Rubric 1914, between Marceau and Milleret.
But for now the dead had to be their own monument.
There, in the place where they began their search, lay the fallen of 1917. It was a long journey from the end to the beginning of the war, but François and Pinchas did not allow themselves a shortcut, but paced out the line of graves in the sequence in which they had been laid. Always one row to the left and a row to the right.
1917.
1916.
1915.
The closer they got to them, the more often they had to bend to decipher the names. In those few years the letters had faded, just as memory fades, in which someone is at first a hero, but then only a corpse, a name and then nothing at all.
On some graves there lay the remains of flowers. As they decayed, they emulated the fate of the men for whom they had been brought.
Then they found him. Meijer, Alfred. 1914.
François bent down to the grave, as clumsy as an old man. He ran his right hand through the dried leaves that the wind had formed into a mound. The actual mound of the grave had long since become one with the ground again.
He picked up a stone from the ground, not a pebble, as is customary in Jewish cemeteries, but a sharp-edged piece of rock, of the kind that repeatedly comes to the surface, however carefully ploughed it is. But there was no gravestone on which he could lay it as a sign of commemoration, so he just dropped the stone, which sank into the pile of rotten leaves.
François rose to his feet very slowly. His back would not fully straighten.
‘Please, Pinchas,’ he said.
‘I don’t know if it’s right.’
‘Is anything right in this world?’ said François. And then, after a pause, ‘It’s what Mina would have wanted.’
And so it was that Pinchas Pomeranz spoke the Kaddish at a Christian grave, Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey raba.
The Kaddish for Alfred Meijer, who had been made a Christian, and a Swiss citizen, from which he had benefited not at all.
The Kaddish for a Jew with a cross on his grave.
1937
55
The tables had been cleared; only Chanele and Arthur were still sitting there. The nice woman with the hygienic white bonnet had wanted to take her tablecloth away, but Chanele had refused, quite violently, as she sometimes did, and the woman had nodded pleasantly and just wiped down the bluish-white oil-cloth with a sponge.
Bluish-white meaning milky food.
‘It’ll be breakfast in a minute,’ said Chanele, even though she had just eaten her bread and butter and drunk her malt coffee. ‘They will bring you a plate as well. Please join us.’
She was usually at her most alert shortly after getting up. That was why Arthur liked going home early when he visited his mother in the old people’s home in Lengnau. The last time she had asked him to go with her to the cemetery, and even though he knew that she had forgotten that wish long ago, he still felt obliged to fulfil it for her.
Janki had come from Alsace back then, so he wasn’t from one of the two old Jewish communities. Still, he had insisted on being buried in the cemetery shared between Endingen and Lengnau, not in Baden, where he had lived for so long, and certainly not in Zurich, his last, unloved dwelling place. He and Chanele had explained the fact that they had moved there anyway by saying they wanted to be closer to the children, but it was probably more important that Janki’s leg had got worse over the years, and he didn’t trust small-town doctors. Now, at the University Hospital they couldn’t help him either, even though they had tried to do so shortly before his death of necrosis.
All the old furniture, even the big mahogany table, had been sold long ago by then. Arthur had only asked for the Tantalus, in which the golden fluid was evaporating more and more. The old Shabbos lamp from Endingen, about which Mimi and Chanele had never been able to agree, now hung over Hinda and Zalman’s dinner table in Rotwandstrasse.
Chanele hadn’t given up her butter knife, and held it menacingly in her fist as if arming herself for an attack.
‘Why didn’t you bring the children?’ she asked.
‘I have no children, Mama.’
‘You could have brought them.’
She had lost none of her persistence. Much else that had seemed exactly as inseparable a part of her had flaked away from her without really changing her, just as one can still discern the broad form in a weathered sandstone monument.
