by J. S. Margot
The woman’s frustration erupted like a boil. I was shocked by all the hate that flowed out of her, despite having witnessed plenty of ugly scenes since I’d been with Nima.
I told the woman we would lodge a complaint with the police.
“I should lodge a complaint against your kind,” she shouted.
“Remember the name of the sandwich shop,” I ordered Elzira loudly. And then, to the shopkeeper: “Are you the manager? What’s your name, please?”
“Your kind looks down on us, day in, day out. What are you going to lodge a complaint about? Discrimination? But discrimination is your national sport!”
She wouldn’t give her name. I went inside to ask. The boy behind the counter told me without hesitating.
We didn’t lodge a complaint. Just as Nima had never lodged a complaint. You were only wasting your time going to the police. No one took discrimination on the grounds of nationality, religion, race, sexual preference or gender seriously.
Elzira and I discussed this incident at length. As well as the episode with the Maltese in the park. Elzira’s decision to be silent. To blend in with the crowd. The difference between being silent and standing up for yourself and other people. Nevertheless, Elzira managed to distil an unexpectedly positive note from the bleach scene. The woman had taken me for a Jew, not a goyte. “So, wrapped up in dark winter clothing, one person can look like another.”
Thirty-Four
Evening after evening I cancelled on the Schneiders. “My own study first” was the excuse I invented, by analogy with the Vlaams Blok slogan “Our own people first”.
But there was more to it than that. My studies. My work at the Schneiders’. My relationship. The Gulf War. The Schneiders’ religion, permeating every aspect of their daily lives. Their closed attitude to the outside world. Their suspicion of that world. Israel’s stance on the Palestinians. The intifada. The impact of those tensions on Nima and his fellow exiles. The jitteriness sparked by the term “Muslim”.
“Trop bon, trop con,” Jakov had said to me only recently. Too good, too dumb: a soft touch, in other words. He was only teasing, but I’d lost my temper, had told him to cut the crap and speak plainly. It soon emerged that he strongly disapproved of my lifestyle.
He couldn’t understand that I was living with a man whose religion was different to my own. He called atheism an expression of cowardice. “These days it takes courage to be religious. Atheism is proof of lack of courage. It’s nothing, neither fish nor fowl.” I contradicted him. He let me speak, but didn’t listen. It was water off a duck’s back.
He couldn’t understand that my parents not only knew I was living with a man, but allowed it. He couldn’t understand that I’d chosen a man from an alien culture, someone whose family I’d never met, who no one had vouched for, and who didn’t have a permanent job. How could I be satisfied with someone who was doing odd jobs and studying at the same time, who couldn’t provide me with any security? Surely only because I was an idiot?
I called him a brat and told him to get lost. Said that he, with his narrow-minded, provincial outlook, he who’d never left his community, should perhaps take a long hard look at himself and his people. That not everybody chose to live in a straitjacket. That there was such a thing as emancipation, and that just learning by your mistakes was an education in itself. “You don’t even realize you’re in a straitjacket—how narrow-minded is that?”
Mr Schneider, too, annoyed me. How dare he take me to task about the newspapers I read? Or drag Nima into it? How did he have the nerve to censure my political views, which were by no means as radical as he claimed? What did he know about me? Wasn’t this the same man who, three years ago, had asked for Nima’s surname so he could have my boyfriend checked out? Wasn’t he the one who should be criticized for his political leanings? For all I knew, Mr and Mrs Schneider voted Vlaams Blok. Voted indirectly against me.
After an overdose of Catholicism and all the hypocrisy that went with it, I’d deliberately chosen to study at a liberal university. Nima had fled a religious regime. Now I was up to my neck in the laws of Judaism.
