Mazel Tov

by J. S. Margot

  Twenty-Nine

  Less than a year later, Jakov started a little business in essays, presentations and book reviews.

  With my knowledge and support, he sold my work to other pupils in his year; he pocketed a third of the sales price, the rest went to me. I can’t remember any more how much I charged per essay, or for writing a book review or presentation. But it was certainly a lucrative little number.

  In practice, our partnership amounted to me writing six or seven different essays per assignment. The pupils signed up for my work in advance. Because they were given a choice of topics by their teacher, I never had to come up with six or seven versions of the same theme or book title. Usually I would do two versions per topic or book, making it less likely we’d be rumbled; I didn’t find it too hard to vary them sufficiently but subtly.

  The only thing I refused to do was to betray my beliefs. If the essay title was “For or against the death penalty” I’d be against it by definition, not so much because I wouldn’t have been able to make a credible argument in its favour, but because I was dammed if I was going to preach a message that went against everything I stood for.

  Book reviews followed the same lines. The reading list of Jakov’s yeshiva was different from the lists I’d had at secondary school. It didn’t include any novels about Flemish Catholicism, nor any books featuring sex. No Claus, Boon, Geeraerts or Wolkers. No Willem Frederik Hermans, with the sole exception of The Darkroom of Damocles. And certainly no Gerard Reve, with his homoeroticism. The list did contain a couple of works by Elsschot: Cheese and Will-o’-the-Wisp, though some of the passages in which the main character speaks of ladies of pleasure had been censored with a big fat black marker. Mulisch was considered acceptable. Along with, if I remember correctly, Leon de Winter’s Kaplan, Mendel’s Inheritance by Marcel Möring, Frans Pointl’s The Chicken that Flew over the Soup, Anton Koolhaas and Frederik van Eeden.

  “How do you explain that, Jakov? That prominent Jewish writers are thick on the ground in the Netherlands, whereas Flanders, apart from our wonderful Eriek Verpale, has none, as far as I know? Where are you in our literature?”

  “You Flemings don’t love your language,” he answered, without even having to pause for thought. “You don’t love Dutch and therefore you don’t love yourselves, so how could you love us, and we you?”

  His words were like a blow. On a couple of occasions, Nima and his Iranian friends had reached the same linguistic conclusion. I thought this silly and simplistic. As if our language lay only in our camp, and those who spoke other languages didn’t have the responsibility to get to know it too. So as to get to know our culture. To take part in it.

  “In Argentina, Sweden, Moldavia, Australia—everywhere—someone is saying gutn tog,” Jakov rubbed it in.

  “Gutn tog sounds like the dialect of Limburg, Jakov, or West Flanders,” I said, tired as always by debates like these.

  “Anyone who speaks Yiddish loves that language.”

  “You keep saying the same thing, over and over. What is your native language, actually?” I asked.

  “French perhaps. Hebrew, Ivrit, to an extent. But later my native language will be English or American. I’m going to get a master’s in business administration. I’m not going to stay in Belgium.”

  “Your native language is the language of where you were born, you can’t change it ‘later’!”

  “I was born in Judaism.”

  Our fraudulent business flourished.

  And it remained a secret for years, as all our accomplices realized they’d be better off keeping this underground network to themselves.

  My conscience knew no pangs, not even the teensiest.

  “You’re worse than we are,” Jakov laughed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re always shakhering.* You’re a dirty Jew.”

  * Yiddish: wheeling and dealing

  Thirty

  I said: “Come on, let’s take the tram to the city centre for once, and walk with Monsieur as far as the Scheldt.”

  But we didn’t take the tram. Mrs Schneider dropped us—Elzira, Monsieur and me—off at the Steen castle, the oldest building in Antwerp, on the bank of the Scheldt, close to the historic town centre. She would pick us up an hour and a half later at the castle’s gate. “Just to be clear: you are to walk away from the city, towards the bend in the river, not in the opposite direction, n’est-ce pas.”

  Monsieur was excited to discover this new terrain. Snuffling up the smells of the quayside cobblestones, he kept lifting his head skywards, scenting the breeze blowing from the river.

  A freighter with a Panamanian flag lay moored to the quay, its churning engines spreading the stink of diesel. A member of the crew vaulted gracefully over the gangplank: “I have just such a dog at home, my wife takes care of him—oh, he’s so cute.” Monsieur allowed himself to be petted.

  We strolled northwards, past the old warehouses. Near what used to be the tollbooth, Elzira pointed out a cable strung high in the air.

  “That’s the eruv,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you see that wire?”

  “I see a cable.”

  “Hung at a height of six metres. That’s the eruv.”

  “You might as well be talking Chinese,” I said. “What on earth’s an eruv?” She laughed, and picked up Monsieur. From the way she held him against her chest, I could already see how she would cherish her children later.

  She explained to me that Antwerp was the only city in the world to form an eruv in its entirety. An eruv is a ritual enclosure of a specific domain. In cities like Paris, London, Amsterdam and New York, there were eruvs too, but not enclosing the whole city.

