Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

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 been 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.