Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  It had happened to all of them at least once.

  Then they would easily be able to understand what he was about to explain to them. In the Mosaic Law, to which rabbis referred constantly as the supreme authority, there was in fact – and this would come as a surprise – not a single word to say that animals destined for consumption need to have their throats severed with a long knife. Not a single word!

  The hall was amazed.

  ‘Only in the fiftieth book of Moses, chapter twelve, verse twenty-one, does it even mention the subject. You are certainly all Bible-reading men, and you know the passage off by heart (laughter), but for the few who might not be able to remember it right now, he would happily repeat it: “If the place which the Lord thy God hath chosen to put his name there be too far from thee, then thou shalt kill of thy herd and of thy flock, which the Lord hath given thee, as I have commanded thee, and thou shalt eat in thy gates whatsoever thy soul lusteth after.”’ As soon as Dr Stern quoted verses from the Bible, in spite of all his unbelief he assumed once more the god-fearing expression that had certainly served him well in his time as a pulpit orator.

  ‘“Thou shalt kill of thy flock as I have commanded thee,” it says, and nothing more. Not a word about long knives or severed throats. Only “as I have commanded thee”. But how God commanded is recorded nowhere in the Bible, you can read the Old Testament from cover to cover and the New straight afterwards. And because it doesn’t say anywhere, interpreters and exegetes set about referring to an oral tradition that no one could prove and no one could refute. This is more or less as if, to put it in the simplest terms, one were to write in a contract with one’s neighbours: “we want to keep it as we have always kept it.” Then at some point a lawyer and twister of the law would come along and slip the most impossible things into the clause, until eventually one had not only granted the neighbour a right of way, but signed over one’s house and chattels.

  ‘“Thou shalt kill of thy flock as I have commanded thee.”’ In a religious sermon, the exception rather than the rule in the Jewish tradition, the orator would quote a verse from the Bible over and over again, to highlight a different interpretation and suggest an even deeper wisdom could be gained from it. Dr Stern, delivering a kind of sermon of his own, did the same.

  ‘“Thou shalt kill of thy flock as I have commanded thee.”’ However, slaughtering was also mentioned in another passage of the Old Testament, where it was expressly stated that one had to spill the blood of the animals. ‘“Thou shalt offer the blood upon the altar of the Lord Thy God.”’ But in those verses they meant only sacrificial animals, not everyday slaughter, which is something quite different. The Bible also made a linguistic distinction, and they were to forgive him if he now had to make a slight detour into philology. ‘You know how we scholars are: we always want to prove that we’ve actually learned something at university.’ (Laughter.)

  It was really only in those passages discussing the slaughter of sacrificial animals that the Bible used the word ‘shachat’, which meant the slicing of the neck, and whose linguistic root was also present in the word ‘shechita’. But where the everyday killing of animals was concerned, as in the verse he had just quoted, the word was ‘sabach’, and anyone could see that two very different words also meant two different things, that much was obvious to anyone who hadn’t twisted his brain into a knot studying the Talmud. Where it said ‘shachat’, the animal’s throat had to be sliced. The word ‘sabach’ also included any other method of killing.

  Of course the rabbis had noticed this contradiction as well, and as religious shysters they had tried to magic it away with an argumentative somersault. Ramban, for example, who was one of the most important Talmudic commentators, had seen fit to interpret the clear word of the Bible thus: ‘When God said “Thou shalt slaughter as I have commanded” he did not mean “In everyday life”, but: “As I have commanded in the case of sacrificial animals.” Hence Ramban, believing that he knew better than God himself, claimed that what the Lord had really meant was, “Grab your knives and slash away!”’

  The hall cried, ‘Boo!’ and was proud to have caught a medieval scholar cheating.

  ‘Of course this is quite a hairy argument,’ said Dr Stern, and was now unable to stand still with delight at his own brilliance. ‘But then these gentlemen sometimes are quite hairy, like our friend from Lemberg who is so industriously taking notes at the back.’ Laughter and general head-turning.

