The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  Zvi arrived back at half-past four, joining them for tea in the drawing room, making stilted conversation while waiting for sunset to sanction his escape. Any hopes that his spirits would lift on the train were dashed by the desolate face reflected in the window of an otherwise empty compartment. She broke the silence with occasional remarks to which he listened mutely, gazing at his wrist as if transfixed by the pattern of hair. Then, moments before reaching Slough, a town which to her dying day she would hold to be maligned, he looked up and, without ceremony, asked: ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want you to be my wife. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes you do, or yes you will?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I will. Yes, I mean… yes. Yes. Yes, with all my heart.’

  ‘God be thanked!’

  At a stroke, all the horrors of the weekend vanished, along with all the frustrations of recent weeks. The tears in her eyes mirrored his as she stretched her arm tentatively across the table. He shook his head, smiling. ‘Soon, my dearest, soon. Soon your hand will be mine and my hand will be yours, but we must wait a little longer.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Rivka told me there were three people in a Jewish marriage. We must wait for the third to give us His blessing.’

  7

  To avert a clash of festivities, they agreed not to announce their engagement until the end of Passover. Even Helen observed the holiday, although her simple substitution of matza for bread paled beside the stringent preparations at the Rabbi’s. Rivka and Rebekkah scrubbed and scoured the kitchen to remove any trace of leaven before covering each surface with foil in case a recalcitrant crumb should slip into a pot. Tali and Yosef brought in a stove from the shed and took down the designated crockery from the loft. The Rabbi, under doctor’s orders to avoid exertion, sold all the leavened goods left in the house, notably a full crate of whisky, to a Bangladeshi neighbour who sold them back eight days later at a small profit. To prevent so much as a grain of matza falling into the wine at the Seder table, Rivka gave every guest a paper bag to hold under the chin. Susannah watched Tali and Yosef taking part in the celebrations with none of the cynicism she saw in her friends’ children and prayed that it would be a portent.

  The Lubavitch disapproval of long engagements came as a relief to Susannah, who would have been happy with a Jewish Gretna Green. Zvi proposed that they plan the wedding for early June, adding that the precise date was a matter for her to fix with Rivka, which she realised from his coyness was a hint at her monthly cycle. Nervous of her friends’ reactions, she decided to wait to break the news until she could dazzle them with a diamond, only to find that, so as not to tempt fate, Zvi was forbidden to give her a ring before they were married. Instead, the following Friday night the Rabbi called her into his study and handed her an exquisite rose-gold and ruby Reverso watch.

  ‘I’m just the messenger,’ he said. ‘Zvi can’t give it to you himself because, as you know, you’re not allowed to meet in private.’ His mischievous smile made her blush. ‘On the other hand, if there are any witnesses to the gift, it counts as a betrothal and, in the event that it’s called off, you won’t be able to marry a kohain.’

  ‘I couldn’t ask for a better envoy,’ she said, touched by his solicitude. Then she put on the bracelet, which clipped so snugly on her wrist that she suspected Rivka’s intervention.

  Rivka and Layah greeted the watch with an enthusiasm she feared would not be echoed elsewhere. Far from impressing people with her fiancé’s largesse, she was afraid of confirming their belief in his perversity. With nothing to be gained from showing off the watch, she chose to spare herself the trip to Beckley and tell her parents of the engagement by phone. With typical generosity, her mother assured her that, for all her reservations about the Lubavitch lifestyle, she had none about the man.

  ‘I liked him. He has character and integrity. What’s more he obviously dotes on you.’

  ‘You could tell?’ she asked, eager to hear the words out loud.

  ‘Even Mrs Shepherd commented on it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She paused to savour her elation. ‘There’s a party at the Rabbi’s on Saturday night. Please say you’ll come. You must. It wouldn’t be the same… Pa will be well enough?’

  ‘He’s fine. Of course we’ll come. But why not at Beckley? It’d be perfect. Your friends can stay.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ she said, trying to conceal her disquiet. ‘Since you’re not a member of the community, Rivka – the Rabbi’s wife – has to act as my sponsor and oversee all the arrangements. It’s just a formality.’

