Fervor, page 2
* * *
Like any verbal will whose instructions confound its listeners, Yosef’s final wishes were simply ignored. Following centuries of custom, Eric decreed that his father would be wrapped in his tallit and buried in East Ham Cemetery next to Janet of beloved memory. Only Elsie objected. As the body was lowered, she stood back, clicking her tongue. And when her mother handed her a small round stone to place on the grave, she stowed it away in her pocket. “This is all wrong,” she said. Elsie was drawing attention to herself now, but Hannah let it go. “Funerals do funny things to people,” Eric said later.
Afterwards, the family huddled in the attic and sat shiva along with various honoured guests invited to complete the minyan. There was much weeping and rocking back and forth. All the mirrors in the house were covered with black cloth, and for seven days the portals to those illusory depths were closed.
That was in summer, the last of the century. And so, Yosef Rosenthal, child of the twenties, never made it to the new millennium. He was a Jew born into Warsaw’s lower middle class, whose first home was long ago obliterated by ancient hatreds and modern politics well beyond the reach of his imagination. As the course of his life bundled him across first countries then eras, his memories of childhood came to seem no more than a series of pleasant tales, an evening’s diversion. Meanwhile, the surviving world made less sense with each passing year, until, by the end, coughing away his last hours in that dusty attic, he hardly believed in it at all.
TWO
Elsie kept hold of the stone her mother had given her on the day of the funeral. Grey with white striations, it had a perfectly formed hole to one side, as though it had been drilled. She took to rolling it between her fingers while she talked, and when she was anxious, she would clasp it to her chest. No one in the family remembered where the stone had come from, and soon they stopped remarking on these new habits.
In the park, one day, Elsie’s school friends saw her toying with it for the first time. Everyone noticed, but it was Meredith who commented.
“What’s with the rock? That your new boyfriend?”
Meredith had a fat smile that revealed a little too much pink gum. When she found something ridiculous, as she did now, she would shake her frizzy hair and wince. In their circle of friends, Elsie was better-liked and, as both girls knew it, Meredith was always looking for opportunities to bring her down a notch. There were a few of them in the park that day, legs dangling from motionless swings.
Elsie stood up and turned to face the group. “You can do a lot with a stone,” she said.
“Eww gross,” one of the other girls said. A few of them laughed.
“I wasn’t talking about that.” Elsie lifted the stone level with her cheeks and crooked her elbow, as if she was about to let fly. Meredith flinched.
“What’s the most violent thing everyone’s ever done?” Elsie asked. No one answered. Elsie continued, “If you ever catch a fish, you have to hold it by the tail and smash its brains against a rock.” She tensed her bicep a moment, then, slowly, slowly, lowered her arm. Her father hated all blood sports, and no one had ever taken her fishing.
Afterwards, there were no more jokes. For a brief spell that August, Meredith and a few of the others picked around in the soil of their parents’ back gardens, searching for pebbles, and would sometimes choose one to carry around for a bit. But they never really saw the point, and the fad soon died out.
* * *
Come autumn, some way into the first term of the new academic year, Elsie’s English teacher called in Hannah and Eric for a meeting. Ms Varden had concerns about their daughter, which she preferred not to mention over the phone. An unexpected summons. As far as Hannah and Eric knew, Elsie had always been a model pupil.
Mrs Wilson, round-cheeked and heavily pregnant in a loose floral dress, met them at reception, then led them to Ms Varden’s room. Wilson was the Head of English, apparently, and would be sitting in on the meeting. “Just for support.”
Hannah strode into the room first, letting the teacher hold the door. You’d never know this commanding woman, suited and high-heeled, felt anxious about the encounter, for reasons she herself could not name. In the carpark outside the school, she’d had the distinct urge to throw up. Now she took her seat opposite Varden—younger than Wilson, and slightly better dressed—and waited for her husband to follow.
