Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Zalman wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Just leave it be,’ he said. ‘I am a peaceful man, but when people get solemn on me I get furious.’

  ‘It was a nes min hashamayim!’

  ‘Then thank the Lord,’ said Zalman and went back to sleep. That was the only exchange on the matter that ever passed between father and son.

  When they had passed the border, Ruben spoke the prayer after a danger has passed.

  He wanted to get out in St Gallen to send a telegram home. In Austria that had been forbidden for fear of espionage: secret information about force levels and troop deployments might be concealed behind apparently harmless words. But the walk to the telegram office would have taken too long, the train would have left without them, and they would have arrived in Zurich four hours later.

  So no one collected them at the station, and in fact they were both glad of it.

  On the way to Rotwandstrasse they received hostile and disapproving glares, because they were wearing ill-fitting clothes, and it was obvious that they had just been on a long journey. There were already enough refugees in Switzerland, the glances said, where the war had caused enough hardship already.

  But the streets were full of traffic and the shop windows full of goods.

  The closer they came to home, the slower they walked. One can also be afraid of things that one has long yearned for.

  When they were outside the door, Ruben kissed the mezuzah, the little capsule with the verses of the scripture that all Jewish families fix to the front door of their flat or apartment. Only then could Zalman ring.

  It was Rachel who opened the door, and when she saw them both she screamed so loudly that Hinda thought she was being attacked and came running out of the kitchen with a frying-pan in her hand.

  ‘You are even more dangerous than a Cossack, Frau Kamionker,’ said Zalman.

  Then no one said anything else for a very long time.

  54

  By the start of December 1914, Alfred’s military training was declared complete. Admittedly, the time scheduled for it was not yet over, but the war was going badly, and the fatherland needed every man it could find.

  He was assigned to Infantry Regiment 371, and he and the other young soldiers were inoculated against typhus, because the whole battalion was to be posted to Indochina. But plans had changed, and they were sent instead to Alsace, not far from the Swiss border, where the regiment was given the task of re-establishing the connection, interrupted by German troops, between Aspach-le-Haut and Aspach-le-Bas. Alfred was waiting with his comrades at the assembly point near Thann, for transport to the front, when a stray French shell exploded beside them.

  He died instantly.

  At induction the recruits had been asked for an address to which the news should be sent in the event of their heroic death. Alfred had written Désirée’s name on the envelope. The practice of using these pre-addressed envelopes was later abandoned; they saved time, but it proved damaging to morale on the home front when families had to take the news of their son’s death out of an envelope written in his own handwriting.

  The letter was delivered to Morgartenstrasse by Frau Reutener, a notoriously nosy individual who stood in for the postman while he was on active service. She met Mimi on the stairs, and when she had fished the envelope from her bag she said, ‘So, so, Frau Pomeranz, from France,’ in the tone that one uses when one would like to have an answer from the other person, but is prevented by convention from asking the question. Mimi said ‘merci’, stressing the second syllable correctly in the French style, to distinguish it from the vulgar Zurich ‘märsi’, and disappeared into the flat without satisfying Frau Reutener’s curiosity.

  Since he had been called up, Alfred’s communications had all arrived censored, as one could tell by the sloppy strips of paper with which the opened envelopes had been sealed again. No one had opened this letter. A Frenchman would have known immediately what that meant: it was a official letter, and in these days that could not bode well.

  Mimi, for whom the war was far away, didn’t know this rule and didn’t worry.

  She had acquired a certain skill in opening envelopes over the hot steam from the kettle, because even though she had announced quite clearly and distinctly from the start that she would keep a personal eye on her daughter’s correspondence with the unloved Alfred, one couldn’t do such things too conspicuously. Lately Désirée had been inclined to burst into tears at the drop of a hat in any case.

  Mimi read the letter and at first didn’t understand it, just stared at the letters and could find no meaning in them. ‘Sur le champ de bataille,’ it said. ‘En defendant sa patrie.’ ‘Sans avoir souffert.’ None of it made any sense.

  When she could no longer resist comprehension, the crazy idea ran though her head, ‘If I didn’t understand French, Alfred would still be alive.’

  She didn’t faint, as they did in plays at the Municipal theatre, but considered quite calmly and objectively what needed to be done now. Only in the cold wind of the December morning did she realise that she had run out of the house without her coat and hat.

  It was Wednesday, when there were never very many customers. Mimi knew that on such days her husband liked to leave the shop in charge of his daughter and Frau Okun, and sat down at his Gemara. Since Zalman had come back from Galicia, Pinchas had had more time for it; previously the Refugee Relief Association had occupied every free minute. He had had to organise accommodation and modest financial support for several dozen people.

  A classroom of this kind is a purely masculine refuge. Mimi had only ever ventured into it before when it was used for an alternative purpose, such as the obligatory receptions at bar mitzvahs or engagements. Now she came charging in, without even noticing the disapproving glances of the other students.

  She set the letter down in front of Pinchas, and her lower lip trembled like that of a little girl who has experienced something so terrible that she doesn’t even have the courage to cry.

