Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

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 pebble 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.

Arthur wanted to give her a hug, but she pulled away and looked at him searchingly. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked.