The Innocents

by Francesca Segal

  “I know.”

  Together they turned to look up at a beaming Lawrence who extended his camera toward them, capturing for posterity the moment at which they arrived together, back onto dry land.

  15

  “Friday night dinner” is one of the most evocative phrases in the vocabulary of any Jew—up there in significance with “my son the doctor” and “my daughter’s wedding.” In the Newman household Friday night dinners had been, like everything else, divided into the epochs of Before Jacob and After Jacob, both defined by distinct but equally fixed practices. In the early years of Adam’s life, his father would collect him and Olivia from school on Friday and they would go home via Carmelli’s to buy the challah for the blessing of the bread, unless they had made dough the night before and were baking it themselves. To buy challah so late on a Friday is controversial. Most of North London’s housewives had already queued for theirs well before midday—by three thirty there is always a moderate risk that they’ll have sold out (one is meant to have two challot on the table beneath a decorated cover to represent the double portion of manna that God bestowed on the Sabbath, a clever suggestion on the Lord’s part that ensures there will always be enough left over for French toast the following morning). By the afternoon the bakeries are either feverishly crowded or stripped bare.

  But Adam and Olivia both loved to go to Carmelli Bakery with their father, to breathe in the warm steam of fresh bagels and admire the glass displays of cakes and biscuits, the loaves of challah and black rye heaped on blond wooden shelves behind the West Indian shop assistants, all of whom now spoke Yiddish by osmosis. If Adam was lucky, these outings also offered the opportunity to ruin his dinner with something that he and Olivia had nagged Jacob to buy them. Olivia favored the apricot-glazed Danish pastries, shiny as glass; Adam’s most coveted treats had been the broad, dry gingerbread men with piped white faces, their clothing implied by a series of miniature Smarties. Adam had passed many walks home to Temple Fortune trailing behind father and sister, absorbed in rendering his gingerbread man’s howls of protest during a slow and violent consumption. Sometimes the captive biscuit was a Nazi, at other times merely a nonspecific villain whom Adam’s cunning had defeated. At the door, crumbs were brushed off chins. Ruining one’s dinner was a sin punishable by swift but potent guilt inducement. Michelle did not work a long day at the office and then slave to cook their meals for her own health, you know.

  After Jacob, the visits to the bakery had ended, and instead the remaining Newmans had begun to go to synagogue every Friday—religiously, as it were. Through the modern wizardry of delayed-timer ovens and Slovakian au pairs, Michelle had managed to parboil potatoes, roast a chicken, pâté its liver and the livers of many of its cousins, steam vegetables, and bake amaretto-soaked peaches, all while she accompanied her offspring to shul and remained with them therein, praying for them to stay anchored and supported at the bosom of a community. Adam fought temptation each week. His friends from Sunday school were inevitably sitting together in the back row or were outside gloriously unsupervised in the dark playground, but as the eight-year-old man of the family, he knew what his father would expect of him. And so he remained standing beside his mother throughout the service, braced for the two inevitable danger moments—the misheberach, the prayer to heal the sick, and the Kaddish, the mourners’ prayer. During these—the first a sweet, lilting melody, the second chanted in mysterious and haunting Aramaic—it was always his worst fear that his mother might cry. She had never done so but each week he felt her stiffen beside him and watched as her left thumb crept to stroke her wedding band under the partial cover of a closed fist. He would not leave her side, though he longed to escape. Olivia was spared such temptation by having no friends she wished to join.

  The dinner that followed would inevitably be strained, and strange. It was for Jacob that all was arranged as it had always been—the starched white linen tablecloth, the elaborate courses, the blessings over candles and wine and bread—but Jacob wasn’t there. And so Michelle, ramrod straight, did not look very thankful as she lit the candles and intoned her blessings to God for the light of Shabbat, and eight-year-old Adam raised a wineglass and squeaked a version, woefully inadequate, he felt, of the prayers that his father had sung each week. A man ought to do it, and he was the closest thing to hand. When they invited other families to join them, as Michelle did more and more in the years that followed, someone else’s father would sing the blessing over the wine and that was worse, usually. They always did it wrong, not knowing that in this house you were meant to pour little glasses of sugary, boiled Kiddush wine for the children to raise along with you, or that the “amen” at the end was meant to be said with a deep Southern Baptist twang—“ay-men”—to make Adam giggle and Olivia roll her eyes.

