by J. S. Margot
Contents
Title Page
PART I: 1987–1993
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
PART II: 1994–2000
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
PART III: 2001–the present
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
About the Publisher
Copyright
PART I
1987–1993
One
It must have been the beginning of the month. The new academic year hadn’t yet begun and I was heading for the canteen, feeling relieved, having just resat the Spanish grammar exam. To get there, I had to walk through the hall of the university building, past benches where dozens of students sat chatting and smoking. The route to the canteen was more exciting than most lectures.
Noticeboards lined the walls, full of intriguing announcements: “Who wants to swap my landlord for theirs?”, “Feel like coming to Barcelona with us? Room for one more person. Conditions apply. Call me” and “Free sleeping bag for anyone who’ll join me in it.”
A single corner was reserved for the university’s job agency.
If one of the jobs displayed in a lockable, plastic showcase looked interesting, you’d note down the number of the vacancy and go to the little social services office a bit farther along. There a lady with a long-suffering expression would tell you the details, which usually boiled down to her giving you the name, address and telephone number of the employer. Then, sighing under the weight of her boring job, she’d wish you good luck with your application.
The agency had provided me with a lot of temporary jobs in the previous two years, from chambermaiding to dishing out detergent samples, from headhunter’s assistant to museum attendant.
When I came across a handwritten job vacancy: “Student (M/F) required to tutor four children (aged between eight and sixteen) every day after school and coach them with their homework”, I immediately wrote the number on my palm. An hour later the lady from the job agency gave me the contact details of the family in question. I will call them the Schneiders, which is not their real name, though their name also sounded German, or German-ish.
The Schneiders, the lady said, were Jewish, but that shouldn’t be a problem, and if it was a problem, I could always come back and she’d try to see if we could work something out, but she couldn’t guarantee anything, because you never knew with people like that—which she apparently did know, just as she knew that the Schneiders would pay me 60 Belgian francs an hour, which wasn’t a lot, but could have been worse. When it came to money, she informed me, Jews were a bit like the Dutch.
When I stared at her in surprise, she seemed taken aback by my ignorance. “Why do you think so many Dutch people come here to study interpreting? Because it’s a good course and it’s cheap. As soon as they’ve got their diploma, they whizz off back to their country. So we’re basically training our biggest competitors. Luckily the university gets a subsidy for foreign students, so it’s not all bad. What I want to say is: don’t let yourself get pushed around. Don’t accept an unpaid trial period. Even if you decide to stop after the first week, they have to pay you for the hours you’ve worked.” I did quick sums in my head as she babbled on, calculating that I could earn 600 Belgian francs a week: 2,500 a month. Back then, when the rent of a small flat was about 6,000 francs a month, it all added up.
Two
“Hello Mevrouw. Could I please speak to Mr or Mrs Schneider?”
“Mrs Schneider speaking.”
“Good afternoon. I believe you’re looking for a student who can help your children with their homework?”
“We have been looking for such a person for un certain time.”
“I only saw the vacancy this week.”
“Last year we had six students. They gave up after a few evenings.”
“Why did they give up?”
“Tcha, why. Why not, n’est-ce pas? They did not do a good job, I can tell you.”
“You have four children.”
“Two sons and two daughters.”
“How old are they?”
“Between eight and sixteen. It says so in the vacancy. You call me for what reason, if you have not read it? You are how old?”
“Twenty…”
“That is only four years older than our oldest child. You are studying at which university?”
“Antwerp University. The Higher Institute of Interpreting and Translation Studies.”
“That is not a university, it is a higher institute.”
“In Belgium it’s technically part of the university.”
“Belgium is bizarre.”
“I’m studying French and Spanish.”
“French is good. Your Spanish is of no use to us. At home we speak French with the children. But their yeshiva, school, is Flemish, or I should say ‘Dutch-language’, n’est-ce pas? My husband is not at home now. You need to speak to my husband.”
“I’d like to come over and introduce myself. When would suit you?”
“You have experience with children?”
“I really like children. And I like teaching. Shall I come on Friday?”
“You never come to us on a Friday. You have experience with teaching?”
“I sometimes helped my cousins with their homework. And my sister, and my friends.”
“Then you cannot know whether you like teaching, n’est-ce pas.”
“I think I like it.”
