Fervor, page 6
This was why he’d made no friends on his course, why people like Jan and Carrie despised him. It had very little to do with his mother’s Zionist politics, or even his family’s religious fundamentalism. Socialising with other students was supposed to provide a welcome contrast to seminars and tutorials; you had drinks, you made dumb jokes, you flirted, and you bitched. But with Tovyah, being in the pub was being in a tutorial. This, no one wanted.
Except me, apparently. Encountering Tovyah’s combative side, I didn’t feel repulsed. In fact, for the first time since we’d met, I wanted to win his respect. This was not at all the timid boy I had taken him to be. For all his oddness, Tovyah had a definite magnetism. Did no one else feel his pull?
He went on. “Remember, remember, we must always remember! I can’t bear the pseudo-spiritualism. As if all this stirring up the past doesn’t come at a price.”
“What do you mean? What price?”
“My grandfather was a survivor. Very religious man. When I was a kid, he said the most appalling things, just to keep me in line.”
“Like what?”
Tovyah shook his head. “Maybe after a few more drinks.”
A few more drinks? Was this to be a post-synagogue bender?
“And Schultz reminds you of him?”
“No, they’re opposites, in fact. God, Eli Schultz is a ray of sunshine. Zeide used to say anyone who lost their faith in the camps didn’t know their Torah. He said there was nothing Hitler did that wasn’t written about thousands of years ago. And he was right! In Leviticus, you know what God told the Israelites would happen if they didn’t follow the rules? They’d be given up to their enemies and the ground would open under their feet. And if they survived that, the land itself would turn against them and the crops would fail. Before they died, they would grow so hungry that mothers would eat their own daughters and fathers would eat their sons. Going well beyond Abraham, we would butcher our own children, roast them on an open fire. That was God’s promise to our ancestors, the promise we have recited year after year, from Sinai onwards.”
Tovyah scratched a spot on his neck. “He was no intellectual, my grandfather. His education ended at fourteen and his letters are riddled with basic errors. But he was canny. And he knew more about the Godhead than Eli bloody Schultz. His God was the one who spawned Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels, then turned deaf ears to the cries of Auschwitz.”
I was conscious of other pub-goers listening to our conversation, averting their eyes when I turned to look. They’re not banging on about the Holocaust, are they? On Friday night… I said, “But surely you don’t believe in that kind of a God.”
“Me?” Tovyah said, sitting up on his stool. “You’re asking me?” His face creased with derision, and he leaned towards me, conspiratorially. “I don’t believe in anything.”
Now I thought about it, I had never heard Tovyah speak about his religious convictions. But everyone knew about his mother’s beliefs—you could read them each week in the papers. And hadn’t he reached for the absent mezuzah at the start of term?
He took another swig of beer. He had drained two-thirds of his pint in about three sips, spaced out over twenty minutes. After swallowing the dregs, he went up to the bar for a second round. When he came back, he placed another vodka coke next to my first, which was still half full.
Something nagged me. “What were you doing there tonight, then?” I asked.
“It’s what I know.” He shrugged at his own feeble reasoning. When he asked why I was there, I told him I was interested in Schultz. And for what it’s worth, I was Jewish. Sort of.
“You are?” He scrutinised me, as though checking this revelation against my bone structure. “But not practising. Right?”
“Just my father’s side, actually, my mother was raised Catholic. They’re both atheists anyway.”
“Atheists? Lucky lady. And not matrilineal. What the Nazis would have called a Mischling. A half-breed.”
It was hard to know if I was being insulted. I didn’t appreciate being labelled with Nazi terminology and said so.
“Relax, I’m not saying anything offensive. Proust would have been a Mischling. If he’d lived.”
“I’ve never read Proust,” I said, flatly.
“How’s your French? If you can get by with a bilingual dictionary, it’s worth struggling through. Otherwise, the Moncrieff translations do the job.”
