In such a short time a second trousseau could not be supplied, but they made do. ‘Because of us,’ Golde said, ‘they should not lie on their bare tochus in Baden.’ The garconnière was cancelled even before Janki had moved in, and Janki wrote to Guebwiller about the furniture that was still in storage with the coachman. When it was delivered, it was shabbier than he remembered, but for the time being – six thousand francs isn’t the same as twelve, after all – they would have to do. Chanele made curtains, and in the end it was not a flat where you could impress elegant friends, but certainly one in which you could live.
Chanele had made it very clear that she wanted to have a parlour and not a drawing room, and the tantalus now stood on the old table from Guebwiller. If the curtains – not made of Shantung silk, but not exactly rags either – were open and the sun shone into the right corner, the yellow liquid gleamed like gold.
‘One day everything in our house will be as elegant as that,’ said Janki.
‘Make Shabbos with it,’ said Chanele.
On 17 December, two days after Chanukah, the chuppah was set up in Endingen synagogue.
It was a cold day, the coldest of the year. Anyone who wanted to be there – and who would have missed the double event – had to fight their way through heavy drifts of snow on the way to shul. The musicians who were to have collected the brides from home had appeared on time, but fearing for his instrument the violinist refused to play in the street, and the trumpeter and trombonist could produce nothing more than a gloomy rhythm, to which people could only slouch, and not march cheerily and proudly along.
Mimi and Chanele walked along side by side, and if anyone had been standing watching them by the side of the road – but no one was, it was far too cold for that – he would have taken them for the best of friends. Over the past few weeks they had treated one another with exquisite politeness, and only once, when they went to the ritually cleansing immersion bath at the mikvah, and met one another on neutral ground, they had talked of their true concerns. But no one had witnessed that conversation apart from Mother Feigele, who liked to make herself useful at the mikvah because it was always well heated, and Mother Feigele was deaf.
Mimi set one foot in front of the other in her expensive new boots, thinking as she did so about a historical novel that Anne-Kathrin had lent her, the story of the queens Elizabeth and Mary Stuart. They had walked along side by side and nodded graciously to the people, except that one of them was going to the scaffold and didn’t yet know. ‘I’m glad I’m getting Pinchas and not that chap Janki who wandered in from nowhere,’ thought Mimi, and almost persuaded herself to feel sorry for Chanele.
During the first wedding she had to wait in a side room, next to a box of battered Holy Scriptures waiting to be buried with the corpse at the next levaya. A chair had been brought for her, but she thought it was dusty so she chose instead to stand and shiver in her white dress.
The noises in the synagogue hall could be heard only as a distant murmur, and it was impossible to make out voices or even individual words, and yet Mimi followed the sequence of the ritual in all its smallest details.
First the bride was led under the chuppah. As Chanele had not a single relative in the village, two women from the community had undertaken this task of honour: Hulda Moos, who always liked to push her way to the front at mitzvahs, and Red Moische’s wife. The prayers and songs could not be distinguished from one another, but Mimi could still have spoken and sung along with them. It was in any case only a kind of rehearsal before they would then sound, with the same words and the same tunes, for her.
Now Salomon Meijer and Naftali Pomeranz were leading Janki to his kalleh. He was probably making a very pious face as they did, supporting himself heavily on his walking stick and dragging his right leg, the fraud.
They sang and prayed, and then the vague noise ebbed away and Mimi heard – she didn’t really hear it, but she heard it all the same – Rav Bodenheimer uttering the marriage blessing to the chassen, and the chassen repeating every word individually. ‘Herewith,’ said Janki, ‘you are made sacred to me, by the laws of Moses and Israel.’
It had been exactly as cold back then, as ice cold as it was in this bare room, back then when he had stood outside the house in his uniform, a pirate or an explorer, with his fake bandage and his fake eyes. She granted him to Chanele, she really granted him to her, and for that reason she smiled at the dead prayer books, with a majestic smile, and made a dismissive movement of her hand, just as Elizabeth did in the book, when she said, ‘Cut her head off, but do it with respect, she is a queen like me.’
