Fervor, page 10
But had he never heard of a brave face? It wasn’t easy, keeping up a front for the boys. Biting down the pain. In bed that night, Eric switched off the lamp while Hannah was still reading. Turning over, he presented her with the wall of his back.
She switched the light back on. “I’m suffering too.”
Eric lay like a plank, sleepless and unmoving.
“Did you hear? I said I’m suffering.”
“You have a funny way of showing it.”
“You mean because I’m trying to keep it together, you think I don’t care?”
“Keep it together! Have you got any idea how inane that sounds?”
“I can’t talk if you’re being like this.”
Eric said, “So don’t talk.”
Hannah stared at her husband’s rounded back. She might have pummelled it with balled fists.
“Is this about the piece? You should be congratulating me.”
“You broke the dry spell. Mazel tov.”
“I’m not talking about my career.”
She had insisted on being referred to in the article as a memoirist, not a journalist. And at the bottom of the text, it had announced the publication of her first book, due the following year. “Do you know what their circulation is?”
Eric said nothing.
“Our daughter is missing, this isn’t some family secret. The more people know, the better.”
“Great, fine, agreed.” Suddenly hot, he kicked his legs free of the duvet. “Did you have to use that picture?”
“You want something done, you have to stir people’s sympathies.”
The photo showed Elsie on her thirteenth birthday, in front of a cake loaded with candles. Yosef stood behind her, huge and bearlike, with his hands resting on her shoulders. Leaning down, he was kissing the side of her head, and Elsie, distracted from the cake, was smiling up at him. That same picture was sitting in a million households across the country, grease stains from a million breakfasts muddying the image.
“That’s a million people who know we’re looking.”
Eric sighed. “You can drop the pretence that everything’s going just brilliantly, the boys aren’t here.”
“Grossman said—”
“Fuck Grossman.”
Hannah let the words hang for a moment. “At least I’m doing something,” she said. “It’s only been three days. It’s like you’ve already given up!”
She’d spoken more truly than she intended. Why did she not see it before? Of course. Eric had already lost hope, was even now making a start on the period of mourning. A head-start on a race with no finish. No wonder he couldn’t sympathise with Hannah as she endured the lesser torment of not knowing. The knowledge he carried through his waking hours was far worse than any uncertainty. And he was alone with it. Trapped in that bare place, where the darkness was close and heavy. Deep in his soul, he knew what had happened to Elsie. Eric was no more than a boy when, thanks to his father’s tales, he got his first graphic lessons in the history of human evil. The early years of their marriage—so much straightforward joy—had deceived her. Now she knew. Her husband had grown up just as his father had wanted: quick to frighten, and without faith in people’s basic humanity. What Yosef, with a dry laugh, would have called a realist.
She didn’t want to consider the influence the old man had had on Elsie. At times, when she very was young, they’d been like father and daughter.
“Eric,” Hannah said.
He wouldn’t look at her. She put her hand to his shoulder and he shrugged it off.
How awful to be divided on this. Something brand new happens, you learn a little more about yourself, about your marriage. “We’re going to find her,” Hannah said. “She must be—”
“How? By writing more trash for the tabloids? It was just a normal, piss average day.”
He’d shocked her into silence. At last, he rolled towards her.
“It was the same thing with Zeide! You should have let him live out those last months without bullying the memories out. It’s all just material to you. The career that eats everything.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”
“Open your ears! I’ve been telling you long enough. You had no business writing that book. Elsie worshipped the man.”
“Zeide needed to talk to someone. He had to unburden himself.”
“You think you’re the first person who ever heard those horror stories? For God’s sake, Hannah, step outside of yourself for two seconds. Before I met you, the greater part of my life was getting him to stop telling those nightmares. Tateh, I’d say, you haven’t set foot in Poland for thirty years, do you think we can give it a rest now?”
“What’s this got to do with Elsie?”
“Do I need to spell it out? While you were up there, mining for literary gold, she used to sit on the stairs and listen. Whatever he spilled out, she soaked up.”
“If you want to talk about Elsie and your father, let’s talk about them. Why did we bury him? Elsie knew he wanted a cremation, everyone knew. Do you remember her face the day of the burial?”
“That subject is closed,” Eric said.
“Oh, so now you’re done.”
Hannah considered forcing the argument. Didn’t he see that she was blessed with a mind that was meant for more than knockabout journalism? In the pit of unemployment, she’d discovered not just a way out, but her true vocation. Baruch Hashem. The book she was writing about her father-in-law was moral work, her contribution to the ongoing effort to ensure that never again… And now, if there was anything she could do to bring Elsie home, it would be crazy not to try it. Everything had its purpose.
But she was tired of the old fights, and as she too rolled over, her eyelids dragged shut. She dreamt of Yosef, underground, wrists straining against the lid of his casket.
A sudden movement woke her. The bed shook as Eric convulsed. As she listened, choked little pig noises escaped from her husband. A maternal feeling stirred in her chest. She threaded an arm under his neck and muttered soothing words into his ear, just as she had done on difficult nights with Tovyah, years earlier.