  ‘Of course,’ her mother said slowly. ‘I suppose you’ll be married in London?’

  Susannah nodded, forgetting for a moment that they were on the phone. Her mother took her silence for confirmation.

  ‘I’d pictured the parish church. Your father performing the ceremony.’

  ‘He always said he’d marry me. Every little girl’s dream.’

  ‘And Mark and Clement used to squabble over which of them would give you away.’

  ‘Yes, the sooner the better, as I recall.’ Their laughter took her back to her childhood. She wondered if it really had been a gentler world or if memory lent it a glow. ‘You’ll still have a role to play at the party. Rivka tells me that you and Zvi’s mother have to break a plate.’

  The next name on her telephone pad was Clement’s. They hadn’t spoken since the dinner, but it was the perfect chance to build bridges. She rang him several times over the weekend, but he was always out. Refusing to trust her happiness to a machine, she tried again from the office on Monday morning. Finally catching him at home, she trembled as though confessing to adultery rather than announcing an engagement. Any hopes of a reconciliation were shattered by his response.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll live to regret it.’

  ‘You really know how to make a girl feel good.’

  ‘I’m your brother. I’d be letting you down if I didn’t speak out.’

  ‘Well you’ve spoken. Thanks. Now I’ll try to forget that you ever did. Zvi is the man I want to grow old with. I love him.’

  ‘You said that about Chris.’

  ‘I was twenty-one when I met Chris.’

  ‘And now you’re forty.’

  ‘Thirty-nine.’

  ‘Call me a liar for four months.’

  ‘Not a liar but a shit.’

  ‘Someone has to say it. Even if you do love Zvi – ’

  ‘There’s no if about it. I’ve already told you.’

  ‘You’d not just be marrying him but all those beards.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if he were Amish. No, you’d admire his spirit; you’d praise his authenticity; you’d want to paint him!’

  ‘I spend my life trying to show that religion is a force for the good; now you go and marry a man whose religion is dark and repressive.’

  ‘Tough! But you know something, Clem? This is my life, not yours. And Zvi is a force for good. He makes me feel good. And not just me: everyone around him. I didn’t ring to ask for your blessing but your support. To invite you to the Wort on Saturday week.’

  ‘Wort?’

  ‘Let’s get the jokes over with now, shall we? It’s the engagement party, for our family and friends to celebrate with us. Fat chance!’

  ‘Of course we’ll come. We’re always there for you, sis. We were there for Chris and we will be for Zvi.’

  ‘Will you please stop comparing them!’

  ‘And there’s the single-sex dancing to look forward to. All the hot young rabbis.’

  ‘No, there’s not.’

  ‘You mean the men and women dance together?’

  ‘No, of course not. But I need you and Mike to play down the single-sexness.’ She winced to think of his face at the other end of the line.

&
nbsp; ‘In what way?’

  ‘Zvi knows the score. He won’t make an issue of your sexuality. But some of the others have been more sheltered. It’s bad enough that you’re a Christian. I’m not asking you to lie; just be discreet.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll tell Mike not to wear his I’m not gay but my boyfriend is T-shirt and I’ll make sure that my pillbox doesn’t bleep in the middle of the toasts. Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps you haven’t told them? What is the party line on HIV?’

  ‘It’s one evening, Clem. That’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘One evening. Then there’s the wedding. And the christening – or whatever they have instead. Or aren’t we invited?’

  ‘No, not if you don’t show some respect to me… to them.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘You want me to wind the clock back twenty-five years. While you proclaim your relationship, I’m to keep mine hidden. No way!’

  ‘Ma said you were depressed.’

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘I don’t want to quarrel with you. Today less than ever. But I won’t let you offend the people I mean to spend the rest of my life with.’

  ‘You’ve made your choice. Fine! That’s your right. But I won’t deny who I am for you, for Zvi, for anyone. I’m not some tailor’s dummy; I have bits. And if you invite me, you get them along with all the rest.’

