by J. S. Margot
They were regular customers of Antwerp Taxi. The operator of the city’s largest taxi firm knew not to send certain drivers to certain addresses. Just as he knew when it would be better to send a people carrier: large families didn’t fit into a standard cab, and if they had to go to Zaventem airport there could be scenes when the head of the family wanted to lash all the suitcases and buggies to the roof of the cab with rope or bungee straps, and you had to tell him that safety regulations didn’t allow it.
Elzira didn’t look around her, but marched on. She seemed to be in a hurry.
The area around Verschansingstraat and the old Waterpoort city gate was home to a large Moroccan and Turkish community. The men sat in coffee and tea houses whose windows were covered with opaque plastic, and sometimes bore the letters VZW, standing for “not-for-profit organization”, not always in the right order. The women were nowhere to be seen. In summer, surrounded by children, they would sit chatting on stools on the pavement, newly washed mats and rugs spread out around them to dry. They drank mint tea, unfailingly accompanied by sweet, orange-coloured pastries. In winter they vanished indoors. The streets were almost deserted. The only shops open were Turkish ones. I could hear Arabic or Berber; I couldn’t distinguish the one from the other.
Elzira asked: “Is it dangerous here?”
“Dangerous? Why?”
“Only non-Jews live here.”
“That applies to most places in the city.”
“Je sais.”
“Do you feel uneasy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Every city has its neighbourhoods.”
“Yes.”
“My boyfriend Nima is Iranian; you know that.”
“But he’s with you.”
Never a great talker, Elzira suddenly started to rattle away without stopping. She told me that she had been given her pink bicycle for her bat mitzvah—a kind of confirmation ceremony for girls. That she’d tried to ride it a couple of times. That it hadn’t worked. That she hadn’t been able to keep her balance. That she’d never managed to pedal and steer simultaneously, because of her handicap. She repeated the word handicap, pronouncing it in a French way. She said she’d once smashed her bike against the garage wall in front of her parents and run off to her room in a rage. Told me that Daddy had put the bike in his car and that they’d driven to a park outside the city a few times. That the last time she’d burst into tears and Daddy had said, “You don’t have to, it’s all right.”
She explained to me what bar mitzvah, “son of the commandment” meant. She did it really well, going into detail, as if giving a mini presentation. In short it amounted to this: bar mitzvah was the solemn ritual ceremony at the synagogue for thirteen-year-old boys, marking their transition to religious adulthood. From then on they no longer fell under the religious custodianship of their parents, but took personal responsibility for keeping the 613 Jewish commandments, mitzvoth, which I knew existed, but not that there were so many of them.
Elzira: “‘Bat mitzvah’, with a ‘t’, means ‘daughter of the commandment’. But in public Jewish life, men are more important than women. So boys get a bigger party. And more and bigger presents. But girls do have this celebration earlier, when they’re twelve.”
“I think your bike’s a big present, you know,” I responded.
She nodded. Here, plucked from her familiar environment, she looked extra vulnerable. She placed her hand on the bike saddle. It was a Kalkhoff, a brand you hardly ever saw in Belgium. Kalkhoffs were made in Germany.
My grandfather regarded all German companies as tainted. No German products crossed his threshold. For the Schneiders, though, the fact that Kalkhoff workers might have contributed to the extermination of the Jewish people was apparently no reason to boycott the brand. I had yet to meet a Jew who drove a Mercedes, but in the case of this bicycle they hadn’t even bothered to paint over the name on the frame.
At the baker’s in Verschansingstraat, near the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, I bought two croissants and two pains au chocolat.
Elzira didn’t want to go inside with me. “You go, I’ll stay with my bike.” Her head was hidden by her down hood.
“Have one,” I urged her before we set off. I held the bag, with its fragrance of fresh pastry, under her nose.
She shook her head.
“Go on, I didn’t buy them for nothing.”
“No thank you.” She pushed the bike’s kickstand up again and asked what direction we should go in.
“The croissants here are really tasty,” I tried once more.
She had already walked on. She said nothing more, but I could see from her pace that she wanted to get going.
As we waited at a zebra crossing she looked at me. “Could I perhaps just taste a pain au chocolat? But don’t tell Mummy or Daddy.”
“Sure. Here. Enjoy. They’re really good. But why aren’t your parents allowed to know? Are you on a diet?”
“It’s not allowed.”
“What’s not allowed?”
“The baker isn’t kosher…”
“But there can’t be anything wrong with a croissant. There’s no fish, meat or milk in them.”
“There are eggs and butter in them. Eggs have to be checked by the rabbi. Only he can say whether they’re kosher.”
“Checked for what?”
“Traces of blood. We don’t eat eggs qui sont des poussins.”
“Eggs that are chickens? There aren’t any chickens in these eggs!”
“You shouldn’t mock us.”
“I’m not mocking you, sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just find it, er, a bit absurd. But if I’d known you weren’t allowed to eat anything from our bakers, of course I wouldn’t have bought something here or offered it to you…”
“With us, all produits laitiers have to be separated from everything else. That includes the kitchen, our own kitchen. Have you seen that there are two dishwashers in our kitchen? One for produits laitiers and one for everything else. We’ve got two sets of pots and pans.”
