François, convinced that most problems can be solved with money, gave Monsieur Charpentier plein pouvoir to buy Alfred out, but in France patriotism had broken out along with the war, and the traditional little channel of corruption no longer worked.
Training wasn’t all that bad, Alfred wrote to his family; so far in the general chaos they hadn’t even found rifles for the new recruits, and exercises with broom-handles had an almost comical character. The French had as little a chance against the well-organised Germans, this was his firm conviction, as they had in 1870–71, and the war would be over long before he himself got to the front.
Janki travelled unannounced to Zurich to talk to François. When he didn’t find him in his office, he looked for him all around the department store and in the end made a scene in front of him in the middle of the fabric department. He wasn’t doing enough to solve the problem, he told him, not every soldier was as fortunate as he, Janki, had been in his own day, and if Alfred had to go to the front and died there, it was all François’s fault. When François tried to calm him down – one doesn’t discuss family problems in front of other people – Janki lost control and started hitting his son with his lion’s-head stick. For the first time, François was glad that business hadn’t been good since the outbreak of war, which meant that only a few customers were able to observe the embarrassing scene.
Meanwhile Chanele had gone to see her daughter-in-law Mina, and the two women were trying to give one another encouragement. But try as she might to conceal her own anxiety, Chanele could not suppress the thought that Mina had only ever been unlucky all her life. Why should it be any different with her son?
Mina, the only member of the family council to vote against Alfred’s banishment, gave no outward sign of what was going on within. Only once, when she met Parson Widmer in town, did she spit on the ground in front of him, and then had to struggle to resist the urge to apologise to him. The misfortune had begun not with him, but with that plot of land for which François was prepared to do anything.
François, in the meantime, in his attempt to change the situation, had abandoned his lifelong resistance and decided to become Swiss. There were several communes which were known to like refurbishing their coffers with increased fees for – mostly Jewish – new citizens; he opted for Wülflingen near Winterthur, where they declared themselves willing to speed up the procedure for an acceptance fee of five thousand francs above the usual amount. As at his baptism, Alfred was involved in this too, without having been asked first. But at first the argument of his new citizenship did not persuade the French authorities to free him from military service.
Désirée did nothing but cry now, and Mimi dragged her to see Dr Wertheim. He diagnosed anaemia and general nerves and prescribed a strengthening diet. But one doesn’t heal broken hearts with beef broth, even if it’s made according to the recipe of Grandmother Golde.
Pinchas said Tehillim every morning and even, without making much fuss about it, had several personal fast days. There was much to be asked for during those days, because prayer had to be said for Ruben too.
Immediately after the events in Sarajevo, Zalman and Hinda had urged their son to come home straight away. He had written back to say that he only wanted to stay the few days until Siyum, the traditional feast that is always celebrated when the students of the yeshiva have finished studying a section of the Talmud. Then the war broke out, and all connections with Eastern Galicia were suddenly interrupted. At the Post Office they were told only that telegrams could unfortunately no longer be accepted for regions where battles were being fought.
Hinda did not moan or complain, but became very quiet, and did her work mechanically. Lea and Rachel had only ever known their mother to be cheerful, and found it hard to accept the change. During this time they were more hard-working and helpful than anyone had known them before. It was the only way they could show their concern for their brother.
With Pinchas’s support Zalman set up a fund for refugees from Galicia, more and more of whom arrived in Zurich in the course of September. He asked each one of them who registered with him whether he had heard anything of the yeshiva in Kolomea, but the new arrivals were all too preoccupied with their own fates. The invading Russian troops, they said, treated the Ruthenian inhabitants with perfect correctness; the Galician Jews, on the other hand, were generally suspected of collaboration with the Austrians, which constantly gave the Cossacks new excuses for acts of violence and looting.
Even though Switzerland was neutral, even here the war changed life from the bottom up. It was shocking how quickly one got used to it.
Arthur, the most unmilitary member of the whole family, volunteered for the emergency medical services, but was not taken because of his weak eyes. Joni Leibowitz was in active service as an infantryman with Fusilier Company IV/59, where he quickly rose to the rank of corporal. As a quartermaster, Sally Steigrad finally had the adventures he had always yearned for.
Alfred reported from Paris that they had by now received their guns, but they still lacked ammunition, which is why, ludicrously, they were only being trained in bayonet fighting. The German victory at Tannenberg confirmed him in his conviction that the war would not last long, and he was already making plans for the time that came after. ‘If they still want to part us,’ he wrote poste restante to Désirée, ‘I will win you back with my bayonet.’
On Erev Shabbos and on the eve of the feast days, all the Jewish refugees, whether they were religious or not, turned up for service at one of the two congregations. Because of the mitzvah, but also out of genuine pity, people tripped over themselves to invite them to dinner, and it even turned into a real competition over the most pitiful figures. On Erev Sukkot, Pinchas Pomeranz brought a whole family home, a couple with a grown-up daughter, all three of whom had to be kitted out from the various wardrobes before they could sit down at the table reasonably yontevdik. They had fled full pelt from the Russians, and spent the whole of Yom Kippur on a train, crammed tight into a cattle truck with many fellows in misery. ‘Even the treyfest among them fasted,’ the man said bitterly, when he climbed the stairs to the attic behind his host, ‘because there was nothing to eat or drink.’
