The kosher clothes factory had sent a delegation, and Sally Steigrad was there, who went to all his customers’ funerals. Wicked tongues said you could tell the extent of the life insurance from his facial expression by the graveside. In this case there was an additional, to some extent official reason for his presence: he had in the meantime become honorary chairman of the Jewish Gymnastics Association, and Janki had been flag sponsor after his big donation, and so Chanele effectively the co-sponsor.
Not many people came from Endingen, which was closest; since it had been possible to live anywhere, the old Jewish communities had shrunk. On the other hand, a whole busload arrived from Baden, mostly old women who wanted to take a look at the descendants of the Shmatte-Meijers. With a lot of significant nodding, they confirmed to each other how good the service had been in the Modern Emporium in Chanele’s day, much better than it was now the wealthy Schneggs were in charge, but then the Schneggs didn’t feel the need to encourage their employees to be polite.
They generally kept their distance from Frau Olchev and the other representatives of the old people’s home. Their presence was too potent a reminder that new rooms were always becoming available in Lengnau.
Very surprisingly, at the last minute, Siegfried Kahn arrived, Mina’s brother, whom Aunt Mimi had wanted to match up with Hinda many, many years previously. He stayed apart from the rest and didn’t say hello to anyone, to demonstrate that he was here only to pay his respects to Chanele, and not to the rest of the family. During the short ceremony he turned his owlish head, now grey, quite malevolently towards the place where François stood with his brother and sister. ‘A goy has no business at a Jewish funeral,’ his eyes said. ‘Whether he is the son or not.’ Still, François had been sensitive enough not to have a tear made in his jacket as a sign of mourning, as Arthur had done. That wouldn’t have been at all appropriate. François wore a black coat with a beaver-fur collar, and in the opinion of the old people from Baden he looked particularly un-Jewish.
The only family members missing were the ones from Halberstadt. It was possible that Ruben didn’t yet know anything about his grandmother’s death: for some reason the telephone call they had booked immediately had still not come through. They had now sent him a telegram, but so far he hadn’t replied.
They were all really mourning, which isn’t necessarily the case at funerals, for Chanele, although not for the Chanele of the last few years. With her death, she had become once again in all their minds what she had once been.
If one is unused to crying, it can easily tear one’s face apart. Hinda was born to laugh and didn’t know how to deal with tears. She wore her pain like a disguise, as if she had bought it quickly without spending very long choosing it, as she had done with the hat with the little black veil.
Zalman listened to the rabbi’s hesped with a critical expression. Sometimes, when the speaker got unnecessarily lost in commonplaces – ‘Eyshes chayil, loving wife, exemplary mother’ – without being aware of it, he shook his head disapprovingly and seemed to be preparing the arguments for a contradiction. He had always been particularly close to his mother-in-law; Chanele had been his ally from that first evening, when – ‘If it’s not negotiable!’ – she had forced him to make a formal proposal to Hinda.
Lea, who was standing beside her father, went on tugging nervously at her coat or straightening her hat. Something didn’t seem to be quite right, because the people, particularly the ones from Baden, were staring at her and whispering. She could even feel the glances on her back, like the touch of tiny fingers. She should have taken more care with her clothes: the old people of Baden, most of whom had previously known the Kamionker twins by name at best, now agreed how much Lea, with her eyebrows that met in the middle, looked like her grandmother, may her memory be blessed. You had to imagine her without the glasses – Chanele had never worn them, even when she was very old – but then it was, God preserve her, the spit, the very same punim.
Lea’s husband would have liked to give the whisperers a good telling-off, as he would have done at school. But Adolf Rosenthal had no say here. If you’ve only married into a family, at levayas you’re inevitably a marginal figure, a role that didn’t suit him at all. He stood stiffly among the others, almost insulted, and had to confirm his authority by digging his son in the ribs a number of times to make him stand up straight.
Hillel was wearing his old Shabbos suit, and didn’t feel at all comfortable in it. During his time at the Strickhof he had developed new muscles, so that the fabric bulged all over him. He felt as if with this disguise people were trying to force him back into a role that he had outgrown once and for all. He felt like Böhni in it. Still, he had successfully resisted the peaked cap that his father had tried to force on him, and instead insisted on the little embroidered kippah that identified him as a Zionist.
Rachel wore a dark grey suit from the winter collection of the Kamionker Clothes Factory. Her hat was too elegant for a funeral, but should one really wear an ugly one only so one didn’t put people’s noses out of joint? Her clothes were, however, subject to fewer comments than her red hair: it was generally agreed that this colour was entirely unsuitable for a sad occasion. At the same time her hairdo wasn’t a sheitel that could be donned or doffed as the situation required.
She had brought along her fiancé, an artiste or a circus man, one heard. (‘A fiancé? At her age?’ – ‘Well, of course a nice fat dowry takes years off a bride. Zalman Kamionker’s clothes factory is supposed to be booming.’) During the whole ceremony Herr Grün stood there as motionlessly as he had stood by Rachel’s desk on his very first day: someone who had learned to wait as other people learn a profession.
