Fervor, page 13
Tovyah said he couldn’t think of anything in particular that Elsie had said. It was only small talk.
Hannah didn’t press him. “I do hate leaving her. It must be awful to be surrounded by those people. I know it’s not their fault, but still. Dr Howard told me there’s been some difficulty with one of the other patients. Apparently, the poor woman keeps telling people she’s seen Elsie levitate.”
ELEVEN
After school and on weekends, Tovyah set to work on his two UCAS applications and his two personal statements. There was the official one, overseen by his father, in which he argued that the rule of law was the first cornerstone of any civilisation. In preparation, Eric had dragged him to Snaresbrook Crown Court, where he’d listened to interminable arguments, quite irrelevant—as far as he could tell—as to whether the defendant was guilty. What struck him was how friendly Eric was with his opponent, and how the two men (prosecution and defence) seemed to agree privately on the facts and even sympathise with each other’s predicament.
Then there was Tovyah’s second personal statement, the unofficial one, written under the supervision of Ms Zhang, on whom he’d developed an unbearable crush. Alone in her office, with her lithe body so close, it was impossible to think straight. Yet somehow, he’d cobbled together an application, in which he’d discussed the poetics of Shelley’s “universe of things,” a world undarkened by any God. Unknown to his parents, it was this second personal statement, the unofficial one, that he submitted to universities.
Meanwhile, he had not been back to visit Elsie at St Anthony’s. He’d been planning to, along with Hannah, but one of the nurses had discovered a bottle of cheap gin between Elsie’s mattress and the wooden slats. After a heated confrontation, Hannah was called in, and it was agreed Elsie would return to her parents’ house for a bit. And then she ran away again. This time, it was a week before she returned.
* * *
A month went by, and then a week. Then some days. Finally, one November afternoon, Tovyah came home from school to find an envelope addressed in his name, bearing an Oxford postmark and with a collegiate crest stamped in the corner. The crisp white rectangle lay flat against the wooden floorboards, perfectly framed. Part of him just wanted to let it sit there. But he could not put off knowing long, and within a few seconds he’d bent down, scooped it, and ripped open the envelope. And there it was: he had an interview. An Oxford interview! Here in his hands was the exit visa to another life. All those years not fitting in at school, keeping his head down, studying, they’d not been wasted after all.
It was only fair to tell his parents together—so although Hannah was back at teatime, he held off until his father returned from work, then fetched his mother from the study.
“Well, what is it?” Hannah said, as the three of them sat around the kitchen table. “You look like the dog that broke into the butcher’s.”
Without speaking, he produced the letter.
His mother was ecstatic. “This is wonderful! I woke up with a smile on my face this morning, I knew something terrific would happen.”
But Eric, peering at the printed sheet through half-moon spectacles, failed to get caught up in the excitement. “There’s a mistake.”
“What are you talking about?” Hannah said.
“It says here you’re interviewing for English Language and Literature. They must be confused, no? Did they mix you up with another student?”
Of course, Tovyah had expected some awkwardness. But he never thought it would totally overshadow his news. Wasn’t this what they’d always wanted? Look at Gideon, two years deep into his military service, an occupation his father described as a game of Russian roulette in the desert. Or Elsie, who never finished school. When he’d opened the letter, he believed he would make them proud.
Tovyah said there was no mistake. “At the last minute I changed my mind. That’s not a problem, is it?”
Eric grunted. “And you didn’t mention anything?”
“English, law, who cares? Our boy’s going to Oxford university.”
“It’s only an interview,” Tovyah said. “I haven’t got in yet.”
“You’ll get in all right,” Hannah said.
Eric turned over the letter, as if looking for a watermark. “I took you to Snaresbrook, showed you behind the scenes. What boy gets such a chance? I can’t believe you lied to us.”
“I didn’t lie. I forgot to tell you,” Tovyah said.
