‘The Meijers will be here at any moment,’ Hinda said into the embarrassed pause. ‘Would anyone like a piece of cake in the meantime?’
No one answered. Only Mimi reached her hand out towards a plate with what was almost a gesture of longing, and quickly lowered it again.
The place where Hinda and Zalman lived wasn’t exactly a slum, but no one had ever seen a Buchet here before, let alone the latest model. The car hadn’t even come to a standstill before a group of children had gathered at the side of the road, commenting expertly on the vehicle and its occupants. When Landolt wanted to open the car door for his employers, a boy of about fourteen got in ahead of him. His knees were scraped bloody from some adventure or other, and a cigarette behind his ear demonstrated his premature masculinity. He opened the car door, dramatically pulled the cap – wherever he had learned the gesture – from his head, wedged it under his arm and held out the hand thus freed in a demanding manner. The three Meijers got out, François very correct in top hat and grey Ulster greatcoat, Mina in her usual over-sized skirt, and Alfred in a suit with such an adult cut that it made him look particularly young. Ignoring the outstretched hand, they walked through the cordon of curious faces to the front door. The disappointed tip-hunter nodded as if he had expected nothing else, and said, ‘Typical Jews – they’re all tight.’
‘Herr Meijer is a Protestant,’ said Landolt.
‘Of course,’ the boy answered and spat artfully just in front of the chauffeur’s feet. ‘And this is a horse-drawn carriage.’
With her lame leg it was hard for Mina to climb the stairs. None the less, she would have nothing of Alfred’s proffered arm. The rejection seemed to upset him, and she regretted her own inflexibility. ‘It’s not you,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve just got used to doing things for myself.’
When at last they reached the third floor, François had already rung the bell and gone in. Mina took her son’s head between her hands – she practically had to stretch, because Alfred was already far taller than she was – drew him down to her and tried to smile encouragingly. ‘Things will go on somehow.’
‘Somehow,’ Alfred repeated. It didn’t sound convinced.
When he came into the room, Désirée gave a start as if she wanted to run towards him or away from him, but Pinchas hand still rested on her shoulder and wouldn’t let go.
They greeted one another formally and without warmth, delegates from enemy countries who are forced for diplomatic reasons to meet in a last bid for peace, even though both sides are already arming for war. Zalman was right: this was not a coffee party, it was a conference.
‘Let’s sit down,’ he said. Chair-legs scraped like gun carriages along the parquet floor.
The seating arrangement arose quite naturally: on one side the Meijers, on the other the Pomeranzes, Alfred and Désirée each flanked by their parents, just as miscreants are guarded by severe police officers in court. Désirée kept her head lowered the whole time and ran her fingernail repeatedly along a starched fold in the table-cloth. Alfred studied the mizrach panel on the opposite wall. Zalman, as master of the house and, as an experienced negotiator, moderator of the discussion, had taken his seat on the narrow side of the table by the window. Arthur was left with the seat at the opposite end of the table, with his back to the door, and unable to push his chair too far back in case anyone suddenly came in. Hinda sat down at a corner of the table, ready to get up at any moment and fetch something they’d forgotten from the kitchen.
‘Who will have a piece of cake?’ she asked.
François pushed his plate aside in a gesture of refusal, the others mutely shook their heads, and only Pinchas was polte enough to say, ‘Thank you very much, Hinda. It’s very kind of you, but . . . this really isn’t the moment.’
‘In that case . . .’ Zalman began.
‘I’d like a piece of cake,’ said Alfred.
It was a challenge, quite clearly. He wasn’t concerned about the cake – how could one be hungry in such a situation? – he just wanted to demonstrate that he was not prepared from the outset to accept any decisions that were made here.
‘Stop it!’ his father hissed at him.
Alfred didn’t seem to hear him. He held his plate out to Hinda and said, ‘I loved your cakes even as a child.’
François brought his fist down on the table.