Every time Arthur visited his mother in the old people’s home, she had asked him, ‘Why didn’t you bring your children?’ Today, the day of her funeral, he was finally able to fulfil her wish.
His new family set a lot of tongues wagging. The filing cabinet in which public opinion organises its objects has its drawers, and his had always been quite clearly and emphatically marked ‘bachelor’. Even though he was a doctor and from a good family, all attempts to make a shidduch for him had long since been abandoned, and here he was all of a sudden turning up with this wife from Germany. As if the mothers hereabouts didn’t have beautiful daughters too. And besides, she was too young for him, far too young. Such things seldom turned out well, there were plenty of examples of that. Admittedly she looked quite nice, not at all dolled up, and yet it remained to be seen how she would fit in here. The children seemed to be well brought up, only the girl was cross-eyed and the little boy was anxious. In fact, Moses held tightly on to Arthur’s hand all the time; according to local custom only the men here went right up to the grave, and he was so keen to be a man.
The only one about whom no objections were raised was Désirée. Funerals suited her, and she suited funerals.
Eventually what had to be said had been said, the prayers and the eulogies. Nothing makes a person a tsadik as quickly as the fact of his death.
They set off for the last mitzvah that could be done for Chanele. The leaves had been falling from the trees for days, and under their carpet it was hard to tell where the paths ended and the graves began. Arthur tried to think of the reliable, protecting, ever-busy mother that he had known, not of the white, shrouded body that lay there in a wooden box with clay shards over its eyes, a bag of soil from the Holy Land as a pillow.
They drilled holes into the coffin, François had whispered to him at Uncle Salomon’s funeral, so that the worms could get at the corpse more quickly.
Someone – it later turned out to have been the over-eager Frau Olchev – had seen to it that the double gravestone was cleaned and freed of moss. The free half now looked indecently empty, as if people had been waiting impatiently for it to be filled out correctly like a blank form.
Janki and Chanele.
Jean Meijer and Hanna Meijer.
No maiden name, as would normally have b
een the case for a wife. Chanele had never known her parents.
Even though weeping constricted his throat like a tie knotted too tightly, Arthur spoke the kaddish for his mother in a firm voice. As before, at his bar mitzvah, he didn’t make a single mistake from the first word to the last.
Chanele could be proud of him.
One after the other they threw a handful of earth on the coffin, but they didn’t even succeed in hiding its lid. The official gravediggers with their shovels waited in the background and tried out of politeness to look as if they were especially affected by this particular death.
The bereaved passed through the lines of mourners and let the murmur of the mandatory words float over them. ‘May God console you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.’ It did them good for a moment, but it wasn’t real consolation, just as a brief shower on a hot day isn’t really cooling.
Then it was over, and they were all able to get into their cars again and drive back to Zurich. Why should they hold the shiva in Lengnau, which their mother had only ever visited during all those years? They would sit down together with Zalman and Hinda, under the Shabbos lamp that Chanele had polished so often as a young girl in Endingen.
How long ago was it now? Uncle Salomon was only a memory now, and Aunt Golde not even that.
‘François and I are the last Meijers,’ thought Arthur. ‘There will be no more after us.’
Arthur’s little topolino had been just right for his new family. Irma and Moses were firmly convinced that the back seat, far too small for adults, had always been meant for them.
He had to concentrate on the road, and therefore couldn’t look across at Rosa. But precisely that gave him the courage to ask the question that had preoccupied him since he had received the news of his mother’s death. Many things were easier to say if you didn’t have to look other people in the eye as you did so. That had always been his experience.
‘Could you imagine . . .’ he began.
‘Yes?’
‘Could you imagine Irma and Moses . . . I mean, now that we’re . . . It wouldn’t have to be straight away. Could you imagine that?’
Later, when it had long been plain that they belonged together, he often said to her, ‘The fact that you understood me then, when I was stammering around – at that moment I knew our marriage wasn’t simply one of convenience.’
‘Yes,’ said Rosa, ‘I agree that the children should take your name. The Meijer line must continue.’
Even though it had not been directly discussed or decided, Zalman’s flat on Rotwandstrasse had become the place where the family met when there was something to celebrate or mourn. The last occasion had been the engagement between Rachel and Herr Grün, but the same room had also held the seder at which drunken Alfred had stumbled back into the family, and at the same table they had made the fateful decision to separate the lovers and send Alfred to Paris and thus in the end to his death.
When they arrived, Uncle Melnitz was already waiting impatiently for them. He was dressed in black as always, and yet in some inexplicable way he looked less old-fashioned than usual. Sometimes a style from days long gone imperceptibly becomes fashionable again, so that you can’t tell whether the old times have come back, or whether the new ones were always there.
As soon as each of them came in he shoved the low mourning stool towards them, an over-eager maître d’ already praising the specialities of the house before his guests have even taken their coats off. ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said. ‘It’s time to start mourning.’
They tried not to notice him, they didn’t want be defined by him and stayed where they were.
Uncle Melnitz made a particularly low waiterly bow in front of François and even hummed the tune of the 133rd psalm for him: ‘Hine ma tov u ma nayim . . .’ – ‘Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.’
‘Now sit down, sit down!’
