My father’s father’s name is Sam. He has a funny accent. I wonder if they call him Commie? He lives in a bit of London called Mile End, and he wears a skullcap but doesn’t look the slightest bit Jewish otherwise. His hair—and he still has a lot of it, even though he’s old—is all white. He wears an embroidered waistcoat, very beautiful but a bit threadbare. He’s awfully old.
All the way in the car, my father and I had been talking about books. He hadn’t mentioned Sam except to say that’s where we were going. I was more thinking about the hotel and about London, so it was almost a surprise when he got there. My father tootled the horn in a pattern, and the door opened and out Sam came. My father introduced us on the pavement, and he hugged me, and hugged my father too. I was a little alarmed at first, because he really isn’t at all like anyone I know, and not the faintest bit like Grampar. With my father and his sisters it’s quite easy to keep them at arm’s length, and even to keep thinking about them at arm’s length somehow, because they’re English, I suppose. But Sam isn’t English, not at all, and he just instantly seemed to accept me, whereas with them I always feel horribly on probation.
Sam took us in, and introduced me to his landlady as his granddaughter, and she said she saw the resemblance. “Morwenna favours my family,” he said, as if he’d known me for years. “Look at the colouring. She looks like my sister Rivka, zichrona livracha.”
I looked blank, and he translated, “May her memory be a blessing.” I like that. That’s a nice way to say that somebody’s dead that doesn’t stop the conversation. I asked him how to spell it and what language it was. It’s Hebrew. Jewish people always pray in Hebrew, Sam says. Maybe one day I’ll be able to say “My sister Mor, zichrona livracha,” just normally like that.
Then he took us up into his little room. It must be odd to live upstairs in someone else’s house. I can tell he doesn’t have any money. I’d know even if I didn’t know. The room has a bed and a sink and one chair, and books all piled up everywhere. There’s a dresser, all piled with books, with a kind of electric samovar and glasses. There’s a cat, too, a big fat ginger-and-white cat called Chairman Mao, or maybe Chairman Miaow. She took up half the bed, but when I sat down on it, perched on the edge, she came and sat on my lap. Sam said—he said I should call him Sam—that meant she liked me, and she didn’t like many people. I stroked her, carefully, and she didn’t scratch me after a minute the way Auntie Teg’s Persimmon always does. She curled up and went to sleep.
Sam made tea, for him and me. My father had whisky. (He drinks an awful lot. He’s gone down to the hotel bar now, drinking. He smokes a lot too. It would be unkind to say he has all the vices, in the circumstances, as he did help me get away and he is paying for me to go to school. It’s not as if he wanted me.) The tea came in glasses with metal holders, and didn’t have milk or sugar, which made it a lot nicer. It had a pleasant sort of flavour. I was surprised, because I don’t usually like tea at all and I was only drinking it to be polite. He got the water from the electric samovar, which he said kept the water at the right temperature.
After a little while, I was looking at the books, and I saw The Communist Manifesto on top of one of the piles. I must have made a little noise, because they both looked at me. “I just noticed you have The Communist Manifesto,” I said.
Sam laughed. “My good friend Dr. Schechter lent me that.”
“I was reading it recently myself,” I said.
He laughed again. “It’s a lovely dream, but it would never work. Look at what’s happening in Russia now, or Poland. Marx is like Plato, he has dreams that can’t come true as long as people are people. That’s what Dr. Schechter can’t understand.”
“I’ve been reading about Plato too,” I said, because he’s in The Last of the Wine of course, and Socrates too.
“Reading about Plato?” Sam said. “How about reading Plato?”
I shook my head.
“You should read him, but always keep arguing with him,” he said. “Now, I must have some Plato in English somewhere.” Then he started moving piles of books, with my father helping him. I would have helped too, but I couldn’t move with Chairman Miaow asleep on my knees. He had Plato in Greek, and Polish, and German, and I realised as he muttered his way through the piles that he could read all those languages, as well as Hebrew, and that even though his English was funny and quite strongly accented and he lived in this little rented room, he was an educated man. Seeing my father help him go through the piles, I saw that they were fond of each other, though they didn’t do much to show it. “Ah, here,” he said. “The Symposium, in English, and a good place to start.”
It was a slim black Penguin Classics volume. “If I like it I can order more from the library,” I said.
“You do that. Don’t be like Daniel here, always reading stories and no time for anything real. I’m the opposite. I have no time for stories.”