He sat opposite them when they read their newspaper at the breakfast table, and when they gave a start as they read and said, ‘We didn’t know that’ – they said it every day and every day they gave a start again – when they didn’t finish reading and set the paper aside and didn’t want to know anything more about everything because they couldn’t bear the knowledge, then he patted their hands comfortingly and said, ‘You should have asked me. You should just have asked me.’
They hadn’t asked him because they were afraid of his answers.
He had never been away and now he was everywhere.
He sat on all the benches along the lake shore, he stared into the sun with his eyes wide open, for days, and yet his skin stayed pale as if he had never emerged from the shadow of his hiding place. He ran after all the prams, he bent his back low again and again to peer in and every time he was disappointed. He begged for bread at every door, only to let it go hard and say, ‘My teeth have been knocked out.’ Where someone laughed loudly, he stood in the room and put his finger to his lips, a bony finger with which he could also drum on the table, making it sound like the precise rattle of a firing squad. From all the family trees he drew names at random, kept them in big baskets, unripe fruits from which he distilled a brandy that no one could drink without their eyes watering. He sat in all the libraries and scribbled notes in the margins of the books. He wrote with red ink, dipped the old-fashioned quill in his own veins and became paler and paler. If a couple kissed, he stood behind them, if they made love, he lay down with them, whispered in their ears tender words that didn’t belong to them, he knew a different story for each couple and another and another, and in none of them did they live happily ever after. He gave the children names, and every time he knew how to name a thousand other children who had had exactly the same name, and who had also fared badly. He scraped the putty from the windows so that the panes came loose and the wind whistled into the room. He ate the window putty, stuffed it greedily into his mouth and chewed it toothlessly. He had a crudely carved flute in his pocket, and he took it out, played infinitely sad tunes and demanded that everyone hum along. He told of far-away countries in which it had been cold, oh so cold. Walked close behind people and wrapped his bony arms around them to show them how one had tried in vain to warm oneself there. He sat at all the tables; his plate was empty, however much was ladled into it. He stuck the fork through his hand, and he scratched notches into the spoon, a new one every day. He smiled from all the mirrors, pale and patient, let his face seep into that of his beholder like an ineradicable colour, infected him with an incurable illness, became an inseparable part of him. Soon no one knew which part was him and which part was them.
Every time he died, he came back.
He belonged to the family.
He belonged to all families.
When they talked about Ruben – and when didn’t they speak about him? – he repeated the name like a spell, ‘Ruben, Ruben, Ruben’. Hinda and Zalman had grown old, older than their years, and still lived entirely on what once had been. They sat under the Shabbos lamp that no one lit now, because it couldn’t make their worries vanish, they sat there looking at the same photographs over and over again until he took them out of their hands and fanned them out on the games table like playing cards. He listed the tricks as they had been played, for twelve whole years. One game after another, and they hadn’t won a single one. He could tell them where Ruben had been collected and where he had been taken to, on what day and at which hour, where he had been first and where he had ended up after that, which way they had gone and on which transport. He told them where he had been seen and where he had eventually not been seen, told them what had happened to him before his trail had disappeared amid millions of other trails that Uncle Melnitz all knew as well, and whose stories he could all tell on long dark days and on long wakeful nights. He spoke calmly and without haste, like one who knows: I will never run out of stories.
So many stories.
He knew how to talk about Ruben’s wife, who had been a Sternberg from Berlin, and who everyone had only ever called Lieschen. Those two names were all that was left of her, Lieschen and Sternberg, everything else had been carried away by a cold wind, grey dust and flakes of ash. ‘Where it blows, the flowers grow better,’ he said. They couldn’t really remember their daughter-in-law, they had only ever visited her or been visited by her, and you don’t get to know people that way. Not the way you would like to know somebody. They couldn’t even have named her hair colour, the photographs were black and white, black and ivory, black and brown. Each time they took the album out, her face was less familiar to them. There was only one detail that they never forgot, the one small, unusual thing that everyone has left over if he’s lucky, the detail which is like a nail that you can hang things on, a picture or a memory. They’d called her Lieschen, a child’s name, even when she was long grown up, only ever Lieschen. Even her own children had got used to it; you remembered that even if you remembered nothing else about her. It had been four children, three boys and a girl; there was one photograph in which they would never grow older. Uncle Melnitz was the only one who could tell them apart, who still knew their names. The only one who had played with them, and now he wanted to teach the game to everyone else, you count down and clap your hands and sing, ‘Ei! Ei! Ei!’
Every time he died, he came back.
