by J. S. Margot
Bicycle bells tinkled from the street. A dog barked. I could hear a low ticking sound: pigeons pecking up food in the courtyard, I thought. I could see that Nima was scared.
He gestured with his chin at the walls. They were covered with photos of Western fashion models. I recognized Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista. In among their portraits, Marjane had stuck up daubed photos of herself.
Twenty
We took her to an Iranian doctor in Brussels. She didn’t say a single word. Neither to us, nor the doctor. She was injected with a sedative and given a prescription for more tranquillizers. It was only when we were in the doctor’s surgery that I saw her head was covered in bald patches. Marjane had been pulling out her hair.
I asked if she minded me wiping the make-up off her face. When she didn’t answer, I took a tissue and bent over her. She pushed me away. I handed her a few tissues. She didn’t respond.
We went to a hotel. I filled the bath and invited her to get in. She crawled to the very end of the bed and stayed there without moving.
I washed her jumper. She put it back on when it was still wet. I also washed the other clothes we’d taken from her flat, but she paid them no heed. She was emaciated: her jeans hung from her waist, several sizes too big. “This isn’t my sister, this is a shadow of the Marjane I know,” Nima said, more to himself than me.
While we were in the hotel he rang some friends.
They came to fetch us. We spent two nights at their place. A lot of telephone calls were made on Marjane’s behalf. Everyone was kind to her. She wouldn’t allow anyone near her, wouldn’t communicate at all.
A psychiatrist came. She still wouldn’t say anything; her eyes remained blank.
The psychiatrist, who knew a smattering of Farsi, talked to Nima. She prescribed yet more medication for his sister.
One of the friends drove us to Antwerp. My study was transformed into Marjane’s bedroom.
In Antwerp we went to yet another doctor, who had her admitted to a psychiatric clinic. But Marjane refused to stay. She returned to our flat, sought out the far corner of our sofa and just sat there. She wouldn’t eat anything. We bought Suzy waffles; those she did nibble at. She leafed through magazines, forever cutting and tearing out photos of white-skinned fashion models. The dark tint of her own skin obsessed her; she constantly tried to it wipe away or conceal it, using whatever came to hand. Next to her bed stood a packet of powdered sugar she’d taken from our larder. She’d sprinkled it on her face.
After a while she wanted to go out. If you went with her, she shook you off. If you followed her at a distance, worried that something might happen to her, muddled and dozy as she was, she would just stand stock still and not go another step.
In the end, we let her go alone. We no longer knew how to deal with her, or the whole situation.
We put notes in her jacket pocket with our address and telephone number.
Sometimes she’d disappear for a whole day and a night, and Nima, no longer able to contain his anxiety, would go looking for her. He would walk the streets of the old city, to which she fled time and again. She had a preference for the cathedral and for the church of St Paul’s, stony bastions of religion and history.
One night Marjane was brought home by a police officer. He’d seen her wandering the streets around St Paul’s for hours and was worried that, so near the red light district, she might get assaulted, or might walk to the river Scheldt and jump in.
He’d tried to get her to talk to him. She told him, in English, that she wanted to go back to Iran, that she wanted to be with her parents and the rest of the family. She’d allowed him to take her home. While the policeman drank a cup of tea in our flat, she rubbed her cheeks furiously, making them redder, not paler.
She gave off a peculiar smell: of something unhealthy.
“Something in her has died,” Nima confirmed.
Twenty-One
“And this is my mother,” Mr Schneider said. His wife and four children were lined up behind him in the dining room, which was furnished in a sparse, modern style. Only the sideboard struck a more old-fashioned note: it was crammed with framed family photos, at least fifty of them, all jumbled up together. “We’d like her to come and live with us, but she doesn’t want that, n’est-ce pas, maman?”
Seated at the long table, which was covered in dishes, platters and bowls full of delicacies, a wiry, dignified woman nodded at me. She was dressed entirely in black, right down to her hair net.
Suddenly my red Champion tracksuit felt horribly garish. Sweat trickled down my back. I could smell the coconut-scented shampoo I’d washed my hair with the evening before. The scent emphasized my presence even more.
The idea had been to drop off a book for Elzira on my daily run. I thought it might be useful for the talk she was preparing for her Dutch class, on organic farming. I hadn’t intended to stay, but to run straight back home.
Grandmother Schneider, who turned out to be called Gabriella Pappenheim—she’d taken her second husband’s name—beckoned me over.
When I got to her chair, she gestured that she wanted to whisper something in my ear. Before I’d even bent over, she said, in anything but a whisper, that Elzira was full of praise for me and that Jakov, to her surprise, didn’t seem to find me objectionable. Jakov heard this. He began to blush but recovered.
I hadn’t realized I’d rung their doorbell on a Jewish holiday, and I didn’t even know what holiday it was. But when the intercom didn’t respond and when shortly afterwards Simon came and opened the door manually and then didn’t take the lift—Schindler—but the stairs, I realized I’d violated their rules.
