Fervor, page 25
“Fine,” Tovyah said. “I’ll say I’m sorry. Just as soon as she apologises for writing that fucking book.”
Eric’s face shone.
“Here we go,” said Gideon.
When no one else spoke, Tovyah continued.
“I’m not joking. I’d like to hear her say sorry.” He turned to his mother. “You want Elsie to go to Oxford, right? Get a good job, meet a nice husband. Who’s going to give her a job when they know her life story? You think that’s a picture of a stable employee you’ve painted? Everywhere she goes, for the rest of her life, people will stop what they are doing, and they will look at her. There she is, that poor girl. Such a sad story! But you never thought about that.”
Now even Elsie begged him to stop his accusations. “Tovyah, I can have one glass, you know. I’ve done it before.”
Hannah spoke next. “Everything is my fault, you see, Kate. Go on, Tovyah, why don’t you tell us again? You do it so well. Perhaps you could tell us about being a parent while you’re at it. You don’t want to know what sort of house your father grew up in. You lot have it easy. The life we’ve provided for the three of you. The holidays you’ve had, the education. Elsie knows we love her. Who do you think feeds her, clothes her, puts a roof over her head? Who pays for everything she’s stolen over the years? Who pleaded with teachers, doctors, police officers, on her behalf? Your father and I, no one else. While you’re swanning about in Oxford, who do you think is stuck here, doing the work with your sister? So go on. Let’s hear what tyrants we are.”
“Spare me the handwringing, Mum.”
“Always the same. Once he gets going, no one else is allowed to speak.”
“But why are we even here?”
“Excuse me? It’s Shabbos.”
“I mean here! In this situation! Why is Elsie how she is? You have three children, you put straitjackets on the lot of us, and look what’s happened! Gideon moved to the other side of the world to shoot Arabs, Elsie’s sick in the head, and as for me, I’m the worst of the pack. Everyone thinks I’m a fucking psycho!”
Gideon looked at me. “Got siblings?” he asked.
Elsie, meanwhile, was saying something. “You shouldn’t talk like that. Really, Tuvs, you don’t know everything. I’m not sick, and it isn’t their fault.”
“Can I just say, I’ve never actually shot anyone.”
“Of course it’s their fault! Who else? We were the children, and they were the adults. They made our lives for us. Why do we never speak about things honestly? Why can’t we say what’s right in front of us? Even she can see it.” He was pointing at me.
When Gideon spoke again, all levity was gone from his voice. “No more, Tovyah. We’re done now.”
“No more? I’ve hardly even begun.”
“Tovyah—”
“You tell me how it is, then. Captain bigshot. What are you doing in Israel? What’s there, aside from the greatest possible distance you can put between you and this nuthouse?”
“It’s a beautiful country.”
“Italy is a beautiful country, and it doesn’t have barbed wire round the edges. Spain is a beautiful country! You wanted to get the hell away from our magnificent, back-breaking parents, and you went somewhere you could actually save the Jews. A big man, just like the biblical Gideon, the great deliverer! You felt so ashamed of what Zeide got up to in Poland, all those years ago, it’s the only thing you could think of. You were sick of your idiot friends telling you how your grandfather helped the Nazis shovel Jews into the ovens. Which he did, by the way, he did, so why don’t we talk about that? Oh, no, let’s do what healthy families do, shall we, let’s just keep silent while Hannah publishes her trashy book and tells the whole world what she never would have told her own children! I bet you were thrilled when you figured him for a collaborator. Just think of the sales!”
“He was never a collaborator,” Eric said.
“Wasn’t he? He asked her to destroy the tapes, burn the manuscript. Begged her! Did you ever think, maybe if you’d let Zeide be, if you hadn’t sold his life-story to the highest bidder in a literal auction, your oldest son would still live in Western Europe?”
Hannah said, “Zeide did nothing we should be ashamed of.”