Tovyah passed his hand over the flame of a tealight, which wobbled and righted itself. He then swung his hand back the other way and grabbed his drink.
I said, “I’ve got enough to read for my course, thanks.”
“Come on. You’ve got to be more curious than that.”
“Why?”
“You seem interesting. The way you sit there listening, taking everything in, not saying much. In the lunch hall, on the quad. Just look at how you showed up tonight—you’re curious”—the second time he said the word, I noticed the odd way he pronounced it, two squashed syllables, more like cure us “—and you don’t fit in with those kids you hang around, Jan Stockwell and his band of morons.”
“Those are my friends. You shouldn’t talk like that.”
“Well, they don’t talk very nicely about me,” he said. “My mother who pulls strings, and so on. I thought maybe you were different.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“Just a hunch,” he said.
He was still fiddling with the candle. After a rapid movement, the gust from his hand extinguished the flame. A plume of thin white smoke rose from the dead wick.
“You’re very pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” I said.
“I wouldn’t say so, no.”
Tovyah had a way of shaking his head. Only his chin seemed to move.
A song came on that I recognised but couldn’t place, and whoever was in control turned up the volume. My thoughts ran to my A Level year, nights skulking in the smoking area outside clubs, not smoking, watching other people make out under streetlights. It occurred to me that right now, Jan, Carrie, and Ruby were probably ordering a taxi to Park End and I felt no desire to join them. At some point in the last couple of weeks, going big on a Friday had become a tedious ritual, and I could no longer fool myself that I enjoyed doing countless shots or making eyes at strangers in low lighting. I’d been so sure I’d succeeded in escaping the frustrations of school and had found my niche here. But something about the lecture I’d heard, or the vodka that was warming my blood, or Tovyah’s unapologetic gaze was forcing me to reconsider. Did I even like my new friends? Rude and unpleasant as he was, at least Tovyah didn’t expect you to be anything other than yourself. His bluntness invited a reciprocal candour.
“You don’t normally do this sort of thing,” I said. “You don’t hang out much.”
“No.” His chin swung from side to side. “You don’t actually have to, you know.”
The song ended and was replaced by another, loud and unfamiliar.
I had little idea what Tovyah was thinking as he sat there with his shoulders hunched. But I think that’s when I twigged that he must be harbouring some tremendous wound. Whatever path had brought him to this point had not been easy; something, somewhere along the line, had gone devastatingly wrong. I remembered what I knew about his sister, and I thought of the girl whose face I saw, half-hidden, the day we arrived.
In an effort to reignite the conversation, I said, “He sounds like a character, your grandfather.”
“Total shit,” Tovyah said, without missing a beat. “I know, I know. But you have to understand. My parents were always busy when I was young, even when my mother was jobless she was busy, so he was the one around. And it wasn’t just me who was terrified of him. We used to hire women to clean his rooms, and he kept driving them away.”
“Sure, but the things he’d seen…”
Tovyah leaned back and clapped his hands together. “You don’t mind stating the fucking obvious, do you.”
At that moment we were interrupted. Someone from the next table was balancing four beers in his outstretched fingers, one of which slipped from his grasp and smashed. Dark liquid spread over the floor and I had to lift my bag onto my lap to keep it dry. His table thought this hysterical.
Tovyah brought his lips to my ear and said, “It’s getting a bit horrible in here.” I agreed. Then he suggested we continue our conversation back at college, over a glass of whisky. Was he flirting? I decided not; by turns he’d been indifferent, antagonistic, and patronising.
On our walk back through town, I lit a cigarette and Tovyah asked if we could swap places—the wind was blowing the smoke in his face, and he found the smell disgusting. I apologised and stubbed it out. Then, as we strolled past the older colleges with their dark windows agape and their pale walls lit from below, Tovyah opened up.
