Obiter Dicta

Wednesday, July 4^th, 2012.

No blog for a couple of weeks so I’m posting an extra one this week. It’s my short story, ‘Gogl Mogl’. I wrote this after a Twitter mate, @Zenjew, (follow him, I recommend it) tweeted about gogl mogl being an old Jewish hangover cure. At the time, I was suffering from a particularly virulent old Jewish hangover. He also suggested that we each write a short story using ‘Gogl Mogl’ as the title. This is mine. My Gogl Mogl Blogl, in fact. Enjoy, already.

GOGL MOGL

Sam the tailor lived in the attic room when I was a child.

            In the 1950s, we lived in an old building in the main street of a small town in central Scotland. My parents had originally lived in a room and kitchen on the ground floor. But there was a bakery right next door to them. As a result, my parents’ place was infested with beetles: those big, black, shiny beetles that Scots refer to as ‘clockers’. My father told me that, any time they returned from being out in the evening, Mother would wait by the bus-stop a pace or two down the hill from the front door, until Father had opened up and switched the light on. When he did, he said, the floor looked like it had a glittering black rug that exploded immediately in every direction, as the insects scuttled to hiding places in the skirting and behind the furniture. Mother said that, in those early days of their marriage, she slept only poorly at night. She couldn’t stand the thought of those creepy crawlies being at large in the house. But at least she didn’t have to see them. When I asked her how they got there, she said they were only to be expected. Because of the bakery. The flour and the water and the spices, she said.

            When my parents found out that I was on the way, they put a request in to the council for a move to a larger house. The week after I was born, they flitted to an apartment on the middle floor. It was one room larger. In addition to a living room, kitchenette and bedroom, it had a box-room that could be used as an infant’s bedroom. They still had to use the outside lavatory. But now they had to trip downstairs to use it.

            The attic room, two flights up the brown walled stairs from our place, was a long room with two long windows that gave on to the street. From these windows, at that level, there was an uninterrupted view of  two faces of the town clock. The townspeople called it ‘the town clock’, but it was actually the clock of the English church. Four faces, one on each side of the square Gothic tower. To my childish mind, with its two visible clockfaces like startled eyes, and its crowning pinnacles like long erect ears, it had the look of a monstrous owl gazing over the rooftops. Birds sometimes flew around it in slow loops. Spread out below, were the roofs and chimneys of the town, and the bustle of the street.

            The planked ceiling  was low and long. In one corner, were a couple of old armchairs with the stuffing hanging out, and a bed screened from view most of the time. There was a little sink and a stove. The majority of the room was given over to trestle tables strewn with bolts of cloth, cuttings and remnants, patterns, needles, pins, thimbles, clamps, scissors, chalk and other tailoring paraphernalia. There was a large window in the back wall that gave a steepling view of the yard outside, with the lavatories and drying poles all weirdly fore-shortened from that height; at least, to a child’s view.

            Sam was a middle-aged man, single. He lived and worked up in the attic. I never saw him outside of it. I remember him as wearing a striped shirt with no collar, and a blue waistcoat that he never fastened. He had a tape measure around his neck. Small and hunch-backed, he used to sit, cross-legged, on a table by the long windows, sewing.  He wore eye-glasses with thick lenses and held his sewing up close to his eyes. His eyes were big and white and moved as slowly as slugs behind his bleary specs.

            Some of the people on the stair said he was a pole, and others said he was a Jew. I did not understand how a man could be a pole. Later, my father explained that he was a Jew from Poland. I didn’t know what a Jew was. Sometimes, if something nice happened to you, people might call you ‘a lucky Jew’. That was the only other time I heard the word. My father explained that a Jew was a man who went to a different church from us. Not long ago, he said, some bad people did terrible things to Jews. During the War. I heard a lot about the War when I was a child. My father told me that Sam had lost all of his family during the War. Bad people put them in a special kind of camp and they died. Sam had flown planes with the RAF in the War. Now he was a tailor in the attic room at the top of our stairs.

            Some of the neighbours did not like Sam. They did not seem to care that his family had died in a special camp. They did not like him because he was not like everybody else. I remember the names of some of the other people on the stair. McArthur. Towers. North. Little Mr. McArthur worked in Menzies’s steel foundry. He did not like Catholics, either. My father told my mother, once, that Mr. McArthur was an orange man. I thought that sounded wonderful and looked closely at Mr. McArthur the next time he came up the stairs. But I was very disappointed. He looked the same colour as everybody else.

            Mrs. Towers was a huge woman in a wraparound pinny. Her husband was a miner. She used to say he came home from his work ‘like a darky’. She also said the chimney sweep looked like a darky. I didn’t know what a darky was, either. Any more than I knew what a Jew, or an orange man, was.