To one side of the room was a row of blue and green lockers that recalled the changing areas at the public swimming pool. Inside those tall metal boxes, no doubt, were textbooks and diaries, a few crinkled love letters, and perhaps the odd stash of cigarettes. In Hannah’s day the school lockers had been grey, and no stickers were permitted on the outside. Even so, she had loved them. Having your own key and a locked door barring access to your possessions gave you a terrific, adult feeling. The tables and chairs were wooden with a dark varnish, and on the walls various posters displayed the talent and creativity of the girls of 4B. But where was Elsie’s work? None of the displays bore her name. Was it possible that her projects were not deemed worthy? Hannah’s brilliant daughter, whose precocious creativity was maturing under her influence—surely some mistake. Just look at the stuff that had made the cut.
Mrs Wilson asked if anyone would like a cup of tea, or a biscuit maybe. There were no takers.
“Do you sometimes help Elsie with her homework?” Ms Varden asked. “If she’s given an essay to write for history or for English, does she show it to you?” Through the lenses of her glasses, thick and wide, her eyes stretched beyond the limits of her face, an effect both clownish and mildly sinister.
Hannah said, “Our children are very independent. I hope you don’t think they’re handing in work that’s not their own.”
“Nothing like that.”
Eric shifted in his chair. “Generally, Elsie shuts herself in her room to do her schoolwork. Her grandfather used to look over her work with her sometimes, especially when she was younger. More on the maths side, though—he was good with numbers.”
“He passed away recently, didn’t he? Must be tough on Elsie.”
Ms Varden nodded as she spoke, and for a little while after she finished speaking. The Head of Department frowned sympathetically.
“We get by,” Eric said, just as the teacher’s head slowed to a stop.
“I’m afraid this isn’t going to be easy,” Ms Varden said. “As you know, I take the girls for English, and lately, well, for a while now, some of the things Elsie writes have been… What would you say, Maggie?”
“Concerning,” Mrs Wilson suggested.
“Concerning. Yes.”
Hannah asked how so.
“To put it bluntly, Elsie has a violent imagination. This week, for instance, she wrote a story about a young woman whose father, after returning from war, tied her to a fence, bound her hands behind her back, and then set her on fire, while all the neighbours watched from their front gardens.”
Mrs Wilson’s eyes widened. There was a brief silence, which Eric broke. “What was the assignment?”
“To write a story about a family reunion,” Ms Varden replied.
This was not the only example. Another story centred on a girl named Dinah, who fell in love with her own rapist, a foreigner. When her brothers discovered the affair, they approached the boy’s parents and proposed a marriage that would unite the two families. Then, having lulled the foreigners into a false state of security, Dinah’s brothers slaughtered the lot of them. Mrs Wilson hoped it went without saying that xenophobia was not tolerated at the school. In a third story, Ms Varden carried on, a young man has a premonition of his own death when he sees the ghost of his father.
Hearing these things, Eric wondered how well he knew his daughter. Elsie wrote all that? The same Elsie who insisted on eating her salad with ketchup, who often narrated her actions in scraps of song, Now I’m going up the stairs / To have a bath and wash my hairs? The Elsie who only last week cried over a bad roll in family monopoly? The one with the impish overbite, the little girl whose blue scrunchies found their way to every floor and carpet in the house? That same Elsie was now fantasising about rape, immolation, and mass death?
Hannah had a different question in mind. “Was it any good?”
“Excuse me?”
“Elsie’s story. Were you impressed? Or did it simply get you reaching for the parents’ phone number?”
“Literary merit is not really the point here,” Mrs Wilson said.
Hannah begged to differ. If her daughter was just coming up with horrible images, hoping to shock teachers, then that was pornography. But if she was producing something with real power, then wasn’t that the aim? Or would she rather the girls wrote stories like the pictures on the wall: garish, saccharine, unserious?
“Perhaps you’d be a better judge of this than me,” Ms Varden said. “From a purely academic standpoint, I have no worries about your daughter. But where does she get these ideas?”
