The Elected Member

by Bernice Rubens

  ‘You made out that it was self-defence,’ Bella was saying.

  ‘It wasn’t really though, was it. You never believed that, did you, Norman?’

  ‘What does it matter what he believes?’ Rabbi Zweck interrupted. He could see the danger in that question. ‘With another lawyer. hanged he would have been, that murderer.

  That’s what they all said. He’ll hang, they said, so cocksure they all were. Well, they didn’t reckon with Normal Zweck,’ he said proudly. ‘In the court, all those clever people, suddenly they’re crying for the murderer, with Norman speaking about the terrible life with his terrible wife the murderer was having. I also wept a little. And you remember after the sentence how they all cheered. Such a hooray there was. And all because of Norman Zweck,’ he said, thrusting his face close to his son’s. He gasped Norman’s hand. ‘He owes his life to you, that murderer. Who should deny it? And how they all came running afterwards. All the murderers. All the thieves. Suddenly, everybody wanted Zweck. You remember, Norman?’ he whispered. ‘And now again, they’ll want you. You go back to the Law and we start again.’

  Norman took his hand away, and hid his face in the pillow.

  Perhaps he should not have mentioned the Law bit, Rabbi Zweck thought. In all honesty, it was what he, his father wanted him to do, and Rabbi Zweck knew by instinct, that his expectations and hopes for Norman had contributed in large measure to his son’s breakdown. ‘Is Norman must lead Norman’s life,’ he kept saying to himself, and he recalled Minister’s remark on his first visit to the hospital, oh, how many long weeks ago? ‘When I die,’ he’d said, ‘it won’t be my death at all. Like my life, it’ll be something that happened to my Mum.’ It was as if all had been clarified, and that Norman’s sojourn in hospital was a lesson primarily for his father.

  A few days after Norman’s deep sleep, the doctors decided that he was ready for intensive treatment. He was depressed which was to be expected but he was not silent. He talked endlessly to the nurses and the other patients. He had no curiosity about anyone else’s condition; his concern with his own was supreme, and he talked about his problems endlessly. At first, he made an erratic start with his doctor.

  He wanted to tell everything, as if it would elude him and embed itself behind his mind, and take yet another spell of pain and hallucination before it would risk showing itself again. Over the weeks, he calmed down, but every session reverted to ‘her’. whose name stuck in his throat. No matter what the subject, it was always Esther who dodged through the cluttered events of his life, nagging to be heard. So it marked a decisive advance in Norman’s analysis when, after a few weeks, overcome by an oppressive melancholy, he was able, tentatively, to speak about her.

  Dr Littlestone was smoking a pipe when Norman came into the room. It was a smell to which Norman had at other times been indifferent, but today, possibly because of his acute depression. the fumes nauseated him. He begged the doctor with almost servile deference, to put it out. The doctor obliged, but the fumes still hung in the air.

  Norman went to the window and opened it. Then he sat down, waiting for the smell to subside. They waited in silence. Then, after a few minutes, the doctor went to the window. ‘Shall I shut it now?’ he asked.

  Norman nodded.

  Dr Littlestone shut the window and sat on the corner of his desk. ‘How are you Norman?’ he said. It marked the regular opening of a session. It was not a question that required an answer. It meant, simply, ‘Let’s go on from where we left off.’

  ‘I must tell you about her,’ Norman blurted out. ‘I must tell you about my … er … sister.’

  Dr Littlestone moved over to his chair, and sat down. Norman’s opening promised a fruitful session.

  After his initial announcement, Norman did not know how to carry on. He sought for a beginning, but all that crowded into his mind, was the final denouement of disaster. He could have started at the end and worked his way backward, until a beginning would have found itself, simply when he would stop talking. But, depressed as he was, he still had a feeling for shape, drama and climax, a hangover from his barrister training. ‘She,’ he began, ‘my sister.. .’

