Who's Sorry Now? Read Online Free Page B

well-being, wasn’t of the best. Why did Kreitman hate his father so intensely on account of those whisky decanters? Because they bottled up curiosity. Because they denied the random mess of life. His father could have come home from the markets with funny stories, anecdotes of the pedlar’s life, traveller’s tales. Guess what happened to me today … ? Who do you think I ran into … ? Listen, you’ll enjoy this … But he didn’t see himself as a pedlar and therefore wasn’t able to avail himself of any of the pedlar’s consolations. The fact that it was small leather he was peddling only made it worse. You can’t distance yourself from the public when you’re flogging them small leather. Purses and wallets infect mankind with a distraction close to madness. But he could have made a virtue of that, couldn’t he? Could have come home expert in the rich insanity of his trade – ‘You should see them at my stall, like perverts loosed into a playground. Fingering, poking, probing. Sniffing the leather. Rubbing the suede against their cheeks. You’re the clever dick, Marvin, you explain to me why every woman over fifty, whether she intends to buy a new purse or not, feels she has to show you the contents of her old one.’ Marvin Kreitman, growing into a speculative boy, would have enjoyed putting his mind to that. ‘Could it be love they crave, Dad? Could purse-buying be like exhibitionism, a cry of sexual loneliness?’ Bad luck, in that case, if you happened on KreitmanSenior. Nothing doing there. He rebuffed all cries for help and told the punters not to finger his goods if they weren’t buying. Swore at them, too, if they persisted or grew tetchy or had the effrontery to haggle. Take it or fucking leave it. Sambo! Yes, Sambo as well, under his poisoned breath. Anybody call Bruno Kreitman a kike and he’d have had the Haganah in and instigated another Nuremberg. But Sambo awakened no consciousness of equivalence in him. He would still be swearing when he got home, reliving the mortifications of his day: the bleeders – curses aimed at his own chest, blows to his own heart – the bleeders! Turning Kreitman’s soul to ash. It amazed the boy that with manners as gruff as his, his father ever managed to sell anything. But there’s the mystery of the purse. In the end it will sell itself.
    So if he didn’t see himself as a pedlar, what did Kreitman’s father see himself as? Simple – a man with a round stomach and a bald head who wore silver-grey waistcoats and black mourning ties and drank whisky from cut-glass decanters. A sort of
maître d
’ in his own house. Everything else took from his dignity. Kreitman went buying with his father sometimes, accompanying him in silence from warehouse to warehouse in Stepney and Stamford Hill, where it upset him to see how cheerfully other purse sellers embraced the ups and downs of purse-selling, and how much they reciprocated his father’s icy loathing of them. There was always laughter in the warehouses, exaggerated comedy even when expected lines had not arrived, or returns were being dealt with, or someone was accusing someone else of pinching from his trolley. Everybody, from the smallest tuppenny-ha’penny stallholder in Brixton to the owner of the biggest bag arcade in Hammersmith, everybody including the person in the mobster suit and expensive wig whose warehouse they were in, rejoiced in the rubbish around which their lives revolved. ‘Look at this! Henry, look at what you’re asking me to buy. The clasp doesn’t fasten. The lining’s hanging out. The zip’s the wrong colour. And the dye’s coming off in my hand.’ ‘It’s fashion. It’s whatthe kids want.’ ‘Henry, you’ve been stocking this same bag since the Coronation. And it wasn’t in fashion then.’ ‘Morris, you know what your trouble is?