‘I am a black swan,’ thought Mimi.
At a tea party she had sat Hinda next to Siegfried Kahn, who studied law and who, given the importance of his family in the silk importing trade, would soon be a successful lawyer. Furthermore, apart from his sickly sister, he was an only child and would eventually inherit the lot. But after their meeting Hinda had only laughed, and imitated the way the student twisted his head, in its high starched collar, back and forth like an owl, ‘as if he had no neck’. Mimi had had no more success with Mendel Weisz from the matzo baking dynasty; Hinda had submitted to his awkward compliments and then said, ‘A matzo factory might be very useful at Pesach, but what would I do with him for the rest of the year?’
Chanele really hadn’t prepared her daughter very well for life.
Today there were no young men on the agenda, but who knew whom one would meet in town? Hinda’s clothes were all of good quality, after all she was the daughter of the biggest drapery in Baden, but all très simple, more suited to a provincial backwater than for a proper city. Luckily Mimi had taste, and you can do lots with a nice cape and a parasol.
She herself wore a very plain twin piece in dark blue silk satin, the jupon cut straight, with a wide pleated flounce and a sewn-on twill ribbon, and the long jacket was very simple too, with a little plissé ruching and with a barely noticeable inset of silk twill. Hair was worn very severely that year anyway, with the tiniest of hats. Her umbrella alone was slightly extravagant.
‘Where are we going?’ Hinda asked.
‘We’ll have a cup of hot chocolate later in the Palm Garden. But first . . . You’ll see.’
The flat was in Sankt Anne Gasse, directly above the butcher’s shop. Mimi didn’t really like living there. Having a shop in one’s house was, in her opinion, très ordinaire, but of course it was practical too. Since Pinchas had taken on an assistant, young Elias Gutterman, a very efficient shochet, and luckily one who could stand on his own two feet, he was often able to absent himself from the shop for an hour or two, and then only had to climb a flight of stairs and he was sitting at his desk. Over the last few years he had been writing more and more little articles, which had appeared under the abbreviation – pp – in a few German newspapers and now even in the newly founded Zurich Tages-Anzeiger. A financially unrewarding art, of course, but the butcher’s shop was going well, and Mimi, as she often stressed, didn’t get involved in it.
They didn’t head towards Löwenstrasse where, only a few yards from the butcher’s shop, the synagogue was, but went first to Bahnhofstrasse and then along one of the little alleys up into the Old Town. Mimi still wouldn’t say what she had planned, but for some reason she was very excited. ‘You don’t need to be afraid, Hinda,’ she said impetuously, ‘nothing at all can happen.’
Hinda laughed. It was hard to imagine that anyone in Aunt Mimi’s milieu might do anything serious, let alone anything frightening.
They came to a house in Wohllebgasse, a building so narrow it looked as if the neighbours had reluctantly shifted sideways a little to make room for it. On the ground floor was an upholsterer’s workshop. A group of tatty chairs with their innards spilling out stood in the street in a semicircle, as if awaiting unloved guests.
To get into the house, you first had to enter the workshop and then leave it again immediately through a rough wooden side door. The pungent smell of boiling glue made way in the narrow, dark stairway for the intense smell of cabbage soup, a poor-people smell that Mimi would have on any other occasion described as dégoûtant or affreux. Now she just pulled up her skirt and climbed the creaking stairs ahead of Hinda, past a door behind which the cries of a baby and a cross woman’s voice could be heard, and a second, behind which a dog was furiously barking and repeatedly hurling itself against the wood with a dull thud.
On the top floor, where the walls were already beginning to slope, Mimi stopped by a door to which a brass lion’s head was fixed. It was probably intended as a doorknocker, but its mouth lacked the appurtenant ring.
‘What . . .?’ Hinda began to ask.
Mimi put a finger to her lips. ‘Take your gloves off,’ she whispered.