  Pinchas looked at her, looked at the letter and didn’t understand a word. Only now did it occur to her that he didn’t speak French.

  In a quavering voice she started translating, just as one renders the tanakh into German in cheder: a short fragment of sentence, followed immediately by its translation. ‘J’ai la lourde charge – I have the sad duty – de vous announcer – to inform you – que le soldat Alfred Meijer . . .’

  Le soldat Alfred Meijer.

  Sur le champ de bataille.

  Pinchas rubbed his forehead as he did when a difficult passage in the Talmud refused to yield up its meaning. Then he praised the judge of truth and asked the only question that remained to be asked at that moment: ‘Does Désirée know?’

  Mimi shook her head. She yearned to be able to weep at last, but everything inside her was dried up.

  That they did not go straight to Désirée was only partly down to cowardice; François’s department store was really on the way. Regardless of how one felt about him in other respects: you must shake the hand of a father who has lost his only son, and say a few consoling words to him.

  Mimi knew the little door in the laundry section. The lady with the severe hairdo who tried to stop her she simply pushed aside. Pinchas asked her with a gesture to forgive his wife’s haste.

  François was sitting at his desk with his hands over his face. He was thinking about business problems, but Pinchas and Mimi couldn’t have known that, and thought it was grief.

  He reacted brusquely to the disturbance. ‘I know that Alfred has been writing your daughter love letters in secret. But it has happened behind my back. If I hadn’t happened to see Mina at the counter in the post office . . .’

  He hadn’t heard.

  Neither Mimi nor Pinchas could find the right words. Mimi just held the letter out to François, but he waved it away and refused to read it and repeated, ‘I’m telling you: behind my back.’

  When he finally understood, he said in bewilderment, ‘But I bought him Swiss citizens
hip.’

  And only then did he start screaming.

  He shouted only one name, and it wasn’t the name of his son.

  ‘Mina!’ François shouted.

  Désirée read the letter standing behind the counter, as if it were a shopping list.

  She read it without a break, the way one reads something that one knows already and only has to call to mind. ‘J’ai la lourde charge. Sur le champ de bataille. Sans avoir souffert. Veuillez accepter, Mademoiselle, l’expression de ma profonde sympathie.’ Capitaine Waltefagule had never met Alfred, but he had still added the sentence: ‘Il était beaucoup apprécié par ses camarades.’ There were instructions for the writing of such letters.

  Désirée read twice and three times. Mimi wanted to take her in her arms, but her daughter stepped away from her. Then she folded the sheet up very slowly and put it back in the envelope, which bore her name in Alfred’s handwriting, which she knew so well. She went to the drawer with the sweet bonbons that no one wanted to buy, opened the drawer, covered the letter with bonbons, really buried it underneath them, then took a handful of the little caster-sugar-covered balls, rosewater and almonds, and held them out to her parents.

  ‘Would you like one?’ she asked. ‘They’re very sweet.’

  Only now did Mimi remember how to cry.

  Mina, who had been an onlooker all her life, listened in silence as she was told of the death of her only child. She sat by her husband for seven days and held his hand. It was not a real shiva – how could a goy sit shiva? – but they were together and thinking of Alfred. When François was urgently needed in the shop, she stood in the doorway and straightened his tie. That was the last time he saw her.

  When he came home in the evening, Mina had disappeared, she had just left, without saying goodbye, leaving only a note that said in her neat handwriting, ‘I’m going to my son.’ Whether that meant that she was trying to go to France or something much worse no one could tell. Although her limping gait was a striking characteristic, Mina was never found. ‘She could have drowned in Lake Zurich,’ the police said, but there were no clues suggesting that either.

  It was as if there had never been a Mina.

  The worst thing was that life simply continued. It should have been like the kinematograph, when the film gets caught in the projector and stops, when the heat from the bulb eats its way into the picture, at first there’s just a patch, then a hole that gets bigger and bigger, a brown-edged nothing into which everything that was on the screen only a moment before disappears, faces, heads, people, loving couples, when the pianist goes on playing at first before noticing that there is nothing more to accompany, when he lifts his hands from the keys, mid-tune, unfinished and with no closing chord, when everyone shouts for the projectionist and the light in the theatre comes on and everyone sits there, not having quite returned to the real world, thinking about how it would have continued.

  If it had continued.

  That was how it should have been. But the world didn’t stop.

  Désirée kept going to the shop, weighed pearl barley and wrapped salted herring in newspaper full of reports on the war, listened to the chit-chat of the customers and was considered particularly polite because she herself didn’t want to speak. No one outside of the family knew about her secret love, so she didn’t need to listen to any messages of condolence, which would have been nothing but empty words.

  Once a customer asked if they sold those old fashioned bonbons, the ones that tasted of almonds and rosewater, and Désirée said, no, they didn’t have those any more and they weren’t being supplied either.