Physically, too, Chanele had become smaller. She had complained about this change, three and four times – just as she said everything three and four times, without being aware of the repetition – she had complained that the hem of her skirt dragged on the ground and she tripped over it, the fabric must have stretched, poor quality, she would complain to the supplier. François, who had become a good son now that Chanele was no longer aware of it, had finally had an exact copy of the old dress made in his tailor’s workshop, cut slightly smaller, but no different in any other way, the same severe black, with the same old-fashioned lace trim around the collar. To make the new material familiar to her, he dabbed it himself with the expensive eau de cologne that Chanele had been given by Janki in Westerland that time, and which she had used even since his death. That way she could go on dressing as if she were going to work at the Modern Emporium and not just to breakfast at a table for six in the Jewish old people’s home.
‘Why didn’t you bring the children?’
‘I have no children, Mama.’
‘You could have brought your wife.’
‘I’m not married.’
Chanele smiled slyly; she had known that, of course, and had just wanted to test his memory. A little game to see if the boy was listening.
‘Of course not. Shmul is the married one.’
As ever, it took Arthur a few moments to work out who his mother meant by that name. It was a long time since François had been called that.
‘At least he always brings his wife.’
‘Mina is dead, Mama.’
‘He brings her,’ Chanele insisted, and Arthur didn’t contradict her any further. Perhaps, in her world, she was right.
‘Hinda’s married too.’ You had to know Chanele very well to hear the timid request for confirmation in the apparent statements of the obvious that she made like this one. In her better moments, she knew that there was much that she no longer knew, but the attitude that she always preserved was part of the core of her being, and would probably be the very last to go. Only her eyebrows betrayed her: every time she worried away at some uncertainty, she raised them quizzically. Over the years the unbroken line had turned white, and in her wrinkled face, because Chanele still wore the same dark sheitel, it looked as artificial as the stuck-on cotton-wool eyebrows of the St Nicholases who had just paraded through Zurich.
‘Yes,’ Arthur confirmed. ‘Hinda is married.’
‘And she has children.’
‘How many?’ He couldn’t help asking the trick question.
‘Not as many as I would like,’ said his mother. A triumphant smile darted over her face. She wasn’t as easy to catch out as that.
‘What’s the eldest one called?’
‘Tell them to bring me my breakfast.’ In a gesture reminiscent of old Salomon Meijer – except that apart from her there was no one left who remembered him – she rubbed her hands together as if washing them without water, reached for her knife again and drummed impatiently on the oilcloth with the other. When Arthur asked her for a second time what her eldest grandson was called, she didn’t listen.
Didn’t want to listen.
In January, for Chanele’s eighty-fifth birthday, they had all come to the old people’s home in Lengnau. Ruben, the son of Zalman and Hinda, had been there too, although without his family. He had been worried that the German authorities, who were coming up with fresh kinds of anti-Semitic bullying every day, wouldn’t let him enter the country again. A few years previously he had taken a post as rabbi in Halberstadt, a centre of Jewish
Orthodoxy, where he held the office of deputy and, he hoped, future successor of the famous Dr Philipp Frankl at the Klaus Synagogue. His wife, who looked eternally youthful even under her sheitel, and who was only ever called Lieschen, even by her own children, was a Steinberg from Berlin; Ruben had met her when attending the rabbinical seminar there. They had four children, three boys and a girl, a fact upon which Zalman tended to comment by saying that his son had outdone him in this respect at least.
Ruben could only spend three days at home. A longer absence would have been construed as definitive emigration, and he wouldn’t have been allowed back in the country. Germany was trying to get rid of its Jews, and using its bureaucracy to that end. They had told him over and over again not to stay in that dangerous country, and to come back to Switzerland with his family, but Ruben, who had even assumed German citizenship as a precondition of his office, and renounced his Swiss nationality, wanted on no account to leave his community in the lurch at this difficult time. ‘They’re bullying us, of course,’ he said, ‘ but we Jews are used to that. It’s not as if they’re about to kill us.’
‘Ruben!’ said Chanele with sudden recognition. ‘Ruben and Lea and Rachel. Three children.’ Sometimes a window opened unexpectedly in her head and then, for a few minutes or, if you were lucky, half an hour, she was almost herself again. ‘Why are we actually still sitting here?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Breakfast is long past. You’re always dawdling.’
