Fervor, page 16
I was still awake, revising an essay due the next day, when at around midnight he burst through my unlocked door. After stumbling a few paces, he managed to right himself without falling over. As he tried to fix his gaze on me, his eyes shone with dark light. I was sitting at my desk, quite still. Before we’d exchanged a word, he seemed to come to a decision, and collapsed onto my bed. Finally, he spoke. Drawing his knees up to his chest, he announced—not that I’d asked—that he was absolutely fine.
“How’d the date go?”
“Date?” He took a moment to consider. “Total disaster. For some reason I couldn’t shut up about Israeli domestic policy. The reality of the threat from neighbouring countries, the inhumane treatment of the occupied people, two-state solutions, one-state solutions, must have bored the shit out of her. Anyway, she left hours ago.”
“So where have you been?”
“Just having a little drink, you see. Just a drink. Well, a few drinks, really, if you’re keeping count. I might have another. There’s whisky in my room. I’ve got mugs too. Do you want one?”
“It’s a bit late for me, pal.”
“Killjoy.” He spoke with his face pressed to the pillow, one eye visible.
I said he should go to bed, and he asked me to reconsider having a drink with him. Once more, I refused.
“Fair ’nuff, fair ’nuff. That girl tonight didn’t want to have another drink either. Just the one was good. Personally, I disagree, I happen to think one drink is a bit pathetic. But you can’t force someone, can you? Got the hint, you know. Just friends, she said. She thought maybe we could be just friends. Are you sure you don’t want a drink?”
“You’re shitfaced.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a little… inebriated. By the way, do you want to know what my mother’s done? It’s funny this. It’s hilarious. My mother, she’s written a book, the fucking crackpot, she’s written this book, right, where she says my sister has been possessed! How do you like that? Possessed by a fucking demon!”
His laughter was like a submachine gun. I tried to quieten him.
“I don’t want to go on about it, but it’s just a bit much, you know? I mean here I am, trying to get away from all that, and look what she’s up to. It’s just a bit fucking much.”
“I’m really sorry, Tovyah.”
“You? What have you done?”
Rather than answer, I poured him a glass of water from my sink. I sat down next to him and placed the glass on my bedside table, then stroked the back of his head. I told him it would be all right, that I was here for him. Then my hand was in his and he was massaging my palm with his thumbs. I didn’t pull away.
“Kate?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Do you reckon I could sleep here tonight?”
THIRTEEN
I was woken by the morning light stabbing through a gap in the curtains. Tovyah lay on the floor, naked apart from his boxers and vest. As he began to stir, he reminded me of a beached fish.
Despite the state he’d been in, sleeping together had been a moderate success. It felt vaguely transgressive to reach up under his shirt, to run my hands over that skinny body. Transgressive and yet familiar. And safe. Eager to satisfy me, he took instruction without self-consciousness. After we had each climaxed, he held me in his arms. Then, in his sleep, he made panicked, whimpering noises. I didn’t know when he had made his way to the floor.
With my big toe, I now prodded him awake. Groaning, he pulled on his trousers while still lying there. When he sat up, I could see red lines on the side of his head, imprinted by the ridges of the carpet.
“How did you sleep?” I asked.
“Terribly.”
“You should have stayed up here.”
I pulled the covers off and stood up, towering over him.
“Stop that, don’t move. Think I might throw up.”
He bent his head between his knees and grabbed an ankle with each hand, as if prostrating himself before some terrible power. He stayed like that for a minute or two. I watched him suffer, unsure whether to hurry him to the sink or just let him sit there. When the moment of danger passed, he spoke again. “Fucking bloody piss.”
“It’s not a big—”
“I can’t believe, I really can’t believe her.”
His gangly body unfolded itself. Under his eyes, the skin was pouched and violet.
“Your mother,” I said.
“Of course my mother. Who else? I take it you’ve seen the news.” He began to stand up, thought better of it, and thumped back to the floor. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You really don’t remember,” I said.
“Oh God, I wasn’t whining on about it, was I?”
“You did a bit. And—”
“I hate being drunk. It’s so ugly.”
Some people make too little eye contact and come across as shy or rude. This was not usually Tovyah’s problem. When he looked at you, you felt like you were being examined. But now, for once, he was reluctant to meet my eye.
“About last night,” he said.
“You didn’t forget everything, then.”
I knew exactly how uncomfortable he was and I was enjoying myself. I raised my eyebrows as I waited for him to respond.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?”
“If I misled you. I don’t know what came over me. I was very drunk. No offence, Kate, I just don’t have those sorts of feelings about you.”
It was too early to know how I myself felt about what had happened. Mortified? Triumphant? Interested in a repeat? There would be plenty of time to work it out. For now, I too had slept badly, and decided to take things as they came.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
Tovyah started to dress himself, quite uninhibited in my presence. I watched him, amused by his pale body.
“So your mum’s written a book about your sister… having supernatural powers?”
“You don’t know her. Sometimes, I even feel sorry for Eric. When they married, I don’t think he had any idea what he was up against.”
