Shulie

I met Shulamith Górecki in late summer 1997 at the dinner party where my father publicly denied the Holocaust for the first time.

I had known of the possibility of both things before, obliquely. Shulamith was soon to be Jacob Bloom’s new stepmother. Jacob and his elder brother David were my next-door neighbours and my oldest friends, although neither of them were in Liverpool that summer: David was on a finance internship in London after his first year at Cambridge, and Jacob was at their mother Miriam’s house in Haifa, where he’d been staying since we sat our A-Levels. Usually I would have been there with him—for many years we had alternated summers there and at my grandfather’s apartment in Paris—but this year I’d been on a month-long stint teaching piano at a summer school in Belleville.

One day, on the phone from London, David told me that his father was planning to marry again. It was a blow that silenced me. It knocked me an inch or two back in my chair, in my father’s study at the top of our house overlooking the gated garden in Falkner Square.

“Hasn’t he told you?” David sounded genuinely surprised.

“No. I’ve barely seen him. I only got back from France on Monday.”

Images of my young students crossed my mind, brows low in the naïveté of concentration, starfish fingers reaching for the keys.

“Well, you’ve missed a scoop, Tasha,” David said, with the syrup of sarcasm that told me instantly his feelings on the matter.

“I didn’t know your dad was even seeing anyone.”

“Yep.”

“But why?”

David laughed. “Why.”

I couldn’t move my eyes away from the wall. All this time, Michael Bloom had been falling in love on the other side of it.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“A friend, apparently. He’s known her for a while.”

“And have you met her?”

“Once. In passing. Her name is Shulie Górecki,” he said. I heard it as Julie Guretzky and didn’t make the connection.

“How long has he known her?”

“A year?” David said. “I’m not sure.”

I couldn’t think of anything to fill the silence.

“I have nothing against her,” he said. He had no reason to. His mother had left almost a decade ago when he was eleven and Jacob nine. There was nothing particularly questionable about Michael marrying again. But underneath was a deep-seated skirmish of loyalties at play, which David didn’t seem to recognise.

 “You might know of her, actually,” he said. “She conducts the Philharmonic.”

“The Liverpool Philharmonic?”

“Yeah. She’s quite well known.”

“I see.” My mind was dashing. “And what does Jacob think of it?”

The silence that followed was a second too long.

“Haven’t you spoken to him?” David asked.

“Not for a while.”

Another silence.

“Okay.”

“I’ve been busy,” I said, knowing even as I spoke the words that they wouldn’t wash. Jacob and I were the people David knew best in the world, and therefore he knew that for us to go even a week without speaking was unheard of, let alone the best part of the summer. When I thought about it long enough my body felt like cold stone.

“Well, make sure you’re in touch,” he said. “He’ll be glad of it.”

After we said goodbye, I went to find the programme from the last Philharmonic concert I’d been to, just before I went to France in late June—a performance of Ravel’s Boléro.

Shulamith Górecki joined us as Principal Conductor in 1995, after acting as Chief Conductor for the London Symphony Orchestra since 1988. Prior to embarking on her conducting career, she rose to acclaim as a solo violinist, known particularly for her Deutsche  Gramophon recording of Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1980.

During her time with the Liverpool Philharmonic she has led the orchestra on international tours to Japan and Argentina. She also holds titled positions with the European Youth Orchestra, Paris Sinfonietta, and the Stockholm Symphony Orchestra.

Born in 1953, Górecki began her musical education at the Jerusalem School of Music and Dance, before studying piano and violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was married to conductor Pawl Górecki from 1978 until his death in 1995.

I remembered reading this for the first time during the concert and concluding that she wasn’t a conductor in the true sense. She was a violinist who had clearly turned to conducting when her husband died. It was an uncharitable thought—the type you only have in passing, if the person in question is a fleeting figure and not a part of your immediate world.

On stage that night she’d been wearing a suit and bow tie, black hair barely contained in a thick chignon whose bulk made me wonder idly how she looked when she wasn’t working. She was small and slim, and used her hands instead of a baton—a maverick novelty that had only vaguely piqued my interest.