Even without a knock on the door, their arrival was noted. A gaunt woman of perhaps fifty, but perhaps much older, opened the door a crack. She wore a light grey skirt and a high buttoned blouse in the same colour, fastened at the neck by a silver brooch. Her hair was covered with a scarf of starched material, also grey. Her eyes were narrowed, as though even the gloomy light of the stairwell was too bright for her. Without a word of greeting she nodded to Mimi, as matter-of-factly as if she were ticking off a sheet on a laundry list, and then turned her suspicious gaze on Hinda.
‘Who is that?’ she asked tonelessly.
‘My niece,’ answered Mimi. ‘Madame Rosa knows.’
‘She mentioned nothing to me.’ The gaunt woman seemed at first not to want to let them through, but then finally stepped aside. ‘You’re late,’ she hissed reproachfully.
A smell of cabbage soup hung in the corridor too, mixed with a sickly, penetrating smell that Hinda couldn’t identify. In big plates, ordinary soup plates, arranged on the floor along the walls, candles flickered, sooty smoke rising from their wicks.
Hinda coughed. The woman in grey walking in front of her turned to her and cast her a reproachful look. Then she opened the door to a room whose windows, in the middle of the afternoon, were covered with heavy velvet curtains.
Five or six people, Hinda couldn’t tell straight away in the half-darkness, sat around a circular table. The room was tiny, even smaller than the maid’s room under the roof in Baden. Four people had to get up and push their way into the corner of the room and the window niche so that Mimi could sit down. As they did so, the curtain was pushed aside for a moment, bright sunlight flashed in and lit an unframed oil painting, hanging on an unpapered wall, depicting a fogbound crevasse.
Hinda, always ready for an adventure in spite of her irritation, wanted to follow Mimi, but someone held her back. The gaunt woman had grabbed her parasol and didn’t seem to want to let go of it. It was only when she saw that the woman also had Mimi’s parasol hanging over her arm that Hinda realised she was trying to take it away from her. She pushed her way along the edge of the table to her seat, and all the others sat down again with much scraping of chairs. No one said a word.
Hinda was horrified to feel something touching her legs; but it was only the worn, dark brown table-cloth that reached to the floor. On her left sat Mimi, on her right an asthmatic-sounding, heavily breathing woman who smelled unhealthily of sweat. They had both rested their hands on the tablecloth with their fingers spread. Hinda looked around and established that everyone else had assumed the same posture, so that their little fingers touched and the whole thing formed a kind of chain. Hinda joined them; it seemed to be expected of her. The strange woman’s finger was cold and damp.
For almost a minute nothing happened. Then the gaunt woman, the only one to have stayed standing, said, ‘Let us close our eyes.’ Although she was still whispering, the sound of her voice reminded Hinda of a strict governess.
She obediently lowered her eyelids, but only half. When the kauhanim appeared before the congregation for the priest’s blessing in the prayer room, looking was also forbidden, and there was even a rumour among the younger children that a stolen glance could make you blind. Arthur, fearful as he was, had always obeyed the prohibition, but Hinda had once been unable to resist the temptation. Nothing bad had happened to her, but neither had she seen anything exciting. Only Mosbacher the businessman with his son and old Herr Katz, all three with arms outstretched, tallises pulled over their heads.
What she saw now around the table from beneath her lowered lids was even less exciting than that.
With one exception, all the people gathered around the table were women. The only man was sitting right next to Mimi, an elderly man with a narrow white beard, whom one might have imagined as an academic, or perhaps a grocer who liked to pic
k up a book in his free time. The woman beside him wore glasses with very small lenses, which sank into the fatty wrinkles of her round face like raisins in fresh dough. Her eyes were so tightly shut that she looked like a bawling baby. Then came a younger lady with an arrogant expression; one had a sense that she had only closed her eyes so that at least she didn’t have to look at the unworthy society in which she found herself against her will.
Next, diagonally opposite Hinda, sat a small, cosy woman, who looked a bit like the wife of Pfister, the baker on the Church Square, who not only sold the best Spanish rolls, but who was also first with the latest gossip. She was the only one of the ladies who was not wearing a hat, but had instead hidden her hair under a colourful turban, with an enamelled medallion resplendent on the front. That, of course, was Madame Rosa.