Pinchas had set up his tabernacle on the roof, where the washing was normally hung. Its board walls were decorated with faded pictures of famous rabbonim, and chains of wrinkled chestnuts and now colourless paper garlands crossed above the solemnly laid table. Where there are no children in the house, no one makes new decorations. The October evening was cool, but at least it wasn’t raining, which was why, in accordance with the rules, they were able to open the solid roof to eat, and see the stars. Arthur too was invited into the sukkah every year, and Mimi complained to Pinchas – in French, as one should when discretion is called for – that it would be very cramped in there with seven people. Basically, however, she was very proud to be able to demonstrate that they didn’t need to economise in her household, and were entirely capable of entertaining even unexpected guests. The bean soup, so full of sausage and smoked meat that a spoon would have stood up in it, would have fed twenty people.
Quite contrary to his normal habits, Arthur was late and nearly missed the kiddush. He had been called out to an emergency at the last minute, he apologised, to tend to an elderly Galician who had, while escaping, received a serious wound in the foot that was now beginning to fester dangerously.
When he was introduced to the foreign guests – ‘The Wasserstein family, Dr Arthur Meijer!’ – something strange happened. The daughter of the family, a very reserved young woman who hadn’t said a word all evening, suddenly burst into loud laughter. It was a reaction that had nothing to do with cheerfulness, a hysterical, breathless screaming or panting. As she did so she pointed her finger at Arthur and repeated over and over again: ‘Arthur Meijer! Arthur Meijer! Arthur Meijer!’ The laughter broke off as abruptly as it had begun, and turned just as swiftly into tears. She shook off all attempts by her mother to console her, but then
allowed Désirée to take her in her arms and rock her like a baby.
‘Please be moichel,’ said Herr Wasserstein. He seemed to be just as discomfited as his daughter by the fact that Dr Arthur Meijer was sitting opposite him here in a Zurich sukkah. He shook his head again and again, and ran his fingers through his curly hair as if he were about to rip it out in bunches. ‘This coincidence . . .’
‘You must know, Doctor,’ his wife explained, ‘you two were to be married.’
Chanele and Janki had never mentioned the encounter in Westerland, they had been very tight-lipped about their summer holiday, so it came as a complete surprise to discover that – at least in his parents’ plans – he had once been to a certain extent engaged to Chaje Sore Wasserstein.
‘But now of course she will never marry,’ said Hersch Wasserstein.
Chaos knows no order, so the story was told in fragments and without a logical sequence. The listeners had to assemble much of it from hints, and complete certain things left unsaid. There were many such stories around this time, and the only special thing about this one was that it very tangentially touched the Meijer family.
The Wassersteins had been extremely surprised by Janki and Chanele’s hasty departure. Their own stay on Sylt had come to an end without further events, but also without a shidduch. Back in Marjampol they had tried to resume contact with the Meijers, but no reply came from Baden. ‘So, not every business deal ends with a handshake,’ said Hersch Wasserstein. ‘One learns that as a businessman.’
And he quickly added, as if his words might be thought presumptuous, ‘Now I am of course no longer a businessman, but only a shnorrer. I must put on other people’s clothes and be grateful for it.’
‘We are grateful,’ his wife said quickly. ‘We have nebbech lost everything.’
The Russian troops had burned down the sawmill; there was wood enough for a magnificent blazing pyre. Hersch Wasserstein had tried to stop them from destroying his life’s work, there had been an argument, and little Motti – ‘A boy like that doesn’t know how bad people can be!’ – had run to help his father. He probably thought the war was like the parading children on the spa promenade, just a game, and they wouldn’t let his father join in.
They impaled him on the bayonet, ‘not even in anger’, Malka said in a voice of wonder, as if her son would still be alive if only someone could explain that one circumstance to her. ‘They weren’t even furious.’
‘Praised be the judge of truth,’ murmured Pinchas.
‘Affreux,’ said Mimi. That too sounded like a prayer.
Chaje Sore had pressed her head to Désirée’s dress, and was moving it up and down very slowly, as if to be stroked by the silk fabric.
The Cossacks – ‘Only a little shock troop, but you don’t need an army to make a family unhappy’ – had then celebrated, which in their case meant: they had had a drink. What soldiers do when the vodka goes to their heads and their loins was well known, and Chaje Sore was a pretty girl.
The tabernacle had neither gas nor electricity. An old-fashioned paraffin lamp cast flickering shadows on the walls; the lips of the framed sages seemed to move, as if they were speaking kaddish for little Motti.
And a prayer that won’t be found in any siddur for Chaje Sore Wasserstein, who had been too good for any man, and then good enough for twenty.
Later, when they were saying goodbye, Malka Wasserstein said something surprising to Arthur.
‘If you had married her, she wouldn’t have been there,’ she said.
Arthur took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Two hours before, he hadn’t known that there was such a person as Chaje Sore Wasserstein, and now he felt responsible for her fate.
All night he kept starting awake, as he had often started awake in his school-days and as a student before exams, and when he did go back to sleep he dreamed of questions he was being asked, for which he didn’t know the answers.
