Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Pinchas gave a start. He had been completely lost in his thoughts; that happened when you had the train compartment all to yourself. And on the journey he had planned to go through all the precautionary measures that were to be observed in a correct shechita; there could, he thought, be no more convincing proof of how much care was taken in shechita slaughtering to ensure that the animal was caused no unnecessary pain. First of all, he counted them off to himself, the blade was to be carefully checked, because even the tiniest nick on which anything could get caught or on which the tissue might tear would make the whole slaughtering process invalid and the meat unsellable. The cut itself must be carried out in one go, without pressure and only with the sharpness of the blade; the windpipe and the oesophagus had to be completely severed one after the other. ‘These are all precautionary measures,’ he would say, ‘to cause the animal as little pain as possible. So you see,’ he would say, ‘you may not be anti-Semites yourselves, but your vote would still confirm those people in their belief that things can be achieved with prejudice and harassment.’ Yes, that was what he would say.

  But then his thoughts drifted away. What was he doing delivering speeches? Was he a politician? He would have been better off staying at home and looking after Mimi. What was wrong with her? She had always liked to complain and enjoyed her little ailments, she had turned every molehill into a mountain and every crisis into a drama. It was precisely because she was behaving differently this time that he was worried. Every time he asked her about her condition she evaded the issue, accused him of making her ill with all his endless questions, and one didn’t have to be constantly singing and dancing just to prove to one’s dear husband that one was feeling well. As long as it wasn’t anything dangerous! This evening, immediately after his return, he would talk to Dr Wertheim and refuse to be satisfied with the empty, comforting phrases that doctors were so good at. No, he would insist . . .

  He had arrived in Baden without noticing.

  To his surprise, it wasn’t Janki waiting for him at the station, but Chanele. Janki preferred not to come to Endingen, he had said to tell him, after mature consideration it seemed more correct to him as a Frenchman not to get involved in such purely Swiss matters. Chanele delivered the message in a tone which left no doubt that Janki really had different reasons. It was simply that he chose to avoid situations in which his role was not entirely clear.

  She as a woman, Chanele said, was not a desirable presence at such political assemblies, but no one could prevent her from visiting her foster-father, and then to take him, if Salomon wanted to go, to the Guggenheim in the afternoon, he was an old man now, after all, and needed the support of an arm. The idea of a frail Salomon Meijer made Pinchas chuckle; in spite of his years, the cattle-trader went walking across country for a few hours every day, swinging his umbrella as he had long ago.

  Chanele hadn’t ordered a coach for them, and instead waited with a box-wagon and pair. Gold letters on a green background sang the praises of the Modern Emporium and its comprehensive range. ‘At the weekend the carts are just parked in the shed,’ Chanele said by way of apology. ‘Why throw money out of the window to no good end?’

  So the three of them squeezed onto the coach box. The coachman subserviently made himself very small and actually leaned over to the side to leave enough room for Chanele, and sometimes asked solicitously whether Madame Meijer was really sitting comfortably. He smelled of the stale smoke of his curly Virginia cigar, which had gone out when he was waiting and which he didn’t dare relight, and his presence made conversation impossible. Chanele inquired after Mimi’s health, and Pinchas shook his head dubiously. Then they fell silent again.

  It was Sunday, and no one was working in the fields. The weather was calm, and the few clouds drifted slowly across the sky. One might have thought it wasn’t just human beings who were taking a break, but nature as well, a breather between blossom and fruit.

  Chanele felt reminded of the time – was it really more than two decades ago – when she had worked in the newly founded French Drapery. Back then, too, they had often sat crammed in the coachman’s box, whenever a friendly driver stopped for her and Janki, early in the morning or on the way home to Endingen. Then Janki had tried not to touch her, but she had always been very aware of his body, so close to hers. She hadn’t been happy in those days – where does it say in the Shulchan Orech that you have to be happy? – but it had been a vivid unhappiness, a pulsating sadness, not the impersonal coexistence that had become her fate. Chanele would have liked to be properly sad once again, just to know that she hadn’t lost the ability.

  The houses of Endingen came into view, and when he approached his parents’ house, where someone else had been running the butcher’s shop for a long time now, Pinchas armed himself against a surge of homesickness and melancholy. But when they drove past he saw that the place meant nothing more to him. He had grown out of Endingen once and for all.

  The carts and coaches were parked so densely around the Guggenheim that there was no room for the broad box-wagon to get through. ‘As if there was anything for free,’ the coachman grumbled sullenly. He couldn’t force his way through to the entrance to the inn, but had to let Pinchas climb down first, and was quite disappointed when Chanele too decided to walk the few streets to the old double house. He would rather have driven his boss up like a princely postilion, with snorting steeds and a bright rosette on his top hat.

  In the pub room there was hardly an empty chair to be found, even though the meeting was due to start at three o’clock. The wave of conversation, laughter and shouting swept over Pinchas so loudly that he took an involuntary step backwards and had to take a second run even to enter the room.

