“It isn’t proving as easy as I’d hoped it would,” he said to Barnaby, conscious of a little lie in that he had hardly as yet tried moving mountains.
Barnaby threw him one of the most beseeching looks in his collection. “My heart is set on it, D’Anton,” he said.
Ah, the potency of punctuation. Barnaby knew his friend was powerless to resist him when he finished a sentence something something something comma, D’Anton. The full stop taking an eternity to arrive, the name—D’Anton—lingering it seemed forever in his mouth.
And D’Anton knew that Barnaby knew it. But that made him no more proof against its influence. “I see that, Barnaby,” he said, lingering over the other’s name himself, “but could we not pay a further visit to the auction house and see what else they have? Love’s First Lesson can’t be the only artwork in the world you like.”
“Well there’s still The Singing Butler,” Barnaby said pettishly. “And anyway it’s not a matter of what I like, it’s what Plury would like. The naked Venus is so her, D’Anton, I swear to you she could have posed for it…Could she have posed for it?”
“Only if she’d been born a hundred and fifty years ago.” If Barnaby thought he detected an unaccustomed testiness in his friend he was right. For all the love he bore him—indeed, perhaps, because of it—D’Anton couldn’t but think that Barnaby might have met him halfway on this, agreed to try at least to see if there was another picture that might catch his fancy, or show some sign of understanding the enormity of what he asked, no matter that it was D’Anton who’d originally proposed it. But he would not have dreamed of endeavouring to dissuade him further. His friend had set his heart on Love’s First Lesson—again Barnaby repeated that very phrase: “My heart is set on it, D’Anton”—and what was close to Barnaby’s heart was close to D’Anton’s. His purse, his person, his extremest means lay all unlocked to his young friend’s occasions.
So again, after pouring himself a large brandy, he sat down at his desk, extracted from his drawer a sheet of headed writing paper, handmade for him in an alleyway few visitors to Venice ever find, and, in the smallest of hands and with the finest of nibs, wrote:
Dear Simon Strulovitch,
Please grant me a moment of your time. Albeit I am not customarily a favour-seeker, I have a favour to ask of you.
I write to you on behalf of a friend—or rather, I am acting on behalf of a friend in the name of whose disappointment I make this appeal to you. We recently attended, he and I, an art auction in Manchester at which you were astute enough to buy an early study by Solomon J. Solomon for his painting Love’s First Lesson. It is an exquisite cartoon, lacking none of the grace of the finished painting. I commend your good fortune and your taste. I also commend your punctuality. We alas, who would have bid against you for the Solomon, were late. Our fault. But here’s the favour I would beg of you. Might you consider parting with it? I make no mention of the price. Add what commission you please.
It is, I repeat, not for me that you would be doing this, but for a young and impressionable friend who has his heart set on giving the painting as a token of his devotion to a woman who, I can assure you, will cherish the work every bit as much as we would wish her to.
When love calls, my dear Strulovitch, can any of us turn a deaf ear?
I await your response with keen anticipation.
Yours very respectfully,
—and signed it with a flourish designed to conceal nothing of the openness of the writer’s own heart.
—
“So how did that go?” Shylock wondered.
Strulovitch was surprised Shylock had the nerve to ask. “I think we could both have anticipated how it would go.”
“The footballer keeps his foreskin?”
“Correct. And I lose a daughter.”
“You broached the matter in her presence?”
“No. But he was bound to go straight to her and tell her what I’d asked. ‘Obviously,’ he told me, ‘I’ll have to think about this.’ Which meant ‘Obviously, I’ll need to speak to Beatrice,’ who obviously was horrified.”
“She told you so?”
“She didn’t have to.”
“And she’s gone already?”
“Can’t you hear her seething around the house? I’ve been divorced—I know the sound of resolute packing. Not the banging—that means they’re not really going. Throwing stuff around means they’re giving you a chance to stop them. It’s the quiet folding of garments you have to fear. The measure of Beatrice’s rage is that she hasn’t banged a wardrobe door or said a word to me. But I know anyway what that word would have been had she said it.”
