Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘And your name is Meijer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pinchas Meijer?’

  ‘To an extent,’ said Arthur.

  As he left, the deliveryman was convinced that something not quite right had occurred. He hadn’t even been given a tip. He couldn’t have known that on feast days Jews aren’t allowed to carry money in their pockets.

  They opened the letter at the dining room table, where Mimi and Désirée were still sitting over their late breakfast.

  Dear Uncle Pinchas,

  I remember so much, and I still can’t remember your surname. I’m just writing ‘Meijer’ on the envelope. You were always Uncle Pinchas to me, and I hope you won’t mind if I continue to call you that. I still remember the stories you told us when I visited you to play with Désirée. One of them was about a fish so big that sailors lit a fire on it and had a picnic. Back then I believed in that fish, and in a way I still do.

  You once told me you had a tooth missing, and the doctor gave you an artificial one. I was to guess which one it was, and I couldn’t find out. They all looked the same, and yet one was false and the others were real. I couldn’t understand that at all.

  I also remember that you promised me a very special present for my bar mitzvah. I never got it.

  I’m no longer drunk, even though all this may read as if I am. We had to celebrate the opening of the new university building with German colleagues, and didn’t leave the pub for three days.

  I’m writing this letter to apologise to you and Aunt Mimi and Désirée. I behaved incredibly badly, and it didn’t just have to do with the drinking. Sometimes there are moments

  The sentence ended there, without a full stop or a comma, and what came next had plainly been added later: the same handwriting, but in a hand much more angular and controlled.

  I beg you to forgive me, and promise that I will never again trouble you with such a ridiculous performance.

  Respectfully yours

  Alfred Meijer

  Pinchas carefully folded the letter as one folds a document that one is going to need for a trial. Arthur had taken off his glasses and was rubbing his nose. Désirée seemed to be counting the matzo crumbs on the tablecloth.

  ‘Scandaleux,’ said Mimi.

  38

  François had only employed his chauffeur because his name was Landolt. He had previously been his coachman, and François had bought him a chauffeur’s cap and a pair of leather gloves and organised driving lessons for him.

  ‘Where can they be, Landolt?’ he could say now, or, ‘Faster, Landolt’, and because it was a sour joke, pickled in vinegar, as it were, it stayed fresh for a long time. He could equally well have got himself a dog, some mutt off the street, and called it Landolt, but dogs just whine if you treat them badly, and put their tails between their legs.

  A human being was better.

  His Landolt had sticking-out ears. From the back seat it looked as if the grey cap was wedged in between them. The shaved back of the head above the collar of the dust coat was pimply and inflamed. He was an ugly person, this Landolt.

  That was another reason why Janki had employed him.

  ‘Everything satisfactory, Landolt?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Meijer.’

  If he leaned forward, he could see beyond the back of the driver’s seat how tightly Landolt had to grip the steering wheel. Sometimes, after a long journey, he had blisters on his hands.

  Which was fine.

  Of course it would have been more comfortable to take the train to Baden. One wouldn’t have got so dusty, and Mama would have picked him up at the station. She always enjoyed being on her own with him for a few minutes, even though they usually didn’t talk, but just walked along in silence side by side. Sometimes he thought, ‘One could explain to her how everything came about.’ But he owed no one an explanation.

  No one.

  The car was a Buchet, with a radiator that looked like a gaping mouth. French quality. François had never become Swiss, unlike Arthur, and he had no plans to do so, either. Why conform when you get nothing from it?

  Once they had covered the journey from Zurich to Baden in three quarters of an hour. François loved those moments when the cloud of dust that you pulled behind you gave you a sense of speed. If necessary, the car with its heavy iron springs could also cope with potholes and bumps in the road. A car was something for people who refused to be held up. It was all about power. Twenty-five horsepower. François liked the thought of twenty-five horses having to strain to take him to Baden.

  Buchet engines were even put in aeroplanes.

  ‘Faster, Landolt!’ he said, and had to repeat it in a louder voice because the engine was making such a racket. Landolt.

  They had met twice, and on both occasions Landolt had been polite. He had got to his feet when François came in, had offered him a chair and held out his cigarette case. Dark brown leather with an engraved gold family crest. François hated him for it.

  ‘You have made me a very interesting proposal,’ he had said.

  Landolt owned a plot of land – he owned a lot of them, but there was this one, this particular one – a plot of land that had always belonged to his family. ‘Always,’ he said, and it sounded almost like an apology, as if the Landolts had stood outside of history without having to do anything, once rich, always rich. There was a squat, elongated building on this particular plot, a former workshop or factory, with narrow windows, long obscured, and dirty green, moss-covered roof tiles. A ruin in a prime location, just a stone’s throw from the Paradeplatz. Forgotten and abandoned, because you didn’t need to do anything with it.

  Not if you were a Landolt.