In the morning, Hannah’s parents got in touch once more. This was the second time she’d spoken to her father in a week; the preceding silence had lasted years. He said he’d seen the latest news clip, filmed at a careers event at school: Elsie talking about how when she grew up she was going to be a vet. He just wanted to know how everybody was holding up. Was there anything he could do?
“You could try praying,” Hannah said. And to his credit, he said he would do as she wished.
In her mind, she repeated the rabbi’s warning. The whiplash reversal could kill. They mustn’t, any of them, despair. Day after day, she told herself things would turn around. They had to. They would because they had to. Life could not contain that much suffering. It would split her open, from the crown of her head downwards.
* * *
On the fifth day Elsie was missing, Hannah got a call from St Edwards, the school Tovyah and Gideon attended. A voice she didn’t recognise asked, stammering slightly, if she was free. When Hannah said she could make time if she absolutely had to, the voice asked if she could collect Gideon. Immediately. He’d been suspended. Just an hour earlier, he’d broken another boy’s nose.
Hannah, not driving strictly within limits, was there in half an hour. She found Gideon waiting in the Head of Year’s office, having been guided by a young teacher whose name she didn’t catch. There was a dull, rusty stain on Gideon’s shirt the size of a fifty-pence piece, and one of the buttons dangled from its stitching. Next to him stood a nervous, wiry man: the owner of the weak voice she’d heard on the phone.
“I’m afraid the boys can get a bit territorial this time of year,” he said. “I often find them locking antlers in the autumn, then they calm down over the Christmas break. Normally, we’d have held him until the end of the day, but I thought perhaps he could be some use at home.”
Hannah thanked him distractedly and led Gideon to the car. They drove in silence. Once home, she asked him if what the teacher had told her was true.
“That depends what he said, dunnit.”
“Don’t be cute. You’ve been fighting.”
Gideon shrugged his broad shoulders. He was getting to be a man now.
“And you broke a boy’s nose.”
“Dunno about that. You’d have to ask the nurse, won’t ya.”
“Wouldn’t you. You weren’t raised in a slum.”
This estuary English was a new affectation of Gideon’s. She didn’t care for it any more than she cared for playing chauffeur in the middle of the afternoon. They sat in the living room, either side of the squat apothecary table laden with magazines. Gideon’s eye darted now and then to the bundle of papers. Hannah had managed to keep the story in the headlines this long, but there was no real news.
“And don’t look so self-satisfied,” Hannah said. “What did you say the boy’s name was?”
“Chaz. Charlie.”
“Is he a friend?”
“Not now.”
“No, I suppose you’ve blown that one. What on Earth made you do it?”
“Said summin’ I didn’t like.”
“Something. What was it?”
“Some-THING. Ok now? Everyone thinks I’m a spaz if I talk like you and Eric, but fine, whatever. Something.”
“Is that why you hit him? Because he called you a spaz?”
“You know why I hit him.”
Gideon gave his mother a look. She understood.
“He said something about Elsie, then.”
“Her and all of us. Something about Jews.”
“And so you smashed his face in.”
Gideon drummed against the table with the index and ring fingers of his right hand. “I ain’t gonna say—I’m not going to say sorry, if that’s what you’re after. I don’t regret it.”
“What I’m after is for the clump of cells inside your skull to develop intelligent life. Don’t you see what’s happened here? Look at me. Look!”
“What?”
“You come across a black-and-white case of anti-Semitism, black-and-white, and what do you do? You lash out. And so who gets suspended from school? Is it the small-brained bigot, your friend Charlie Goebbels? No, it’s my son who gets suspended from school, that’s who. What’s the point of having a lawyer for a father if you want to behave like a savage? Why do we spend all this money on your education? And so now, if you go and tell the headmaster, if you go and tell the police, who will they believe? A fuming, spitting Jew who yells ‘Anti-Semite! Anti-Semite!’ or poor little Charlie Buttermouth, the gentile with the broken nose?”
“The police? Who said anything about the police?”
“There are laws about these things, Gideon. This isn’t Imperial Russia. Racial and religious discrimination are crimes in this country. I cannot believe a son of mine is so stupid.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“Stop grinning. You won one fight, and now you think you’re a tough guy. Well done. But this is what you need to understand. Out there, in the big bad world, you will not win the fights. You won’t throw the last punch or even the first punch. You will be smashed over the head before you can turn round. If you wake up at all, it will be in a hospital, where you will take your dinners through a straw. The world is stuffed with people bigger, uglier, and dirtier than you will ever be and they will tear you apart. The enemies of the Jews are stronger than us. Always have been. Why do you think for three thousand years, from Moses to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, we have been obsessed with the law? If you want to survive out there, do not trust in your ability to win a fair fight. Believe me, there won’t be any fair fights. There won’t even be fights.”
Though Gideon had not been subjected to this exact speech before, the gist was familiar. This time, however, he had a ready comeback: “Not in Israel.”
“Excuse me?”
“In Israel, nobody pushes you around for being a Jew.”
“My son, the genius, meets one poodle of a Nazi thug, and he decides he wants to live in the desert. You don’t even like the heat.”
