The Elected Member Read online

  ‘We have from Mrs Steinbergs testimony, and Mr Steinberg’s too, for that matter, that a ring was on your late mother’s finger and was positively seen by both of them. We have no evidence that anyone else saw the ring. And we know that the ring could only have been taken by someone who saw it.’

  A murmur went round the court. Mrs Steinberg opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. She shoved her husband in horror, and he shoved her back, regretting their earlier collaboration.

  Norman unfolded his arms, and left his stand. He walked towards the magistrates bench. ‘Your Honour,’ he said. ‘I am in no way accusing my own clients of theft as you may have supposed from my line of argument. But I will have no truck with people who refuse to see things.’

  The magistrate leaned forward. He hadn’t the faintest idea of what Norman was about. Norman had shown no ignorance of the case, nor a lack of preparation, otherwise he could have adjourned the court, and advised the plaintiffs to find themselves another lawyer. There had been such simple and irrefutable logic in Norman’s argument, and his manner had been so self-assured and calm, that he wondered on what basis he could call for an adjournment.

  There are too many people in this world,’ Norman was saying, ‘who refuse to admit that things are there, who say, “No, I cannot see them, they’re in your imagination.” We all know,’ he went on patiently, and turning to the body of the court, ‘that certain things exist, and their existence is denied by certain people for their own motives in order to drive other people mad. Your Honour,’ he turned to the Bench again, ‘I want nothing to do with that type of person. I submit that Bertie Cass is not a thief. He is a lunatic and he should be put away.’ He tugged at his gown on his shoulder and walked back to his stand.

  The magistrate coughed to hide his own bewilderment. ‘I move the case be adjourned,’ he said, wiping the sweat that had already gathered on his forehead. He indicated to his clerk that Norman should come to his chambers, and he left the court.

  Norman waited for the court to empty. Only his father and Bella remained. He had sat down, his body hunched over the desk. With his black gown streaking the floor, he looked like a fallen blackbird. Rabbi Zweck went up to him. ‘Come home, Norman,’ he said. ‘Is overstrain. A rest you need.’

  For some reason, Norman offered no resistance. He took his father’s hand like a child, and Bella followed them. At the door, he turned round and looked sadly at the empty chamber, as if even he had to admit to himself that he could never enter it again.

  Rabbi Zweck mopped the sweat from his cheeks and beard. He noticed that Mrs Golden was crying. She too, had come to the end of the recollection, though how long ago, Rabbi Zweck could not guess. He had laboured alone into the past, oblivious of his present company. He watched as she wiped her eyes on the cuff of her coat sleeve. ‘But is all over now,’ he said, trying to introduce a little cheer into his voice. ‘Much better he is. They told me is getting better.’

  Mrs Golden sniffed. “You should only have joy from him,’ she said.

  ‘Joy,’ Rabbi Zweck echoed. 'I'll do without the joy. He should only be well.’

  It was only when Mrs Golden had left the shop that Rabbi Zweck realised what he had offered to forego from his son. Did not every father have the right to expect nacchus from his children. ‘Rights, rights,’ Rabbi Zweck muttered to himself. Who should have rights. So long he gets better. Nothing else. Just better he should get. Such a right he should have, my son Norman should have.’

  He stood at the counter, hanging on with his fists to his lapels, and shaking to and fro in an attitude of prayer. ‘I give up my rights,’ he said, ‘I give them up.’

  As he rung up Mrs Golden’s order in the till, he paused with one finger on the key. ‘Too late it is, already,’ he muttered.

  Chapter 8

  Bella found herself in Norman’s room. She had come there out of habit, as she came every morning, nagging him to get out of bed, to pull himself together, to stop his nonsense, and do you get pleasure out of driving us both mad. Look what you’re doing to your father. In the end, it will kill him. It had been her matins for the last five years during each bout of Norman’s illness.

