The doctor took her arm and led her silently out. It was only when he had opened the grille and closed it again that he said, ‘I have found the old index card after all. His name is Menachem Bär.’
Menachem.
Menachem and Sarah Bär.
And their daughter Chanele.
When they were walking across the courtyard that already lay in the shade of the brick building, he asked her, ‘Is that your father?’ She didn’t reply, and he didn’t press the point.
They walked down the long corridor where there were no names on the doors, through the corridor with the windows that weren’t windows, down the other corridor where the arrow on the enamel sign still pointed into the void. There was something consoling about the chaos in his office, like a warm, untidy bed inviting one to climb in. Dr Hellstieldl lifted the cosy off a pot and poured a glass of tea. He did it clumsily with the pot in one hand and the cosy in the other. Chanele watched him, as one might observe an event in the street that doesn’t concern one. When he held out the glass, she had first to think before she understood his gesture.
He sat down opposite her and said nothing. Saying nothing was plainly a considerable effort for him. More than once he made as if to speak and then left his words unsaid.
The tea was hot, and Chanele was grateful for it. The sun was still shining, although lower in the sky, but her whole body was shivering with a kind of cold that she had never felt before. Old people sometimes complained that they could never get warm any more. For the first time Chanele understood what they meant.
‘I called for a cab for you,’ Dr Hellstiedl said at last.
She nodded, grateful not to have to make any decisions for herself.
‘If you wish, I can keep you informed about his condition. In case a change . . . It could be, or it could not be. We know so little. And to combat our ignorance we have Latin and Greek names.’
He topped up her tea and then asked again: ‘Shall I . . .?’
‘No,’ Chanele said. It was the first word she had spoken since her meeting with her father.
She took the cab back into town. In the avenue, the poplars now cast long shadows.
In the square in front of the Minster a feast day was being celebrated, with happy people and cheerful music. Chanele thought of the big simcha that Menachem Bär had been so looking forward to, and to it she devoted every laughing face she glimpsed from the cab window.
The hotel porter welcomed her with chummy curiosity. How had her day been, he wanted to know, had she found the way and how did the esteemed Madame Meijer like Strasbourg? She silenced him with a tip.
That night she slept deeply and dreamlessly.
The next morning she took the train back to Basel and from there on to Baden. She went straight from the station to the shop and worked there as she did every day.
When she got home in the evening and Janki questioned her, she replied, ‘They made a mistake. It was someone completely different. He has nothing to do with me.’
24
Pinchas had to grab his shirt collar again to get some air, and that had nothing to do with the fact that the sun was beating down far too hot for the second day in a row. This man that Zalman Kamionker had introduced him to, this Dr Stern from Stuttgart, Congress delegate of the Württemberg Majority Socialists, was driving him completely insane. And he looked quite harmless, an outwardly inconspicuous man of middle age, not very tall, with a cosy, round little bourgeois belly, on which his watch chain did a skipping little dance each time he laughed. And he laughed a lot, in an unpleasant way. He said the most dreadful things, concluded them with a wobbly ‘Hohoho!’ and then wiped the back of his hand over his moustache. ‘God,’ he said, for example, ‘God does not exist, of course. I should know, I’m a rabbi.’ He made his belly wobble and looked at Pinchas with the natural expectancy of someone who already has a counter-argument ready for any objections.
He had in fact once been a rabbi, in Buttenhausen, a small congregation in the Swabian Jura. ‘I learned the job thoroughly,’ he said and laughed again, as if at the best possible joke. ‘No half measures where I’m concerned. Even today I can cast a glance at the innards of a chicken and tell you unerringly whether it’s kosher or not. Admittedly it’s an utterly meaningless skill, but I can still remember how to do it. The way other people can balance on their hands or walk a tightrope.’
