was really, uh, staggered to hear about ... I'm very sorry ... ah . . .'
‘. . ah, c'est triste, c'est tres triste . . .'
‘. . Defunct Imperialism, my boy . . .’
‘. . an osteopath, in Luanda . . . ?'
‘. . Mboya, he was the man . . .'
`Well, I only knew her when we were small. We grew up in different worlds, she with our Dad, Max, in Oxford, I was brought up in the States, in Kansas . . .'
`Kansas, can you believe that, Avram? Notice that Yankee accent, my boy ... is that a place for a native English memsahib.. . ?'
‘ . . another minty stick, will you . . .'
‘ . . the booze! Who's in charge of the booze ... ?'
‘. . Mein Gott! Asher is at it again . . .'
‘ . . cheese snaps ... ?’
`What have you been doing all these years, Avram?'
`Our Aybraham has been in the Holy Land, have you not? Leading his people out of bondage. Trying to sell them the virtues of the True God. Jehovah, my friends, no imitations!'
`That's nothing to do with me, Walter . . .'
‘. . O tempura! O Morris Minor ... !'
‘ . . the Abbey National, of course . . .'
‘. . busted on the Central Line ... ?'
`Ah, our Aybraham is modest. He declines the priesthood.
When was it you were here last? '73... ? Man, you can't believe how time passes. Edward Heath! Good Lord, can you believe that? Now we look back to that man with nostalgia! Can you beat that? Not to speak of old Wilson!'
`Vietnam . . . the Committee of One Hundred ... Bertrand Russell ... Canon Collins ... Grosvenor Square ... the LSE ..’
`When Savimbi was still a Marxist . . .'Memory lane. Memory lane. After drawing a blank with Yissachar's two addresses, Blok had taken a red London bus northwards, to the old abode of Victoria Happenstance, the Seventies' hub of his own remaindered echoes of meatier times, in Stamford Hill. But the house whose number he remembered belonged to a Hassidic family, who had bought it, unoccupied, from an estate agent, in 1978. Blok returned south, continuing to wander the West End streets aimlessly, half resolved to the abortion of his entire escape plan, and the premature use of his return ticket, when, by the random luck of his wanders, he came across a group of South African exiles, standing on a picket line outside the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square, unfurling banners of defiance at the door of the Republic: `FREE NELSON MANDELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS NOW!'
A familiar black face behind one of the shaken fists. Mutual recognition across the years: `Avram Blok! I cannot believe this!' `Walter! My God! It's been a long time. How have you been? Do you know where Vicky is?'
`. . reading Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare on the bus . . .'
`. . Consciencism? My God, who could forget . . .'
`. . bayonet practice in Queen's Park ... ?'
`. . golden years ... golden years . . .'
`. . man, you can say that again . . .'
Then Walter had to tell him the sad news: `Your old friend Victoria Happenstance is dead. It happened just one year ago in Zimbabwe. She was poisoned by an Elixir of Life. She'd gone back to her old profession of Anthropology after she broke up with the Black Panther, Wellington Frog. He became a Black Muslim and wanted her to convert. Now he is publishing Islamic Books in Memphis. A millionaire, can you believe it, Avram?'
`Well, so many people have changed…’I have your measure, Avram,' Asher challenged him at breakfast the morning after the wake, expropriating Walter's Sultana Bran. 'You don't have to tell me, I have my crystal ball. Don't bother to correct me if I'm wrong: I see a disillusioned mug, escaping the cat's cradle of a supposedly renascent nation that has gone off its head. Inflation, wars, oppression, general incompetence. The boy can't take it. He runs for the hills. The Lebanon War. It tears away at his conscience. Great tears fall to sog his old boots. He remembers a time when it was all so pure, so innocent, so redolent of a bright future. He cries out: Why have you done this to me, pascudniaks!? Why have you fucked up my life? But the grass is greener elsewhere. It grows and twirls. A beanstalk, it surpasseth its roots and reaches the skies. Eagerly our Jack climbs up it, hand after hand, foot after foot, reaching for the etherial regions. Sanctuary! Sanctuary! he cries, throwing open the doors of the cathedral. The priests look down at him with grim, wary faces. He crouches down, hiding his lack of foreskin with his calloused, bleeding hands. Sanctuary! Sanctuary! They hold out the collection box. He stretches his palms out in mute supplication. Perhaps this time they will not wallop him over the head with it. Am I right or am I right ... ?'
`I cannot deny it,' Blok said.Walter away to his job at the local library. Annie to her post as a ward sister at Hampstead Hospital. Jacqueline still snoring the wake off above. And Blok's feelers still in the future.
`I thought I'd see if I could earn a little cash somehow, and stick around... sound recording somewhere, I don't know. I thought I had some contacts, but. . .'
Asher buttered a slice of Mother's Pride and cut himself a hunk of Cheddar cheese. The sun had parted the clouds a little to reveal in the garden a welter of old boxes, bicycle frames, pram wheels, crates of empty wine bottles, an old fridge, a dead washing machine, piles of cut branches, weeds bursting out of plastic bags, a row of old disembowelled cinema seats.
`I know,' said Blok. There was no need to mention the issue of rents, recessions, rejections, of four million bodies and souls out of work, stretching out dole queues, lives wasted not as the reserve army of the State but as its punching bag. The morning paper's headline pointing at the future: `SNAP SPRING ELECTION FOR MAGGIE?'But he spelled it out, yet again: `This is Margaret Thatcher's Britain.'