“Friday our holiday begins already, the preparations for it. That day, the children never have school in the afternoon. But on Wednesday afternoon they do. Shabbat lasts, simply explained, from Friday when the sun goes down to Saturday when
the sun goes down. Saturdays you therefore cannot come, as we devote the day to rest. But it is the intention that you also come to us each Sunday forenoon. To help the girls. You think that this you can do?”
“That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“You think you can respect us?”
“What do you mean?”
“We are not like everyone, n’est-ce pas. We will explain that to you later. I would first like to know: students have the habit to go out on Saturday evenings. And they would rather not get up on Sundays.”
“I’m an early bird,” I lied.
“When you can come to introduce yourself?”
“Would Wednesday afternoon suit you, Mevrouw Schneider?”
“I just said: the children have lessons on Wednesday afternoons. And it is better you see the children.”
“In the late afternoon I mean,” I corrected myself. “At five o’clock? I have your address.”
“What is your name, please?”
Three
You’d think no one could possibly remember what the weather was like, say, thirty years ago, but that Wednesday in September the sun shone and the sky was bright blue—the kind of warm blue that heralds cold autumn weather—as I walked down Belgiëlei, the wide, busy avenue that cuts the Jewish neighbourhood in two, terminating in the handsome masonry of the railway embankment that runs between Zurenborg and the imposing edifice of Antwerp Central Station.
I never came to this side of the city. The only street I knew here was Pelikaanstraat, crammed with little jewellers’ shops, where, on Sundays especially, people flocked to shop or just browse.
I was amused to see hordes of immaculately dressed infants on scooters. Girls and boys—with or without side curls—raced recklessly but alertly along the pavement, nearly taking off my toes as they shot past. Outside some buildings—schools and crèches?—there were clusters of over a dozen scooters and as many children’s bikes. Very few were locked or chained.
Men with big white, grey or black beards strode along, seemingly in a tearing hurry. They had the air of people who knew where they were going; they didn’t look at me, but turned their gaze the other way. Their beards and sidelocks, reaching from the tops of their ears to their shoulders, were blown around not by the wind, but by the speed with which they walked. Like funeral directors late for an appointment. Some wore white stockings under black breeches. Their jet-black coats (silk, satin or polyester?) all looked identical. Though they hung below the knee, not a single one was unbuttoned. Mustn’t these men be stiflingly hot and sweating under their black top hats?
Practically all the women I saw had the same hairstyle: a sort of pageboy cut that just cleared their shoulders. The same colour too, pretty much: chestnut brown or black. It was obvious that some were wearing cheap wigs. Others had tucked their hair under a kerchief—the kind my mother and grandmother wore during spring cleaning, when they repainted their ceilings. Blondes appeared to be a rarity in this neighbourhood. Skirts and dresses were nearly all ankle length. Despite the warm weather, many of the women wore tights: black, dusky pink or brown, occasionally white. Garments were buttoned up to the neck. The only woman I saw in a colourful outfit was a passing cyclist with earphones on her head, listening to a Walkman.
I spoke into the intercom of a town house with a broad facade, gleaming as if newly renovated. A many-branched candelabrum stood on the window ledge next to the door, in front of the net curtain. Above the doorbell hung a transparent tube in which there seemed to be a piece of rolled-up paper. I took it to be a kind of fortune cookie, a note with a thought-provoking saying to cheer up your day. It struck me as a nice idea.
A female voice repeated my name—it resonated through the intercom—and asked me to “look at the eye”. It was the same voice as on the phone a few days earlier.
It took a while before I realized that the doorbell was linked to a security camera, and that I was being filmed. In the late 1980s, a camera system like that was a high-tech gadget, something you’d only expect to see at the entrance to a jeweller’s or a big corporation; certainly not at the door of a town house surrounded on all sides by other houses. My parents, who lived in a detached house in the countryside, only locked the back door in the evening, after the dog had been fed. During the day it was left open. When visitors rang the door of my flat in Antwerp, I would throw my keys out of the window, knotted up in a tea towel.
“Could you please go a bit lower? You are too high for the eye,” the voice said. The “too high for the eye” made me smile.
I bent my knees slightly and looked into the protruding eye. For at least five minutes, things went silent on the other side.
I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do as I waited. Every now and then I would look at the camera, smiling awkwardly. It was irritating, but when you’re applying for a job you don’t want to mess up. They might get annoyed, I thought, if I rang again too soon. Then I thought perhaps they’d already opened the door for me via the intercom and I just hadn’t realized it; perhaps I should have pushed harder against the door, have pressed my whole weight against it…
I gazed at the houses and apartments on the other side of the street. There, too, I saw many-branched candelabras, each one bigger than the last. I counted the arms: seven, occasionally nine.
