Mazel Tov

by J. S. Margot

  Seven

  What a nice evening! What a lovely Shabbat!

  We were eating in the garden of Simon’s and Abigail’s apartment, not much bigger than the canopy of the tree under which we were dining, from which two bright light bulbs hung that attracted mosquitoes and would burn until the next evening. The candle flames of the menorah flickered under the awning between kitchen and garden, we clinked glasses of water and white wine—l’chaim—toasting the good life, and I felt great and thought: look at us sitting here now, we’re all in our twenties, time has already caught up with us, we’re getting closer and closer together, my grandmother was right.

  Yet initially the reunion had been a little awkward.

  Elzira had been the first to arrive that afternoon. She was happy, in her quiet way, to see me, and the happiness was entirely mutual. As was the feeling of strangeness: it was odd to be seeing each other again after so many years. And in this environment, too. In Israel. In Bnei Brak. In the house of her brother and his wife.

  Our letters had brought us closer together, but at the same time they’d created a distance. Now we were face to face, the intimacy with which we’d written to each other made way for awkwardness, perhaps even a little embarrassment and guilt. In our conversations we circled around our paper confessions.

  But didn’t she look terrific! Her face. Her aura. Her whole being. Before I’d thought her naturally melancholic: a trait she’d been born with, along with her dark eyes. Now I saw I’d been wrong. She’d shaken off her seriousness; now she radiated energy and charm. She had an air of emancipation about her, of autonomy. At the age of twenty-one, she’d transcended her life in Antwerp. I was touched by her.

  Jakov didn’t show up till a good three hours later. He nearly didn’t make it at all. A friend had given him a lift and the two had got stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway. On a Friday afternoon, an overturned truck can have serious consequences for observant Jews, given that they can’t travel after sunset, even by bus. I’d heard incredible tales about this religious law. About people who stopped their journey halfway, parked by the side of the road and continued on foot, in search of a hotel or some other place to sleep, because even on foot there were limits as to how far they were allowed to go. Some slept in their cars, only resuming their journey after Shabbat. Even if it was only a ten-kilometre trip. Even if they were in a city like New York, London or Paris. Telephones were left untouched: ringing to tell someone you were delayed was also prohibited on Shabbat. Though many could think of ways to get round this rule.

  It was long past seven when Jakov and his friend reached Bnei Brak. They could no longer drive into the city: during Shabbat, devout Jews blocked the access roads with crash barriers. Jakov had completed the last stage of the journey on foot.

  He stormed in, hurled his Kipling rucksack into a corner of the hall, strode to the kitchen and downed a glass of water in a single gulp, acting as if he visited his brother and sister-in-law every week. First he greeted his family, then me. He kissed me on the cheeks. “That’s allowed after so many years,” he laughed, without blushing. Elzira laughed too. Simon looked away. Abigail appeared amused and troubled at the same time. I felt like the odd man out.

  “How’s Nima?” Jakov asked before we’d even sat down to dinner in the garden. He was tanned; you could see a pale band of skin as he fiddled with his watch strap. His red Swatch wasn’t the only thing about him that had remained unchanged.

  “He’s fine. But we’re no longer together,” I answered. He looked startled and sad. I gave Elzira a grateful nod; so she didn’t talk to Jakov about me, which I was glad of—I’d written to tell her about our break-up in one of my letters, and she’d touched on it in her reply.

  “A shame that you split up, ou non?” Jakov ventured.

  “Yes, a shame, very much so.”

  “Why didn’t you try?”

  “We did try.”

  “You didn’t try hard enough.”

  He ran up to the next storey, which turned out to belong to the flat. He and Elzira were sleeping there. During the week it was home to two students from the yeshiva. They would take up residence again on Sunday, the first day of the Jewish week.

  Jakov was the ingredient that made us all relax. From the moment he arrived, one word started to pry another loose, and gradually sentences wove themselves together, stories bubbled up. Jokes. Memories. Dreams of the future. We talked and feasted, let down certain, but not all, barriers. I was the only one who, after the aperitif, drank wine: kosher wine from the Carmel Winery, founded by the Rothschilds and certified by the rabbinate.

  I lingered longest in the garden, with Elzira, until after two in the morning.

  When I paid a quick visit to the bathroom before going to bed, I found a pile of toilet paper sheets, pre-emptively torn from the roll, in a little willow basket. Amused, I wondered whether Orthodox Jews were allowed to flush the toilet on Shabbat.

  Eight

  That night I lay awake. The whole evening passed before my eyes. Every single thing.

  The photos of Monsieur. Elzira had shown three: one of just him, one of him and her, and one of the dachshund and its new mistresses. Their grandmother: she was still alive, her hip and her zest for life were whole again. Sara: enjoying life on her own in Antwerp, apparently. The wedding of Abigail and Simon, the photos and all the explanations that went with them. Simon had met Abigail in Amsterdam at a wine tasting. He himself had taken the initiative to approach her, and at first Mr and Mrs Schneider hadn’t been too pleased. They’d had other plans for their eldest son, but Simon was not to be deterred.

