by J. S. Margot
This time Jakov wasn’t playing basketball. Muffled up against the cold, he was fishing all kinds of debris out of the garden pond, in which three big, colourful fish were swimming. He looked at me from the little bridge. He was wearing a multicoloured, crocheted yarmulke; there was even a bit of red in it.
“Of course,” he answered. “Every Jewish boy can. We start learning Hebrew from the age of three, we’re taught the alphabet, then we study the Torah! When we’re thirteen, we’re called up to read aloud in the synagogue. By then we have to be able to read Hebrew perfectly. Our family’s reputation depends on it!” He spoke in exclamation marks, as if he were standing in a pulpit.
“What about girls?” I asked. “Can they read Hebrew?”
“Girls don’t have to read aloud in the synagogue. But at our school, the Yavne, they learn modern Hebrew too. Just not as thoroughly as us boys, I think. Men have to be smart.”
“We boys, Jakov. They don’t learn Hebrew as thoroughly as we learn it, not ‘us’. And I think your mother’s smart. Elzira and Sara too,” I said.
“When I get married, I’d like a smart wife.”
“Smarter than you?”
“Being able to read the Hebrew alphabet doesn’t mean you know the language, right? I don’t always know what I’m reading.” He was changing the subject again.
“Oh, I know what you mean,” I said. “I can read a difficult Spanish text aloud fluently without always knowing what it’s about. But I do love the feel of the language rolling over my lips; sometimes it even gives me butterflies.”
He grinned. “In shul—that’s to say, in synagogue—we talk about what we read, and we debate it. We don’t have a fixed truth, like you. We discuss texts, we discuss their exegesis, their interpretation, their commentaries. We have interpretations about interpretations about interpretations. You people aren’t like that.”
He fished a fat, slimy, dark-green strand out of the pond, pulling a face as he did so.
“‘You people’, you say. Just who do you mean, exactly?” I asked. I went and stood beside him. The fish gleamed under the surface. Two were white with orange patches. My coat touched Jakov’s. He continued to peer intently at the water, stroking the surface with the net, not budging aside at all. I noticed a constellation of spots on his red nose and forehead. He’d have to be careful not to get acne.
“You, the other people.”
“The non-Jewish population?”
“Catholics, certainly. And Muslims.”
“Do you think I’m Catholic?”
“You’re not a Muslim!” His joke seemed, like a deep sigh, to release some inner tension.
“In what language do you converse in the synagogue?”
“In Yiddish, modern Hebrew, French, English. There are many Jews who speak better English than French.”
“Don’t you ever talk Dutch?”
“Sometimes. Yes, of course. But by no means all Jews were born here or went to school here. We come from all over, as you know.”
The fish swam in circles. Occasionally the silver one, the only one that didn’t have orange blazes on its scales, gulped for air. Jakov danced round him with the net, working carefully.
“Ancient Hebrew isn’t the same as Ivrit, modern Hebrew. It’s the language of the Torah, our Holy Writ. It’s not a spoken language. Jews stopped speaking Hebrew long before the birth of Christ. Of course you know that very well, you study languages.”
As you know. Of course you know. These asides of his pricked me like fishhooks.
“So all those Antwerp Jews who speak Hebrew are in fact using a new form of an ancient language?” was all I could think of to say.
He stopped sweeping the net and turned round, raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly. A mocking, superior smile played on his lips. His glasses were smeared. I found the contrast touching.
“Or am I wrong?” I asked, beginning to get tired of waiting for Elzira. Was I allowed to count time spent waiting as time spent working? I should be. Every evening I arrived at their door at half past five. And according to Jakov’s bright-red Swatch it was now nearly six thirty. His watch was modern. Everything else about him was Orthodox.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know that Yiddish is the most commonly spoken language in Antwerp’s Jewish community!”
He’d hooked me again.
“Elzira told me Yiddish wasn’t taught at your school.”
“At our school, the religious subjects are taught in Hebrew.”
“Why?”
“We’re not Hasidic Jews,” he said, once again with that knowing air of mystery he cultivated. It made him seem opinionated, tough, scared and vulnerable all at once. “Haredi and Hasidic Jews belong to another group.”
“Am I supposed to know what you mean?”
“Haredi and Hasidic Jews are ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have their own rebbes and their own shuls.”
“You don’t?”
“We’re Modern Orthodox. We go to different synagogues and have different rabbis. Hasidic children go to different schools, which are much stricter about religion than ours. Assuming they go to a school that teaches secular subjects in the first place. In Belgium, children must be educated, but they don’t have to go to school. So in the very strictest groups, some children are home-schooled. They don’t have a curriculum; they only study the Torah and the Talmud—the interpretations of the Torah. Those are their frames of reference, those they will study and discuss throughout their lives, from the moment they get up to the moment they go to sleep. We are not like them. We do not close our eyes to modern society, we form part of it.”
“Hasidic Jews are the ones with the sidelocks, right? I’ve never seen boys wear such a jolly yarmulke as you,” I teased him.