  Now she missed him. It was ridiculous, but she missed him. And, she had to admit, she missed him for her own sake. Now there was no-one to punish, no-one to diminish, no target for her own bitter feelings of inadequacy. For a moment she wished him back, lying there, yellow with a sleepless night, the floor sprinkled with insecticide, and the mirror covered to hide the echo of his horrible imaginings. Yes, she wished him back. He had become a necessity for her, the sick Norman, the failed Norman, the scapegoat for all her unhappiness. Listlessly, she picked up the papers that her father had left on the bed the previous night. She stuffed them back into a drawer. She wanted no part in the discovery of his source of supply. It was pointless. An addict could replace one source with another, with a speed and efficiency in direct ratio to his needs. She shut all the half-open drawers and looked around the room. It was tidy now, the bed changed, and the windows open with fresh air. It had taken Bella a half an hour to erase Norman from the room, and she wished for a moment that she had left it as it was, with all the visible signs of his madness. She sat on the bed, and noticed with smile that her feet did not touch the floor. She remembered how, before her mother had died, she could sit on the bed, and without even stretching her legs, she could follow with her toes, the fading rose pattern of the carpet. It was just that since her mother had died, the bed was higher, that much higher by two eiderdowns, one belonging to her mother, and the other to her sister Esther. She had noticed the same sudden sproutings in other bedrooms of the neighbourhood, how with each death and each departure, beds seemed to grow higher, and that it was no reflection on your height or lack of it, if you could not touch the ground from off a Jewish bed.

  She looked down at her dangling feet. A varicose vein burst out from underneath her white ankle-sock. Only a children’s playground or a tennis court could have legitimised those white socks, not a mad brother’s bedroom on a double-decker bed. She remembered how she first started to wear them, as a little girl almost forty years ago, the excitement of turning down the bright white top, and lovingly pressing it into a neat fold. How she had folded one first, then lined her feet together, to get the exact fold on the other foot. Now she found no joy in turning them down; she had lost all interest in their symmetry. But she could not stop wearing them. Every day, a clean pair, from the dozens of pairs in her drawer, and every day, the inability to discard them. She recalled her first rebellion against the white socks, the first, and indeed the last stand she took against her mother’s endless perpetuation of her daughter’s childhood. It was Norman’s sixteenth birthday, the morning of his barmitzvah. A belated one, three years belated, according to the Jewish Law, but behind the delay lay a story that possibly held the seeds of Norman’s present torment. But how could anyone know, Bella thought, how it had all started? In any case, madness had no precise beginning or end. Norman was in a nut-house, and she was sitting on his bed. For her, his incarceration was prob ably the end of things. For Norman it was possibly the beginning. There’s madness for you. Who knows when it started, she thought. Perhaps in his childhood, in her father’s childhood, in her own, even. She looked at her socks and hurriedly tucked her feet under her on the bed. Madness started or it finished, she decided, whichever way you chose to look at it, according to the nature of your own problem. And so she recalled the story, because she needed to, because she needed to acknowledge her part in her brother’s disintegration.

  Norman was five years old, and she a year his junior. He had picked up a young Polish boy, who had drifted into the neighbourhood, and after about three months of solid street companionship, Norman brought the boy to the house, and they spoke together in fluent Polish. Mrs Zweck, who had long been convinced that there was something special about her first-born, now set about his education in earnest. She sought out a French teacher, ‘Is cult
ured, the French language,’ she would say. ‘Is nice people the French,’ as opposed in her mind to the Poles, whose worldly philosophy, i.e. their attitude to the Jews, was barbaric, and so possibly was their language. So Norman was farmed out to French, the posh tongue, which he mastered with little difficulty by the time he was six. By the age of seven, he was fluent in Polish, French and English, together with Yiddish and Hebrew which he had picked up between times from his parents.

  In his ninth year, Mrs Zweck, who had a prophetic blockage on German, finally relented, since ‘all knowledge, even the German, is power,’ and Norman with a contempt possibly inherited from his mother, refused to ascribe difficulties or subtleties to the tongue, and mastered it with even more speed than the others. ‘My son, the linguist,’ Mrs Zweck would introduce him. ‘speak a little French,’ and then, when this accomplishment had been, in one or two sentences, proved, she would make the same requests for each tongue. From all over the country, journalists came, armed with cameras and note-books, and overnight, Norman Zweck became a household word. ‘How old is he?’ they marvelled.

  ‘Nine,’ his proud mother would answer, and it was the last time that she was truthful about her son’s age. Sub-sequently, with each new language Norman acquired, he lost one year, so that, after putting Italian, Spanish and Russian under his hat, he was, in spite of his twelve years, and in all the papers, for the public’s memory is short, still only nine years old. ‘only nine yet,’ Mrs Zweck would beam. ‘Such a son I have.’