  Dr Littlestone waited. He didn’t want to give any help at this stage. Norman was articulate enough. Once he got started, he would gather his own momentum. He doodled idly on his pad, and then, without thinking, he put the pad away. The gesture gave Norman confidence. The pad reminded him of the policeman’s note-book, in which I ought to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you. Norman wanted to get his story out, but he wanted it forgotten, he never wanted it to be referred to again. ‘People used to think she was pretty,’ he began. It helped, he found, to distance her, to give other people the responsibility for her story. ‘They thought she was pretty,’ he repeated, ‘but I myself, never took much notice of her. Not until David started to look at her. When she was about He paused, dissatisfied with the shape the story was taking. ‘I suppose I should tell you about David,’ he said. ‘It’s really about David I’ve got to tell you.’

  ‘Who is David?’ Dr Littlestone said. He didn’t remember hearing the name. If Norman had ever mentioned it, it was in passing, and without any significance.

  ‘David was Norman hesitated. He fumbled with the fold of his dressing-gown. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ he said aggressively. ‘He was my friend, that’s all.’

  ‘Tell me about Esther then.’

  Norman shrugged helplessly. His mouth was full of vocabulary, yet there seemed no way to distil it in any kind of order. He let his mind wander away from the whole sorry story. He thought of Minister. He missed him. He must have been discharged when Norman was in his deep sleep. He wished he could contact him again. What point was there in living this so-called sane way of life, when all zest was drained out of him, and all he was left with was a clear recognition of his own torment that hammered at his skull. He could have done without such memories to nag at him. He had kept them dormant and controlled in his white days. On reflection, the silver-fish were preferable to any thought of David. He knew it was wrong to wish anyone into the hell-hole, but he hoped that Minister would come back and push David out of his mind once more.

  Dr Littlestone twiddled his pencil. ‘You were going to tell me about Esther,’ he said softly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Are you very fond of her?’ he said.

  ‘I hate her. Can’t you see that? I hate her and I’ll never see her again.’

  ‘When did you start hating her?’

  ‘I don’t remember. Always, I suppose. I hope I did, anyway. Whatever’s wrong with me, she started it all. She’s hateable, she’s rotten.’

  ‘How was it her fault?’

  ‘She didn’t have to do it, did she?’

  ‘It depends on what she did.’

  ‘She left him. that’s what she did. She didn’t have to that, did she?’

  ‘It depends on her reasons.’

  ‘Oh, let’s forget it,’ Norman said. He didn’t want to discuss it, so that someone else could take his sister’s side.

  There was no defence for her anyway. He just wanted to tell the story without any interruption, and especially without comments of partiality. ‘Let’s forget it,’ he said again.

  ‘Would you like to go back into the ward? I’ll be seeing you again at the end of the week. Perhaps it’ll be easier then.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to go back. It’ll only nag at me.’ He leaned on the desk and put his head in his hands.

  ‘Don’t worry about the order of things,’ Dr Littlestone said. ‘Try to make a start. Anywhere.’

  Norman lifted his head. ‘We were in shul one day.’ he began softly, though as he knew, not at the beginning, ‘and I saw him looking at her.’

  ‘Who were you with?’ Dr Littlestone asked, putting his pencil down, ‘and who was she that he was looking at?’

  ‘I was with David,’ Norman went on, slightly irritated by the interrupt
ion, ‘and she was … well she was my sister.

  She was upstairs. You know they separate us in shul. The women sit upstairs and the men down below. We used to spend most of our time looking up and seeing them come in. It was more noticeable when we did it, more noticeable than when they did it, that is. Because the centre of our attention was supposed to be downstairs anyway, where my father was standing. At that time, he was Minister of the Congregation.’ Minister, Norman thought, and it was the first time he’d connected that connotation with his erstwhile pusher. ‘Yes, he was the minister there in those days,’ he said aloud. ‘We used to spend most of our time looking upwards, David and I. I think most Jewish marriages begin like that, looking upwards. It’s an enforced kind of idolatry.

  Maybe that was the point of the separation. I don’t know.