  He didn’t often visit inns, he wasn’t really familiar with these places, and yet he immediately had the feeling that there was something different here, something that you didn’t usually see in such places. Only at first he couldn’t quite put his finger on what that different thing was. Until all of a sudden he understood: usually one sits in an inn at night, it’s dark, and in the lamplight all you see is faces, hands and glasses. Here the sun shone through the windows and gave the clouds of smoke from the many pipes and cigars an almost festive glow. The guests, all men, also seemed to be in a holiday mood. While normally in the country people carefully nurse their beers or wines to derive the greatest possible amount of comfort from their invested money, here they were boisterously clinking glasses, no sooner had they been given their schnapps than they ordered another one. The mood was more like a victory party at a gun-club party than the meeting of a Popular Education Association.

  The door to the hall where the actual event was to take place was wide open, but two sturdy young men, dark blue ribbons around their muscular upper arms, flanked the entrance and made sure that no one entered the holy of holies prematurely. They stood there motionless as sentries, with severe expressions, visibly impressed by their own importance.

  ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ said a voice directly beside Pinchas. ‘Herr Pomeranz! I recognised you immediately. Yes, yes, true beauty stands the test of time.’

  The schoolmaster himself had changed a lot. Above all he seemed to be much smaller than Pinchas remembered, the miniature copy of a vanished original. In Pinchas’s day Jewish children had only gone to the cheder and not, as they did quite naturally these days, to the community school too, but that had not diminished the authority of the schoolmaster. On the contrary: precisely because one had not experienced them personally, one believed all the horror stories that the village children told about his teaching methods.

  Now an elderly little man was standing there, with thin legs and a pot belly that looked as if he had stuffed a pillow up his waistcoat. His beard was just as bushy as before, but now it looked as if it had been stuck on. His voice had got shriller and thinner as well, just as a bottle, when being filled, reaches its highest note just before overflowing.

  ‘The good endures,’ said the little man. ‘Slow
and steady wins the race. It took me a long time to found my Popular Education Association, but then my son’s stepfather said to me: Let’s just do it. And look at this onslaught, this enthusiasm. This delight in the competition of opinions and arguments! Arma virumque cano! Do you understand Latin?’

  ‘Enough for that,’ Pinchas said.

  ‘Who would have thought that in such unusual circumstances we would . . .? You remember the last time we met? It was in my garden, in my modest Tusculum, and you . . . But I see you don’t like to be reminded of it. Don’t worry, I am as quiet as the grave.’ He put a finger to his pursed lips and blinked at Pinchas with unpleasant familiarity. ‘Come, come, they’ll keep a chair for us, but not for long. So many people have come to hear the song and see the chariot-fight.’

  He took Pinchas by the arm and pulled him along in his wake. When they made their way through the inn, conversations fell silent as they passed. People nudged one another and whispered.

  Pinchas didn’t recognise any of the faces, however hard he tried to think back twenty years. They all seemed so young to him, but of course that was ridiculous. He himself had got older.

  The first familiar face was that of master butcher Gubser, whom he had often met in the abattoir when his father had taken him there. Gubser had hardly changed, had if anything become more dignified and vicar-like. He leapt to his feet when Pinchas and the schoolmaster approached, and although it was very noisy in the inn, the many little pendants on his watch chain could be heard jangling.

  ‘Young Herr Pomeranz,’ he exclaimed, putting his hand on his heart. ‘How lovely that you could come. I’m so glad, so glad, so glad.’ He took Pinchas’s hand and shook it as if he had just met up with a long-lost friend. ‘Sit down, please, sit down! I had to fight like a lion for a chair. Will you drink a glass of wine with us?’ And when Pinchas politely refused, ‘Of course not, how silly of me. Our wine isn’t clean enough for you, or however you put it in your books. But we don’t have such sensitive stomachs, what do you think, people?’

  The two men at the table laughed loudly. You could tell: they would have laughed at anything Gubser said.

  Pinchas would have preferred to find a seat elsewhere, but the schoolmaster wouldn’t let him. ‘Herr Gubser helped me so much with the preparations,’ he said, and was childishly delighted by the success of his Popular Education Association. ‘I myself would have expected the setting – what blessing it is to be modest! – to be much smaller, in the schoolroom, perhaps, but Alois . . .’

  ‘One does what one can.’ The master butcher bowed slightly to the schoolmaster. ‘Did you know, dear Herr Pomeranz, that Anne-Kathrin and my eldest . . .? Oh, you did? Of course. You people are always well informed. Then you will also now that I have passed on the business to my son and now devote myself only to important matters. The truly important matters.’

  The men around the table nodded. Yes, there could be nothing more important.

  ‘Alois,’ the schoolmaster said in his piping voice, ‘Herr Gubser is in fact the chair of our local league—’

  ‘Cantonal!’ one of the men corrected him with an important expression, and again they all nodded.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Who knows more about the suffering of animals than a man of my trade?’ said Gubser piously.

  ‘—and he will also be representing the viewpoint of the organisation on the podium today,’ piped the schoolmaster. ‘I am already looking forward to an informative and peaceful debate, relying only on the power of the superior argument. How does our beloved Goethe poet put it? “With words we can our foes assail.”’

  Pinchas was not at all happy about the prospect of having to stand up against master butcher Gubser, who was so popular in Endingen, and his facial expression revealed as much with great clarity.