  Reb Tsvi hadn’t been taking any notes at all, just trying to follow the address as best he could. But in the heads of the participants he was now a spy, someone who had come to keep an eye on them, and they really didn’t know why they should put up with such meddling.

  ‘I’ll sum up,’ said Dr Stern.

  Perhaps they should just throw the interloper out the door. What was the point of having bouncers?

  ‘I’ll sum up!’ There was no bell with which they could have called the meeting to order, but Dr Stern hammered on the lectern until they listened to him again. ‘According to Mosaic law, and I say this to you as a trained Jewish theologian, there can be no question of so-called shechita as a religious duty. All rules in that direction are an invention of medieval Talmudic Judaism, and cannot be derived from the word of the Bible itself. So there is no reason to agree to any exceptional laws on the basis of a false understanding of religious tolerance. Thank you for your attention.’

  The hall cheered him, and as he left he thanked them for the ovation with a series of tripping little steps and bows that would have befitted a circus performer. He looked as if he would have liked to come on stage again and deliver his whole speech again da capo.

  But now it was Pinchas’s turn to speak.

  It was a disaster.

  They didn’t listen to him at all, and why should they have? The shopkeepers and craftsmen and farmers in the hall had all suddenly become specialists in religious history as well as ancient Hebrew linguistics, and wouldn’t have their heads muddled up any further. Every time Pinchas tried to start talking about the moral obligation of a tradition many thousands of years old, they bellowed sabach! and shachat! to drown him out. He had only to say, ‘In my experience!’ and already they were shouting, ‘Experience as an animal torturer!’ and the roaring started up again. Master butcher Gubser had shown them that shechita was nothing but bloodthirsty carnage, and this Dr Stern had also told them that the Jews had even forged the Holy Bible. So why should they listen to him?

  Gubser’s comparison of methods of slaughter had been one-sided and partial. But how to refute it? He would no longer be able to find anyone to listen to that kind of evidence here. You can’t halt the storm with your bare hands. And Dr Stern’s distortion of the Talmud? How was Pinchas supposed to argue with that? With Rashi and Onkelos and other sages? They would have mocked him as a medieval sophist. No, the hall had delivered its verdict, and was announcing it in drunken chants.

  Then they started singing too, only to drown him out at first, and then because they liked it. ‘Hail to Helvetia,’ they sang, and all bold sons they were, as once St Jacob saw, ready for fight. Their mouths opened and closed as if all by themselves, and no longer belonged to them, they drummed out the beat on the tables with their beer mugs, and would probably have marched off somewhere if they could, no matter where.

  In the front row the schoolmaster had stood up and was waving his arms around, trying to calm everyone down. But the song was stronger than he was, and his waving gradually turned into conducting, he picked up the rhythm, and guided it and for the first time really belonged to this founding evening of his Popular Education Association. Master butcher Gubser and his animal protectors sat there with their arms folded and had nothing to do with the whole thing.

  The people were just singing for themselves now, and had completely forgotten Pinchas. He carefully took one step aside, and then another, the alley was quite close by, and then he had reached it and disappeared behind the stage. On a small table beside the curt
ain pull was a half-empty beer mug. Here Dr Stern had probably given himself Dutch courage before and after his performance. A small door leading straight to the street was open.

  They were still singing in the hall. ‘Standing like rocky cliffs,’ they sang, and so they did, upright and manly and swollen-chested. Ne’er did they peril shun, bold mortal risks did run, and they were happy because they had found something to defend, if only an animal protection league.

  Some of them knew all the verses, others started again with the first one, until their voices became a jumble and finally fell silent. But they had sung enough now, and wanted to do something at last. There was no one on the stage now, and they weren’t surprised. That Jews are cowards and run away as soon as you put up any opposition, they had known for ever. But at the back of the hall, there was still that foreigner, that spy, and they wanted to show him what was what and how the land lay. No one needed to tell them what to do to him, they knew already. If someone like that thought he could just come from Lemberg and obstruct their freedom of speech, he could face the consequences.

