Written on the Body Read Online Free PDF

whenever she ladled it into the bowl she said, ‘Elgin, Jehovah spared me to serve you.’
    And so Elgin grew up thinking that the world ought to serve him and hating the dark counter in his father’s little shop and hating being set apart from the other boys but wanting it more than anything.
    ‘You’re nothing, you’re dust,’ said Esau. ‘Raise yourself up and be a man.’
    Elgin won a scholarship to an Independent school. He was small, narrow-chested, short-sighted and ferociously clever. Unfortunately his religion excluded him from Saturday games and whilst he managed to avoid persecution he courted isolation. He knew he was better than those square-shouldered upright beauty queens whose good looks and easy manners commanded affection and respect. Besides, they were all queer, and Elgin had seen them grappling one another, mouths open, cocks hard. No-one tried to touch him.
    He fell in love with Louise when she beat him in single combat at the Debating Society finals. Her school was only a mile away from his and he had to walk pastit on the way home. He took to walking past it at just the time when Louise was leaving. He was gentle with her, he tried hard, he didn’t show off, he wasn’t sarcastic. She had only been in England for a year and it was cold. They were both refugees and they found comfort in each other. Then Elgin went to Cambridge, choosing a college outstanding for its sporting prowess. Louise, arriving a year later, had just begun to suspect him of being a masochist. This was confirmed when he lay on his single bed, legs apart, and begged her to scaffold his penis with bulldog clips.
    ‘I can take it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’
    Meanwhile, at home in Stamford Hill, Esau and Sarah, locked in prayer through the twenty-four hours of the Sabbath, wondered what would happen to their boy who had fallen into the clutches of a flame-haired temptress.
    ‘She’ll ruin him,’ said Esau, ‘he’s doomed. We’re all doomed.’
    ‘My boy, my boy,’ said Sarah. ‘And only five feet seven.’
    They didn’t attend the wedding held in a Registry Office in Cambridge. How could they when Elgin had arranged it for a Saturday? There was Louise in an ivory silk flapper dress with a silver headband. Her best friend Janet holding a camera and the rings. Elgin’s best friend whose name he couldn’t remember. Elgin, in a hired morning suit just a size too tight.
    ‘You see,’ said Louise, ‘I knew he was safe, that I could control him, that I would be the one in charge.’
    ‘And what about him, what did he think?’
    ‘He knew I was beautiful, that I was a prize. He wanted something showy but not vulgar. He wanted to go up to the world and say, “Look what I’ve got.” ’
    I thought about Elgin. He was very eminent, very dull, very rich. Louise charmed everyone. She brought him attention, contacts, she cooked, she decorated, she was clever and above all she was beautiful. Elgin was awkward and he didn’t fit. There was a certain amount of racism in the way he was treated. His colleagues were mostly those young men he had been taught with and inwardly despised. He knew other Jews of course, but in his profession they were all comfortable, cultured, liberal. They weren’t Orthodox from Stamford Hill with nothing but a squatted semi between themselves and the gas chamber. Elgin never talked about his past, and gradually, with Louise beside him, it became irrelevant. He too became comfortable and cultivated and liberal. He went to the opera and he bought antiques. He made jokes about Frummers and matzos and even lost his accent. When Louise encouraged him to get in touch with his parents he sent them a Christmas card.
    ‘It’s her,’ said Esau behind the dark counter. ‘A curse on women since the sin of Eve.’
    And Sarah, polishing, sorting, mending, serving, felt the curse and lost herself a little more.
    ‘Hello Elgin,’ I said as he came into the kitchen in his navy blue