Next to her was a women entirely in black, with a half-length widow’s veil pinned to her hat, covering her eyes, and then came the woman who was having difficulty breathing. To look at her more closely, Hinda would have had to turn rudely and look at her.
‘Is there a good spirit there, who wants to speak to us?’ asked the woman with the turban. She said it in the coarse dialect of a suburban village, and as unceremoniously as someone asking if the post has arrived. Hinda, with her gift for seeing the ludicrous side of everything, had to struggle not to explode with laughter.
‘I ask again: is there a good spirit there, who wants to speak to us?’
Even afterwards, Hinda couldn’t explain what happened next. The table seemed to move under their hands, seemed to rise in the air and fall again, like someone turning in their sleep and then coming to rest again a moment later. There was a clearly audible knock as the foot of the table touched the floor again.
‘We greet you,’ said Madame Rosa, and all those present repeated: ‘We greet you.’
‘What is your name?’ asked Madame Rosa.
As in shul, when the moment has come, the people around the table began to murmur. Hinda thought for a moment that it was a prayer, but then she understood the strange sounds.
A B C D E F G
In a muttered chorus they recited the alphabet.
H I J K L M
Like little children at school.
N O P Q R
A knock.
‘R,’ said Madame Rosa.
The speaking chorus started again.
A B C D E F G
This time the knocking came after the O.
And then after the D.
And again after the O.
R. O. D. O. L. P. H. E.
‘Rodolphe,’ said Madame Rosa. A particularly violent knock confirmed the name.
Next to Hinda, Aunt Mimi started sniffing.
‘It’s him,’ she managed to speak between her tears. ‘I would have called him Rodolphe if he . . . if he . . .’
An impatient knocking interrupted her. Under Hinda’s hands the table was bucking like a restive horse.
‘Do you want to say something to us?’ asked Madame Rosa.
Knocking.
And the murmuring began again from the start. ABCDE.
M. the table spelt this time. M. A. M. A.
‘He’s talking to me,’ sobbed Mimi.
There was still a smell of of cabbage soup.
Afterwards, when they were sitting in the Palm Garden, Mimi admitted that while she didn’t believe in any of it, of course, there was without a doubt a lot of hocus pocus involved and she felt a little bit ridiculous, but on the other hand how could the table, or how could somebody, if there was deception involved, how could they have known the name Rodolphe, not just Rudolf, as people spelt and pronounced it hereabouts, but Rodolphe, in French, such an unusual name, how could anyone have known? And even if – she could see that Hinda was laughing again, she didn’t even need to hide it and perhaps she was right – and even if it was all a lot of theatre, a show put on for the credulous, it had done her good, so much good that Hinda couldn’t begin to imagine. Anyone who has not known true sorrow, Mimi said, anyone who does not know proper tsuris, cannot understand, but if someone has been through as much as she has, one clutches at straws. And what the voice had said – for her it was a voice, even if all you actually heard, of course, was the knocking noises that Madame Rosa then had to interpret – what the voice had said had been so correct, so clearly and unambiguously meant only for her, that he was well, that he was happy and that he loved her, ah, Hinda had no idea what that meant for a mother who had never been able to pick up her child or bentsh it on a Friday evening. Rodolphe was the name she wanted to give him, after a book that someone had once read aloud to her, it was so long ago that she sometimes thought she’d only dreamt it all.
Then Mimi poured the hot chocolate, very daintily, with gloved fingers, and ordered two slices, because spiritual excitement always gave her an appetite.
When the séance was over – ‘This is a scientific experiment, which is why we call it a séance,’ Hinda was told by the elderly gentleman who, it turned out, had been a teacher all his life, a professor of Physics and Chemistry at the high school for girls – when the gaunt woman had drawn the curtains and revealed the little room in all its petit-bourgeois shabbiness, they had stood around for a while, very uncomfortably, because even after the chairs had been carried out they had still kept their backs pressed against the crooked wall and made conversation. Most people’s interest was directed at Hinda, the new adept, in the words of the heavily-breathing woman, who introduced herself as Hermine Mettler, wife of high court judge Mettler. She herself, she confided in Hinda, had been seriously ill and long since given up by the doctors, but in contact with the beyond she kept finding new strength, and her spirit guide had even promised her that she only needed to experience one proper ectoplasmic phenomenon to become quite healthy again.