            I was not very old when I first found my way up the stairs to the attic room. Three and a half, four, maybe. The stairs were greenish stone and each one had a diced black and white pattern on the front edge. The walls were painted brown. The stairs turned several times before they reached the attic, but I managed to make my way up there one day. I must have escaped from our place when Mother had her back turned. I remember pushing the door open into the attic room and seeing Sam’s squatting figure on the table, humped over his sewing. Then Mother came up and said, ‘Oh, here you are. I’m sorry if he’s been bothering you, Sam.’ Sam looked at her and said I had been no bother. I don’t even think that he had been aware of me.

            I used to scramble up the stairs to the attic landing regularly after that. I was never sure whether Sam liked me being there. Sometimes he was nice to me; sometimes he scared me. I don’t know if it was deliberate. If I tentatively pushed the big door and it swung open silently, Sam might ignore me completely. Or he might squint over the top of his spectacles and say, ‘Ah, is His Nibs.’ His voice sounded different from everybody else’s. I’d never heard a foreign accent before.

            Then, most times, he’d go back to his sewing whilst I tottered around the room and looked at the piles of things on the tables. He had a little table by the armchairs before the fireplace. On it were two red candles in glass sticks and a little chessboard. That fascinated me. I did not know what it was at the time, but I liked the checkered pattern and the carved chessmen, particularly the black ones. The black ones were so black they shone. There was a tailor’s dummy that sometimes was draped with garments he was working on. Once in a while, he would be fussing around that, the tape measure round his neck, his mouth bristling with pins. The first time I saw him with pins in his mouth, I ran away. I thought he had turned into a fiend.

            Actually, now that I think about it, I was frightened much of the time I was in Sam’s room. I’d watch him squatting on his table by the window, like an idol on a plinth, forcing a needle through thick cloth. One day, I picked up a needle that was lying on the table, a big thing, a bodkin perhaps, with a length of thread through the eye.

            “Put down!” he said sharply. Then went on a little more kindly, when I jumped at his tone and my chin started to tremble, “Not to play with needles. A needles go through your skin. It is get into your veins and follow your blodstream; and is go right into your heart. You is no want a needles in your heart. Deadly is a needles.”

            I dropped the needle smartly and  ran home. For nights after that, I had bad dreams where a vaguely looming person on the periphery of my vision was sewing. As if I was seated right beside them. The sweeps of the needle, drawing white thread after it, first towards my face and then away from it, had me snivelling in my sleep and then howling at the darkness when I awoke, my heart throbbing.

            One time, after I’d been visiting the attic for many months, Sam was perched up on his table with a large pair of tailor’s shears in his hand, slicing them through some grey cloth. I stood silently by the door and watched him at work. I had started sucking my thumb by then. He eyed me and kept cutting.

            “Not to suck your thumb,” he said. Then, when I did not reply or stop sucking my thumb, he said, “You is break your teeth this way. Is to have goofy teeth, you want?”

            When I still did not react, not understanding what I was doing wrong, he loped to the floor, and scuttled like a humphy-backit spider over the lino, making sharp snapping noises with the shears. I backed off.

            He said, “If you is suck your thumb again - snip! Snip! Cut the thumbs off. You is like to have hand is like flipper?”

             I fled from the room with my heart in my mouth. But I was back again the following day, drawn to the shrine against my will. And there he was, in the old blue waistcoat, measuring-tape around his neck, his mouth full of bristling pins.

            “Hey!” he said, taking the pins out. “Is His Nibs is back. You no sucks your thumb today? Hah? I no cut off thumb. Here. I no like I frighten you. Here. Is good. Eat.”

            And he gave me the remainder of what he had been eating. Half a sandwich of marg and brown sauce. No sandwich has tasted like it since.

Another time, he was seated in one of the armchairs when I went in. He looked round and smiled. He was eating something yellow from a little dish. There was a teapot on the table, and a chipped chanty mug full of black, steaming tea. He put down his little dish and picked up another just like it from the table.

            “Here,” he said again. “Eat. I made enough is for you too. Eat. You like.”

            When I stood and looked at him, he spooned some of the liquid out and supped it. He smacked his lips and smiled a brown-toothed smile. “Mmmm!” he said appreciatively.

            Then he spooned out some more and put the spoon between my lips. It tasted sweet and chocolatey, not all what I had expected. But the sugary sweetness was all it required. I took the spoon and the little dish from his hand. Greedily, I spooned the food into my mouth.

            “You like? Is gogl-mogl.”

            I liked all right. I finished the little dish in a few seconds. Sam beamed at me, displaying those ruined castles again.

            “Hey! We is friends again? Is good. I make you gogl-mogl, you be good boy and is no suck your thumb.”

            He must have told my mother. One evening, at tea, she said to me, “What has Sam upstairs been giving you?”

            I looked at her.

            “Something nice to eat? Something sweet?”

            “Goggy mog,” I said.

“Goggy what?” said my father, looking up from the pink paper on his knee. Most days the newspaper he got was white with black print. But sometimes he brought home a pink paper. I preferred that. I liked the colour better.

            “Some pudding thing old Sam makes,” answered my mother. “He said the bairn lapped it up.”

            “He shouldn’t be going up and annoying Sam. The man’s got work to do.”