Ever the rationalist, Tovyah saw his sister’s troubles as a complex web of mental disorders, a product of brain chemistry and the incidents of her life so far. So much bad luck compounded by so much bad parenting. His mother, not believing in luck, interpreted things differently. For Hannah, the unimaginable change in Elsie must have a spiritual dimension. A meaning. If something was happening to her daughter and not to someone else’s, then it was because that was what God wanted. In the Times article, they printed this teaser from the book:
When I looked at her then with her hair shaved close to her scalp, her eyes sunken into her face, I couldn’t help but think that isn’t my daughter. Something had taken possession of her. Some imp, some demon, some dybbuk, something that cared nothing for the well-being of my darling Elsie…
I asked Tovyah if he was close to his sister growing up. “She was my best friend,” he said. “And then she went away.”
No wonder Tovyah had drunk himself senseless and ended up in bed with the nearest available person. I was still having trouble believing his mother’s central premise was sincere. Her journalism, though often misguided, was intelligent and well argued. The book she was bringing out now was obviously insane.
“You wouldn’t believe what went on in that house,” Tovyah said. “The things they did to ‘cure’ Elsie.”
“Like what?”
“Ok, she goes missing. Hannah rings up everyone she’s ever met, asks them if they’ve seen her. Fair enough. But what does Eric do? He fasts. He doesn’t eat a thing until Elsie has been found. The crazy bastard went on hunger strike against God.”
“Why? Is that a Talmudic thing?”
“You’re not getting it. Where it came from is not the point. A little fast now and then? That’s chicken shit.”
He told me a story about a mezuzah, the little box that contains a scrap of parchment and offers protection to Jewish households. Once, Hannah read that if there was a mistake on one of the prayer sheets, the house would by cursed rather than blessed. During one of Elsie’s darker spells, she decided to take down the mezuzah above the front door, just to check. And of course, after unscrewing the box and comparing the text with a prayer book, she noticed a discrepancy. Eric! Come now! After a brief consultation, they buried the script with the error and commissioned a scribe to handwrite a new sheet. For a week or more, Hannah genuinely believed this would solve Elsie’s problems. Meanwhile, her daughter had just decided that she didn’t like her latest medication and had been caught flushing it down the toilet. Eric discovered what she was up to when a clogged drain left a pill swirling in the toilet bowl. And what did Hannah say? They shouldn’t tell her off about the pills. That’s not the issue.
“Was there any improvement?” I asked. “I mean after the prayer was corrected.”
“Improvement? Are you listening? I grew up in a madhouse.”
Standing now, Tovyah retched, though nothing came up. He stumbled to the door and pushed his way out. But he did not make it to the bathroom. Early though it was, there was someone in the corridor.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I heard Tovyah say.
“Lovely to see you too.”
I knew the voice at once: it was his mother.
She went on, “They tried to stop me coming in, can you believe. Said I had to wait in the porters’ lodge for you to come and meet me. But we tried your phone and no one picked up. ‘This is a farce,’ I said, ‘you know exactly who I am.’ Then I marched on through.”
“Some nerve, don’t you think?”
“Buckets of nerve! As if I’m a security risk.”
“I meant you coming here, like nothing’s happened.”
In the pause that followed, I snuck closer to the door. I wondered if Hannah realised the room Tovyah was standing outside was not his own.
“It’s virtually the end of term,” she said. “You’ve had your last tutorial, yes? I was in Reading anyway, and I thought you might want to get away from all the publicity. You can take the train if you’d prefer.”
“There’s no need.”
“Right, let’s get on, then. I knew you’d see sense.”
“You’re not following me. There’s no need for me to take the train because I’m not coming home.”
Hannah betrayed no emotion in her voice when she spoke again. “Well, if you’ve set you heart on staying, I can’t prise you away. Though, after what I’ve seen, I wonder how welcome you are.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Hannah had been standing in front of Tovyah’s door. She now took a step away, revealing something behind. Whatever it was made Tovyah say, “I don’t believe it.”
“You will,” Hannah said. “You can go back to your whore now. Ring when you come to your senses.”
In another moment, she was gone, and I emerged from the room to find Tovyah hugging himself, staring at his own door.
“What did she call me?” I said.
“It’s like the idiots want to prove her right.”
For a moment, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then I saw it too. His door had been vandalised. On either side were two symbols carved into the wood, bridged by an equals sign cut deep into the central beam. On the door’s left panel was a six-pointed star formed of two overlapping triangles: the emblem of King David, ancient symbol of Judaism, and icon of the modern State of Israel. And on the right was two bolts of crossed lightning, a crooked shape understood by children everywhere as a token of monumental human evil.
FOURTEEN
Unfair but true, most families celebrate a favoured child, about whom the constellation of parents, grandparents, and lesser siblings revolve. For the Rosenthals, this was Elsie. According to family lore, her first word wasn’t mama or dada or even some garbled attempt at Gideon. It was me. “Meeee!” she cried, sometimes joyfully, sometimes baffled, and sometimes with bitter indignation. “Me me me me me!” And always as loudly as her small lungs could manage. Her parents crowed. Eleven months old, and she had attained self-consciousness. Their baby girl was nothing less than a pint-sized Descartes.
