Rivka and Rebekkah arrived in time for the Rabbi’s sermon, the one element of the service in English, which, with its review of the Biblical grounds for Greater Israel, jolted her out of her timeless concerns and back to the contemporary world. Then, after the final blessing, the curtain was opened and the women headed for the kitchen to prepare the kiddush. To her surprise, Susannah found that, far from resenting her subservient status, she was glad to be given a clearly defined role. She set out the selection of salads and snacks, chicken liver, pickled herring and the aromatic cholent, a bean and vegetable dish that had been slowly simmering overnight. For all that she admired the meal, she was far too nervous to eat, and she was relieved when Zvi asked if she were ready to make a move. Such a public request left no room for confusion, and her pleasure was doubled when, crossing the road, they passed a stream of people walking home from a nearby synagogue whose friendly nods acknowledged them as a couple. They entered the café, settling in a Formica booth with a leatherette banquette, which, in a more fashionable part of town, would have been hailed as retro. Zvi ordered an expresso and she a cappuccino.
‘So did you enjoy our Shabbat meal last night?’
‘Tremendously. Although enjoy isn’t a strong enough word. I was moved and excited and charmed. Oh yes, I enjoyed it.’
‘I’m very glad.’
‘Everyone made me so welcome. I felt as if I truly belonged… more, as if I’d never known anything else.’
‘I’m very glad.’
‘The one drawback,’ she said, strangely emboldened, ‘was sitting so far away from you.’
‘Were you? I didn’t notice. I felt as if we were as close as we are now.’ Susannah thrilled to words which, unless he had developed a sudden flair for flattery, implicitly recognised the bond between them. ‘I’m afraid that’s the way things are,’ he said. ‘When I marry, my wife and I must be prepared to spend several days apart each month.’ She was surprised to learn that his work took him away so often.
‘Your wife will be prepared for anything provided she knows you’ll be home.’ As he stared at the table, she remembered his belief in discretion and feared that she might have overstepped the mark. She was grateful for the arrival of the waitress with their drinks. Before stirring in the sugar, Zvi recited a simple blessing.
‘Everything is blessed,’ he said, registering the question in her eye. ‘We thank God for all the goodness in our lives.’
‘I’m starting to feel very blessed myself.’
‘I’m glad. It can be hard for an outsider who comes into our community. Especially someone brought up in a different faith.’
‘It depends how much she… or he – ’ she added quickly – ‘wants to be part of it.’
‘In your line of work you must meet a lot of men.’
‘And women too. Don’t forget the women,’ she said, eager to acknowledge the achievements of her own sex.
‘Really?’ he asked, with a look of alarm.
‘I mean I come across people of every sort. As do you, I imagine. But if you’re asking whether I’ve had boyfriends, the answer is yes. I can’t pretend that I’ve slept alone for twenty odd years.’ As she tossed out the figure without thinking, she prayed that he would see her as an early developer.
‘Some women are wedded to their careers.’
‘Yes, nuns. But, for the rest of us, it’s compensation. I can’t disown my past – I wouldn’t want to – but I’m not bound by it. That’s why I’m here.’
‘I’m very glad you are. Very glad indeed.’ He was distracted by the spectacle of three rowdy children at a nearby table. ‘Look over there!’
‘I am.’ She shuddered.
‘It’s good to see parents who let their children be themselves, who don’t try to squash them.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Susannah said, choking back the censure on the tip of her tongue. She marvelled at Zvi’s unexpected tolerance as the youngest boy thumped his plastic tomato, sending ketchup all over the booth.
‘You must think that all we do at the Chabad House is worship and study and argue about the Torah, but some of my best times – my very best times – are spent with Tzivos Hashem, that’s our youth group.’
‘I didn’t know… Are you very involved?’
‘Almost every week. I’m one of the leaders. We run a packed programme. In the summer we take the kids on trips or go camping. We regularly ask in experts to teach them different aspects of Jewish life, anything and everything from making candlesticks to baking challah. It’s a joy and a privilege to introduce them to the richness of their tradition.’
Zvi fell silent and Susannah was fascinated to discover another facet to him. As they lingered over a second cup of coffee, she scarcely even craved a cigarette. She yearned to take their relationship a stage further, but there was no easy way. With anyone else she could show her interest by inviting him for a meal or a film or a drink with friends, with Zvi that was out of the question. Not only was he forbidden to eat in her home or any of her favourite restaurants, but he never went to the cinema and would be offended by her friends. What’s more, he would disapprove of her taking the initiative. Although the two men could not have been more different, she would be as dependent on him as she had been on Chris.
Zvi loomed large in her thoughts when she prepared dinner the following week for Clement, Mike and Carla. The superstitious dread of speaking his name had given way to the wish to do so at every opportunity. She planned to use the occasion to inform her family of the changes in her life. In the event she had to wait until they moved to the table, since the aperitifs were taken up with Clement’s account of the trial of the Roxborough protestor. All his doubts about the penal system had disappeared and he welcomed the man’s eighteen-month sentence, with the rider that the foot-soldier had been punished while the Major escaped scot-free. Carla, meanwhile, announced that she had almost completed the repairs to the window, which would shortly be put back behind sheets of reinforced glass. Rather than celebrating, Clement declared that it would only goad Deedes and his friends into finding fresh ways to vilify him and launched a blanket attack on fundamentalists of all faiths, which alarmed Susannah who knew that, however unjustly, there would be those who applied the term to Zvi.