  Then Norman didn’t want any more. He was tired of being the freak in the circus, and he wanted to be twelve, like the other boys in the neighbourhood. Rabbi Zweck saw his point. ‘So what’s so wrong in knowing nine languages, and being twelve? Is still very clever,’ he said. ‘Let the boy be his age.’

  But Mrs Zweck was adamant. It was too late to retract on her son’s primogeniture. He couldn’t overnight become three years older. It would give the lie to all her stories over the years. ‘I don’t care if he doesn’t want more language, a lazy good-for-nothing he is, if I say he’s nine, he’s nine, next year, God willing, he will be ten, and so on, and so on, he should have a long life. Plenty time to put on your age.

  ‘And what about Bella?’ Rabbi Zweck said.

  ‘Bella is eight,’ Mrs Zweck said with finality.

  ‘She’s eleven,’ Rabbi Zweck said, with utmost honesty, ‘and she won’t thank you for it.’

  ‘You want she should be older than Norman, when everyone knows a boy is our first-born.’

  Rabbi Zweck was silent. She was hard to budge, and he understood why. She had to maintain the illusion she had created, for the sake of her own reputation. ‘What about the barmitzvah?’ he ventured. ‘We cannot deceive Ha Shem.’

  ‘He will understand,’ she said with confidence. ‘So long we make a barmitzvah, what difference when?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Rabbi Zweck said.

  ‘You want I should look a fool?’ she shouted at him. ‘With all those stories of him in the papers?’

  It was the end of the argument. In spite of his intermittent protestations, and Norman’s stubborn retirement from his studies, his thirteenth birthday passed heretically by. And on his sixteenth birthday, more than bristling on his chin, he was allowed to make his Covenant with the Lord.

  Breakfast was late and in snatches in the flat that morning. Mrs Zweck was trying to dress Esther, the youngest, seven years old in anyone’s terms, the spoilt Esther, untouched by her mother’s arithmetic. Then Mrs Zweck had to organise herself and put the finishing touches to the prepared cold lunch. She adjusted the hat she’d had made for the occasion, and joined the others in the kitchen. Mrs Zweck patted Norman on the head, though he was a good deal taller than his mother. ‘So today, you make it,’ she said proudly. ‘A man, you’ll be. My son, a linguist’, the apposition was a habit with her ‘is a man already.’

  ‘I’ve been a man for three years,’ he hissed. 'Who’s kidding whom?’

  ‘Shush,’ Rabbi Zweck said. He didn’t want any argument. ‘Let’s go already. Is late.’

  Bella, whose legs had been hidden under the table, moved towards the door.

  ‘Oi veh,’ moaned Mrs Zweck, ‘what is it on your legs?’

  ‘Stockings,’ Bella said, trembling. ‘Silk stockings from your drawer.’

  Mrs Zweck gaped.

  ‘I’m fifteen,’ Bella reminded her.

  ‘You’re twelve,’ Mrs Zweck shouted. ‘You hear? You’re twelve. Next year, please God, you are thirteen. Go put on the socks. At your age in stockings. Plenty time to be grown up. Believe me. Go change,’ she screamed at her.

  Bella stood her ground, terrified.

  ‘Bella,’ Rabbi Zweck said gently, ‘what difference after all?’

  ‘No.’ Bella said. ‘If I can’t wear stockings, I’m not going.’

  ‘You’ll change. You hear me?’ Mrs Zweck thundered.

  ‘No.’

  The slap came almost as she said it, and another slap, and another, as Mrs Zweck saw her fantasy, carefully woven over the years, dismissed so flagrantly by one of her own flesh and blood.

  ‘Go Bella, go change,’ said her father. ‘You see how it upsets Momma. Bellale,’ he pleaded, ‘for your mother, go change.’

  She stood in the doorway, hesitant, but long enough to hear Norman say, ‘For Christ’s sake, Bella, go and put on your socks.’

  Bella and her stockings were at once forgotten, an oh so minor misdemeanour in the face of her brother’s outrageous blasphemy.

  ‘Never before in my house,’ Rabbi Zweck whispered. ‘And on his barmitzvah day,’ Mrs Zweck echoed.

  Rabbi Zweck stood and raised his hand to his son. ‘Take it back,’ he thundered. ‘Such words in my house. I should live.’