  The bouncers were waiting for an instruction from master butcher Gubser, but in the hall everyone was on their feet, they were even standing on the benches, so they had to take the initiative and do as they saw fit. With arms linked they blocked the people’s way, but weren’t able to hold them back for long. But it was long enough for Reb Tzvi Löwinger to get himself to safety, slam the hall door behind him and run across the floor of the tap-room and out into the street.

  Then the charging crowd came to a standstill all by itself, because someone was lying on the floor right outside the hall door, legs twitching. It wasn’t the foreigner from Lemberg, but cattle trader Meijer, whom almost all of them knew, another Jew, but a decent fellow, and they knew the woman kneeling beside him as well, her name was Chanele and she had grown up here in Endingen.

  No one had done anything to Salomon Meijer, certainly not with a fist or a beer mug. He had just fallen over all by himself, without anybody even touching him. Dr Reichlin, who was also in the animal-protection league, said it must have been a sudden stroke, as could happen to anyone at any time; it needn’t have anything to do with the excitement of the moment. He couldn’t supply a good prognosis, sorry though he was, he knew of cases that had gone on for months, but bringing such a patient back to life was beyond the medical art.

  Then they carried him out to the back, carried the still heavy boy across the stage past the Swiss flag. The other way wouldn’t have been such a good idea, because there was a noisy post-meeting party on the go, and the people were singing again.

  ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on,’ said the schoolmaster, and even the master butcher was very sorry about the whole affair. It was really an unfortunate coincidence, he said, that it had had to happen here of all places.

  Chanele had run ahead to look for the coachman.

  They laid the old cattle trader on a bed of fabric bales ready for delivery in the cart the following day. Salomon was still breathing, quite regularly, in fact, but eyes had rolled back in their sockets and his tongue hung out of his mouth.

  When they were about to set off one of the bouncers came hurrying out of the Guggenheim, his black and blue armband still around his sleeve, and brought Salomon Meijer’s umbrella out after him.

  They drove to Baden, where Janki had long offered his father-in-law a room in the big flat.

  The last words of Salomon Meijer, beheimes dealer and gematria artist, had been these: ‘Why is the numerical value of “shachat” so much higher than “sabach”?’ Then he gave up the ghost.

  On the train back to Zurich Pinchas shared his compartment with two men who talked about their culinary preferences throughout the whole of the journey. They didn’t recognise him as a Jew and tried to involve him in a conversation about the relative merits of brawn and calf’s head. He only answered in monosyllables, which prompted a sniffy reaction. It seemed that this gentleman was too refined to talk to them.

  All along Löwenstrasse Pinchas drew out each step, and yet the way to the Sankt-Anna-Gasse seemed shorter than ever. Sometimes he even simply came to a standstill, out of pure cowardice, even though he excused himself by staying that he still had to find the right phrase. At the same time he was aware that there are no painless ways of telling a woman that her father is dying.

  He had reached the house before he was ready, and rummaged awkwardly in his pocket for a key, even though the door could not have been locked at this time of day.

  In the stairway the steps creaked far too loudly with each step he took.

  When he stepped inside the flat, Mimi was already in the corridor waiting for him. She had hectic flushes all over her face, as she always did when she was agitated. She wanted to say something but couldn’t get a word out and started sobbing.

  Chanele must have sent her a telegram.

  Pinchas took his wife in his arms. Although it wasn’t really the moment for such thoughts, he was struck by how good she smelled. Under all the perfumes and eaux de Cologne that she liked to use, there was still the young girl that he had fallen in love with all those years ago.

  Pomeranzes.