All that time she’d been involved with Michael Bloom and I hadn’t known. She had been in my vicinity, my domain, and I hadn’t been aware. The Bloom house was as familiar to me as my own, connected by a wall and a chimney flue stretching three floors up. I’d spent more of my childhood there than my own house. The boys and I had been friends since before we knew it; our mothers before us, now both gone.

I loved the Blooms. All of them. Michael—clever, and kind (moulded around the tender, stoic gap that Miriam had left) with his grammar school accent and Radio 4, his sphinx cat Waxy, bookshelves the length of the lounge filled with gently Jewish books; David, who came and went from Cambridge with his forehead of rueful curls; Ben and Adam, Michael’s two adult sons from his first marriage, both lawyers in London; and Jacob. It was Jacob who was my Bloom. We had grown up with no spaces in between us, and now it had been weeks since I’d heard his voice.

The dinner party where I first met Shulamith took place at my house. Barry Jauns’ house: my father. His idea of hosting involved crates of alcohol and freezer-aisle party food. He didn’t care for politesse or frippery. People, he said without irony, came for the force of his wit and personality, not for anything as tedious as fine dining. And his lumpen soirées did hold a curious cachet in his circle. They were invariably memorable. Things often got rowdy but never simmered over. Although Barry Jauns was a working class man in a middle class body, he kept himself tightly contained. Only a rash of colour across his cheeks showed the aquifer of constant rage below.

The topics of conversation were often inflammatory regardless of the guests and their occupations. My father was Head of History at Liverpool University. His specialism was a field he liked to call “crypto-historiography,” which, outside of academia, was at best dismissed as charlatanism and at worst reviled as pure revisionism. I’d heard him argue the toss with other academics until daylight across the messy dining table, his index finger hooked around the neck of his beer bottle, making his point in the air with the stump of a cigarette: whether a battle had happened or not, how egregiously a death-toll had been overstated, whether a despot had really been so bad.

“Shulie’s fine,” he’d said to me that afternoon as we were pulling the wine bottles from the crate and lining them up on the kitchen counter. Through the window there was shadowed sunlight, gathered among the narrow brick back walls of the surrounding Georgian terraces, nets of ivy up the walls. The longest days of summer had passed; evenings now were a lambent dissolution into unconvincing darkness.

I blinked in surprise. “Have you met her?”

“Yeah. Mike’s done alright for himself.”

I was suddenly guilty. I wondered again whether Michael would resent me for not visiting him since I’d been back from France. The Blooms knew, and I knew, and I think my father even knew, that they were my family more than he was. But the Blooms had clearly changed without my seeing it, and it had knocked me off my axis. Because thus far there hadn’t been a single milestone I had not witnessed: important birthdays; the drama of David’s choosing not to take Bar Mitzvah; the smaller drama of Jacob’s choosing to; Michael opening his law chambers; Miriam’s departure; David’s stellar A-level results and his place at Cambridge. And now I had broken the pact. I had not been there to welcome the newest Bloom-to-be, this Shulamith Górecki, whom I now thought about constantly as she moved about behind the wall that separated my home from theirs. The fact of having seen her on stage without knowing who she was made me feel as though I’d stepped through ice.

“He’s done alright, has Mike,” my father went on, scratching a blemish from a wine label and squinting at the vintage. It was good wine. That was one area where he never scrimped.

Nobody else called Michael “Mike,” and no one except Michael called my father “Baz.” It was a joke they had, multi-layered, forged over years at the Taverner’s Arms on the corner of Rodney Street. It was a nod to a forced friendship based first on their wives’ and then on a shared heritage of wifelessness. There was nothing else that bound them; Michael was a pigeon to Barry’s crow.

I always wondered what they talked about when they drank together. Neither Jacob nor I had understood our fathers’ continued alliance after our mothers were gone. We’d assumed they had only tolerated each other for their wives’ sake. After all, wasn’t it Marie and Miriam who had united our families and kept them close? As two glum nine-year-olds bolstered by our similarities, Jacob and I had found it strange how Michael turned to Barry after Miriam left for Israel. It makes sense, though, looking back. My mother had died six months before. In Barry Jauns as widower, Michael struck upon an example he could emulate to craft his life around his loss. Absence is the same, I think, regardless of its reason.

