The Lubetkin Legacy (24 page)

In spite of her execrable command of English, the story Inna told me over lunch was not without interest. She was born, she said, mournfully munching her tuna and lettuce sandwich, in a part of Moldova that bordered on to Ukraine, and while she was still a baby – she was coyly unspecific about her age – in the spring of 1941, when the Romanian army joined the Axis pact and invaded, her mother had fled south with her to Odessa, where she had been left in the care of her grandmother, who lived in a vast decaying mansion divided into apartments. At the end of their road the Black Sea glimmered between the trees, and a tall statue looked down over a magnificent flight of steps that connected the town to the port. According to Inna, this was a statue of the Duck of Richard Lee, which surprised me somewhat as Richard Lee is the Brentford FC goalkeeper, but some judicious googling threw light on the confusion.

‘Do you mean the Duc de Richelieu?' I asked, wondering how a Frenchie had ended up with a statue in this iconic Black Sea port.

‘Aha! Duck of Richard Lee! Governor of city. Odessa was full up with foreigners and Jews!'

Her grandmother, whom she described as a small lady with a coil of silver hair wound around her head, informed her that the German Empress Catherine the Great had founded Odessa a century and a half ago, when the glorious Imperial Russian Army captured Crimea and the surrounding coastal areas from the barbarous non-believer Turks, and added, jabbing
with a stern finger, that if she did not go to bed immediately the Turks would come back and cut off her fingers with a scimitar. At other times, the threat came from the empire-building British or the false-hearted French, who had bombarded the city during the Crimean War.

The fear of these wicked foreigners kept little Inna awake at night. Despite its high ceilings and tall windows, the apartment in Odessa was gloomy and dimly lit, with semi-defunct chandeliers, mouldy brocade drapes, long corridors and fearsome dark closets. Her grandparents had once had the whole apartment to themselves; her grandfather had been an ophthalmologist at the Filatov Institute, but after his death her grandmother had shared it with a reserved middle-aged couple called the Schapniks, who occupied two rooms at the back from which they seldom emerged except for their interminable morning expeditions to the shared WC.

Then, in August 1941, the invading Romanian army swept south and besieged Odessa. Despite the assistance of the glorious Black Sea Fleet harboured nearby in Crimea, the city surrendered to the Axis forces. Inna learned all this later at school. At the time, the main thing she noticed was the noise, which she thought was summer thunder, and the disappearance of the Schapniks. When she asked her grandmother where they had gone, her grandmother muttered something about Jews being taken away. At that time Inna did not know what a Jew was; nor did she find out until much later about the massacre of some thirty thousand Jews in Odessa, who were rounded up and shot or burned alive in two October days in 1941.

One day, a boy appeared in their flat – a lean, shaven-headed boy with dull grey eyes and trousers several sizes too big. It seemed that he had been hiding in the school, and had followed her home. He sat silently at their big mahogany dining
table and wolfed down two bowls of cabbage soup, moving his spoon so fast that Inna's eyes only took in a blur of green and silver, and the quick movement of his pink tongue around his lips when he had finished.

‘What's your name?' she asked in Ukrainian.

He looked at her blankly. She tried in Russian, and received the same empty stare. What a rude person, she thought; and then she had the idea of asking in Moldovan, which was now tucked away in a back drawer of her mind where childhood things were stored. At once his face brightened into a smile. He told her his name was Dovik Alfandari, he was nine years old, and he had come with his family from Romania to Odessa. A tear trickled out of the corner of his eye, leaving a pale trail in the patina of grime on his cheek.

Dovik told her that his apartment in Odessa had been raided by Romanian soldiers a few days ago and all his family had been taken away. By chance Dovik had stayed late in school that day. When he returned home to find the door broken down and the apartment looted, a neighbour told him to go back to the school. He had hidden for two days in the store cupboard of the gymnasium.

‘What did you eat?' she asked.

‘Nothing,' he spluttered, shovelling more cabbage soup into his mouth.

For three years Dovik never left the apartment. If anyone came to the door, he ran and hid among the fur coats in Grandmother's wardrobe and came out smelling of mothballs after the visitors had left. He and Inna played hide-and-seek in the gloomy corridors, jumping out on each other with blood-curdling shrieks, while outside Romanian soldiers stood at the ends of the street smoking and pointing their guns at everyone who passed, and neighbours were led away in twos and threes at gunpoint. If there was fighting they didn't see it,
but at night they heard shelling from the port and Grandmother told them that the glorious Black Sea Fleet would soon liberate them from these Nazis.

‘Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!' yelled Inna in Dovik's ear one day, jumping out from behind the sofa.

Dovik almost leaped out of his skin. ‘Don't say that, you stupid girl!'

‘Why not? Don't call me stupid!'

‘It's what they shout when they take the Jews away.'

‘What's a Jew?'

‘I'm a Jew.'

She stared at him. ‘You can't be a Jew. You look normal. Well, nearly normal. Ha ha. You can't catch me!' She disappeared behind the curtain.

‘Jews
are
normal.' He yanked back the curtain angrily. ‘But ignorant people think we drink blood. So they want to kill us.'

‘Huh! You drink cabbage soup like everybody else. But I don't see what it's got to do with glory to Ukraine.'

‘It's complicated.' He frowned. ‘Too complicated for girls to understand.'

‘Stupid boy!'

Inna chuckled now, recalling how she had batted him on the head with a thick ophthalmology book. Dovik told her that his family had come to Bucharest in Romania when the Sephardi Jews were expelled from Spain in 1942.

‘1942?' I said, puzzled. ‘Are you sure, Inna?' Something didn't seem quite right about this.

‘Definitely 1942.'

‘First of March, 1932!' Flossie joined in from the balcony.