He was a stranger here in Zurich, and yet he was at home, just as he was at home in every place to which he had been exiled. At Sechsläuten he marched with the parade, in a costume that was older than everyone else’s, and stamped out the beat of the brass band music with dusty shoes. The bouquets thrown to the others dried in his hands, and he greeted and laughed and waved and was the guest of honour. In the Knabenschiessen shooting competition he stood in front of the targets and unbuttoned his red frock coat, waved to the riflemen not to keep him waiting. And he also liked to pick up the black wand and point it at the hits, on the chest, on the belly, on the forehead. At Schulsilvester, the tumultuous last day of school before the Christmas holidays, he went from house to house at dawn and roused the people from their beds with lots of noise. ‘They often came at this time of day,’ he said.
When Adolf Rosenthal walked past the Cantonal school – he was retired now, and had had to give up his authority along with the key to the staff room – when he just happened to walk past it, as he just happened to do every day, when he then looked up to his old classroom, where no one had been allowed to interrupt him, Uncle Melnitz was standing at the window, waving at him and calling, ‘You’re late! My class has already started.’
They had a lot to learn from him, and this time they had to listen to him.
He had been right.
As he was right every time.
Came back and reported.
Telling stories made him vivid. He had brought new stories with him, lots of new stories, each one so fatally vivid that the others paled in comparison. In the modern age everything gets bigger and better and more efficient. Six million new stories, a fat book from which you could read for a generation without repeating yourself a single time. Stories that could not be believed, certainly not here in Switzerland, where they had lived all those years on an island, on dry land in the middle of a deluge. Stories that wouldn’t go into people’s heads, not here, where supplies had never run out. Here you had lit your fire to cook and not noticed that you were doing it on the back of a huge fish that only had to roll over once in the water or beat its fins and you would be crushed and suffocated and drowned straight away. They hadn’t known it, here in Switzerland. They were finding it out now, and would have been happier if they never had.
He told and told and told his tales and had been buried so often that it almost bored him to think of it.
These were no heroic tales that he had brought. Not the kind that one knew in this country.
Hillel, for example, had stood at the border, for five whole years. He had defended his fatherlan
d with his rifle in his hand and would one day defend another fatherland. No one had yet found the knife to cut it from the map. Hillel had been a hero in active service, or had at least been granted permission by the state to remember heroism, to hang it on the wall in a frame: a dark green soldier staring into the distance, as unbowed and alert as a shomer in a different picture. Uncle Melnitz liked to stand before it, twist his head to study the signature of General Guisan, and say to Hillel, ‘Don’t forget to keep your rifle clean.’
Melnitz loved Switzerland. Even those who fear war like to play with tin soldiers. He loved this country, in which you could complain of hunger when chocolate was in short supply. It was interesting to visit Noah’s Ark after its thousand-year voyage.
In the watch shops on Bahnhofstrasse he made the hands stop. ‘Nothing changes here,’ he said. ‘Why would time need to change?’ On Bürkliplatz he walked from market stall to market stall and asked the farmers for rotten fruit and potato peelings. ‘I’ve got used to it,’ he said. ‘Why should I lose the habit?’ In François’s department store he stood in all the window displays, always behind the company emblem that decorated every pane, stood in such a way that the sun cast the shadow of the company insignia on his chest, where the circle in which the letters MEIER intersected sat over his heart like the bull’seye of a target. ‘Doesn’t it suit me?’ he asked.
Meijer with or without a yud.
He kept François company in his office, pushed the photographs of Mina and Alfred aside and sat down on the desk. With a small, modest gesture that was supposed to mean, ‘Don’t be distracted!’ Watched François as he checked accounts and added up columns of numbers, only nodded appreciatively from time to time and said, ‘A fine result. You’ve really achieved something.’
He loved the ringing of the tills and the cold solemnity of the strong rooms. He scratched secret signs into the gold bars, knew their origins and made them recognisable. When the shutters rattled down over the riches at night, he let himself be locked in, studied the neat columns of figures in the books and couldn’t stop laughing.
In the darkness he often went walking arm in arm with Herr Grün. They got on very well. They silently recited old texts – ‘Guten Tag, Herr Grün!’, ‘Guten Tag, Herr Blau!’ – or marched in uniform boots down the narrow alleys of the old town and startled the people with the songs in their heads.
He lived in the cemeteries, in the Steinkluppe, in the Binz, in the Friesenberg, and scratched the numbers of the years into the stones with his fingernails. ‘It was yesterday,’ he said, ‘Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday.’
Every time he died, he came back.
At every funeral he spoke the kaddish, and at every wedding he crushed the glass, at every bris he held the child on his lap and at every bar mitzvah he was the first to fill the cup. ‘L’chaim!’ he cried, ‘To life!’ Where three spoke the table prayer, he was the fourth, where ten met for the minyan he was there as the eleventh. When they danced with the Torah roll, once a year, he was the first dancer and the last, and when fasting was done, he rubbed his belly and said, ‘You call that going hungry? That’s nothing.’
Every time he died, he came back.