As the years went on our fathers’ friendship made Jacob and me into orphans. Michael and Barry turned to each other instead of to us. But then Jacob and I had done the same. Perhaps our fathers bonded over that as well, once their grief had bedded in: bewilderment, then admiration for their children’s closeness, which was almost ritualistic in its exclusiveness and persisted into adolescence against the odds, without the mothers who had cleaved us together. We’d been mothered well, Jacob and me—so well that our fathers had been relegated. Now, pushed under the spotlight, they had broken rank and left us to it.

Miriam Bloom and Marie Jauns-Mamou had been both of our parents. For almost a decade it was an unselfconscious matriarchy of home-schooling, trips to museums, summers in either Belleville or Haifa. Among our shibboleths was the memory of my first discernible word: meh-meh, and nobody knowing whether it was Miriam or Marie to whom I was directing it. For me, my mother’s death was a blurred catastrophe that belonged to Miriam alone. I remember Marie only through Miriam, filtered by Miriam.

And because of this I avoided Shulamith Górecki for as long as I could. There was no Miriam now, so there was nobody to guide my perceptions of a newcomer, as she always had. The fact that Shulamith was here was precisely because there was no Miriam, and that made it all the worse. However, as the dinner party approached, I was surprised by the creeping of a small hope. I began to wonder if this Shulie’s presence might turn our lives into a communal experience again and cancel out the horrors of my last conversation with Jacob, back in June on the Blooms’ doorstep as he stood in silhouette from the lights of the taxi that was to take him away.

On the evening of the dinner party I saw her come into the porch behind Michael. No jackets because it was summer; Michael in his slippers because their front door lay just eight stone steps and three pavement slabs from ours.

Shulamith placed her hand on Michael’s back as he shuffled into the hallway holding a bottle of red wine. She was wearing a pair of black silk trousers, the sort of black silk that looks more dusty grey, and a pale pink blouse rolled up to the elbows. The fabric stretched against her arm as she rested her hand on Michael’s back, and in that moment—the moment I first saw them as a pair—I saw the tense, ropey pull of her bicep, hardened from her work. Not noticing me on the stairs, Michael turned and caught Shulamith’s lips with his own. She smiled and raked her thumb and index finger up from her forehead, bringing the mass of her black hair back from her face to show a vacant look of slight anxiety for what lay ahead. And then she saw me. She caught my eye and straight away her self-awareness shored her up.

“Hi,” she said.

I blinked. I had been expecting a “Hello” instead.

“Are you Natasha?” she asked.

If I hadn’t known her provenance I wouldn’t have placed her as Israeli from the way she spoke. Her voice would have been timid if she didn’t consciously lower it for gravitas. Her smile was subtle, as if she trusted her emotions well enough to only hint at them. She had the sort of face I wouldn’t have paused at but for the harrowing solemnity of her eyes. Just from looking at her I could see the magnitude of her sadness. It seemed too vast for one person alone to manage. I wondered if Michael could see it as well, and if he had chosen her because of it or in spite of it. I also sensed, looking only as closely as the moment would allow, that she was as different from Miriam as it was possible to be. It was a relief, in a way.

“I am,” I said.

When Michael saw me there was a pull of fear that the time I’d spent away from him might have changed us. It was dashed by his slant-eyed, full-faced smile, which lifted his plump cheeks and extended to his temples. He held out his arms.

“Tashaleh,” he said when my cheek connected with the towelling of his polo shirt, his wide chest, the soft acrid pine of his cologne. “You’ve abandoned me. Too busy with your little protégés.”

I pulled away and pretended to be irritated by the name he’d always called me, but in truth I was glad to hear it. It meant that there was no ill feeling for my staying away. It also meant that Jacob hadn’t told him what we’d said to each other that night on the front step, nor the true reason he was in Haifa.

“You’ve not met Shulie, have you, yet?” Michael said, one arm still around me.

“Not yet.”

Shulamith held out her hand for me to shake. I felt every knuckle, every valley under the warm skin, my thumb on her wrist where the pulse flickered. “Shulamith Górecki,” she said. The rhythm of it: two fast trios of semi-quavers on her tongue.

“Are you related?” I asked. “To Henryk?”

