Prelude To A Certain Midnight

for repairs. May I pay you now? And I’m sorry these aren’t nicer flowers, Mrs Sabbatani…’

Sam Sabbatani’s widow wept. ‘You’re the third what comes to pay a bill like this,’ she said, looking at the flowers; ‘people are good.’

‘You are good to have such faith in people,’ said Tobit Osbert, a tall, quiet man with a dreamy face and a gentle voice. “You are good, Mrs Sabbatani.’

‘God is good,’ said Mrs Sabbatani. ‘The kettle’s boiling. A cup of tea?’

‘You’re too kind,’ said Tobit Osbert, sighing.

Then Mrs Sabbatani remembered her husband’s sigh before he went away with the strangers. She had been sitting in the shop-parlour. As the door-bell tinkled, Sam leapt up and went out, leaving a cup of tea which he had not yet touched. After a minute or two, something in the tone of a stranger’s voice made her sit up and listen. Then:

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sam Sabbatani.

‘It may be a mistake, but you must come and identify —’ said a stiff-backed man, in a clipped monotone. ‘Pull yourself together.’

Sabbatani said: ‘_Why_ should anybody? How could anybody? It’s a mistake. No offence — anybody can make a mistake. … I don’t believe it.’

She saw her husband turn towards someone she knew — a flat-footed old police constable who tramped a local beat. The policeman looked wretched, and nodded. Then Sam sighed: he seemed to suck into his lungs all the air in the shop, leaving everyone else gasping for breath. That was a terrible sigh.

‘Sam!’ cried Mrs Sabbatani.

‘Wait,’ said her husband.

‘Keep calm, ma’am — back in a minute or two,’ said the man with the stiff back. His voice was as gentle as he could make it. His hard mouth was chopping off chunks of reluctant sweetness, like a toffee-cutter.

‘Wait, Gertie, for God’s sake,’ said Sam.

Half an hour later they returned in a taxi.

‘Where is she?’ asked Mrs Sabbatani.

Sam Sabbatani caught the point of his right-hand lapel in a clenched fist and tore his coat. Then he burst into tears.

The man with the stiff back said: Mr Sabbatani, I sympathize. But you’ve got to pull yourself together. We’ve got to have a talk, now. Now. D’you hear? Now. Hold yourself in, Sabbatani. Sit down. Get some strong sweet tea, George…’

Later, Mrs Sabbatani asked: ‘But what for? Why? Why should anybody do it to her? A child! Sonia! Why? What for?’

Sam Sabbatani looked at his wife, and then at the detective, who said: ‘Just for nothing, ma’am. For nothing at all, Mrs Sabbatani. A madman. Could happen to you or me.’

‘If I could find who it was!’ cried Sam Sabbatani.

‘All right, Mr Sabbatani: that’s what we’re here for - ..’

‘Sammele, Sammele!’ said Mrs Sabbatani, weeping. ‘Why should it be?’

Her husband could not speak of the abomination; yet it had to come out. The evening papers were already printing the story.

Sonia Sabbatani, who would have been eleven years old next birthday, had been gagged and bound, raped and strangled, and thrown into the cellar of an empty house. She had told one of her classmates that a friend of her Daddy was going to meet her and tell her a great secret.

But she named nobody, and Sabbatani had a thousand friends.

7

Six months later Sam Sabbatani went to bed with a stomach ulcer. In normal circumstances he would have laughed it off. After the operation he contracted pneumonia: there is more than one way of dying of a broken heart. A man who really does not want to go on living will find deep water or a gas oven in which to drown or suffocate; inside himself, if need be. ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ cried Sam Sabbatani, in his last delirium. ‘Where is he, the murderer? Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! ..’ Then he thought that he was back in Bessarabia in the days of the pogroms. ‘Hide the children!’ he shouted, in a voice that echoed through the long cold corridors of the hospital. ‘Hide the children! In the cellars! The Cossacks are coming! They cut Reb Shmuel’s heart out — they cut the Rebbitzin’s breasts off — they tore little Esther Krejmer to pieces! Hide the children! Where are the men? Quick! Out! Give me the cutting-shears! Dovidel — take the fur-knife! Mottke, take an iron bar! Hold them back a minute, the murderers, while the women hide the children! Where are the men? . … Men! - Men! Women, women! — hide the children! the murderers are coming! …’

But at last he lay back rattling in his throat under the oxygen apparatus. He was buried in the Jewish Cemetery at North Ham, where the remains of Sonia had been lowered into the ground a few months before. There is a little place reserved for Mrs Sabbatani next to Sam’s grave, over which stands a tall. ornate gravestone of pale marble.

This stone cost more than she could afford: members of her family remonstrated with her. ‘It’s for all three of us,’ said Mrs Sabbatani.

But her time has not come yet. She must wait and live, and in order to live she must carry on the business. And what is the business worth? There is nothing worth honest buying, and next to nothing fit to sell. Clothes are like blood. Nobody sells them, and you need coupons to buy them. It is necessary to play strange games — leer here, nudge there, fiddle on the Black Market. Sam (she thinks) would have seen them all in hell first.

Meanwhile, Mrs Amy Dory, whom everyone calls ‘Catchy’, cannot pay her rent. And if Catchy would pay her rent, what good would it do? Ten shillings a week can make no difference now: times have changed: nothing will