“Not the way you wrote it. How do you think Elsie felt? She adored the man. And you made him a monster! You—”
No doubt Tovyah would have gone on speaking, but Elsie let out a noise then like nothing in this world, a tremendous wail that contained both rumbles and shrieks. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and her outstretched fingers scratched at the tablecloth. A loud popping noise arose and, in the centre of the table, the vase cracked and fell into two clean pieces. Open mouthed, Hannah stared at the spot where it had once stood. Elsie rose from her seat. In a low, growling voice, not her own, she said, “Voss is doss? Who collects this rubbish?”
No one answered. Elsie wilted to one side, then folded down to the floor, muttering to herself. She reached a hand towards her mother, who recoiled in her seat. At last Gideon went to his sister, dragged her up, then half-carried, half-walked her out of the room.
Eric’s voice emerged from the shattered silence. “Are you happy?” he said. “We’ve trodden all over the sabbath now.”
With nothing else to do, Tovyah suggested that we go and make that coffee after all.
Hannah picked up the two halves of the vase, as though wondering if they could be reattached.
TWENTY-ONE
In the kitchen, Tovyah filled the stove-top kettle, and left the tap running. When I tried to spark the gas ring, it clicked a few times without catching, so I used my cigarette lighter. A stream of gas flared out into wide orange flames for a moment, then pulled back into a tight blue ring.
“Tovyah, what happened back there. That vase!”
Apart from the light of the stove, we were in total darkness.
“It went, just on its own.”
He thought about something. “They’re infectious.”
“And I can’t help thinking about some of the stuff in your mother’s book. I—”
“My family’s infectious. You only have to come near them to go straight out of your mind.”
“Don’t shut this down. Your grandfather was there, at the lecture. And just last week, when Elsie was staying, there was this strange light bleeding under your door.”
“Listen to yourself, Kate. The things you are saying don’t make sense.”
“Then tell me. How do you make sense of all this?”
“Hannah pulled the tablecloth and it tipped it over.”
“It didn’t tip, it exploded! You don’t smash an antique for a cheap stunt!”
Tovyah shook his head and told me had more important things to worry about. He was planning a prison break. Tonight: it couldn’t wait any longer. This was no life for someone with Elsie’s troubles, mocked by Gideon, and regarded as a sorceress by her parents. “Who knows what’s really going on with Grossman’s visit tomorrow? There are no reliable narrators in this house.”
All through Tovyah’s gap year, he explained, he’d worked in a hotel. He hadn’t travelled, hadn’t done anything, just folded towels, checked in guests, and put the money away. On top of that, he had savings. Whatever else you could accuse his parents of, they weren’t tight-fisted. They’d put money into an account on his birthday every year of his life. Twenty princely deposits.
“I have enough to rent a place for the two of us, outside London, somewhere we can figure out what she’ll do with her life. She can have another go at A Levels if she wants, she’s so clever. I’ll help. Or she can get a job. As long as she’s away from all this.”
“And when your savings run out?”
“I can make money.”
He didn’t say anything about his studies, but I understood he meant to drop out.
“What about Oxford? You’re just going to quit?”
“Oxford? I’m afraid to say, Oxford has been one of the great disappointments of my life.”
His face took on a ruminative look. He might have been thinking of all that had gone wrong in the last year. But if I had to bet, I’d say he was recollecting the hope that smouldered inside the seventeen-year-old he once was, knocking at Oxford’s door, so unprepared for this first encounter with the outside world.
“And us?” I said.
He couldn’t meet my eye.
“You could help me break her loose,” he said. “If you stay the night, distract my parents in the morning—”
“That’s not what I was asking.”
He said nothing.
“You could be free of all this,” I said. “Your mother didn’t drag you back here, you know. You reinserted yourself—it’s like you have to prove something to them, you can’t just leave them be.” I paused, weighing my words. “You don’t have to keep being unhappy.”
“What do you want of me, Kate?”
“Just to see where this goes. You and me. This is your chance to forge your own life, to give up this obsession with hating your family. Finish your degree, let your parents take care of Elsie. They do love her, you know.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say. Love her? They’re killing her.”
