by J. S. Margot
Twenty-Seven
Elzira begged and begged for a dog and was given a dachshund. She named the hairy little red sausage Monsieur, even though Jakov had argued passionately for him to be called Mazel Tov. Elzira had no objection, but Daddy didn’t think it such a good idea.
Monsieur was a four-month-old puppy when he swapped his kennel for the Schneider residence. He smelt of the litter, of wet dog squared, which Elzira found delectable. She carried the animal around like a teddy bear, burying her nose in its coat.
She rang to tell me the good news.
“I thought dogs were unclean,” I blurted out. Pious Muslims believed that, I knew, so I assumed that pious Jews thought no differently. After all, both religions had their own, similar slaughtering rites. Plus they both shunned sausages, chops and other pork dishes.
“Do you know what the Hebrew word for dog is?” she asked, knowing very well that I didn’t speak Hebrew. “Kélèv. And do you know what ké-lèv literally means? Comme le coeur. Like the heart! We Jews love dogs, they are like our hearts; we have to look after them well, that’s what it says in the Talmud and the Torah.” The way she said the words Talmud and Torah, in her slight French accent, made it seem as if the books were walking on high heels.
During our phone call I shared her joy. But privately I was thinking: another pup that’s destined for the dogs’ home. The deep-pile white carpet alone! They really didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.
Elzira did well at school: her marks see-sawed above the class average. Whenever she did get a fail, it was because of her dyspraxia. There was some overlap with dyslexia, so she mixed up letters. And when she had to draw maths diagrams with a compass, the lines shot all over the place. But she did get full marks for biology, which, by the by, seemed very light on sex education. The illustrations in Jakov’s textbooks, I discovered, were different from those in Elzira’s: Jakov didn’t get to see a front-on picture of the vagina.
“By loving a dog, she will learn to love herself more.” This, or something of the kind, had been whispered to me one day by Mrs Schneider as she placed a cup of tea in front of me, along with some buttered matzos sprinkled with sugar.
Since Jakov’s condom exploit, Mrs Schneider had got into the habit of coming up to the room each evening bearing a tasty snack: from matzos to half an avocado with olive oil and coarse salt from an enormous tub, from almond cookies to chocolate or cheesecake, from asperges à la flamande to vanilla ice cream with strawberries.
“But your lovely carpet?” I asked Elzira.
“I’ll teach him to wipe his feet.”
“I’ve never seen Jewish people walking a dog.”
“That’s true,” she laughed, “Granny says, dans son Yiddish: ‘Az a Jid hot a hunt, iz der Jid kejn Jid oder der hunt kein hunt.’ If a Jew has a dog, either the Jew isn’t a Jew or the dog isn’t a dog. Je sais. It’s une exception. But then, so am I.”
Hearing her speak Yiddish sparked a kind of homesickness in me, as if the sound, the rhythm, the music of the language took me back to long-gone times in Limburg, linked me to people of many generations ago.
“In Israel, certainly in Tel Aviv, a lot of Jews have dogs. Not in Antwerp, je sais. I’m an exception. I don’t know why that is. Hasidic Jews aren’t allowed to have a dog, I think, je sais pas; I think that hairy pets are unclean, and that Hasidic Jews are only allowed to keep goldfish. Or koi.” Her mischievous smile really suited her.
The office on the ground floor became Monsieur’s doghouse. After he arrived, the doors to the walled garden were kept open all year round, even though it took over six months before Monsieur, thanks to the loving patience of his little mistress, sought out the lawn of his own accord to do his business. Elzira always cleaned up after him, including his little accidents in the room. Opris, the Romanian home help, removed the dirty paw marks he left on the carpet. But Elzira trained Monsieur to frisk about on a special doggy doormat before dashing down the corridor. When Elzira was at school, Opris took charge of Monsieur, taking him on the bus to parks for long walks. If she had too much other work she would ask her daughter, who was about my age, to help out.