His childhood was idiosyncratic. Although his parents believed in the literal truth of the Old Testament, they were only capriciously observant. While some Jewish customs were honoured in order to affirm their relationship with God, others were denigrated as peasant superstition. So on the one hand, pork and shellfish were prohibited, along with all other forms of trayf. Daily prayers were compulsory, as were the convoluted rituals that marked high holy days—unleavened bread for Passover, outdoor meals in the week of Sukkot. On the other hand, after Yosef Rosenthal’s death, Eric and Hannah attended Friday services sporadically. They took pride in social and professional advancement and worked right through sabbath when their careers demanded. God understood, Tovyah’s mother explained. Life, for a modern Jew, was difficult.
In short, he said, arrogance and hypocrisy were his parents’ defining qualities, and though groundless belief could trump rational thought, worldly ambition usually trumped groundless belief. None of the children were sent to Jewish schools, or even schools with large Jewish populations. They went to whichever school (in budget) was highest in the league tables. All the same, they’d each studied Hebrew, Torah, and Talmud from the age of four.
As for Tovyah, he’d always been, by instinct, an atheist. “You find yourself living on an obscure rock, hurtling through space at great speed. All around you is a huge expanse of nothing. Even a child knows this. Just look up and there it is.” He’d hidden his views from his parents, of course, who dragged him through a religious upbringing. Until he was seventeen. One day he’d turned around and said: Mum, Dad, there’s something I need to tell you. There were many fights and much emotional blackmail. His allowance was stopped. Certain possessions (“My books!”) were confiscated. Tovyah was preparing his application to universities at the time—for English, not history. He was rejected by Oxford and decided to reapply the following year. Desperate as he was to leave his parents’ home, he couldn’t live with the failure. Academics, he told me, was all he had.
I asked if he got on with his siblings.
“My brother and I don’t see eye to eye.”
“You have a sister too, right?”
By then, I’d learned the full details of Elsie Rosenthal’s disappearance. Hers was not a horror story ending; within a few days of leaving home, she was found alive and well. Whether she was abducted or ran away was not clear from the information I found online.
Tovyah stopped walking, and I stopped too. “Given up pretending, then,” he said.
Later, I got the chance to inspect his room for the first time since freshers. On his mantelpiece sat a square clock, whose hands no longer turned. Unlike the rest of us, he had put up no posters, nor any Polaroids of friends from his school days. No smiling picture of the girl he once took to prom. The only thing on his shelves were books, mostly hardbacks with their jackets removed, hefty volumes with titles like How Language Functions, and A History of Abstract Thought. A few of the books were in Hebrew, identified at once by the blocky characters, and there were some collections of English poetry—Larkin, Coleridge, and a translation of the Aeneid. The Oxford World Classics edition of the King James Bible squatted on his bedside table, bookmark protruding. On the cover was a detail from the Sistine Chapel, God’s face: a white-haired and lushly bearded man stroking his chin.
“Bedtime reading?” I asked.
“Know thine enemy.”
When I opened to the bookmarked page, I saw he was reading (or rather, rereading) the Book of Judges.
* * *
We had talked a long time. I sat in his chair, swivelled away from the desk, and Tovyah was on the floor, with his back resting against the side of the bed. With the overhead light on, we were bathed in hospital-ward brightness, despite the hour, and were now on our second or third whiskies. Though mine were diluted with water from the tap over his bedroom sink, I was about as drunk as I’d ever been.
Drunk enough to start talking about my hopes for university. How I felt thwarted at school and saw my life here as a blank canvas; I could fill it however I liked.
“And how’s that going for you?”
I said it was early days. “What about you? Enjoying yourself here?”
He shrugged. “It’s an extraordinary city. If nothing else, you can’t deny that.” He asked if I’d been to see the statue of Shelley yet, at University College. When I told him I hadn’t, he said he’d take me the following day. “Shelley saw things as they were,” he said, “and rendered them more beautiful even than that.” I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, but at that hour, after a few drinks, it seemed a pretty good thing to say.