  Mrs Zweck stayed his hand in the air. ‘Say you’re sorry Norman. Say quick you’re sorry. Quick, quick,’ she panicked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Norman said, and Bella heard him repeat it at his mother’s demand, again and again, as if to exorcise the word. She reached the bedroom. They had enough on their hands. She couldn’t expect them to take on her stockings too. Meekly she took them off, and followed, white hosed, to the synagogue.

  Bella shifted her feet from under her, and dangled them once more over Norman’s bed. She couldn’t recollect the events in the synagogue. That part of the story must have been irrelevant to her need. So it was the homecoming that crept into her mind, though she consciously tried to turn it away. In it was perhaps the beginnings of her brother’s anguish, and possibly her own. She lay back on Norman’s bed, and fully outstretched, she willed herself to experience again the event that followed her brother’s barmitzvah.

  She had come back to the flat, first, and alone, to make the final preparations for the lunch party. There was little to do, and she was glad to go to her room and be alone. She left her door open, so that she could hear them coming up the stairs to the flat. She sat on the bed, but in that position, she could not avoid the sight of the white flags of surrender on her feet. So she lay down, flat, so that they could not offend her. She wondered when she would be allowed. even encouraged, to give them up, and whether she ever would. After her small rebellion that morning and all through the ceremony, she had begun to feel that the white socks had taken over, that they had become more than just a symbol of the lie of years; they had stunted her growth for ever.

  She heard a quick movement of footsteps up the stairs, two at a time, in a hurry, then the opening of the front door. She waited, not understanding her excitement. He came straight to her room. He shut the door behind him, his back towards it, and his hand behind the back, still on the handle.

  ‘Where are the others?’ Bella said.

  ‘They’ll be ages,’ Norman answered her. ‘I left them yakking outside shul. They’ll be ages,’ he repeated.

  She didn’t look at him. She knew and expected something to happen.

  Something had to happen between them. Two people cannot play a conspiracy f
or so long, and play it each on his own. There came a moment, when, in the dross of lies, the truth, known to them both, had to be asserted, and for their own sanity, shared.

  He came over towards the bed. ‘After tomorrow, when all the fuss is over,’ he said, ‘I’m going to be sixteen, whatever anyone says, and you can take off those socks.’

  She looked at him, and was glad that he was smiling at her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘shove over.’ He chose the word to hide his embarrassment. He laughed a little too, in order to ridicule what he intuitively knew was going to be desperately important to both of them.

  ‘Draw the curtains,’ Bella said.

  Norman went over to the window, and as he did so, Bella slipped inside the sheets. Now the room was quite dark, and she felt her brother moving beside the bed, and soon, his forbidden body alongside her.

  Rabbi and Mrs Zweck led the way from the synagogue, little Esther tugging behind. ‘What a performance, our Norman,’ Mrs Zweck said, licking her lips. She patted Rabbi Zweck’s hand. ‘I was proud. A good son we have.’ ‘Bella, too,’ Rabbi Zweck said. He paused. ‘Sarahle, forget already the socks. Is not right for a big girl like Bella.’

  Mrs Zweck stopped in her tracks. ‘Who wants with socks any more. After tomorrow, no more socks. She should grow up already. Looking at the boys she should be. Is funny, Abie,’ she confided, ‘but no interest she seems to have with the boys. Look today, how she runs home. Did I tell her to go. Everything’s ready. No she’s got to run. Nice boys in shul today. All nice boys. What for she’s running away?’

  ‘Is the socks,’ Rabbi Zweck said.

  ‘So finish with the socks,’ Mrs Zweck almost shouted, as if she’d had no hand in their beginning. ‘Finish with the socks, and we should both live to dance at her wedding.’

  Meanwhile the guests had caught up with them, and taking up the whole pavement in four serried ranks, they returned in festive mood to the flat. Mrs Zweck opened the door with her key, and led the guests into the dining room. Everything was ready. Bella was standing at the table, ready to serve. Mrs Zweck noticed a flush in her cheek, and attributed it to her shyness and excitement of the occasion. Norman stood at the other end of the room, a little pale. his mother thought, but also, God bless him, because of the excitement. Something in his look prompted Mrs Zweck to look again at Bella. She stood as before, flushed a little. and waiting. Mrs Zweck looked back at Norman, then again at Bella, as if something in each of them magnetically bounced off the other, like a ball that moved between two players without their participation. Whatever it was, Mrs Zweck sensed that she was excluded from it, and standing between them, looking involuntarily from one to the other, she wondered why she felt suddenly disturbed.