Hinda, with the cake slice already in her hand, looked from one to the other and didn’t know what to do.
François slowly opened his fist again, one finger at a time. His face twisted into a smile, although one that didn’t reach his eyes. Hinda was familiar with his apparently friendly expression. Even as a child her brother had always put it on when he was genuinely furious. ‘Can we start now?’ he asked. His voice was flat, he was probably trying to hold his breath to keep from shouting.
‘In that case . . .’ Zalman tried to start again, but Alfred cut him off again.
‘One moment, please, Uncle Zalman,’ he said, and his smile was as ruthlessly polite as his father’s. ‘There are temptations that I cannot resist.’
Arthur was the only one who noticed Désirée blushing at these words.
‘So if you will be so kind, Aunt Hinda,’ said Alfred, and held his plate out to her again.
Hinda hesitated. Like everyone else at the table she sensed: there was an argument going on here, in which one didn’t want to take sides.
Désirée raised her head into the silence. Her voice quivered slightly. ‘I’d like a piece of cake too,’ she said quietly, looking only at Alfred.
To gloss over the tension of the moment, apart from François everyone suddenly said they actually did want some cake after all, and of course they would have to have coffee to go with it. Under the pretext of making themselves useful, Lea and Rachel used the opportunity to welcome their relatives, who had gathered together for such a sensational occasion, and at the same time to inspect them as inconspicuously as possible. Back in their room they then had a violent discussion about whether Désirée’s eyes had really been red with tears.
It was only when the plates and the pleasantries – ‘Your cake gets better all the time, my dear Hinda!’ – had been finally cleared away that they got to the subject. It quickly became apparent that apart from the couple involved, everyone shared the same opinion: what was happening between Désirée and Alfred was impossible. Absolutely impossible. Admittedly the pair were not so closely related that an association between them needed to be ruled out for that reason, but, well, all right, it simply didn’t fit.
But the reasons that the two fathers gave for this shared conviction were completely different.
François, the businessman, based his argument on the chances that Alfred would throw away his whole life through an ill-considered liaison. He listed all the advantages that his son enjoyed at present: freshman in an exclusive student fraternity, links with the best families in the city, endless business contacts, just because he no longer bore the stigma of . . .
‘Stigma?’ Pinchas spat the word out like a stone that’s found its way into the jam. ‘I must ask you not to use such treyfeneh expressions.’
‘Call it what you like. It won’t alter the facts. As a Christian Alfred has all the opportunities that I never did.’
‘You pauper! One can see that you’re on the brink of starvation!’ said Hinda, even though she had made a firm resolution to stay out of the debate.
‘This isn’t about me!’
‘Ah,’ said Mimi, ‘then that would be the first time!’
‘It’s about my son.’
‘You should have thought of him before you dragged him along to be geshmat.’
‘I’m not willing to talk to you about this matter. That I had myself baptised that time . . .’
‘Geshmat,’ Mimi insisted.
‘. . . is no one’s business. It was my quite personal decision!’
‘But not his.’
Alfred adopted such an studiedly indifferent expression that t
he argument at the table might have been about some insignificant namesake.
‘I did what was best for him,’ said François, and Mimi laughed the pinched laugh used to express contempt in social comedies at the Stadtheater. ‘Chrétiens – cretins,’ she murmured, and nodded several times, as if the profound truth in this similarity between the two words had only just struck her.
‘We won’t get any further like this,’ Zalman tried as chairman to bring order to the debate. ‘We have to speak sensibly and in turn . . .’
‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,’ said François. ‘As a Christian – whether you like it or not, Pinchas – Alfred has the best prospects for a glittering career. And they would be destroyed at a stroke if he married Désirée.’
‘Married? Ha!’ said Mimi, her cheeks already combatively pink.
‘Which is of course out of the question,’ said Pinchas.
‘Then we agree.’
‘No, François, we don’t agree at all.’
