Fervor, page 4
Back in my own corridor, I met Tovyah coming out of the kitchen. He was drying a teaspoon with the corner of his shirt. As always, he was both overdressed and a little shabby; his blazer was stained on one lapel and his shirt needed ironing. All his clothes were like that—theoretically smart but worn without care.
“What’s all the fuss about?” he asked.
I explained about the fight and the altered freshers’ schedule.
“That’s it? Just because of some disco, everyone’s rending their hair and their garments?”
“Sorry, they’re what now?”
“Rending—traditional response to bereavement. You tear out your hair and you rip your clothes. My grandfather saw it happen in real life, once. A neighbour whose husband was hanged from a lamppost on the street outside her house. She pulled her hair out in fistfuls, he said, and handed him the clumps. Then she tore the skirt of her dress. There he was, younger than us, holding these clumps of hair. What was he meant to do with that?”
Though Tovyah had related the anecdote in the same offhand manner in which he had told me about ancient mystics and their obsession with faces, he was glaring at me now, and I felt obscurely criticised. I could think of nothing to say in response and left his grim question unanswered.
* * *
So, when people in college branded him a weirdo, someone best avoided, I guiltily agreed. No matter the occasion, Tovyah was happier to keep himself to himself, and after the second or third time someone from our corridor asked if he was coming out tonight, only to be rebuffed, we stopped asking. I thought it was to do with not drinking, which in my head was somehow connected to his religious upbringing. But I was doubly mistaken there; even Ultra-Orthodox Jews are not prohibited from consuming alcohol—there are certain sages who encourage it—and Tovyah, who was only moderately Orthodox, kept a bottle of Glenlivet on the mantelpiece in his room.
Due to conflicting habits (I was an early riser, he was a night owl), we did not run into each other much. We sometimes chatted over coffee in the morning, and occasionally went to hall together. But we were cordial, not close. Nick, my brother, cautioned me that in those first weeks of university life, when the social layout of the college was still taking shape, you had to be careful who you spent time with. I was terrified of not fitting in. There was nothing I wanted less than to befriend a clingy eccentric, someone who might make it difficult for me to get on with everyone else.
Perhaps I needn’t have worried. Those first few weeks of term were almost undiluted happiness. I remember smoking from my bedroom, legs dangling over the windowsill, and laughing with friends into the night. The excitement of discovering essays and ideas that might change the way I thought forever. Hurried pencil marks down the side of the page, sometimes accompanied by an exclamation point. Everything seemed charged with potential: the rushed drinks, the clubs, the music, and the mornings swallowed by hangovers. This was it, the great adventure. And here they all were, the people and events that really mattered. Just a few weeks in I had a group of friends more interesting than anyone I had known back home: people with ambition, drive, things to say about the world. If I spoke less when I was around them than I would have liked, it was only because I was still getting used to new social conventions. Later I had my first romantic entanglement. We were totally incompatible, and our relationship burnt itself out within a fortnight. Afterwards I spent two or three days playing the jilted lover, and somewhere, in a battered ring-binder, there exists the awful poetry I felt moved to write.
Tovyah had no place in this new world of mine. I’ll never forget his expression the one time he showed up on a night out. As he stood on the edge of the dance floor, nursing a plastic wine cup and miserable in the coat and scarf he refused to leave in the cloakroom, he summoned me over and asked, genuinely bewildered, “How is this fun?”
* * *
About halfway through term, four of us sat on the benches that overlooked the front quad, smoking. I had only started recently. The summer before I went up, Nick told me I would need an in with people, and smoking was as good as any. “You’re not exactly Little Miss Personality.” I hated him for him saying it—Nick had always found acceptance in the main crowd—but I didn’t doubt his wisdom. Now here I was on the benches with Jan, Carrie, and Ruby. We swapped stories about tutorials, compared notes on the idiosyncrasies of our lecturers. Jan was the sort of person I had nothing to do with at school—popular, good at sports—but at university we met as equals. He was joint honours English and history so, unlike me, had the chance to observe Tovyah’s manner in seminars first-hand. (“Oh, he’s a total psycho.”) It was well known that Jan and Carrie had hooked up in first week, but they weren’t “a thing,” apparently, and Carrie, as I later learned, was pretty much only into women. Carrie studied French and Russian and was tipped for parliament one day.