  In Rachel’s family there were no notable absences at Friday night dinner, only many, many presences. As a Mediterranean people Jews tend to be expansive by nature—as for Greeks, Italians, or Turks, a meal is not a meal unless you sit down to it with twenty people you love (or if that’s too optimistic, twenty people you are at least related to). But even among Jews, Jaffa hovered near the upper end of the scale. She owned several sixty-liter stockpots of the sort found in school kitchens; Rachel had grown up thinking it normal to buy chickens six at a time.

  By Jaffa’s standards this particular Friday night dinner had almost negligible attendance. In addition to the Gilberts there was Rachel’s grandmother Ziva, who came every week and therefore did not count as “having people”; Adam’s mother, Michelle, who came almost as often; Adam’s sister, Olivia, down from Oxford in another of her strange embroidered getups and an especially peculiar bottle green and burgundy striped woolen hat; Leslie and Linda Pearl; Tanya and Jasper; and all four Wilsons, who had brought with them Leonora Wilson’s pouting French exchange.

  Unable to break a habit so long established, Jaffa had catered for approximately forty guests, and the menu was traditional Ashkenazi by way of Marks & Spencer—much like Michelle’s Shabbat dinner, and the Shabbat dinners of innumerable North West London families. Jaffa’s version was compiled with loving intuition, with minimal aesthetic concern and a great deal of care for flavor and balance, infusing, tweaking, marinating, improvising; Michelle prioritized expedience and presentation and cooked, always, to a precise recipe. But the building blocks were the same. Chopped liver topped with a spaghetti heap of translucent golden caramelized onions; egg mayonnaise streaked with shreds of bright green spring onion to be eaten with the challah, followed by chicken soup. This was succeeded by a main course of chicken stuffed with whole lemons and onions and cooked, at Jaffa’s house, in zatar; roast potatoes and tsimmes—soft carrots long baked in honey and cinnamon. The menu was predictable but there was safety in the weekly appearance of these foods—security, continuity and love. For a people whose history is one of exodus and eviction, the luxury of repetition is precious.

  “You must read Trials of the Diaspora,” Olivia was saying to Ziva, who had been asking her something about Chaucer. “It’s a conflation of ideas of course, by necessity, but excellent and essential. If you’re at all interested in the Prioress’s Tale, you must look at it.” Olivia was animated for the first time in the evening as the seating had shifted slightly since dinner and her earlier position, between Lucy Wilson and Rachel, had exposed her to conversations in which she could not hope to participate—Lisa London’s rumored new boyfriend, for example, and what had possessed Adele Summerstock and Anthony Rosenbaum to call their new son Zebedee. Women like Rachel (like her own mother, in fact) bewildered Olivia, and she did not know how to talk to them. Her knowledge of North West London’s complex social networks had been limited when she had lived there, and now she was unable to recall the relationships even between people she’d known since infancy. It was a defense, Michelle theorized, against recalling a childhood of rejection by the cooler, less cerebral girls. Olivia had simply forgotten them all. During the reshuffling at the table Olivi
a had gravitated toward Ziva and Lawrence.

  “Is that the one by Anthony Julius?” Lawrence asked. “I’ve heard good things about it.”

  “Yes, I can send it to you. There’s another article in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology that’s relevant too, called ‘Wordsworth and the Jews.’”

  “I would like very much to see that,” said Ziva. “I have recently reread his translation of ‘The Prioress and Her Tale,’ which is interesting, of course, when considered beside ‘A Jewish Family.’ Please, if you might e-mail me the reference.”