He started, began to blush, felt to see if it still sat properly on his head and laughed. “A fine yarmulke, you must admit. Given to me by my grandmother. She brought it back from Israel, from a famous shop in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood in Jerusalem; there they sell almost nothing but hats and yarmulkes, thousands and thousands of them. In theory we can wear all colours. Haredi and Hasidic Jews can’t, they only wear black. And their kippahs are never crocheted, like mine. They’re made of velour.”
“When do you say kippah and when yarmulke?”
“There’s no difference, kippah, keppeltje, yarmulke, it’s all the same.”
“You could have your name crocheted in a yarmulke.”
“My name’s on the inside. Embroidered.”
“May I see?”
“No.”
“Say something to me in Hebrew.”
“Everyone has a different accent in Hebrew.” He turned back to the pond. The surface was clean. He checked the air pump and opened the tap to refresh the water.
“What sort of accent do you have, then?” I asked.
“The accent of a French-speaking Flemish Jew born in Antwerp, with roots that started off somewhere in Hungary, but also lie in the Netherlands,” he said.
“So you have family in the Netherlands?”
“Had. The Netherlands, Jews, war.”
“What do you mean?”
“Anne Frank wasn’t the only person to be betrayed by the Dutch, in case you thought that.”
“I don’t think that.”
“You should listen carefully when you hear Hebrew or Yiddish being spoken. Georgian Jews roll their ‘r’s. Jews from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria have a guttural ‘r’, they gargle like the Arabs.”
“As if I could hear that. As if I knew what country a Jew was from. To me, you all look alike!”
Once again, his eyebrows went up very pointedly.
“Some rabbis détestent modern Hebrew,” he went on. “They can’t abide that their holy language is reduced to a tool with which to papoter… That’s why the
language of communication is Yiddish and not modern Hebrew.”
“Papoter is French. You mean ‘chat’.”
“It takes aeons for the finest diamonds to reach their full brilliance. To me, ancient Hebrew is such a diamond. So I get it that people think you shouldn’t touch it. But let’s talk about something else, it’s not good to talk about this all the time.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not a Jew.”
This defensive, slightly superior attitude was familiar to me. Nima and I sometimes played the same game. He said I had no right to talk, because I was an outsider. I retorted in kind.
Like when someone rang the doorbell whom I didn’t feel like seeing. Nima just couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t answer. In his country that was unthinkable. He would quote an old Persian proverb: “A good hostess knows there is always enough water for an unexpected guest.” It meant that a meal for two could easily be turned into a meal for four if you added water to the dish.
“You’re not in Iran now,” I would respond. “Here, things are done differently. You couldn’t know, you weren’t born here.”
For my part, I couldn’t understand his boundless generosity. One day, when we were visiting my sister in Ghent and it turned out, while cooking a meal for us, that she’d run out of olive oil, Nima said, “I’ll just nip out and get some.” He came back with a five-litre can. Me: “Isn’t that a bit over the top?” Him: “In my country, you can never give too much, only too little.” “But we can’t even make ends meet ourselves!” “An Iranian doesn’t think like that.”
“These are koi,” Jakov said. “We’ll have to put wire netting over the pond, otherwise they’ll get eaten by herons. Herons just love kosher koi.” He laughed.
“Kosher koi? Surely you don’t eat them!”
“Joke. But we’re allowed to eat them. Koi are carp. We buy them in Israel. They’re just as good as the ones from Japan, but only half the price.”
“Aren’t those fish too big for a heron?”
“You never know. Prevention is better than care.”
“Prevention is better than cure.”
“You’re a goyte,” he said. He walked to the garden shed and hung the fishnet on a hook on its wall.
“What’s a goyte?”
“Feminine of goy.”
“And as a goyte I’m inferior? And you’re superior?”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What are you saying, then?”
“You don’t believe in the Messiah.”
“I don’t believe in anything.”
“Anything at all?”
“Well, if you must know, I believe in my boyfriend, Jakov. In love.”
Eleven
Elzira was right-handed.
And it was her right hand that failed her the most.
Yet even at the age of twelve, Elzira showed extraordinary feistiness. I’ve seen her, surrounded by relatives, open cards and parcels with beads of sweat pearling on her forehead, not from the heat or excitement about the contents, but because she knew everyone was looking at her: the more eyes on her, the more her hands would shake.
Though it cost her a huge effort to prise open the gift wrapping, though it would have been much easier for her to accept all the help that was offered, or to rip open an envelope in one go, she refused to let her deficient motor skills get the better of her and opened presents by herself, as calmly as she could. You could see from her seriousness that this battle between her and the wrappings was nothing less than a point of honour.
It had started suddenly, when she was five. At first, her parents thought their daughter was just highly strung. Or that she suffered from growth spasms. Maybe a nerve had got trapped somewhere. But when the tremor continued, day after day, they were worried enough to go to their doctor. The doctor sent them to a neurologist, the first in a long line of specialists the Schneiders consulted at home and abroad, Jewish and non-Jewish.