  François had walked past this plot so often that it almost belonged to him. He knew exactly where the entrance to his new department store would be, two massive double doors that had to be open whenever the weather permitted, so that you had no option but to walk in, not just into a shop, but into a world where you could stroll around and gasp with amazement and buy lots of things. He had paced out the length of the shop windows, each one four and a half metres long, and had already envisioned the displays, not goods crammed together as if in a general store, but generous ensembles, designed by artists.

  He had already counted the customers.

  Business wasn’t going badly, far from it. None the less, it was all very limited. It was called a department store, but when it came down to it you were still standing behind the counter and had to bow and scrape each time you made a sale. That wasn’t what he wanted, he had other plans, he had always had, much bigger, and he would see to it that they were realised. One man walks on foot, another buys a Buchet. Eventually, he had firmly decided, he would get hold of the property near the Paradeplatz, regardless of the cost. Even then Landolt had been an old man, a sickly old man, and his inheritors would . . .

  One of Landolt’s grandsons was in the same student fraternity as Alfred. They were getting closer to one another.

  Once Alfred had his doctorate . . . Dr. jur. Alfred Meijer. He should have been given a second first name, as was the practice in America. Dr. jur. Alfred D. Meijer.

  D for Department Store.

  Our junior head, Dr Meijer.

  Eventually.

  For now Alfred was a freshman, and François was almost prouder of the term than his son was. And he didn’t mind if Alfred stayed up all night with his fraternity and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. That was bound to happen. For now the important thing was that he was meeting people there. One had to belong.

  That at least had been right.

  That at least.

  The Buchet had slowed down, and now came to a standstill on the main road, still pulsing and quivering as if the machine could sense François’s impatience. Two cows whose ribs could be counted blocked the way, and the farmer’s boy who was supposed to take them to the field, or to the butcher or the knacker, just stood there, switch in hand, and stared at the automobile as if he’d never seen on
e before.

  François leaned out of the car and had to stretch until his hand reached the rubber bulb of the horn. The noise was too loud, half bleat and half groan. The cows didn’t even look up – as if their own horns were too heavy to lift, they were so thin – and then at last they set off, leisurely old ladies who stretched out each movement to fill as much of their empty days as they could with their few errands.

  ‘Now drive, Landolt!’

  He had made a quite respectable offer. Nothing trivial. Mina’s dowry had not been inconsiderable, and had grown still further along with the business. Janki was also prepared to top up his silent partnership. Everything had been discussed with the bank, even though Herr Hildebrand there had said, ‘They won’t sell you the property; you’ll see.’

  And then Landolt coughed into his handkerchief and said, ‘A very interesting proposal that you’ve made to me.’ And offered him a chair and held out his cigarette case.

  How he hated that man.

  ‘You can do your sums, that much is obvious,’ said Landolt. ‘Everything you’ve written there makes sense. It’s almost a shame . . .’ He turned his cigar around in his fingers, puffed on it and had all the time in the world. Studied the glowing ember as if he had just invented fire.

  ‘. . . almost a shame that we can’t go into business together.’

  The plot, Landolt explained, belonged to a family trust. He himself, and this had been stipulated, as the eldest of his generation, had sole discretionary power, he could sell if a sale seemed appropriate, but he had certain rules to observe.

  Superannuated rules, perhaps, he wouldn’t argue about that right now, but none the less binding for that. And one of those rules – ‘It really is almost a shame!’ – was that one did not do business with people of the Mosaic faith.

  ‘Is it really laid down in those terms?’ François had asked.

  And Landolt had studied his cigar, whose ember still didn’t strike him as perfect, and had replied, ‘There are things that you don’t have to write down.’

  ‘That’s the only reason? If I weren’t a Jew, would you sell me the property? At that price?’

  ‘In principle, yes.’

  That had been the moment. The precise moment.

  It was seven years ago now.

  Already seven years.

  There was suddenly a rotten smell in the air. Probably the rapeseed that was already blossoming in a field.

  ‘Drive faster, Landolt!’

  It was the first time in his life that François had thought about his Jewishness, and he moved the vague sense of his membership of the community around in his personal accounts book, entering it now in one column, now in the other, and got a different result every time. He weighed up loyalty against usefulness, compared old habits with new opportunities and started one new calculation after another. Nothing like faith appeared in any of them, because he had never had faith. If such philosophical concepts had been part of his world, he would probably have described himself as an agnostic, someone who considers it a waste of time to ask questions for which there are no answers. According to ancient Jewish practice the name ‘God’ was never put down on paper out of sheer awe of the sacred, one writes ‘G-d’. For François, this traditional lacuna had always meant something quite different from respect: there was simply nothing there. Or to put it another way: everyone was free to put whatever they liked in the gap.

  These were unfamiliar trains of thought for him. All through his life he had given more thought to his moustache – for years he had worn it short, no longer as striking as it had been in Baden – than to his religion. For him, being a Jew had been just as natural as the fact that he had brown eyes, or that his hair had turned grey far too soon.

  It was just how it was.

  But hair could be dyed, and he could hide his eyes behind a pair of glasses.