  Lawrence, his arm around Jaffa who was dipping a shard of black chocolate into his coffee cup, wore his habitual Shabbat expression of beatific contentment. He had been to synagogue to mark the transition from week to weekend, from work to rest, and there had greeted the approaching Sabbath with joy, as was customary—as one celebrates the arrival of a bride. Lawrence had a quiet faith and he liked to reconnect with it like this, once a week. He would come home from shul and stop Rachel wherever she was, placing his hands on her head and blessing her softly, father to daughter. Before they ate he read aloud the words of the ayshet chayil to Jaffa: “A woman of valor—who can find her? Her value is far beyond pearls. Her husband’s heart relies on her.” He would recite this in poor Hebrew and then in English every week with, it had always seemed to Adam, no diminution of sincerity or passion as he looked across the table at his glowing wife. Lawrence was a happy man. A grateful man. By the time he reached grace after the meal the French exchange had decamped to the kitchen where she was on the floor feeding scraps of chicken to the dog.

  Jasper had the week’s Jewish Chronicle before him, open to the “Social & Personal” pages.

  “Sadie Levine,” he read.

  Olivia looked unimpressed. “Dispatched, clearly.”

  “Correct. That was a warm-up. Lisle Kupermann.”

  “Dispatched,” said Olivia and Adam together. Jaffa tutted in ostentatious disapproval and began to clear the plates, noisily.

  “Wrong. Hatched.”

  “Hatched, really? Lisle? Oh, that’s terribly old-fashioned these days, poor thing,” said Michelle, standing to help Jaffa.

  “Jonathan Cohen.”

  “You’re giving us nothing to work with,” Leslie Pearl complained. “Matched.”

  “Well done. Okay. Coco Winter Freedman. Too easy,” he added, over the collective shout of “Hatched.”

  “Maurice Leonard Pinsky.”

  “Dispatched,” said Ziva, who until that moment had shown no sign that she was listening.

  “Matched,” Jasper corrected. “Although possibly a second marriage.”

  “This game is not very respectful,” Jaffa called from the kitchen.

  “Feyga Baumel?” Jasper shouted in reply.

  There was a silence, during which everyone looked expectantly toward the open door of the kitchen.

  “Dispatched,” Jaffa called eventually.

  “Indeed. May she rest in peace, poor woman. What a life she must have had, with a name like that.”

  “She was no doubt a frummer,” said Ziva sagely, “and so probably did not realize that she had been so inconsiderately encumbered. Very good. I will now go home.” No one was surprised by her abrupt announcement; Ziva did not believe that social niceties were required with family—or indeed, with most others.

  “Okay Ima, Adam will take you back,” said Jaffa, who had returned from the kitchen with a bowl of tangerines, just in case anyone was in need of a little something.

  “Adam, thank you. I am ready to go now.” Ziva pushed her chair back and stood stiffly, her handbag already on her arm. Into the front pocket of this she placed a single Bittermint, slipped in to join the other disks wrapped in frog-green foil that accumulated there from week to week. Beneath the foil the chocolates would whiten and seam with hairline cracks like glazed pottery, eventually making their way to one of the bowls scattered around Ziva’s sitting room, decanted there each time the pouch on the front of her handbag was full. Adam had been caught out by these antiques before.

  “Of course we’ll take you, Granny,” said Rachel.

  Jaffa objected. “No, motek, you stay. I need you to help me with the guest list this evening, and you’re away all weekend you said, so it must be now. Adam will get you on the way home, okay?”

  “Of course.” Adam reached for his jacket. Michelle, who had driven herself to the dinner just as she had driven herself everywhere else for the last twenty years, was unimpressed. She did not see why her son should be presumed chauffeur to these assorted women. Paragraphs of censorious commentary were written on her face, discernible only to her son—if Jaffa wanted Adam to drive Ziva to Islington, it was one thing, she was an old lady, but it was utterly unreasonable to ask that he then come back again to collect Rachel. Michelle was fond of Jaffa, but this perceived exploitation tapped into a long-held objection—as a woman who already had one man at her beck and call (and Lawrence was a man who did a great deal for his wife, whether it was demanded of him or not), Jaffa had even less need to commandeer the services of a second. But it did not seem to work that way. Accustomed as she was to men in the roles of drivers, lifters, bankers, shleppers and errand boys, she employed them all the same way and with ease. Her role was merely as controller of the fleet—God forbid, thought Michelle with heavy sarcasm, she should actually have to do any of these tasks herself. Why did Adam never say anything? Why did Rachel never disagree with her mother about these commands? And while we’re on the subject, it wouldn’t actually kill Rachel to get behind the wheel herself once in a while. Adam shrugged at his mother in response to this silent communication. Michelle shrugged back with an expression of elaborately feigned innocence. What? I didn’t say anything.