“I’ve never been in your kitchen. And it’s ‘dairy products’, Elzira. Produits laitiers is dairy products. Eggs aren’t dairy.”
“Butter’s a dairy product. I’ll show you our kitchen.”
“So because of your dietary laws, you can never come and eat pancakes at our place? What a shame!” I said.
“We only eat at the homes of Jewish people who respect our dietary laws. Or we go to a kosher restaurant. But Mummy says there are so few kosher restaurants in the city that she always sees the same people there. Mummy would like to go somewhere where she doesn’t know anyone for a change. But Daddy’s different. He likes people to know him, he enjoys it when people greet him en public, he’s happy when someone comes to chat with him and he can tell a joke—he knows good jokes, really. Luckily Irma can cook well, and Mummy even better.”
She laughed.
“Who’s Irma?”
“She works at our house. You’ve seen her already. She often cooks.”
“And your mummy?”
“She often cooks too.”
“Are the women who work for you Jewish?” I asked. As far as I could make out, I’d seen three domestic staff. The children were friendly to them, but kept their distance more than from me.
“They’re not Jewish. But they’ve learnt all our dietary laws. One of them, Krystina, used to work for the catering company that supplies El Al, the ligne aérienne of Israel. Krystina comes from Poland, just like Irma. Opris comes from Romania.”
“My boyfriend Nima is a good cook. Suppose he were to cook for you one evening, using only kosher products and keeping to your laws? Would you come for a meal at our place?”
“The Eternal One is the most important thing for us,” she announced, swallowing the
last mouthful of her pain au chocolat. Her answer came out of the blue. The Schneiders excelled in this kind of deus ex machina.
“Is God more important than friendship?” I wouldn’t be put off.
“He is friendship,” she said, “and we never speak his name, out of respect for the Eternal One. Could you please never mention his name again?”
There I stood. Not believing in God or G*d or any kind of supreme being whatsoever. Seriously doubting the possibility of ever becoming friends with Elzira, or any other pious Orthodox Jewish child.
“But you can always come and eat with us. You don’t have to keep any dietary laws. So you can keep ours,” she said, without a trace of superiority. Adding that the best kosher chocolate was made by Callebaut, and that from now on we would get pastries at Kleinblatt’s to take with us, or at Grosz, her favourite kosher supermarket, not far from their home.
By the time I helped her into the saddle, there was already more colour in her cheeks. Though it could have been my imagination.
Thirteen
Somewhere in Iran there are at least ten videotapes of films starring me.
Every few months, Nima would rent a portable 8mm Sony video camera and film scenes from our daily lives to send to his parents.
Many were recorded in our kitchen: dishes expressed more than we could say.
Nima prepared basmati rice the way his mother and grandmother had taught him. He washed the grains in a fine sieve as I panned the camera from him to the tap and the sink, and then back again. As soon as the rinsing water was crystal clear he tipped the rice into boiling, salted water. I recorded him layering the bottom of the oven dish with thin slices of raw potato, then letting the rice, enriched with a big knob of butter and filaments of saffron, steam in the dish, which he’d covered with a clean tea towel. In the end, the potato layer was transformed into a crust patterned by the grains of rice. As I scraped out the delicious crust and gobbled it up, Nima zoomed in on my beaming face.
Flemish cuisine was demonstrated in the same way. While Nima trained the camera on me, I put large, peeled potatoes through a mechanical chip cutter. I dabbed the raw chips dry with kitchen paper, fried them once in lard, then fried them again. As Nima dipped the chips in—home-made!—mayonnaise and Andalouse sauce, I zoomed in on his greasy lips. We made shrimp croquettes, recording the whole procedure from A to Z. Even though we knew that pink shrimps weren’t to be had in Iran. I made pancakes and spread them with pear syrup.
We gave his parents a tour of Antwerp. Guided them from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts to the cathedral, from the Rubens House to the Begijnhof, from the pedestrian tunnel under the Scheldt to the Middelheim sculpture park.
We wanted to show them the Jewish neighbourhood.
When we filmed a group of boys with sidelocks under the bridge by Van Den Nestlei, we were stopped by a police officer who said that we’d been under observation since we’d entered Mercatorstraat and Simonsstraat. In those streets we’d filmed three picturesque, typically Jewish shops: a bookshop, a baker’s, a greengrocer’s. At the synagogues, housed in ordinary town houses, Nima had filmed the faithful going in and out. The security guard standing at the entrance, his legs slightly apart, had nodded at us. When they saw our camera, the worshippers had turned their heads away angrily. A man dressed in civilian clothes, somewhat flustered, came to tell us to go away. Which we’d done without too much protest, walking in the direction of Belgiëlei, to the bridge where this officer had stopped us.
“You’ve been spotted,” he said.
“Spotted?” Nima asked laconically. “Like celebrities, you mean? Or UFOs?”
“Can I see your identity document.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been spotted.”
“By whom?”
“By our colleagues at the places of worship.”