“Savage?”
“Since that’s the word that occurs to you, I wonder you didn’t think of it earlier.”
“Or you, since you’re thinking of it now.”
“I’m thinking what Beatrice might be thinking.”
“You’re thinking it because you fear it might be true.”
“And isn’t it?”
“There’s nothing good or bad but thinking it makes so. Our greatest weakness as Jews is forever to be thinking the worst of ourselves. What if we’ve fallen short, what if we are a light unto nobody, what if we’re barbarians at heart. Our eternal refrain: what if we’re not what we claim to be.”
“Why shouldn’t we ask ourselves that? Isn’t periodically wondering if we’re savages what keeps us civilised?”
“That depends on what you mean by periodically. Every five hundred years—fine. Every time a Jew asserts himself or acts in self-defence—that’s something else.”
“It’s the self-defence part that’s controversial.”
“There is nothing controversial about protecting your daughter.”
“I know all this.”
“Then why are you having second thoughts?”
“Because I cannot be said to have protected her if she runs away.”
“Then stop her. Explain your motives.”
“I behave like a barbarian, Beatrice, because I love you?”
“You are still seeing with her eyes, when you should have the courage to see with your own. You have seen more of the world than she has. You have more understanding. Have you explained to her just what the rite of circumcision is? What it stands for? What it portends? How it’s the very rejection of barbarism? Why it’s a passage out of savagery into refinement?”
“That takes some explaining to a child.”
“Everything serious takes some explaining to a child. Try sitting her down and reading to her.”
“She doesn’t go a bundle on Maimonides.”
“It doesn’t have to be Maimonides. Do you have any Roth on your shelves?”
“Joseph, Cecil, Henry, Philip? I have walls of Roth.”
“Philip will do. Do you have the one where everyone is leading someone else’s life?”
“That’s all of them.”
“A shame Leah isn’t here. She’d know which I’m thinking of. It’s the one where Roth lets the anti-circumcisionists have it with both barrels. Circumcision, he or someone like him argues, was conceived to refute the pastoral.”
“Christ! And you think that would make it all right with my daughter? What in God’s name does refuting the pastoral mean?”
“You ask me that! You who venture into your own garden as though it’s snake-infested. Do you even own wellingtons? My friend, you are a walking refutation of the pastoral.”
“And that’s because I’m circumcised?”
“You were circumcised in order that you shouldn’t, in the first days of your life, when you were still in a womb-swoon, mistake life for an idyll.”
“Then it’s worked. In fact I’d say it’s worked too well.”
“You’re bound to think that. It’s what you were circumcised to think. The heavy hand of human values, in our friend Roth’s words, descended on you early. As it should.”
“That’s not going to convince anyone who sees precisely those values as inhu
man.”
“Those who are sentimental about being human will never be convinced.”
“Worse and worse, Shylock.”
“Look. The mohel’s knife acts mercifully, to save the boy from the vagaries of nature. I don’t just mean the monkeys. I mean ignorance, the absence of God, the refusal of allegiance to a people or an idea—especially the idea that life is an obligation as well as a gift. We are not born free of loyalties and oaths. The mohel’s knife symbolises what we owe.”
“Subdues us, in other words.”
“Is that so terrible if the alternative is running lawless in the wilderness?”
Strulovitch was the wrong one to ask. What struck him as terrible one day, didn’t strike him as all that terrible the next.
“We can’t be saved from nature a little bit,” Shylock went on. “It’s all or nothing, it’s human values or the monkeys.”
Strulovitch’s mind turned from abstractions of duty to the living daughter in whom, at the hour of her birth, he’d glimpsed the meaning of covenant. “Well that might fix it for the boys,” he said, as though Shylock had both won and lost the argument, “but what help is there for the girls? There’s no mohel’s knife to subdue a daughter. Not in the civilised world, there isn’t. In the civilised world, men who talk of subduing daughters are stoned to death.”