  Mina had a paralysed leg, but as long as she stayed sitting on her chair, no one noticed.

  Not that his Jewishness was the same as a handicap, of course not. But a handicap it sometimes was. The business with the plot of land was just one example among many. Situations had repeatedly arisen in which it would have been more useful to be called Huber or Müller. Things were easier for a Meier than for a Meijer.

  And a Landolt could afford to do anything he liked.

  A stone thrown up from the road struck the spokes of the back wheel. It sounded like a string breaking in a piano.

  ‘Be careful, Landolt!’

  He didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even to Mina. Even though they’d been talking to each other more and more often for some time, and that had been unexpected. At the time he had married a dowry, and Mina had come with it, a bale of satin fabric with last year’s pattern that you have to take if you also want the fashion material currently in demand. Their marriage had been a business deal, an honest, clean transaction. She had acquired a husband, and he the chance to start a company at a young age. He had fulfilled his part, he had always been a decent husband, even though Mina, with her paralysed leg, wasn’t really presentable. If he cheated on his wife, he did it so discreetly that she didn’t have to notice if she didn’t want to. But then, very gradually, he had got used to her, the way people who keep pets get used to a dog; he had even started missing her if he came home and she happened not to be there.

  At first he had only sometimes thought out loud, had summed up in words a problem or a decision that needed to be made, and he had certainly not expected a comment from Mina, let alone a solution. But Mina could listen the way other women play the piano or arrange flowers, she had turned it into an art form, so that when telling a story one found the answers one had been looking for all by oneself, before having them confirmed by Mina. She was a good person to talk to.

  An outsider would probably have observed that in the course of his marriage François had gradually fallen in love with his wife, that familiarity had gradually turned to affection. But there was no more room for the word ‘love’ in François’s vocabulary than there was for ‘faith’ or ‘blind trust’. Human beings – and this reflection would also have been alien to the businessman François Meijer – can feel more than they can say.

  He told her nothing about Landolt. Only that the purchase of the property had fallen through. But another solution would be found sooner or later.

  There was nothing to discuss, either. For the time being he was only collecting information. Purely theoretically. Just in case. An imaginary manoeuvre, nothing more. A general doesn’t go straight into battle just because he’s working on a strategy.

  Even the conversation with Pastor Widmer had been nothing more than that. A conversation, nothing more. Just because you’re talking to people doesn’t mean you’re making plans with them.

  He had just happened by the church. If the property by Paradeplatz was not to be had, he would have to look for another one. He would have to stroll through the city without a precise goal in mind. Look at the people and see them as customers. Where did they keep going? Where did they stop? If you want to cast a net, you have to know where the fishes swim.

  He had gone in purely out of curiosity. A tourist passing an interesting ruin in a strange city. He had never been inside a church before. It wouldn’t be all that different from a synagogue, but since there was one there . . . He just had time.

  Entirely by chance.

  His first impression was a great disappointment. He had always imagined a church as something magnificent, all colours and paintings and fragrances, but apart from the brightly coloured windows this was just a bare hall, high and narrow and forbidding, a building with pursed lips, you might say.

  No incense in his nostrils, just dust and the waxy solution that was rubbed on the pews. It was how his schoolroom had smelled after the summer holidays.

  You entered by a side door; they probably opened the main entrance only on Sunday. The first thing you caught sight of was a wooden stand holding texts and brochures. ‘Too many goods in too tig
ht a space,’ François noted with a practised eye. Bad for profits. Over-filled shelves signal to the customer that there’s no special hurry to buy.

  Grey unadorned walls, stone blocks that looked damp but weren’t. At the back a loft with organ pipes. No galleries to the side. Men and women weren’t separated here during the service.

  François couldn’t imagine sitting next to Mina during prayers. But that was out of the question in any case. He was just here by chance.

  Purely out of curiosity.

  They didn’t have individual seats for the members of the congregation as they did in the synagogue, just long benches in which, François imagined, people probably came unpleasantly close to one another.

  No little desk to set down books and tallis.

  Stupid. As if they would need a tallis here.

  Why shouldn’t François just sit down? He had been walking through the city for ages, and his legs were tired.

  There was even a special board to rest your feet on. Not really comfortable, it seemed to him. But perhaps the construction had another purpose.

  Of course.

  ‘I would never kneel,’ thought François. ‘I would feel ridiculous.’

  A pulpit had been fitted to one of the pillars that held up the barrel vaulting. Stuck on like an afterthought. Among the Christians, François remembered, you weren’t born a priest, you could become one.

  You could become anything you liked.

  Old Kahn, as his name suggested, was a Kohen. François had always found it hard to see Mina’s father as being in any way holy just because he pulled his tallis over his head when giving the priest’s blessing. Perhaps the Christian system wasn’t all that silly.

  Purely theoretically. Not that it had been his intention.

  At the front to the right, where the rabbi would have sat in a synagogue, a panel of numbers was fasted to the wall. ‘124, 1–4, 19, 1, 2, 6.’ Every religion had its secrets.