It was a stupid thing to say but I wanted her to see me as well-versed, and then to view my knowledge as a commonality. I wanted her to register me and my importance to the Blooms, and to realise that she could love me too.

Her smile was tight and patient.

“Distantly,” she said, giving each syllable the same weight. “Through my husb– my late husband.”

She’d caught herself. Michael hadn’t noticed it, but I had. With his heavy arm around me—his Tashaleh, the daughter he’d never had—I suspected, and it wounded me even to consider it, that he was merely a replacement. He could have been anyone for Shulamith. She had chanced upon him and had run with it. Mutual friends had most probably eased them together over quiet, judicious suppers—a youthful widow and a charming old divorcé, a musician and a barrister, good company as individuals but even better as a unit.

My father came into the hallway from the kitchen, clad in the same shabby jeans and shirt he’d been wearing all day. A million minor fears crowded in on me, centred on how Shulamith would view the people my father had amassed around him. I didn’t want her first impression of me to arrive through the prism of Barry Jauns. I didn’t want her to be disappointed. Out of instinct I thought of Jacob. However far apart we were, my eyes still scanned the room for the sight of him, familiar as the words you know before you can read them. I longed to speak to him. Longed to. But too much time had passed; too many opportunities to cringe and punish myself for what we’d both said that night, before the taxi took him.

My father had a habit of ironically lionising people, of bringing them into his circle for gentle mockery disguised as acceptance. His friends usually came from groups he considered risible: liberals, homosexuals, lesser academics. In lionising them he gained a weapon against those who called him a bigot, and at the same time he gathered grist for his mill of contempt. His guests at dinner that night (only two of them, to my relief; there were often more) were a militant trade unionist named Frank “Red” Rooney and his wife Bríd. The last time I’d seen them had been at my father’s annual “non-Christmas bash”—a frantically irreverent gathering involving takeaway curry and ribald arguments—when Red had asked me to play revolutionary songs on the piano and became annoyed when I refused. It did not thrill me to see him again.

When he and Bríd were introduced to Michael and Shulie it put me in mind of a photo I’d seen of two oceans meeting: two bodies of water of distinct colours, jostling up against each other in a line of angry foam but never mixing. I knew instantly that the evening would be a disaster—either an awkward washout or verbal carnage.

Michael said his own name confidently and held his hand out to Red.

“Yes, we’ve met.” Red’s default expression was a sneer.

“Have we?”

“Red Rooney.”

Michael chuckled, confused. “That’s a curious moniker.”

“You said that last time and all.”

“Did I?”

The mirth drained from Michael’s eyes as it dawned on him that he would not find a partner here for the gentle banter that made up much of his social repertoire.

As we all filed into the back room Bríd asked me:

“Where’s your wee pal?”

“Jacob?” I went for my usual seat by the window but my father clicked his fingers rudely and pointed to the chair nearest the archway into the kitchen instead. I was on food duty. “He’s in Israel.”

Red, who was midway through sitting down, looked up.

“And what’s he doing there?”

“Visiting his mother,” Michael said, with businesslike cheer. “My ex-wife.”

“Oh, I see,” said Bríd, then gave a grim little fluting laugh. “He’s not a Zionist, is he?”

Across the table I saw Shulamith’s eyes widen. Michael cleared his throat.

Say yes and own it, I willed him. Say yes and prove you’re not a coward.

But Michael merely raised his eyebrows ruefully and said:

“I couldn’t possibly say.”

Ha, I thought. Just you wait.

My father came in with a wine bottle in each hand. There was me at the head of the table, Red and Bríd down one side, then Michael and Shulie down the other. Shulie was beside me and I could see a muscle tensing in her jaw.

“Say what?” my father asked.

Before anyone could answer, Shulie stood up.

“I’m going for a cigarette,” she said to Michael.

“Stay here,” my father crowed magnanimously. “There’s ashtrays everywhere.”

“I don’t like to smoke indoors.”

“I’ll take you,” I said, glad of the opportunity both to leave the unfolding drama and to spend time alone with Shulie.

She followed me into the kitchen, where the rows of miniature quiches in the oven had made the air reek of high-street bakeries.

I opened the back door and showed her into the yard.

“Thank you,” she said.