  When François came back to his department store after the week of mourning, he didn’t let anyone talk to him about his twofold loss. He plunged himself into his work, sat at his desk until late at night and now slept almost always in his office. ‘He can’t stand it at home any more,’ his staff said, and felt their suspicions confirmed when François sold his villa in the university quarter, for a very bad price, because it was a time when there were no buyers for such objects.

  But his feelings were not the reason for the sale. François, who everyone was convinced was a rich man, urgently needed money. Since the start of the war the turnover in his store had declined by almost half; people were buying only absolute necessities, and even that they were putting off for as long as possible. With the little money that the men sent home from the occupation of the borderlands, the store wasn’t about to go from strength to strength.

  That could all have been borne, they could have scaled down, shed staff, allowed the business to hibernate to some extent. But there was also the fact that François had got into serious debt buying the plot of land. According to his contract with Landolt’s heirs the deposit would lapse if he failed to pay the agreed instalments on time, and when the Kantonalbank, with many words of regret – ‘This is just how times are, Herr Meijer, you must have some understanding!’ – terminated a credit, that was exactly what happened. François was not completely ruined, he kept his department store, and things improved eventually too, but the plot of land on Paradeplatz, the plot of land that had defined all his plans and considerations for so many years, that plot of land went to someone else.

  All he was left with was a drawn plan on which a stone lion guarded the city coat of arms and impatient customers waited outside the door.

  A plan that Mimi’s heels had torn holes in.

  For the last twenty years, the whole lifetime of his son Alfred, François had been working for nothing.

  On 11 November 1918 the Armistice was signed in Compiègne. According to its conditions the Germans were to withdraw from Alsace-Loraine, and as soon as that had happened, François went to Pinchas and asked him for a big favour.

  Pinchas hesitated at first. He sat over his books for a whole night and tried to find guidance for his decision. But there are requests that one cannot turn down, however much one might give never to have heard them.

  The Buchet had stood jacked up in the garage of the department store all throughout the war. Now François got it going again. In Alsace most railway tracks were still destroyed; the automobile was the only way to get there.

  François drove himself. He had fired his chauffeur Landolt long ago, with a surprisingly generous final payment. The car wasn’t easy to steer, but François endured the pains in his arms as part of his penance.

  During the long journey the two men said very little to one another. Although they were both thinking of the same thing, they were thinking about it in quite different ways.

  In Mulhouse the after-effects of the war were still tangibly apparent, and they had to share a hotel room. When Pinchas put on his tefillin for morning prayer, François looked awkwardly aside, as one studiously ignores another person’s nudity.

  Without agreeing in advance, they both did without breakfast. As soon as it was light outside, they were already sitting in the car again.

  For several weeks during the war the front line had passed precisely between Mulhouse and Thann, and the road on which they were driving had been fiercely fought over. One could still imagine that the narrow avenue must once have looked very picturesque, even though it was now lined with ragged, splintered trees. Some of them were already showing green shoots again.

  Thann was an unprepossessing little provincial town, or rather it had once been an unprepossessing little provincial town. Then, with the clearsightedness that the war always brings, the armies had recognised that its houses were not really houses at all, in fact, but cover for enemy soldiers, and had systematically shot them to pieces.

  The big square in front of the church, or in front of what the gunners on both sides had left of the church, had once been the assembly point for newly arrived troops. Now the rubble of the demolished houses piled up there into good-sized mountains, shattered gables here, burnt wood there. For once it was not the residents but the stones of a town that had gathered there, as if to discuss how things would go from here.

 
An elderly gentleman with the armband of an auxiliary gendarme with a severe expression ensured that no one offloaded his rubble on the wrong mountain. Where chaos had long prevailed, rules and regulations could only be beneficial.

  When François and Pinchas asked the way to their destination, at first he looked at them suspiciously. But then François’s Swiss German accent convinced him that these were no Boches in front of him, and he kindly gave them information. So take the next left past the mairie – ‘You can still read the sign, even though there’s only a wall left of the building’ – and then carry straight on, to the little stream with the improvised bridge of wooden planks. Not across the bridge, which would probably not have supported the weight of the car – ‘A lovely automobile, by the way, a Buchet, am I right?’ – but turn right and keep on the path along the water. ‘Or even better: leave the car by the bridge and walk the rest. The wheels might sink into the mud, you see. A lot of people have been there recently.’

  The path was lined with a blackthorn hedge. The little violet-blue sloes still hung from the branches. François couldn’t stand the silence and said: ‘They should have been picked after the first frost.’

  He received no reply.

  When they had reached their destination, François took off his hat. Pinchas shook his head, and he put it back on.

  The cemetery wasn’t fenced; it wasn’t really a proper cemetery. They had just taken a field where once maize or rape had grown. Certainly not the best kind of ground; peasants are economical people, and corpses bring in no income.

  Later they would set up a monument here, perhaps a martial sandstone poilu, watching alertly towards the East, his gun ready in his hand. Once a year they would lower a wreath at his feet, always with the same ribbon and the same speech. Then they would also carve all the names into an imposing plinth, arranged by year, and alphabetically within each year. Then it would be easier to find an Alfred Meijer.