  Jakov: his infectious enthusiasm as he’d talked about his international studies. My feeling of slight jealousy at the ease with which, time and again, he and his people settled into new places. I envied them their extensive ties with the world beyond the country of their birth; the social, religious and professional networks on which they, Orthodox Jews, could count anywhere in the world. They only had to go three times a day to the same shul to be recognized, received, acknowledged, understood, assisted. All of this thanks in large part to their lingua franca, modern Hebrew. I tried to picture myself in a similar situation. That film was short and not very pretty. Yet Abigail, who’d only just moved to Bnei Brak, already had a job and was involved in voluntary work. Had Nima’s sister found herself in such a world full of contacts back then, things would have gone very differently. The social control, which hung like a shadow over everything, was something that I passed over. But I mistrusted the ease with which they entered into international marriages. They formed alliances across every geographical border. How could that be: didn’t it matter from which country or culture you came, as long as you shared a religion? Was religion the glue that kept all relationships intact, no matter what? Like in our Catholic Flanders? I remembered the first teacher to get divorced at my school in Meulenberg. I was about eight at the time. She was instantly dismissed. No one protested, but there was a lot of gossip.

  I just couldn’t get to sleep. I tried lying the other way round, with my head at the foot end of the bed, but that didn’t help. I switched on the light, then quickly switched it off again—it was Shabbat.

  I was kept awake by the bad marriage between Jews and Palestinians. By the many daily humiliations that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—young and old, sick, healthy and pregnant—had to endure, close to the bed in which I lay. By the colonization strategy with which the Jewish state, despite the protests of the United Nations, took more and more land from Palestinians. By the image of Simon as a young soldier, the image of innumerable Simons and Simonas who temporarily defended Israel tooth and nail, then went back to their countries of origin, but who were given the authority to make decisions about the lives of Arab inhabitants. How deeply could you wound the Palestinian soul? How many souls would hate and fear kill, on both sides? Why couldn’t there be joint pe
ace and shared sovereignty? Why had we avoided this subject so consciously during the meal? Didn’t silence mean complicity? Had the children become more radical? Did they no longer believe in a two-state solution, as we—especially Jakov and I, at his desk—had often discussed?

  Under the light sheet I dwelt on all the memories that welled up. My time at the Schneiders’ home. Elzira, who now had to laugh at herself and at how difficult she’d sometimes been. Abigail, who often, to her own annoyance, said Elvira instead of Elzira, because the name Elzira inadvertently reminded her of a German relative who’d died in Sobibor: “But let’s not talk about that.” Elzira, who got so good at chess that she beat Jakov. Jakov, who said that he let his little sister win.

  The three had told me what they’d thought of me all those years and how, when I started, they thought that I’d soon give up, just like the other students. They joked about my skull-print trousers and my short, spiky hair. Other things amused them too. How little I knew about their laws. How, in the early days, I’d ring them on Saturdays to say I’d be coming a bit later the next day—something I’d forgotten or repressed. How even after six years I didn’t know when their main holidays were, and how they couldn’t understand it: surely it wasn’t so hard to remember that Rosh Hashanah was celebrated on the first day of the month Tishrei, that Sukkot fell on the fifteenth day of that month, and that Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was celebrated ten days after Rosh Hashanah, i.e. five days before Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, which lasted seven days?

  How I’d thought that Jakov was pulling my leg when he had told me about Shavuot, a holiday in early June, with its tradition of studying all night until sunrise. The Jewish people had overslept, it was said, the morning that they received the Torah. By studying all night, they were still atoning for such laziness all these centuries later.

  My high heels: it hadn’t been the height that had bothered them, rather the noise that they’d made. Did I really think their crêpe soles were an expression of militant feminism? Hadn’t I grasped that women’s heels weren’t supposed to make a noise? Because women shouldn’t attract attention?

  Sometimes Jakov, Elzira, Simon and Abigail had talked to each other in Ivrit. There could only be one reason for that, I was sure, lying in bed: that they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about.

  The deep affection with which they spoke about their parents kept coming back to me. Affection and a respect that seemed almost too great to be true. Their gratitude to their father, who had worked hard to pay for their studies abroad: “Daddy says the Jews know better than any other people that no one can take away their intellects. Our brains, our knowledge—we can take them with us wherever we go.”

  The air conditioning in the guest room hummed. So did my head. Even though there were no mosquitoes the night seemed endless.

  Jakov: “Do you remember how Daddy always drove a second-hand car, so he could pay for our studies? He bought a Volvo that was at least six years old, and drove it for a good six years or so.”

  Me: “But you guys are filthy rich.”

  Simon: “Our parents possess nothing besides their children, their house and their intellects. No savings. Nothing.”

  Me: “You’re filthy rich. You have domestic staff who are there all day, from early to late. You all have your own bathrooms. If it rained, you went to school by taxi. Your parents paid me. I could go on.”

  Of course that once again prompted the question of why I didn’t have any children. And as in all such discussions, it led to the invariable assurance that I’d be a good mother, yes, really, I shouldn’t have any doubts on that score.