The woman with the little glasses and her arrogant neighbour were mother and daughter and came to every séance, because Madame Rosa had discovered that they both had quite special clairvoyant powers, which the circle of hands required to make contact with the other world. The veiled woman didn’t take part in the conversation, just dabbed her eyes with a little black lace handkerchief and sometimes said into a silence, ‘Yes, yes.’
Madame Rosa was the only one to stay seated. She looked, to use a term from Mimi’s lexicon, très ordinaire, like a washerwoman after a long day in hot steam or like Christine after the last course of a big dinner. The enamel medallion on her turban represented an open eye. She was, as Mimi explained on the way to the Alpenquai, a distant relative of the upholsterer who owned the house, had discovered her special abilities only very late and only by chance, and in principle accepted no money for running the séances; one just gave the gaunt, grey woman something to cover the costs, with no compulsion at all, one could give what one wished.
When they were saying goodbye, Madame Rosa had rested a cabbage-smelling hand on Hinda’s cheek, had looked at her and then said with a shake of her head, ‘Today is a very special day for you, my child.’
They had gone down the stairs – the baby had stopped crying, and the dog was barking only very faintly – and when they stepped out of the workshop door and breathed fresh air again, Hinda had laughed so hard that she had thrown herself into one of the broken chairs and kicked her feet.
On the way through the city her laughter had kept bubbling up again, and in the end it had infected Mimi, too. They both giggled like schoolgirls sharing a secret, and even – ‘But you mustn’t say that at home, it will not be considered polite!’ – had to find the ladies’ convenience on Bürkliplatz, because Mimi was weeping with laughter, and without freshly powdering her face she couldn’t show herself in the elegant surroundings of the Palm Garden.
20
The Palm Garden in the Tonhalle was the most fashionable place in Zurich to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate. Well, in fact, the hall of the Hotel Baur en Ville on Paradeplatz was perhaps a little more exclusive, but it attracted a quite different clientele, predominantly foreign
travellers, and Mimi had never understood why one should put on one’s best for people one didn’t even know. In Palm Garden one always saw familiar faces, particularly in the afternoon, when the orchestra played on the low platform, ‘under the baton of the eminent conductor Fleur-Vallée’, as it said in the advertisements. Monsieur Fleur-Vallée was a regular customer at the butcher’s shop, and his real name was Blumental.
The four huge palm trees that gave the café its name grew from metal-studded tubs which had to be turned every three months by the whole staff, all pulling together and people shouting ‘heave!’, so that they didn’t grow towards the light from the plate-glass window on all sides. Mimi knew that from Monsieur Fleur-Vallée, who had complained that they actually expected him, a sensitive artist, to join in with such a coarse operation.
For someone who didn’t know, the Palm Garden might have looked like an undifferentiated sea of little round tables, washed together here and then into random groups of islands for larger parties. But just as one did not move just anywhere when choosing a place to live, but sought the proximity of one’s peers – small craftsmen in the Old Town, workers in the recently incorporated district of Wiedikon, Jews around the synagogue on Löwenstrasse – here too one had to respect a clear social demarcation which might not have been recorded anywhere, but with which the habitués were nonetheless very familiar.
The most sought-after seats were on the bright south front – ‘but not right by the window,’ Mimi had explained to Hinda, ‘that’s cheap. It shouldn’t look as if we need to display ourselves in a shop window.’ They found a seat in the second row, not too far from the wide entrance; they wanted to be able to see who was coming and going, after all. In the Palm Garden there was a quarter of elderly couples, an arrondissement of newspaper readers, and so on. Right in front of the orchestra platform sat students in their best clothes and young ladies who wanted to be near them. Non-residents had to content themselves with a seat in the no-man’s-land somewhere in between.
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