It was Elzira and no one else who, over the space of several months, taught the dachshund to stop chewing the legs of desks and chairs, and not to touch her insoles and shoelaces (her father had made her learn to tie laces, sometimes with a stopwatch ticking). One day Monsieur chewed all the corners off a holy book. How he managed to reach it was a mystery. That was the only day no one had a smile for him.
Elzira kept Monsieur fed and watered, dabbed the sleep crusts out of the corners of his eyes with lukewarm water, inspected his paws and belly for ticks and other insects, washed him when he needed it and, even when he didn’t need it, deposited him in an oblong, plastic tub. After a while, on hot days, Monsieur would go and sit in his bath of his own accord; he enjoyed splashing around. The floor of the doghouse was littered with balls, and chewy toys lay everywhere. Many were shaped like shoes, with shoelaces and all.
Because Elzira was worried that one day Monsieur might tumble into the pond, she got her parents’ permission to ask the odd-job man to cordon it off with terracotta flower pots. By that time the koi had all died, or been snapped up by a heron.
From the day that Monsieur entered her life, Elzira got up promptly three-quarters of an hour earlier than usual. In the afternoon she would cycle home, whatever the weather, as quickly as possible: “O, comme je suis contente that I can cycle!” She no longer ate her lunch at the kitchen table, but spent her lunch break in the garden with Monsieur. Mikaela, a classmate, would come along with Elzira during the break or after school, and became her best friend. The girls played together and chatted away. Mikaela and Elzira weren’t allowed to go farther than two blocks away on their own. When they went for a longer walk, someone had to go with them: Opris, Opris’s daughter or me.
After a few months, the dachshund was used to trotting next to his mistress on a lead. Elzira soon mastered the extendable lead: a real test of her motor skills. I’d never seen her so relaxed and happy throwing balls—the hand-eye coordination exercise she usually detested—as to her eager little companion, the first love of her life, Monsieur.
Twenty-Eight
Jakov’s parents believed their son when he told them I had nothing to do with his condom enterprise.
The affair even had a positive effect on our relationship: he asked for my help more often. But we could never get started without him first making a song and dance about the Dutch language.
“Why do I have to spend my time and energy on a poxy language like Dutch?”
“I’m not making you do anything. But you’re being educated in Dutch. If you hate Dutch so much, maybe you should have gone to Brussels, to a school that taught in French.”
“How many people even speak Dutch?” He said it mockingly, fiddling with his tallit katan, which he allowed to poke out from under his jumper, seemingly nonchalantly.
A tallit katan, a small tallit, is—I can’t think of a better way of describing it—a life vest for observant Jewish men. They wear it day in, day out. Whereas an inflatable life vest has an air nozzle hanging from one corner and a whistle from the other, from each of the four corners of the tallit hang tzitzit, eight threads knotted five times: thirty-two threads in total. A number of ritual significance, since nothing in Judaism is coincidental. According to the mystic teachings of the Kabbalah, the numerical value of the Hebrew word leev, heart, is thirty-two, and the numerical value of the word tzitzit is six hundred. Six hundred plus eight threads and five knots corresponds with the six hundred and thirteen commandments set out in the Torah, which is precisely what these ritual tassels are supposed to be a reminder of. Thanks to this life vest, which may never be worn right next to the skin, the pious will not drown in superficiality.
Jakov had already shown me the black leathe
r phylacteries he put on for morning prayers, as all observant boys over the age of thirteen are required to do. One strap he wound many times round his left arm—from elbow to palm—the other he bound to his forehead in the prescribed way. A small black leather box—called tefillin—is attached to each strap. Just like the mezuzahs on the door posts, it contains a passage from the Torah. The box attached to the strap that’s wound round the head must be affixed to the centre of the forehead, the one on the arm above the elbow. The texts in tefillin all over the world are more or less the same.