His father was a solid man then, with an intelligent brow. Round and forceful. His beard was still dark, and his eyes sat close together in a way that hinted at strength of purpose rather than a weak mind. Now he brought his hands together across his belly and sighed. Since the death of Tovyah’s grandfather, Eric had seemed to him father, grandfather, and great-grandfather rolled into one, a man who wielded the spectral authority of previous generations. Gideon and Elsie, being older, had it easy. But the years had hardened Eric, who suffered more than anyone from his daughter’s breakdown. Now he was no longer someone to indulge his children against his better judgement. And so, with Tovyah, he did not laugh things off or let them go. When, aged fifteen, Tovyah had unknowingly eaten pork sausages at another boy’s house, Eric had shown him a video of a pig in a slaughterhouse, failing to die.
“Slipped your mind, did it?” Eric said.
“I’m telling you now.”
“Don’t get confused. Either you deliberately misled us or you forgot to mention it. Which one?”
Tovyah didn’t answer. His silence was understood by both parents as an admission of guilt. Not a faulty memory, then, but a deliberate misleading.
“So you want to study English literature,” Eric said. “Novels, poetry, all those fantasies. Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth…” He pronounced them like the names of foreign cities. “I hope you’re prepared to become a schoolteacher.”
“Dad, I—”
“Let me finish. I understand turning away from maths, too abstract, too theoretical, although you’ve always been good with numbers.”
“What’s maths got to do with anything? I gave up maths after GCSE. I haven’t—”
“But English Literature. Why not study the literature of your own people? I would have been thrilled to send you to yeshiva. You could have trained as a rabbi, done something useful with your life. You are a gifted boy, Tovyah, and that comes with a responsibility.”
“Dad, I don’t want to become a rabbi. I never—”
“Tovyah, please. You can have your say in a minute. Let’s be grown up. When did we force your hand? We always let you follow your own desires. Believe me, I know what it’s like to have a father who rules by decree, who instructs with his fists. Maybe we were too lenient. Now you want to go and study gentile writers? At Oxford University! When did my son become an English snob?”
Until that moment, Eric had always spoken about Oxford with hushed reverence.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tovyah said. All his life, he’d tried to be polite to his parents. But after so many years of strain, having seen his brother’s self-willed exodus and the destruction of his sister’s promise, something finally snapped. “The Oxford English department is not some Christian boys’ club. Ever heard of Isaac Rosenberg? Harold Pinter? Well, guess what, they’re on the syllabus. You can do a whole paper on Philip Roth if you like. Nothing but Jews for hundreds of pages. And you know who I wrote about in my personal statement? Franz Kafka.”
Eric might not have been the reader Hannah was, but he was no philistine, and he registered each name in turn. Bringing up Roth was a dangerous move. On the one hand, yes, he was a famous Jew, both tremendously successful and one of the chosen. On the other, he was a shameless non-believer who had exposed his people to ridicule. Officially speaking, Tovyah had never read a Philip Roth novel.
Now the corners of Eric’s mouth curled downwards, and his eyes widened. In response to his son’s provocative tone, he assumed the same look he had playing chess when he spotted an opportunity several moves ahead. The face made Tovyah squirm. In the last ten years, he’d defeated his father exactly twice, and one of those times he’d been given a handicap. From now on, Eric had said after turning over his own king, we meet as equals.
“It is a misfortune unique to the Jewish father that his son consoles him by citing Franz Kafka as a role model.”
“Very funny. Kafka was a genius. If you’d read him, you’d know.”
“Is that so?”
The look hadn’t slipped from Eric’s face. He rose heavily from his seat and disappeared from the room. When Tovyah asked his mother where he’d gone, she shrugged. Her eyes drifted to the bureau in the corner, where she stored her notebooks and other writing materials. She’d never told anyone of her silent vow to quit writing the day Elsie was brought home. And it was just as well: after the confetti-strewn success of her first book, which saw her lifted from dull obscurity to the gleaming table of minor fame, she never stood a chance of keeping it.