And then – the sudden noise surprised her, because she hadn’t been thinking of that other marriage any more, and why should she have? – then the people in the synagogue were all making a great hubbub, ‘Mazel tov!’ they cried, and that meant that Janki had stamped on the glass that was stamped on at every marriage in memory of the destruction of the temple, that the ceremony was over or nearly over, that Janki and Chanele were a couple, a couple for the rest of their lives, according to the law of Moses and Israel.
It was really very cold.
‘Have you been crying?’ asked Golde when she came to collect Mimi.
‘Why should I cry?’ asked Mimi.
She allowed herself to be led between Golde and Sarah Pomeranz to the canopy. ‘We must look ridiculous,’ she thought, ‘Sarah so long and thin and my mother so small.’
The people smiled at her, and she kept her head quite straight, like a queen.
When she stepped under the chuppah, something crunched under her shoe. It was a splinter of the glass that Janki had broken.
1893
15
Uncle Salomon never told anyone in advance when he was coming to Baden. Janki had often enough offered to send him a coachman, whenever he liked; as long as the information was received in time, a coach could be easily organised; after all, they delivered far into the Canton. But Salomon didn’t want to be pinned down. ‘All my life I’ve gone my own way,’ he said in that cantankerous way he had, ‘and now I’m supposed to know in advance when I’m where?’
The truth was that Salomon had become peculiar since Golde’s death. Even Chanele had to admit that. Sometimes he locked himself up in the house for days at a time, no one knew if he was even eating anything, and when people dropped by to check on him, he wouldn’t open the door. And it was quite a trek from Baden to Endingen, even if you drove it could easily take half a day, which was lost to the shop. And what about him? He left you standing in the street, you had to knock and shout, and once he calmed down and unbolted the door he refused to be disturbed, he had to work, he was on the track of major discoveries and under no circumstances could he interrupt his calculations. It was no longer the register of Simmental cattle that so intensely preoccupied him; he had completely abandoned the beheimes trade. Salomon’s new passion – ‘It’s already more than an illness,’ Janki said – was gematria, a Cabbalistic method of performing complicated calculations with the numerical value of Hebrew letters, to read hidden connections out of agreements and differences. Here too, Salomon was very much the cattle trader: he had practised juggling with numbers in a thousand cattle trades, and when he succeeded in wrestling a new meaning from a word with great computational skill, he was as happy as if he had purchased a cow at a knock-down price.
‘My own name,’ he would pontificate by way of example, Salomon, Shlomo, has a numerical value of three hundred and seventy five. Golde had a numerical value of forty-eight. Take forty-eight away from three hundred and seventy five – and what do you have left? Three hundred and twenty seven. And which word in the Torah has a numerical value of three hundred and twenty seven? Ho-arboyim, evening twilight. What is that trying to tell us? Since the Lord took my Golde away, evening has fallen in my life. All I have left is waiting for the night, for death.’ When he said such things, he wasn’t sad or anything, he smiled quite cheerfully as he spoke, as if providing an explanation and being rig
ht were consolation enough for him.
Golde had died quite suddenly, her death caused to some extent by motion. She had gone to Zurich, to see Mimi who – me neshuma! – had been through some difficult times, and who had found herself terribly out of her depth, had spent two days instilling the fear of God into that slut of a servant girl, had then got back onto the train to be at home in time for Shabbos preparations at home, and had just sat there, hadn’t got out in Baden, or in Turgi, or in Brugg, and when the man who cleaned the carriages there poked her with his finger to wake her up, she had simply toppled sideways, ‘like a bag of flour’, the man said. When the chevra came to fetch the corpse, it was lying in the luggage store room. The right hand, which could no longer be opened easily, was still clutching a bag. In it was a large piece of smoked meat, the speciality of Pinchas’s butcher’s shop in Zurich.