  An eruv, she told me in fits and starts, could be created by walls, embankments, train rails and water. In places lacking these natural or architectural boundaries a holy wire was stretched at tree height, under rabbinical supervision.

  “The eruv represents a house: an imaginary house, fictional, you understand?” She massaged Monsieur’s little paws and put him back down again. He barked at a couple of screeching gulls. Curled his tail tensely.

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Our laws allow us to do much more inside our homes than outside. The eruv turns l’espace public into our espace privé.”

  I burst out laughing. She was kidding me.

  It took quite a while before I got it.

  As always, it had to do with the five books of the Torah and with the Talmud. That was nothing new: I’d long got the message that there was no place for trivialities in the lives of observant Jews, and that everything they did was formalized by their religion.

  “Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work.” Elzira quoted the Bible, going on to specify what this pronouncement meant: the Eternal One had pronounced a ban on thirty-nine forms of labour—including cooking, writing, travelling, building and making music.

  Without knowing it, she was finally giving me an explanation for the transparent plastic bags that many married men and rabbis would put over their sable shtreimels summer or winter, before Shabbat began, even if it wasn’t raining. You never knew—it might rain, and opening an umbrella is like putting a roof over your head: you can’t do that on Shabbat. I told Elzira what I’d just realized. “But those hats cost a fortune, you know,” she responded. “As much as 20,000 francs. And often they are patrimoine familial, handed down from father to son, so it’s kind of logique that they use plastic to protect them against water. Do you now also understand why our synagogues have to be so close together?” Elzira asked. “On Shabbat we’re not allowed to use any means of transport. Or take more than a certain number of steps. So all Orthodox Jews have to live within walk
ing distance of the synagogue. Which is why we have so many shuls.”

  So within the eruv, the symbolic, imaginary wall that had been constructed around Antwerp, the city was transformed into an imaginary house. And within that imaginary house, in line with the Shabbat laws, certain strictly defined actions were permissible: carrying a baby, carrying shopping, pushing a pram… In cities without an eruv, none of that was allowed.

  “Are you allowed to walk Monsieur on Shabbat?”

  “We asked the rabbi that. Daddy rang him. The rabbi thought it strange we had a dog, but he said that walking him wouldn’t be a problem. But I still don’t take Monsieur outside on Saturdays. Mummy and Daddy think we shouldn’t make a display of our chien. And Opris is at our house toujours. It is all right for Opris to show that we have a dog. Much more than for me.”

  “Don’t you mind that?”

  “Pourquoi?”

  “Do you often ring the rabbi?”

  “We ring if we don’t know how to interpret a certain law. If we have a problem, or want advice. A rabbi is much more than a religious teacher, you already know that of course, he is very sage, wise: an authority. We consult him on domestic questions, but also on issues like my dyspraxia. Mummy and Daddy went to ask him for advice on that.”

  “Is it true the rabbi won’t let you live in the same house as non-Jews?” I don’t know why I asked her this. Milena—Milena who worked in a boutique and knew all there was to know about real Jews—had whispered this to me not so long ago. She added that modern Orthodox Jews made sure to move into apartment buildings occupied only by Jews with deep Belgian roots—“because those new ones from the Eastern Bloc aren’t like us, they’ll only cause us problems.”

  Elzira shook her head.

  “So it isn’t true?”

  “It’s a myth. Like so many other myths that exist about us.”

  I didn’t know what to think of the eruv.

  I didn’t understand that need for biblical mores. I couldn’t fathom why people had to make their lives so complicated. Who was kidding whom here? How could you live in the modern age and yet observe all the rules, laws and rituals of Jewish religion, Jewish culture and Jewish identity so strictly? In that respect, the Amish at least played the game more consistently: they still travelled about by horse and cart, cultivated crops rather than diamonds.

  We walked along in silence for a while.

  Monsieur created a diversion. He found a dead fish on the quayside and tried to gobble it whole. Pulling a face, Elzira dragged him away. In the grass behind the sheds, the dachshund discovered a frog. He nudged it with his nose and it jumped up, croaking. Teasing the frog amused him for a while, then he dashed off in hot pursuit of a fat bumblebee. Hampered by her long skirt, Elzira struggled to run after him elegantly. We laughed and laughed. A good hour and a half later we found the car waiting for us in the car park, with not Mrs but Mr Schneider at the wheel. Elzira and Monsieur crawled into the passenger seat; I was invited to sit in the back.

  “The marit ayin is very important to us,” Elzira whispered.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “Appearances,” Mr Schneider answered for her. “An Orthodox Jewish man will never allow a woman other than his spouse to sit in the passenger seat. It might be misinterpreted.”

  I mumbled something and fiddled with the white leather of the seat, which was torn in a couple of places.

  Classical music boomed from the speakers.

  “The opera Lohengrin, by Richard Wagner, is set here, at the Steen,” Mr Schneider said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Lohengrin is a knight. The opera is about Antwerp and the Duke of Brabant.”

  “Oh,” I said, once again ignorant. “So this is Wagner’s music we’re listening to?”

