‘Who . . .?’ asked Désirée and gulped before she could finish the sentence. ‘Who are you?’
‘Don’t you recognise me?’ said the student. He belched, almost brought his hand to his mouth and then waved it away wearily: completing the movement was too much of an effort. ‘I’m Alfred. Alfred Meijer. The goy.’
37
‘Scandaleux,’ said Mimi.
She said it for the fourth or fifth time during this late breakfast, while buttering her matzo with such furious ardour that it crumbled to tiny pieces on her plate. The satin bow that fastened her dressing gown of Turkish-patterned muslin at the throat with gaudy elegance fluttered into the void for a moment and then settled once more on her bosom. Mimi had not grown fat, certainement pas, but she had, the closer she came to sixty, assumed certain matronly qualites, ‘statuesque’ would have been the word in the novels that she still liked to read, and it gave her, as she repeatedly noted in front of the mirror, a certain dignity. Her face was still smooth, a condition that she eagerly supported with powders and creams; only on either side of her mouth, below her slightly doughy cheeks, did two deep wrinkles stretch down to her chin, the kind that life draws on the face if one has had much to endure; other people have no idea.
‘Scandaleux,’ Mimi repeated. ‘Of course he was drunk. At their pub crawls, or whatever they call them, they drink beer like pigs from a trough. Such impudence, simply coming in and joining us at the table! As if he were part of the family!’
Désirée had lowered her eyes and was concentrating hard on a tiny chip in her coffee cup. You don’t use your very best crockery for Pesach, it just sits in the attic all year waiting for someone to bring it down for a week. If you ran your fingernail along the edge of the cup, it always made a quiet, almost inaudible clicking sound when you reached the crack. ‘He is a relative, though,’ said Désirée without looking up.
‘Not one of mine. Kinship is something different. You have to bear in mind where he comes from, this . . . this student.’ Mimi uttered the word with such revulsion as if she couldn’t find a more contemptuous one in the dictionary. ‘Even Chanele – you know I love her, may she live to be a hundred and twenty, but she’ll only ever be a foster-child. And Janki . . . a grandson of an uncle of a grandfather. If that’s mishpocha, then I’m related to the whole world. A stranger. Stood outside our door in Endingen in the middle of the night like, like . . .’
‘Like Alfred yesterday?’
‘Alfred!’ Mimi’s fury had immediately found a new direction, like a dog chasing a new odour trail. ‘What sort of a name is Alfred!’
‘He can’t do anything about that. My name is Désirée, although . . .’
‘Although? Although?’ When Mimi became annoyed, she got bright red cheeks like a stout market trader.
‘Sorry, Mama,’ said Désirée, although she had said nothing she needed to apologise for.
‘Just outside the door.’ Mimi’s rage went on bubbling away, as milk goes on foaming even after you’ve taken it off the flame. ‘And he was so bold as to sing along.’
During the Hallel, Alfred had sat there in silence. A chair had been found for him, and Rachel had even had to fetch a pillow, from her own bed, because pillows and cushions are part of a Seder evening. But he didn’t lean back, he sat there with his back straight, both feet planted firmly on the floor, like someone who was about to get up and leave at any moment.
They had all tried not to stare at him, whether out of politeness or embarrassment, who could say? Only Ruben stared at his cousin the whole time, as he might have stared at a piece of pork that had landed on the Seder table after an intricate sequence of chance events – more unusual situations arise in the elaborate examples in the Talmud. ‘You are a treyf goy and have no business here,’ the expression was supposed to say.
Had anyone looked at him like that in his fraternity’s regular haunt – although Ruben could not have known this – Alfred would have immediately challenged him to name his second. Here he didn’t even notice the looks. Nor did he seem to hear the twins exploding with mirth time and again, however much they pressed their napkins to their mouths in a vain attempt to control themselves. He just sat there, rocking gently back and forth. Back and forth.
Like someone shockeling.
Once, just as the others were chorusing ‘Omeyn!’, a belch escaped him. He leapt to his feet, clicked his heels together and seemed about to launch into an apology. But then he forgot what he had wanted to say, looked around with confused eyes and sat down again.