Whenever I saw Jakov busying himself with these items, I was always reminded of Ann Demeulemeester’s fashion designs. The way the boy wound the black leather around his left arm: it could be one of her accessories. And it wasn’t hard to imagine these straps on the catwalk. There was something about his religious garments that seemed both timeless and fashionable. They were powerful in a way no substitute could have been.
“Huh, you’re really putting me on the spot, Jakov. How many people in the whole world speak Dutch? Including Flemish, right? A good twenty million, I think, but I could be wrong.”
“Aimes-tu raconter des blagues? You like to joke, right? You call Flanders and the Netherlands ‘the whole world’?”
“Suriname, Curaçao… Dutch is spoken there too.”
“At least Yiddish is a world language. Yiddish is spoken on all continents! We Jews are an international people! It’s always been like that. We were always spread all over the place.”
Once again he put on that arrogant, superior look. Nima sometimes armed himself with the same fake toughness.
“Oh come on, Jakov. How many people speak Yiddish? Only a fraction of the Jewish community, right? And how many Jews are there, worldwide?”
“About twenty million too, I reckon. So the number of Jews and Dutch people in the world is the same! But like I said, we live all over the place. And you only hear Dutch in this little bit of Belgium, in the Netherlands and those two African countries you mentioned.”
“Suriname and Curaçao aren’t in Africa.”
“Whatever.”
“But how many of those twenty million Jews speak and write Yiddish? You don’t even speak it yourself. Sure, the odd word or phrase. But you don’t know the grammar. You don’t speak it fluently, like your grandmother.”
“Perhaps there aren’t so many of us. But we’re smart. We don’t even make up half a per cent of the world population. But have you ever noticed how many Jews win Nobel prizes? Around twenty per cent of all prizes!”
“Congratulations.”
“To say nothing of all the top jobs we hold in all kinds of sectors: banks, universities, the film industry, diamonds, art, literature… No one can deny we’re more creative than any other minority—even than the majority.”
“Yes, you are the elect,” I said. He’d done it again. Provoked me into a remark like this. I didn’t care.
“What would you know about electness?”
“Election. If you must delude yourself you’re one of the elect, at least get the word right.”
“Electness.”
“Nothing, that’s how much I know about election, Jakov. How would I know what special pact God made with you guys? You’re the chosen people, not me and the other goys.”
“Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who has chosen us from all nations.”
“You guys are superior and we’re the plebs.”
“What does plebs mean?”
“Nothing that need concern one of the elect. Don’t worry about it.”
“Everyone is born with more or less the same brain. But we excel. No one can deny that.”
“I write your essays and make your summaries.”
“That alone proves I’m smarter than you.”
We laughed. It felt good.
“Catholics don’t believe in a Messiah,” he went on, “but in a guy, nota bene a Jew, who was nailed to the cross. Now that is ridicule.”
“I’m not religious; as I’ve told you before, there’s a difference between someone who’s a devout Catholic and someone who’s just a cultural Catholic. Can we get started on your homework now?”
The challenging gaze he shot me was at odds with his spots and spectacles.
“We don’t watch TV,” he blurted out.
“I know,” I said. “Come on, get your books out.”
“Some of my friends have a TV at home. They watch TV like you guys do. Some of them can get Israeli channels via the European KingOfSat satellite, you know? Dingue! But not us. At most we go to the cinema when there’s a film Mummy and Daddy think is okay for us to see.”
“How often have you been to the cinema?”
“Three or four times. The last time to see Rain Man.”
“Do you watch TV at your friends’ places?”
“Sometimes.”
“So what do you watch?”
He blushed. “You’re annoying. Does your boyfriend never say that? That you’re annoying?”
*
Jakov and I became proficient in writing essays, reports and presentations.
We followed a set method.
The first step involved analysing the topics his teachers had given him to choose from. We always picked the topic or book that tied in best with both our worlds: I had to be able to say something about it, he had to be happy with what I wrote.