‘Turkey murder. Two hundred dead.'

‘Save our dead!'

‘Shut up, devil-bird!' Inna slammed the door to the balcony and went to put the kettle on.

While she did this, I did a quick google. The expulsion of 200,000 Sephardic Jews from Spain took place in 1492, not 1942. How ever did we get on, I wondered, before we had Wikipedia? ‘Turkey murder' was a bit more of a challenge until I lighted on Torquemada, the head of the Spanish Inquisition. I learned to my surprise that many Jews from Spain had fled to the Ottoman Empire, which at that time included provinces of what is now Romania. Here they prospered under the tolerant Muslim rulers, who afforded them some protection from the hostility of their bloodthirsty Christian neighbours. This gave me food for thought. Although I had long since stopped regarding myself as a Christian, I still thought of Christians as being basically decent, tolerant easy-going types like myself, while Muslims I'd always thought of as, well, let's say a bit prone to fundamentalism.

I celebrated my discovery with a mug of coffee and another round of tuna and lettuce sandwiches for both of us.

Although Inna's grasp of the history was patchy, she embellished and dramatised it colourfully. Hopping lightly over half a millennium, she described how Good King Carol of Romania with his amusing moustaches was overthrown by the evil ‘Ion Guard Antonescu'. When Antonescu joined Hitler's Axis alliance, many Jews packed up and left Romania. Dovik's family had fled eastwards through Western Ukraine, where they were harassed both by German soldiers and by Bandera's Ukrainian Nationalist militias. At last they made their way down into Odessa, where they had relatives – almost a third of the population was Jewish – only to face further catastrophe when the Romanian army arrived.

‘Oy!' She sighed, and dabbed a tissue to her eyes. ‘Only Dovik got away.'

After the siege ended, Inna's mother returned to Odessa and her father came home in his Red Army uniform covered
with medals, but with only one leg. She turned her head and gazed out of the window, where in a moment of synchronicity Legless Len was trundling through the grove in his wheelchair.

‘How did your father lose his leg?'

‘Same like Len. Gangrena. On ice road to Leningrad.'

I stared at Len's stumps. ‘But I don't think Len has been to Leningrad. Despite his name.'

‘No, Len is deeyabet. My father was war hero got frozen in feet in Lake Ladoga …'

Len waved up to her from the grove, and she waved back.

‘Siege of Leningrad,' she ploughed on. ‘They took him in hospital for cut it off but doctor said we try new medicine. Bacteriophage. Bacteria-eating virus. Soviet antibiotic. One leg saved. Not like poor Len,' she said.

As we watched, Len rolled his wheelchair up to the encampment of tents under the cherry trees. Despite what Violet had said, he looked pretty much the same as always to me.

‘Nuh, Dovik seen miracle of father's leg, and he want study this new Soviet-type medicine at Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages in Tbilisi. They find it in toilet water. I stay in Odessa and train for nurse. But all time thinking about Dovik in Tbilisi.'

While Inna was still droning on, my attention wandered to the scene below. A number of people were milling around there, but it was hard to make out what was happening.

‘Did you know, Inna, that Berthold Lubetkin, the man who designed these flats, also came from Tbilisi? And his family was Jewish too?'

I thought the coincidence would please her, but she just muttered, ‘Council flat,' and wrinkled her nose. ‘Oy! Oy! I regret my parents. I regret my Dovik. I regret my country! England is good, but not same like home! Sandwich is good, but not same like golabki.'

While Inna paused her narrative to dab her eyes with a tissue, my thoughts drifted on the mysterious tides of history that had brought Lubetkin through the battlefields of Europe to my mother's bedroom, and had delivered Inna here from Moldova by a different route. I tried to conjure up the optimism of those post-war years, the hopes of a future free from squalor, want and disease, which had set Lubetkin on his journey towards housing good enough for ordinary people, had drawn Mother into the NHS, and had sent Dovik chasing around the world searching for a dirt-cheap cure-all medicine. Big dreams they had, in those days.

Down below in the grove, there seemed to be a lot of shouting and arm waving going on. The colourful elders had disappeared, but the beefy Y-fronts guy who had liberated me was arguing with a short man in a suit. Then a slender woman dressed in lilac approached from the direction of the bus stop. It was her.

‘There's something going on down there,' I interrupted Inna's mournful munching. ‘Let's go and take a look.'

A milky afternoon sun was still throwing blurred shadows through the cherry leaves in the grove. As we drew close I recognised the voice of the short man in the crumpled suit whining into a megaphone.

‘… and I'm the elected representative for your area, so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you who voted for me at the last election and to reassure each and every one of you that I will strive my utmost to have this eyesore removed …'

‘Why for he remove eyesight?' whispered Inna beside me.

But Violet, standing in the crowd, had understood what he was saying. ‘These people are saving our cherry grove, Councillor Dunster, which is more than you're doing!' she yelled.

A few people cheered. Mrs Crazy waved her umbrella. ‘Save our trees! Save our trees!' The ra-ra girls had arrived on the scene and started up their routine. Inside one of the tents, a baby began howling. A scrawny youth I had not seen before emerged from a tent with an even scrawnier dog on a string, which peed against the councillor's leg.

Desmond Dunster carried on. ‘The Council is in the process of drawing up comprehensible development plans which will see the area greatly improved, with hundreds of new homes built, and –'

‘But they won't be for the likes of us,' I heckled at the top of my voice. ‘It'll be separate entrances for the private owners and floor spikes for the dossers!' I think Mother would have approved.

Violet clapped, though if I had hoped for another embrace I was disappointed.

Len turned on me. ‘Why d'you always have to be so bloody negative, Bert? We might all get rehoused in new flats like they're building up Old Street.'

‘I don't want to be rehoused. I like it here.'