We were sitting quite close to each other now. I became aware that our feet were touching. After a moment, I drew mine away. Then, interrupting the silence, I said, “Can I ask you something? Don’t you fancy throwing yourself into college life a bit more?”
“How so?”
“Just seems like this could be an opportunity for you to come out of your shell.”
Tovyah winced. “You’re saying I should go to the bops, and get shit-faced, and try to snog someone I’ve just met?”
“It’s what everyone else does.”
Tovyah let his head fall back against his bed. When he spoke again, the words were directed to the ceiling.
“I’m not like everyone else.”
“In what way?”
“In the most important way. People don’t like me.”
I knew all too well what it was to be reviled. When I was twelve years old, my first year of secondary school, some of my classmates held me down, tied my shoelaces together, then dumped me in a deep puddle that had formed in the playground.
“People like you fine. You haven’t tried.”
“What do you know? At the start of term, I went along to the stuff, the freshers’ fair, the welcome drinks, all that crap. No one spoke to me. Ok, I thought, you’re new, it’ll take time. Soon everyone was meeting up after lectures, going to each other’s rooms, and where was my invite? And then I started to hear the things people said about me. How I was so stuck up, such a freak… which of course was nothing compared with what they’d say about my mother, my sister…”
It was hard to think of Tovyah, with all his wilful independence, all that disdain, wanting people to ask him to their rooms. And I was sure he got invited as much as anyone else, at least in the beginning. But he kept refusing.
I said, “I’m sorry if you’ve had a bad term. But you have to give things another chance. I like you. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Only because you think you’re not clever enough to be here. I suppose this insecurity has something to do with your homelife. Or perhaps they bullied the shit out of you at school? Either way you’re impressed by my intellect, and you think that if we were closer it might validate your own intelligence, somehow, which, let me assure you, it would not.”
By the end of this little speech, Tovyah had lifted his head up and brought his eyes level with mine. I held his gaze.
“I was trying to be kind.” I slammed my whisky down on the desk and stood up.
“There’s no point taking the moral high ground. As you told those bastards on the quad, we’re not even friends. Because I don’t like fun, right? ‘Total Scrooge vibes,’ I think you said?”
I was so angry and drunk that it took me another moment to realise what he was talking about. My face was hot. “So now you’re listening to my private conversations?”
“You’re being ridiculous,” he said, a hint of exhaustion in his voice. “Please just piss off.”
As I left the room, he had one hand on the whisky bottle, the other teasing out the cork stopper. I didn’t necessarily mean to slam the door.
* * *
Over the next few days, Tovyah contrived to not run into me even once. I considered pushing a note under his door or writing him an email, but I decided he had at least as much to be sorry for as I did, and I make a point of only apologising first when I’m unambiguously in the wrong. Else a girl can end up spineless.
And the more I thought, the angrier I was. Who did he think he was to say I craved his validation? Or that I didn’t fit in with Jan and Carrie, my actual friends? To hell with Tovyah. And to hell with Marcel Proust.
By the Wednesday, I had completed all my work for the term and the afternoon was wide open. Suddenly a term had gone. There would only be two more and then a year, one third of my university life, was over. How not to waste such increments of time was a major concern. So, feeling more like a tourist than I ever did on arrival, I crossed the Bridge of Sighs, wandered the grounds at Magdalen, and admired Shelley’s statue at University College. Cast in marble, the poet reclines on a bronze slab, borne up by two winged lions, while a stone angel weeps beneath him. I left the college laughing. Percy Bysshe Shelley was thrown out of the university for his defence of atheism. Was this how Tovyah viewed himself?
After lunch, I went book shopping. Second term would be our foray into twentieth-century literature, and we were to begin with the daunting works of high modernism: Joyce, Woolf, Pound, and Eliot. Each of us had to pick one of the above to produce two thousand words on over the Christmas break. Having never read any of them, I opted for Woolf on the grounds that she was the only woman.
