by J. S. Margot
Another reaction I’d got tired of hearing. I gave it short shrift: “Mevrouw, my boyfriend lives in Belgium precisely because he has fled from the likes of Khomeini.”
I didn’t tell her that Nima, who had come to Belgium with his older sister, was from an affluent family, nor that his resistance to the Islamic regime had been limited; unlike many of his friends, his ideological battle had cost him no more than a blacklisting and few nights in jail, after which he very soon left the country.
His parents were worried he’d be called up to fight in the war against Iraq. It was one of the factors that prompted them, like many other middle-class Iranian families, to send their son to the West, along with their daughter. Under the Shah’s regime they had enjoyed considerable freedom, including freedom of thought. Tehran, to them, was the Paris of the Middle East. They had abhorred the authoritarian, dictatorial Shah, but they abhorred the reactionary Islamic state even more. They wanted their children to savour the taste of Paris, rather than the bitterness of a Shiite dictatorship, if needs be in another country.
Mrs Schneider did not ask my friend’s name.
“You live with someone of a different faith.”
“Yes.”
“You are not a Muslim.”
“I was brought up as a Catholic.”
“You do not intend to covert.”
“I’m not religious. Any more. If I ever was…”
“And your parents…”
“My parents were churchgoers. They observed all the main Catholic traditions. Easter. All Saints. Christmas. Now that we children are more or less grown up, they no longer attach such importance to church services or belief…”
She toyed with her bracelet, as delicate as the two rings she was wearing: fine silver with a minuscule gemstone. You have jewellery that whispers and jewellery that shouts; Mrs Schneider’s jewellery whispered so clearly as to drown out any shout.
“Your husband fled his religion.”
“He fled a religious state.”
“And his parents?”
“Are still there.”
“Your husband, he is an Arab.”
Oh no, I thought, not this again too. “The people of Iran are not Arabs but Persians. He doesn’t speak Arabic, he speaks Persian.” The word “Persian” worked its usual magic, thanks to the association with handwoven carpets. They were seen as a good investment, especially in Belgium, where house ownership is a national obsession. So much so that Belgians are said to be “born with a brick in their stomachs”.
“Our children, Aaron has told you about them.”
“About all four.”
“My husband didn’t ask you anything.”
“He talked the whole time,” I said. And it was a relief to be able to say it.
“I thank you,” she said, all of a sudden. “I will ring for the maid. Krystina will show you out. I wish you a pleasant day. Merci et bonne journée.”
She pressed a button under the desktop and with a brief nod left me sitting there, somewhat bemused, in a fine cloud of her perfume, which I couldn’t identify. Anaïs Anaïs was the only scent I knew, as I occasionally sprinkled it on my neck and wrists. Not so much because I liked its heavy, floral fragrance, but because I wanted to spread the aura of the writer Anaïs Nin.
Krystina was not the woman who had served me the delicious cheesecake.
Six
A good three weeks later I was rung by Mrs Schneider. After a few evenings of tutoring, the three students who had passed the Schneiders’ application procedure had stopped coming. Mrs Schneider didn’t give me any details, and I didn’t trouble to find out whether they’d been fired or had left of their own accord. Clearly, the departure of the third student had made emergency measures necessary. That was where I came in.
During the call, Mrs Schneider made no mention of my failed job interview. Speaking to me as if for the first time, she stressed the need for her children to receive the best possible education. There was no time to waste, she said, every day and evening needed to be spent profitably, n’est-ce pas?
Would I consider coming, she wanted to know.
“My boyfriend’s still from Iran, you know,” I couldn’t help saying.
“Aaron will continue the conversation,” she responded. Her husband would prefer to receive me in his office near Pelikaanstraat, she added. As soon as possible: would tomorrow at four be convenient? Did I need picking up, or a taxi to be sent, peut-être?
After the chicness of the Schneider home, the un-chicness of Mr Schneider’s workplace was startling. Housed in a building along with—to judge by the number of doorbells and letterboxes—dozens of other businesses, his office contained little more than a cluttered black metal desk and four chairs. It was stuffy, as if the only window, streaked with dirty rainwater, hadn’t been opened in years, and as if the concrete decay visible from the outside was seeping through the walls. The building’s secretaries, as unstylish as the interior, were common property, just like certain office equipment: the typewriters, photocopiers and IBM computers. Through the dirty window I could see the dome of Antwerp Central Station.
All kinds of magnifying glasses, pincers and tweezers lay on a table against the wall, along with prehistoric-looking microscopes. The harsh fluorescent lighting over the centre of the table, banishing all shadow, made everything even uglier than it already was.
“I am a diamond merchant,” Mr Schneider said.
I could not suppress a smile.
“This amuses you?”
“I was just reminded of that scene in Cheese where the main character says ‘I am a cheese merchant’.”
Mr Schneider looked a little blank.
“Do you know the book I mean? We studied it at school. It’s by Elsschot.”
“Elsschot?”
“A Flemish author, it doesn’t matter,” I mumbled.
