‘My name is Melnitz, and there’s a special reason for that — but I’ll tell you another time. I didn’t have to go to the register office, but many people had no other choice. You could have a name given to you for free, you only had to pay the fees, but something that costs nothing is also worth nothing, and that was what those names were like. In such offices people got bored, of course, and to pass the time those officials came up with funny jokes, or jokes that they thought were funny. “Your name is now Stiefelknecht” — Boot-jack — they would say when a little Jew stood in front of them and hadn’t even brought them a gift out of politeness, or, “You’re now the Futtersack — Feedbag — family.” And there was always some underling who would laugh loud and long and praise their humour because he wasn’t a Jew, and already had a name that no one could take away from him.
‘But the people in the offices were human beings too, and human beings can be talked to. Not that they were corrupt or anything, officials never are, but crossing a line out of a list and writing another one, that takes effort, particularly if it’s to be a pretty name, and no one could possibly object if they liked to be rewarded for that effort. Anyone who brought enough money could be called Blumenfeld or something else nice, and when he came home with a new name a bottle of bronfen was opened to celebrate the fact that they had got off so lightly.
‘Yes, Shmul Meijer,’ said Melnitz, ‘buying a name is an old Jewish tradition. But buying oneself a Meier, a quite ordinary Meier, is something I have never heard of.’
‘You’re dead, Uncle Melnitz. I don’t have to listen when you talk.’
‘You’ve written your new name in an original way,’ said Melnitz and studied the drawing. ‘So wonderfully symbolic. Your name as a cross, how appropriate. And such a pretty circle all around it. Is that the circle you’re moving in now?’
‘You’re dead!’ shouted François, and wasn’t sure if he had really shouted or not.
Uncle Melnitz put the drawing very carefully back against the wall. Where he had touched it, the bones of his hand were depicted as if on an X-ray. ‘I wish you the best of luck with your new name, Shmul Meier,’ he said. ‘Yis’chadesh. May you wear it gesunderheit.’
50
The stage curtain smelled musty, like an old woman’s dress. The soft, dark red fabric of the curtain condensed the chatty chaos on the other side into a broth of words and laughter; you could imagine that down in the auditorium everyone had only mouths, but no faces.
‘Where have you got to?’
Since the success of the evening was obvious — more than six hundred tickets sold, when the gymnastics association would have covered its costs with five hundred — Sally Steigrad had started adopting an unpleasantly bossy voice, like the one the regional director of his insurance company used when he gathered the representatives together for their annual conference. ‘I have had enough of having to check every single detail myself,’ this tone said, ‘but with staff like these I have no option.’ Even a few weeks previously, when 28 June was approaching at great speed, Sally had been secretly anxious about the association’s finances, but now, with a full house, he saw himself as a born organiser, and was already planning new feats, a tournament with Jewish sports clubs from all over Europe, or at least an association trip to the Olympic Games in Berlin.
‘All the parents are asking after you, Arthur,’ he said crossly. ‘They want to know when their little ones will have their turn.’
The children had been another of Sally’s ideas. In the name of the festival committee he had put an advertisement in the rag — ‘For the arrangement of a flag ceremony we need a large number of boys and girls’ — and had given Arthur’s surgery as an address for applications without asking him first. ‘People are happy to entrust their children to a doctor,’ he said when Arthur complained, ‘and besides, who knows, you might even get some new patients out of it.’
Then, of course, Arthur had had to do all the work. Sally had thousands of even more important things to think about, the decoration of the hall, the list of guests of honour to be invited, but above all the collection of donations for the big tombola, which for an insurance salesman was very discreetly associated with customer care and acquisition. He had also raised a considerable number of attractive prizes, from three pairs of almost high-fashion lace-up boots (Schuhhaus Weill) to twelve bottles of sweet wine from Palestine (Pinchas’s contribution). The main prize, presented in the foyer on a pedestal decorated with colourful crêpe, was a very respectable bellows camera with tripod.
‘Why are you hiding yourself here on the stage?’
‘I just wanted to…’ Arthur fell silent. He couldn’t tell Sally the truth. ‘I’m hiding’, he should have said, ‘because I’m afraid of meeting Joni. Because I’m even more afraid of not bumping into him. Because I don’t know what I should say to him. Because I don’t want to say the wrong words. Because there are no right words.’ But as it was, he just shrugged, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
‘Come on, come on!’ Sally clapped his hands as his regional director always did. ‘Into the hall with you!’
So many people had come — ‘From both communities!’ Sally observed with satisfaction — that even the big Volkshaus hall was full to the rafters. The tables had had to be pushed forward again, and in the end there was hardly enough room, once the official part was over, for dancing or, as Sally had called it in his small advertisement in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt, paying homage to Terpsichore. Apart from those for the few official guests — the community presidents, the rabbis, the gymnastics association delegation and of course the generous donor Janki Meijer — there were no reserved tables, so when the door opened at seven o’clock in the evening an amusing competition for the best seats had begun, in which the yontif-suited men and the heavily made-up women in their glittering dresses had to pretend not to be in a hurry, and were only moving more quickly than usual out of a sudden excess of energy.
To Hinda’s displeasure and Zalman’s secret amusement, Rachel had no ladylike inhibitions. Holding up her skirts, she had been the first to charge off and had conquered a table for eight for the family, right beside the dance-floor, and was now successfully defending it with Lea’s help. Zalman who, as a good tailor, didn’t just know about coats, had conjured two evening dresses for the twins out of remnants from one of last year’s collections, and they looked irresistible. So they had to sit in a spot where they could be seen. When was one to make conquests, if not today?
Zalman and Hinda were wearing the same clothes as they had on Seder evening, the suit and the twice-altered skirt which they’d also worn to synagogue, and which they would take out of the wardrobe again for the high holidays. Admittedly Hinda had seen a beautiful dress in a shop window and made eyes at it for a few days, but in the end a wooden-barrel washing machine with a crank drive had been more important.
On the other hand, Aunt Mimi rustled into the hall in a new black dress embroidered with diamante, and with a hat the size of a wagon wheel full of ostrich feathers. She ignored Rachel’s achievement in finding a family table, and sat down in the best seat as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Uncle Pinchas had refused to put on anything more solemn than his black lustrine jacket, but Mimi had compelled him to put on a silk cummerbund, and had tied it so tightly that in the course of the evening he had to keep pulling it out with his index finger so that he could breathe.