She waited until the vichyssoise had mellowed his mood before describing how she met Zvi at the Kabbalah class.
‘That’s fantastic!’ Carla said. ‘I told you you’d find it enlightening. Of course, I meant spiritually – ’
‘Believe me, it’s that too.’
‘So it was your idea?’ Clement turned on Carla. ‘Brilliant!’
‘I just put Susannah in touch with a Lubavitch friend – ’
‘For which I’ll be eternally grateful.’
‘The Lubavitch! I might have guessed.’
‘Who they?’ Mike asked.
‘A proselytising Chassidic sect,’ Clement said. ‘The Jehovah’s Witnesses of Judaism.’
‘You have your faith, Clem, so does Carla – ’
‘I’m beginning to feel outnumbered,’ Mike said.
‘So please don’t begrudge me mine. For years I’ve longed to find something I can believe in – something of my own, not yours or Pa’s – and now I have. I know you have issues with them. But if you met them, you’d feel differently.’
‘Met them or met him?’
‘Zvi is a Lubavitch. You can’t separate the two.’
‘But suppose for a moment you could… that he hadn’t been at the class, would it still have held the same attraction?’
‘Do you think I haven’t asked myself that? Do you think I’m too besotted to question my motives? But I’ve realised that in the end it doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yes, really. People come to God in different ways. Some through the head; others through the heart.’
‘I just don’t want you to be hurt,’ Clement said. ‘I know these people.’
‘Since when?’
‘
I mean I know their sort. Major Deedes and his friends, wearing yarmulkes and speaking Yiddish.’
Susannah resolved to keep her temper. She understood that he felt threatened. She was worried in turn how Zvi would respond to her brother’s sexuality. Her one hope lay in his exclusive focus on his fellow Jews.
‘What sort of a name is Zvi?’ Mike asked.
‘It’s Hebrew for Henry.’
‘Tell us more!’ Carla said. ‘How old is he? What does he do? Is he gorgeous? What colour are his eyes… his hair? Tell, tell! We want to know everything.’
Susannah was happy to oblige. ‘He’s thirty-eight,’ she said, grateful that no one alluded to her eighteen-month seniority. ‘He owns a highly select travel agency. I’m talking new clients by referral only. Although he suggested last week – I’m not sure how seriously – that we should pool our lists: I send him my clients for holidays and he send me his for PR.’
‘Cosy,’ Clement said.
‘He was brought up on a kibbutz. His parents still live in Tel Aviv. He had a sister – Chava – but she was killed in a terrorist attack ten years ago.’
‘Shit!’ Mike said.
‘Yes,’ Susannah replied, gazing at Clement and trusting that he made the link.
She longed to say more about Zvi but found herself at a loss. She couldn’t cite a love of jazz or windsurfing or vintage cars or any of the thousand and one things thought to be integral to a well-rounded personality. She had fed enough feature writers details of eccentric interests and endearing passions to know what people wanted to hear, but in Zvi’s case it was impossible. His life was the Lubavitch. He worked and prayed and studied and spent all his spare time in the community. His faith was who he was.
‘He goes to synagogue three times a day,’ she said. ‘Morning and evening in Hendon and lunchtime near his office in Stepney Green.’
‘That’s just what this family needs,’ Mike said pompously, ‘another religious fanatic!’
‘Fine. You can all dust off your prejudices before you meet him.’
‘I can’t wait to meet him,’ Carla said. ‘You should have invited him here tonight.’
‘And put him through this?’
‘We’re just concerned for you, Nanna,’ Clement said, his appeal to their nursery intimacy making her flinch.
‘That’s very kind of you. But why not try showing me a little less concern and a little more respect? Do you think I’m such a bad judge of character that I’d fall for a man who’d hurt me?’
She bit her tongue as they all fell silent, picturing the black eye and broken rib that led to her leaving Chris.
‘It’s not that,’ Clement said finally. ‘But we’re your family. We want the best for you.’
‘Then you should want Zvi.’
‘You’re your own woman. Strong-willed. I still bear the scars.’ She refused to smile. ‘Look at how you’ve built up the company from scratch. Are you really going to throw it all away for the sake of a man you met five minutes ago?’
‘Three and a half months.’
‘I stand corrected.’
‘And I won’t be throwing anything away. You’re right that most Lubavitch women work in the home. But it’s not compulsory. I can still go to the office. I fully intend to. I just have to make a few adjustments.’
‘Such as covering yourself up like a Victorian piano leg!’
‘Has it never occurred to you that the Victorians might have found a piano leg arousing? You live in a world where sex comes at you on every street corner – ’
‘I wish!’ Mike interjected.
‘But there are still people who value delicacy and restraint, for whom a naked ankle has the power to shock.’ Fearing that her vehemence might itself be immodest, she softened her tone. ‘It may be hard for you to grasp. Their world is so alien to yours. And to mine too, I admit, until lately. In ours, men and women fall in love, marry, have a couple of children and divorce. In theirs, they marry, then fall in love, have a dozen children and stay together for life.’
