‘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 the 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.