To be accepted by such people outstripped every social aspiration I’d ever had.
With one caveat: I couldn’t really see the point of Ruby. Her face was so symmetrical I didn’t quite believe it. And she made a show of complimenting something about every new person she met. (I got “beautiful fingernails.”) For this, she enjoyed a reputation as charming.
During a lull that fell in the conversation, she asked if anyone had read the piece Hannah Rosenthal had written in The Spectator. It was about religious obligations, traditional gender roles, and feminism, apparently. Neither Jan nor I had seen it, but Carrie had. In agreement with Ruby, she found the article problematic and distasteful.
“Can you imagine what it was like growing up with her?” Jan asked. “I mean, the woman’s an actual fascist.”
I had no idea then why someone would describe Tovyah’s mother as a fascist. As I understood it, she was basically a social conservative, a defender of religion and the nuclear family, most of whose pieces seemed to be along the lines of, “people should believe in God and be nicer to each other.” Someone you could easily dislike but would take hard work to hate. I was not a careful student of current affairs and was yet to read her columns on the topic of Israel.
“I know, I know,” Carrie said. “Not to mention that whole thing with his sister.”
Everyone nodded; I alone was at a loss. “What whole thing with his sister?”
Jan said, “She went missing. As a kid. You don’t remember? This was when we were like, nine, or whatever.”
I searched my memory and found nothing. This was to be expected. My parents were deeply protective and would no doubt have shielded me from such news; I only learned the name Jamie Bulger years after the story broke.
“Must have been such a nightmare,” Ruby said. “She was, what, twelve? Thirteen?”
No one could recall the exact year.
Jan said, “Do you remember the footage of Hannah Rosenthal telling the nation that Sky Daddy was going to find the poor girl? ‘Look at Moses, look at Joseph. God does not forget imperilled children.’ And that’s not some mad street lady, that’s your mum!”
Carrie observed that kids go missing all the time, and wondered what strings Hannah must have pulled to get that kind of coverage.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did they find the girl?”
Jan answered, “Sure, they found her. At the bottom of a ditch.”
“That’s revolting,” Carrie said. “And it’s not even true. After a few days she wandered back on her own. I’m sure of it.”
Jan stubbed his cigarette on the arm of the wooden bench. “You must be mixing her up. I don’t want to be dark, but she was def killed. They even arrested some creepy dude she knew. The two of them collected all this weird crap—tarot cards, hexes, voodoo dolls.”
But Carrie wouldn’t back down. She knew exactly who she was talking about, Elsie Rosenthal, it was Jan who was getting muddled. There was no “creepy dude” either, he was just making stuff up now.
Ruby offered a third version. According to her, the girl was still missing, the investigation open. “What do they call them? Cold cases?”
“The thing I don’t understand,” Carrie said, “is why he makes such a big deal about the whole Jewish thing anyway. At my school, there were loads of Jewish kids, but they didn’t go on about it.” Carrie had attended St Paul’s Girl’s. On a scholarship, she clarified.
I wanted to take the conversation back to his sister, but Jan was speaking again.
“At St Paul’s? They were probably all secular. Most Jews are—they’re too smart to believe in that bollocks.” He was looking at me now, and I wondered if he’d picked up on something. I was sensitive about my looks, which I considered vaguely Eastern European, and owed more to my maternal grandmother than I would have liked. “Our friends the Rosenthals, however,” he went on, “are with the signed-up crazies.”
Jan was the first proper Marxist I’d met, one who could quote from not just the Communist Manifesto, but also from latter-day interpreters: Gramsci, Hobsbawm, Stuart Hall. He had a poster of Leon Trotsky above his desk and when I said, isn’t that the bloke who was killed by an ice pick, he was unamused. “He did a bunch of other stuff first.” Jan could often be heard defaming Late Capitalism or the Church, his two great nemeses. Unafraid of being labelled culturally insensitive, he deplored Islam and religious Judaism as well. Whoever was doing it, he’d say, organised faith cults sucked shit.