Might it be Pesach, perhaps? There were lighted candles and bowls of pickled cabbage and cranberries. Along with hummus, halved avocados, fried cauliflower florets and the creamy aubergine and sesame paste dip that Nima called baba ganoush but the Schneiders salat hatzilim. For all I knew they were celebrating Purim, Jewish carnival. Or did this dish featuring a gigantic carp flanked by bowls of pickled herring mean it was Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles?
Once I’d brought some caviar as a present. “Extremely kind and thoughtful of you,” Mr Schneider had thanked me, “but most species of sturgeon don’t comply with our dietary laws, so we can’t take the risk of eating this roe, and we’re not allowed to profit from the sale of non-kosher food either, so—and please don’t take this the wrong way—I’d appreciate your taking that tin home again, because it would be a shame to leave it here.”
Don’t ask me if alcohol was drunk at their table that day. I can’t even remember whether it was afternoon or evening when this family gathering took place, winter or summer. But there was a steaming pot of tea on the table that smelt of mint. And Jakov was opening a bottle of Coke, and if I hadn’t whipped a platter away from under the bottle in time, the fizzy drink would have dripped onto the plaited loaf of bread.
His grandmother saw my quick, subtle intervention, and she smiled from me to Jakov. I smiled back and had the ridiculous feeling that no more was needed to create a bond between us.
She made a deep impression on me. The warmth of her voice seemed in keeping with her frail stature. Her eyes sparkled more brightly than the pearls around her neck, which, like her face, was deeply wrinkled. She radiated a kind of volcanic intensity, as if both death and life were contained in her.
Before I knew the Schneiders, I’d never met any Orthodox Jews. Now, for the first time, I was in the company of someone who’d been in a camp, who’d survived the Holocaust. I felt a deep longing to tell her all about Marjane. It seemed to me she’d be able to understand Marjane’s pain, and perhaps know how we should deal with it.
Granny Pappenheim took my hand. Looking at her hand, it was impossible to conceive that less than fifty years ago, this imposing woman had been taken off to Auschwitz. That that hand had ex
perienced the camp. She smiled at me, then looked at the chair next to her, which I took to be an invitation to sit down.
Carefully, with one hand, I pulled the chair back. “We must pack up some tasty things for you to take back home,” she said. “I hear you have a husband. He must be waiting for you.”
She continued to hold my hand for a while, squeezing it as children do, and lovers. Her warmth spilt over into me, but the sweat on my back felt cold.
Twenty-Two
My meeting with grandmother Pappenheim must have had something to do with it; when Mr Schneider appeared in the doorway of Jakov’s room, poised to tell the joke about the German, the Frenchman and the Israeli who were shipwrecked on a desert island for the umpteenth time, I interrupted his mock jollity: “Jakov has told me that your mother, Mrs Pappenheim, survived Auschwitz. What I don’t understand, and what I keep wondering is: where were you born? In… the camp?”
Mr Schneider turned solemn. He came into the room and went and sat on Jakov’s bed, under the gaze of the eight rabbis.
“Where’s Jakov?” he asked.
“He’s still in the kitchen,” I answered.
“That boy is always hungry. He’ll eat us out of house and home.”
He looked at me, stroked his beard and said: “We Jews have always had a great feel for language. But all the words in the world would not suffice to describe what it was like in the camps or to comprehend the manifestation of so much evil. How could anyone who has not experienced these horrors talk about them? When even those who have gone through these things and survived are unable or unwilling to find words to describe them? Do you understand why we choose to be silent? Silence is the way of least betrayal.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I was just wondering.”
He was silent. We were silent. For a long time.
“Do you know that a few years ago my mother suffered a heart attack?” he began. “It happened at Knokke, on the seafront. She felt a sharp pain on the left side of her chest. Concluding that it must be a heart attack, she walked to the nearest taxi stand and had herself driven to the hospital emergency department. On arrival, they had to carry her out of the taxi on a stretcher. Yet she still had the presence of mind to give her name and age, and, just before she lost consciousness, told the medical staff that she should not be revived under any circumstances whatsoever, n’est-ce pas. An operation, okay. But resuscitation, no way. Do you understand the point of this story?”
“Yes,” I said. But I hadn’t the faintest.
“That her will to survive and her cool-headedness are a legacy of the camp,” he enlightened me.
Jakov entered the room. He looked a bit surprised, but plopped down next to his father. His glasses were all smeared again.
“Our children know the general outline of their family history,” Mr Schneider said, greeting his son with a nod. “If they want, we will tell them everything, n’est-ce pas. But for the time being they don’t feel any need for this information, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s fine. The general outline’s bad enough. You have to stop somewhere.”
There were three wraps on the plate in Jakov’s hand, filled with home-made falafel. He stuffed the first roll into his mouth like a sausage and, as he chewed, gazed at his father, who continued his account.
“My father managed to evade the Nazis’ clutches until late 1944,” Mr Schneider said. “But then he and others were betrayed and arrested. Weakened by his ordeal, he died of typhus in Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
Jakov stopped eating and put the half-eaten wrap back on the plate, which he placed on the edge of his desk. I loved the smell of pickled cabbage, it reminded me of my childhood. Now, though, it made me feel sick.