Elzira wasn’t allowed to swim in the same pool as boys. When she did risk a plunge, along with other Jewish girls in a hired swimming pool, she didn’t wear a swimsuit or bikini, but an enveloping outfit worthy of Batwoman. Boys’ and girls’ schools opened at different times to prevent any hanky-panky at the school gates. Why, in the Schneider home, did I never hear any punk, pop or rock—not even Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, who were Jews after all? Didn’t young Orthodox Jews, the modern ones at least, have a spark of anarchy in them? Elzira’s bicycle and dachshund were the only subversive attributes in the rule-bound habitat into which she’d been born. These days I no longer had a soft spot even for Monsieur. Before, I would stroke him under his chin when he came eagerly to greet me. Now I turned away from him.
The differences between the Schneiders’ world and my own had become sharper, like the taste of pickled fish, which—along with pickled onions, gherkins and horseradish—I suddenly no longer liked, not even on a poppy seed bagel prepared by Mrs Schneider.
And then there was Nima. In his sleep he muttered what sounded like prayers, but turned out to be snatches of songs he’d heard as a child. When he was studying, or even just sitting with me at the table, he would grow lost in thought.
“What are you fretting about?”
“Nothing, just leave me be.”
Every now and again, in a roundabout way, he’d permit a glimpse of what was going on inside him. If my friends praised Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, he couldn’t restrain himself.
“You lot just can’t understand that to all non-Westerners Gorbachev’s a traitor,” he would say tiredly. “That’s the real wall separating the world, that’s the real tragedy dividing us: that you guys refuse to grasp that not everyone sympathizes with the United States, which only has one goal: to wage war.” He reacted just as hotly when the assassinated Egyptian president Sadat was painted as the Arab hero who’d shaken Menachem Begin’s hand in 1981. “Sadat violated the independent, free spirit of Nasser and of all Egypt. You fete this puppet of the West—this man who sold the honour of his people, of North Africa and of the Middle East, down the river.” If friends in our circle defended and supported the Gulf War: “Why should the West have a right to the oil of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait? The Americans never started a war unless it was in their own interests. And yet you lot believe the US should teach the whole world a lesson in morals, and you kowtow to them.”
Fortunately, he spent more time than usual in a gym in Kammenstraat. The owner was called Benny or Eddie or something like that. A big muscly guy who knew all his customers’ names and backgrounds. Benny’s gym has long since disappeared from the corner of Kammenstraat, but the guy deserved a medal; at times of national and international crises he single-handedly managed to channel a lot of conscious and subconscious aggression into sport, endurance and fair play.
At home, we stuck up a poster in the window: “No to the Gulf War!”
Thirty-Five
For two months, I didn’t go to the Schneiders’.
Then one evening, Mr Schneider appeared on our doorstep, under the window with the “No to the Gulf War!” poster.
Nima opened the door. “She isn’t at home just now, she’s still in the library. Would you like to come in?”
I was in my last year at the Institute of Interpreting and Translation Studies. Sitting tests. Resitting tests.
Nima took Mr Schneider’s long coat and hat. He made fresh mint tea and spread out bowls of pistachios, almonds, figs, fresh fruit and nougat from Isfahan. Mr Schneider sampled it all, even the sickly-sweet, non-kosher nougat.
I never got to hear what they talked about. “All kinds of things,” was the answer I got from both Nima and Mr Schneider when I asked.
“He’s okay,” my b
oyfriend said. “That father’s okay.” He also said he’d asked Mr Schneider what he’d done with the piece of paper on which I’d written down his name after my job interview. “I stuck it in the shredder,” he’d answered. Nima said he found that hard to believe. Mr Schneider merely smiled and told a few jokes.
Mr Schneider left a letter for me, from Elzira.
It was the loveliest, most honest letter I’d ever received in my life, and thanks to three years of boarding school I had quite a pile of correspondence. After that two-month break, I went back to work for the Schneiders.
I’d missed them much more than I wanted to admit.
Thirty-Six
Then Elzira asked me if I wanted to help her prepare for Shabbat on Friday afternoon and whether we, Nima and I, would like to celebrate with them that evening.
“Of course,” I said, excited and curious, without hesitating a second. But doubt immediately kicked in. “Is that allowed, then?”