Pinchas wouldn’t have been surprised if his interlocutor had performed one of those tricks on the spot. Dr Stern’s manner had much of the fairground barker about it, one of those men one sometimes encounters outside travelling theatres of curiosity, except that the attractions in his booth were not six-legged calves or women with fishtails, but the treasury of mysteriously glittering theses and the mirror-maze of brightly polished paradoxes. ‘Every true believer is proof that there is no God,’ he would say, for example, rocking springily back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if he was about to turn a somersault and shout ‘Hoppla!’.
He liked talking, almost compulsively, about how he had lost his faith, ‘freed himself from it’, as he called it, and it seemed that he often addressed large gatherings on the subject. He never had to search for a word, and his perfectly formulated sentences always sounded as if they were read from a manuscript. He had not been a rabbi for ages, but was the first chairman of the German Free-Thinkers’ Union, and he could, when he spoke of this association and its goals, adopt an expression every bit as unctuous as if he were still wearing the cassock. He put his unbelief on display in his buttonhole like a medal, he was proud of it as one might be proud of a doctorate acquired after a long period of study. There was something crusading about his atheism. Godlessness was his religion, and he advocated it with the fire and enthusiasm of the convert. When he said, ‘God is nothing but an invention of man,’ he beamed like Moses at the sight of the Shechinah on Mount Sinai.
The two men had met in the Palm Garden at around midday, and Kamionker had introduced them to one another. He did that with a sly smile whose meaning Pinchas only now understood. It was noisy and stuffy in the Palm Garden, so they decided to take advantage of the fine weather and take a short stroll in the park by the lake. Pinchas had prepared a whole list of questions about the Socialist Congress – the Israelit in Frankfurt would certainly be interested in an article on the subject – but he never got around to asking them. No sooner had Dr Stern learned that the actual profession of his new acquaintance was that of shochet, than he only wanted to talk about religion, or rather about the non-religion that was his deeply held credo. ‘Man should know and not believe,’ he said with devout emphasis, spreading his arms to welcome the whole world with a fraternal kiss into the newly founded alliance of the godless.
He must once have been a good pulpit speaker, even though Buttenhausen, as he said, had only a tiny synagogue, where it was often possible only with a great deal of difficulty to assemble a minyan. ‘But what was I to do? Rabbinate positions were thin on the ground, and as a theologian fresh out of college one had to take what one could get. An interesting word, by the way, ‘theologian’. If one returns to the Greek root it actually means nothing more than a person who talks about God – and one can of course also talk about things that do not exist. About unicorns, about dragons or indeed about the Lord God.’
‘But our world must . . .’
Dr Stern interrupted Pinchas with an expansive gesture. ‘My dear friend,’ he said, and it sounded like ‘My dear congregation’, ‘My dear friend, I hope you are not going to bother me with one of these proofs of God’s existence. Which one were about to take out of your pocket? The cosmological? The ontological? The teleological? All of them refute long ago. Read Kant! Read Schopenhauer! “The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason.” The world does not need a first mover. It bears its laws within itself! We need only recognise them. Voilà!’ He gave a little hop, a circus artist returning to terra firma after a daring tightrope walk, and expecting applause.
‘And who
made those laws?’
‘Nobody.’ Dr Stern, the man whom one could as little imagine without his title as without his trousers, dabbed his forehead dry with his silk handkerchief. Pinchas had a sense that he had practised the elegant movement in front of the mirror. ‘When the sun is shining, no one sits there heating an oven. Natural laws need no almighty creator to set the first ball rolling. The universe is as it is. Our fate is what we make of it. The world – to bring it down to its lowest common denominator – is as we form it. It is only because we are afraid of this responsibility that we invent punitive deities and in their name draw up laws for whose consequences we may thus not be held to account.’
‘But the Torah . . .’
Dr Stern caught this objection in mid-air as well, a juggler whose hand is always in the place to which the next ball is about to fly. ‘The Torah is literature,’ he said. ‘Very fine literature, in fact. Like many of our writings, incidentally. I myself have brought out a small volume with Reclam’s Universalbibliothek: Rays of Light from the Talmud, a collection of quotations valuable not least from the pedagogic point of view. One had only to pick them carefully out from among all the silly legends – I am thinking for example of the woolgathering tales of such a one as Rabba bar bar Chana – and the overheated sophistications of the interpretations of the law. The moral clarity of our scholars is strangely at odds with the logical confusion of Talmudic ritual. One might even say: where Judaism manages without God, it can serve as an excellent model for other people.’ And, inspired by his own eloquence, he made the watch-chain on his belly skip, laughed deeply from his throat and ran the back of his hand over his moustache.