Even in the cemetery, halfway between Endingen and Lengnau, Salomon had maintained his composure, and at the shiva, too, no one had noticed anything but the normal grief of a widower. It was only when Janki asked him, quite quietly and reasonably, on the last day of the week of mourning, whether he mightn’t think of dissolving the household in Endingen and moving in with them in Baden, after all, there was plenty of room in the big flat, there was a sewing room that was never used, that Salomon had started shouting, all of a sudden and in a way that was most unlike him. They were to leave him alone, he had shouted, he wanted to stay with Golde, and apart from that he needed nothing and nobody.
Now he sat day after day over his calculations, visited by nobody but the shnorrers who buzzed around the double house in Endingen like bees around a particularly luxurious shrub. From Bialystok to Mir the address had been discussed as a place where you didn’t first have to laboriously reel out your tales of woe about sick parents and starving children, where all you had to do was listen to the Cabbalistic ravings of the master of the house for an hour or two, stroke your beard and nod, before moving on amply piled with food and gifts. Janki repeatedly complained about this pointless waste of money, even though, as he stressed, it didn’t affect him personally, because while his wife Chanele might have grown up in Salomon’s house, nothing would come to her after his death.
Sometimes Salomon would take his umbrella at dawn and then walk the old paths for hours, to Zurzach, for example, on a day when there was no market there, or to the farming villages where he had once done his deals. There, as people were already saying all over the place, to Janki’s irritation and Chanele’s concern, he would enter some byre or other without a word of explanation, leave it just as silently, frighten the maids and be laughed at by the labourers, stayed whole nights away and was then, if anyone rebuked him for it, suddenly the old Salomon again, thoughtful and humorous.
‘Of course I would rather come and see you unannounced,’ he once said, ‘ideally in the afternoon, when I can be sure that Janki is in his fabric storeroom and Chanele in the other shop. Then I can sit down in the kitchen, fat Christine makes me coffee, a piece of bread or cake is found and I can talk at my leisure to my friend Arthur.’
Arthur, the late-comer, loved his uncle Salomon, because he treated him like an adult. ‘You will soon have your bar mitzvah,’ Salomon had declared. ‘Thirteen years old, and thirteen is the numerical value of the word Echod. What does Echod mean? Echod mi yodea? Nu? Didn’t you pay attention in cheder?’
‘Echod means one.’
‘Correct! And what does thirteen have to do with one? Very simple: when you are thirteen years old, you are no longer just a part of your family, you are a human being in your own right. An individual. A man. And I’m not supposed to talk to you seriously?’
If one has always been the youngest, always the one who understands the least, there is nothing more valuable than a person who gives you the feeling of being on an equal footing with you. Not that Arthur was jealous of his older siblings, that was not part of his character. He had a low opinion of himself, he knew that he would never smile as elegantly as Shmul or glow from within as Hinda did. He wasn’t even dainty, which would have been the natural role of the baby of the family. Arthur was an angular child, he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin and lost himself time and again in thoughts too complicated for his incomplete intelligence. He was often deemed to be precocious, but that wasn’t right. Arthur was younger than his years, and that can be very painful.
Shmul, on the other hand, or actually François . . . The very fact that his brother had two different names profoundly impressed Arthur. He too would have liked a second personality that he could slip into, and sometimes at night when the leaves of the plane trees cast threatening lunar shadows on the wall of his room, he imagined himself as a Siegfried or a Hector, a broad-shouldered, fair-haired boy who could run faster than everyone else and throw a ball without his fellow pupils shouting ‘Butterfingers! Butterfingers!’
If their eldest had two names, it was down to the fact that during the first week of his life, the eight days until the bris, Janki and Chanele had not, as so often, been of the same opinion. Janki argued for François, after his revered Maître Delormes, while Chanele, who had never known her own parents, insisted that the child should be called after Janki’s late father, Shmul, because it’s only if someone goes on bearing a name that the dead remain alive. And anyway, who had ever heard of a Jewish boy being named after a goyish tailor?