The next morning he went to the prayer hall, right at the beginning, when only the most pious are there, to help form the minyan on time, and for hours read along word for word with all the blessings, pleadings and songs of praise, as if they might somewhere conceal a sentence that was meant for him and him alone.
The Sukkot service has a quite special character; the palm frond, the lulav, is waved in all four directions, and laid out on the lecterns; the essrogim, the ritual citrus fruits that have no name in any other language, spread their very special fragrance. But when Arthur tried to find an answer in the familiar words and gestures, there was none to be found. Only the haftarah, the word of the prophet, which follows the reading from the Torah, seemed to contain a reference to the events of the previous evening: ‘The city shall be taken,’ Zachariah threatened, ‘the houses shall be rifled and the women defiled.’ But even the prophet could not say what one was supposed to do if one felt guilty for all of that, when in fact one was not.
In the short break that always happens before the Torah rolls are lifted, Pinchas murmured to him, ‘Désirée had another letter from Alfred. Yontif or no yontif, we opened it. He writes that at last they have ammunition. But he is sure that the war will be over long before new recruits have to go into battle.’
‘Nothing seems certain to me any more,’ Arthur whispered back.
Only when service was over did he notice that Hersch Wasserstein had been there as well, right at the back in the last row meant for strangers and beggers. He wore the suit that Pinchas had given him the day before, and now, in daylight, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the jacket was too tight and the trouser legs too long, the clothes of a shnorrer who has not yet learned his craft. Each time someone held out their hand to him to wish him a good yontif – as if he could ever have a good day again! – he hesitated for a moment before taking it. He was used to waving away the submissive cordialities of supplicants, and had to keep reminding himself that he himself was now the supplicant.
Arthur very slowly folded up his tallis, the fine one that Zalman had given him for his bar mitzvah, and just as he was putting the cloth back in its velvet case, he knew what he had to do. It was quite clear to him, beyond any doubt, and the fact that the matter would not have a happy conclusion made it all the more correct. ‘I wasn’t born to be happy,’ he said to himself, and he felt as if that was the answer that he had sought in vain in all the prayers.
Most of the men had left already. Hersch Wasserstein was now standing all on his own by the door of the prayer hall. Arthur walked over to him, and it seemed to be a very long way. ‘Herr Wasserstein,’ he said, ‘I would like to ask for your daughter’s hand.’
His own voice sounded strange to him, but the idea of walking under the marriage baldaquin with Chaje Sore, whom he barely knew, made his eyes quite moist.
Hersch Wasserstein made an uneasy scraping movement with his foot, as if stubbing out a cigarette. Then he looked Arthur in the eye, and his gaze was not that of a shnorrer. ‘It isn’t decent to mock the afflicted,’ he said.
He turned away and walked off, and nothing that Arthur said to him would make him come back.
‘You’re meshuga,’ said Hinda, when Arthur told her about it.
The siblings were sitting in the Kamionkers’ sukkah. The twins had taken a lot of trouble over decorating it; their father had had to bring home colourful scraps of fabric from work, and they had used them to create something almost like an oriental palace. That too was for Ruben.
‘I meant it quite seriously,’ Arthur assured her.
‘I know. That’s exactly the meshuganeh thing about it.’
‘If I’d married her then . . .’
‘You didn’t even know her.’
‘But if . . .’
It did Arthur good to argue in favour of his moral duties towards the Wassersteins, above all – even though he might not have admitted it to himself – because he knew that he would not win the debate. Hinda knew him too well.
‘You aren’t responsible for everything in th
is world,’ she said. ‘You are not the Lord God.’ And then Hinda, confident, ever-cheerful Hinda, suddenly started crying, wailing, threw her arms around her brother’s neck and whispered to him, ‘But if you are the Lord God – please, please bring my Ruben home to me.’
Arthur clumsily patted her back, and had the feeling that he was consoling himself.
Meanwhile Zalman was sitting in the back room of Pinchas’s shop, where the relief committee for Galician refugees had set up a makeshift office between sacks of lentils and barrels of pickled gherkins. Frau Okun, who had fled from Russia herself many years ago, acted as secretary, and the people coming to her for help seemed to like her brusque, matter-of-fact manner. Even too much empathy can be painful.
War pays no heed to feast days, so even today new refugees had arrived, who were supplied with absolute necessities and needed lodging somewhere for the first few nights. Zalman asked few questions: ‘if someone’s tongue is hanging from his throat, you don’t need to ask him if he’s thirsty.’ But of course he asked each one of them if he could tell him anything about the fate of the yeshiva of Kolomea. The front had been a few days’ journey away from the homes of these refugees, and today’s new arrivals came from a quite different area. Only one old man with a strange half-beard – a joker in Russian uniform had burned off the other half – thought he had heard that the rabbi had left the city with all his students, but couldn’t say where they had got to.
Zalman found lodging for all the refugees, told them where they could get something to eat and gave the sick and wounded the address of Arthur’s surgery. Then he carefully, without chivvying, recorded the details of the new arrivals on file cards, put them in order and passed the box to Frau Okun.
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