Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Only Hinda treated Uncle Salomon as she always had, even after weeks. Every time she visited she chatted away about the trivialities of her everyday life, as one does with a dear friend whom one sees so often that everything important has already been said. If Uncle Salomon really had still been able to hear anything, he would have known more about her than anyone else, including things that Hinda didn’t confide in anyone else, that she had kissed Zalman Kamionker, and that it had been quite different from kissing father or mother after bentching on Friday evening. He had put his tongue in her mouth, an idea only that meshugena could have come up with, but it hadn’t even been unpleasant, ‘like a little soft animal’, Hinda confided in Uncle Salomon, and if she blushed he couldn’t see it anyway. Kamionker had already found work in Zurich; he knew how to use a sewing machine, and nobody could have predicted that. ‘He can do everything,’ said Hinda.

  François never came. Worrying about someone who wasn’t even aware of it and couldn’t be grateful for it was utterly pointless as far as he was concerned.

  Twice Pinchas and Mimi came from Zurich. There was something out of the ordinary about them, Arthur noticed immediately. Pinchas now walked along very close to his wife, as if to protect her, and Mimi was unusually nice to Arthur, stroked his head and mussed his hair. She even brought him some presents, once a red and white candy cane, and once a kaleidoscope with little coloured shards of glass that kept assembling themselves into new patterns. She called him ‘Cousin Arthur’, and then had to hold a handkerchief up in front of her mouth, it made her laugh so much. When she saw her father lying there, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and his tongue hanging out, she burst into tears and said, ‘Mon Dieu, ah, mon Dieu.’ But she didn’t cry for long. Then she had to shut herself away with Chanele in Chanele’s room and talk to her for ages.

  Mostly Arthur was alone with Uncle Salomon. He sat for hours on a chair beside his bed, always bringing a book along and never reading it. He had understood that Uncle Salomon was going to die, and he wasn’t even afraid of it. In fact he was afraid of missing the exact moment when someone was living and then they weren’t, because Arthur had decided to become a doctor, not just an ordinary doctor, but the kind who makes discoveries and whom people travel from far away to come and see. If you managed to observe the moment of death, it seemed to him, if one could observe it very precisely, it must also be possible to find a cure for it. Thomas Edison had made 493 inventions, probably even more than that by now, and every time he had started with a very simple observation.

  Now Arthur always ran home after school as quickly as he could, and was first to go into the sewing-room. Then when he heard regular breathing he was reassured and relieved.

  He had already made one discovery, and a very important one, in fact. Dr Bolliger, who had come every day at first and later only twice a week, had even said to Chanele, ‘He’s extended your father’s life with that.’ Uncle Salomon wasn’t Chanele’s father, but it would have been too complicated to explain that to the doctor.

  Arthur’s discovery went like this: at first it had been impossible to feed Uncle Salomon. He didn’t notice if you put a spoon into his mouth, and the soup or milk just flowed back out of it. Or if it didn’t run back out his breath would suddenly stop, and he had to straighten the heavy body and slap it on the back. ‘You’re not the kind of woman one has to mince words with,’ Bolliger had said to her, and Arthur had pressed himself very quietly into the corner lest he be sent from the room. ‘Your father will not die from a sudden blow, but from a lack. And not from hunger, but from thirst. Man can survive for a very long time without food, in India there are supposed to be fakirs who don’t eat a mouthful for forty days, but thirst is something quite different. If your father can’t take any fluids . . .’ He had moved his head meaningfully back and forth, and Chanele had said, ‘Perhaps it’s better that way.’

  But then Arthur made his discovery. He had experimented, just like Edison, he had tried out all possible methods and then happened upon it: if you pressed the full spoon down on the tongue a little, at a very precise spot very far back, Uncle Salomon swallowed, or rather: his throat swallowed. It didn’t work every time, but Arthur became more and more skilled at it, so Uncle Salomon didn’t go thirsty, and Dr Bolliger said, ‘You have quite an unusual boy there, Frau Meijer.’

