by J. S. Margot
“After the war many Jews changed their surnames. For fear of getting targeted and arrested again.”
After recounting their own experiences of anti-Semitism, Jakov said the boys had talked about other attacks on their personal and collective integrity. Not long before, a restaurant had been blown up in Paris, in Rue des Rosiers, at the centre of the Jewish neighbourhood. They talked about the attack on the synagogue in Rue Copernic, which they’d all heard about at home.
As the train crossed the Belgian border near Roosendaal, Mr V. had clapped his hands and concluded that the boys’ self-confidence had got torn. He told them they needed to do something about it. After all, if you could mend a tear in your jacket, surely you could mend a tear in your self-confidence? He’d then wondered aloud whether observant Jews might just share some responsibility for these nails on which anti-Semites got caught. And then he really got started. Why did the boys, just when their values needed defending, retreat into the trenches of society? Why was this community as tightly closed as a fort? Why didn’t they admit non-Jews to their world?
The pupils had discussed the issue until the train reached the outskirts of Antwerp, and as it rumbled towards Central Station, they’d pointed to the shuls and the diamond district, with a turnover worth billions, surrounded by run-down blocks of flats, the balconies full of junk, rubbish bins and black clothing hung out to dry.
By the time they got off they felt utterly drained. Never before, outside the shul or yeshiva, had they talked so long and so freely about their Jewishness.
*
But it meant that Jakov still had to write a report on his visit to the Anne Frank House.
“I can help you formulate your observations and conclusions,” I told him. “But you’ll need to tell me what you thought of the museum.”
When I was young, I’d been blown away by The Diary of Anne Frank, just as I’d been blown away by Christiane F.* I’d never visited the museum.
“I didn’t like it at all,” he answered.
It gradually became clear that he hadn’t paid attention during the guided tour. He couldn’t remember anything, in fact, apart from the cramped little attic room. He’d hardly been able to follow a word the guide said: “He spoke so quickly and indistinctly, even worse than a Fleming.” He hadn’t bought a book in the museum shop: “It’s just a racket, I wasn’t going to fall for it.” He hadn’t even brought back a brochure as a souvenir.
“So how do I write a report without any material?” he asked.
“We could go to the library.”
“But then we’d lose even more time.”
“Not really.”
“We’ll just have to manage with what we’ve got.”
“We haven’t got anything.”
“That’s why I’m asking you to help me.”
“Suppose we join up the dots?” I suggested. “We’ll link your personal stories from the train to Anne’s experiences. We’ll ask ourselves whether there’s a connection between what happened to Anne and her people and your collective reflex to hide in certain situations.”
“I can’t imagine how you’d tackle that.”
“We’ll do it together.”
“You’re being too ambitious. It needs to be simpler. I’m no great shakes at this kind of thing, maths is more my line.”
“Do you remember how you blushed, Jakov, the first time I sat next to you in this room?” I asked.
He looked me straight in the eye, again with raised eyebrows behind smeared spectacle lenses.
“When you’re conscious of blushing, you feel horribly conspicuous: you want the earth to swallow you up. When it doesn’t, you blush even more. But people who don’t know they’re blushing—or just don’t care—don’t have that problem. In other words, everything starts with that strong sense of self-consciousness.”
He continued to stare at me: “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Could you please get to the point?”
“In your report, we’re going to ask ourselves whether the contemporary Jewish fear of persecution has a historic explanation. Is your instinct to retreat into your own fortress the result of centuries of being persecuted? Perhaps the Jews are more self-conscious than anyone else in this country. With all the reflexes that go along with it.”
“Like Elzira’s hands?”
“What do you mean?”
“My sister’s shaking gets worse as soon as she knows she’s shaking.”
“Exactly. And being ashamed of her condition only makes things worse.”
“I’m not ashamed of being Jewish! And you can’t compare my culture to a disorder!”
“There are times when you’d like to conceal your belief.”
“Being a Jew is more than a belief. It’s a way of life. My way of life! This is pointless. You don’t get it at all.”
“But even in a country where there’s freedom of religion, you’re frightened to profess your faith.”
“Because I’m scared of the consequences, tiens, not because I’m ashamed! I’m proud to be Jewish!”
“Okay. Sorry. I should have put it differently. But you get my meaning.”
“Mr V. would know I hadn’t written a report like that by myself. He’d spot straight away that a goy had a hand in it.”
“Not if we do it properly.”
“That’s to say, if he doesn’t lose his job.” And then Jakov mumbled something about the rebbe and how Mr V. had been given a dressing-down by the yeshiva’s board of directors for overstepping his bounds by insinuating to the children that, just by “being who they were”, they perhaps helped to create a climate of anti-Semitism.
“So anyone who says something you don’t like is sent packing?” I asked him. I wanted to defend this teacher, precisely because he’d had the guts to ask the boys some relevant questions.
Jakov pushed a pen and paper under my nose. “Let’s get started.”
* An exposé of the Berlin drugs scene in the 1970s, based on the experiences of a teenage girl.