“And that,” said Shylock, in a tone of steely quiet, “is why daughters are a byword for disloyalty.”
Were they a byword for disloyalty? I used to think I was an extremist, Strulovitch thought.
Shylock read his reservations. “You wouldn’t anyway dispute,” he said, much calmer now, “that it’s because her footballer is a ‘natural’ man that Beatrice loves him. At least if you have described him to me correctly.”
“He is not the question. She is. Does she love him? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure she’ll give it a good try now. And my telling her that life isn’t meant to be a womb-swoon won’t deter her.”
“She’s a bright young woman.”
“She’s sixteen! That’s too young to be giving up on life as an idyll.”
“Then it’s too young to be Jewish.”
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you gleefully proposed this course of action.”
“Did I propose a course of action?”
“In a dumbshow, yes.”
“I mustn’t have realised you were so impressionable.”
“As to take you at your word?”
“I uttered no word.”
“Call it what you will. But I must ask you what you meant by it.”
“Mischief.”
“Is that what you’re here to cause me?”
“Cause you? No. The very opposite. But all isn’t yet lost. By your own account, if you can hear her silence, she hasn’t gone.”
“And what do you propose I do to keep her?” He chanced a long look into Shylock’s covert eyes. “Bar the doors?”
He let his words hang in the air, let the shutters to Shylock’s windows swing open, let the sweet disgusting smell of goats and monkeys enter.
Two could play at mischief.
—
But he didn’t bar his own door.
FOURTEEN
When Strulovitch has things to consider he considers them, if he can, in the presence of Kay.
If he could pretend they were still able to discuss what mattered to them, one of the things he would not have to consider was his part in her disintegration. Never mind that a doctor had told him he was not the cause, he knew he had made life intolerable to her, not just on account of Beatrice, but on account, quite simply of him—who he was, what he was like, what he believed one minute and then disbelieved the next, his inflamed Jewishness that blew hot and cold but was always in the way, like a deranged and disreputable lodger, disturbing their domestic quiet.
Yes, his father had welcomed him back into the fold when he married Kay, but she wasn’t Jewish beneath her fingernails as he was even when he thought he wasn’t being Jewish at all. She taught religious studies in a non-denominational school—respect for other people’s beliefs, respect for yourself, respect for your body, respect for the environment. She happened to be what she was, others happened to be something else. End of story. She didn’t start when she saw an Arab in the street. She didn’t start when she saw a Hassid in the street either. She wasn’t beset by enemies outside the faith or fanatics within it. Strictly speaking she had no faith. Strulovitch—or Strulo as she called him—insisted that he too had no faith. And maybe he was telling the truth. What he had was stronger than any faith she had encountered. He had a madness, a frenzy. Had she been forced to teach what he had she’d have called it Judaeolunacy.
Judaeolunacy for A2 Year students.
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he told her. “I’m indifferent.”
But even his indifference, Kay thought, was a sort of delirium. He didn’t go to synagogue because going to synagogue irked him, but not to go irked him just as much. “Look at them,” he’d say if they happened to be driving past a synagogue on a Saturday morning. “Look at them in their fucking yarmulkes! What are they doing remembering to go every fucking week? Don’t they ever just forget? Don’t they have anything else to think about?”
“Leave them alone,” Kay would tell him. “You don’t want to go to shul, they do. It’s not your business. What do you care?”
“I don’t care.”
“Then why are you swearing?”
“Because they’re praying.”
“So?”
“Being Jewish isn’t just about praying.”
“For you no. For me no. For them yes.”
“It’s not Jewish,” he’d shout, “saying for me no, for them yes. That’s Christian talk. We are a people who value x above y because x is true and y isn’t. This is called ethics, Kay. It’s what we’re famed for. For me no, so for them no!”