  One could not have said that Arthur took over the care of his uncle all by himself; without fat Christine, who could straighten Uncle Salomon up or turn him over as if he were no heavier than a bag of onions, he couldn’t have done it. But it was Arthur who spooned fluid into the helplessly gaping mouth, mostly luke-warm broth whose recipe came from Aunt Golde, made from a whole pound of stripped flank. Arthur suggested trying the special drink that was known in his family as Techías Hameisim tea, but Dr Bolliger explained that the cloves and schnapps would be too irritating for the unconscious man’s throat. ‘The swallowing reflex is still there, but we don’t want to check whether the coughing reflex is still working.’ Arthur was proud that the doctor addressed him as an equal, almost as one specialist to another. The only other person who had ever taken him so seriously was Uncle Salomon.

  Chanele praised him for looking after Salomon so touchingly, but the truth was that Arthur enjoyed the long hours by the dying man’s bed. Just sitting there and listening to the even breathing gave him a feeling of usefulness with which he was otherwise unfamiliar. Arthur, the late addition, in fact considered himself superfluous, someone who had only come into the world when everything was already finished and distributed. Now at last he had a function, a task that he hadn’t had to take away from anyone, and which was entrusted to him gladly and even gratefully. He always pushed his chair very close to Salomon and sat there quite still, often long past his bedtime. And because his bar mitzvah was approaching, he chanted the whole of the sidra to Uncle Salomon again and again, with all the blessings and haftorohs; he recited the droosh, of the mitzvot that are bound to time, and from which women are therefore exempt, and repeated the whole thing so many times that Cantor Würzburger rapped him on the head with his knuckles in astonishment and said in pointed High German, ‘Look at this one, has the little door opened?’

  If anything changed in Uncle Salomon’s condition, Arthur was always the first to notice. Even before anyone else spotted anything, his nose told him it was time to call Christine to clean the bed again. Uncle Salomon had been put in nappies, extra large and specially made for him in the tailor’s shop at the Modern Emporium, and when they were being changed, Christine would often pat the old man’s backside and say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, that’s better, isn’t it, that’s better.’

  Salomon was looked after with great attentiveness, ‘in an almost exemplary fashion,’ said Dr Bolliger, you could tell that amongst the Jews the family still meant something, say what you like. None the less, one day there was that rotten smell, which Arthur was of course the first to catch. It was an open sore that came from lying down for a long time, and which ointments did nothing to help. Uncle Salomon regularly had to be turned, from his back onto his side, and from his side back onto his back, ‘like a piece of meat to be roasted on all sides,’ Christine said to Louisli. Even so, the smell got stronger, Dr Bolliger’s face grew thoughtful and Arthur felt guilty.

  And then, on the morning of 20 August, on the eighth of Elul of the year 5653, Salomon Meijer stopped breathing. It didn’t happen as Arthur had expected, there was no gradual weakening or fading away. Uncle Salomon’s last breath was no different from all the others before, it was sure and steady, but no others came after it. Otherwise nothing at all had changed, the eyes were open, and the tongue that hung out of the mouth was still damp, but under the canvas the ribcage no longer rose and fell, and the rotten smell, to which Arthur had almost become accustomed, suddenly acquired a completely new meaning.

  Nothing had happened that could have become a discovery. It was only that something had stopped happening.

  Arthur came out of the room, ‘ver
y quietly’, as Chanele later told Mimi, and said, ‘I think we should call the chevra.’

  The men of the funeral fraternity were soon there; they had been expecting Salomon Meijer’s death, and everything was ready. One of the men screwed up his nose and said, ‘It was high time.’

  That Sunday evening, when the corpse had long since been carried from the house and old Herr Blumberg, who had drunk away his fortune and now performed any duties asked of him, was keeping watch over him in the cemetery, the news came in that the vote had been lost, and the prohibition on shechita was now part of the constitution. Janki said, ‘That’s all we need!’ and later, whenever anyone talked about shechita, Arthur couldn’t help thinking about his dead Uncle Salomon.

  Nothing unusual happened at the funeral, except that Herr Strähle, the hotel director, in ignorance of the more austere Jewish practices, sent a big wreath. Fat Christine and Louisli later plucked the flowers from it and used them to decorate their attic room.