Eighteen
“So you’re going to work for those Jews, in your stretch pants and short skirts?” Milena asked. She was the girlfriend of Serge, a fellow student who was happy to let others copy his essays and beautifully clear lecture notes.
Milena worked in a boutique on Keyserlei that was so expensive I didn’t even dare look in the window.
“I can’t believe they don’t chuck you out!” she went on.
I was surprised and irritated. It had never occurred to me not to wear my stretch pants, or a miniskirt and T-shirt. And it never seemed to bother the Schneiders.
“Elzira, the elder daughter, even copies me,” I said. “She wears the same kind of clothes, the same brands.”
Recently, Elzira had started wearing a black T-shirt with a white long-sleeved blouse underneath. If, despite the air con, it got too hot in her room, she’d roll the sleeves of her white blouse up to her elbows, never higher. She seemed proud of that T-shirt.
My favourite trousers were a pair of Jean-Paul Gaultier stretch pants I’d snapped up in a second-hand shop. I wore them until the seat almost wore away. They were light grey, with a print of dark-brown and yellow skulls. They could hardly have been more eye-catching.
One day, Elzira had casually asked what brand they were. A few weeks later, in her bathroom, she showed me her brand-new, burgundy Gaultier dress. Floor-length and close-fitting, it had a high neck and long sleeves. I encouraged her to put it on—which she did, after a lot of persuading. She looked stunning in it. You wouldn’t have thought she was only twelve or thirteen.
She bought tights of the same brand I wore: Wolford, an Austrian brand that had just teamed up with some French fashion designers, and was fast becoming hip. Elzira went for plain dark-blue and black tights,
not the patterned ones I preferred.
“Real Jewesses are the worst customers you can imagine,” Milena said. She spoke the word “Jewess” as if it tasted really bad. The tone of her voice, the conviction with which she spoke and her look were familiar to me: the same as when people talked about Nima and his kind.
I never spoke of Jewesses. The word stuck in my throat. Made me think of the Holocaust. Seemed light years away from the confident, elegant Mrs Schneider, sweet Elzira and energetic little Sara.
“‘Real’ Jewesses?” I repeated. The use of the word “real” in this context was alas all too familiar. “But he’s not a real Muslim”, “You can’t call him a real Iranian!” and “Nima isn’t a real refugee”: I’d lost count of the times I’d heard things like that. Mostly from people who didn’t know a single Iranian besides Nima, people who’d never yet met a Muslim or refugee.
“The rich ultra-Orthodox ones,” Milena said. “They’re terrible. For one thing, they refuse to use the mirrors in the shop. Suppose a male customer were to come in and catch them twirling around in plain sight? So my boss—who bends over backwards to accommodate them—has even installed a special large changing room for these Jewesses.”
“Aren’t other women allowed in?”
“Yes. But he designed it for them.”
“Well I like Elzira and her little sister, they’re sweet girls,” I said.
“And Madame?”
“Mrs Schneider is a very nice woman.”
“Who knows, she might be one of our clients. All the rich Jewesses shop with us. Is she one of those haughty, English-speaking ones?”
“She speaks French and Dutch.”
“Oh, the French-speaking ones are the worst.”
“The family’s well off, it’s true. But they don’t show off their wealth. The children aren’t spoilt. They study all the time: their lives revolve around intellectual development. They don’t go out at all, not even the oldest. My childhood was quite different. I was already partying at fourteen—going to dances at the church hall.”
“And Mijnheer works in the diamond trade, I take it? That’s what all Jews do.”
Once again I thought of Nima and of the difficulty we’d had finding somewhere to live. The owner of a flat we viewed near Marnixplein was quick to air his opinions: “All Muslims are the same. Don’t get me started. Before you know it they’ll be slaughtering sheep on your balcony.”
That had been two years ago. Soon afterwards we found a really nice apartment near Vlaamse Kaai. But I couldn’t cycle past Marnixplein without those images coming back to me.
“Those rich madammen rarely come into our shop with their husbands. They’re usually with other Jewesses. I shouldn’t really say this, I know, but they’re just like spiders spinning their webs. They plot together. They won’t let you into their world. They’ll gobble you up if you get too close.”
“Please, Milena.”
“Try working in our shop for a few weeks! Those real Jewesses try on all the clothes and never hang anything back. They like to make as much mess as possible. They like to see us work. The ‘chosen ones’ want us to be their slaves.”
“Guess they don’t try on any stretch pants,” I kidded.
“Ha, don’t you believe it! Young Jewesses try on everything. They want to know how they’d look in leggings or a miniskirt. Or in a skirt with a high split, and push-up panties. Our changing rooms are the only place they can do that! You can’t teach me anything about Jewesses!”
“What time will Serge get home?”
“They accused our boss of anti-Semitism.”
“Who?”
“Those supposedly chosen people, who themselves act in a totally racist way! Do you know how these superior beings interpret our returns policy? Officially, customers have three weeks to return an unworn item of clothing. If it’s not damaged, they get their money back. Do you know what these real Jewesses do?”
I shrugged. I felt very tired.