“I’m willing to answer your question,” Mr Schneider said, “if from now on you promise to talk about the future. We know our past. It informs our present, from morning to evening, and it’s one of the reasons why we cling so steadfastly to our traditions. Our parents were murdered for who they were. We have a moral duty to stand up for them. To defend their way of life, which is also ours.”
I nodded.
Jakov looked at his father almost imploringly. It wasn’t clear to me what the downturned corners of his mouth signified: “Daddy, stop it,” or “Daddy, please go on.”
“I was born at the beginning of the war, at a place where my parents were living in hiding. At my mother’s insistence, I was immediately placed in the keeping of a non-Jewish farmer and his wife, in Wallonia, in the south of Belgium. Those people took good care of me. For the first five years of my life my name was Pierre—that was what they called me. After the war, my mother came to fetch me. That was painful for everyone, not least those brave people to whom I am eternally grateful… In those five years I had become their little son.” He cleared his throat. “My mother didn’t even want me to be circumcised, you know. She knew, even before the war had properly started, that being circumcised might mean my death. But my father could not bring himself to comply with her wish. He wished to carry out this rite on the eighth day after my birth as our religion prescribes, and so it came to pass.”
There was no embarrassment in the room, only an attentive silence occasionally broken by noises from the kitchen: the rattle of plates, the clatter of cutlery. I’d never seen Jakov look so serious.
“Can you name one of the main characteristics of coolheadedness?” Mr Schneider asked. He turned to me and Jakov but didn’t wait for an answer. “Cool-headedness is knowing when to speak and when to be silent. My mother knew that. She didn’t have to know the names of all the SS officers in the camp. As long as those SS officers knew who she was. She understood very well that she had to distinguish herself from the faceless group, the group dismissed as ‘dirty Jews’… Everyone in the camp knew my mother was called Gabriella and that, besides her sister, she also had two daughters with her—my sisters. She made sure of that: that in her inconspicuousness she became conspicuous.”
Mr Schneider stood up. Because he wanted to end this conversation, I presumed, and I was relieved. I’d wanted to know where he was born. But I knew my question was disingenuous. I hadn’t quite believed that he was born during the war. Now I’d heard enough. Had probably already gone too far.
Mr Schneider closed one of the curtains and sat down on the bed again.
“The history of our people is built on this cool-headedness,” he went on. “We know what discrimination and inequality are. We know that above all we have to be smart to save our skins. Look at Abraham, the very first Jew on earth, father of Isaac, the boy who was nearly sacrificed to God. When in the power of the King of the Philistines, Abraham could only think of one way to survive: he pretended that his beautiful wife Sara—after whom our Sara is named—was his sister. The King saw Sara as a prize worth having. He took her into his harem, and so the couple was saved.”
I nodded.
Despite being raised a Catholic, I didn’t know much about Abraham, Sara or the Philistines. But I did know that refugees, whether political or economic, would go to great lengths to save their skins.
“Or take another example,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts, “the mother of Moses, who placed her child in a basket on the river.”
Once again I nodded. I knew that story.
“My mother always said she followed the example of Moses’ mother, though it cost her great pain. I wasn’t put in a basket. But I was shipped off to another place for my own safety.”
That had also happened to Nima, of course, but I didn’t think it appropriate to say so. Nevertheless, I was sorry it hadn’t occurred to Mr Schneider to make that comparison.
“Yet that cool-headedness didn’t help your people against the Nazis,” I said.
“That’s true. We hadn’t appreciated how evil humans could be. No one had ever thought twentieth-century Europeans capable of such horrif
ic acts.”
“Did you ever go back to your foster family in Wallonia?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Repudiation is part of the necessary silence,” Mr Schneider answered softly, looking at me with eyes that had welled up with tears. “There are two kinds of sorrow, remember that. One that can bear being prodded. And one so great that you have to keep your distance from it, even when asked apparently innocent questions.”
Twenty-Three
Elzira could be moody. Not just with those predecessors of mine who’d only lasted a few weeks. With me too.
Sometimes I’d arrive to find her just sitting there, in the office or in her room, her head propped on her hands, staring out of the window or into space. Immobile. Calm. Mysterious. Withdrawn.
She wouldn’t respond to anything. Not to the books I put in front of her. Not to my greeting, which I sometimes repeated ten times. Not to any of the jokes that I came up with on the spot, hoping to break the ice. At most she’d grant me a distant, friendly little nod, without the least affectation. Sometimes she’d start singing, and seemed unable to stop. One song came back over and over again, a little tune full of shalom aleichem. I remember, too, how one evening she sat there imperturbably for hours, declining the verb s’asseoir in different tenses: present, past and simple future. She just couldn’t master the last one, remarking drily that while most people wrestled with the past, she, young as she was, didn’t even know how to cope with the future. At that, I burst out laughing, and then she did too, and it was as if our shared laughter brought something into being, a momentum that I could feel, and that she surely sensed too. Suddenly, though, her laugh was switched off like a light, and she went back to just staring into space. I tried teasing her about her stubbornness—it was more sinewy than the veins that ran like cables over her jaw and neck, I told her. She merely shrugged. But a little later she went and looked in the mirror.