  For the shiva, Janki had the big table with the tropical wood top taken to the store-room; in its place the low stools for the mourners were arranged. Then the family sat there for a week, as people in Biblical times had sat on the floor as a sign of mourning, but what one sensed in them was less grief than relief.

  Many visitors came, including some who had never known the beheimes trader Salomon Meijer. Arthur opened the door to everyone and pointed them to the dining room. No one had told him to do this; he had simply got used to having a task. Janki was delighted with every new arrival. He liked to be an important man in the Baden community, someone to whom respect was paid by participating in his loss.

  None of the guests had put themselves out at home and cooked a meal for the mourners. Given that the family had its own cook, the old custom no longer really made any sense. But they did bring bread and cakes, more than could be eaten.

  Although Chanele was not a real daughter, she sat with them there for the whole week, and no one was bothered by the fact. On the other hand some people raised objections to Mimi. Frau Pomeranz, they said, was not making the sort of face suitable for such an occasion. And in fact it could not be denied that Mimi was happily and absent-mindedly smiling away to herself the whole time.

  Uncle Melnitz arrived with the visitors too, sat down and didn’t get up again. Pinchas, who had entrusted the butcher’s shop to his co-partner for the whole week and stayed in Baden, nodded to him, while Janki assiduously ignored Melnitz and looked at him only very covertly out of the corner of his eye. ‘If we just don’t take any notice of him,’ he thought, ‘sooner or later he’ll have to work out that he has no business here, that he’s dead and buried once and for all and no longer belongs in the present.’

  But Uncle Melnitz sat where he was, and even if he didn’t say anything, he involved himself in the conversations by his mere presence.

  Such a shiva is not only devoted to the shared commemoration of the dead, but also gives the bereaved the chance, in the long hours that they spend sitting together, to discuss everything that needs to be sorted out after a death. They quickly agreed that Chanele should take over the closure of the flat in Endingen, and that the small profit to be taken from it should go to the shnorrers that Salamon had so liked to look after in the last years of his life. A few of them had even turned up at the shiva, confident that grief might open the money bag.

  Pinchas asked to be able to pick out anything useful to him from the books of the deceased. There would not be a great deal, that much was clear, because Salomon had not been a scholar in matters religious, and the writings that he had bought in his dotage on the subject of gematria belonged largely in the sphere of superstition.

  The only argument centred on the Shabbos lamp that hung over the dining table in Endingen, and which both Mimi and Chanele would have liked to own. This good piece was made of brass and fitted with a device whereby the lamp could be lowered – ‘lamp down, worries up!’ – and then hung higher again after the end of Shabbos. It was filled with oil, and then the seven wicks burned from Friday evening until Saturday night, because on the Sabbath itself lighting a new light is of course forbidden. For Mimi, this lamp symbolised everything to do with home, all the security of her parents’ house, and it had a special significance for Chanele as well. For all those years it had been one of her tasks to prepare the lamp every Friday and clean it again every Sunday. The two women engaged in their debate in unusual manner: each insisted that the other should take the lamp, and out of pure concern and generosity they nearly came to blows. In the end they agreed that the lamp would go to Baden for the time being, but that it should not be hung there; in that way the difficult decision was put off until later.

  When everything had been discussed and sorted out, and when, as is often the case during the last days of a shiva, a little boredom was already beginning to spread, Pinchas suddenly cleared his throat and said he had something important to tell the family. Now of course everyone knew about Mimi’s pregnancy, even if no one had officially mentioned it, and they were therefore preparing to put on the expressions of fake surprise that people like to wear so as not to spoil the joy of the bearer of good news. But Pinchas wanted to say something quite different.

  ‘Now that the prohibition on shechita has been introduced – and we have the anti-Semites to thank for that! – much in my job will change. One will have to travel abroad once or twice a week, to Strasbourg, perhaps, that remains to be seen, to perform shechita there and then import the meat back into Switzerland. That will take a great deal of time. Or else we will not be able to do our own slaughtering at all any more, and will have to prepare meat brought in from somewhere else. Either way, I will no longer be able to be a butcher as my father was.