Physically, she took after her mother. She had rigid blonde hair, almost white, which darkened and began to curl in the first years of puberty. Cameras embarrassed her, so in photos she never smiled. You can find them online, and in her mother’s books. Here she holds a cushion before her face, there she looks away, and in this last one, she scowls. Notice, here and there, the chipped canine, a reminder whenever she looked in the mirror that she once slipped on wet paving slabs beside an outdoor swimming pool. She only realised she was bleeding when she saw a burgundy ribbon twist in the water. Twist, unwind, disperse.
Even her grandfather, not known for friendliness towards children, adored her. “This one I like,” Yosef would say, affectionately tugging her ear this way and that. “The boys, I can take or leave.” His death was the first blot on an idyllic childhood. Before then, it was possible for Elsie to believe nothing truly bad would ever happen to her. Nothing worse than a lost footing, an outrageous smack to the face, a broken tooth, and one morning ruined in a summer brimming over with days.
She was about to turn fourteen when she lost him. In her diary, which years afterwards was found and read by her mother as research for Daughters of Endor, Elsie wrote, “How can a person be here and then just not here anymore? It doesn’t make sense.” The word sense was twice underlined. Until that point, she’d kept her diary haphazardly—whole weeks passed undescribed—and always with an eye for harmless comedy, such as the time she saw a dalmatian sneeze in the park; the owner wiped the dog’s nose with a handkerchief, cooing “bless you, dear, bless you.” During her bereavement, however, Elsie’s thoughts darkened:
Stepped on snail at lunch. Fascinating to see the mangled sludge and broken shell up close. Meredith called me disgusting.
Sex ed with Humphries. More like sermon on chastity, but for health reasons, not moral. Didn’t mention souls, didn’t mention defilement.
Met C again this evening. Wants to go to the next level.
Such fragments were no doubt tantalising for her snooping mother to read as she later investigated all that had gone wrong for Elsie. While most of the names mentioned were known to Hannah, “C” was a mystery. The initial appeared regularly for a few months, and then abruptly dropped out of the diary altogether, just around the time her daughter went missing. But however much Hannah begged, threatened, and bribed, Elsie would no more talk about “C” than she would explain why she had run away in the first place.
So Hannah formed her own conclusion. Without meaningful evidence, she decided that “C” was Chaim, Jane and Jonathon Strasfogel’s oldest, expelled from school for smoking pot. Proof or no proof, it killed the friendship between the Rosenthals and the Strasfogels. Unpleasant looks were exchanged in synagogue. Seating plans at weddings were rearranged.
* * *
Unknown to the rest of the family, Elsie’s first romantic adventure began just days after her grandfather had been lowered into the ground, when the full-length mirror in her wardrobe was still draped with black cloth, and the atmosphere of the house was thick with prayers and candlesmoke. He was a sixth-former at a nearby college, a boy she’d noticed clattering around the park on his skateboard towards evening, sometimes with friends, mostly alone. They met when she was out walking the neighbour’s dog, Archie, a lazy dachshund that often dug his heels in and demanded carrying. The boy surprised her near the bandstand by asking if she had a lighter. When she said no, he offered a cigarette.
“But how will we get it lit?” she asked.
He smiled. After producing a Zippo, he flicked open the lid and brought the flame towards her mouth. “How old are you anyway?” he said.
She went with seventeen. Her name was Emily. His was Carl. He offered his hand. She took it without hesitation. She said, “Carl? Doesn’t inspire much confidence.”
Ignoring this, Carl bent down to fuss over Archie, who rolled onto his back submissively.
Later, the two of them sat on a park bench, listening to the soft rumble of evening traffic. For a few minutes neither had spoken. Taking this as a sign, Carl was about to lean in, when Elsie stuffed a hand into her pocket. Rather than the expected breath mints, however, she produced a smooth grey orb, flattened on one side.
Elsie rolled the stone between her fingers, then tossed it into the air and caught it.
Carl blinked. Why were girls so weird? “Go on, what’s with the rock.”
“It was given to me on the day of a funeral. I was meant to place it beside my grandfather’s grave.”
“Don’t people normally put flowers on graves?”
“Only plebs,” Elsie said. According to Hannah, plebs was what goys called other goys when they considered them inferior. “It’s much better to place a stone.”
“And I’m guessing there’s some super interesting reason you didn’t?”
Elsie didn’t mind Carl’s scepticism. In fact, it played into the mood she was trying to create; he was her straight man.
“There shouldn’t have been a headstone. My grandfather knew what he wanted—after he died, he was meant to be cremated.”
“So?”
“So? Sometimes I get the feeling that he’s still here, that he can’t move on.”
Elsie laughed inwardly. This was her first time playing the part, and the high camp delighted her.
“Do you want to hold it?” she said, proffering the stone. “Careful though. It belongs with the dead.”
“Uh-uh,” Carl said. “You keep it.”
Elsie held the stone to her chest, smiling. She drew nearer.
“I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re one creepy chick.”
Their faces were so close now. He only had to extend his lips, and the first delicate kisses formed themselves. After a time, the kisses grew insistent.