Gideon was lying when he told his mother that Charlie had got his nose broken for an anti-Semitic slur. Or half lying. “Have you ever noticed how basically all Jews are faggots?” the boy had said. Any word other than “faggot” and he might have kept his cool. If only Jews weren’t such nebbishes! Look at his brother, thin, jumpy Tovyah, too scared to dive from the high board into the local pool. Top of the class in maths, of course, good with numbers, yes, and good at fuck all else. Even his father was no more than a fat guy with a big voice. Outside this ridiculous house, that man would be the boss of nobody.
And yet, in Israel they had found a way to overcome the Jewish destiny, to say fuck you to the bad genes and the dorkery. They walked tall, they built themselves up strong, and they kicked ass.
“Maybe that’s exactly what I want to do, Hannah,” Gideon said. “Maybe I want to make aliya.”
“Wonderful. You can wear a bullet-proof vest on your way to buy groceries.”
Gideon kissed his teeth. “What’s the alternative? It’s not like I’m going to write books or become a lawyer.”
But just as Gideon had started to open up, he seemed to have lost his mother’s interest. This was not an uncommon frustration for a child of Hannah Rosenthal. Her eyes scanned something through the window over his shoulder.
“Erm, hello? Are you listening? I’m being serious about—”
“Gideon! Shut up a second!” She had raised a finger in warning.
“What?”
Hannah was still staring out of the window. She stood up now to get a better look. Gideon followed the line of her vision and saw the police car that had just slowed to a crawl in the road outside.
“What the hell?” Gideon said. “When you talked about calling the cops, I thought you were being dramatic.”
Hannah was trembling now. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. The car stopped next to a parking space on the far side of the road. Hannah climbed up onto the back of the sofa and pushed her face to the window to block out her own reflection. But still she couldn’t see inside the rear of the car; the glass was dark. All she could make out was the driver, and a second policeman in the passenger seat.
Gideon climbed up to kneel beside. “Oh my God,” he said. “Do you think it’s…? Oh fuck.”
Far, far too late, Hannah saw that Eric was right. Everything that was happening was her fault. A famous poet once said that to be a writer was to bring ruin to a family; now she understood. She hadn’t given Yosef a second life on the page, she’d done the opposite. You fix people in ink and you kill them. Even if they’re already dead, you kill them over. They can’t move, they can’t breathe, they can only lie there stiff, in whatever shape you bent them into. And if there’s a chance, they will have their revenge.
As long as she lived, she would never write another book. That was her penance: to renounce the one thing that had given her, for a little while, a sense of purpose.
The door on the driver’s side swung open and a man lifted himself from the vehicle.
Feeling her resolve crack, Hannah closed her eyes. She couldn’t cope. How would she sit shiva for her own child? How could she wail prayers for her little girl? How could she get through all the years to come, stabbed by every phantom birthday, every milestone that would never happen: graduation, marriage, pregnancy, grandchildren?
In another moment Gideon tapped her shoulder, and his hand sprang into a pointing finger. “Look!” he gasped.
His voice, though emphatic, was not devoid of joy. Not quite daring to hope, she opened her eyes.
Baruch Hashem. Baruch Hashem. Baruch Hashem. Baruch Hashem.
The policeman had unlocked the back door and pulled it open. And there, with her arms folded and her head slumped against the head rest, was Elsie. She rose from the car as if half asleep. The officer walked behind her, with one hand on her back, as Elsie stumbled towards home.
It was only once she’d got her inside the house that Hannah noticed something was off. There was a line of dried blood behind her ear, and her eyes had taken on the colour of misted glass.
PART TWO
Daughters of Endor
NINE
When I returned to Oxford for my second term at university, I found the city transformed by winter. Roofs glittered beneath frost, cars squatted like stumpy white hills on either side of the broad streets. The snowfall in the university parks was thick enough to build not just towering ice-men, but also, for one group of excited children, an igloo; they huddled in the cave, stamping their feet and sounding the echoes. The view from my bedroom was likewise upgraded. The window above my desk now revealed an expanse of frozen lawn. On the horizon, skeletal trees bent under the weight of snow. Squint and you were in St Petersburg. Squint again and you were in Warsaw.
I was both eager and apprehensive to see Tovyah. Reading his mother’s book over the winter break had compelled me to reconsider what had taken place between us at the end of the previous term. Historical atrocities, like great art, drag us into the light, where there’s no more hiding your moral character. Both serve as a reminder of the most basic human truths, how simple it is to be better to people, and how important. I knew now that I had treated Tovyah badly, whatever the provocation. I pictured his hot face, scorched by rejection. Tovyah who had chosen me alone as his friend, for no reason I could fathom.
A week slipped by without us crossing paths. It was possible he hadn’t returned to university at all, that he’d been so depressed and frustrated by his first term that he’d dropped out. Extreme, sure, but Tovyah was capable of extremes. But no, he was here all right, skipping up the steps to the library one morning, boyish in his hurry. And I realised, with some surprise, there was no one I wanted to see more.
My fears that he was giving me a wide berth were soon dispelled. The following Monday, he invited me for lunch with his mother and sister, due in college in less than an hour.
“That’s very kind of you to ask. What’s the—”