Pinchas, who took part in the shiur of the Talmud-Torah Association twice a week, had the feeling that he knew a thousand arguments against such blasphemous talk, but not a single one came to mind. If he could have led this debate in the familiar evening classroom, protected by the bulwark of a shelf full of ancient tomes . . . But here, in the bright light of the lakeside promenade, under the fresh green of the trees, here, where a disobliging-looking nanny in a starched blue and white blouse led two little girls in pink by the hand, where an old lady was scattering cake-crumbs into the water from a greasy paper bag, for swans and ducks to dispute over with belligerent gulls, here, where a teacher had assembled his whole class around him so that he could name all the peaks of the alpine panorama, clearly visible today thanks to the föhn air – here he felt helpless. Debating the nuances of a word, the finer points of the interpretation of a law – that he was used to. But someone simply wanting to tear down the whole intellectual edifice on which so many generations of scholars and their pupils had taken such trouble – that left him speechless. He walked along in silence beside Dr Stern, who kept dancing with excitement at the abundance of his own self-confidence.
Their path led them past the improvised geography lesson, where the teacher was just saying, ‘Over there, still shrouded in fog, you will see the Grosse Mythe and the Kleine Mythe.’ Dr Stern chuckled, a rich man winning the lottery on top of everything. ‘You see, my dear friend,’ he said, wiping his moustache with the back of his hand, ‘this bold pedagogue has just summed up my whole argument in the most concise form. We humans come up with myths, big ones and small ones, we claim they are as solid as fortresses, and mask our own doubts with a fog of traditions and rituals.’
‘It’s easy to believe in nothing at all.’ Pinchas felt unfamiliar fury welling up in him.
‘On the contrary, my friend.’ Dr Stern had also been expecting this sentence, like a practised dancer taking his partner’s hand without looking at the end of a complicated figure. ‘Believing in nothing is difficult! What is easy is to swallow down without resistance the mush of ideas, pre-chewed a thousand times, of previous generations. It is easy to bend the knee obediently, to cross yourself, put on the tefillin, jump over a burning pyre at midnight, or whatever strange rituals our forefathers came up with in the name of their self-invented deities. It is easy to accept holy scriptures as God-given, to accept the premises of a religion uncritically and use one’s intelligence only to draw constant new conclusions from it. We Jews are true masters in the art of gnawing our way through the finest ramifications of supposedly divine laws, like woodworm in a long-dead tree. Night after night we study medieval commentaries, just to understand debates pursued fifteen hundred years ago, we talk ourselves blue in the face about the rituals of sacrificial services in a temple destroyed two thousand years ago. We waste our intelligence because we lack the courage to question ancient fairy-tales. Fairy-tales, yes indeed! But in fact: he who does not wish to think must believe.’ He was so pleased with that last sentence that he performed a little dance on the spot. Two elderly ladies peered at him disapprovingly from under their parasols.
‘You know what strikes me?’ Pinchas asked and felt rising up in him the combative anticipation that emerges from the sense of a watertight argument. ‘You know what even strikes me a lot about you? You still say “we”. “We Jews.” So for all your protests you are still part of it.
‘Let’s say: I don’t exclude myself from it. Or only as long as the concept refers to the community of a people and not of a faith. But otherwise . . . In this connection I can tell you a funny story.’ He pointed to one of the wooden benches that the Beautification Society had set up along the promenade. ‘The sun will do me good, after all those long hours in the Congress Room.’ He carefully wiped a trace of pollen off the green painted slats, made himself comfortable in the middle of the seat, his arms spread out on the back, and when Pinchas continued to hesitate, tapped invitingly on the narrow free space beside him. ‘Sit down next to me, my dear friend! I promise you, you will enjoy yourself royally.’