They had all agreed that François had to be present at that shiva. He had decided not to be a Jew any more, but he still belonged to the family. To spare him any embarrassment, they had even cancelled the daily minyan that is normally part of the mandatory prayer times at shivas.
‘Ruben can say the prayers,’ Hinda had said, but they hadn’t been able to get hold of him yet. Immediately after the funeral they tried again, and the helpful woman from the telephone exchange even asked her colleagues in Halberstadt specially. No, the number was correct, they said, and that was how it was listed in the directory, but it was coming up as temporarily disconnected.
Temporarily disconnected.
Herr Grün made his most expressionless face and said that didn’t sound good.
Rachel nudged her fiancé in the ribs. ‘What a prophet of doom you can be, Felix!’ She was the only one who used his first name. Everyone else called him ‘Herr Grün’, even if they were on familiar terms with him.
Ruben was temporarily disconnected.
It was a phrase, the lady from the exchange had said, that she had never heard before. It wasn’t internationally customary either.
Herr Grün nodded gloomily. In Germany at the moment lots of things were customary that were unknown in other countries.
‘Wrong,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘It’s known everywhere. It’s also customary everywhere. Because it’s been the custom everywhere. It sometimes falls out of fashion, for a century or two. But then it comes back in, and then they enjoy themselves again, yes.’
They didn’t have to listen to him, because he was dead, after all. Dead and many times buried. No one had to listen to him.
‘Now sit down! Sit down!’
No one had to start the shiva just because he urged them to.
Ruben was disconnected.
What could that mean?
Adolf Rosenthal tried to explain that the telephone network in Germany was particularly efficient, he had been reading an article about it in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung only the day before.
‘Oh, shut up!’ Lea interrupted him. She had never spoken to her husband like that before.
They were all much more keen to hear Rosa’s opinion. She had, after all, just arrived from Germany and must know what was going on there. What could that mean, ‘Temporarily disconnected?’
Rosa didn’t want to scare anyone, far from it, but since the Nazis had been in power there it was never a good sign if something was suddenly different from the norm.
‘It’s no different from the norm,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘It’s exactly as it always is, yes.’ He rubbed his hands, not like someone who is cold, but like someone who has been proved right. ‘It’s as it always is,’ he repeated, ‘Because it has always been like that. We just forget it sometimes. So sit down, sit down!’
His smell had changed too, as the smell of a cellar changes when you clear it out to make way for new things.
But he was dead and buried, he no longer existed, once and for all he had ceased to exist.
He could not exist any more.
At shivas you don’t close the door.
Anyone who wants to bring condolences to the mourners doesn’t ring the bell, he just steps in and joins them.
But now someone did ring. Twice.
‘Ruben’s getting back to us!’ cried Hinda and ran outside. It was just the reply from the post office, saying that it had not been possible for her message, addressed to Ruben Kamionker, 16 Lichtwerstrasse, Halberstadt, to be delivered as normal.
Not known at this address.
Which was of course nonsense. Complete nonsense. Ruben lived there, had lived there since taking the job at the Klaus, lived there with his wife Lieschen and their four children.
Three boys and a girl.
He lived there. Something must have happened.
‘So sit down, sit down!’ urged Uncle Melnitz. ‘And let’s start mourning at last.’
Epilogue
74
Every time he died, he came back.
His shoes were coated with dust, as if from a
long and strenuous journey, but he walked weightlessly, light-footed, a dancer who hears the music even before the instruments have been tuned. He came in on tiptoe like someone who doesn’t want to disturb, and drew the door closed behind him as carefully as someone who has decided to stay for a long time. He still kept his eyes closed, not like a sleeping man, but like someone who has enough pictures inside him. He didn’t have to see the way to find his seat. His chair was waiting. They had expected him even when they thought he was never coming back.
When they still hoped.
He sat down and was there again.
Had always been there.
Every time he died, he came back.
He inhaled the new air, searchingly at first, like something strange and forgotten that you first have to remember, then greedily, in quick, impatient gulps. His lung rattled, a long unused machine. He said ‘Ah!’ as if after the first cooling draught of water on a hot day, opened his eyes, looked round and recognised them all. Had never forgotten them. They avoided his gaze, and he noticed it and smiled. ‘This is my shiva,’ this smile said. ‘They’re mourning for me here. My own shiva, from which no one will drive me. I am Uncle Melnitz, who got his name from Khmelnitsky.’
Uncle Melnitz.
He cleared his throat and coughed, blew black stains into a handkerchief the side of a map, big enough for a list of all the countries in which he had experienced death. A white flag like that waved by someone surrendering.
He smelled of damp, of must, of memories. He brought alive the scent of distant lands, just as Janki’s first shop had held the scent of cardamom and nutmeg. But he brought no spices to them; he came from cold countries and carried with him only smells that choked the throat.
When one of them edged away he didn’t edge after them, he just sat where he was and waved after the departing one. He was already waiting for him at the next place, he had made himself comfortable at a table or in his favourite armchair under the lamp. Or else he lay in his bed, in a long white shirt that wasn’t a nightshirt.
Melnitz Page 80