Almost as an afterthought I flicked the switch on the fairy lights that I’d zigzagged across the pergola for Jacob’s leaving party all those weeks ago. The battery pack was filled with rainwater, and they blinked diligently a couple of times before giving out.

Shulie took a slim silver case from her trouser pocket and slid out a cigarette. As she put it to her lips she offered the case to me. I shook my head.

“I’ll stay and keep you company though.”

“Thank you.” She smiled at me through the first reel of smoke. For a second the world closed in so there was just the crackle of the ember-end of her cigarette, the thick evening air, and the bristle of the concrete step beneath my bare feet.

“Don’t worry about them in there,” I said. “Red Rooney is a grade-one prat.”

She smiled again. “I don’t worry.”

“My father is as well.”

“Okay.”

“To be honest, the Blooms are more my family.”

“Yes I know. Jacob was your friend.”

It was a fault of her English but the past-tense wounded me.

“And David too,” I said, wondering exactly how much she knew of us.

“Yes, David.”

There was a secretive whimsy about her alongside a steely directness, both of which threw up a panoply of questions I wanted to ask her. But she spoke first.

“You play piano?”

I nodded.

“And you’ll be studying under Andrei Răducan?”

I nodded again, cheered by the fact of having been spoken about, clearly at length. “Do you know him?”

“Quite well. I taught with him at the RNCM for a while.”

“Aren’t you a violinist?”

“I was.” She took a long pull on her cigarette. “After my husband died I–” She blew the smoke out quickly. “I couldn’t, anymore.”

Later I would learn that this tragedy was shocking in its many layers. Her husband Pawl had taken his own life, just months after their infant son Yosef, whom they had tried for years to have, died of leukemia.

I wanted to say “I’m sorry,” but remembered how ineffectual it sounded to me after my mother died. Instead I said: “That’s understandable.”

The smile she gave me was one of tacit kinship.

Michael, please don’t disappoint her, I thought as we went back into the dining room where my father was holding court with a pile of papers in front of him. He was a fair way away from me, but I could see what it was: the draft of his latest book, Shadows of Doubt: The Distortion of History and Memory. My heart sank. Of all the people to present this to. Red and Bríd would lap it up, but Michael Bloom and his new fiancée? Sometimes my father’s thoughtlessness staggered me.

“You see, what I’m doing,” my father was saying. Bríd and Red were rapt. Michael was studying his thumbnail. When Shulie sat down she placed her hand on his knee. He covered it with his own and drew his thumb over her knuckle.

“Is questioning what we’ve been led to believe.” My father had a sort of repulsive charisma that commanded attention. Even if you didn’t want to listen to him, he gave you no choice. The more years that passed the surer I became that my mother had married him—and stayed with him—for this reason alone. Why else would the intelligent, industrious daughter of a Tunisian migrant taxi-driver have wasted her time and energy on a boor like him?

“Barry,” Michael said carefully. “I’m not sure I’m quite understanding the premise of this.”

My father cocked his head. “No? It’s actually quite simple.” He took up his wineglass and opened his mouth to elaborate. Michael didn’t let him.

“Well, you’ll excuse my saying so, but it sounds an awful lot like something I’m not even going to mention.”

Red Rooney shifted in his seat. “It sounds to me like something a lot of us have been thinking for a long time now.”

“Thank you,” my father bowed his head humbly, as if Red were an MC introducing him. “I think, Mike, what you’ll find is that my evidence points to a certain. . . challenging of the orthodoxy on what we presume to be the facts and figures about the. . . event in question.”

“The event in question?” Shulie asked. “You mean the Holocaust?”

Red made quotation marks in the air as Shulamith spoke. My bile rose.

“I’m merely questioning the reliability of certain eyewitness accounts,” my father said, with an equanimity so unsuited to the situation that it was almost comical.

“I see,” said Shulamith, in a monotone of earnestness. “So you would question, for example, what my father told to Yad Vashem about his wife and children being sent to the left and he being sent to the right, on the Judenrampe?”

In the silence that followed, my father tilted his head in a way that made me hate him with a fierceness that unfastened me.

“Individual testimonies aside,” he said. “It’s the figures I’m questioning.”

“Absolutely,” Red put in. Bríd’s eyes were darting from her husband to my father to Shulamith.