‘Don’t call him François,’ Mimi barked. ‘His name is Shmul.’ And repeated, because she knew how much François hated his old name: ‘Shmul! Shmul! Shmul!’
‘This is impossible,’ said Zalman.
Mimi pursed her red painted little mouth and leaned back in her chair with her arms folded. ‘If my opinion isn’t wanted here – please, I don’t need to say anything. Certainement pas. I can be silent too.’
‘Listen to me, François,’ Pinchas began again. ‘I want to present you with my point of view without excitement, but also with great clarity. Deborah is a respectable Jewish girl . . .’
‘Deborah? Since when has she been called Deborah?’
‘It was the name of my late grandmother, may she rest in peace.’
‘You see? That’s exactly your problem. You want everything always to be as it was for your forefathers.’
‘Who are also yours.’
‘Perhaps. But they lived back then, and we live today.’
‘Some things are always valid.’
‘And some things change.’
‘At any rate I will not let my daughter marry a non-Jew . . .’
It didn’t happen often that Mina got involved in debates. But when she did, you listened.
‘Alfred isn’t a goy,’ she said. ‘He’s my son.’
‘He’s baptised.’
‘He’s my son,’ repeated Mina, and even Pinchas had no objection to raise to this, because the child of a Jewish mother always remains a Jew, regardless of what detours his life might take.
‘But he’s also my son,’ said François with the menacingly quite voice of someone who can barely contain himself, ‘and I forbid . . .’
‘I don’t care what you forbid or what you allow!’ Désirée wasn’t used to raising her voice in front of other people, and her voice, like a flute being blown into too violently, immediately tipped over into shrill. ‘And I don’t care if Alfred goes to synagogue or to church or nowhere at all! I don’t care. I love him.’
‘Nebbich,’ said Mimi. ‘What does anyone your age know of love?’
‘At what age is anyone supposed to know about it?’ asked Arthur, but no one listened to him.
François spoke of the necessary adaptation to society in which his son was not to become an outsider again. Pinchas quoted passages from the Talmud, none of which really applied to the situation. Mimi repeated her bon mot about chrétiens and cretins, and even Arthur, who normally always found something worth supporting on both sides of an argument, took a position for once and said very sadly that some relationships, however painful it might be to those affected, were condemned to failure from the outset, it pained him to say it, but that was his experience. Only Mina said you had to take things as they came, and sometimes she had the feeling that some people only talked so that they didn’t have to listen.
They threatened and they begged, Mimi even wept and sobbed, ‘Mai tu m’as déchirée!’ But the old accusation had lost its power. Désirée just went on repeating over and over again, ‘I love him,’ a magic phrase that suspended all reality. And Alfred, the law student, explained stubbornly that he was an adult now, and as soon as Désirée turned twenty-one nothing would stop of them from doing what they thought was right.
‘And what are you going to live on?’ cried François. ‘You won’t get a rappen from me.’
‘You can’t buy everything,’ Alfred replied, and Désirée, with a courage that scared even her, reached for his hand across the table and said, ‘The really important things are free.’
The more often the same arguments were repeated, the more everyone talked at the same time. You could hardly make out a word, even though Lea and Rachel had now opened the door to their room wide, curious passers-by standing outside a circus tent without tickets, and trying to guess from the reactions of the spectators which sensation they had just missed.
‘What if we made them some more coffee . . .’ Rachel wondered aloud, but Lea shook her head. ‘Papa will kill us.’
At first Rachel seemed entirely willing to take even that risk into account. She had – ‘It’ll be her red hair,’ Zalman always said – a fiery temperament and was inclined to rebellion. But then she stayed sitting next to her sister on the bed after all.
‘What kind of person is Alfred?’ she asked.
Lea shrugged. ‘Would you have thought Déchirée capable of such a thing?’
‘No,’ Rachel replied, and added yearningly after a long pause. ‘But I’d like to be able to love someone as much as that one day.’
