Melnitz

Charles Lewinsky Melnitz

About the Author

Charles Lewinsky studied German literature and theatre studies in Zurich and Berlin. Among the numerous novels that he has written, he received the Schiller Prize Zürcher Kantonalbank for his novel St. John’s (2001) and was nominated for the 2011 Swiss Book Prize for Gerron (2012). He lives in Zurich and the French Vereux.

Melnitz

For my wife

without whom I would not be

1871

1

Every time he died, he came back.

On the last day of the week of mourning, when the loss had dispersed into the everyday, when you had to make a special effort to seek out the pain, a gnat-bite which stung yesterday and which you hardly feel today, his back aching from sitting on the low stools assigned by ancient custom to the bereaved for those seven days, there he was again as if it were the most natural thing in the world, walking inconspicuously into the room with the other visitors, indistinguishable from them in outward appearance. But he brought no food with him, even though that would have been the custom. In the kitchen the pots and covered bowls waited in line, a guard of honour for the deceased; he came empty-handed, took a chair, as one does, said not a word unless addressed by the other mourners, stood up when they prayed, sat down when they sat down. And when the others, murmuring their words of condolence, took their leave, he simply stayed on his chair, he was there again, as he had always been there. His smell of damp dust mingled with the other smells of the house of mourning, sweat, tallow candles, impatience; he was part of it again, he joined in the grieving, took leave of himself, sighed his familiar sigh, which was half a groan and half a snore, fell asleep with his head drooping and his mouth open, and was there again.

Salomon Meijer rose from his stool, lifted his body up like a heavy weight, like a quarter of a cow or a mill-sack of flour, stretched so that the joints in his shoulders cracked, and said, ‘So. Let us have something to eat.’ He was a tall, broad man, and the only reason he didn’t create an impression of strength was that his head was too small for his bulk, the head of a scholar on a peasant’s body. He had grown side-whiskers which were in places — far too early, Salomon thought — already turning white. Beneath them, framed by his beard, a network of little burst veins formed two red patches that always made him look tipsy, even though he only drank wine for the festive kiddush, and otherwise one or two beers at most on very hot days. Anything else befogs the head, and the head is the most important part of a cattle dealer’s body.

He dressed entirely in black, not out of mourning, but because he couldn’t imagine wearing another colour; he wore an old-fashioned frock coat of heavy cloth which, since no more visitors were expected, he now unbuttoned and dropped to the floor behind him without looking round. He assumed that his Golde would pick up the frock coat and lay it over the arm of a chair, and there was nothing tyrannical about it, only the naturalness of spheres clearly assigned. He straightened his silk cap, a superfluous gesture, since it had not slipped for years, for no unruly hair grew on Salomon Meijer’s head. Even as a young man his friends had called him Galekh, the monk, because the bald patch on his head reminded them of a tonsure.

On his way to the kitchen he rubbed his hands, as he always did when food was in store; as if he were already washing his hands, even before he had reached any water.

Golde, Frau Salomon Meijer, had to lift her arms over her head to shake out the frock coat. She was short, and had once been delicate, so delicate that in the first year of their marriage a jocular habit had come about, one which no outsider understood or even so much as noticed. When, at the beginning of the Sabbath, Salomon uttered the biblical verse ‘Eyshes chayil, mi yimtza’ in praise of the housewife, he paused after the first words and peered questingly around, as if he had said not ‘Who can find a virtuous woman’ but ‘Who can find the virtuous woman?’. Long ago, having married young and fallen in love young too, every Friday he had accompanied the words with a pantomime, looking with exaggerated foolishness for his fine little wife, and had then, having found her at last, drew her to him and even kissed her. Now all that remained of that was a pause and a look, and if anyone had asked him why he did it, Salomon Meijer himself would have had to ponder.

Golde had grown fat over the years, she hurried stoutly through life, a hasty peasant sowing seeds, she wore her dress with the black silk ribbons as a pot wears a tea-cosy, and her reddish sheitel, even though it was made by the best wig-maker in Schwäbisch Hall, sat on her head like a bird’s nest. She had developed the habit of pulling her lower lip deep into her mouth and chewing on it, which made her look toothless. Sometimes it seemed to Salomon as if at some point — no, not at some point, he had to correct himself — as if, after that lengthy and painful childbed, after those uselessly wailed-through nights, a young woman had left him and a matron had taken her place. But he could not reproach Golde for that, and he who finds a virtuous woman, as the Bible says, has gained riches beyond rubies. He said it every week, paused and looked searchingly around.

The frock coat now hung over the arm of the leather armchair in which Salomon liked to rest after a long day on the country road, but which today he had offered to the rebbe, Rav Bodenheimer. Now the chairs had to be lined up in a row again, order had to be re-established around Uncle Melnitz, whose chin hung on his chest as if he was dead.

‘Well? I’m hungry!’ cried Salomon from the kitchen.

Usually, or rather whenever the man of the house was not away on business, the Meijer household ate in the front room, which Mimi liked to call the ‘drawing-room’, while her parents called it the ‘parlour’ plain and simple. Today the big table in there had been pushed up against the wall, so that the Shabbos lamp hung in the void, they had had to make room for the visitors, a lot of room, because Salomon Meijer was a respected man in Endingen, a leader of the community and administrator of the poor box. Anyone who had raised a glass of kirschwasser ‘to life’ at his Simchas also came to him at a shiva to pay his respects, not least because one could never know when one might need him. Salomon acknowledged this without reproach.

So for once they ate in the kitchen, where Chanele had already got everything prepared. She was a poor relation, said the people in the community, even though the old women most skilled in Mishpochology were unable to say exactly which branch of the Meijer family tree she might have sprouted from. Salomon had brought her back, more than twenty years ago now, from a business trip to Alsace, a wailing, wriggling bundle, swaddled like a Strasbourg goose. ‘Why would he have taken her in if she hadn’t been related to him?’ asked the old women, and some of them, whose teeth had fallen out and who therefore thought the worst of everyone, suggested with a significant nod of the head that Chanele had exactly the same chin as Salomon, and that one might wonder what had taken him to Alsace so often in those days.

The truth of the matter had been quite different. The goyish doctor had explained to Salomon that the son that they had had to dismember to get him out of his mother had torn Golde so badly that she would not survive another difficult birth; he should be grateful that he had at least one child, even if it was only a girl. ‘Thank your God,’ he had said, for all the world as if there were several of them, and as if they had divided their responsibilities among themselves as clearly as the duty physician and the cattle vet.