“They make a sport of buying expensive clothes, wearing them at one of their many parties with the price tag tucked away, and then bringing them back, claiming: ‘I haven’t worn it so give me my money back.’ If you have the nerve to point out signs of wear, those Jewesses call you an anti-Semite, and write to the manager and the city council. Like I said, they’re the worst.”
Nineteen
Every two months, Nima’s mother would send us a food parcel from Tehran. Not because she feared her children would starve, but because she hoped that familiar delicacies would assuage their homesickness.
Amongst other things we received tins of the world’s finest and costliest caviar, the roe of wild Beluga and Ossetra sturgeon from the Caspian Sea. When we were struggling to make ends meet we would sell the caviar to the chef of a famous Antwerp restaurant. The proprietor of a local delicatessen regularly bought Medjool dates from us, selling the fleshy fruits at ten times the price he paid us. The pistachio nuts and spices—saffron, baharat spice blend and whole sacks of dried dill—we kept, along with the basmati rice and the dried limes that Nima used in all kinds of sauces.
His mother always addressed the food parcels to us. Inside, the contents were usually divided into separate sections, the idea being that we’d deliver the things marked with Marjane’s name to her. This we were almost never able to do. Nima had virtually no contact with his sister, who lived in Schaerbeek, just north of Brussels. Every now and again they rang each other, but that was it. In the years I’d been with Nima, he’d tried about five times to visit Marjane. But although he’d always arranged it with her in advance, she was never at home at the agreed time.
In her last telephone conversation with her son, Nima’s mother had urged him to visit his sister. She’d tried many times to reach her daughter, but in vain. It seemed that Marjane’s telephone had been cut off. The number no longer existed, and she and her husband were so worried they couldn’t sleep.
So Nima set off on the train to Brussels, without a rendezvous but with caviar.
I went with him.
When his sister didn’t open the door, we pressed all the doorbells of the building, which looked like an ordinary house but to judge by the names was home to at least thirty people.
An old man who spoke a language we didn’t understand let us in. We asked to see Marjane and he pointed to a basement entrance at the back of the narrow hallway. The floor of the hallway was awash with post and flyers. Sifting through the huge pile we found around ten letters addressed to Marjane, almost all from utility companies. A few cards had been left by the postman: “A registered letter addressed to you could not be delivered. It can be collected from the nearest post office.” Without speaking we went downstairs. Mould crept up the walls of the staircase. The steps were sticky with dirt.
The basement door was unlocked.
There was no light on in the first room—the kitchen—and the two vents that might have let in sunlight were covered with cobwebs and dust. The cooker looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in months, the porcelain sink was cracked and piled full of dirty pans and crockery. The only “view” of the outside world was of the pavement: through the grime you could just make out the feet of passers-by.
Wrappings from packets of Suzy waffles lay scattered everywhere. A grim pile of grey and crumpled washing was heaped in a corner. A couple of photos of Marjane and Nima, taken when they were infants, had been stuck up on the wall. We had the same ones at home: charming portraits taken in the same studio, with the same background and the same sheepskin rug that contrasted so nicely with their jet-black hair, their coal-dark eyes and their long eyelashes and dark eyebrows. Marjane’s skin was darker than Nima’s. She’d inherited her colouring from her father, Nima more from his mother.
Nima looked round the room. He chewed fiercely on the inside of his cheeks and bit his lip.
In the next room, separated from the kitchen by a thin piece of cloth, lay a grubby mattress. A bedside table made of wooden fruit crates was covered with glossy magazines. I bent down and found, amid a scattering of broken lipsticks and bottles of nail varnish, a folder with clippings of fashion models. Red and blue stripes had been drawn over their faces, sometimes delicately, sometimes savagely.
From the tone of Nima’s voice when he called me into an adjacent room, I could hear something was wrong. I hurried in his direction. I’d heard it said that people don’t age gradually. That when you’re dealt a real blow—one that breaks your spirit—it can happen from one day to the next. In the space of a few seconds Nima looked a changed man.
We were standing in the bathroom. The shower was primitive: a yellowish plastic affair. A makeshift partition had been erected to screen the leaky toilet. The stench from the drain was overpowering. Behind the partition, in a damp corner, stood a table on which a round mirror had been placed. The table was brightly lit by a lamp with just a bare bulb. A woman was sitting at it. A woman who didn’t seem real. Not sitting erect, but hunched up. Her face was covered with white powder, like a geisha’s. Her bright-red lips were clown-like, made bigger with lipstick. Her eyes, under which dark circles showed, stared fixedly at the mirror.
Nima fell on his knees. The floorboards cracked under his unexpected weight, the table wobbled. He threw his arms around his sister, who remained as motionless as a plastic doll. The house was so silent that Nima’s soft crying sounded loud. The hairs on my arms stood on end. “My little sister, my little sister,” Nima sobbed, in Farsi, French and Dutch, “Marjane, Marjane, Marjane, what’s happened to you Marjane, pardonne-moi, forgive me, kheyli motasefam, khahare azizam…” His tears wet her cheeks, which he kissed; he kissed her forehead too, but Marjane did not respond, not even when he put his head in her lap, held her hands and said that he would help her, that everything was going to be okay, that he would take care of her.