48
They finally agreed on a compromise that satisfied nobody.
‘If no one has really won,’ Zalman said afterwards to Hinda, ‘then no one has really lost.’ Even though it had been not a piece of pay-bargaining, but a love story, he was probably right.
The solution, which wasn’t a real solution, and which could therefore be accepted by everybody, consisted in putting off the decision. The two lovers were obliged not to see one another for a whole year; then, if they were still sure of their cause – ‘Which God forbid!’ – then they would see what happened next. At worst they would be allowed to do as they pleased, although it was to be hoped – ‘Very much to be hoped!’ – that they would have come to their senses by then. Désirée and Alfred claimed that nothing, nothing at all, could part them? Then fine, now they would have the opportunity to put their conviction to the test.
But as long as they both remained in Zurich, the Meijers and the Pomeranzes were agreed, they could not be relied upon to keep their word on anything. They were practised at secrecy, and even without Esther Weill’s help they would find ways and means of getting round any arrangement. Over the last few months Désirée had demonstrated that she was able to lie shamelessly to her parents, above all to her mother, who had – ‘Tu m’as déchirée, ma petite!’ – sacrificed herself for her all her life.
So the family council decided that Arthur, during this cooling-off or probationary period, would interrupt his studies and go abroad. Perhaps it had been a mistake to let him study so young, and the spoilt rich sons in a fraternity had probably not always been the best models for him. A thorough dose of practical work, François hoped, would drive the fancies from his mind. In Paris – that was far enough away – François had a business friend, a certain Monsieur Charpentier, who also ran a department store; he would get in touch with him and ask him to take his son on as an apprentice.
Mimi, who liked things to be dramatic, suggested that the two of them shouldn’t be allowed to write letters to each other either during the agreed year, but everyone thought that was too harsh. ‘But I will read every letter that comes to our house,’ said Mimi, having the last word after all.
The arrangement with Monsieur Charpentier was soon in place. He didn’t just agree to taking Alfred on in the various departments of his store and, if he proved his mettle, even giving him some responsibility, he also personally found him a little lodging, nothing luxurious, but with a good re
putation, where the young man could suitably stay. In a long letter full of solemn French politesses he promised Mina to keep an almost paternal eye on Alfred, and in a second, significantly less formal letter, he agreed with François that he would keep him discreetly informed if his son did anything stupid. Whereby the two businessmen agreed that a particular kind of stupidity in this special case was thoroughly desirable. In Paris, according to François’s secret plan, the women weren’t nearly as buttoned up as they were in Zwinglian Zurich. A young man would find enough distractions there to forget any kind of romantic nonsense.
Désirée wasn’t even allowed to accompany Alfred to the station. Mimi even tried to keep the date of his departure secret from her, but in contrast to the image that she had of herself, she had no great gift for dissemblance, and chattered with such incredible excitement about trivial matters that Désirée set down her knife and fork and said, ‘He’s leaving today, isn’t he?’
‘He’s gone already,’ said Mimi, and was prepared to take her weeping daughter comfortingly in her arms. But Désirée just nodded silently as if the news had no particular importance for her.
Mimi had undertaken to spend a lot of time with her daughter now. ‘After all,’ she often said to Pinchas, ‘it’s all my fault and mine alone. I have paid too little heed to Désirée, and am a very bad mother!’ Pinchas then contradicted her, and that comforting contradiction, they both knew, was the true purpose of her self-reproach.
Although Mimi repeatedly stressed that she, in the goodness of her heart, was entirely willing to forgive and forget, the old friendly intimacy between mother and daughter did not reappear. When Désirée had confided her secret adventures to her every day, even though she did so under the pretext that it had all happened to her best friend, they had got on better. She was now forbidden to see Esther Weill, much to the amazement of Esther’s parents. But if one didn’t want to be the talk of the whole community, one couldn’t let anyone in on the whole sorry story.
Melnitz Page 52