Nevertheless, the Monday after his outing with Jacqueline, Asher took Blok to see the Director of the film school at which he eked out his living as a tutor of hopeful young cineastes: the London College of the Cinematographic Arts, otherwise known as LOCCA, a large warehouse at the backside of Drury Lane, brimful to its labyrinthine sixth floor with aspiring artists whose names might or might not, one day, be inscribed in lights in the cinema marquees of the world or in the invisible dots of television.
`These are people,' said Asher, `who have yet to fail. Let us put up a brave face at their ecstasy.' The students hopped, skipped, jumped up and down the steps of the institute, carrying camera cases, cables, tripods, lights, viewfinders, or just their hopes, in tense, fluttering hands.
`There might be a vacancy,' Asher told Blok, `not in the Sound Department, the main qualification for which is a tin ear, if not absolute deafness, but as an assistant for the Editing Tutor, Bill Flint. You'll like him, he's a gent of the old school. Only here for the beer, exercise your rights, join the Red Revolution and so on. The job is usually reserved for an ex-student, but we can say you did a stint in the Homeland.'
`I have done a spot of editing…' murmured Blok, recalling perhaps his days of hanging out-takes of New York hard-ons upon hooks on plastic bins, many many moons ago.
`Whatever you say here, don't tell the truth,' said Asher. `This is the castle of illusions. Just get a foot in at the bottom of the ladder. Don't worry about the effort to climb. That need will not arise.'
He ushered Blok in, past a cud-chewing secretary with spiked hair, on the second floor, a small reception area with walls covered with cork notice boards bearing witness to mundane agonies: 'FERNANDO, PLEASE CONTACT THE BURSAR URGENTLY', `CHRISTINE, MY KINGDOM FOR YOUR CHEQUE', `PHILIBERT KOCH - FOUR BIG ONES CASH ON THE NAIL', `JOCK WOON - YOUR MANNA OR YOUR LIFE', `ARISTOFANOUS D. - THE METER IS TICKING', `TWENTY STARVING (to which someone had appended AND BLIND) STAFF TO FEED', `NO KWACHA OR YUGOSLAV DINARS ACCEPTED', `GET THAT DEAD WEIGHT OFF YOUR POCKET', `TIME'S UP!' `NO IOUS', to the file cluttered office of the incumbent director of the College, a heavy-set thin-haired florid-faced gentleman slumped behind a desk strewn with application forms to which polaroid mug shots were attached.
`Oh my God, it's the Jews!' he cried, as Asher entered, making the sign of the cross with his fingers.
`Drat, forgot the nails again,' said Asher. He introduced the newcomer.
`Avram Blok, this is Henry Gibson, our Fiihrer. Don't worry, they only let him out once a week.'
`Ze bells! Ze bells!' The director threw his arms up over his head, upsetting a paperweight. He recovered swiftly, straightening his tie over a soft grey waistcoat. `Sit down, if you can find an electric chair. There, Asher, that one has just been wired up. You know this criminal, Mister Blok? Asher Katzman? The law can only be one step behind him. I tore up three telegrams from Interpol only yesterday. So what can you do me for this time? Are you a candidate, Mister Blok? You look a little mature, if I may venture to presume, to start to flower in our humble greenhouse . . .'
`My friend would not dream of dropping his hard-earned cash as one of your registered convicts,' said Asher, `but he is an ideal choice for the Editing Assistant's post, if you haven't yet found a victim.'
`So reduced is he in circumstances?' asked Gibson, swivelling to fix Blok with a languid stare of bottomless compassion sunk in the deep green of eyes enlarged artificially by his thin-rimmed thick spectacles. `My heart goes out to you. What are your bona fides? Have you carried out at least six contracts for the Mafia? Have you participated in the Hopi blood-rite? Have you eaten live worms and spent a night locked up with a member of a Trotskyite organisation in the Great Pyramid of Cheops?'
`I have worked in the film business,' said Blok. `Sound recording. Some editing. Reading scripts.'
`Don't read any of our lot's. You'll go blind. Have you had lunch? I'm starving. Let's escape the queue of predators eager to rend my flesh for my failure to supply their money's worth even if they don't pay it. Form a shield around me and let's go, Avram! Don't look back, or we shall all be turned into ammonium nitrates.'
They walked, and Henry Gibson staggered, waving his arms, through the narrow streets of a revamped Covent Garden, milling with tourists in search of ersatz ephemera, knick-knacks, fashionable shoes and schmutters, art galleries, French restaurants for businesspersons and new coffee shops straining to be a la mode in a mode of shifting urban sands.
`Ah! What all this used to be!' enthused Asher. `Did you ever know it, Avram, then? The old fruit and veg warehouses, the hustle and bustle of real commerce, cockles and mussels, alive, alive O. Hitchcock shot one of his last films here, did you know? A man who strangled women with ties. Ah, nostalgia! And now look at it: fart galleries and shops selling plastic frogs and cardboard mice, nutburgers, packaged incense and pot noodle dispensaries.'
`One Messerschmitt raid and we'd be rid of the lot,' Gibson oozed melancholy. `It's all gone, Asher. We are the last mastodons, mooning for the Palaeozoic.'
Plod, plod, plod. Gibson led them, by an invisible ball of thread, through the modern maze to a small Italian restaurant in a side street off Leicester Square, where he exchanged light banter with the waiters of the `Hey Luigi, come sta?'vein. Dishes clattered noisily in a recessed kitchen and a warm aroma dispelled the dank grey chill of a typical London spring.
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