“You’re not serious,” Tovyah said.
“Excuse me?”
“I saw you looking. You’re not thinking about writing this down.”
“What have I done now? My eyes move around in my head and I’ve committed some crime.”
Tovyah gaped.
“I keep notes,” Hannah said. “It’s my job.”
“Not of this. I’m at home. You don’t have to take notes about everything.”
Overhead, there was the sound of plodding steps, then a cupboard popping open and clamping shut. Calling out from halfway down the stairs, Eric picked up the conversation from where it had left off.
“Kafka is a genius, he says. How often have I heard my son speak of the great Franz Kafka, Prague’s answer to William Shakespeare. A couple of weeks ago, I asked Rabbi Cohen what Franz Kafka is all about.” By now Eric had re-entered. “And Rabbi Cohen, he says to me—”
“Not a rabbi,” Tovyah interrupted.
“What’s that?”
“Bryn Cohen does hedge funds!”
“Cohen is the name of the priest caste. From the tribe of the Le-vites. Moses, Aaron. You know this, Tovyah. Don’t mimic ignorance.”
“Priest caste? Really? Caste? This isn’t the 1700s.”
Eric chuckled. “Have it your way. I asked hedge-fund manager Cohen about your idol. I wanted to know where I should begin reading if I was to catch up. And you know what he told me?”
“What?”
“He said Franz Kafka was an anti-Semite.”
“Ridiculous. Literally absurd. Kafka was a Jew.”
Now Eric turned to his wife and shrugged. Look how excitable your boy is. You try to have an adult conversation and he gets pink in the face and shouts at you. It was then that Tovyah saw what Eric was holding in his hand: Kafka’s Letters to Milena, laminated and stamped by Islington Public Library.
“You don’t believe a Jew can hate his own people? Read Otto Weininger. Read Karl Marx, who said the only God we worship is money. You think Kafka wrote only nonsense about men turning into bugs? Then you haven’t read this.” He held up the book theatrically. For Eric, all the world was a courtroom, and he was forever appealing to the judgement of an invisible jury. Real-life jurors, the ones who presided over the fates of his clients, were at best fools and at worst wilfully obstructive. But the jurors of the soul, God’s jurors, were infallible. Tovyah shook his head.
“A collection of letters. Written, I might add, to a married woman. A shiksa. Leaving aside the question of adultery, let us read Franz Kafka’s idea of a good love letter. And I quote.” A cough preceded the reading. Tovyah could see that the text beside his father’s thumb was underlined in black ink. “… Sometimes I’d like to cram them all as Jews (including myself) into the drawer of the laundry chest, then wait, then open the drawer a little to see whether all have already suffocated, if not, to close the drawer again and go on like this to the end.” Eric raised his eyes from the page and looked across the table at his son. “Charming, no?”
“Let me see that,” Tovyah said, snatching at the book. He read the words back to himself. If ever Tovyah had needed proof of Kafka’s powers, this was it. The image of an enormous chest, stuffed with the sorts of Jews he had seen only in photos—ghetto Jews, Jews who stared death in the face—was before him, real as his hands. As though Kafka could bypass words altogether and deliver nightmares directly into his readers’ minds. What novelist could do that?
Tovyah placed the book face down on the table. On the back cover was a picture of his hero with the slicked-back hair, that haunted face inscrutable as ever.
“This was written in 1922. I’ll say one thing, he was ahead of his time. In ’22, Hitler was still a street hoodlum.”
“You can’t compare Kafka to Hitler!”
“Why not? His ideas are similar, no?”
“Because Hitler actually did it. I can’t believe I have to spell that out.”
“I judge a politician by his actions, by his speeches, by his policies. A writer, I judge by his fantasies. Is that not reasonable?”
“No!”
Tovyah felt the sweat gather on his forehead. So far, not once had Eric raised his voice. As if to make the point, he now spoke more softly than ever.
