Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘I see no reason to make fun.’ Pinchas had spoken much more loudly than he had actually intended. A young woman who was walking past the bench with her pram, quickened her pace in alarm.

‘I’m not making fun,’ Dr Stern said. ‘On the contrary. I have always felt a great affinity with this Acher. Perhaps he actually did glimpse heaven, and established that it was empty.’

‘I have to go now. I can’t leave my butcher’s shop alone as long as this.’ Pinchas was about to get up, but Dr Stern would not let him. He held him back as a circus barker might an indecisive peasant.

‘Wait, dear friend. I haven’t yet told you my story.’

‘I don’t know if I want to hear it.’

‘Of course you want to hear it. You are a curious person. Did you not come here just to ask me questions?’

‘Not these questions!’

‘Because the answers might shatter your picture of the world?’

‘No!’

But Pinchas stopped making as if to stand up, and Dr Stern laughed, making his watch chain skip, wiped his moustache and said, ‘Let’s wait a moment! So, as I said, I had understood at last that I could no longer perform my office. Because — unlike most people, as I have been forced time and again to observe — I am not afraid of drawing conclusions from my discoveries, I decided to draw a clear line. So I wrote to the Supreme Royal Württemberg Rabbinate and declared to them, to my superior authority, that I was abdicating from Jewry.’

‘What nonsense!’ Pinchas had raised his voice too loudly again, and really had to force himself to utter his next sentences in a more moderate tone. To his annoyance it now sounded as if he were about to confide an intimate secret to the man beside him on the bench. ‘You can’t step down from Jewry! We’re not a club!’

‘That’s exactly what the Supreme Rabbinate said to me. Amongst some very wordy admonitions. But I am a consistent person, and someone who doesn’t want to play the game no longer needs to adhere to the rules. So at the next Yom Kippur I went and stood with a bag of ham rolls outside the main synagogue in Stuttgart, and when all the dignitaries walked out of the door with their black top hats on…’

‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ Pinchas had leapt to his feet, and he no longer cared in the slightest that passers-by were staring at him. ‘You should be thoroughly, thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

Dr Stern smiled in friendly challenge at the man who stood so furiously before him. ‘A pity you aren’t Catholic. “Apage, Satanas” would simply sound better.’

‘Ashamed!’

‘You have said that before, my dear friend. But perhaps you should consider whether you yourself might not have more reason to be so. A man of your profession.’

‘What does my profession…?’

‘You are a shochet, are you not? And thus a professional, approved animal-torturer.’

‘I’m not a…’

‘You shouldn’t shout so loudly. The two policemen coming along the path over there already look quite suspicious.’

Pinchas had no choice but to sit down again.

‘How can you claim that a shochet…?’

But Dr Stern had suddenly stopped enjoying the debate. He drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and let it spring open. ‘So late? I’m neglecting my duties as a delegate. Do you know what, dear friend? Read my brochure. Animal Torture and Animal Life in Jewish Literature . Available in every bookshop. With a rabbinical-theological appendix about shechita. It might interest you. I have been told that this little essay will play a big part in the coming plebiscite in these parts. Now farewell, dear friend, farewell.’

At the same time as Pinchas was talking to Jakob Stern or, as he later said only half ironically, arguing with the devil, his wife received an unexpected visitor.

Mimi wasn’t feeling well that day. It was probably because of the much too sultry weather that she felt dizzy when she tried to stand up, and had to lie down in bed for an hour again with a cloth soaked in lemon water over her forehead. Regula, the great lump, wanted to open the curtains without the slightest delicacy, when a beam of light would go like a knife through the head of a sensitive person in such a condition. Later Mimi even had to throw up, and it was already almost eleven when she finally summoned the strength to leave her room. In a peignoir of salmon-coloured crêpe Georgette had lined with matt silk, which set off the pallor of her face to extremely good effect, she crept through the flat like a ghost. Nothing was moving anywhere. Even the breakfast plates were still on the dining-room table. If one wasn’t constantly chasing them — Pinchas had no idea! — the servants immediately became slapdash.

She found Regula, Frau Küttel, the cleaner, and last of all Hinda in the kitchen where they all, at a time when the preparations for lunch should really have been far advanced, were drinking coffee with lumps of bread and, as far as Mimi could tell from the sentence that broke off mid-word as she appeared, discussing Regula’s favourite topic, the question of whether the tram driver at whom she had been making eyes for weeks now, might have more serious intentions. Mimi had to become quite fierce, although that was far from easy in her condition, and she also had to tell Hinda, who often had quite déclassé tendencies, off for socialising with the staff. Hinda merely laughed and said that in all honesty she found Regula’s love story more interesting than any novel, at least she had never yet come across a novel in which a gallant had slapped his sweetheart on the backside and said appreciatively, ‘You’re better padded than my horses.’

Later — she still lacked the strength to get dressed — Mimi went through the contents of her clothes cupboard with Hinda. The Hachnasat Kallah Association, which supplied dresses for impoverished brides, had organised a collection of cast-off clothes, and as wife of the community shochet — ‘You can’t imagine how people watch you!’ — Mimi felt obliged to contribute something. But it was actually only a pretext to spread out the treasures of her wardrobe once again.

She had just taken out a day dress of greyish brown silk twill with a maroon rose pattern, a dress that had always suited her very well, but the skirt of which she really couldn’t wear any more, because it still had a cul de Paris cut, and that was truly out of fashion once and for all, and she was busy persuading Hinda that the tight-fitting jacket with the little collar and the jacquard trimming on the cuffs would actually suit her youthful figure very well, although obviously with a different skirt, they would donate the old one to the impoverished brides, and in all that activity she had begun to forget how poorly she was actually feeling, when there was a ring at the flat door. ‘I’m not at home to anyone!’ Mimi called and, pained by the wound of her own voice, had to draw little circles on her temples with her fingertips.

‘Frau Pomeranz isn’t at home,’ they heard Regula explaining a little later. And then, in response to an inaudible objection from the visitor, the maid added. ‘She definitely isn’t! She just told me herself.’

Hinda bit her hand so as not to burst out laughing. Mimi rolled her eyes with a long-suffering expression.

Regula’s protest, increasingly uncertain and hence increasingly shrill, made it clear that the uninvited guest would not be fobbed off as easily as that, and at last the maid knocked at the room of the door and said, ‘I’m sorry, Frau Pomeranz, but there’s a lady here who absolutely…’

‘It’s me!’ a voice rang out from the corridor.

‘Mama!’ Hinda exclaimed and pulled the door open.