“Strulo, why does it matter to you so much what’s Jewish and what isn’t?”
“It doesn’t. I don’t give a shit about Jews.”
The next day he’d be throwing the Guardian in the bin, saying that Jews were on the brink of extermination and it was the Guardian’s fault.
Kay wondered why he had never gone to Israel and enlisted with the IDF.
“Israel? What’s Israel got to do with anything?”
“I thought you were a Zionist.”
“A Zionist, me! Are you mad?”
“So why are you burning the Guardian?”
“I’m not burning it, I’m binning it. Interesting, though, that you said ‘burning.’ I’d call that a Freudian slip. You’re remembering the ovens. That’s what reading the Guardian does to you.”
“Why would reading the Guardian make me think of ovens?”
“Because the Guardian hates Israel and Israel is the only place that will save us when they start the ovens up again.”
“So you are a Zionist!”
“Only when I read the Guardian.”
And then Beatrice came along, Beatrice the child of their early middle age, their belated gift, in Strulovitch’s words, from God. Like Isaac, miraculously born to a laughing, unbelieving Sarah. Isaac—laughter. Beatrice—joy.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Strulo,” Kay said. “It’s not as though we’re both a hundred. Can’t we leave God out of this.”
But she agreed to the child being called Beatrice.
It had been a precarious pregnancy and a difficult birth. Strulovitch saw that it took strength from his wife which she never fully regained. It fell to him, he thought, to keep Beatrice on the straight and narrow, to ensure that the high purpose he discerned in her delivery would be honoured.
Not a Jewish education—heaven forfend!—just a Jewish consciousness, or at least a Jewish consciousness sufficient to a Jewish wedding. And not so much a Jewish wedding as a Jewish lineage. And even that was overstating it. Not a not Jewish lineage—that was closer to what Strulovitch meant.
“I agr
ee with you it would be nice if she found a boy we could all approve of,” Kay said. “But beyond that—”
“Beyond that! Beyond that, Kay, is everything that makes us serious.”
“You’re a Judaeolunatic,” she reminded him.
Beatrice, when she was old enough, cheered her mother on. “Tell him, Mummy. The man’s off his rocker.”
“Don’t call him ‘the man,’ darling, he’s your father.”
“Is he? Do you know what he said to me last night? He said I was letting Hitler win.”
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Snogging—not even that. Just pecking someone goodnight.”
“Where?”
“Outside our front door.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know his name. Feng, I think. A Chinese boy.”
Aha, Kay thought. Feng not Fishel. She wanted to know if her husband really was telling their daughter that by going out with a Chinese boy she was letting Hitler win. She would divorce him if that were true.
Strulovitch knew to back off. “You should have seen what she was doing…”
“I don’t care what she was doing. Did you say she was letting Hitler win?”
Strulovitch knew to back off even further. “Not exactly win. More…”
“More what?”
“Kay, it was in the heat of the moment. You don’t know what it’s like out there. You don’t know who she’s mixing with.”
“I’m prepared to bet Feng isn’t a Nazi stormtrooper.”
“Feng!” Strulovitch wasn’t so sure. He had seen Bridge on the River Kwai. But he kept his counsel. Feng was better than Fritz.
Shortly afterwards he dragged Beatrice home by her hair. Shortly after that Kay was felled.
Strulovitch wondered if he should mourn her as one mourns the dead, but knew he had to go on loving her as one loves the living. The trouble was, he couldn’t. Open the heart and it would break. But the forms of a domestic life—the greetings, the expressions of tenderness and concern, the passing on of news—those he thought he could manage. He fell into the habit of talking to her about what bothered him, quietly, without any excitement, much as Shylock talked to Leah, keeping all hint of Judaeolunacy out of his voice, censoring the news. When her face found repose she was still pretty, still recognisably the woman he had loved, the wife who called him Strulo, but ravaged by whatever had struck her down: disruption of the blood supply to her brain, a terrible tiredness, and him.
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