  ‘I cannot imagine a better pairing than the two of us,’ said Gubser, and put his hand on his heart again. ‘When we are professional colleagues. A Schlächter and a Schächter. Two types of work with only an L between them. And do you know what that L stands for, my esteemed Herr Pomeranz? For what the Schächter sadly lacks. For Love.’

  The men at the table applauded.

  Pinchas felt himself turning very cold inside. ‘If the L does not stand for what the Schlächter has too much of,’ he said. ‘Lies, I mean.’

  ‘But that’s—!’ one of the men began, but a gesture of Gubser’s was enough to silence him.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ The schoolmaster would probably have liked to smack them all. ‘These are not the tones I wish to hear hereafter. Sober and peaceful, that’s how it’s to be done. Who lives by the sword dies by the word.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gubser and smiled. ‘Peaceful. Absolutely peaceful.’

  32

  When, in response to an invisible sign, the two doormen stepped aside, allowing access to the hall, there was a great rush, as if there were really – how had the coachman put it? – something for free in there. An elderly man lost his hat in the crush and tried to bend down for it, but the flood of people would not be stemmed by a single individual. Still bending, unable to straighten up in time, he was simply swept along.

  In an instant, the table at which Pinchas had so reluctantly taken his seat became the only one where people were still drinking. On the others the glasses and jugs stood empty or at best half-full, so sudden had the general decampment been. Only the men from the league – it had taken Pinchas a while to notice the badge that they all wore on their lapels – sat motionless, like dignitaries on the platform of honour in a festival procession. ‘No one takes our seats away,’ said Gubser, and the schoolmaster beamed all over his old face and said Alois always thought of everything. It would never, he had to admit, have occurred to him on his own that one would need ushers at such an event, but then he was more a man of intellect than a man of action.

  The two ushers who had been guarding the door for so long were stood a beer each by Gubser. They drank them standing to attention in the military style, and had exactly the same foam moustaches above their mouths afterwards.

  ‘Don’t we also need to . . .?’ Pinchas was about to get to his feet, but Gubser shook his head.

  ‘Not yet. Keep the people waiting for a while, and they’ll pay more attention.

  ‘In school it’s exactly the other way round,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘If you leave them alone too long they become unruly.’

  Everyone ignored him.

  The door of the inn opened and a few stragglers came in. Because the sunlight was behind them, they were at first seen only as silhouettes. It was only by his umbrella that Pinchas recognised Salomon Meijer. Chanele had come in with him, and a man he didn’t know. He must have been from the East, because he wore a kaftan tied with a black cord. The red payot that framed his bearded face seemed to be fastened to the brim of his oversized hat.

  ‘This is Reb Tsvi Löwinger from Lemberg,’ said Salomon, introducing the stranger. ‘He has come to Switzerland to collect for his yeshiva, and has done me the honour of being my guest over Shabbos.’

  The shnorrer nodded his head loftily.

  ‘Reb Tsvi is interested in this event that you are having here. So if no one objects . . .?’

  ‘We welcome all those who for knowledge strive!’ squeaked the schoolmaster. ‘What does it say in Faust? “I may know much, but I would fain know all.”’

  ‘Yes,’ said master butcher Gubser, and looked the man in the kaftan up and down. ‘I’m happy for him to be here. You can’t imagine how happy I am.’

  His animal-protection friends giggled, even though Gubser hadn’t said anything the slightest bit funny.

  Loud laughter echoed from the hall, as if the people in there had been listening to what there were saying.

  Salomon turned his face to the door of the hall. ‘A lot of people?’ he asked.

  ‘You will find a seat, Herr Meijer,’ said Gubser. ‘I have no worries on that score. You people are practised enough at pushing your way in anywhere.’
/>   Laughter from the hall again.

  Salomon waved Pinchas aside. ‘It’s not looking good,’ he whispered.

  ‘I know.’ Everyone at the table now drained their glasses as if on command. ‘It’s not going to be easy.’

  But Salomon’s concern had nothing to do with the League. ‘Reb Tsvi and I took a look at the gematria. You’re going into a discussion, a pilpul. Numerical value two hundred and twenty six. But it will be a discussion without a lev, without a heart.’

  ‘It’s time!’ called Gubser.

  ‘Nu!’ said Salomon, and in this instance it meant, ‘They will be able to wait a moment longer.’

  ‘I really have to . . .’ Pinchas began, but Salomon wouldn’t let him finish.

  ‘Take care,’ he said, talking more and more quickly. ‘Lev has the numerical value of thirty-two. Take that away from two hundred and twenty-six and it leaves one hundred and ninety-four. And what word in the tenach has the gematria of one hundred and ninety-four? Nu?’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me later, after the . . .’

  ‘Vayiboku,’ Salomon said triumphantly. ‘“And they were parted.”’

  Pinchas stared blankly.

  ‘The waters of the Red Sea. During the exodus from Egypt.’

  ‘Herr Pomeranz!’ cried Gubser.

  ‘You understand what that means,’ Salomon said. ‘In a discussion held without a heart, there can be no agreement.’