  They spoke of the great faith their parents had had in them. Which meant I’d been allowed to work in their bedrooms, with the door shut. That this seclusion had been a test whose results Mummy and Daddy had known in advance. It was in this context that I had to see Bnei Brak and the strict seminary. The Schneiders had precious little in common with Haredi Jews. They could just as well have sent Simon and Jakov to the rabbinical school Yeshiva Etz Chayim, which was close to Antwerp. Yes, they believed that the Messiah would arise from their ranks, someone who would rid the world of all poverty and injustice. But they didn’t believe that the whole of Western humanity was one big tragic mistake. In the spiritually confined surroundings of Bnei Brak they’d get to know their Jewish soul better than in Tel Aviv, was the thinking.

  “Mightn’t your parents have also hoped that if you were beset by carnal urges while still single, you’d be safe here, Jakov?” I teased.

  “How come?” asked Jakov.

  “Remember Amsterdam,” I said.

  I couldn’t see if he blushed, it was too dark for that.

  Elzira didn’t understand, and asked what I meant. Turned out she knew nothing of the whole condom affair.

  I also reviewed my own life as I lay in bed. Nima, our friends from the Middle East, Turkey and Morocco. The friends who split up when we did: oil and water. Limburg. My work for the Schneiders. Meulenberg, where I’d gone to school with children from ethnic minorities and myself belonged to a minority: of my classmates, only the Flemish children had gone to university. First-generation immigrant children weren’t expected to continue their education after school. The idea didn’t even occur to anyone, least of all their parents: “She should train for a job in childcare. So that when we go back to Turkey or Morocco she’ll at least have a diploma.” The institute that advised pupils on study and career choices automatically steered immigrant children into vocational education. A university education, it was felt, was only an option for youngsters whose native language was Dutch. Or who were Catholic: Spanish and Greek boys and girls were given a little encouragement. But later in my professional life I never even encountered them. Some had returned to their countries of origin. Others worked in the Houthalen tobacco factories. The lowest social class remained low, was kept low.

  My past, I realized, featured more couleur locale et sociale than the present in which I found myself. For someone intending to make journalism her vocation, that realization alone was enough to keep me awake.

  Nine

  In Jerusalem Elzira told me she wanted to get married.

  “Oh, you’ve fallen in love with someone here!” I exclaimed, enchanted and curious. “And you’re telling me now? Don’t your brothers know yet?”

  “I’ve asked Mummy and Daddy to set the matchmaker to work,” she answered.

  We were strolling around the busy Mahane Yehuda market, where the vendors of fruit and vegetables, spices, nuts, cake and other delicacies were loudly praising their wares; their collective calls sounded like one big choir.

  I don’t know why I responded as I did. I acted as if I hadn’t heard what she’d said. I said I was delighted she’d fallen in love, then I drew her attention to the Hebrew and Arabic being spoken around us; it was the first time during my visit to Israel that I’d heard these two languages dancing together.

  “Many of these Arab vendors speak Hebrew,” Elzira said, and instead of asking what had got into me, took my arm and guided me to a biscuit baker whose stall dripped with honey and sugar.

  “If these Arab merchants know a fair bit of Hebrew, then the same must be true in reverse,” I said.

  “Sure. Especially the people who work for Shin Bet.”

  “Shin Bet?”

  “The internal security service. We have our men and women everywhere.”

  She too said “we” and “our”. With her sweet face, dear little studs in her ears and her hair, strictly parted in the middle and plaited into a ponytail, she didn’t look like someone who thought about internal security services.

  In the middle of the baker’s long table, every millimetre of which was covered with Bundt cake, plaited bread and baklava, stood a layered tower of dishes full of orange, glazed angel-hair pastry so sticky that just seeing it made me r
un my tongue anxiously over my teeth.

  I thought: she’s too young and beautiful to get married, she’s so happy right now, she’s at such an important stage of her life.

  She bought a syrupy wedge of angel hair. It smelt of rosewater and was studded with chopped pistachio nuts, under which a layer of cream cheese peeped out invitingly.

  “You have to try this knafeh,” she said, “you’ll be hooked.”

  Within the space of five minutes we’d bought a second wedge that we shared with relish, sitting on the doorstep of a house in one of the sloping side streets. Elzira, her legs slightly spread, caught every crumb in her skirt. She collected the little pile on a spit-dampened index finger, then licked it clean.

  “You will come to my party?” she asked. “My wedding party.”

  I gazed at her intently. She seemed to glow, desirable as the ripe pomegranates on the stall across the road. That she was deadly serious I didn’t doubt. Yet I hoped she’d suddenly burst out laughing.

  “I’ve already been introduced to a young man. I really like him. He’s from a good family. He lives in Switzerland. We met once, briefly, in the company of others, in Jerusalem, when he was here on business. Daddy and Mummy came over. He works in a bank. He knows about my dyspraxia. He has to know. It’s on the list of particulars that the matchmaker has about me. It’s important, très important, that my future husband knows as much as possible about me, especially tous les trucs that our children might inherit from me. And we know all about him. Our shadchan made sure of that. As did we. My brothers looked up everything they could about him, so did my parents. I think I like him.”

  I nodded. So her brothers knew. How should I respond to this news?

  “Do you want to move to Switzerland?” I asked.