To Eric and Hannah, that was obvious. They never kept things from their daughter; her own curiosity set the limits. And since Yosef’s death, she’d spent more time closed up in her room, fondling that stone, reading. Especially Scripture. The sacrificed child was Jephthah’s from the Book of Judges, and Dinah was one of Jacob’s daughters.
“It’s all in the Tanakh,” Hannah said.
“She means the Old Testament,” Eric said.
“This is not a religious school,” Mrs Wilson put in. “Here, in our English classes, we focus on secular literature.”
Hannah tried not to smile. “You must be joking. Secular literature only. What, so no Chaucer, no Milton?”
Confused, Mrs Wilson turned to her younger colleague.
“Elsie told me you were readers,” Ms Varden said.
Hannah laughed. It was obvious now. Elsie had been mocking these absurd ladies.
“I don’t see what’s funny,” Mrs Wilson said.
How much this moment resembled a dream. The school in which there were no children, the classroom that was also a changing room. Look how they were discussing Elsie, but the Elsie in this dream world was not the same as the one she knew. Elsie was happy, she sang every day of her life. And yet these women, these supposed English teachers who didn’t read books, were saying her daughter was broken and needed fixing.
Eric put his hand on Hannah’s knee.
“We’re very grateful for you calling us in like this,” he said. “And I can see why Elsie’s choice of subjects is worrying you. But I don’t think there’s anything to get excited about. She misses her grandfather, and she’s passionate about Scripture. My father was too.”
Ms Varden removed her glasses and, with a licked thumb, peeled an eyelash from one of the lenses. She was quite pretty, really, when you looked at her. Young too. Twenty-three, twenty-four at the most.
Squinting, the teacher said she was worried about the effect Elsie was having on the other girls. “They’re frightened of her. I know this must be difficult to hear. But she makes them do things that are against their nature. They misbehave. Sometimes, when they all get together, they can be cruel.”
Earlier that week, a girl in Elsie’s form—no need to name names—was found by a prefect crying in the school library, angry red marks along her neck. The prefect took her to Mrs Larsson, her Head of Year, who soon got the story out. It seems the girl had been pressured by her classmates into playing this horrible game, where someone lies prone, and one of her friends pushes down on her neck until she passes out. The game was known, apparently, as “seeing the other side.” They had lectured the year group, of course, on the dangers of what they’d been doing, and an article was circulated about a student at another school who never came round after blacking out. Anyone who was involved henceforth would be immediately suspended.
“But what does this have to do with Elsie?” Eric asked. “Or her stories? I thought that’s why we’re here.”
“What I’m about to say is going to sound a little strange, so bear with me. Sometimes the things Elsie writes come true.”
She’d written a story in which a beloved pet fish was poisoned, and a week later the goldfish at the top of the L building were found belly-up on the surface. It seemed she was getting the other girls to act out her fantasies. And the phrase “seeing the other side” was used again and again in her stories. Mrs Wilson and Ms Varden could hardly ignore the situation. They wanted Elsie to begin therapy sessions with the school counsellor immediately. They would closely monitor the girl, and hopefully in time she could have back the same liberties as any of her peers.
The clock on the back wall ticked off fifteen, twenty seconds. Hannah dragged her chair forwards a few inches.
“Let me get this right. Your students are getting up to dangerous activities in their breaks, and on the basis of a single sentence in a short story, you’re blaming my daughter? And now you think Elsie and her friends are going to burn one of your girls at the stake? So you want her to go for a cup of hot cocoa with some quack once—”
“Mrs Rosenthal, please—”
“Once a week with some quack, and that’s going to fix everything. That’s what you’re saying here. Yes? I’ve seen some things, believe me, but never in my life have I encountered ridiculousness, downright—”
“Darling—”
“—downright stupidity on this scale. It’s just a shame you weren’t around to confiscate the pen from William Shakespeare before the maniac started blinding pensioners. It’s a pity you—”
Losing her breath midsentence, Hannah stopped speaking and the outpouring was cut short; whatever climax she was working towards had to be imagined from her warlike expression, her face almost within kissing distance.