  Gradually her sobbing subsided and faded away as a summer storm fades away, with one last gust and then one very last one. She sniffed like a child, and then, without freeing herself from his embrace, she opened her tear-filled eyes and looked up at him.

  Her face was very soft.

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ Mimi said.

  Pinchas stroked her back helplessly. At that moment he perceived everything with exaggerated clarity that he could hear the material of her dress rustling.

  ‘Un vrai miracle,’ Mimi said.

  Her sheitel had gone slightly askew and sat crookedly on her head as if she had only donned it as a playful disguise.

  ‘In this state one has no pains,’ Pinchas said comfortingly. ‘I’m quite sure of that.’

  Mimi took the tip of his nose between her fingers and slowly moved his head back and forth. That had once been a game between the two of them.

  ‘You men!’ Mimi said. ‘What do you know about these things?’

  ‘The doctor said . . .’

  ‘You’ve already talked to Dr Wertheim?’ Her tear-damp face was very disappointed.

  ‘Dr Reichlin. I don’t know if you know him. He was at that meeting too, and—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear a word about your stupid meeting,’ said Mimi. ‘Certainement pas. Dr Wertheim says there’s absolutely no doubt about it. Pinchas, I’m pregnant.’

  34

  Salomon Meijer died on 20 August 1893, the day of the plebiscite. His condition hadn’t changed during all those weeks. They had taken him to the little room that was called the sewing room even though no one ever sewed in it – if you own a business with its own tailor’s shop you don’t need such a thing – and he lay there on his back for all those days, breathing without apparent difficulty, was there and yet not there.

  At first they still talked to him, or talked at him, thus keeping to the un-spoken agreement that this was still Uncle Salomon lying there and not just a lump of old meat. Very gradually, in imperceptible stages, the language that they used to the patient became increasingly childish, as if the old man were getting younger and younger with each day of his death throes, turning back into a baby, as if at the end of his journey he would not die, but would instead slip back into the warmth of the womb.

  But this reverse transformation was not complete, because at the same time Salomon’s face got older and older. His beard sprouted as if gaining additional power from the motionlessness of the rest of his body, and shaving his sagging skin proved difficult. So stubble turned to hairs, and hairs to clumps. The sideburn, so carefully groomed for so long, lost its contours, an island swathed in seaweed. The little red veins that for as long as Arthur could remember had always made his cheeks look so cheerful now disfigured that face like a rash.

  Even they th
emselves didn’t notice that they were treating Salomon more and more like an infant. When they had wiped away his drool, it struck them as perfectly natural to pat his cheeks and say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, that’s better, isn’t it, that’s better.’ Later they didn’t talk to him at all, they did what needed to be done quickly and in silence, and left the room without looking round.

  Although looking after the sick is not really among the duties of a cook, fat Christine proved particularly efficient at such tasks. The performed the most unpleasant duties as naturally as she might have scrubbed the scales from a carp or pulled the innards from the abdominal cavity of a freshly shechita-slaughtered chicken. ‘If you cook every day, nothing repels you,’ she once said to Arthur, and the longer he thought about that sentence, the worse food began to taste.

  In the end he was the only one to spend long hours by Salomon’s bed. Janki looked into the room once a day when he came back from the Modern Emporium, stood in the doorway still in coat and hat and didn’t actually come inside. ‘Is everything all right, Salomon?’ he would ask, or, ‘Do you have everything you need?’ When no answer came, as indeed no answer could, Janki cleared his throat two or three times, executed an almost military turn and left. He never closed the door behind him, it was as if he feared the finality of a lock clicking shut.

  Chanele came more often, but only ever when Arthur wasn’t there and she could be alone with Salomon. Once Arthur had come into the room without knocking – and what would have been the point of that, when Salomon could hardly have shouted ‘Come in!’? – and Chanele had been sitting there with Salomon’s hand in hers, crying. Arthur was quiet, and went out again without her noticing; there was something indecent and forbidden about seeing his own mother crying.