She threw the knife on the table and said, as strict as she had often had to be when she was Madame Meijer, ‘When they clear away they always leave half of it there. I shall attend to it later. Not now. We should be going.’
It wasn’t a memory that made her say that. A coat that seemed familiar to her lay ready on the back of the chair, and she had drawn her conclusion from that. Time and again she managed to bridge the gaps in her reality with such deductions. These little successes made her quite boisterous, so for once she dared to wander out quite far on the black ice of confusing facts.
‘Are we going in the Buchet?’ she asked.
‘Not quite, Mama.’
Arthur didn’t really need a car. His practice kept him busy, but most of his patients lived nearby, in a shabbosdik walking distance around the new synagogue in Freigutstrasse in Zurich Enge. There were so many of them crammed into the area that neighbours said, ‘God must have sent them here for our sins.’ So he didn’t need a car for his patient visits, and he could have come to Lengnau on the coach. No, if he was honest, Arthur had bought the car out of pure pleasure, had convinced himself that one could afford to treat oneself every once in a while, if one worked all day and had no family.
As if a car could replace a family.
He had chosen a new Italian model, a tiny Fiat with room for only two people. There was a third seat only when the weather was fine; then you could roll back the window and the extra passenger in the back could sit more or less straight. The car had been painted bright red, and Arthur was insanely proud of its thirteen horsepower.
Chanele sat beside him, her hands folded girlishly in her lap in accordance with the eternal diminutive of her first name. It was how she would have sat in a carriage next to a strange coachman, taking inconspicuous care not to touch him. Before he set off, Arthur leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. The familiar, dear smell of her skin was overlaid with something that reminded him of the sweat-drenched sheets of fever patients.
‘Ruben, Lea, Rachel. Ruben, Lea, Rachel.’ Chanele sang the three rediscovered names over and over to herself, a descending triad.
‘Lea is called Rosenthal now,’ Arthur tried to help her. ‘Do you remember her husband? Adolf?’
That was two decades ago now. It had even been before the end of the war, a few weeks before Lea’s – and of course Rachel’s – twentieth birthday. The whole family had been surprised that she, always the more reticent and, if one was going to be honest, also the less pretty of the two, came under the chuppah so much sooner than her lively twin sister. Dr Adolf Rosenthal, her husband, was a few years older than she, but today everyone who saw them together thought they were the same age. Perhaps that was down to the thick glasses that Lea now needed.
Adolf was a maths and geometry teacher at the Cantonal School, a job that suited him down to the ground. He loved precision, in his convictions as much as in his habits. Lunch, for example, had to start at exactly ten minutes past twelve, so that one could set one’s cutlery down at precisely half past, to hear the radio news. Nuances were not his thing; as far as he was concerned there was a wrong and a right opinion about everything, and he was able to put forward the correct one in long monologues with irrefutable logic as long as one accepted his premises. So he was the only one in the family to have read Mein Kampf from the first page to the last and drawn hope from it. A system, he argued, that was constructed upon a pamphlet of so many inner contradictions, was simply unsustainable. When he lectured away, Lea just raised her eyebrows and at such moments looked like her grandmother Chanele.
They had a son called Hillel. According to his papers his name was Heinrich, but quite unlike his Uncle François, he only liked to be addressed by his Jewish name. He was an enthusiastic Zionist, and was already making plans for his aliya, which led to violent arguments with his very Swiss father. The worst blow for Adolf was that after secondary school Hillel refused to learn one of the usual professions of the community. ‘In Eretz they don’t need accountants or sales representatives,’ he said. ‘Eretz’ means simply ‘land’, but for a Zionist there is no other land than this one. ‘Farmers are what they need in Eretz,’ said Hillel, and registered for the agricultural school in Strickhof, where as a child of the city and the first Jew in the school’s history he was marvelled at like a calf with two heads.