Pinchas sat down. What option did he have? His interlocutor, that much was clear to him, was not one of those people who can be deterred from telling a story once they have started it.
‘This is already . . .’ Dr Stern began, and adopted that artificially reflective face that loquacious people often put on in order to give often-repeated stories the appearance of spontaneous authenticity. ‘In fact, more than ten years ago now. How time passes! It was clear to me at last, once and for all, that I could no longer reconcile it with my conscience, telling my little flock . . . A lovely term, isn’t it?’ he interrupted himself, and even that interruption seemed to be part of his manuscript. ‘Little flock. It so accurately describes the submissive lack of criticism with which even thoroughly intelligent people credulously trot along with the herd of their religion, always encircled by the barking dogs of the punishments of hell and eternal damnation. As I say, it was clear to me that I would be being unfaithful to myself if I went on interpreting laws to my congregation that I no longer believed in myself – even though the interpretations themselves were still entirely correct. Utterly meaningless, like all religious mumbo-jumbo, but correct. If you consider: a God who is concerned in all seriousness with the question of whether the pitum is broken off an essrog, such a detail-obsessed heavenly trifler, can only be an invention of humanity! Only we humans are stupid enough to glue our view of the world together from mere trivia.’
‘And your view of the world, Dr Stern?’
The free-thinker heard the irritable undertone and seemed to be pleased, a conjuror who has directed his audience’s attention exactly where he wants it. ‘I deal with the main issue, and flatter myself that I have thus achieved something greater than all those regulation-obsessed Talmud greats. With one exception. Does the name Elisha ben Abuyah mean anything to you?’
Pinchas nodded. ‘Acher,’ he said. ‘The Other.’
‘Very good.’ Dr Stern nodded to him with schoolmasterly condescension. ‘Excellent. That is how he is always referred to in the scriptures. “The Other.” And why? Because he was not even granted that name after he, the great teacher of the Law, had reached the only possible conclusion: that there is in fact no God. And do you know how he lost his faith?’
Pinchas had studied
the relevant passage of the Talmud not long before. It concerned a boy ordered by his father to fetch eggs from the nest, but first to chase away the mother bird, as it is written: ‘You shall let the mother fly and take only the young, that you may thrive and that you may long endure’ – the same reward that the Torah promises for the keeping of the Commandment to honour one’s father and mother. In spite of that twofold promise, the boy fell and broke his neck. And that is supposed to have been the moment when Elisha ben Abuyah became an apostate.
‘You cannot use that argument,’ Pinchas said, ‘if you bear in mind what Rashi says about the passage “that you may long endure” . . .’
‘I’m impressed.’ Dr Stern applauded ironically, and Pinchas could have slapped him. ‘So you know that passage from kiddushim. But I like the explanation that Talmud gives in the treatise of Khagiga – 14b, if you want to look it up – much better.’
‘I know that passage too,’ said Pinchas, but Dr Stern had closed his eyes as if to remember better, and recited, almost singing, as one does during a lecture. ‘Ben Asai, ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah and Rabbi Akiba meditated long enough over the glory of God until they could glimpse the uppermost sphere. Ben Asai died. Ben Soma lost his reason. Elisha ben Abuyah fell from faith. And only Rabbi Akiba . . .’
‘I see no reason to make fun.’ Pinchas had spoken much more loudly than he had actually intended. A young woman who was walking past the bench with her pram, quickened her pace in alarm.
‘I’m not making fun,’ Dr Stern said. ‘On the contrary. I have always felt a great affinity with this Acher. Perhaps he actually did glimpse heaven, and established that it was empty.’
‘I have to go now. I can’t leave my butcher’s shop alone as long as this.’ Pinchas was about to get up, but Dr Stern would not let him. He held him back as a circus barker might an indecisive peasant.
‘Wait, dear friend. I haven’t yet told you my story.’
Melnitz Page 27
