Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

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 citizenship.’

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.