For Dutch, for instance, Jakov was given the following three essay titles: “Life after Chernobyl”, “Is a world without child labour a utopian dream?” and “The human voyages of discovery of today”.
Television, video and the rise of mobile telephones were discoveries of the new age. But if we wrote about these technologies I’d be putting forward views alien to the pious Jakov, and I’d probably find it hard not to mock the painful contortions made by modern Orthodox Jews as they wrestled to fit their ancient traditions into a modern society. Like the religious Jew in the electric wheelchair who asked two senior Antwerp rabbis for advice: “Is it treyf if I press the buttons on the armrest on Shabbat or Pesach? Should I push myself forward manually on these days of rest?” Another wanted to know: “What about the lift? Am I keeping our commandments if I get into a lift on Shabbat and a goy presses the button? What’s better: to programme lifts to stop on every floor, like they do in some skyscrapers in Manhattan, so Jewish residents can get in and out without having to break their laws? Or to have a goy press the button of the twenty-third floor, so that we, the faithful, needn’t stop on every one of the twenty-three floors, thus wasting a lot of time?”
The story of the lifts had been told to me by Jakov himself. Other examples were plain to see.
Anyone who took the last train from Brussels to Antwerp on a Friday night—something Nima and I occasionally did—would see evidence of similar ambivalence. Between Berchem and Antwerp Central, the lights in all the houses and flats inhabited by Hasidic Jews, many of them poor, would blaze all night long. Sabbath law prohibits Jews from making or creating anything, including electricity or fire. So in the days before home automation, the lights and even the cookers would be on the whole time, from the start to the end of Shabbat, on average twenty-four hours at a time.
Of the three subjects given by the teacher, I would have opted for the theme of child labour, but Jakov waved away that suggestion and lobbied for Chernobyl. First, because the explosion in the Ukrainian nuclear reactor would allow him to display his knowledge of physics, and second, because he just happened to find science more exciting than exploited children. So by the rules of our method, I had to go along with that.
The second step consisted of collecting material.
That meant a trip to the library for me. I would try to prod Jakov—who was usually given about ten days to write an essay—into going to the library himself; if not the big cen
tral one, then one of the smaller branches in the Jewish neighbourhood.
He didn’t see the point, and said I should just add all the hours I spent looking things up to my work schedule, which I did without protest. If Jakov happened to come across a relevant article somewhere, he would tear it out and put it in the blue wicker basket under his desk, which was full of comic books. He had some Tintin books in Hebrew. When I asked whether Hergé’s anti-Semitism wasn’t a problem, he shrugged: “J’aime Tintin.” “Is Tintin’s name the same in Hebrew?” “Yes.” “What about his dog Snowy?” “Zachi.” “Do you know what Tintin’s called in Persian?” “Tintin, non?” “Tan Tan.”
Steps three and four were the most interesting, for him too: we would put together all the information that had been collected and discuss it for hours, trying to view the topic from different perspectives. Then we’d pick an angle. After that we’d sketch out a framework: beginning, middle, end.
From step five, it was all down to me.
I would try to blend all the elements into a consistent narrative. If necessary, I’d try and find more information. I would do this all at home. Alone.
I would write down all the hours I’d worked, including the ones typing out the essay on my first computer, an IBM with green letters on a black screen. I charged for it all, just as if I was teaching at the Schneiders’ house. We’d go through the finished item carefully. Make changes where necessary.
As an approach it was pedagogically unsound. But that didn’t bother me.
I could use the money. On top of that, I actually enjoyed doing these tasks. The more assignments I rounded off successfully for Jakov, the more I became aware of a new form of freedom—one that reminded me of the day when, having left home at last, I browsed a supermarket’s aisles, pushing my own shopping trolley, without a shopping list. It was a first. I bought what I wanted to buy, including Granny Smiths (“We don’t buy imported apples, Limburg has apples aplenty!”), giant bags of crisps, wine and cigarettes.