Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

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.