“Oh, I’ve read Elsschot’s books, you know! And Simon, our elder boy, chose Elsschot in his Dutch literature classes. I suspect that Jakov will too. It’s not that the pupils choose this writer because they love his work so much, of course, but because Elsschot wrote thin books in language that is easy to understand!”
Mr Schneider laughed, his whole body shaking.
“Elsschot came from Antwerp, n’est-ce pas,” he continued. “He was a gifted chess player. Sapira, a Polish Jew, was for a while a family friend of the De Rudders—Elsschot’s real name, if I’m not mistaken.”
“De Ridder,” I corrected. But I was amazed. I’d never expected to be taught something about Elsschot by a Jewish man with a yarmulke and a beard. I’d written a thesis on the author, so I knew a fair bit about his life. When I cycled through the city, if the weather was nice I’d sometimes make a detour through the neighbourhood where he’d lived and where his favourite cafe was. I’d never read that he had a Jewish friend, or friends.
As soon as I was installed on a squeaky leatherette chair, Mr Schneider embarked on yet another monologue, this time on the might of the Persian empire. He talked about someone called Haman, the vizier of the King of Persia, who, in the biblical book of Esther, tries to persuade the King to kill all the Jews, because the Jew Mordechai had refused to bow to him.
I’d never heard any of these names or stories. Nor had I heard of Purim, the Jewish carnival, a religious holiday that, according to Mr Schneider, had something to do with Haman and Mordechai. At the time, it didn’t interest me. I was there about a job.
But Mr Schneider was off again. He just couldn’t stop talking, and I got the impression that he wanted to placate me, to make up for some perceived faux pas of his wife’s. He talked about the richness of Persian civilization and about the importance of the Mizrahi Jews in Iran and the wider region. From the terror under which the Iranian population was suffering he switched to Jewish cuisine and the influences of Lebanon a
nd the Middle East. He even spoke of the Persian intellect, of Persian culture and tradition. Lavished more praise than Nima, even in his most chauvinistic moods, had been able to muster for his fatherland. I found it slightly ludicrous.
Mr Schneider went on to hint that he’d perhaps done business with the Shah—not directly, no of course not, what an idea. It was even possible, he said, that some of the gems he sold now were being bought by relatives of the late Shah, though he could not be sure: in his business, secrecy was as precious as the raw diamonds in which he traded. But one of his regular customers, a diamond cutter, paid visits to the home of Farah Diba, the Shah’s widow, which in the old days had meant travelling to Tehran, but after the Islamic Revolution and the flight of Reza and Farah Pahlavi to the West, this jeweller only had to go to Paris—much more convenient.
Paintings of gold letters on a dark-blue background hung on every wall. I didn’t know the Hebrew alphabet—or even the Persian alphabet, for that matter, though Nima had made a couple of attempts to teach me. A framed photo of the Belgian King and Queen adorned the wall behind Mr Schneider.
The picture frames wobbled every time a train went past. Seeing that, I shivered. Why, I wondered—as Mr Schneider held forth on the Diamond High Council and the Antwerp Diamond Bourse, and on the Jewish tradition in the diamond sector—had the Jews of Antwerp chosen to resettle here after the war, in their old neighbourhood near the railway line? It seemed so masochistic. Who would do that to themselves? Why hadn’t they moved to another neighbourhood? Why would you want to be confronted every day with the horror of your own, decimated people? To see the trains, those potent symbols of the sufferings of your people, your family, rolling past. To hear their rumble—feel it, even: the window of his office vibrated in its frame.
Sixty-five per cent of Antwerp’s officially registered Jewish population had been—I looked it up after my failed job interview—deported by rail to concentration and extermination camps, mainly from the Dossin barracks in nearby Mechelen. Of those thousands, the vast majority never came back. After 1945, most of those Jewish children who had survived the war in hiding had lost a parent or been orphaned. It was likely that Mr Schneider belonged to this group. Yet Mr Schneider’s office was near Simonsstraat, one of the main streets of Antwerp’s Jewish diamond district. Named after Pieter Simons, the engineer who built the first railway line between Antwerp and Mechelen. Mechelen, the place from which, a century later, many Jews were transported.
I grew suspicious. I suspected Mr Schneider of something, I didn’t know what. At the same time I mistrusted myself.
I thought of my grandfather. From his rocking chair next to the stove he would tell stories about the war and about POW camps. He loathed Nazis so much that as he lay dying, he summoned up his last remaining strength to send the very nice district nurse away: “No collaborator’s daughter sets foot in this house!”
I also thought of Yehudi Menuhin. Nima and I had a few CDs of duets by that brilliant violinist and the equally brilliant Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. To us, the music of these two virtuosos was a symbol of harmony between East and West, a harmony that we strove to achieve in our private life, often—but by no means always—successfully.
The liner notes in one of these Menuhin and Shankar CDs gave a brief summary of their lives. Menuhin was the first Jewish musician to perform in Germany after the Holocaust. As early as 1947, scarcely two years after the end of the Second World War, he allowed the people who had tried to exterminate his people to enjoy his genius and his art.