I tugged at Nima’s sleeve. He ignored me. He asked where it was written that you couldn’t stand under a bridge or film in Simonsstraat. He wanted to see the law on paper; only then would he perhaps be prepared to admit that he’d committed an offence. He asked the officer for his name and the names of his superiors. He suggested that we all go to the police station together. “Then we can get to the bottom of this case.” I burst out laughing.
The policeman looked a bit at a loss, but he was sympathetic towards us and quite communicative. He told us that the Israeli embassy, in consultation with the local and federal police, deployed its own security patrols in Antwerp’s Jewish neighbourhood. They were the ones who’d spotted us.
“I’d like to see the Iranian embassy try that,” said Nima.
“Sir, I can’t change the world,” the officer replied. “And if there was no injustice in it, we’d be out of a job.”
He noted down our personal details, but didn’t impound the camera or the videotape. “In future, film more discreetly,” he advised us, “and respect the wishes of those who don’t want to be filmed.” Deciding to celebrate this happy outcome within our budget, we went to Hoffy’s, fairly new at the time, but which almost instantly became the best-known kosher restaurant and takeaway in the city. Run by photogenic Hasidic brothers, with a menu in Yiddish, it did the second-best takeout hummus in town.
Fourteen
Less than an hour into our practice session—I’d let go of the back wheel and given her bike an extra push—Elzira came a cropper on the cobblestones.
I saw it happen. At first she pedalled timidly. Then she grew bold, starting to go faster and faster. She was only about thirty metres away when she panicked and lost control of the handlebars. The bike collided with a Renault that was parked by the kerb. So did she.
I ran towards her. She struggled to her feet, holding her right hand with her left. With a grimace she started picking bits of gravel out of her glove, removing them carefully, finger by finger and centimetre by centimetre. Her skirt was dirty, her woollen tights were torn at one knee and there were dirty, wet patches on the right sleeve of her jacket. Her wrist was red and already quite swollen.
She tried to stand her bicycle upright. Again and again it fell over. The more she tried, the more awkward her movements became. It was as if a flame had been lit under her clumsiness, causing a host of slumbering frustrations to flare up. When I tried to help her, she pushed me away. “Laisse-moi.” The white Renault, whose rear end was now scraped and disfigured by pink stripes, suffered fresh wounds.
I went to inspect her wrist. “Non.” I asked where it hurt. “Laissemoi, je te dis!” I said soothingly that everything was hard at first, and as I said it, I heard my mother, and knew how ludicrous these well-intentioned words must have sounded to Elzira. She pushed me away. I picked her bike up; the chain had come off. “Shall we put it back on together?” I asked her.
She started to punch me violently on the chest. Short blows punctuated by sobs. As she punched, she jumped up and down like someone trying to warm up as quickly as possible. She was saying something to me in French as she hit me. I didn’t know what, couldn’t follow it at all. Small and frail as she was, she was stronger than I’d thought.
“Look at me, Elzira,” I commanded. I didn’t dare grab her punching hands, she might have sprained her wrist.
She thumped me hard on the chest. It hurt. “Stop it, Elzira, look at me.”
“I’m not coming back!” She ran off angrily.
When someone runs away, you should let them run, I knew from personal experience. Just then I didn’t care about the trouble this would certainly cause. The Schneiders would sack me on the spot, I was sure. The very first time I’d taken their daughter somewhere they felt she shouldn’t be, I’d abandoned her to her fate.
She’d never be able to find her way home. Unless she asked a passer-by for directions. But she wouldn’t dare. She’d never done that in her life. All the activities organized by Aguda, the Jewish youth movement
, took place in the Jewish neighbourhood. And the movement’s summer and winter camps were held abroad, in places where the Jewish faith and all that went with it weren’t threatened by outside influences. Once a year she went skiing with Aguda. Boys and girls separately. The ski slope was the only place where Elzira wore trousers, immediately changing into her long skirt and tights for the après-ski. I’ve seen photos of one of these camps; in her ski pants she looked strong and pretty.
She would probably hail a taxi, I thought. But hardly any taxis drove around this neighbourhood, especially on a Sunday morning. The people who lived here used public transport or walked. She didn’t have any money on her, I realized, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem; her parents would pay the driver when he dropped her off at their door.
I replaced the bike chain and went and drank a cup of coffee in Entrepôt du Congo, a cafe where I regularly read the papers of an afternoon. There was a payphone near the toilets. Should I call Elzira’s parents? Should I look for Elzira? Or would she come back, as I suspected she would?
I drank a cup of coffee, ordered a second.
Elzira came round the corner, dragging her feet, her hands pressed against her temples.
She saw me through the window and gave me a nod. I waved, gestured she should come inside. She shook her head. I pantomimed that I wanted to finish my coffee. She nodded.
When I went outside, she came and pressed her body against me. I felt her tense muscles—neck, shoulders, back—and wasn’t quite sure what to do. I stroked her glossy, dark brown locks; they smelt so nice I wondered if she’d sprayed them with perfume.
“Your hair smells really nice,” I said.
“Mummy taught me that,” she said softly. “Mummy says, ‘put a dab of eau de toilette on your hair, everyone’s the better for it.’”
I laughed.