He also visited Désirée, in her shop, where people met to get hold of kosher butter, kosher biscuits and kosher gossip. He brought her bonbons, old-fashioned bonbons that smelled of almonds and rosewater, they played games with them on the counter, and the winner was allowed to stop remembering for a whole night.
He knew all the secrets and revealed them even to those who didn’t want to know.
He looked in on Arthur and Rosa, who had become a happily married couple without having been a real one. They now lived on Morgartenstrasse, in the big flat that had once belonged to Mimi and Pinchas and after that to Désirée, and when they sat in the evening as married couples do, Uncle Melnitz sat between them, put one arm around Arthur and one around Rosa and became a part of it.
The children weren’t children any more, certainly not Irma, who turned the heads of all the young men in the community with her distinctive squint, but Uncle Melnitz still knelt by their beds and whispered fairy-tales to them all night, stories in which bad things happened until everyone called for Goliath. But Goliath didn’t come. Then, when they woke up screaming, he moved on, bolstering himself with a deep swig from the locked crystal bottle in the Tantalus. He could drink from it without opening it; he had learned so much in his life.
Every time he died, he came back.
He didn’t come alone. This time he had brought reinforcements. One on his own can’t tell so many stories.
The whole city was full of them.
The whole country.
The whole world.
They live in attics, in ocean-crossing chests that had missed setting off in time. They hid in the cellars, under piles of rags that had once been festive costumes. They met in every corner. They sat in the empty Gotthard mail coach outside the National Museum, they travelled without horses to the end of the world. In the station they chalked numbers on the freight wagons. In the junk shop on Neugasse they looked for objects that had once belonged to them, and didn’t want them when they found them. At Sprüngli they scraped cream cakes from tin plates. On the terrace of the meat market they lined up as if on parade; only sometimes one of them jumped into the Limmat and was allowed to drown.
They were everywhere.
They sat in all the trees, a swarm of black birds, playing chess with each other. Melnitz had carved the pieces out of bones; he could name the origins of every beaten peasant, his country and his family. He knew everything and wouldn’t let anyone forget it.
‘Enjoy your lives,’ he said. ‘You’ve been lucky, here in Switzerland.’
Every time he died, he came back.
Acknowledgements
For their help with research I wish to thank the historian Ursulina Wyss and the helpful ladies in the ICZ Library. My wonderful daughter Tamar Lewinsky corrected the Hebrew and Yiddish expressions and wrote the glossary.
The translator wishes to thank Pro Helvetia and the Max Geilinger Foundation for their generous award in funding the translation, and the staff at Looren Translation House, as well as John Stevens, Nina-Anne Kaye and the Guggenheim family of Zurich for their help and hospitality.
Glossary
Most Yiddish expressions come from the Hebrew. The pronunciation varies according to the origins of the speaker.
adir hu
‘mighty is He’, start of a song from the Pesach Haggadah
aliya
‘ascent’. Immigration to Palestine/Israel
almemor
platform for reading from the Torah
amod no’ach!
at ease! (military language)
arba kanfes
‘four corners’; undershirt with tassels
Ashkenazi
refers to the rites, customs, texts and Hebrew pronunciation of western, central and eastern European Jews
badchen
a wedding entertainer
balebos
master of the house, owner
bar mitzvah
‘son of the commandment’; ceremony of maturity for boys reaching their 13th year
beheimes
livestock, cow
bekovedik
respectable
bentch
bless; say the mealtime prayer
bentch gomel
give thanks after a danger survived
berches m.
plaited Sabbath bread, usually covered with poppy-seed
bishge
serving girl, maid
B’nai B’rith
‘Sons of the Covenant’, name of an international Jewish charitable organisation
bocher pl. bochrim
Talmud student, pupil
boruch Hashem
God be praised
Bovo Basro
‘the last gate’; name of a Talmudic tractate
Bris, bris milah
bronfen
spirits
bundel
stuffed cow’s stomach
Chai
life; in numerology: eighteen
chaluz pl. chaluzim
pioneer
Chanukah
eight-day festival commemorating the reconsecration of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt
Charoset
mixture of apples, nuts, wine and cinnamon. One of the symbolic meals eaten at Pesach
chassene
wedding
chaver pl. chaverim
colleague, friend, comrade
chazer-treyf
‘pig-treyf’, a strong way of describing things impure according to the dietary rules
cheder
‘room’, Jewish school in which only religious subjects are taught
chevra
society, association
chevra kadisha
a burial society
chochem
a wise man, an intelligent person (also ironic)
chochme pl. chochmes
wisdom, cleverness (also ironically)
Chol HaMoed
half-holidays between the first and last two days of Pesach and the feast of tabernacles, on which the prohibition on work is largely suspended
chossen m.
bridegroom
chumash
Pentateuch, the
chuppah
wedding baldaquin; wedding
droosh
sermon
Melnitz Page 81