I couldn’t comprehend such forgiveness. There were days when I saw it as a form of treachery. Whenever I shared my doubts about Menuhin’s integrity with Nima, he said I was blowing the issue out of all proportion. But he loved it when I got all passionate about something, he said, it really turned him on.
“Our children go to Jewish schools,” said Mr Schneider, interrupting my thoughts.
“Jewish schools? Private schools?” I asked, all ears again.
“No, not private education. They go to a Jewish school that is recognized and subsidized by the Flemish government. But it is a Jewish school that centres on Jewish culture, our way of thinking and behaving. Is there anything else you want to ask?”
“I didn’t know such schools existed.”
“In addition to being educated in the Jewish religion and culture, all pupils are taught the regular secular curriculum. The same education you had.”
“That seems like a lot.”
“Jews like to study. We can handle that type of workload.”
“And on top of that, there’s me? More lessons after school?”
“What use has a child for precious objects? Jewels, expensive cars and suchlike? They should develop their minds to the full—that is truly precious.”
“Do only Jewish children go to these schools? Or are they mixed schools, accessible to all?”
“Indeed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exclusively Jewish pupils.”
“Then it is a private school?”
“No. As I said, the pupils follow the education ministry’s official curriculum. The government scrutinizes our attainment targets. We do what is expected of us.”
“But the children don’t come into contact with non-Jewish peers?”
“Liberal Jewish children sometimes go to regular secondary schools. But Orthodox Jews prefer schools that honour their tradition and religion. We don’t want to equip our children with a watered-down version of our belief and culture. Our sons and daughters go to the Yavne school, which is strict Orthodox, but less strict than the Jesode Hatora–Beth Jacob school.”
“And the teachers? Are they all Jewish?”
“The teachers of lay subjects usually aren’t.”
“Lay subjects?”
“Maths, French, Dutch… Religion is taught by Jewish people. Secular subjects usually aren’t.”
I must have looked dubious: I’d never heard anything so strange. And yet at the same time it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. I myself was the product of a Catholic school where eighty per cent of the pupils came from migrant worker families, most of them Muslim. It was the 1970s, and the school was in Meulenberg, Limburg, a neighbourhood built to house miners’ families. It was a purely practical choice: we lived in a “white” village not far away, but my mother had always taught in Meulenberg. So back then, long before multicultural schools were a concept, my classroom featured all kinds of nationalities, dress, smells, tastes, languages and religions. In the playground we spoke our own language, an argot of the streets. “Your mother’s a whore!” we would shriek, and “Pull your lip over your head and shut up!” Anyone who didn’t stand up for themselves was a goner. Threats of physical violence—“I’ll beat you up at the school gates!”—were standard fare. Just like the delicious, exotic food items shared in the canteen. Until it became too expensive (or the authorities found it too progressive) there was even a Koran teacher. He taught after normal school hours, so his pupils stayed behind, along with the children receiving instruction in their native languages: Spanish, Turkish, Arabic. But at these Jewish schools, if I understood it correctly, secular and religious teaching intermingled throughout the day, throughout the year, throughout an entire school career.
“Why don’t your children go to ordinary schools and learn Jewish religion and Hebrew after school?” I asked. The tables had turned since a few weeks ago. The Schneiders now wanted something from me; I had nothing to lose.
“We have our own traditions. And our own history,” Mr Schneider said.
“Who doesn’t?” I blurted out.
He smiled.
“Are non-Jewish children allowed to register at your schools?”
“Officially, yes. Of course they are, we owe that openness to the state that subsidizes. We’re no different from Catholic sc
hools.”
“Would I be admitted to your children’s school?” I asked.
“In theory, yes. In practice, it’s very rare.”
“Is only secondary education segregated?”
“Do you mean boys and girls being educated separately? No, we separate them at an early age.”
“By segregated I meant separated from other religions and the rest of the world. Does that start in secondary school?”
“Children also go to Jewish primary schools.”
“So there aren’t any non-Jewish pupils there?”
“There could be, but that doesn’t really happen in practice.”
Just like when I’d been struck by the proximity of the railway line, a feeling of oppression washed over me. So religious Jews separated themselves from the rest of the population very deliberately and from a very young age. What possessed them? How could a minority seek to distinguish itself so strongly from the majority? Who, apart from the whites in South Africa, sought to protect their identity by isolating themselves? How self-righteous—or fearful—would you have to be for that? How blind to your own history? It wasn’t so long ago that Germany and its cohorts had viewed this tight-knit people as public enemy number one. Yet now, not fifty years later, they still wanted to isolate themselves? In the army, everyone knew that camouflage could save lives. But these people, of all people, with a history of persecution, were trying to do everything they could to be noticed? Or was there something I was failing to understand? To see? Did the problem lie with me? Why was I focusing on outward differences, anyway? It was assimilated German Jews, after all, whom the Nazis perceived as the greatest threat: the many who had worked themselves up unobtrusively to the highest echelons of society.
As all these confused thoughts bubbled up, I bit my lip. I knew I’d sound anti-Semitic if I blurted out what I was thinking. There were times when Nima was proud that he could distinguish himself from us Westerners. But at the same time he was maddened by people constantly reminding him that he wasn’t “one of us”.