“It’s allowed if you do as I say,” she answered resolutely. Her gaze was still soft, but had grown more self-confident over the years. Her movements were no longer clumsy. Her hand had become more stable, as had she herself.
“What time shall I come?” I asked. I knew of course that Jewish schoolchildren had Friday afternoons off, just like non-Jewish children had Wednesday afternoons off. But I had no idea what time her school finished.
“Come shortly after noon, if you can. Then we have assez time to cook and so on. Shabbat begins eighteen minutes before sunset on Hadlakat Nerot, when we light the candles. And the day of rest ends the next day, on Saturday evening, when there are three stars in the sky.”
“Three stars in the sky? How do you know what time that is? Surely it depends where you are in the world?” This seemed to me yet another case of believing in one’s own fairy tales.
“Le calendrier! The Jewish calendar hangs in all Jewish kitchens. Haven’t you ever seen ours? It has all the Shabbat times on it. All our holidays. Everything we need to know and aren’t allowed to oubliëren—to forget. We don’t live in your time. We live in very different years.”
The first thing Elzira showed me when I entered their L-shaped kitchen was their calendar, a thick exercise book with a purple cover, which lay at the far corner of the counter, next to the telephone.
For nearly four years I’d been coming to the Schneiders’ house, on average five times a week. I’d grown accustomed to the holy carefulness that marked their lives and was more or less familiar with their festivals, mainly because they almost all translated into days off school, which meant I didn’t have to come then. But no one had told me there was such a thing as a Jewish calendar. Nor had it ever occurred to me to that there might be—stupid, really, since Iranians, Kurds and Afghans had their own calendar. I saw it every day, in fact, stuck with magnets to our fridge door.
The Persian calendar wasn’t remotely in sync with the Gregorian and Islamic calendars; it had often struck me as bizarre that the human race couldn’t even agree about the era they lived in. I wondered whether that fact alone wasn’t telling.
Nowruz, Persian New Year, is celebrated in spring, around 21st March. Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, falls in autumn, in our September or October. Our own old year is shot down and replaced by a new one in the middle of winter. Islamic New Year, Muharram, is celebrated on a different date and using a different calendar. “We’re already living in 5752,” Jakov bragged. He dug around in the fridge and bumped his shoulder playfully against mine, a friendly gesture he’d never have made in the old days, certainly not in the presence of his mother, whose gentle dark-eyed gaze seemed to pierce all the relationships in the kitchen.
“Yes, you’re way ahead of us,” I joked. Mrs Schneider smiled. She was sitting at the far end of the kitchen, in a kind of bay window overlooking the garden. Sara, next to her, was busy clearing her plate. The kitchen was white: window frames, walls, floor, cupboards, sinks, cookers, table, chairs, the modern leather benches around the table—all white, white, white.
Krystina filled a bucket with soapy water. Her job was to make sure that everything was spic and span. She was wearing plastic gloves—even those were white.
Elzira helped me put on a white, freshly starched apron, then tied another round her own slim frame. (At home I never wore an apron, students like me shunning such bourgeois trappings.) Her hair was kept in place by a black velvet headband. She was wearing ballet pumps, and in my high-heeled shoes I towered above her: her head came up to my breasts. When we sat at her desk this difference in height hadn’t been so obvious. And when we took Monsieur out for a walk, we didn’t notice it either: we were so busy with the frisky dachshund. But here in the kitchen it was a little awkward, and Elzira must have realized that. Without saying anything she disappeared into her room and came back with some gym shoes that fitted me.
“This is the side for all the meat we can eat, meat from mammifères with shoes that are cloven.”
“Shoes?”
“Like those of a cow.”
“With split hooves?”
“And they must be ruminants. We only eat mammifères that are ruminants. And here on this side we put everything that has to do with produits laitiers,” Elzira said.
“Mammals and dairy products,” I corrected, in a whisper. I didn’t want to play the role of teacher in the kitchen, too. Elzira was busy with pots and pans. She dropped a pan lid. “Don’t take any notice,” she laughed. “Lady Dyspraxia is assisting me.”