“The figures,” Shulie said with measured scorn. “I see. The figures. So if not six million, would five be okay? Four? Three million? Ten thousand? How many of us would make it bad enough for you?”

My father tilted his head the other way in an odd gesture of concession.

“Shulie, listen. I’ve met you just the once. I like you. Okay? This is nothing against you.”

“Your late wife was a Jew, wasn’t she?”

“Technically no,” my father said. “She had a Jewish father.”

She still has, I thought. He’s right there in Belleville, probably at the shul right now, praying Arvit.

“The way I see it,” Red piped up, “is that those figures were inflated to justify the creation of the State of Israel.”

“You would think that, wouldn’t you?” I said. At the surprise of my sudden involvement, all eyes turned to me. Already Red’s upper lip was rising in derision.

My father sat back in his chair and smirked at me. “Thus spake Natasha, fruit of my loins. Please, continue.”

“You’re denying the Holocaust,” I said, holding his gaze.

“Am I?” His smirk enraged me.

“And your friends are antisemites.”

“Are they?” My father brought his chair to land with a small thud. “Perhaps Mike should be the judge of that.”

We all turned to Michael.

“I. . .” he stammered, and again I pled with him silently to step up. “I. . . I’m speechless, Barry. And that’s rare for me.”

“In a good way?” From my father’s curious half-smile, it seemed he seriously believed it could be so.

“No,” Michael said. “Not in a good way at all. You’re questioning the–the very root of Jewish suffering.”

“Suffering!” Red huffed gleefully.

“Barry, out of everything that’s happened between us,” Michael went on—and I caught the gravitas of his words from the pallor of his face and the slight shaking of his hands that only I and Shulie noticed—“this is possibly the most unforgivable.”

To my surprise and relief, Michael stood.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, so quiet as to put across a thousand emotions. “I won’t come back here.”

“Mike, please. . .” My father pulled his chin to his chest. “Twenty years of friendship gone, just like that?”

“It wasn’t friendship. Barry. It was a companionship of convenience.”

“Was it?”

“Our wives were friends. You and me? Drinking buddies, if that.”

At this my father cast his eyes down, shrugging at his manuscript. By this point Shulie had stood up too. I rose to my feet.

“You as well, Tash?” my father said.

“Me as well.”

I followed Michael and Shulamith to the door.

“And if you must know,” Michael said, turning back to address my father. “My Jacob is a Zionist. He’s enlisting in the IDF.”

So he did know. He knew and he was proud.

Later, when I thought of this moment—Bríd and Red Rooney, their faces a pantomime of disgust, my father recoiling in reproach—I would hear those three famous notes from Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, rising, then falling so perfectly, a triptych of notes capturing a tension that could never be properly described.

Back at the Blooms, when Michael and Shulamith had gone to bed, I sat in the stuffy sunset gloom of Jacob’s bedroom and called him in Haifa.

“Tash?” he said before I’d even spoken.

“Hineini.” Here I am.

“Are you okay?”

“Just about. I’m sorry.”

“What for? What’s happened?”

“Everything, really. I’m done with my dad.”

“Finally. Why?”

“His new book. You don’t want to know.”

“I can imagine.”

“I met Shulie.”

“And?”

“She’s amazing. I’m so happy for your dad.”

“Good.”

“Are you fine with it?”

“Of course. My dad deserves it.”

“He does. And you? How are you?”

“Kol b’seder.” All okay.

“How’s training?”

“Hard.”

“How’s everything else?”

“Hard. Without you.”

“I’m still here.”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

“I’ll come to you,” I said. “I hate it here.”

“I’m leaving Haifa soon. We’ve been posted to Hebron.”

“I don’t care. I’ll come anyway. I’ll stay with your mum till you finish.”

“What about music college?”

“I’ll go back and forth. All those summers.”

“Tasha.”

“What?”

“Are you sure? Last time we spoke, you said the very thought of me disgusted you.”

“I was scared.”

“What of?”

“That you’d go away to fight and die and that I’d lose the only person who has ever understood me.”

Silence.

Down the phone I heard the nighttime sounds of Israel: the tenor of the air, the hubbub of his training base, the fact that he was there and that I missed him and loved him.

“Just come,” he said.

“Okay, I will.”