Arthur took off his glasses and pressed his fingertips against the bridge of his nose. ‘The poor boy doesn’t know where he belongs,’ he thought. ‘That’s the most terrible thing that can happen to anybody.’
Hinda had taken Mina’s hand and was gripping it very tightly. The gesture said, ‘I know how you are feeling right now,’ and Mina was grateful for the pious lie. Of course Hinda, to whom nothing really bad had ever happened in her whole life, couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on in her sister-in-law’s mind, but consolation draws its power not from understanding but from good intentions. So Mina’s son was suddenly sitting at the table, an only child, in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong world, drunk and chaotic and ridiculous, and she couldn’t throw her arms around him and press him to her, she couldn’t just kiss away his confusion, as she had kissed away his little hurts when he was a little child. She could only look at him. All her life she had had to look at everything.
Zalman, the master of the house, tried to act as if nothing at all had happened. He didn’t really succeed. He sang the Hallel more loudly than necessary, and after the fourth cup he wiped his lips with ostentatious nonchalance. Then they had come to the very last part of the Seder, the medieval songs that no longer have any ritual significance, and which you only sing because they’ve always been sung and the evening would be incomplete without them. They sang the ‘Adir hu’ and very suddenly, at ‘bimheyro, bimheyro’, Alfred joined in with the song. He hadn’t been at a Seder for seven years, and he had only sung with his fraternity brothers, ‘Gaudeamus igitur’ and ‘When the Romans got too bold’. But now a memory had welled up in him, perhaps because he was too drunk to avoid it, and he sang along with the others as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Ruben immediately fell silent; in his severe youthful religiosity it felt like a sin to sing a song praising the mystical qualities of God along with someone who had been baptised. But not even Uncle Pinchas wanted to be a part of this silent protest, so at the next refrain he joined in with the chorus with renewed vigour. Ruben had a rough voice into which the occasional squeak crept, as if, even though he was old enough for the yeshiva, his voice hadn’t quite finished breaking.
Alfred, on the other hand, intoned the old melodies with a velvet-soft baritone that made you forget his beer breath and inappropriate suit. He had closed his eyes now and smiled to himself as he sang. ‘A little boy,’ thought Désirée.
They sang the songs with all the repetitions. Towards the end of the next song, an Aramaic round about the lamb that the father bought for two zuzim, they all fell silent as if by mutual agreement and let Alfred sing the last repetition on his own. He actually remembered – seven years! – the whole backward chain of events by heart, he had the slaughterman kill the oxen, and the oxen drink the water, the water put out the fire, the fire burned the stick, the stick struck the dog, the dog bit the cat because it had eaten the lamb that the father had bought for two zuzim, the lamb, the lamb.
After the last song of Seder there is always a moment of awkwardness. One has followed the prescribed ritual for a whole evening, one has pursued a familiar path and must now find one’s own direction again. On this evening – what distinguishes this night from all other nights? – this feeling was particularly strong. They all looked at Alfred, who still sat there rocking gently and listening to his own voice. Then Alfred opened his eyes, not like someone waking up, but someone who’s been star
tled, he looked at them and got to his feet, clicked his heels and said, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t belong here.’ And walked to the door, as bolt upright as drunks sometimes walk, and belched once more and was gone.
‘Scandaleux,’ said Mimi.
Désirée’s fingernail circled the rim of her cup.
With any luck Papa would be home soon.
In the prayer room of the Israelite Orthodox Community morning-service ended a little later than it did in the big synagogue on Löwenstrasse. Here all the traditional interpolations and additional prayers were treated with great precision; after all they hadn’t only split from the big community because of the harmonium and the women’s voices in the synagogue choir. They wanted to preserve the traditional Ashkenazi traditions, without exception, because if one stops filling up the holes in a dam for as much a day, sooner or later the floods will be unstoppable.
