He banked a few hundred dollars a month at the 96th Street branch of the East River Savings Bank. And like any other customer there were small withdrawals from time to time. But unlike most other customers Emil Goldfus had similar accounts at banks all over the city. And at all of them, Emil Goldfus, retired photographer, was a respected client.
When he had first come to New York in 1950 he had spent his days studying the city. Riding the bus and subway routes, getting himself established locally with the neighbourhood shopkeepers, eating simple meals in the local cafeterias. He knew how long the express train took to get from his nearest station to Times Square and how to change lines for the Bronx or connect with Lexington Avenue. He never owned a car and seldom took taxis. There were two cinemas that he visited regularly. One he particularly favoured. Many people would have seen it as a mildly idyllic existence. Sitting on the park benches reading a paper, strolling along unfrequented streets, standing and staring sometimes at derelict buildings and weed-ridden plots of waste-land. But there was no observer of the quiet unobtrusive oldish man.
There were two or three people who lived on East 71st Street who knew him. But they knew him as Milton, an Englishman.
Later in 1953 Goldfus moved to Brooklyn and rented studio space in a drab seven-storey building that flattered itself by having the name of the Ovington Building. The Ovington Building was on the outskirts of Brooklyn Heights and, in addition to the fifth-floor studio, Goldfus also took a room in a boarding house on Hicks Street.
It was a more expansive time in his life. He painted and sketched and slowly got to know a number of the artists who worked in the building. He was quite liked, the old-world charm and wry humour made him pleasant company. He made friends with several of the struggling artists who occupied the studios.
The couple he knew on East 71st Street were Mona and Morris Cohen, and he had been in touch with them from his first days in New York.
There were other people whom he met regularly on his strolls in the parks, or at the cinema. Some knew him as Emil Goldfus, others as Martin Collins or Milton. Some years earlier there were people who knew him as Andrew Kayotis.
He became an accepted and well-liked neighbour to several of the artists who shared the rooms in the building. His paintings were amateurish but he accepted criticism with good grace and seemed eager and determined to improve his painting skills. One of his neighbours even gave up a little of his time to teaching Emil Goldfus to play classical guitar. He joined in their late-night discussions and they came to the conclusion that Emil was no intellectual and marked him down as an elderly Socialist whose vaguely liberal views belonged more to the pre-war thirties than the late fifties.
Part Two
3
Despite its name, the Canadian township of Cobalt was better known for its silver mining, and in 1920 its population of just over a thousand was what you could expect in a boom town. Wildcat prospectors, surveyors, a handful of officials from Toronto and Ottawa, and the suppliers of goods and services that batten on such communities. Three hundred and thirty miles by rail from Toronto it was one of the richest silver deposits in the world.
Jack Emmanuel Lonsdale was a half-breed who found his life in Cobalt rewarding and congenial, and he reckoned he had made a good move when he married the immigrant Finnish girl. Their son Gordon was born four years later in 1924. But instead of cementing the marriage it marked the beginning of the end. Only a special kind of woman thrives in boom towns and even they see it as a place and a time to make your pile and then get out. The girl from Karelia saw no future for a family in the rough and tumble of Cobalt, and the couple slowly drifted apart.
The half-breed couldn’t understand why the woman hated what to him seemed a veritable paradise of money, booze, and girls on the make. It was not so much a difference of opinions as a total inability to comprehend the woman’s objections. When she eventually left, taking the boy with her, there was no rancour from the man. She wanted to go back to Karelia, to Finland, where she was born.
He gave her cash for the journey and enough for a few months’ keep. He was neither angry nor hurt. It was just beyond his understanding. He never heard again from his wife or son and when, in 1940, the Soviet Union invaded Finland through Karelia he neither heard nor knew of the world’s praise for the gallant Finns who fought back against overwhelming odds for over a month. So he never knew that his son was sixteen years old when he was killed or that his wife had died in a Soviet slave-labour camp a few years later. He had long forgotten them both and had no idea where Finland was. He had only the vaguest idea where Toronto was.
In the late spring of 1940 as the snows were beginning to melt in the forests of Karelia the special document unit of the NKVD had the unpleasant but routine job of checking the corpses that had been buried in the snow, and the log cabins, the homes that had been pounded by