            “I don’t think he’s up there that long. Just looks in. The old fellow likes him.”

            “He could hurt himself up there. It’s full of sharp things.”

            “Ach, Sam’ll look after him.”

            “He shouldn’t be taking food from him either. They have different foods, don’t they?”

            “Who? Tailors?” said my mother.

            “Tailors!” my father scoffed. “Jews. Jews have a different diet. They have … what do you call them? …dietary laws, don’t they? Kosher and all that kind of thing. It might not be good for his stomach.”

            “This is egg yolks, sugar and chocolate,” my mother said. “Sam told me. He makes it for himself. A kind of pudding. And he gave the bairn some.”

            “I don’t like him going up there,” my father mumped.

            “The man’s got nobody left in the world,” my mother said. “Have a bit of compassion.”

            My father said no more. He turned his attention to the paper again.

I loved my father and mother. But our house was dull, compared to Sam’s place. From our windows, you could not see the owl of the church tower. All you could see were the buildings on the opposite side of the street. There was Doig’s. Antiques and Curios. I liked the way the name ‘Doig’ was almost like ‘dog’. But the shop window was drab and uninteresting. The church was behind Doig’s. Farther up the slope of the hill was the Post Office and a bus stop. You couldn’t see any roofs or chimneys. The living room was all right. But there were no dummies, bolts of cloth, pins or shears.

            Sometimes, in the evenings, when the sun had gone down and blue shadow crept up the street, when dark birds winged across the limpid wash of the sky behind the church’s outline, we would hear violin music drifting down the staircase from the attic room.

            “Sam got his fiddle out again,” my father would remark.

            I never heard music with that degree of emotion in it. Such feeling. Such … longing. It was as if the violin were weeping. He never played for long, fifteen minutes maybe, at a time. But it was rich and beguiling while it lasted. And it all added to the wonder that was Sam the tailor.

            I went  to see him regularly. I got gogl-mogl several times. I noticed one day that he was wearing a small, dark cap on his head. It was hard for me to see it, because I was so small, and because his hair was uncombed and curled in wisps about it. But it was there. It was the first time I had seen it. I noticed it many times after that.

            I asked him a question one day. “Fere you figgo?”

“Is what?”

“You figgo. Fere is it?”

“Is my fiddle?”

            He produced the violin from somewhere. It was of reddish brown wood and a peculiar shape. Like everything else about Sam, it intrigued me. He plucked a couple of strings and they plinked a silly, tinny sound, nothing like the sound I’d heard from downstairs. He held it out to me and smiled.

            “His Nibs play.”

            I copied him and plucked a string. Plink. Plink, plink. He laughed.  “Oy, oy, oy. His Nibs is Jascha Heifetz!” I looked at him while he laughed. “Is I play you something, huh? Sit. Sit. His Nibs is be my audience.”

            I sat on the chair and he bounced his bow on the strings and played a jaunty melody. It was happy and carefree, and he played it delightfully. I must have smiled at it. He told me it was called Cheerybum. Then he played a slower piece, a sad piece. I was only a child but I knew it was dripping with sadness. He stopped abruptly in the middle of playing. He sniffed and looked out of the window a long time.

            Then he said, under his breath, “Kinder Yoren.” (I didn’t know what that meant.) “Dagger to the heart.”  I didn’t know what that meant either. I thought the tune was beautiful, but sad. I preferred Cheerybum.

Later, he tried to explain the game of chess to me. He told me the names of the chessmen and some of the moves that they could make. Some could only advance one square at a time. Some could only move diagonally; others only vertically or horizontally. He told me it was the best game ever invented. The game of life, he said. I thought it would have been better if the chess pieces had not been so restricted in their moves. If they could all move as they wished, it would be a better game. I liked the knights. They looked like little horses’ heads.

            Once, he sat me up at the table and let me watch him prepare gogl-mogl. He separated the yolks of three eggs, whisked them till they were light and frothy, then added sugar and cocoa, and a handful of currants. He gave me some in a dish. Before he ate his own, he took a small flat bottle from his waistcoat and poured a little amber liquid into it. I watched him do this, as I watched him do everything, with saucer eyes. He smiled his bad tooth smile.

            “Is no is for you. Is for grown man when he is with a sore head. Is good for this. You is remember this when you is grow up.” And he twirled the top back on his  bottle and replaced it in his waistcoat.

            I did remember it, many years later when I had a brooding hangover and a head you could have used to split sticks. I whisked up a gogl-mogl and poured in a snifter of whisky. My wife looked at the result and grued, then left me to it. It worked. A hair of the dog, of course. And the sweet egg taste carried me back to my childhood. And I remembered…

 

He died. I stood in the yard and looked at his window away in the sky, dreading to see his old, white face bumping blindly against the glass. They cleared the room and bolted the door.

            Summers later, the year my sister was born, just before we moved away, the door  to the attic room hung open.  Inside, there was only torn linoleum, dust on the panes and, on the window-sill, tightly rolled up, an old tape measure. And, on top of it, a needle that, somehow, got into my heart after all.