The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters
around the bus.
The elderly man was not to be put off: he was a trouper for the cause of discursive memoir. ‘I think my favourite – I mean, lakes are always lovely, but lakes are lakes, I always say – my favourite was the Chinese Room. Did you see that? That flock wallpaper, it was flock, wasn’t it, and that pagoda in the glass cage …?’
‘Any other buses?’ interjected Simon bluntly.
‘Well, after lunch, we went to Cromer, and had the most delicious brown crab …’
‘The X5 again. Unless you went on a Sunday?’
‘No, let’s see, Tuesday, that’s it, because then at Wells-Next-the-Sea, the sunlight on the water was sparkling in just …’
‘Uggh, ah …’ Simon pulled out a dog-eared timetable from his bag and searched the pages. ‘Let’s see, aah … the 73.’ Spotting that Nodding Man still had a bit of life in him, Simon brought in the heavy artillery, lifted out a second book, which seemed to be compressed from the scrag ends of newspaper, ran his fingers down the index and began darting back and forth between two sections at once. ‘But you could have taken the 645 and changed at … let’s see, aaah … or, uuugh, aaaghhh, if you’d wanted to go on the steam railway …
(‘Alex! What are you saying? Number 73? Number 645? A steam train? I am sure you have invented these references also. I could not have said them. Do you want me to be seen as an ignoramus on public transport?’)
‘… which calls at hnnnn … King’s Lynn, and …’
It began to rain. First, a barely visible drizzle, picked out only against certain backgrounds – the black reflections in the windows of the Cambridge Hotel; a middle-distance blurriness when the bus stopped at the crossroads by the Catholic church, and we had a view up to the park. But it might have been nothing more than stripes of movement left in my eyes by the Clint Eastwood action smack-’em-blast-’em-ride-off-into-them-thar-cactus-lands flick I’d watched last night. Next, streaks of water on the window. Finally, drops pounding the metal sill by Simon’s elbow in buttercup explosions.
‘Getting back to your grandfather, Aslan …’
The driver slammed the brakes and swerved to avoid a line of Japanese girls who’d abruptly pedalled across the road in front. The bus was filled with sudden pushes and violent attempts to avoid falling over. I crashed forward down the aisle and fell sideways onto the six-year-old nympho.
‘Oi, watch where you’re fucking going,’ growled Bruiser Mum.
Simon, who spends much of his time smiling, smiled wider. He burrowed into his bag and, after much rustling and what looked like punches delivered at the fabric from the inside, re-emerged holding a carton of passionfruit juice, which he upended over his mouth.
At the end of the nineteenth century there were 50,000 Jews – a quarter of the city’s population – living peaceably alongside Arabs in Baghdad. Today, according to the latest web report, there are four – four in the entire city. The pro-Hitler Iraqi government expelled and murdered them in pogroms before and during the Second World War. In the late 1940s underground movements smuggled them to safety at the rate of 1,000 a month. In 1951, Israel airlifted 60,000 more from the whole of Iraq and, with the perversity of the self-justified, bombed the rest to try to persuade them to follow. There are today more ostriches in Baghdad than there are Jews.
On one edge of the genealogical poster I’d excavated in the basement is a dedicatory note about Simon’s family:
All probabilities and evidence go to suggest that this community is descended from the ancient Jewish communities settled in Mesopotamia since the days of the Babylonian Captivity, 2,600 years ago … The purpose, in compiling the genealogical table, is to preserve, in some way, a record of a section of this community
The very same day that Israel finally declared independence as a refuge for the most persecuted race on earth, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq launched a combined attack, which the Secretary of the Arab League declared on Cairo radio was ‘a war of extermination, and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’.
‘Murder the Jews! Murder them all!’ shrieked the leading Islamic scholar of Jerusalem.
Sixty years later, a man in London offered a million pounds to any breeding Iraqi Jewish couple who would go out to Baghdad to repopulate the city. ‘I have a friend who’s interested,’ I enthused to Simon. ‘What do you think? Her name’s Samantha.’
‘I dislike the name Samantha, so anyone with that name would be unlikely to attract me. Maybe it’s because it makes me think of Samantha Fox, the pornography star … I may say, I do have a relation with a Samantha. She deals with my tax affairs.’
Simon settled into a dead-eyed stare, gave himself a hug with his elbows and went back to looking out of the window: a quiet, euphoric gesture. Until we were on the train, he could devote his entire attention to ignoring me.
Higher up Simon’s genealogical poster, closer to the rustle of the Old Testament, the children are nameless, lives are replaced by question marks, but deaths are biblical: a sister to Habebah, ‘drowned in the Euphrates’; Sassoon Aslan, ‘buried in Basra’; Minahem Aslan, ‘childless, in Jerusalem’. Before that, Simon’s family disappears off the top of the page into the Mesopotamian sand dunes.
At the train station, Simon jolted off the bus to the fast ticket machine in the concourse and pressed screen after screen of glowing virtual buttons. Once he’d finally amassed all our possible discounts, off-peak fares, and unexpected mid-journey changes to thwart the local train operators’ pricing structures, he stared for a minute at the screen, which was demanding to know how many passengers apart from himself were taking the trip.
‘0’ pressed Simon, and looked up at me without crossness or dismissal.
Together, Aslan and Kitty Manasseh had five children, spaced every two years: Maurice, whose wife sneaked off one day when he was out and had herself sterilised; Nina, an old maid; Lilian, who ended up ‘in Blanchard’s antique shop’ …
(‘Do you mean she was for sale, Simon?’ ‘No! Of course not, he, he he.’)
… in Winchester, childless; Helene, Simon’s mother (Gaia among women in that barren setting, because she had three boys); and Violet, a war widow, who added another boy. This man, Simon’s first cousin, goes by the name of David Battleaxe.
‘You mean he was christened that?’ I perked up.
‘Not christened, although we do celebrate Christmas. He’s Jewish. We’re all Jewish,’ replied Simon. We were on the train now, hurrying down the aisle.
‘David Battleaxe …?’
‘After a racehorse.’
‘A racehorse?’ I puffed.
‘In Calcutta.’
‘In Calcutta?’
‘One of my grandfather’s,’ said Simon, then lunged left and landed with a thump in a window seat, his bag arriving on his lap – crucccnchch – a split-second after.
‘So you do know something about your grandfather,’ I observed, squeezing past two beer cans into the rear-facing seat opposite, next to the toilet. ‘He kept racehorses and named his grandson after a stallion. Yet when I asked you what your grandfather did just now, you said you didn’t know.’
‘You asked me what he traded, and I said I didn’t remember.’
The train pulled away, clacked across various points until it found the London tracks, and mumbled past the Cityboy apartments with tin-can Juliet balconies.
‘I don’t think he did trade horses,’ resumed Simon, as we picked up speed towards the Gog Magog hills. ‘Therefore I did not feel that it was relevant to provide that as an answer.’
A