Pinchas had not joined the religious society at first. With excessive correctness he had feared he might be accused of self-interested motives, because of course the Orthodox members of the dissident congregation were the best customers a kosher provision merchant could have. But that had been almost twenty years ago, and there had been no tensions between the two communities for ages. He had even been offered the chance to stand for the board, but – again for fear of losing one half of his customers – he had so far always turned it down. Perhaps if they asked him again . . .
The sun was already quite warm on this spring morning, so the little groups chatting outside the prayer hall broke up slowly. It was a perfectly normal day all around, an apprentice was pushing a trolley-load of parcels to the post office, a drayman was heaving barrels from his cart, and in the middle of this sea of workaday bustle, two solemnly dressed men stood on an invisible island, holding by the hand two children in their party clothes, doffing their gleaming top hats in a gesture of farewell.
As they did so they revealed the little black caps that they wore under their hats, lest they stand disrespectfully bareheaded for as much as a moment. Arthur was almost the only one wearing an ordinary black hat. That was usual among bachelors, except that in this community very few men of his age were still bachelors. Even though he wasn’t a member, he had recently taken to accompanying Pinchas to the prayer hall on Füsslistrasse, where he was considered pious in his own way, because he was still often seen standing there even after the congregation had finished its prayer, eyes closed, apparently deep in worship. In reality Arthur was just mechanically turning the pages in the prayer book when his neighbours did the same, and using the murmuring regularity of the service to pursue his own thoughts, thoughts that turned in a circle, in an endless circle around the same central point that he didn’t dare to approach.
He had of course – it didn’t even have to be stated openly, so obvious was it – been invited to Pesach breakfast by the Pomeranz family. ‘The ladies won’t have waited for us,’ said Pinchas. ‘When Mimi is hungry, she is hungry, and Dr Wertheim says she should eat when she feels like it, she needs that in her condition.’ Arthur knew Dr Wertheim as an elderly colleague, who was particularly popular among patients who weren’t really ill, because he recommended spa cures rather than diets. Mimi’s ‘condition’, he assumed, would not be found in a medical handbook but was, in spite of all the strains that her late motherhood had brought with it, no more than a handy excuse to avoid unpleasant duties and always to do exactly what she happened to feel like doing. But he just nodded and said, ‘Maybe we could do a little detour. There’s something I’d like to show you.’
On the way to the other side of Bahnhofstrasse, of course, their conversation turned to Alfred’s surprising appearance at the Seder. It was one of those events that you have to bat back and forth over and over again until it has found its suitable place in the museum of family memories. ‘If I had been in Zalman’s place,’ Pinchas said, ‘I would have thrown him out. But I wasn’t the master of the house.’
‘Why would you have done that?’
‘Such a thing is inappropriate,’ said Pinchas, and among Jews that is a formulation that brooks no argument.
They walked a few steps in silence, side by side. Arthur greeted a patient who came towards him with a shopping basket over her arm, and she looked in surprise at the young doctor who had put on such a solemn suit on a perfectly ordinary day. ‘Someone close to him must have died,’ she thought.
‘I have some sympathy with the boy,’ said Arthur.
‘He isn’t a boy any more. He must feel extremely grown up in his student finery. We should be grateful that he didn’t bring his sword as well.’
‘He can’t do anything about who he is.’
Pinchas looked at Arthur in surprise. ‘Why so vehement?’
‘You’re all attacking him, while in fact . . .’
‘It was Pesach, and he’s a goy.’
‘Because he’s been turned into one. It’s bad not to know where one belongs.’
‘You’re not going to find out by getting drunk.’
They nearly had an argument, but as always in such situations Arthur relented. Afterwards, he knew already, he would be unhappy with himself for doing so. Luckily they had reached the window display that he wanted to show Pinchas. It belonged to a tiny shop on one of the alleys leading up to the Rennweg, and was hardly big enough for the magnificently embroidered flag displayed in it. It was white and blue, the shimmering matt silk run through with gold threads. ‘Take a look at that!’ said Arthur. ‘That’s exactly what we need!’
‘Herrliberg Rifle Guild,’ Pinchas read. ‘What do you have to do with them?’