All the experts came up with much the same diagnosis: dyspraxia, a genetic disorder that has links with dyslexia.
The more tests that Elzira had to undergo, the clearer it became that her motor skills had been impaired right from birth.
She’d never managed to handle a knife and fork with ease. In shoe shops she chose moccasins, or shoes that fastened with Velcro, avoiding shoelaces and zips. She pretended not to like ball games, to mask her lack of skill. When, as a five-year-old, she refused to learn to ride a bike, her father and mother thought this was from religious motives: some of her little playmates came from ultrastrict families and they could neither ride bicycles nor sit on the back. The notion of their legs whirling about on the pedals, or dangling from the carrier, was anathema to Him.
One evening I found her sitting in her room crying, almost inaudibly. Perhaps she’d got a bad mark for her test, I thought. But the marked paper was lying in front of her, and I could see she’d done very well.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. She wiped away her tears. New ones immediately appeared.
Trembling, she began to hit her right hand with her left. Cautiously, I took hold of both her hands. She didn’t resist.
“Are you cross about something?” I asked.
She clenched her fists. “I go to the physiotherapist,” she said. “Twice a week after school. He was supposed to me guérir, to cure me. But it’s not getting better. And sometimes I go to a psychologist.”
That explained the mysterious appointments.
“Does the physiotherapist give you exercises to do?”
“All the time. And I have to do them at home. Throw balls and catch them, so that my eyes and hands react together, or something like that. Write down words. Tell the time. I have a book with exercises.”
“And the psychologist?”
“Talks to me.”
“And you talk back?”
“As much as I can. Sometimes I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“With me, that’s sometimes the same.”
“So this psychologist, is he Jewish?”
“Yes. And it’s not ‘he’ but a ‘she’. Most of her clients are Jewish. She speaks Yiddish and Hebrew. I speak to her en français.”
“Do you like talking to her?”
“She’s gentille.”
“Do you feel relieved afterwards?”
“I go on shaking.”
“You’ll have to be patient. Did she tell you whether you can expect to improve, and when?”
“She says she can’t guarantee anything.”
“But?”
“But what?”
“Did she say that the exercises will help? That talking will help?”
“I don’t know. I’m tired.”
“Shall we do some exercises together?” I suggested. “Where’s that booklet you got from your physiotherapist? Shall we play catch in the garden for half an hour?”
Elzira stared outside, every muscle tensed. Her skin was so translucent I could see the blue veins in her neck and temples.
“Are you crying because you’re scared your hand might never be steady?”
“Daddy will buy me an electric typewriter one day,” she said.
“That ought to make you happy,” I smiled.
“Daddy doesn’t want to buy the typewriter yet. Like you, he believes in exercise. He thinks I’m giving up if I stop writing by hand. If I can, at my young age, already replace my pen with a machine, he regards that as… He thinks then that I succombeer…”
“That I’m giving up: succomber means ‘to give up, to surrender’.”
“Yes, une défaite, he will think it a defeat.”
“The shaking will get less as you grow older,” I said reassu
ringly. “Your mummy and daddy told me. And they know, because of the doctors and test results.”
“But it will never go away altogether.”
Now we both stared outside.
“Congratulations on your French test,” I said after a while. “You got eight out of ten for verb endings! Not many girls could do that.”
“Could you please teach me to ride a bike?” she asked.
Twelve
After badgering them for weeks, Mr and Mrs Schneider finally gave me permission to teach their elder daughter to ride a bike. We were allowed to spend two hours a day on this activity every Sunday, from eleven to one, on condition that I took Elzira to a place where she could fall safely, away from traffic, and where she couldn’t suffer loss of face.
The idea of their daughter lying on the ground with her legs in the air in one of the streets of the Jewish neighbourhood horrified the Schneiders. In a neighbourhood where no one knew her, no one could gossip about her.
I walked alongside her, pushing her brand-new bicycle, heading for a park near the banks of the Scheldt.
Christmas trees had been put up in some of the streets.
“Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, right?” I said.
“I think those lights are very pretty,” Elzira said. Her breath made little clouds in the cold air.
She walked with short strides. She was wearing a long, black velvet pencil skirt that restricted her leg movements. Pretty and modest, but decidedly impractical for cycling. We both wore leather gloves: mine were red, hers black.
Elzira, it soon turned out, had never before crossed the avenues that bisected the city centre by herself. “Not even with friends.” She’d never before gone on foot to this side of Antwerp. On the rare occasions that she visited a non-Jewish neighbourhood, she would travel by car, on the back seat of her father’s white Volvo. The Schneider girls seldom went by bus or tram, certainly not on their own. If it was raining very heavily, they would take a taxi to and from school. They would find these taxi firms in the Jewish community’s own telephone book, or in Koopjesplus, the Antwerp Jewish Advertiser, which plugged cheap reflexology sessions, group tours to Switzerland, special offers on detergents or kosher cake for special events in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French, Dutch and even Georgian.