“If you can’t remain civil, I am going to have to end this meeting,” Mrs Wilson said.
Eric nodded.
In a chastened voice, Ms Varden asked if they would agree to the plan of action. If not, the situation would be discussed by the senior leadership team. They couldn’t rule out disciplinary measures.
On the drive home, Eric and Hannah talked it over. Eric agreed the teachers were both fools, and yet the meeting had unsettled him. Didn’t those stories worry Hannah? She claimed not. Elsie was a teenager. She was on the cusp of adult life, she was grieving, her body was flooded with hormones, and she was just discovering what sex and death are all about. “Even a frummer kid like you must have gone through something similar. A hysterical teacher is the last thing she needs.”
“True,” Eric conceded, not wholly convinced. He was more annoyed than he let on by Hannah’s reference to his teenage years, of which she understood nothing.
“But I don’t think the woman’s concerns are baseless.”
Something disturbed him that he did not mention to Hannah. Later, much later, he would wonder why he hadn’t come out and said it right then. The apparition of the father as a harbinger of death is not a biblical idea. He’d have to look it up when they got back, but he was reasonably sure it came from the writings of the Zohar, the Book of Splendour, whose pages Jews are forbidden to open before they reach the age of forty. Neither Hannah nor Eric were adherents of Kabbalah, but their bookshelves at home were well stocked, and it was obvious where Elsie had begun her explorations of mystical beliefs. Just then, having indicated late for a right turn, Eric was scolded by a horn-blast, a Volkswagen right up on his bumper. Hannah wound down her window, leaned out, and cried, “Nazi piece of shit!”
* * *
The next day, Elsie was asked by her geography teacher to hand over the stone she held in her left hand while she copied notes from the board. Elsie refused. The teacher insisted, but Elsie remained firm. She wasn’t doing anything wrong! The teacher said that a stone could be used as a weapon, to which Elsie asked if the teacher had ever seen what a pair of house keys can do to an eyeball? The whole class laughed then, and Elsie was sent to the Deputy Head’s office.
Hearing all this on the phone later, Hannah bit her tongue.
* * *
In her therapy sessions, Elsie spoke about the stories she’d written and her relationships with the other girls at school. She discussed her imaginary friends too, including the spirit of her grandfather, and a ghostly little boy called Ariel who was searching for his parents. They talked about her studies, and they talked about bereavement, and they talked about healing. “There are things that happen, that you don’t get over or move past,” the counsellor said. “And that’s ok. They become a part of you, for better and for worse.”
On another day, in a different session, she said, “It’s fine to have negative emotions. This isn’t about trying to stop you from having normal thoughts and feelings.”
Elsie smirked. “Who said I want to have normal thoughts and feelings?”
Meanwhile, troubling things kept happening in class. Complaints were made. The report sent home just before half term said that Elsie’s progress was “disappointing,” and that Elsie was “uncooperative.” During her week off, she was sullen at meals, and became protective of her solitude.
After the break, Hannah and Eric were called into the school once more. This time, the Deputy Head was present in the conference and the possibility of expulsion was raised. Elsie’s behaviour had reached new lows. She’d stolen another girl’s wallet.
Back home that night, Eric gave Elsie a real talking to. She’d had almost two months of counselling, and nothing had improved. She was missing lessons, getting into fights with teachers, losing friends. And now she had broken a written commandment. If she didn’t turn a corner soon, Eric told her, then it might be too late. And when she gave the first adolescent shrug he’d ever seen her give, he felt his grip on himself slipping. “I’m not going to just stand here and watch you fuck up your life.” He had never shouted at one of his children before, let alone sworn at them. Until now, he’d left that privilege to Zeide.