  ‘He could still be proud of the fact that he was a shochet. But I . . . After that meeting in Endingen, after the terrible atmosphere there, which may be partly to blame for Salomon’s death, who can say, after all that hatred that one encountered there – Chanele, you were there and can confirm it – and now, after the result of this plebiscite, after this decision, which was not made for the protection of animals, we all know that, and not out of love of God’s creation, but simply out of a dull feeling of hostility because the Jews are bad people who need rapping over the knuckles . . . After all that I simply don’t want to do it any more. I will sell the butcher’s shop to my co-partner. Elias Guttermann is a hard worker, and he makes smoked meat even better than I do.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Kosher groceries. There’s also a need for such a shop. I’ve discussed it with Mimi. She thinks I’m meshuga . . .’

  ‘Un tout petit peu fou,’ said Mimi without a hint of reproach.

  ‘. . . but I think that now is the right moment to start something new. One will perhaps earn less, but what is very important to me right now: I will have more time. For Mimi and . . . Well, I’m sure you’ve all noticed.’

  Now at last they were allowed to say ‘mazel tov!’, they could slap Pinchas on the shoulder and kiss Mimi on the cheek.

  Only Uncle Melnitz made a serious face and said, ‘You’re running away. But that’s our style, of course.’

  35

  Arthur’s bar mitzvah wasn’t as big a party as might usually have been expected. On Friday they had still been sitting shiva and receiving visits of condolence, and on Shabbos they were supposed to be suddenly cheerful? What sort of impression would that make? The people in the community would think their grief for Uncle Salomon hadn’t been genuine. ‘We’ll do what’s absolutely necessary and not a step beyond,’ Janki had decided. ‘Arthur will understand that, he’s a sensible boy.’

  The actual reason was that they had just had enough of shared experiences, happy or unhappy. On Sunday morning Salomon had died, and that same afternoon Mimi and Pinchas, summoned by telegram, had arrived in Baden, and since then they had all been crammed into the same flat, which while it might have been spacious, wasn’t in fact all that spacious, they sat side by side on their mourni
ng stools all day and got far too close to one another at mealtimes; at the little tables that were only really designed for drinking tea, you almost bumped each other’s elbows. On Friday afternoon, when the men from the chevra at last collected the low stools again, and kindly helped bring back the long dinner table from the store-room, everyone tried to hide their relief, but each one of them in his own way longed for the everyday. Chanele wanted to get back to her shop and Pinchas to his butcher’s business, where much needed to be discussed because of the planned handover to Elias Guttermann. Mimi worried at length about whether Gesine Hunziker, who hadn’t been working for her for long and had not been properly introduced to her tasks, whether this girl from the country had paid due attention to business, perhaps they would return to a veritable brouhaha, ‘et tout cela dans mon état’.

  Throughout these days, François had worn his guardedly polite expression, the mask he always took out when something wasn’t to his liking. For him, the week of mourning was only a continuation of the strict regime that Janki had imposed on him and which, quite contrary to François’s expectations, hadn’t simply been cast into oblivion. When he wasn’t even allowed to go to the pub in the evening, with a few other young people who all had exactly the same moustache as he did, when it was quite certain that no more mourners were due to arrive, he complained that in this family you were treated like an under-age child, at any rate he couldn’t wait to get out of this musty prison as soon as possible, regardless of how. When Chanele merely smiled, he was insulted and didn’t say another word all day. The visitors who saw him sitting there with a pinched face took it for grief.

  Janki had been given the task of informing all outside guests who had been invited to the bar mitzvah seudah that they very much regretted not being able to enjoy their company, but in view of their tragic loss they had decided to spend this day in thought, and in the closest family circle. The letter was also sent to Herr and Frau Kahn from Zurich, who were on the list along with their daughter Mina. Even though Chanele had taken a great deal of trouble to persuade Janki that personal contact with the biggest silk importer in the country might be useful for his companies, she didn’t protest when he declined. One must take things as they are. On the other hand, Hinda, who was otherwise always the family’s little ray of sunshine, did not seem to have responded well to her enforced proximity to her relatives. She argued with her father about the letter of refusal, and even raised her voice. All because the same letter had also been sent to Zalman Kamionker.