  Anyway, that’s how we used to spend our time in shul.’ He paused. ‘What was I saying?’ he said.

  ‘You’re in the synagogue,’ Dr Littlestone said. ‘You’re with David, and Esther’s upstairs.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And he was looking at her. I caught him looking at her and when he saw me looking at him, he blushed a little, as if he were guilty. Then I thought to myself, how long has this been going on? And I was angry, for two reasons. First, that I hadn’t noticed it, and second, that it was going on at all.’

  ‘Why should you be angry about it?’ Dr Littlestone asked.

  ‘I was jealous, I suppose. After a while, when they really got going together, I was glad about it. I was very happy about it in fact. But in the beginning I was jealous, because, well, he was my best friend. I wanted him all to myself. He was my only friend, in fact, I couldn’t afford to share him.’

  ‘Tell me about your friendship,’ Dr Littlestone said.

  Norman left off fiddling with the folds in his dressing-gown. He leaned back in the chair. He was feeling less depressed, already slightly detached from the story. ‘How do you describe a friendship?’ he said, as if the two of them were engaged in a philosophical encounter. ‘In hindsight I can examine it, and ascribe this meaning to it, or that. But at the time, I didn’t know what it was all about. All I knew was that I was happy when I was with him, that he was part of me, as I was of him. That we fought like two brothers, and loved likewise. I loved him more than that, I think.’

  Norman fiddled with his dressing-gown again. ‘Well, maybe,’ he shrugged. He was depressed again, and the detachment was gone. ‘Once I went away to stay with my aunt for a week, and I couldn’t stand it. Nothing to do with my aunt. It was him. I missed him and I worried about who he was with and what he was doing. I had to stick the week out, hiding my feelings, ‘cos I knew, even then, that there was something unnatural about them. Then when I came back, he was waiting for me in my house, and his mother was there, and she said, well thank God you’re back. He’s been sulking the whole week. Such aggravation I’ve had from him. She was like my mother. She was always having aggravation. And not just aggravation. Such aggravation they were always having. We never aggravated them. They never found us aggravating. It was only that we gave them such aggravation. We gave it to them when we came home late from school, when we didn’t wash our hands before a meal, when our shoelaces were undone. Throughout our childhood, it seems the only thing we gave our mothers was aggravation. And not just aggravation, but such aggravation. I used to think aggravation was a yiddish word.’ He smiled to himself, remembering the joy of that homecoming and the knowledge that David had missed him equally. He looked up at Dr Littlestone. ‘Well, that’s the kind of friends we were.’ he said.

  ‘Were your mothers friendly?’

  Norman did not see the relevance of the question, and he answered with little interest. ‘Yes, I suppose they were. They were always together. She made our clothes. My mother was always being measured for something. David didn’t have a father you see. He died when David was a baby. It was our local tragedy. We grew up with the story. We didn’t know how he died; there was a feeling abroad that we shouldn’t ask. It became a kind of myth. That’s why she didn’t marry again I suppose. It would have been letting down one of our local traditions. She was a “good woman” as they called her, bringing him up on her own, and earning a living as a dressmaker. Yes, they were good friends, she and my mother.’

  ‘Were you orthodox, you and David. Did you go to the synagogue every Saturday?’

  Norman laughed. ‘Oh, the shul was only the smallest part of it. Yes, we were religious all right. It’s pretty difficult not to be, if your father’s a minister. We went every Friday night too. And we used to go to cheder together. That’s our Sunday school, and my father would teach us privately too. My father felt responsible for David’s Jewish education, since he didn’t have a father of his own. Yes, we were orthodox all right.’

  He fiddled with his dressing-gown cord again. He found it difficult to keep his mind on the story. He kept thinking of Minister. What right had he to be discharged without leaving any provision for his clients? He wondered if others in the ward depended upon him, but on the whole, unless it was obvious what was the matter with them, the men didn’t volunteer why they were there. So there was no way of knowing who was suffering from Minister’s absence.