‘But you do love him?’ Carla asked.
‘Oh, yes.’ She felt tears welling in her eyes. ‘Yes, I love him. That’s the first time I’ve said it aloud. And it’s wonderful. I know it’s strange, Clem, that I can say it to you when I’ve not yet said it to him, but that’s part of the deal. And I’ve accepted it. OK? I love him with every breath in my body. And my body’s never felt so alive.’
‘Nanna, please try to see – ’
‘No, you try to see! For years all I’ve cared about is myself and my job and staying ahead of the game. I longed for another relationship, but the older and more successful I became, the more conditions I placed on it: the more perfect my perfect man had to be, until I’d talked myself out of it even before the first date. Then the moment I stepped into the Chabad House – ’
‘The what?’ Mike asked.
‘The synagogue – I knew that I’d found my roots, my place in the world.’
‘Half of you comes from Oxfordshire,’ Clement said.
‘It was more than a sense of vitality: I can get that at a club. It was more than a sense of fellowship: that’s soap opera stuff. It was a sense of being at one with the universe and, yes, with God.’
‘That’s good, surely?’ Carla appealed to Clement and Mike.
‘It is to me,’ Susannah said. ‘Everything’s changed. My life’s no longer a problem to be solved; it’s a pattern to be followed.’
‘So there we have it!’ Clement said. ‘The Susannah we know and love, the girl with the tidiest bedroom in the West Country.’
‘Which proves what exactly?’
‘My dear little sister, you’ve always longed for order… for clarity and neatness. Now you finally have them. No more nasty ethical conflicts or moral choices. You can escape them all in a world of “thou shalt nots”.’
‘Nothing you can say will make me change my mind. I know that what I feel is true. And the greatest proof is that God has brought me Zvi. He’s awakened my heart and my spirit and my senses all at the same time. I’m triply blessed.’
5
Susannah opened the glove compartment of the car and took out her well-thumbed copy of Judaism For Dummies. Turning to the entry on Purim, she read that it was the first festival of spring, a joyous celebration of the victory of the Jewish Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai over the Persian Haman, a time for drinking and dressing up and dancing in the streets, as well as offering gifts to the poor and food to friends. Fixing the names in her head, she grabbed the bottle of champagne for Rivka and hurried up to the house.
No sooner had she stepped through the door than Rivka set her to work alongside Rebekkah and herself preparing Purim baskets. They were taking twelve to the local nursing home, packed with chocolates, biscuits, fruit and hamantaschen, a triangular pastry filled with jam, cheese or poppy seeds. While aware that any Lubavitch meal was as much a matter of blessing as cooking, Susannah was surprised to find Rivka blessing not only each ingredient but each separate flavour of jam. Once the pastries were in the oven, she helped to clean the kitchen, gathering a pile of plates, before panicking at the thought that one of them had been used for cheese. She gazed at the sinks, unable to recollect which was for meat and which for milk and even if it were permitted to mix cheese with jam.
Rivka relieved her of both the plates and the problem. ‘Remember you’re doing it for God and it’ll become second nature.’
‘That’s guaranteed to intimidate me even more.’
‘Keeping a kosher kitchen is a mitzvah, our way of turning a base human appetite into something spiritual.’
‘It’s not just the kitchen though, is it, Mama?’ Rebekkah said. ‘Wouldn’t the same be true of all our laws?’
‘Quite right, darling,’ Rivka said, beaming at her. ‘Not least the different laws for men and women. I know how hard it can be for a stranger coming into the community.’
‘Not at all,’ Susannah said, fearing that she had betrayed her ign
orance.
‘Believe me, I think you’re doing splendidly. But Jewish life is very different from life elsewhere. It’s not about asserting our rights or imposing our wills. It’s about honouring the covenant God gave us. It’s about sanctifying everything we are and do. Nothing today is more damaging than the illusion that all people are the same and all relationships are valid. “Everything is good as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone,” is the cry, which begs the question of whether it’s hurting God. And don’t you find it odd that the people who shout the loudest about respecting our differences ignore the most basic one of all: the difference between men and women? Of course women have an equal place in the world and an equal responsibility to fulfil God’s plan. But the Bible teaches that we must set about it in our own way. Women are by nature more compassionate; it’s our job to look after the home and bring up the children. Men are more aggressive; it’s their job to go out into the world.’
‘A few months – even a few weeks – ago I’d have taken issue with you on that. I was brought up to believe that women could do everything as well as men. The rest was just conditioning or, worse, a male conspiracy to keep us down.’
‘To some women, everything’s been a conspiracy since the Garden of Eden.’
‘But since I’ve come here, I realise that the pressure to compete is the very thing that made me miserable.’
‘That’s a story I hear time and time again. Feminists claim that they’re setting women free when what they’ve done is to make them slaves to dogma. Everywhere I look, I see unhappy women: women who are unsure of their place in the world; women who are afraid of their own femininity; women who are desperate to measure up to men. Jewish women are exempt from this.’
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