“Really we should be asking Kate what she thinks,” Carrie said. “You two are pals, aren’t you? Same corridor, no? Or maybe more than just pals…”
Although I’d spent a fair amount of time with Jan, I was just getting to know the other two, and was surprised Carrie knew where my room was. I was slow to appreciate the smallness of my new home.
“We’re not friends,” I said. “He just lives next door.”
“But you must know something about him,” Ruby insisted. Everyone was waiting for me to speak again. What could I say? That he drank his coffee sugarless and black, which I found weirdly annoying? That no one came around to our corridor looking for him?
“The main thing about him,” I said, picturing Tovyah under strobe lights, trembling at the volume of the bass, “is he hates fun. He’s got these total Scrooge vibes going on, like he actually enjoys being miserable.”
To my relief, Jan responded with his hard, staccato laugh, and the others followed his lead.
Not needing further encouragement, I went on. “When I first met him, he didn’t even know how to shake my hand.” I mimed it for them, which everyone loved.
Carrie, a little piqued, I thought, at being upstaged, took the discussion back to a more serious assessment of his character. “Guy has serious anger problems, though. Did you hear he had a fight with Dr Brooks and stormed out of his tutorial?”
I hadn’t heard and was eager to learn more. Just then, however, Tovyah himself emerged from the archway that leads up to the library. He walked stiffly as always and didn’t so much as glance in our direction. After he’d disappeared through the porters’ lodge, everyone bent over laughing again. Not me. In these situations, I’d always been Tovyah.
“Holy shit!” Carrie said. “Do you think he heard us?”
“So what? We didn’t say anything. I only called his mum a fascist. Which, erm, excuse me, she is.”
The others continued to laugh, and I made my excuses. If I wasn’t Tovyah’s friend, who was? For the first time, I wondered if he was lonely. Though pompous, he always took an interest in my studies, and there was kindness in him, often concealed by his strange manners and quick temper. Once I complained of a headache, and half an hour later he brought me ibuprofen. Wondering at the delay, I asked if he had them on him. No, he explained, he’d popped into town.
That evening, when we crossed paths returning to our rooms, he didn’t mention what had happened on the quad. I asked how his day was, and he shrugged, then wished me goodnight with his accustomed formality. So, he hadn’t heard a thing, thank God. We continued to talk now and then, but as the weeks rushed on my attention was increasingly taken up by my studies, my new friends, and my late nights.
Meanwhile, Tovyah spent his time sequestered in his room, though he was so quiet it was hard to tell when he was there and when he was out. Though I felt guilty for what I’d said to Jan and the others, I can’t pretend I worried for Tovyah. Not blessed with much in the way of social skills, he would no doubt find some accommodating peers among the misfits of the university soon enough. Nor was I especially curious. My first impressions had now crystallised. He was a coddled, religious boy: shy, knowledgeable, defensive when provoked, but otherwise largely invisible. A boy who had got thus far in life by knuckling down at school, and not causing much harm to anybody. The son every Jewish mother dreams of.
FOUR
So things stood until an evening in late November, when with term all but finished, I went to hear Eli Schultz speak about intellectual and artistic responses to the Holocaust. It was not a venue I knew, an address on one of those winding streets that branch off from the high street. My final essay was due in a few days, making it difficult to justify the time away from the library. And yet there I was at dusk, scanning the numbers on the buildings. None of them resembled lecture halls.
I’d admired Schultz’s work ever since I read The Black Light and the White Light the summer before my A Levels. In fact, he was partly responsible for my being here—I wrote about his criticism in my application and was quizzed on his ideas at interview. He was in his eighties then, and who knew how much longer he had. When I chanced to hear he was making a rare appearance to address the Ben-Scholem Society, I had to go. And it was a stroke of luck, really, as the society didn’t advertise its speakers; I only knew it was happening thanks to two strangers discussing the event at the table next to mine in Greens the day before.
