Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘I called for a cab for you,’ Dr Hellstiedl said at last.

She nodded, grateful not to have to make any decisions for herself.

‘If you wish, I can keep you informed about his condition. In case a change… It could be, or it could not be. We know so little. And to combat our ignorance we have Latin and Greek names.’

He topped up her tea and then asked again: ‘Shall I…?’

‘No,’ Chanele said. It was the first word she had spoken since her meeting with her father.

She took the cab back into town. In the avenue, the poplars now cast long shadows.

In the square in front of the Minster a feast day was being celebrated, with happy people and cheerful music. Chanele thought of the big simcha that Menachem Bär had been so looking forward to, and to it she devoted every laughing face she glimpsed from the cab window.

The hotel porter welcomed her with chummy curiosity. How had her day been, he wanted to know, had she found the way and how did the esteemed Madame Meijer like Strasbourg? She silenced him with a tip.

That night she slept deeply and dreamlessly.

The next morning she took the train back to Basel and from there on to Baden. She went straight from the station to the shop and worked there as she did every day.

When she got home in the evening and Janki questioned her, she replied, ‘They made a mistake. It was someone completely different. He has nothing to do with me.’

Pinchas had to grab his shirt collar again to get some air, and that had nothing to do with the fact that the sun was beating down far too hot for the second day in a row. This man that Zalman Kamionker had introduced him to, this Dr Stern from Stuttgart, Congress delegate of the Württemberg Majority Socialists, was driving him completely insane. And he looked quite harmless, an outwardly inconspicuous man of middle age, not very tall, with a cosy, round little bourgeois belly, on which his watch chain did a skipping little dance each time he laughed. And he laughed a lot, in an unpleasant way. He said the most dreadful things, concluded them with a wobbly ‘Hohoho!’ and then wiped the back of his hand over his moustache. ‘God,’ he said, for example, ‘God does not exist, of course. I should know, I’m a rabbi.’ He made his belly wobble and looked at Pinchas with the natural expectancy of someone who already has a counter-argument ready for any objections.

He had in fact once been a rabbi, in Buttenhausen, a small congregation in the Swabian Jura. ‘I learned the job thoroughly,’ he said and laughed again, as if at the best possible joke. ‘No half measures where I’m concerned. Even today I can cast a glance at the innards of a chicken and tell you unerringly whether it’s kosher or not. Admittedly it’s an utterly meaningless skill, but I can still remember how to do it. The way other people can balance on their hands or walk a tightrope.’

Pinchas wouldn’t have been surprised if his interlocutor had performed one of those tricks on the spot. Dr Stern’s manner had much of the fairground barker about it, one of those men one sometimes encounters outside travelling theatres of curiosity, except that the attractions in his booth were not six-legged calves or women with fishtails, but the treasury of mysteriously glittering theses and the mirror-maze of brightly polished paradoxes. ‘Every true believer is proof that there is no God,’ he would say, for example, rocking springily back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if he was about to turn a somersault and shout ‘Hoppla!’.

He liked talking, almost compulsively, about how he had lost his faith, ‘freed himself from it’, as he called it, and it seemed that he often addressed large gatherings on the subject. He never had to search for a word, and his perfectly formulated sentences always sounded as if they were read from a manuscript. He had not been a rabbi for ages, but was the first chairman of the German Free-Thinkers’ Union, and he could, when he spoke of this association and its goals, adopt an expression every bit as unctuous as if he were still wearing the cassock. He put his unbelief on display in his buttonhole like a medal, he was proud of it as one might be proud of a doctorate acquired after a long period of study. There was something crusading about his atheism. Godlessness was his religion, and he advocated it with the fire and enthusiasm of the convert. When he said, ‘God is nothing but an invention of man,’ he beamed like Moses at the sight of the Shechinah on Mount Sinai.

The two men had met in the Palm Garden at around midday, and Kamionker had introduced them to one another. He did that with a sly smile whose meaning Pinchas only now understood. It was noisy and stuffy in the Palm Garden, so they decided to take advantage of the fine weather and take a short stroll in the park by the lake. Pinchas had prepared a whole list of questions about the Socialist Congress — the Israelit in Frankfurt would certainly be interested in an article on the subject — but he never got around to asking them. No sooner had Dr Stern learned that the actual profession of his new acquaintance was that of shochet, than he only wanted to talk about religion, or rather about the non-religion that was his deeply held credo. ‘Man should know and not believe,’ he said with devout emphasis, spreading his arms to welcome the whole world with a fraternal kiss into the newly founded alliance of the godless.

He must once have been a good pulpit speaker, even though Buttenhausen, as he said, had only a tiny synagogue, where it was often possible only with a great deal of difficulty to assemble a minyan. ‘But what was I to do? Rabbinate positions were thin on the ground, and as a theologian fresh out of college one had to take what one could get. An interesting word, by the way, ‘theologian’. If one returns to the Greek root it actually means nothing more than a person who talks about God — and one can of course also talk about things that do not exist. About unicorns, about dragons or indeed about the Lord God.’

‘But our world must…’

Dr Stern interrupted Pinchas with an expansive gesture. ‘My dear friend,’ he said, and it sounded like ‘My dear congregation’, ‘My dear friend, I hope you are not going to bother me with one of these proofs of God’s existence. Which one were about to take out of your pocket? The cosmological? The ontological? The teleological? All of them refute long ago. Read Kant! Read Schopenhauer! “The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason.” The world does not need a first mover. It bears its laws within itself! We need only recognise them. Voilà!’ He gave a little hop, a circus artist returning to terra firma after a daring tightrope walk, and expecting applause.

‘And who made those laws?’

‘Nobody.’ Dr Stern, the man whom one could as little imagine without his title as without his trousers, dabbed his forehead dry with his silk handkerchief. Pinchas had a sense that he had practised the elegant movement in front of the mirror. ‘When the sun is shining, no one sits there heating an oven. Natural laws need no almighty creator to set the first ball rolling. The universe is as it is. Our fate is what we make of it. The world — to bring it down to its lowest common denominator — is as we form it. It is only because we are afraid of this responsibility that we invent punitive deities and in their name draw up laws for whose consequences we may thus not be held to account.’

‘But the Torah…’

Dr Stern caught this objection in mid-air as well, a juggler whose hand is always in the place to which the next ball is about to fly. ‘The Torah is literature,’ he said. ‘Very fine literature, in fact. Like many of our writings, incidentally. I myself have brought out a small volume with Reclam’s Universalbibliothek: Rays of Light from the Talmud , a collection of quotations valuable not least from the pedagogic point of view. One had only to pick them carefully out from among all the silly legends — I am thinking for example of the woolgathering tales of such a one as Rabba bar bar Chana — and the overheated sophistications of the interpretations of the law. The moral clarity of our scholars is strangely at odds with the logical confusion of Talmudic ritual. One might even say: where Judaism manages without God, it can serve as an excellent model for other people.’ And, inspired by his own eloquence, he made the watch-chain on his belly skip, laughed deeply from his throat and ran the back of his hand over his moustache.