The Emigrants

fashioned interior put me curiously in mind of a faded wine-red velvet lining, the inside of a jewellery box or violin case. I kept my coat on and sat down on one of the plush armchairs in the corner bay window, watching darkness fall outside. The rain that had set in at dusk was pouring down into the gorges of the streets, lashed by the wind, and down below the black taxis and double-decker buses were moving across the shining tarmac, close behind or beside each other, like a herd of elephants. A constant roar rose from below to my place by the window, but there were also moments of complete silence from time to time. In one such interval (though it was utterly impossible) I thought I heard the orchestra tuning their instruments, amidst the usual scraping of chairs and clearing of throats, in the Free Trade Hall next door; and far off, far, far off in the distance, I also heard the little opera singer who used to perform at Liston's Music Hall in the Sixties, singing long extracts from Parsifal in German. Liston's Music Hall was in the city centre, not far from Piccadilly Gardens, above a so-called Wine Lodge where the prostitutes would take a rest and where they had Australian sherry on tap, in big barrels. Anyone who felt the urge could get up on the stage at that music hall and, with the swathes of smoke drifting, perform the piece of his choice to a very mixed and often heavily intoxicated audience, accompanied on the Wurlitzer by a lady who invariably wore pink tulle. As a rule the choice fell upon folk ballads and the sentimental hits that were currently in vogue. The old home town looks the same as I step down from the train, began the favourite of the winter season of 1966 to 1967. And there to greet me are my Mama and Papa. Twice a week, at a late hour when the heaving mass of people and voices verged on the infernal, the heroic tenor known as Siegfried, who cannot have been more than one metre fifty tall, would take the stage. He was in his late forties, wore a herringbone coat that reached almost to the floor and on his head a Homburg tilted back. He would sing O weh, des Höchsten Schmerzenstag or Wie dünkt mich doch die Aue heut so schön or some other impressive arioso, not hesitating to act out stage directions such as "Parsifal is on the point of fainting" with the required theatricality. And now, sitting in the Midland's turret room above the abyss on the fifth floor, I heard him again for the first time since those days. The sound came from so far away that it was as if he were walking about behind the wing flats of an infinitely deep stage. On those flats, which in truth did not exist, I saw, one by one, pictures from an exhibition that I had seen in Frankfurt the year before. They were colour photographs, tinted with a greenish-blue or reddish-brown, of the Litzmannstadt ghetto that was established in 1940 in the Polish industrial centre of Lodz, once known as polski