I was determined that I would not cry. Not now.
“So are you going to help me or what?” he said.
I couldn’t speak.
“Guess that’s a no, then. Can I at least count on you to stay silent?”
“This isn’t my fight.”
“Careful there, Kate. Sometimes when people do nothing, it ends up counting as something, and they regret it.”
His mouth was taut with anger, but at the same time there was pleasure in his eyes. I suspected a part of him had enjoyed that horrendous display at the dinner table. And he was enjoying this too, the conspiracy, the argument, the whispers. I wondered, for the hundredth time, what we were to each other.
“It’s a fantasy,” I said. “There’s no way you can provide the help she needs. The moment you’re out that door, it’s hopeless.”
Finally, after all those nights spent hashing things out, I had said something that punctured through all Tovyah’s conceit; disappointment swept across his face. I think at that moment he hated me. At last, he told me to go to hell.
“I’d like to go home now, actually,” I said.
“No one’s stopping you.”
The kettle whistled. Tovyah killed the gas, scooped coffee grounds into a large cafetière, and poured over boiling water. “You can have one, by the way.”
“Sorry?”
“Your cigarettes. You’ve been reaching for them all evening. The door to the garden’s right behind you. I only wish you’d lit one up at the table. That would have made an impression.”
* * *
I stood on the lawn with my back to the house, smoking by the weak light of the moon and stars, willing myself to calm down. My surroundings were murky, and I felt the darkness pressing in against my skin. When I moved my head too quickly, the world tilted on its axis. A low voice sounded behind me. “Well, if you’re having one, I might as well have one.”
It was Gideon. When I turned around, he held up his index and middle fingers to his lips.
“I thought you don’t make fire on the sabbath,” I said, passing him a cigarette.
“Do you know how many of those damn rules there are? Follow every single one, you’ll go crazy. Lighter, please.”
I handed it over.
“Apologies, by the way, if I gave the wrong impression earlier, about the sabbath goy and that. I was only messing around. And sorry about my family. They love each other, really, but God they’re nuts.”
“So you agree with Tovyah?”
“I half-agree with him. Hannah’s books are a little reckless, sure, but they’re not bad parents.”
I brought up some of the things Tovyah had told me about Hannah and Eric. That when Elsie went missing, Eric’s response was to fast. Or that later, when her problems really started heaping up, her parents commissioned a new mezuzah.
“You don’t know the one about the prize fighter’s mother,” Gideon said. “He’s got this big fight coming up, biggest of his career. The guy he’s up against is a monster, Muhammad Ali and Genghis Khan rolled into one. So the mother says to her rabbi, ‘Will you pray? Pray that my son wins?’ The rabbi looks at the leviathan in the far corner, and he says, ‘Sure, I’ll pray for your boy. But it’ll help if he can punch.’ One of Eric’s favourite jokes. They never prayed instead of being parents. They prayed on top of being parents.”
I said that’s not what Tovyah thinks, and Gideon said he knew. When Tovyah has an opinion, he doesn’t just say it the one time.
“What about Elsie? Was tonight… normal for her?”
Here Gideon paused. This was not a subject he could navigate on autopilot.
“That girl left normal behind a long time ago. Sometimes she’s sullen and unreachable. Tonight, you saw a mild version. At least, up until Tovyah kicked off.”
“What’s the not-mild version?”
“Won’t leave her room for weeks on end. Starves herself half to death. Or she slips away, no one knows where. The police won’t take it seriously. She’ll come back sooner or later. An adult daughter running away from her parents is no crime. And then other times, she seems perfectly normal. She’s talkative, funny, even charming. In a way, that’s the most painful bit of all. Because every time”—his breath caught in his throat—“sorry, how embarrassing.”
“How do you cope?”
“Were you not paying attention? We don’t.”
I asked him why he thought Elsie ran away in the first place. That seemed to be at the beginning of so much.
“Tovyah would blame it on Hannah and Eric, no doubt. Too much pressure, pushed her away. And Hannah, as you know, thought it was all to do with Zeide’s death. She had to go searching for his spirit, or whatever. All that Kabbalah shit.”