Having never heard of Emanuel Ben-Scholem, or his society, I had no idea he was a latter-day prophet and founder of a small branch of Hassidism, which I understood was some weird cult thing. I was ignorant of the movement’s history, how it evolved from the shtetls of Europe, offering a radically heterodox form of religious observance, one based on ecstatic joyfulness rather than sober prayer. Don’t be fooled by the formal attire and unhip facial hair—Hassidic Jews are no puritans. Their worship incorporates singing and dancing. After the prayers are finished and the books closed, obligations of the mind give way to the obligations of the spirit. Chanting and stumbling ensue. Intoxication may not be prerequisite, but it certainly helps.
After locating the correct building, I approached warily. There was not the usual crowd of students outside the venue, finishing cigarettes, locking their bikes against railings. And blocking my path to the door stood a man in black robes and a homburg hat, with his hair curled into ringlets. As I drew near, he said something in what sounded like German.
“Sorry?” I said.
He peered at me through round spectacles and asked if I was Jewish.
“Sort of. I’m here for Professor Schultz’s lecture. I’m in the right place, aren’t I?”
The man considered, his nose twitching. “A lecture you want? It’s possible.”
I took a step forwards and he raised the palm of his right hand. “But what is this sort of business? You mean like a hamster raised by gerbils is sort of a guinea pig?”
“A hamster raised by a… what?”
“Jews are Jews,” he said.
It was not a warm night, and I felt my arms coming up in goose-pimples.
“I didn’t realise it was restricted entry,” I said.
As I wondered what to do with my thwarted evening, I turned to leave. But the man summoned me back.
“Who mentioned restrictions?”
Stung that I had shown him my back, he stepped away from the door and gestured me on. “Go up, go up. I expect they’re still eating, but you won’t disturb anyone.” Before I went in, he muttered the words “sort of” one more time and shook his head.
The scene upstairs did nothing to settle my nerves. In the wide smoky room, the only lights were candles. The tables were arranged in a horseshoe with diners all the way round, helping themselves from large bowls of limp salads and cold, oily pasta. Some of the younger congregants wore jeans and coloured jumpers, but most dressed like the man outside, and every male head was covered. By now it was abundantly clear; this was no ordinary lecture venue. What had I let myself in for?
* * *
As a child, I had no idea I was Jewish. My father was born in France, during the war, to a French mother and an English father. Or so he was brought up to believe. There was no French spoken in the house when he was growing up, and rarely any reference to the city of his birth. If he thought this was odd, it could be explained away by his mother’s sincere love of England, the country that became a safe haven when she fled mainland Europe, and her consequent desire for her son to be plus anglais que les anglais.
It was only after my grandmother died, and my father came into possession of her papers, that he learned he was in fact Lithuanian on both sides. The Englishman he’d called “Papa” and who had given him his surname (also, by now, long dead), was his mother’s second husband. What had happened to his biological father, or any of his extended family, remained a mystery, though one could make certain obvious guesses. The only thing he knew for sure was that they were Jewish, something his mother had concealed from him his entire life. Her maiden name, he discovered, was not Dupont, but Kohn. And among her belongings were a dreidel, a book of Hebrew prayers, and a set of phylacteries, which he could only suppose had belonged to her first husband.
My parents didn’t have an ounce of faith to split between them, and the revelation of my father’s true ancestry did nothing to change that. But after the discovery, my brother became sufficiently interested in the religion to insist, aged fifteen, on having a belated, Jurassic Park–themed Bar Mitzvah. (Between Steven Spielberg, Leonard Nimoy, and Stan Lee, my brother never lacked Jewish idols, and was delighted to learn of his new heritage.) We decorated the hall with potted ferns, then sat for dinner at tables named “TriceraTopol” and “Menorahsaurus Rex.” Any resemblances to an Orthodox service lay somewhere between superficial and blasphemous.