‘Ruben, Lea, Rachel. Ruben, Lea, Rachel.’ Chanele’s thoughts had got into a circular track; they chased after one another and couldn’t keep up. Arthur knew that this could go on for hours. Sometimes she sang songs like that until she was hoarse. He braked sharply and then accelerated again straight away, so that the car gave a sudden jolt. The monotonous song broke off and Chanele said crossly, ‘You should fire this fellow Landolt. His driving is very erratic.’
‘What about Rachel? Does she visit you?’
‘Of course. She always brings her children along. Not like you.’
Rachel had no children.
She was single, and the family was even more surprised by that than by Lea getting married so quickly. With her adventurous openness Rachel had attracted men from an early age, and soon fallen in love for the first time, and then a second, third and fourth time. Nothing had ever come of it. She had, Chanele had put it when she was still Chanele, fallen in love not with men, but with being in love, and once that first euphoria had passed she could not be satisfied with everyday happiness. Now she was nearly forty, an age that no woman likes to pass through unaccompanied, and she became irritable when Hillel called her ‘Aunt Rachel’. Her vociferously demonstrated love of life – one wasn’t living in the nineteenth century, after all, and didn’t have to hide oneself away as a single woman – had lately assumed a shrill undertone. She worked in Zalman’s clothes factory, a business that had effectively founded itself a few years previously, and as she liked to stress, she was completely indispensable there.
They had now reached the cemetery, a little way off the road on a wooded slope. Arthur wanted to help his mother up, but she turned her head away so as not to see the offered arm. ‘I’m not an old woman,’ the gesture said. ‘A Madame Hanna Meijer does not need any help.’
A hint of snow still lay on the solid, frozen ground. Chanele poked searchingly around among the graves, murmuring quietly to herself; it might have been a prayer, or just the attempt to conjure up a forgotten name. She walked unheedingly past the double grave of Salomon and Golde, which she had visited so often. Arthur, who didn’t want to move too far away from her, hardly had time to bend down and, as custom dictates, set a pe
bble down on the grave.
Chanele stopped among some strange graves and said in a tiny, helplessly confused voice, ‘They aren’t here any more. Someone has jumbled everything up.’
‘Who are you looking for, Mama?’
‘Mimi and Pinchas. I married her husband, but she was still my friend.’
Sometimes Chanele was very confused.
‘Uncle Melnitz lay in bed with me . . .’ She broke off abruptly, looked at her son with empty eyes and asked reproachfully, ‘Why didn’t you bring the children?’
Aunt Mimi and Uncle Pinchas had died of the same illness within forty-eight hours of each other. That was in the winter of 1918, when the wave of Spanish flu had luckily seemed to have ebbed away, and had then swept across Europe for a second time, and with twice the force. Arthur remembered that time as if it were a bad dream. He had really sacrificed himself for his patients, and had still been able to do nothing for many but close their eyes. Mimi had died first, and Arthur had thoughtfully had to lie to Pinchas, whom he liked very much, for another two days, and told him that she was on the way to recovery. Now they lay side by side in Steinkluppe cemetery, and if Arthur had known them at all, Pinchas was still incredibly happy that they were so close even after his death.
Désirée had taken over the grocery shop, and ran it even today. She was still unmarried. In her case, unlike Rachel’s, this seemed quite natural.
Arthur took his mother by the hand. She allowed him to lead her like a little girl to the broad stone with ‘Jean Meijer’ carved into half of it, while the other half had waited more than fifteen years for Chanele. ‘Here lies Papa.’
‘His leg hurts,’ said Chanele, and was quite happy when Arthur confirmed that yes, that was right, Janki had always had problems with his leg.
‘That was from the war,’ said Chanele.
‘Yes, Mama, Papa was in the war.’
He put a pebble in her hand. She didn’t set it down on the grave, but put it in her mouth, sucked on it for a while and spat it out again. ‘Janki doesn’t like the taste of it,’ she said.
Melnitz Page 60