“But what do you think?”
“Maybe I’m just projecting what I was like at that age. But I always wondered if there was a boy in it.”
“She’d have been very young,” I said.
“Elsie stopped being young all at once. I don’t think it’s supposed to happen like that.” Gideon stopped talking, looked over his shoulder. We were quite alone. I was getting used to the light now and could see more of the garden. Raised flower beds, little gnomes standing guard round the edge of a pond.
“But you’re ok, right? You look all shook up.”
Lines from the fight I’d just had with Tovyah were running through my head. Trying to suppress them, I told Gideon that I was a little thrown by what happened at dinner, but basically ok.
Gideon ran his hand through his hair, assessing. “I think you could use a drink.”
“I should go,” I said. “I need to get back.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The last train’s gone, and you’re among friends here. Besides, it’s Shabbos. The Shekhina is with us, God’s light is filling up the house. I’m gonna pour you that drink.”
“What does it look like?” I said.
“Sorry?”
“You said God’s light is in the house. Can you see it?”
Gideon smiled, bemused, and I grew shy.
“You know Tovyah doesn’t believe in any of it,” I said.
“Why do you think he gets so angry?”
Gideon led me back into the kitchen, where he doled out a couple of glugs of whisky into two stubby glasses.
“L’chaim!” He raised his drink. When I repeated the toast, he asked if I knew what it meant.
“To life.”
“Very good. To life. Goes on, doesn’t it. As the rabbis say, however bloody awful it gets, it still goes on.”
“Which rabbis?”
Gideon laughed. “A turn of phrase.”
Speaking sensibly, more alcohol was the last thing I needed. I was a touch unsteady on my feet as it was and had trouble following the train of my own thoughts. But there was no one there to speak sensibly. Just Gideon with his strong arms and his heavy pour, the functional alcoholic that was fewer steps than he realised from becoming, like his sister, a dysfunctional one.
We each knocked back a stinging gulp.
“It’s not true, by the way. What Tuvs said, about me flying to Israel to become this great hero. My parents like to believe I have a saviour complex. And Tovyah, who thinks he knows best about everything, is a total dupe. You want the real story? I spent a week in Tel Aviv when I was nineteen. And I met this boy. A Sabra—that’s what they call the ones who were born there. Spoke good English. And he had the most beautiful skin. He told me the thing about Israel is everyone knows they’re on the brink of a terrible war that kills everyone they’ve ever met, so no one gives a fuck. You see? They don’t give a fuck about embarrassing themselves, or saying the wrong thing, or what strangers think, or any of that English bullshit. They live their lives at a million miles an hour and they party like bastards. And I thought, this, this is what I want. I want this boy. These mountains. These nights. I want to party like a bastard. I want this life, and nothing but this life, until I die.”
As if to punctuate this little speech, he topped up our drinks. The square glasses were now brimming with amber liquor.
“Are you still together?” I said. “You and this guy?”
“No.”
“And what about the life? Is it what you wanted.”
Now he laughed again. “It’s not for everyone.”
Gideon said he’d better go check on Elsie and bade me goodnight. I decided to head outside for one last smoke before turning in. I tripped on the step and found myself taking a few steps to recover my balance. When I reached into my back pocket, cigarette dangling from lower lip, I realised with some annoyance that Gideon had taken my lighter with him.
TWENTY-TWO
I only learned what happened next the following day, when Tovyah, ashen-faced, ran feverishly through the whole sequence of events. At some point in the night, while the rest of us slept, Tovyah wandered across the first-floor landing, treading lightly so as not to wake his parents, and tapped with a fingernail on his sister’s door, an act he’d performed countless times in childhood and had not repeated in years. Now was the time for definitive action, he told himself. No more deferments. A quiet voice ushered him in. The lamp that hung from the ceiling was dead. Elsie was sitting on her bed with legs crossed, back against the wall, arms drooped in her lap.