They never agreed on what the boy was to be called, but neither did they argue about it, as they seldom argued, each one instead imposing his or her own will, as if they had two different firstborn sons, Janki a François and Chanele a Shmul.
Shmul-François or François-Shmul learned early on to be one thing for one and another for the other, and to derive from this whatever he wanted. When he started talking, as he did very late, he talked about himself in a nameless third person, saying ‘He’s hungry’ or ‘He doesn’t want to go to sleep,’ and tacked as skilfully back and forth between his parents as if being a child had been merely a part he played, and the tousled head of curls no more than a theatrical wig. When his hair, in line with custom, was cut for the first time on his third birthday, it seemed to Chanele as if an entirely alien person were coming to light, someone she didn’t know, and of whom she was strangely afraid.
By now François was twenty-one, he smoked Russian cigarettes in an almost authentic amber holder and had a moustache that he rubbed with wax every week. He also subjected his hair to strict discipline, using a pomade that he bought from the barber in colourful tins. The picture on the lid showed an Indian maharaja next to an English officer, and when the tins were empty, Arthur was given them for all the things he collected: stamps, of course, all schoolboys do that, but also the portraits of foreign races that came with certain cigarette packs, and optical illusions that seemed to change when you looked at them for some time.
Hinda also supported Arthur’s mania for collecting things. It had been her who had given him his most precious possession: a ticket d’entrée with a picture of a Greek god listening interestedly but languidly to a muse. Janki had brought it for her, for her of course, as a souvenir of his first trip as a buyer to Paris, it was his ticket to the world’s fair, where he had seen real-life savages and all of Thomas Edison’s four hundred and ninety-three inventions. For his bar mitzvah, Arthur’s dearest wish was for a microscope, because he too would have liked to be an inventor, and he was grateful to his sister for not laughing at him when he talked about it.
Hinda had slipped out of Chanele almost without causing her any pain. That was actually impossible, the midwife said, but she could have sworn that the child had, when it was barely born, smiled open-eyed into the light, and children seldom smile so early. At the holekrash, the naming ceremony for girls, Hinda allowed herself to be lifted up and carried around without crying once. Golde, Salomon told the story often, had kept wiping her eyes dry throughout the whole sude, while repeating the words, ‘Like a princess!’ Mimi, beside her, had drawn circles on her temples with her fingerti
ps, because the happiness of other mothers always gave her a migraine.
Later, when Hinda was older, she wasn’t afraid of anything, not even spiders. When her father fancied a particular bottle of wine she went to the cellar all by herself, just with a candle, and saw nothing of the ghosts that danced on the walls. Arthur admired her a lot for that. And even Janki, who normally saved the big words up for particularly good customers, admitted it: Hinda was a ray of sunshine.
Janki didn’t have much time for Arthur; the business devoured him. When Arthur heard that phrase for the first time, when he was still a little boy, he had been terrified, and had clung weeping to his father until Janki shook him off and said to Chanele: ‘You mollycoddle that boy.’
‘Sometimes,’ Arthur said to Uncle Salomon, and it was something that he had never confided in a single soul, ‘sometimes I would rather be a girl.’
‘Interesting,’ Salomon said. He had crumbled a piece of cake into his coffee and was stirring the mixture around slowly, with great concentration. With each rotation the spoon hit the edge of the cup with a melodic chink. In the background Christine, the cook, provide a basso continuo on a chopping board full of onions. ‘Very interesting. A girl. Why?’
‘I don’t know, it’s stupid.’
‘Nothing you think is stupid. Only not thinking at all is stupid.’ Since Salomon had been preoccupied with gematria, he had become used to speaking in sentences.
‘But it isn’t really possible.’
‘So?’ Salomon waved his hand dismissively, and so violently that his coffee spoon skittered across the table top. ‘What does possibility have to do with anything? Every day I dream that Golde is alive again.’ The spoon had left a trail of coffee behind, and with his finger Salomon drew a snaking line in it. ‘Why would you like to be a girl? Nu?’
Melnitz Page 17