  “No, this is a composition by Daniel Sternefeld, an excellent Jewish composer from Antwerp who died only a few years ago. I don’t listen to Wagner. He was Hitler’s favourite composer. Worse, he was notoriously anti-Semitic.”

  “Oh,” I said, completing my hat-trick of ignorance.

  Thirty-One

  “So you read left-wing propaganda?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s the magazine of the far-left Workers’ Party of Belgium, isn’t it?”

  Elzira and I were working in her room. Before us lay French grammar exercises on the subjunctive. Mr Schneider was pointing at Solidair, a copy of which, featuring Arafat on the front page, stuck out of the side pocket of my rucksack.

  I nodded. When Marjane urgently needed medical care, Nima had discovered the “people’s doctors” of the PVDA, the Workers’ Party, a Flemish party to the extreme left of its already left-wing Dutch sister organization. Without these doctors, the emergency assistance provided to his sister, who had lost all her asylum papers and no longer had a valid identity document—or at least none that we could find—would never have been so efficient and affordable. And without the unwavering support of a PVDA militant—Ludo, a helpful man who seemed to have been born with an Arafat scarf round his neck—Marjane might well have ended up in prison, or been dispatched to the Petit-Château, a former barracks in Brussels that was now the immigration detention centre.

  Ludo spent countless afternoons in all kinds of bureaucratic institutions. Because Marjane’s case was so complex, he was frequently sent from pillar to post. But he didn’t give up until he’d sorted all the necessary papers.

  Wherever he went, Ludo would peddle the party magazine. We bought one every now and again, out of gratitude for his efforts and because we were sympathetic to him. One day he managed to inveigle us into an annual subscription. That was in 1990, a turbulent year. The year when, in Nicaragua, the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was not re-elected, when the first intifada was still at its height and when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

  For Iranians and other citizens of the Middle East, the first Gulf War, which we followed on the brand-new American channel CNN, wasn’t a video game, but cruel reality close to home. They empathized with their region, and mistrusted Western motives.

  Oil state Kuwait could count on the support of the West. The West also included Israel, apart from the Palestinians. Europe and the US supported the war against Iraq. Of course, Arafat styled himself even more strongly as the Palestinian leader. There was a very real fear that Iran and the whole of the Middle East would get sucked into the conflict.

  Nearly all the political and economic migrants from the Gulf and the surrounding region followed CNN’s live broadcasts and fulminated against the Americans and the Saudis. Every evening, Middle Eastern friends would join Nima at our television sessions. They even included an Iraqi. Neighbouring Iraq was regarded as Iran’s enemy number one and vice versa, but in their battle against the Americans the two stood side by side, so on the same side as Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

  They saw how American troops and NATO armies shot Iraq to smithereens. They saw entire convoys of retreating Iraqi soldiers being bombed flat and President Bush proudly announcing the death toll. They became emotional and furious. They reached for the phone, constantly ringing the home front. They felt that the Americans had no business in their region.

  “You even have a subscription, I see. Your name is on the magazine…”

  “Er…”

  “Those PVDA followers would like nothing better than to personally string up Rabin, our minister of defence. While at the same time lobbying for the abolition of the death penalty. I request you not to share such indoctrination with the children.”

  Mr Schneider had said “our” minister.

  “I’ll put the magazine in my rucksack.”

  “How should Rabin deal with the intifada?”

  “I don’t know. But the violence perpetrated by his army is out of all proportion with the violence of stone-th
rowing boys who, in the name of their people, are resisting occupation. There’ve already been a thousand deaths on the Palestinian side…” I stopped halfway through my sentence. Not because he interrupted me, but because I didn’t want to get embroiled in discussions like these. Not here. Not with Elzira present. A silent Elzira. She was fifteen.

  “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

  I was taken aback.

  “Yes, I know that proverb. I know lots of Flemish proverbs,” Mr Schneider said. When he said “Flemish”, he often meant “Dutch”.

  I preferred his jokes to his proverbs. We’d never talked politics, apart from local issues. And the discussions we did have tended to be light-hearted and about trivial matters: the poor state of the city’s roads, the exhibitions in the Diamond Museum or Silver Museum, the tram that rattled through the narrow Lange Leemstraat—a source of terror to mothers, whose little children often got their bike wheels stuck in the rails—the lack of places to park in the diamond district.

  “I’m not here to teach politics, Mr Schneider, you know that.” I nodded at Elzira, who seemed to be lost in thought. She’d just washed her hair; it was tied up in a pink towel that she’d learnt to knot elegantly.

  “Jakov was harassed by some boys last week.”

  I was shocked. “I know nothing about that.”

  “No, you couldn’t have known. We didn’t tell you. I’m telling you now.”

  “What happened?”

  “The thing that so often happens. Jakov was coming to my office—you’ve been there, so you know where it is. He took the taxi to the Stadspark, but just beyond, in the diamond district, there was a traffic jam, so he decided to walk the last stretch. Four boys, perhaps not even sixteen years old, started shouting at him. ‘Dirty Jew’, ‘Shame your parents and grandparents didn’t die in the gas chambers’, ‘Death to Israel and all Zionists’. They tried to surround him. He fled into a hotel. He called me from there.”