  ‘No, Clement, I’m sorry. I can’t.’

  ‘Then neither can I. I hope with all my heart you’ll be happy. Just as I hope that one day you’ll understand what you’ve done.’

  Susannah put down the phone in tears. The bridges had not merely swayed but snapped. She and Clement stood on either side of an ideological ravine. At best, they would observe an uneasy truce; at worst, seize every chance to snipe at each other’s position.

  She immediately rang Zvi but reached Rachel, who told her that he was in meetings all morning. Refusing to disturb him, she sat sunk in misery, only to be caught off guard by Alison.

  ‘Are you OK? You look terrible. Should I call a doctor?’

  ‘What? No, of course not. I’m fine. Never better. I’m going to be married.’

  ‘No?’

  Having brought forward her disclosure, she was forced to feign astonishment when Alison too began to sniff, explaining that the whole office had supposed her to be seriously ill. Filled with remorse, Susannah asked her to reschedule her Reveille lunch, put some champagne on ice and order food for an impromptu party. At one o’clock she gathered everyone in the conference room and, enjoying Alison’s pride as keeper of the secret almost as much as the secret itself, announced that she was engaged to Zvi Latsky, a Chassidic Jew. The kisses and toasts were accompanied by the usual parade of ignorance, headed by Marcus’s remark about making love through a hole in the sheet or, as she saw it, the Bed Libel. She sought both to put them right and to assure them that, while in future she might be more selective about clients (there would, for instance, be no repeat of the Atlases), in all other respects they would carry on as before.

  The office party offered a faint foretaste of the revelry of the Wort. On Friday morning Zvi’s parents flew in from Tel Aviv, and the following afternoon she walked anxiously over to meet them. It was her first visit to the house that would soon be her home. She had imagined that, family photographs apart, it would be a replica of the Rabbi’s, the tattered rugs and threadbare furniture a mark of contempt for all possessions but books. In the event, the decor of white walls, abstract art and minimalist furniture spoke more of Zvi’s finances than his faith. She was equally surprised by Etta and Chanan, whom she found perched on a Philip Stark sofa. Zvi had depicted them as unrepentant ideologues who quit the kibbutz when it abandoned its socialist ethos. They turned out to be warm and welcoming, their joy in their future daughter-in-law seemingly unalloyed by the loss of their daughter ten years before. While wary of the easy attraction of other peoples’ mothers, not least in view of the stream of intense young women who had adopted her own, she felt an immediate bond with Etta, which she sought to cement with questions about Zvi.

  ‘I long to hear what he was like as a boy,’ she said.

  ‘Then you should ask my nurse,’ Zvi interjected. ‘I was put in the kevutza at five days old.’

  ‘We saw you for an hour each evening and all day on Saturday,’ Etta said.

  ‘This is as much as most parents,’ Chanan said.

  ‘We wished to build a better world for Zvi, not just a better life.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Susannah said, torn between love and compassion.

  ‘But my son, he chooses to go back to the world of my grandfather.’

  ‘It’s the world of God, Father,’ Zvi said, cutting him some cheesecake.

  At sundown he drove them the few hundred yards to the Rabbi’s. Taking Etta to join the women in the sitting room, Susannah strove to ignore the complaints of sexual segregation which, intentionally or not, implied that her own faith was only Zvi-deep. To underline her place within the community, she introduced Etta to Rivka, Rebekkah, Rachel, Layah and the rest of her friends. Meanwhile she waited for her parents, whose encounter with the Lubavitch would be still more disconcerting. As she gazed around the room, which seemed unusually shabby in the light of their imminent arrival, she dreaded their discretion even more than their disapproval and prayed for a phone call with news of a roadblock or breakdown… but the only ringing was the doorbell and she reluctantly followed Rivka into the hall. She effected introductions, scarcely concealing her surprise when Carla responded by presenting Curtis, a tall lean man in his mid-thirties, who was both better looking and better groomed than his description had led her to expect. He held out his hand to Rivka, who shied away.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to shake your hand.’

  ‘That’s cool. I was an Untouchable in twelfth-century India.’