“What do you think Zeide would have made of you reading Franz Kafka?”
“You can’t bring him into everything. It isn’t fair.”
“Not fair, eh? I read over drafts and drafts of that application, correcting points of law, and all the while I believed we were on the same side. Turns out I was a schmuck! Is that fair? And now this. Shouting at me in my own house, shouting at your mother. What do you think it does to us to see you idolise a man like Franz Kafka?”
Tovyah looked to his mother, hoping for a spark of sympathy. Her expression, like Eric’s, was dark and creased. Studying his mother’s face, he saw Elsie. Lately, they were so alike. The eyebrows, the thin lips. The thought of his sister, deposited once more in some miserable institution, stoked his fury. They’d all grown up in this house together. She must have felt what he’d felt.
“I’ll tell you something Bryn Cohen didn’t mention,” Tovyah said. “Kafka also wrote a story called ‘The Judgement.’ Did you read that one? It’s about a father who commands his son to kill himself. And guess what the son does?”
Eric spread out in his chair. “I expect that the son, being a good Jewish boy, did just as his father told him.” Then he fell about laughing. He was a man who found nobody’s jokes as funny as his own.
* * *
On the morning of his interview, Tovyah woke before dawn. Propelled by nervous energy, he parted the curtains to reveal only darkness, and as he dressed, the sky took on soft grey light. The trains ran without delays and the printed directions were easier to follow than he’d allowed for. So, having been instructed to arrive for ten, he got to the college just after nine. There was his name, misspelt, on a sheet tacked to the central notice board. Apparently, he would have two interviews that day and might be asked to stay overnight for a third. In the room that served as a holding pen for candidates, he met a Scottish girl, who told him all about the architecture of the college, then launched into a farcical account of losing her breakfast on the train down. “Oh wait, you’re supposed to say up, aren’t you? One of those silly traditions. Wherever you’re coming from, you always come up to Oxford.” She made a point of dismissing her chances of getting in, though Tovyah had a feeling she’d do just fine. She was so easy to talk to, he almost didn’t notice how pretty she was.
Soon, he was led to an oak-panelled room, where he was greeted by a pair of academics, a man and a woman. The man was middle-aged, well over fifty, and wore a tweed jacket. The woman, strangely small against her large seat, must have been edging thirty. They sat in armchairs, angled towards a leather couch that was the room’s focal point. The walls were covered with books, and there was a strong smell of potpourri.
He only had to get through the interviews, then wait out the next nine months, and he was free. He took his seat and the academics leaned forwards, chins on fists. The woman tried several times to retrieve something lost in her tangled hair, while the man uncrossed and recrossed his legs.
Tovyah’s heart fluttered. Not since his Bar Mitzvah, when he’d chanted the haftorah before a packed congregation, when his mouth had seemed to fill up with foam, had he felt so anxious.
“I understand you read Shelley,” the woman said.
Tovyah was soon laying out why he admired the poet. His intellectual ambition, his refusal to partake of the old certainties, the skill with which he could manipulate the strictures of formal verse to incorporate complex propositions about the nature of reality. The woman responded to his ideas with nodding encouragement. Although she pushed him to refine and clarify some of his answers, she did not belittle him. The distress of a few minutes earlier was all gone. The feeling Tovyah had, discussing this long-dead poet with a genuine scholar who took seriously what he had to say, was not elation or triumph. It was simpler than that. For the first time in ages, he felt like he belonged.
The other academic, the man, had not yet spoken. When a silence fell, he glanced at a sheet of paper resting on the arm of his chair. Even upside-down, the shape of the paragraphs was uncomfortably familiar. Tovyah’s personal statement. Please don’t read it aloud, he thought.
“You say here that ‘the Modernist enterprise was poisoned by the toxic political ideas that were current at the time.’ I wanted to ask—what particular toxins did you have in mind?”
Tovyah recalled that one of his interviewers specialised in literature from the turn of the century. He could soon be out of his depth.
