In Vienna they ate at Schmeidel Kalisch’s famous kosher restaurant. It was so good that Ruben had cramp afterwards. He was no longer used to rich food.
Zalman bought a copy of the Freie Presse from a newspaper seller at the station. In Galicia, it said, the Russian troops were not adhering to martial law, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven back to the Steppes from where they had come. Not least for that reason it was extremely regrettable, the author of the editorial wrote, that so many citizens of the Mosaic persuasion had fled irrationally from the country; one should, he wrote, be able to endure a certain amount of hardship in such difficult times. Zalman spread the newspaper out on the empty seat in front of him, put his feet on it and went to sleep.
When he woke up in the middle of the night Ruben needed to talk to him urgently, right now. He hadn’t yet thanked his father and had been trying to find the right words for hours.
Zalman wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Just leave it be,’ he said. ‘I am a peaceful man, but when people get solemn on me I get furious.’
‘It was a nes min hashamayim!’
‘Then thank the Lord,’ said Zalman and went back to sleep. That was the only exchange on the matter that ever passed between father and son.
When they had passed the border, Ruben spoke the prayer after a danger has passed.
He wanted to get out in St Gallen to send a telegram home. In Austria that had been forbidden for fear of espionage: secret information about force levels and troop deployments might be concealed behind apparently harmless words. But the walk to the telegram office would have taken too long, the train would have left without them, and they would have arrived in Zurich four hours later.
So no one collected them at the station, and in fact they were both glad of it.
On the way to Rotwandstrasse they received hostile and disapproving glares, because they were wearing ill-fitting clothes, and it was obvious that they had just been on a long journey. There were already enough refugees in Switzerland, the glances said, where the war had caused enough hardship already.
But the streets were full of traffic and the shop windows full of goods.
The closer they came to home, the slower they walked. One can also be afraid of things that one has long yearned for.
When they were outside the door, Ruben kissed the mezuzah, the little capsule with the verses of the scripture that all Jewish families fix to the front door of their flat or apartment. Only then could Zalman ring.
It was Rachel who opened the door, and when she saw them both she screamed so loudly that Hinda thought she was being attacked and came running out of the kitchen with a frying-pan in her hand.
‘You are even more dangerous than a Cossack, Frau Kamionker,’ said Zalman.
Then no one said anything else for a very long time.
54
By the start of December 1914, Alfred’s military training was declared complete. Admittedly, the time scheduled for it was not yet over, but the war was going badly, and the fatherland needed every man it could find.
He was assigned to Infantry Regiment 371, and he and the other young soldiers were inoculated against typhus, because the whole battalion was to be posted to Indochina. But plans had changed, and they were sent instead to Alsace, not far from the Swiss border, where the regiment was given the task of re-establishing the connection, interrupted by German troops, between Aspach-le-Haut and Aspach-le-Bas. Alfred was waiting with his comrades at the assembly point near Thann, for transport to the front, when a stray French shell exploded beside them.
He died instantly.
At induction the recruits had been asked for an address to which the news should be sent in the event of their heroic death. Alfred had written Désirée’s name on the envelope. The practice of using these pre-addressed envelopes was later abandoned; they saved time, but it proved damaging to morale on the home front when families had to take the news of their son’s death out of an envelope written in his own handwriting.
The letter was delivered to Morgartenstrasse by Frau Reutener, a notoriously nosy individual who stood in for the postman while he was on active service. She met Mimi on the stairs, and when she had fished the envelope from her bag she said, ‘So, so, Frau Pomeranz, from France,’ in the tone that one uses when one would like to have an answer from the other person, but is prevented by convention from asking the question. Mimi said ‘merci’, stressing the second syllable correctly in the French style, to distinguish it from the vulgar Zurich ‘märsi’, and disappeared into the flat without satisfying Frau Reutener’s curiosity.
Since he had been called up, Alfred’s communications had all arrived censored, as one could tell by the sloppy strips of paper with which the opened envelopes had been sealed again. No one had opened this letter. A Frenchman would have known immediately what that meant: it was a official letter, and in these days that could not bode well.
Mimi, for whom the war was far away, didn’t know this rule and didn’t worry.
She had acquired a certain skill in opening envelopes over the hot steam from the kettle, because even though she had announced quite clearly and distinctly from the start that she would keep a personal eye on her daughter’s correspondence with the unloved Alfred, one couldn’t do such things too conspicuously. Lately Désirée had been inclined to burst into tears at the drop of a hat in any case.
Mimi read the letter and at first didn’t understand it, just stared at the letters and could find no meaning in them. ‘Sur le champ de bataille,’ it said. ‘En defendant sa patrie.’ ‘Sans avoir souffert.’ None of it made any sense.
When she could no longer resist comprehension, the crazy idea ran though her head, ‘If I didn’t understand French, Alfred would still be alive.’
She didn’t faint, as they did in plays at the Municipal theatre, but considered quite calmly and objectively what needed to be done now. Only in the cold wind of the December morning did she realise that she had run out of the house without her coat and hat.
It was Wednesday, when there were never very many customers. Mimi knew that on such days her husband liked to leave the shop in charge of his daughter and Frau Okun, and sat down at his Gemara. Since Zalman had come back from Galicia, Pinchas had had more time for it; previously the Refugee Relief Association had occupied every free minute. He had had to organise accommodation and modest financial support for several dozen people.
A classroom of this kind is a purely masculine refuge. Mimi had only ever ventured into it before when it was used for an alternative purpose, such as the obligatory receptions at bar mitzvahs or engagements. Now she came charging in, without even noticing the disapproving glances of the other students.
She set the letter down in front of Pinchas, and her lower lip trembled like that of a little girl who has experienced something so terrible that she doesn’t even have the courage to cry.
Pinchas looked at her, looked at the letter and didn’t understand a word. Only now did it occur to her that he didn’t speak French.
In a quavering voice she started translating, just as one renders the tanakh into German in cheder: a short fragment of sentence, followed immediately by its translation. ‘J’ai la lourde charge — I have the sad duty — de vous announcer — to inform you — que le soldat Alfred Meijer…’
Le soldat Alfred Meijer.
Sur le champ de bataille.
Pinchas rubbed his forehead as he did when a difficult passage in the Talmud refused to yield up its meaning. Then he praised the judge of truth and asked the only question that remained to be asked at that moment: ‘Does Désirée know?’