  Sensing Rivka’s confusion, she swiftly pointed the men towards the study, before returning to the sitting room where she introduced her mother and Carla to Etta. As she observed the three women – her mother, Etta and Rivka – she was in no doubt as to which of them was the most contented. Influence and acclaim could never compare with the seventeen children and fifty-four grandchildren whose photographs graced the hall. She calculated how, with four sets of quads, plus the odd set of quins for good measure, she could exceed Rivka’s total before the age of forty-five. She was smiling at the prospect when her mother walked up.

  ‘You look happy, darling!’

  ‘I’m ecstatic, Ma. How about you?’

  ‘I like your friend Rivka immensely. Such a bright, powerful woman. What a tragedy she was never given the chance to achieve her potential!’

  Saying nothing, Susannah bent over and planted a kiss on her mother’s flushed cheek.

  She felt a fresh wave of panic when the Rabbi called them into the dining room, where he gave her mother and Etta the ritual plate to smash. As they held it gingerly between them, she feared as feeble an effort as her father’s with his eightieth birthday candles, only to be taken aback when it shattered on impact. The room erupted in applause, which the Rabbi cut short by asking for God’s blessing on the happy couple. He quoted an ancient Yiddish formula for a successful marriage: ‘Give your ear to all, your hand to your friends, and your lips only to your wife,’ which he insisted would be no hardship for Zvi. Her joy in the compliment was crowned when Zvi replied by citing the Rebbe’s analogy of a Jewish marriage and a human body in which the husband was the head and the wife the heart. Neither ruled over the other. Each was essential to life.

  ‘I feel like an astronaut on a space-walk,’ she whispered to Carla. ‘I’m seeing the world in a whole new light.’

  She met Carla again on Monday evening to choose a dress that would fulfil both the modesty requirements of long sleeves and a high neckline and her girlhood dreams of wafting down the aisle in a cloud of satin and lace. Surfing the Net, they found the perfect design in a sixteenth-century French court gown with a pe
arl-encrusted cap. Carla put her in touch with a dressmaker friend who promised perfection within a month. Susannah explained, with regret, that she would have to modify the cap. She was forbidden to wear any jewellery to show that Zvi would be marrying her solely for herself.

  The wedding was to follow strict Lubavitch principles, although the Rabbi had made one concession by allowing them to hold it in a Docklands hotel rather than Brent Town Hall. They had hired a caterer to kosher the kitchen. ‘It’s a pity,’ Susannah said sourly, ‘that we can’t kosher some of the guests.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Clement,’ Carla replied, picking up the allusion. ‘I’m afraid he won’t relent until you show – his words, not mine – some respect for his sexuality.’

  ‘How about he shows some respect for my religion?’

  ‘One of you has to make the first move.’

  ‘Yes, him,’ Susannah said. Then, not wanting to offend her staunchest ally, she questioned her on the state of play with Curtis.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ she replied. ‘It’s hard to sustain a relationship that’s already spanned several lifetimes.’

  ‘How can you be so certain?’

  ‘I’m not. He is. He took a course in Neuro Linguistic Programming to investigate his childhood traumas. After a while he started to suffer from a succession of pains for which neither he nor the doctors could find any physical cause and which the NLP therapist insisted weren’t linked to any emotional scars. So he started regression therapy and unearthed several past lives: a man who loved women; a woman who loved women; a child who was killed in a ritual sacrifice. In one of the most violent, he was a mercenary captain who was crushed to death by his men. It seems that his current chest pains stem from that.’

  ‘Is there no way to break the pattern?’ Susannah asked, struggling to suppress her incredulity.

  ‘Only time,’ Carla said. ‘Which is ironic when you come to think of it. Meanwhile, he’s left with a crippling burden of guilt that isn’t linked to his current life but to his mercenary past. All his old friends have lost patience. They claim he’s dreamt it up in a bid to make himself more interesting. He says I’m the only one who takes him seriously. Which, to tell the truth, can be a little wearing. But you understand, don’t you, from your work on the Kabbalah?’