  Who wasn’t suffering, Norman thought. They were all in hell here, anyway. And here was he just scratching at the surface of his story that was pleading in the pit of his stomach for release. He wanted Dr Littlestone’s help and yet he resented his every question. He wanted to tell the story his own, in his own way, and keep it to himself, and not to donate it as a mere case-history. Because, like his dreams, whomever they were about, they, like his story, were his and nobody else’s.

  Dr Littlestone coughed to affirm his presence. ‘In the beginning,’ he said, ‘you wanted to tell me about Esther. Tell me about her before David happened.’

  ‘There never was a time when David hadn’t happened. At least, I don’t remember it. And if there was, it wouldn’t have been of any importance.’

  Dr Littlestone leaned back in his chair. He shoved his legs forward and made almost a production of making himself comfortable. For the first time in the session, he looked as if he wanted to listen, not for any professional purpose, but out of sheer untrammelled interest. And Norman responded. He started, painfully at first, but gathered momentum as the story took hold. As he began, he had a fleeting awareness that he was about to destroy what was his strongest defence, and an accompanying fear of what he could build to replace it. Would the white days come back, and were they dependent on the story or was it the other way around. But it was unfolding itself, almost without his volition, the story of Esther and what it had done to him.

  ‘Esther was around a long time before I took much notice of her. She was the baby, and everyone spoilt her.

  She was pretty too, with the kind of prettiness that didn’t run in our family. Well, take a look at me, for instance, and my sister Bella’s not so hot, either. You’ve seen her when she visits me. My mother was no beauty, and my father, well, I’ve never considered him in those terms. Any.

  way, Esther was pretty, you couldn’t deny it, and as she grew older she even became beautiful. It worried my father a bit, because he thought it would go to her head, so he spent more time on Esther’s education, the Jewish side of it, I mean, than he did on me or Bella. He loved her too, to distraction, and so did my mother, but I’m not blaming Esther for that. She was the baby and she was pretty and neither of those facts was her fault: But I suppose they were afraid that her beauty would tempt her into a wider world than we were supposed to enter, the world of the goyim, as my parents called it. But as a result of my father’s dedication, Esther became more religious than all of us. She was always looking for new rules in the Law to obey. It used to irritate me. Above all, I used to find it priggish, but we weren’t allowed to say a word against her. Well, she grew up, and she didn’t interfere with me in any way, and David was around most of the time, and neither of us had time for anybody else. I noticed s
ometimes that she was pretty horrible to my sister Bella.

  She used to make fun of her because she was grown up and still wore little white socks. I don’t know why Bella did it, but they were her feet after all, and she was entitled to put what she liked on them. Anyway, that’s another story and it’s got nothing to do with me.’

  Dr Littlestone shifted in his chair. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me, those white socks,’ he repeated. ‘That’s Bella’s problem, and it’s me who’s in this place, so forget it. It’s Esther I’m telling you about.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Dr Littlestone said.

  ‘Well, when she was fifteen, she left school. Apart from Hebrew and Jewish learning and that sort of thing, she wasn’t very bright. For a while she helped in the shop.

  We’ve got a grocer shop, you know,’ he said. We live above it. It was my mother’s, and she used to run it when my father was congregational minister. Then, when my father retired, he went into the shop and they shared the work between them. Well, the shop wasn’t really busy enough to warrant all those assistants, especially since a supermarket had opened down the road, so Esther left and took over some of my father’s Hebrew classes. The young ones, at first, then gradually, after a few years, she took over the entire cheder. My parents were proud of her. At the time, I had just qualified and I was beginning to make a modest living. They were proud of me too. In fact, when I think about it, they had plenty to be happy about. There was Bella, of course, getting older. and less marriageable, but every Jewish family has a Bella. They’re a kind of nachus too. Too bad on the Bellas of course, but she seemed reasonably content, though those white socks of hers were beginning to get me down too. It’s all a bit confusing, isn’t it?’ he said.