‘Not this flag, of course. A flag like it. The same quality, I mean. I’ve looked into it. It has to be cotton velvet, with a particularly thick nap, and flag rep, pure silk. The thread is called Japanese gold. It’s the most expensive, but it will still be shiny in a hundred years.’
‘Why do you need . . .?’
‘For the Jewish Gymnastics Association. Without a proper flag we’ll look ridiculous at any gymnastic festival.’
‘I didn’t think you were still a member?’
‘No, in a way I am,’ Arthur said, looking surprisingly embarrassed. ‘That is: very involved, in fact.’
It had been three or four years ago that Arthur, who had always dreaded gym class at school, suddenly took a great interest in sport. He had joined the Gymnastics Association, newly founded and much derided, and become a very active member. His family had only shaken their heads, particularly when he chose wrestling as his personal sport, because Arthur had never shown any particular talent in physical matters. ‘He considers each step until he trips over his own feet,’ Uncle Salomon had once said of him. Surprisingly, he turned out not to be particularly clumsy, perhaps because his specialist anatomical knowledge proved useful in wrestling, and there was a special hold, the neck wrench, with which he had on more than one occasion felled an opponent stronger than himself. He even won the Association Championship in the Greco-Roman style, even though his opponent, a sturdily built apprentice called Joni Leibowitz, was generally held to be the favourite.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, Arthur’s enthusiasm for the sport had vanished again, and if you talked to him about it, he just replied with a shrug and an embarrassed smile.
‘I’m no longer active,’ he explained now, ‘haven’t been for ages, but an association like this needs a doctor, and I said I was willing . . .’
‘Is it one of the doctor’s duties to organise a flag for the association?’
‘I just thought . . .’ Arthur had blushed for no reason at all, a weakness from which he had suffered even as a child. ‘You could help me,’ he said. ‘You write for the Israelite Weekly News every now and again. If they published an appeal . . . To raise some money. A flag like that is expensive.’
‘How expensive?’
‘Very expensive,’ said Arthur and blushed again.
It was quite customary to save the money for an advertisement by placi
ng a free classified, and there was no reason why Pinchas shouldn’t do him that small favour. ‘That can be done,’ he said. ‘But right now I’m hungry. Every year for days in advance I look forward to the first matzo breakfast. A thick layer of butter and then strawberry jam on top.’
Outside the house – Mimi and Pinchas now lived on Morgartenstrasse – a deliveryman stood squinting at the doorbells like someone who can’t read and is using his short-sightedness as an excuse.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Pinchas.
The deliveryman pushed his red and black cap, whose brass letters identified him as number forty-six, to the back of his head, and rubbed his forehead dry with a stained handkerchief, even though it wasn’t at all hot. ‘I’m supposed to drop off a letter,’ he said at last, ‘But he doesn’t seem to live here.’
‘What name?’
‘Meijer,’ said the deliveryman, and added, with the face of a scientist who has just made a great discovery, ‘You know, it’s funny. There are so many people called Meijer, but when you have to look for one, you can’t find him.’
‘Could I see the letter?’
The deliveryman pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his uniform jacket, took a step back and, facing away from Pinchas, his torso bent shelteringly forward, studied the address, a schoolboy who doesn’t want his neighbour copying from him. ‘His name is Meijer,’ he said after a while and nodded several times. ‘With a very odd first name.’ He held the envelope so close in front of his eyes that his whole face disappeared behind it. ‘Pinchas Meijer.’
‘In that case the letter must be for me,’ said Pinchas.
‘Is your name Meijer?’ the deliveryman asked suspiciously.
‘My name is Pomeranz.’
‘The letter is for Meijer.’
‘My name is Meijer,’ Arthur butted in.
‘And you live here?’
‘No,’ Arthur began. ‘I’m . . .’ The deliveryman started turning his head back and forth, very slowly from left to right and back again, as if to say, ‘I’m far too clever to fall for con-men!’ so Arthur decided a white lie was called for. ‘Yes, I live here.’
Melnitz Page 41