The neighbours opposite seemed to have the same little tubes on their doorposts. A man in a long black coat and a wide-brimmed hat entered a house. Rummaging in his satchel for his keys, he turned towards the street, where the light was better. I gave him a friendly nod, but he feigned not to see me. Before he and his hat disappeared behind the door, he briefly touched the tube.
Two women appeared at one of the windows of the building that he’d entered, pretending not to look at me, but inspecting me carefully. They didn’t press curious noses against the windowpane; they belonged to the other kind of spies: the ones who stand a few paces back from the window, because they think that from there they can watch without being seen. Which isn’t true.
Just as I was about to ring the bell a second time, chains began to rattle behind the heavy wooden door. I heard the shove and clink of bolts, both at the top and bottom of the door, the click of keys, a bleeping—the intercom, presumably.
Two pale, giggling girls with blue skirts and white, long-sleeved blouses buttoned up to the neck looked at me, amused and curious, and I looked back at them with the same eager curiosity. One was a larger version of the other.
“Entrez, please, entrez,” said Little, who had a little voice.
“Our parents are expecting you,” Large added. Her voice was little too.
Four
For the first half-hour I sat opposite Mr Schneider in a room that was called “the office”, on the far side of the ground floor, just past the lift.
The lift! That such decadence existed was new to me: that there were people living in the city, people without physical disabilities, who had a lift in their house.
Another thing that greatly impressed me was the thick white carpet: your feet sank right into it. My mother believed in tiles: you could throw a bucket of soapsuds over them and scrub them clean in a trice. In this house, people had lined the access routes with deep-pile white carpet.
The CCTV images flickered on the wall of the corridor, showing the street from various angles. A hazy passer-by walked past. Someone stuffed leaflets into letterboxes.
In the office stood a desk and a bookcase, only a single shelf of which was filled. I recognized a French grammar book and a French dictionary. The other books were Hebrew works, I assumed: fat tomes whose leather spines were embossed with gold lettering and curlicues.
The windows stretched from floor to ceiling and overlooked the courtyard garden whose main feature—in the middle of the city!—was a pond with a footbridge. On the edge of the big marble terrace was a basketball stand and hoo
p, and farther down the garden, a swing hung from a shiny red metal frame. The lawn was immaculate: bright-green grass, freshly mown.
Mr Schneider turned out to be a tall, thin man in a white shirt, dark suit and dark-blue yarmulke. He didn’t have sidelocks and his black beard, speckled with grey, was fluffy and didn’t hang down like a bib between his chin and his chest.
Mr Schneider had a powerful voice, and his French accent was less marked than his wife’s. He looked a bit like my father, but a Jewish version, and with somewhat deeper grooves in his forehead and around his eyes. Some people’s cheeks are never red, and Mr Schneider appeared to me to be such a person. His skin looked to be permanently pale grey. His moustache and beard framed his mouth, lending colour to his face.
“We’ll do this just once, shall we?” Mr Schneider asked after we’d shaken hands. I didn’t know what he meant. He took off his jacket and draped it slowly over his chair, taking care to align the shoulders exactly with the corners of the chair back, then asked me to take a seat.
“If you hold out your hand to me, I will shake it, juffrouw,” he said, having apparently read the confusion on my face. “Because I respect you and your customs, n’est-ce pas? But as a precaution we, Orthodox Jews, do not shake women’s hands. It has to do with ritual cleanliness and suchlike. But we will not speak of that now. It would be nice if you could respect our tradition.”
I smiled at him. Sheepishly, I imagine. I looked at my right hand and wondered how it could be unclean. Though admittedly, my fingers did bear traces of Tipp-Ex.
On a wide shelf of the bookcase, surrounded by three round hatboxes, lay a black hat with a broad, stiff brim. I’d once snapped up a similar hatbox at a flea market; in it I stored all the personal letters I’d received in my life.
Mr Schneider started on a long monologue. He did not leave any space for interruption, and when I attempted to ask him a question he responded like politicians in chat shows, suffering the intervention and then continuing unperturbed.
“I have four wonderful children,” he said, “two exemplary sons and two equally exemplary daughters. All four of them are different, which is logical, and I shall try to shed some light on that.”