It was the first time I was “really” in their kitchen. Really in the sense of beyond the doorway where I’d often stood waiting for Elzira and Jakov and sometimes Sara as they had a quick bite, or when they were preparing a snack for me, or having it prepared.
“Blue is for dairy products. Red for meat.” Elzira was explaining the chopping boards, the dishcloths, the tea towels, scourers and kitchen knives: everything in both red and blue. All the ingredients were kosher, she said, in conformity with the dietary laws. She showed me the rabbinical certificate on the packaging of certain products, right down to the dishwasher detergent and sponges. The rabbi had declared their kitchen kosher, she knew. He had “kashered” certain utensils: purged them, it seemed, blessed them, cleansed them, immersed them in a special bath of boiling water, buried them in the ground, all so that they, as observant Jews, could cook and eat in a way that was kosher. It occurred to me that “rabid” and “rabbinate” sounded awfully similar, but I didn’t share the joke. Jews, sometimes described as the world’s first capitalists, clearly maintained their own protectionist economy, amongst other things, through their dietary laws. It was the umpteenth balancing act I’d come across in their lifestyle: on the one hand their mercantile spirit, on the other their own protected industry, economy, commerce.
“It’s not for nothing that our fridge has two doors, you know,” Jakov said, his mouth full. Since getting new spectacles he not only looked better, but could also see better. It turned out that for years he’d been wearing glasses that corrected his far-sightedness, but did nothing for his astigmatism.
“Don’t forget to explain that to her, Elzira.”
Their fridge was a two-door American model, with a tap in the middle and a machine that spat out ice cubes. The left half was for meat, the right for dairy products. Only when I saw the fridge did I get the full picture: the long side of the L-shaped room was a double kitchen: one side of the wall was the mirror image of the other. The Schneiders had two cookers, two sinks, two dishwashers and two kitchen worktops. Just as Elzira had once told me.
“If someone hasn’t got two sinks they use two bowls, red and blue for instance. And if their fridge isn’t a double one, they can divide it up, with planches or tiroirs, shelves or drawers for meat and dairy products. But nothing may leak: meat may not drip onto cheese, milk may not drip onto turkey, etc. And you must never put anything warm into a single
fridge: everything that is warm breathes, and the hot air can make the whole fridge un-kosher.”
Each side of the kitchen had its own crockery, cutlery, cookware, mixers, table linen and everything else that needed to be kept separate. Utensils that didn’t feature red or blue in their design were marked with coloured stickers. Meat and pancakes were cooked in different frying pans. And steaks and asperges à la flamande—asparagus in cheese sauce—were eaten from different plates. You couldn’t even eat tournedos and cheese from the same tablecloth or placemat.
“So what do you fry your chicken in, then?” I asked, since I, like Nima, tended to fry poultry in butter—it brought out the flavour of the meat.
“In goose fat, bien sûr,” Elzira answered, and I felt I’d asked a dumb question.
“What about a cheese course after dinner?”
“Religious Jews would never order cheese after a meal. Or coffee or tea with milk. We can’t do that if we’ve eaten meat. Or rather, we can, but then we have to wait at least six hours. Or three hours. Religious Jews in the Netherlands, the realm of dairy products, only wait one hour. Tout est relatif, I can’t help it. But the other way round is fine. After milk we can eat meat without waiting. It’s to do with chewing. It’s complicated, je sais.”
We would not only prepare the Friday evening meal, I gathered, but also certain dishes for Saturday breakfast and lunch. “We have a hot meal on Saturdays. We programme our cookers; at a set time they switch off automatically. But not everybody does that. In many traditional families the ovens and hobs are lit before the start of Shabbat and go on burning till Saturday evening. Do you know the typical Jewish dish cholent?”
“Chaud lent?” I asked.
“Cholent. It’s a traditional stew that simmers from Friday to Saturday afternoon, and its main ingredients, in our version, are potatoes, de l’orge, os à moelle and beans.”