  In the car, Ziva inquired, “You did not want to stay and help with the guest list to your wedding? They will no doubt invite many people you do not like if you are not there.”

  “That’ll happen whether I’m there or not. The way things are going I’m not even sure I’m on the guest list.”

  Ziva cocked her head. “You are not happy with Jaffa’s plans for the chaseneh of the year?”

  “I wanted it smaller. And sooner.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember. But let us be serious for a moment. You knew always that would be impossible. Jaffa perhaps has been planning this ever since Rachel was in utero. They said it was a girl, and my daughter began to call caterers.”

  “I know. But I hoped.”

  “Ah, well. In all pleasures hope is a considerable part,” Ziva quoted, “but in this instance hope is perhaps best abandoned, yes? When you reach my age, a few months here and there will not seem so very long to have waited. And a few people you don’t know, a few sandwiches you don’t like at the reception—it is not what you will remember. You will remember a life together. One day is one day, wedding day or no. These days young people marry less, I think, and I cannot disapprove of it. These contracts seem antiquated even to me, and I myself am antiquated.”

  They had drawn up outside her house.

  “You will come in please for one moment, I have a photograph that Rachel wanted. If I do not give it to you now I will forget. At my age one must strike while the iron is hot or risk senility in the interim.”

  The lights were on in Ziva’s hallway. Loud music throbbed from the sitting room—Adam had heard faint strains of it as they’d approached the front door.

  “Tosca,” said Ziva. “For the burglars I usually put Radio Four. And so I believe that my granddaughter is here.”

  In the sitting room they found Ellie stretched out on the sofa, her long legs hooked over the back of it, ankles crossed and flexing gently in time to the music. She did not seem to hear them as they entered. No doubt she had been invited to her aunt Jaffa’s for Shabbat, but the prior engagement that had kept her from coming appeared only to be a date with Ziva’s CD collection. Her eyes were closed; Rocky was curled in the crook of her arm. She looked like a little girl cuddli
ng her doll. Together, Adam and Ziva regarded girl and dog.

  “She is beautiful, my granddaughter, no?” said Ziva, beside him in the doorway.

  Adam merely nodded. The energy with which he had avoided seeing Ellie had been all-consuming these past weeks—that he had second-guessed her whereabouts and planned his own movements only to come upon her like this shocked him, though with hindsight it should not have done. His heart was in his throat. He gestured to Ziva that he would sneak out and leave them. But at that moment Rocky scrambled across his owner’s stomach and leapt to the floor to greet them, and Ellie opened her eyes.

  “Sleeping Beauty,” said Ziva, fondly.

  “Not sleeping, listening. Isn’t Gheorghiu awesome?”

  “I favor Callas myself; this one I do not like so very much, she is too—” Ziva filled in the missing adjective with a gesture, a rotating of her wrist that resembled a royal wave. She approached Ellie, who jumped up to hug her in greeting.

  After embracing her grandmother, Ellie turned to Adam. “Hey, stranger.”

  “Shabbat shalom,” he replied and then instantly regretting his pomposity added, “Hi.”

  “I will go and get the photograph for Rachel, it is somewhere on my desk.”

  “I’ll get it, Granny.”

  “No, you will not know where to look. One moment. You may instead make Adam a cup of coffee now that he is obliged to wait for my scrabbling.”

  “No coffee, thanks,” said Adam when Ziva had begun, painfully, to climb the stairs in the hall behind him. He relinquished his place in the doorway, stepping farther into the room so that he could not see her struggling. In place of help Ziva always preferred privacy.

  “No. No coffee. Apparently there’s nothing I have that you want.”

  This was a response both unreasonable and untrue, and they both knew it. Adam did not reply.

  “You didn’t answer my e-mails,” she said eventually.